Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 9
Grace held a small wad of folded paper which she was unfolding and feeding to the flames sheet by sheet, so that each sheet would be certain to burn completely without leaving half-charred fragments behind. As each page vanished in a puff of brightness, Grace’s finely chiseled profile glowed with a fresh, golden warmth. It was a lovely profile, full of character and yet softly feminine despite her intent expression. I must have been too absorbed in admiring the series of bas-relief portraits—and the rounded symmetry of her thighs as she sat back on her haunches—to realize fully what she was doing. It was only when the last supplementary blaze had died down that I coughed.
Grace rose quickly and turned to me with the embarrassed smile of a little girl who has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. At least I thought her expression was embarrassed, but it was so fleeting that I could not be sure.
“I didn’t know you were awake, Jim,” she said calmly enough. “I started the fire because I was afraid you might be cold when you woke up. Isn’t it chilly in here?”
“Rather cool for mayhem,” I said.
“Feel better after your snooze?”
“Very much refreshed,” I said, “except that I dreamed about Henry Pennington. Has the senator escaped from the grip of the law?”
“Nothing has happened since you went to sleep.”
“You know, we may be writing Pennington off too quickly.” I got rid of the blankets and sat up. “You say Pennington is not a guy who would kill for love. I’ll buy that. But suppose your pal Norman had something on him? After all, they were in college together.”
“I don’t think Henry would have killed Norman for having blackballed him from the Alpha Phalpha fraternity. Or even because Norman caught him cheating in Economics One examinations.”
“What about Pennington’s war contracts?” I asked. “Your pal picked up quite a bit of moola making khaki shirts for a lot of good guys who got two bucks a day for wearing ’em. Are you sure his war contracts were clean?”
“Positive.” Grace came over and sat on the sofa. “I’m not cold-blooded enough to make an investigation myself, but it was done for me. Do you remember Bert Cross?”
“Bert? Sure. One of Mr. Hearst’s most rakish muckrakers. A big handsome animal who was always making passes at you when my back was turned.”
“Bert wanted to marry me for about six months once,” Grace said.
“That’s an idea,” I said. “Why don’t you and I get married for six months? My terminal pay ought to last us about that long.”
Grace unromantically ignored my proposal. “Bert Cross was pulled off anti-vivisection last year to write a series on war-contract scandals,” she said. “Knowing that I was interested in Henry Pennington, Bert dug deep into all of Henry’s transactions. He was a good enough sport to send me carbons of his findings. Henry is clean.”
“Not even a five-percenter in the woodpile?” I asked.
“Nothing. And if Bert could have dug up anything, he would have sent me all the dirt wrapped in cellophane.”
“What did you do with his carbons?” I asked, looking pointedly at the blazing logs. “Burn them?”
Grace ignored my innuendo. She laughed and started folding my blankets.
“You didn’t react to my proposal of marriage two minutes ago,” I said.
“I never do, Jim. You know that.”
“But I haven’t proposed for a long time. Not since I quit writing to you from London and resigned myself to Mr. Pim, Brussels sprouts, and buzz bombs.”
“I didn’t answer, did I?”
“No, but things have changed. I have my terminal pay. Let’s squander it together.”
“And then?”
“I suppose I’ll have to get another job. I couldn’t ask you to support me.”
“Except between paydays,” Grace said.
“Now Grace. You know I always paid back every cent you ever staked me to.”
“Of course,” Grace said. “That’s why you were always broke the day after payday.”
“My dear Grace,” I said with Pennington’s voice, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, “I’m greatly distressed by your new preoccupation with the crass, material things of life. Money. Security. Respectability. Where is your old debonnaire gaiety, your joie de vivre, nonchalance, and dolce far niente? Let us betake ourselves back to the inn, where the higher spiritual values hang in the balance. Life and death. Crime and punishment. Gin and bitters.…”
“Put your shoes on,” Grace interrupted. “You must be feeling better to talk so much nonsense so fast. Come on.”
She held out her hands and pulled me to my feet. I kissed her, but there was no osmosis, no sparks, not even an incipient chain reaction. Obviously she was thinking of something else, and I guess I was, too. We went down the hill to the inn.
The rest of the morning was completely idiotic. We played croquet.
The Stewarts had come back with Tommy and their State Trooper bodyguard, and were too weak to resist when Betty Hurley discovered a croquet court near the lakeshore and dug up balls and mallets. Eight of us played for an hour with the irrational earnestness and foolish logic of a dream. Perhaps because the events of the past eighteen hours had had the strange, unreal quality of a nightmare, no one seemed to find that croquet was not the most plausible and natural thing in the world to be doing on the morning after a murder.
I played one game with Grace as my partner and Tommy as my caddy and inquisitor. Tommy had evidently picked up a bit of gossip about my military career and followed me around with volley after volley of shrewd questions designed to determine the degree of my heroism and my exact contribution toward the winning of the war. He was a little disappointed that I had been neither an aviator, nor a tank gunner nor a spy, but he felt better to learn that I had actually been overseas. He couldn’t quite understand what I was doing with the armed forces.
“What’s a P.R.O.?” Tommy wanted to know.
“A Public Relations Officer,” I told him, “is a newspaper man dressed up in a soldier suit.”
“Did you kill any Germans?”
“Not a one.”
“Did you take any prisoners?”
“Yes,” I said. “I took quite a few prisoners from Grosvenor Square to Wardour Street, for purposes of psychological warfare by Absie.”
Tommy was not deterred. “What’s Absie?” he demanded.
“The American Broadcasting Station in Europe.”
“Did you get shot at?” Tommy asked.
“Only by buzz bombs and rockets.”
I knocked Eddie Westerford’s ball out of the court. Tommy came close to me and said confidentially: “Have you found out yet who killed Norman?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Do you want me to help you find out who killed Norman?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied. “Have you got any clues?”
“I think Eddie Westerford did it,” Tommy said. “He? didn’t like Norman. But I did. So Eddie could have killed Norman, couldn’t he?”
While I was considering this extraordinary bit of logic, I heard “Jim! Jim!” being shouted at me from various quarters.
“It’s your turn, Jim,” Grace said. “Aren’t you playing?”
“Jim’s from the South, that’s what,” Betty Hurley said. “Jim won’t play any more unless we play his kind of croquet. Isn’t that it, Jim?”
“What kind of croquet is one supposed to play in the South?” I asked innocently.
“Jim croquet,” Betty said, and immediately went into the fortissimo movement of a rhapsody in laughter.
I swung my mallet so hard that the ball went through a good many wickets, unfortunately the wrong ones.
At this point Tommy turned tail and started running away from the court. I thought it was an act of desertion until I saw that Alma Frazer had come out of the inn and was headed toward the garden that lay between the inn and the lake.
A few minutes later the game ended, and a recess was called because Eddie Westerford had the trembles so bad that he could hardly hold a mallet. Dr. Hurley came over to look into his eyes and feel his pulse. The doctor shook his head in a gently patronizing manner.
“You certainly need it, don’t you, Eddie?” he said.
Eddie dropped his mallet. “What are you about?”
Dr. Hurley emitted one of those pleasant, reassuring, just- cut- down- on- your- smoking- and- eat- plenty- offresti- vegetables- and- everything- will- be- all- right chuckles so dear to the profession. “You certainly need sleep,” he said.
Eddie made some unpleasant sounds in his throat and walked off the court. He wandered toward the lakeshore, and disintegrated under a tree, lying flat on his stomach, his head pillowed on his arms. He did not even look up at the sounds of the State Police cars returning to the inn.
The return of Captain McKay and Henry Pennington did prolong the recess, however. Pennington had obviously been restored to favor; the renewed dignity and hauteur of his bearing proclaimed as much. His stride, as he came down the path toward the croquet court, certainly had self-assurance, if not arrogance. So I said:
“Welcome back, Senator. You must have all kinds of pull. We thought you’d be brought back here in chains.” Pennington chuckled in a deep, genteel, purring bass.
“Captain McKay is a reasonable police officer as well as a thorough one,” he said. “He can recognize the truth when he sees it demonstrated.”
“Mr. Pennington was lucky enough to buy roses for you at the Blue Falls Flower Shop, Miss Boyd,” McKay said. “You should have had the same foresight when you bought your steak.”
“Miss Boyd rarely buys her meat at the florist’s,” I said.
McKay didn’t smile. “The Blue Falls Flower Shop happens to be next to the news stand at the railway station,” he said, “so the woman proprietor could give me the exact time of Mr. Pennington’s purchase because there was a train coming in. On the other hand, Miss Boyd, your butcher is a little vague about the time you bought your steak. His recollection doesn’t correspond at all with the timetable you’ve given me.”
“Grace, I told you to get a time stamp put on that steak,” I said.
McKay still didn’t think I was funny, but he no longer ignored me. “As for you, Lawrence,” he said, “your fine red herring turned out to be just an old dead porgy. We developed the film in that camera and it was completely fogged. Black, opaque, and light-struck. You’ll have to think up a better story.”
“I think the old one is still good enough,” I said. “The fact that the film was deliberately fogged bears out my original theory that the Leica was stolen by the murderer to destroy evidence. I’m only sorry he didn’t hit me on the head a little harder when he thought I was after the camera myself. Then he might have beat the idea into my head in time, while there was still a decent image on the film.”
McKay turned his back on me while I was still talking. “You can have your camera back in a day or so, Miss Boyd,” he said to Grace, as he started back to the inn.
As I twisted my neck to watch him, I saw Tommy and Alma Frazer coming out of the garden. In one hand Alma had a big bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, obviously for the luncheon tables; her other hand clasped Tommy’s. Tommy shouted at me, and I saluted him with my croquet mallet. Alma waved back with the chrysanthemums. For a moment I thought she was coming toward me, but she hesitated and turned right to go into the inn.
“Well,” said Henry Pennington. “Let’s get on with the croquet.”
Pennington called for a reshuffle of partners and of course claimed Grace. Conchita Westerford thereupon loudly announced that she would pair off with me.
As I was readying the ball for my first shot, Conchita leaned over and said in my ear, so close that her voice wanned my jowls, “I’ve got to see you alone—soon.”
I was off my game from there on in. I was consistently beaten. I was not only wondering what Conchita wanted with me, but I was disturbingly aware of Conchita as a woman. She was perhaps a little too plump, but there was invitation in the way she looked at me, both with her smoky dark eyes and with her full lips. I had never before had the experience of being appraised from a distance by a woman’s lips. I found myself observing the provocative way her pleated blue skirt swung from her well-moulded hips as she bent over her croquet mallet. I noticed that her blue-black hair was skinned back tightly from her high forehead, that her blue-black lashes brushed her high cheekbones, and that the inverted turquoise exclamation points dangling from her ears punctuated every movement of her head.
After another half hour the Stewarts wanted to call it quits. Whereupon Conchita dragged me off the court, leaving the game to the Hurleys vs. Grace and Pennington.
Conchita took my arm and headed for the lakeshore, in the opposite direction from the tree under which her husband was still lying. We walked down to the little garden beyond the inn, following a path that wound among green love seats discreetly hidden behind the well-trimmed cypress hedges. We sat down in silence. I looked out across a bed of bronze-and-gold chrysanthemums and the last of the dahlias toward the lead-gray lake. The day was still misty and the receding ridges of the opposite shore backed up against each other clad in the flat, opaque tones of a Japanese print.
I was, of course, aware of the fact that Conchita was looking at me. I could almost feel the physical impact of her gaze as it touched me here and there. Yet despite the quasi-tangible quality of her glance, I had a strange reluctance about turning my own eyes toward her. I preferred to ponder over the inexplicable mating habits of the human race, and why it was that a vital, full-blooded girl like Conchita should have chosen to marry a bloodless aesthete like Eddie Westerford. I could not help thinking that it was only Conchita’s innate, plump inertia, her languid inheritance of the Latin tropics, that kept her out of trouble—and of strange beds. I finally turned to her.
“Well?” I said.
“It’s about that broken platter,” she said.
“What about it?” I countered. “I already told Eddie that it was smashed all to hell and that’s all there was to it.”
“But you’re the one who found it in the woods,” Conchita insisted. “I thought maybe you told that police captain more about it than he told the rest of us.”
“Why should I know any more about it than you do?” I asked.
“I don’t know. After all, you found it. And I thought maybe the captain doped out something that you didn’t catch, or vice versa.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “And I didn’t. Why are you so worried about that recording—if there was a recording?”
She was worried. It showed in her voice, which had lost some of its velvety contralto overtones and became almost shrill at the end of each sentence. She was suddenly evasive, too, and looked at the ground as she spoke.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am worried. I don’t like to see innocent people get hurt on account of a murder they had nothing to do with. It’s all right for the proper party to get hurt. I’m not saying the guilty party shouldn’t pay. But there’s no sense in messing up innocent people’s lives, is there, if it can be avoided?”
“Am I messing up innocent people’s lives?”
“No, I don’t think you would on purpose.” Conchita was still looking at the ground. “I think you’re a good guy. I liked you the minute I first saw you last night, in front of Grace’s cabin. But you have been mixing yourself around in other people’s business—like that nonsense about Grace’s camera.”
Conchita was looking at me again. Her eyes were no longer smoky. There was a hard glint in them now—almost a threat, I thought. I gave her my best flinty stare right back.
“If you had been conked behind your mastoid,” I said, “as hard as I was conked behind my mastoid last night by the guy who wanted Grace’s camera, maybe you wouldn’t think it was nonsense.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. I didn’t mean it that way.” Conchita put her hand on my knee. It was not an apologetic hand, and I knew it was not meant to be. It was warm and anxious and pulsing with life. The stainless-steel highlights went out of her eyes, and the misty, smouldering darkness came back. “I just meant that maybe in your poking around and talking to the cops, you might know more about those pieces of recording than we’ve been let in on. I mean, you might know if one of the pieces maybe had a piece of label on it, or something that would identify the studio where Dr. Norman had it recorded.”
“How do you know Dr. Norman made the recording?” I asked.
“It’s the sort of thing Norman would do,” Conchita said.
“I guess you ought to know. You were pretty close to Norman, weren’t you, before he decided to make a play for Grace?”
Conchita caressed me again with her eyes, and I was reminded that her hand still warmed my knee. She shrugged. “I liked Norman,” she said. “I liked him a lot. But he did have a mean, sadistic streak in him.”
“Is that why he made love to you—just for the pleasure of making Eddie jealous?”
A little of the Bessemer glint came back into Conchita’s eyes. “Norman didn’t make love to me,” she said. “We used to have a drink together now and then. And I suppose he did like to make Eddie jealous. He didn’t like Eddie. Last time I had a drink with Norman—last Tuesday, I think—he said he was going to have a surprise for Eddie on his birthday. Eddie’s birthday was yesterday. That’s why I thought maybe all those telegrams and the recording, and all—well, I thought maybe you knew something.”
“Conchita, my sloe-eyed beauty,” I said, “I’m really not holding out on you. I don’t know a damned thing more about that recording than you do.” Any more? Not half as much, I thought. I was positive that Conchita was sitting on some hot bit of information that was apt to hatch trouble for herself or Eddie or both. She was working on me for the sole purpose of finding out if anyone else knew where the nest was.
“If I stumble on anything new, I’ll be glad to cut you in,” I added. “Where can I reach you in town?”
