“Because for centuries untold every generation of O’Breens has produced at least one priest. This generation broke the tradition. There’s just me and my sister; but in honor of the family heritage I am a naturalborn confessor. People tell me things.”
Fergus’ tone was light; but he finished his drink in something close to a nervous gulp. There was no use telling this girl the truth about Martha Stanhope. The thought of those cats had shocked even the unconnected Maureen; and if you knew that three slit throats had poured a libation for your parents’ wedding … Not pretty. And one more reason for leaving Lucas Quincy’s quarter-century dead case alone. Why rake up scandal and horror when there is a new generation to be slimed by it? To be a chipped pillar for the reading public of the country …
“And what are you,” Janet asked, “aside from a confessor?”
“Oh,” Fergus lied breezily, “I confess too. Professionally, I mean, for the magazines. I’m ruined twice a month regular. More fun. But tell me, Miss Brainard: you follow football at all?”
“Avidly.”
“Who looks good in the East for this fall?”
“Well, around the office you hear great things about Cornell. All the alumni think it’s going to be something terrific. And oddly enough Boston College, if you’ve ever heard of that out here …”
And so they drifted peacefully away from the subject of chipped pillars and Martha Stanhope.
The dinner was simple; but clearly affection, care, and artistry had gone into its making. The delicately seasoned flavor of that ground round steak, for instance, was no matter of happenstance. And the zucchini, embellished with onions, tomatoes, green peppers, and a suspicion of unidentifiable herbs, were enjoyable enough to make Fergus forget completely how rich they were in vitamins.
“You must tell me all about these afterwards,” he said, “and write it down. I want to try them.”
“Mr. O’Breen!” Miss Paris cocked an eyebrow. “You cook?”
“Sure. I gave up hope of my sister’s ever learning and decided I might make a more promising scholar myself. And to my own surprise I like it. But I never thought squash could taste like this. How do you do it?”
“It is good then,” she sighed with relief. “If people sniff and taste and say ‘Hm! So you use cumin in your zucchini? Yes, and a spot of oregano. Interesting,’ that means you’re wrong. But if they taste and wonder and say, ‘How do you do it?’ then you know it’s just right.”
“Cumin and oregano,” Fergus murmured. “I’ll get the details later.”
“Do. You know,” she smiled, “people can say what they like about Southern California. It’s a strange place, Lord knows, but green vegetables all the year round isn’t anything to sneeze at.”
And just then, with a timing that must have rejoiced all Miss Paris’ half-forgotten theatrical instincts, Fergus sneezed.
“Gesundheit,” said Janet. “Or does that make me a Fifth Columnist?”
“Sorry.” Fergus gave a rueful grin. “I was not trying to contradict. I only—”
The second sneeze was a honey. He turned away from the table and let the third and the fourth and the fifth shake him mercilessly. In a momentary pause he lifted his head and announced, “Two more.” And when the foretold two had passed, he turned his chair back and resumed dinner.
“But how precise!” Janet exclaimed. “Is it always seven?”
“Just about. Trust the O’Breens to have a unique and screwy type of hay fever all their own. Seven sneezes. Mystic number and stuff. But where’s the cat? I haven’t met him yet.”
Miss Paris and Janet looked at each other and were silent.
“Come now. There’s just one thing on earth that sets me off that way, and that’s a long-haired cat. There must be one around.”
“I do not have a cat,” Miss Paris said slowly.
For over a minute conversation was dead. Fergus took another mouthful of those once splendid zucchini, but the taste seemed to have gone out of them. Janet was taking little sips of water and dabbing her lips too precisely after each sip. Miss Paris was staring at her plate as though it were a crystal ball.
“Mr. O’Breen,” she said at last, “Janet and I, as you have gathered, are going to a silver wedding party tomorrow. It will be a small house party on Blackman’s Island—you know the place?”
“That’s that bleak rock off Santa Eulalia, isn’t it? I didn’t know anybody lived there.”
“Janet’s father acquired this house there as part of a business deal. I think he insists upon using it in order to prove that he was not swindled. But that is beside the point. This is, as I think I told you, an anniversary party, and the only guests—aside of course from Janet as offspring—are the members of the original wedding party, my own contemporaries. I have been afraid that Janet might be lonely without any young people in the group. Should you care to join the party?”
“This is so sudden, Miss Paris,” Fergus murmured. “Just a pick-up, that’s what I am.”
“But should you?”
“You don’t know a thing about me. I might be a highclass jewel thief who struck up this acquaintance for just such a purpose.”
“I know enough about you.”
So that’s it, thought Fergus. It had happened to him before—invitations to houseparties so warmly and personally phrased that only a foul-minded low-life could suspect the genial host of saving the expense of a private detective to guard his treasures. But more than treasures might need guarding on Blackman’s Island. The Stanhope case was getting in Fergus’ hair more entanglingly than a gum-chewing bat. First a bastard approaches you with an illegal proposition, but a good round fee. Then nice people give you a friendly invitation, but strictly nonprofessional and no cash. If you could just strike an average …
“Sorry,” he said aloud, “but I doubt if I could make it. Busy week coming up.”
“If you must invite people for me, Stella,” Janet broke in, “you might at least—” She stopped. “Sorry, O’Breen. Nothing personal. But there’s a friend I haven’t seen in a long time and he doesn’t even know I’m in town and I don’t like to seem to go chasing after him and …” The sentence ended in total confusion. Janet was half-blushing and suddenly looking very young and untailored.
“At that,” said Miss Paris, “that isn’t a bad idea. I could call Tom tonight and—”
“No,” Janet interrupted firmly. “No, please don’t. Skip it.”
Miss Paris turned back to Fergus. “Think about it, will you?”
“Afraid I don’t see how I could make it.”
“Please.” She held his eye for a long moment. Then, “And do you like apple pie?” she asked.
Fergus beamed.
He and Janet insisted on doing the dishes, while Miss Paris brought out her sewing and chatted. It was a pleasing domestic scene, and he was willing to forget his usual resentment against people who want to wangle professional services gratis. He whistled quietly as he washed, and wondered why doing dishes with a charming stranger was fun and doing them with your own beloved sister was an onerous imposition to be avoided at all costs.
For Janet Brainard was charming, despite her cool self-sufficiency and the efficient editorial brusqueness with which she had put him in his place as a crossword critic. It would be fun to see more of her, to catch another glimpse of that shy young girl who had appeared for an instant at the dinner table. She made good bait for Blackman’s Island; but still not quite good enough.
“Anything else I can do useful?” Fergus asked blithely as he wiped his hands on the apron.
“If you must, you could take that trash box out to the incinerator. That sounds like a Man’s Task.”
“Gladly.”
He was still whistling as he reached the back porch. There he paused to steady the box against the porch rail and get a better grip. Light from the kitchen window struck the floor of the porch, and as he paused he saw something. It was interesting enough to make him set down the box and d
rop to his knees for a moment to peer the better at that little trail of brown spots.
He was not whistling as he dumped the trash into the incinerator. He did not even reflect happily, as was his wont, that he was breaking a city ordinance as he set a match to it. And in the flare of that match he saw the final link.
Near the incinerator was a little mound of freshdug earth. It was about two feet long and something under a foot wide.
It all clicked together far too clearly in his mind. His seven sneezes and the back porch and this mound, and Lester Ferguson’s chipped-column stare and Martha Stanhope and Miss Paris’ urgency and even Lucas Quincy. And whatever you might think of Quincy, Janet was a sound person and that had been a noble dinner.
He set the empty trash box down on the floor of the kitchen. “Any more tasks for me?” he said. “Or shall we save my energy till I get to Blackman’s Island?”
Chapter 2
This was on Thursday, May 9, 1940.
You remember what happened on May 10.
All winter long we had talked scornfully of the “phony war.” It was a nervous scorn, and perhaps it masked an unacknowledged fear; but we were scornful as all hell. The Finnish war provided a little action in the arena to tickle us in our box seats in the coliseum, but it was soon over and with an annoying reversal of the verdict of our thumbs. We relapsed into boredom and scorn.
Then in early April came the invasion of Scandinavia, and we said in quick succession:
“He’s extended his flank too far; he’s done for.”
“Where the hell is the R. A. F.?” and
“Wasn’t the retreat splendid?”
We tucked the word Quisling away in our vocabularies and settled back in the boxes.
For a week there was a rumorous silence. And then, on Friday, May 10, 1940, came the invasion of the Netherlands.
Fergus had a job rounding off his odds and ends of business before leaving for Blackman’s Island. Hollywood was diving headlong into its worst panic since the closing of the banks in ’33. All the nervous terror dammed up for months burst forth now in one terrific wave, whose crest foamed furiously and incessantly the dread words FOREIGN MARKET.
The foreign market had been lost for months. Its approaching loss could have been foreseen for years. But it took the specific shock of this invasion to make the fact clear to producers. It was clear enough now.
Nor was this panic confined to bigshots with financial interests to fret about. Electricians, propmen, all the ordinary honesttogod people who are no more Hollywood than is an Iowa farmer—these too felt the shocking impact of this final definite act. There was a sense throughout the city of the fall of an age, and a dread of the age to come.
It was good to get out at last, in midafternoon, on the broad coast highway leading north to Santa Eulalia. As the road dipped near the sea from time to time, the surf roared and the sun glistened on the waves, which was hard on a driver’s eyes but most elating to his spirit. Life was momentarily fresh again. The smooth highway attested the mechanical ingenuity of man, the Burmashave jingles along the road reminded you of his business acumen, but nothing in the whole scene suggested his propensity for slaughtering his brother. For two hours and a half of steady driving Fergus was unreasoningly happy, though in the back of his mind he knew that what awaited him on Blackman’s Island might be on a smaller scale than the headlined invasions, but far more immediate.
It was what Maureen had suggested—the complete gathering of the old group for present analysis. But calmly analyzing the past was one thing, and forestalling the present was very much another.
He had called Lucas Quincy last night, and hung up as soon as he had dialed the private number. He could not make up his mind on this proposition. It was all very well to go dashing off quixotically to save lives, to make it stop at cats this time and avert another Stanhope case; but a fee would help. And yet Quincy’s stipulation, that all evidence should be turned over to him exclusively and kept secret from the D. A., made the job not only unethical but goddamned risky. It would take a fine fee to make up for being booted out of your profession.
To expose the murderer and still to get a sweet sum out of Quincy: there was the problem. “And at least,” Fergus reflected, “I’ll have both my good and my evil angel working with me on this.”
Santa Eulalia is a small town consisting chiefly of a wharf surrounded by fishing boats. The two blocks of main street feature a movie house, a bank, five saloons, a chain grocery, and a garage, at which last Fergus stored his faithful yellow roadster. From the back compartment he took his suitcase.
A small overnight case would have sufficed for what wardrobe he had brought. But inside this largish suitcase was another case, and in that case was an admirably compact set of accessories. An island is cut off from the resources of the mainland police, and at best the resources of the Santa Eulalia police department were probably not to be trusted. There was no telling what might bear a little scientific investigation. And beside the accessory kit nestled a loaded automatic.
Fergus carried his case down to the wharf. “Hi!” he observed to a shabby man who seemed to be trying to estimate with the naked eye the distance to China, or possibly merely to Manila. “You know Jesus Ramirez? Runs a motor launch?”
The man lifted his right hand in acknowledgment of the greeting, but did not take his eyes off the Chinese guerrilla warfare. “Ramirez,” he said. Then after a long pause he added, “Try Flannery’s.”
Fergus looked back at the main street. Over the smallest of the five saloons an as yet unlit neon sign said FLANNERY’S. He thanked the long-range observer and started back.
As he drew nearer he smiled and began to whistle with delight. For beneath that sign was a smaller one which read: STEAM BEER. For some incomprehensible reason, this wonderful brew is not to be found anywhere in Los Angeles,* and the O’Breen palate had long been parched for it.
The juke box was playing God Bless America. The only customer at the moment was a fat and sodden old man with a white mustache who listened raptly to the music. “Ramirez?” Fergus asked him, but he waved his hand in denial and went on listening.
“Do you know a Jesus Ramirez?” Fergus asked the bartender.
“Sure, Mac. Everybody knows Hokay. We call him that on account of nobody never heard him say nothing only ‘Hokay.’”
“Has he been around here today?”
“Ought to be in here any minute. What’ll it be while you’re waiting?”
“Steam beer.”
“Thought so. People from out of town, they always want steam. Guess you don’t find it every place. Ain’t everybody knows how to draw it nowadays.”
The juke box stopped. The old man rose and inserted a nickel without changing the setting. He resumed his seat, and there were tears in his rheumy blue eyes as God Bless America started again.
“Now that’s a case for you,” the bartender said. “That’s Mr. Schulzheimer. Damned good butcher. Carve you out a roast as neat as I can draw this here now beer. So what happens to him? This morning three of his best customers get all hot and bothered after they read the news and they tell him they’re switching over to the chain store on account of he’s a German. So he comes in here and for three hours now he’s been drinking beer and playing God Bless America. Don’t ask me what it means.” All this time he had been drawing the steam beer—filling the glass with foam, letting that foam reduce itself to a minute amount of beer, refilling with foam, and so on until he had a full glass of clear brown with a firm-knit head of ideal thickness. It was—work of art might be hyperbole, but it was certainly a noble example of the finest craftsmanship.
“You know, Mac,” he observed as he removed the beer from the glass pressure bell in which it was drawn, “I’m damned if I get it. So the Germans pick on the Jews, so now we decide we got to pick on the Germans. What I’d like’s a sort of a place where there wouldn’t nobody have to pick on nobody. That’ll be a dime, Mac.”
Fergus sh
oved the coin across and looked at the old man listening, intently listening as though this sound of affirmation could drown out the forever departing footsteps of three best customers.
Fergus tasted the beer. It was all that he had remembered and hoped. It had that smooth rich solidity which the best draught beer never seems to equal. It was cool and warming and gentle and bitter all at once. He set down the glass and grinned at his foam-bedecked lips in the bar mirror. Then in the mirror he saw an entering figure.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he and the figure exclaimed at once, and in unison answered each other, “Looking for a dope named Ramirez.”
When Fergus first met Tom Quincy long years ago, this nephew of the eminent Lucas was just out of college and trying to decide whether to take up football, swimming, tennis, or golf as a profession. Last year Fergus had seen that large and splendid body looming at one of his sister’s parties and had asked how the decision finally came out.
“Well, you see,” Tom had explained, “I couldn’t decide which I was best at, and the more I thought about it the more I worried, until finally I went to a psychologist friend of mine who specializes in aptitudes. And after I talked to him, I decided to be a psychologist.”
That was what he was now, a teaching assistant in psychology filling in all his spare time with elaborate research; but to the eye he remained the same magnificent athlete. His eyes were alert and shrewd, and his words made good sense; but every woman who met him was inclined to wonder resentfully why the art of the stripper was confined to one sex.
“So you’re in on this too,” he said now. “I’m glad of that. I can’t say this was a party I was looking forward to.”
“And you,” said Fergus, recalling that almost girlish blush, “are Janet’s Tom. My my. I recommend the steam beer.”
“Janet asked you?” For an instant Tom’s deep voice was not quite so friendly.
The Case of the Solid Key Page 23