Bring the Bride a Shroud

by Dolores Hitchens

  He forced his thought into other channels. He wondered who had put the centipede into his coat. He tried to surmise what Stacey had found out from clipping locks of the women’s hair.

  He wondered why someone should want to kill him and what he should do about it.

  In the middle of the afternoon Mr. Johns came up to tell him he was wanted on the phone.

  Mr. Pennyfeather, lying on the bed with his shoes off, had been reading the papers from San Diego. The papers had put Mrs. Andler’s murder on the first page, crowding the war news a little, because Tichenor Burrell had been a wild and rich young man and anything concerning him was considered colorful.

  Mr. Pennyfeather put on his shoes and went down to answer the telephone in the lobby.

  His caller was Caroline.

  “I suppose you wondered what had become of me,” she began.

  “Yes, I did rather,” he admitted.

  “I heard Stacey’s inquire-y.” She mocked the sheriff’s manner of speech. “Say, what is your first name, anyway?”

  “Not even you, my dear, can get that out of me.”

  She laughed, the wholesome, unaffected laughter he remembered. It brought to mind the freckles and the forthright way she had looked at him. “Any new developments? I ducked out before Stacey was quite through, you see. I didn’t want to be caught snooping.”

  “No new developments that I’m aware of.”

  “What I really wanted to tell you is that I’m meeting Tick when he comes in. Perhaps you’d like to join us. You’d have a chance, then, to talk to him before Stacey gets him.”

  “That’s a very good idea.”

  “Come to Aunt Lou’s about eight. It will be getting dark then, and you shouldn’t have any trouble. Do you remember the way through the alleys?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather hesitated. Her question, the plan she had unfolded, were logical and aboveboard. Nevertheless the idea of going through the weedy alley, hemmed in by the blank rear walls of Superstition’s business houses, and in the dusk, didn’t appeal to him.

  “And why don’t you delay having dinner until you get here,” she added, “and sample Aunt Lou’s baked steak with mushrooms?”

  Mr. Pennyfeather remembered desperately his tasteless restaurant luncheon. He wondered if Caroline Pond could hear his mouth watering over the telephone.

  “Don’t let Stacey see you!” she warned.

  “I won’t,” he promised dutifully.

  He was putting the receiver into its hook, hearing the shuffle of Mr. John’s feet in the room behind the counter, when his eye strayed into the street. Under the blazing sunlight on the opposite walk the figure of a soldier moved along slowly, its face turned toward the hotel. The walk, the posture, brought instantly to his mind the soldier who had followed Caroline last night into the cactus garden.

  Without a moment’s hesitation Mr. Pennyfeather hurried after him.

  The soldier vanished through the door of Mama’s Place, and Mr. Pennyfeather followed. The interior was cool, the effect of the thick adobe walls and the high ceiling. The air smelled richly of beer. A bar filled the left wall, and there was a scattering of tables with chairs about the floor. The soldier Mr. Pennyfeather wanted was at a table. A Mexican waiter was taking his order.

  Mr. Pennyfeather waited until the Mexican had gone and then went over the table. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I wonder if I might sit here?”

  “Go ahead.” The soldier was young and blond, a trifle on the thin side. He would have been better-looking without the strange bitter lost expression in his eyes. “This is a free country.” He turned his back on Mr. Pennyfeather.

  Mr. Pennyfeather sat down. “I don’t know how to say what I have to say in a tactful manner. In the first place, I have to admit having overheard your conversation last night in the cactus garden with Miss Pond.”

  The soldier didn’t turn around; a stiffness came over him. He said, “How did you hear it?”

  “My friend Tick Burrell and I were hiding in the cactus.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then: “That means that Burrell heard our talk, too.”

  “Yes. He heard it. He didn’t tell me who you were or who the girl was. I met Caroline Pond this morning, and I knew her; and a moment or so ago I looked out of the hotel window and recognized you.”

  “So what? What do you want of me?”

  “Well, you see, there’s an investigation being made in the murder of Tick’s aunt.”

  “I didn’t murder her.”

  “No. But you were in the vicinity during the time preceding the murder, and you might have seen something which the police would find valuable.”

  The soldier turned slowly, and at that moment the Mexican waiter approached with a bottle of beer and a glass. The bitter lost look was very intense; Mr. Pennyfeather had a sudden premonition of what the young man would say.

  When the waiter had gone, the soldier poured a glass of beer and tasted it; he kept his eyes on Mr. Pennyfeather. “If I had seen anything which could put Burrell in jail, I’d have told it by now,” he said. “Anything else—I’m just not interested.”

  “You’re very angry about losing Caroline, aren’t you?” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “That’s my business.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess that slipped out.”

  “Skip it, then.”

  “There had been a prowler in the garden shortly before you and Miss Pond entered it. That prowler may have been the murderer.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Would you mind telling me whether you stayed near the hotel after you and Miss Pond separated?”

  “I do mind discussing my affairs with a stranger. Especially a middle-aged, nosy, dried-up stranger. But for your information, no. I didn’t stay near the hotel.” He drained the beer and stood up. “Hey, Pedro. Bring the gentleman a drink. He needs one.”

  He dropped a half dollar on the table.

  Mr. Pennyfeather wondered if he was blushing as furiously outside as he was within. He felt shriveled by the soldier’s scorn.

  The soldier stared down at him. “You can tell Caroline, when you see her, what a heel I am.” He walked out with a long stride.

  Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t taste the beer the waiter set down before him. He sat trying to remember what it was like to be young and to be hurt. Mr. Pennyfeather in his youth had been jilted by a pretty girl as heartless as a doll. She had given him back his ring and accepted one from the first boy in town who owned an automobile. Mr. Pennyfeather felt that he knew, a little, of what Caroline’s Freddy was going through.

  He left a tip for the waiter and went back to the hotel.

  In the lobby was a group: Stacey, his two strangers from San Diego, Mr. Johns, and Glee Hazzard. Mr. Johns was clucking alarm, and Stacey was dangling a pair of handcuffs.

  “We won’t put these on you if you’ll come quietly,” he said as Mr. Pennyfeather entered.

  There wasn’t any color in Glee Hazzard’s face, but the aliveness was still there: the aliveness and the intelligence—and unbelief. “I’ll come quietly,” she said.

  She looked at Mr. Pennyfeather helplessly. “I’m being arrested for murder. They found some of my hair in Mrs. Andler’s comb.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “The most preposterous piece of evidence in the history of criminal detection,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, making himself comfortable in one of the leather chairs. “I’m surprised at you.”

  Stacey turned a little purple. “Look, for a man who conceals his right name from the law—”

  “I haven’t concealed it,” said Mr. Pennyfeather innocently. “You know it. You’ve been calling me by it for ages.”

  “I have?” asked Stacey, dumfounded.

  “Pennyfeather.”

  Stacey squinted a horrendous squint. “Now, Mr. P., you’ve had your little fun and all that. We’ll get on with our business.”

  “An utterly stupid business.” He saw the little flare of hope in Glee’s
eyes. “What gives you the idea that a murderess would stop to straighten her hair?”

  “That’s police affairs, Mr. P.” Stacey worked with the handcuffs, and they yawned open and Glee flinched.

  “Or perhaps I see your line of reasoning, anyway,” Mr. Pennyfeather went on. “You think Miss Hazzard took off her helmet of bandages before committing the crime, so as not to soil them. Then, in order to rearrange herself, she had to comb her hair flat again. Of course, using Mrs. Andler’s comb in such a case would mean that Miss Hazzard is somewhat less than a moron.”

  Stacey obviously hesitated. One of his helpers muttered: “We haven’t got all day. I’m due back before tomorrow.”

  “The trouble with imported talent is that it has to go home,” said Mr. Pennyfeather absently. “It can’t stay and study the evidence in leisure. It wasn’t on the scene and hasn’t absorbed the background of the crime from the beginning.”

  “I’d watch that old guy,” said the other expert nastily.

  “I’ve needed someone to watch me,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, beginning to grow plaintive. “Perhaps they’d have caught whoever it was who put that centipede into my overcoat.”

  Mr. Johns clucked and stared, and then ran to check up on the fish bowl. “He’s gone again!” he squeaked.

  “He’ll turn up,” Mr. Pennyfeather promised. “Somebody’ll get into bed with him.”

  Stacey was growing furious. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “The centipede,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Someone put him in my coat when I wasn’t looking.”

  The two experts exchanged a look of skepticism. Mr. Johns got down to search the floor on his hands and knees, peering under the counter and about the stairs. Stacey walked about jingling the handcuffs. “This doesn’t change anything,” he decided, talking to himself.

  “I believe that Mr. Jessop was the original owner of this centipede,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  Stacey stopped walking as though an idea had just hit him between the eyes.

  “Why do you keep bringing in old Joe?” he demanded after a minute. “It almost looks as though you were covering up somebody by using Joe as a red herring.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather thought briefly of unmixing Stacey’s metaphors and then passed it up. “You are welcome to me as a suspect if you want me,” he offered. “I came in on the bus with the murdered woman.”

  “We haven’t any proof that you knew her before,” grunted Stacey unwillingly.

  “And you feel that murdering her just to help Tick get married is a bit farfetched,” added Mr. Pennyfeather. “Though you don’t put it past Tick, however. By the way, what’s Miss Hazzard’s motive?”

  Stacey looked cautiously at his deputies. He was obviously the gossipy type and wanted to talk, but the presence of his experts reminded him of the censorship of official business.

  “Can’t tell you that,” he said, “but she’s got one.”

  “I hope that your reconstruction of the crime with Miss Hazzard in the role of murderess can account for some of the discrepancies,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “What discrepancies?” Stacey asked, not exactly displeased.

  “Oh—matters like the disappearance of Mrs. Andler during the time before her death.”

  One of the experts—the one who usually yawned—said: “You don’t have to explain things to him, Pop.”

  Stacey must have resented the new name. “Well, as a matter of fact we don’t just know where Mrs. Andler was. But then, neither do we know where the rest of you were, outside of that minute or two Miss Whittemore was getting her skull fractured.”

  “Then there’s the faint blue light which appeared in Mrs. Andler’s room shortly before the time her murderer must have begun on her.”

  “What’s that?” Stacey was startled; the experts looked grim. Mr. Johns, on hands and knees beside the stairs, stopped short in the middle of a cluck.

  “The blue light I saw from the cactus garden. Very dim. It was only long after that I realized it hadn’t been candlelight. Candlelight,” Mr. Pennyfeather explained carefully, “is yellow.”

  “A blue light.” Stacey looked at his experts. “How long did it burn?”

  “Very briefly.”

  “Could it have been a match?” asked the yawning man.

  “It wasn’t that kind of light.” Mr. Pennyfeather, glancing toward the stairs, wondered who in the upper hall might be listening. “It was an uncertain, darting kind of light. Fugitive, soft of.”

  “A flashlight?”

  “Not nearly strong enough for that. Faint and little.” He felt himself frown in an effort to pin down the memory; he wondered if he might be beginning to squint like Stacey. “A lightning-bug sort of thing.”

  “The murderer had a tame lightning bug,” suggested the second man, “which he used to frighten Mrs. Andler into unconsciousness so she’d lie still and let him hit her.”

  “You know, I thought that, too,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.

  Stacey’s mouth fell open. “You thought—”

  “That some means must have been employed to render Mrs. Andler unconscious. Would she have lain there meekly to be slaughtered? I think not.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Stacey. “We haven’t settled about that light.”

  “I don’t know what it was,” Mr. Pennyfeather admitted. “I don’t enjoy thinking about it, either. I didn’t like that blue light.”

  “Do you mind showing us where you were hiding when you saw it?” the yawning man asked. “We might be able to figure out something from that.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Coming, Sheriff?”

  Stacey looked uncertainly at Glee. “You wait here, now. You aren’t exactly in the clear.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Glee quietly.

  They went out, with Mr. Johns bringing up the rear and looking hopefully into corners for his centipede. The cactus garden enclosed them in its heat as in an oven. The sultry wind had a touch of sage in it; Mr. Pennyfeather felt sweat start from his pores. He found what looked like his and Tick’s hiding place of the night.

  “In here.”

  The yawning man wiped his face with a handkerchief before squatting down. Stacey bent, squinted at Mrs. Andler’s window. He and the yawning man exchanged a grin.

  Mr. Pennyfeather knew what bothered them. “Her ceiling is all you see. That’s where the light was.”

  Their grins went away, stayed away while Mr. Pennyfeather told them next and in detail about his cactus thorns.

  Stacey’s other man scratched his head. “You make it all into a mess,” he complained.

  “I’m glad you say so,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Your business about Miss Hazzard’s hair was much too neat.”

  “It was her hair,” grumbled Stacey, fanning himself and then putting his hat back on in a hurry.

  “Of course it was,” comforted Mr. Pennyfeather, “and it was there before Mrs; Andler got into bed to be murdered. I saw it. I noted how dark and how greasy it was. By the way, Miss Hazzard’s hair isn’t greasy. Didn’t that strike you?”

  The expert who liked to yawn took a deep breath and held it, staring at Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “Did you say you saw this hair in Mrs. Andler’s comb before the murder took place?”

  “If you’ll guarantee, from your scientific poking about, that Mrs. Andler was chopped up on her bed—yes.” Mr. Pennyfeather felt heat come up through his shoes from the earth. “The hair was in that comb when Tick and I were in the room, waiting for Mrs. Andler. I thought how little it looked like Mrs. Andler’s own.”

  “Well—we’ve got a blue light to work on, anyway,” said Stacey. He sounded as though Mr. Pennyfeather had robbed him.

  He had revenge, though. For the rest of that blazing afternoon they put Mr. Pennyfeather through his paces: he recreated again and again his wanderings of the night before. He told them several times his story of the cactus thorn, in which they seemed to take little interest and find n
o significance.

  The day began to darken to a purple dusk.

  “We’re going to have dinner now,” said Stacey in the lobby. He looked at Glee, who had waited all this while. “You’re to keep yourself at hand so that if we want you we can find you.”

  Glee nodded. She had given up chain smoking to sit in an utter stillness that alarmed Mr. Pennyfeather.

  “And you, Mr. P.”—he pointed with a leathery finger—“you might jot down any brain waves as they come along.”

  Mr. Pennyfeather watched them leave. He resented the remark about the brain waves; he was worried about Glee Hazzard; and he was mad clear through about the centipede.

  “I think we might have something cool across the street,” he suggested to Glee when Stacey and his men had gone. “And you, Mr. Johns: will you join us?”

  Mr. Johns, reinvestigating the fish bowl, scowled and seemed about to refuse. Then his expression lightened a little. “Wait’ll I straighten up,” he said. He proceeded to straighten up by switching on the lobby chandelier, blowing the day’s dust off the ledger and laying it open on the counter, and kicking a couple of newspapers off the rug into the space beneath the stairs.

  They went out into the gray light. A few stars glimmered overhead. The oppression of the heat was lifting; the wind bore a whip of sand, but it was cooler. The town reminded Mr. Pennyfeather of a lizard under a rock just opening its eyes, just crawling back to life after a sun-induced torpor. Mama’s Place gave forth light upon the pavement and bawdy juke tunes into the air. Mr. Pennyfeather guided his guests toward it.

  He studied the girl surreptitiously as they sat down at a table. She was very pale, and the clammy moisture of heat exhaustion shone on her face. When the waiter came Mr. Pennyfeather suggested that she have something stimulating. Glee and Mr. Johns both ordered a scotch-and-soda. Mr. Pennyfeather wanted a glass of milk, but the waiter misunderstood, or else didn’t speak English very well. He brought three bottles of beer.

  Mr. Johns grew sorrowful as his beer grew less. “I’ve always run a good hotel. I never deserved anything like this.”