Taffy didn’t nod or speak. She sighed as though she were a little tired, a little bewildered by the mystery and intrigue.
“That’s all there is to the whole story,” Miss Comfort concluded. “You see how simple and unplanned all of it was.”
“Except for my coat,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.
Miss Comfort’s imitation of a smile died out slowly, as though her facial muscles had lost track of what was happening in her mind. “Your what?”
“My windproof coat. You were wearing it. Remember? And since Mr. Jessop made the mistake of thinking that you were I, the person who tried to chloroform you shortly afterward might have done likewise.”
This was no longer what Mr. Pennyfeather thought. He had decided that even in the darkness of the alley Miss Comfort’s abundant form and strikingly prominent teeth should have removed her from the danger of being mistaken for a sparrowlike little man like himself. But he was still most interested in her persistent denial on this point.
“I was attacked and chloroformed by the same fiend—” she began.
Mr. Pennyfeather put up a hand. “I know. The same fiend who did for Mrs. Andler and Mrs. Blight. Only so much less thoroughly. And so inexpertly.”
Her gaze flickered past again to meet Taffy’s wide-eyed wonder, retreated to Stacey, settled at last upon Joe Jessop. “Mr. Jessop, since you were in the alley at the time, you may have glimpsed someone else there besides you and myself.”
He mumbled: “I was in a hurry. I didn’t see anybody else.”
They had come to an impasse, Mr. Pennyfeather realized, in which most likely both lies and truth had combined to make a wall. It could be true that Miss Comfort, alarmed and suspicious of the use her little flashlight had been put to, had broken it with her heel and then been set upon with chloroform by an unknown—the unknown who had axed Mrs. Andler and Mrs. Blight. But the story had the texture, the coincidental plausibility, of something created as a screen for other activities and other purposes. As far as Mr. Pennyfeather was concerned, it smelled. He wondered if Stacey had had sense enough to check Miss Comfort’s credentials as a nurse and whether there was any way of finding out if she had known Miss Whittemore previously. Their relationship had been adjusted with a remarkable speed. Or perhaps he was overly suspicious and Taffy, the ivy vine, had taken naturally to the professional strength of Miss Comfort. And perhaps Miss Comfort’s nursing manner was always so far on the protective side.
Stacey allowed Miss Comfort to go while Mr. Pennyfeather stood and plowed his mind for buried hunches. Miss Comfort led Taffy back to her room with chiding remarks about having gotten out of bed when she shouldn’t. Taffy made weary but grateful replies. Glee had disappeared. Mr. Pennyfeather couldn’t recall that she had gone into her room.
Stacey said: “I’m going to round everybody up again and put them through it. If I bring this blue-light business into the open, admit there’s been some monkey busisess with chloroform that we don’t understand, I might get a lead. Even unconsciously.”
Mr. Pennyfeather longed to tell Stacey that the word was subconsciously; but still—unconsciousness might be more comfortable for Stacey than the state he was in.
“I want everybody here by”—Stacey examined a watch of a turnip fatness and with a sound like a cricket—“by eleven. I’ll see if Mr. Burrell can’t join us, too. You might mention the hour to anyone you run into.”
He went away, with Jessop still trailing like a shadow.
Mr. Pennyfeather wished mightily to sit down quietly somewhere and to think industriously about the blue light and the cactus thorn and an odd feeling he was getting about Mrs. Andler’s original intention in coming up here; but he felt, too, the pressure of time passing and of the increase of danger. And he knew, also, that he had better rap on Glee’s door at once and make sure that she was safe inside.
The sun that poured into the hall from the porch door was frankly burning now. It touched his sock under the edge of his trousers and warmed ankle and foot and shoe with a touch like a growing fire. The flies hanging on the screen seemed cooked to senselessness. There was a hot, withered smell of old wood giving up its sap.
Glee didn’t answer his first knock or the second. He tried the knob, and the door opened to show the sunny room without anyone in it.
Some hope of finding her on the porch, in spite of the heat there, sent him outdoors. Here he experienced the feeling of being stuffed alive into a furnace. He looked about at the bare boards, the rickety furniture where he and Tick and Glee had sat the evening before. He moved over to the rail and saw the street, as breathlessly hot and still as the inside of an oven.
Glee’s slacks, a red pencil mark in a dun-colored canvas, were just vanishing through the door of Mama’s Place.
And shepherding her with an air of hurry was Mrs. Jessop, who didn’t look back.
Chapter Eighteen
Mama’s place, being insulated by adobe walls three feet thick, held an approximate coolness which was grateful both to the skin and to the lungs, a darkness in which temporarily Mr. Pennyfeather was as blind as a bat, and a smell of beer only mildly diluted by the morning’s scrubbing. The shutters cut out the glare from the street and lent a pleasant mystery to the Mexican bartender, whom Mr. Pennyfeather found to be looking at him curiously.
“Oh,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “I didn’t see you until now. Just coming in out of the sun, you know. Were there two ladies here?”
“Two ladees?” said the bartender, wielding a bar towel with the ease of long habit. “I don’t see two ladees, I theenk.”
“Mrs. Jessop. You might know her. And a younger one.”
He thought that the bartender’s eyes moved with a liquid caution toward the back door and the alley. “I would know Mrs. Jessop and she’s not coming een yet.”
Mr. Pennyfeather hesitated, then took a seat at a table. “Perhaps I was mistaken in thinking I saw them. Could I have a beer?”
“Sure theeng,” said the bartender, uncapping a bottle.
The beer hit him with the impact of alcohol on an empty stomach, but he sipped at it valiantly until he had studied the place enough to be sure that there was no cubbyhole which could conceal Mrs. Jessop and Glee. Then he paid for his beer and went out. He found a scrap of shade under an awning and looked at the street. There was scarcely anyone in sight now. The crowd of soldiers had long since left for Camp Frey, and shoppers in the main street of Superstition were negligible. He was reminded by a slight giddiness from the beer that he hadn’t had any breakfast. He found the beanery where he and Tick had eaten on the night of his arrival and investigated what passed there for buckwheat cakes and sausages: an experiment which gave him dyspeptic flashes for the rest of the day.
When he came out he struck off at once for Mrs. Jessop’s home, though he had a distinct hunch that she wouldn’t have taken Glee there. He peered in through the front screen and saw the figure of Mr. Jessop sitting in his shirt sleeves at one of the long tables. There were no preparations going on for lunch. Mr. Jessop had two bottles and a glass on the table in front of him. He was pouring drinks from the bottle containing whisky and leaving the bottle of soda strictly alone.
He turned slowly when Mr. Pennyfeather rapped. “Yeah?” he said. Then he saw who it was. “Oh, hello.”
“Is Mrs. Jessop here?” asked Mr. Pennyfeather anxiously.
Mr. Jessop didn’t answer at once; there was a long second of hesitation, perhaps of evasion, while he studied the brown gleam of the whisky in his glass. Then: “Why do you want her?”
The lamest possible reason popped into Mr. Pennyfeather’s head, and no concentration upon Professor Gelett’s teachings could get it out; so he used it. “Sheriff Stacey said, you know, that everyone connected with the case should meet him at eleven, and I thought Mrs. Jessop should be told.”
“What makes you think,” said Jessop with an instant hostility, “that Lou has anything to do with it?”
“Hasn’t she?” wondered Mr. Pennyfea
ther.
“You mean because of Carrie and me?” He moved the glass roughly on the oilcloth, and the liquid splattered out to make a shining mark which began at once to evaporate. “You’re all wrong. Lou wouldn’t know anything Stacey could use.”
“I’ll tell him that, then.”
Jessop said, “You’ll tell him what?”
“That Mrs. Jessop won’t be coming because she hasn’t anything to say of importance.”
“Why don’t you just keep your mouth shut?” The gleam in Jessop’s eye matched that of his glass. “I can’t see that Lou’s ever done anything to you but give you some good meals.”
“And I should keep my mouth shut in return?”
“Now you’re getting the idea.”
“I’d be so much more at ease about co-operating if I knew what it was she wanted with Miss Hazzard this morning.”
Jessop didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t swallow. His slightly bloated face remained turned toward the door, and for his life Mr. Pennyfeather couldn’t tell whether the expression on it was one of surprise or of cunning disinterest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jessop said finally, “but I don’t like it and I don’t think you’ll get very far thinking about Lou. If I were you I’d go back to digging up stuff on Miss Comfort.”
“Would you?” hedged Mr. Pennyfeather in the best tradition of Professor Gelett. “Perhaps you’re right, at that.”
“You might just try finding out, for instance,” Jessop went on, “where she and that Whittemore girl knew each other before.”
Mr. Pennyfeather was so startled that he could do no more than prod his nose into the screen and stare.
Jessop hunched forward confidentially. “They did know each other somewhere. I heard enough of their talking to figure that out. You’d almost think they were relatives.”
“Would you?” Mr. Pennyfeather repeated himself; a trifle on the unconvinced side, but politely, so that Jessop would go on.
“And I think there’s something funny and underhanded in their pretending to be strangers,” Jessop finished.
“You hadn’t, of course, mentioned any of this to Stacey?”
“I’m not trying to be a detective, too.”
“But you did—hm-m-m—just happen to overhear something of their conversation?”
“Two conversations,” said Jessop, unabashed. “One of them in the middle of last night after the Comfort woman had scratched and wheedled her way into the Whittemore girl’s room.”
Mr. Pennyfeather’s thoughts had jolted back to the bus trip coming here, to Taffy’s shrinking and undecided figure in the aisle looking back to where Glee and the nurse sat waiting; and he recalled her stammered words: “She’s in there,” which he had thought referred to Glee. And Mrs. Blight’s rejoinder: “You got rid of her before.”
It was beautifully simple and compact in the light of Tick’s remarks about the aunt or somebody with a face like a horse (whom he had never seen but had heard about from Taffy) and Mrs. Blight’s nervous vigilance in regard to Taffy’s supervision. Glee’s story fitted in nicely, too: Miss Comfort’s moving into her apartment some time back (when she and Taffy had broken up, no doubt) and her eagerness in having a chance to make this trip to Camp Frey.
There might even have been in Miss Comfort’s mind the thought that if she could not attach herself to a portion of Tick’s money through Taffy, she might do so through gratitude from Glee. Mr. Pennyfeather thought that he could see how a woman like Miss Comfort, all teeth and antiseptic smells and unromantic harshness, might find the thought of all that money quite compelling.
Jessop was filling his glass again; a brassy color had come up into his face, and he had begun to hiccup. “If you want to tell Stacey about the nurse and Miss Whittemore, it’s your business.” Hic. “Only don’t quote me. I don’t want that Comfort woman after me again. She’s too damned hottempered.”
“Hold your breath and count to twenty,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “Slowly. And of course I can’t very well say anything to Stacey, since I didn’t overhear what you did.”
“Just tell him they already knew each other.”
“I had begun to suspect that, and I can’t help wondering if Stacey hasn’t begun to suspect it, too. If you see Mrs. Jessop, incidentally, you might remind her that although her absence from the gathering might not be noticed, Miss Hazzard’s most certainly will be.”
Jessop grunted. Mr. Pennyfeather went away with the feeling that Jessop’s gaze followed him. The alcohol had given Jessop a mask of slightly cockeyed surliness, and whether fear or anger lurked under it was a question Mr. Pennyfeather could not solve.
He had the hunch, too, that Jessop would not wait but would follow shortly to keep an eye on the gathering Stacey had arranged. He had gone home apparently to replenish his dwindling supply of liquor. But whether he could or would get hold of his wife, wherever she was with Glee, was also a query without an answer.
He met Stacey on the hotel porch. Stacey was holding a couple of telegrams, and his face expressed a somewhat acid satisfaction. He squinted fiercely at the meek figure of Mr. Pennyfeather.
“Gotcha,” he said, “Mr. Adam Pennyfeather!”
Mr. Pennyfeather regarded him with wonder and reproach.
“Board of Education in Gullville, Oregon,” Stacey went on rapidly. “You were professor of English there in the City College in 1922. I found out about Gullville from Clarendon, from the list of references you gave them.” He grinned like a sand turtle sampling a cactus.
“Gullville. Yes, yes, of course. I remember so well,” said Mr. Pennyfeather thoughtfully, “how insistent they were that I should possess a good solid first name. So I gave them Adam. It does have a first-citizen sound to it, don’t you think?”
“First citizen?” queried Stacey.
“In the beginning,” Mr. Pennyfeather reminded, “there was just Adam. He kept a kind of precarious respectability by blaming everything on Eve. I don’t admire him for the trick, but I thought I might as well take advantage of it. So I gave them the name.”
Stacey’s eyes began to turn a chill shade of gray. “Then the name’s phony?”
“As phony as possible,” Mr. Pennyfeather assured him. “And I’ll do the same for you if you press me any further.”
Stacey exploded. “If you’d lie to a Board of Education you’d lie to anybody. I’ve a good mind not to believe another word out of you.”
“It isn’t Ananias,” Mr. Pennyfeather said modestly.
This escaped Stacey or else was over his head. “I’ll find out your name in my own good time.”
“My father was a professor of classical history and languages,” Mr. Pennyfeather offered. “I’m afraid he sometimes let his enthusiasm get away with him. He had a horse he called Leander. Leander was afraid of water, too. He got that way after Father named him.”
Stacey scratched his head. “I guess I ought to know what you’re talking about, but the fact is, all of those old names sound about the same to me.”
“If you go prowling through the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans, you’re quite sure to find my name prominently mentioned.”
“That would be finding it the hard way,” Stacey decided. “I’ll stick to sending telegrams.”
“Your second telegram—was it fruitless, also?”
“This here telegram”—Stacey waved it angrily in the hot air—“proves that you’re wrong about Miss Comfort. She not only has a nursing certificate, she was surgical nurse at St. Stephanie’s Hospital in Frisco for four years. She’s in the clear, right out in the clear.”
Mr. Pennyfeather made sad eyes at him. “Astounding,” he murmured. “Astounding and mortifying.”
“You think so?” said Stacey, a little puzzled.
“I am, after all, a member of the voting population of this country, a portion of which body has obviously elected you to be sheriff.”
Stacey began to be suspicious. “And so what?”
“You thought,” Stacey pointed out belligerently, “that Miss Comfort wasn’t a nurse at all.”
“That was some time back. Since then I’ve come to see that the chloroformings—all except the one performed on Miss Comfort herself—had a remarkably expert touch to them. They were neat, clean-cut, quick. The patients went to sleep, didn’t die of the chloroforming, didn’t put up any fight to the ax.”
Some of the color had left Stacey’s face. “You’re accusing Miss Comfort of these murders?”
“Regarding the evidence: her profession, the attempt only she could have managed with Miss Hazzard’s strand of hair, the blue light she admits owning—”
“But motive, man, motive!”
“I think you’ll find that she’s some relative of Miss Whittemore’s and that Miss Whittemore’s acquisition of some of the Burrell money will mean much luxury for Miss Comfort. From which Mrs. Andler and Mrs. Blight respectively, and in different ways, barred her.”
Stacey turned to look in at the lobby, where Mr. Johns still made a mournful search of the fish bowl and surrounding territory for the hundredth time and as if the centipede were apt to appear there as mischievously as he had gone.
“Great jumping blue dog-eared—” Stacey muttered, and stopped.
Mr. Pennyfeather waited with interest to learn what noun Stacey could possibly place after such an assortment of adjectives; but Stacey left him. In the lobby Mr. Johns rolled his eyes in surprise, shook a thoughtful head toward the street. Stacey’s curses grew rich with rage. There was obviously going to be some sort of difficulty in getting hold of Miss Comfort.
Mr. Pennyfeather watched while Stacey bolted from the hotel across the way to the bus depot; he then walked in quietly past Mr. Johns and went upstairs. The second-floor hall was silent, hot, musty. The bathroom, when he opened it, had the arrested quiet of a tomb and the heat of a foundry, and the soft gurgle of water from a defective bath hydrant gave it a wistful hint of being woodsy.
Bring the Bride a Shroud Page 15