The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope

by C. W. Grafton

  I spread the dinner on my desk and the sight of it had me trembling so I could hardly pour the coffee. I opened the newspaper so I could read the headlines while I was eating and the top thing in letters about three inches high stopped me in my tracks. When I got as far as learning that William Jasper Harper was dead I didn’t wait for the details but hustled into a suit of clothes and down to the all-night garage where my car was being repaired, in something like a world’s record. The car was ready and before the steak was cold I was about halfway to Harpersville.

  25 The notorious French fortress, in which many of the prisoners of the French kings were incarcerated—stormed by revolutionaries at the onset of the French Revolution.

  26 “The Face Upon the Barroom Floor” is a famous (infamous?) 1872 poem by John Henry Titus about a drunk and his lost love, later adapted to songs, paintings, and movies.

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  There was not much gas in the tank and before I got to Harpersville I had to pull into a filling station. While I was there I saw some of these little packages of sandwiches made out of crackers and stuff and I jammed six or eight of them in my pocket to eat on the road. Then I opened the newspaper to learn what I could while the attendant was working on the car. The paper was not a late afternoon edition at all but was an extra and the ink wasn’t even dry on it. William Jasper Harper had been alive about an hour and a half before and I could imagine the pandemonium in the newspaper office when they hustled to get that extra on the streets. There was a lot of stuff about his life, including where he was born and where he was educated and what he owned and what he was a director of and I guess that much of the article had been written up and kept on file for years against such a moment as this, just as if Mr. William Jasper Harper were Adolf Hitler or Mahatma Gandhi or somebody. The part about his death was very short and said practically nothing. The Harper family was big stuff in this part of the state and the news was handled as if it were a venereal disease. It was perfectly plain that the guy was defunct and it was also made pretty clear that he did not die of old age, but as for the rest of it, you could draw your own conclusions and your guess would have been as good as mine. Practically the only fact was that he was not living any more and his body had been found in his study in his home about nine o’clock that evening with a bullet hole in its head. He had dined at 7:00 with the family and shortly afterwards he had gone into the study and closed the door. The study had French doors opening on a paved terrace. The kitchen help had heard something that could have been a chair falling over or could have been a shot, but they were in another part of the house and did not immediately connect the sound with the study. Mrs. Harper, who was an invalid, had a room downstairs near the study and she was the first one to think there must be something wrong. She summoned the servants and that was how he was found.

  The newspaper article also said that the sheriff and coroner had been called after the family physician came and said he was dead and the sheriff “was following a number of leads” and expected to make important disclosures soon. If you read the guarded wordings two or three times you could take your choice between suicide and murder and obviously the newspaper was not making any choices of its own.

  Harpersville was a good deal wider awake than it was when I drove in two nights before. One car was rolling up to the police station just off the main street and another was roaring away. I decided that it was safe enough to barge on into the town since the sheriff was not likely to worry about small stuff like abandoned charges of attempted blackmail while he was confronted with his big chance to get on half of the front pages of the country.

  I did not know where the Harper home was located so I drove around to the McClures’ and parked. There was a light on in the living room and Ruth McClure was just coming out of her own room with her hat on and before I even got in the door I could tell that she had been crying and not so long ago at that. Miss Katie was there too and I was about as welcome as Mussolini would have been.

  Something had upset Ruth pretty badly but she was not in such condition that she could forget who I was. When she saw me she was as mad in three-fifths of a second as anyone could possibly get and I could see that I was going to be a goat of something I didn’t understand. She clinched her fists and when she spoke she was the next thing to strangling she was so mad. She said:

  “Of all the nerve! Millions of lawyers in the world and I had to pick you. Get out of this house and if I ever see your shadow again, I’ll kill you if I have to do it with a corkscrew.”

  It was hard to tell whether she was going to kick me or burst out crying. I don’t know anything about women and probably never will, but I didn’t have time to put up with any foolishness and I had been pushed around about all I could stand, so I smacked her in the face pretty hard and then shook her until my own teeth rattled.

  I thought Miss Katie was going to take a bite out of my arm with the good side of her mouth, but I gave her a glare that nearly set fire to her clothes and she didn’t do any more than bare her fangs at me and keep her distance. Ruth sat down hard in the nearest chair and burst into tears. I have never been more exasperated in my life and I said with considerable feeling:

  “What in hell is going on here?”

  Ruth went right on crying but Miss Katie said:

  “It was Tim. They think he did it. They’ve got him down at the police station and he won’t say a word.”

  31

  I got down on my knees in front of Ruth McClure and took both her hands and held them firmly although she was trying to jerk them away. She tried to get up but I pushed her back. I was pretty peeved. I said: “Listen little Bopeep, the sheep you are losing aren’t the kind that come home wagging their tails behind them. You have to go out and look for them and I may be just the guy who can do it whether you think I’m Hercule Poirot or Alias Jimmy Valentine.27 Now get up and wash your face and powder your beak and let’s start something.”

  It didn’t go over too big. The look she gave me made it plain that in her bluebook the value of a ’41 model Gilmore Henry was lower than net income after taxes.

  “You started the whole thing,” she said bitterly. “We were stupid and happy and everything was doing fine and then you had to come along and ask a lot of questions so Tim gets to thinking about things and then he slams out of here and goes to see Mr. Harper and now Mr. Harper is dead and Tim’s in jail and I hate your damn g-guts.”

  “All right, if I’ve got to do it the hard way, I’ll do it the hard way. As Tim’s lawyer I could get in and talk to him and probably I could get into the Harper house and find out a lot of things. If I’m not Tim’s lawyer, I’m just a guy named Joe and the law will push me around like a vacuum cleaner. I didn’t start anything that wasn’t started long ago and I suppose I came down here two weeks ago and made a bull’s eye out of the tire on your father’s car just to win the cheap cigar or a baby doll for the kiddies. I didn’t get the lump on my head out of a sugar bowl.” It was a pretty long speech for me and if I hadn’t been wound up as tight as a watch spring, I would have run down before I got it all out. I had forgotten all about Miss Katie but she brought me back to the present tense.

  “Kick him out,” she said coldly, “he’s no good. He asks all the questions in the book but he doesn’t supply any answers. Tell him to beat it and good riddance if you ask me.”

  But I had gotten under Ruth’s hide somewhere down the line and she stood up quite steadily and blew her nose.

  “No, Miss Katie, I’m not so sure. He’s a stinker in a lot of ways and I wouldn’t name a child after him but he’s probably right when he says he came in for only the second feature, the news reel and the preview of coming attractions.”

  “What would Tim say?”

  “Tim isn’t in position to choose and neither am I.” She went into her room and Miss Katie glared at me and went out and banged the door shut behind her.

  27 The exploits of t
he former detective were recorded at length by Dame Agatha Christie; Jimmy Valentine, a reformed ex-convict, is the protagonist of the 1910 play by Paul Armstrong titled Alias Jimmy Valentine based on O. Henry’s 1903 short story “A Retrieved Reformation.” Three films of the play were made between 1915 and 1928, and a radio drama appeared in the late 1930s.

  32

  At the door of police headquarters we ran into Mr. James Mead and he looked at me and then at Ruth and then at me again with evident surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked angrily. “I thought you were going to Louisville and that a certain agreement was made.”

  “I was going to Louisville and I did go to Louisville, but that was yesterday. I didn’t say anything about not coming back.”

  “Where do you figure in this thing?”

  “I happen to be the attorney for Mr. Timothy McClure.”

  “You can’t do that. This is the second time you’ve gotten off base. You accepted an employment hostile to the interests of a client of the firm and I thought that was all cleaned up. I represent the family of the deceased. You can’t represent the murderer.”

  “I can, will and do. How do you like that?”

  “You can’t, it’s unethical.”

  I drew in a deep breath and looked straight at him. “I asked permission to represent Miss McClure in the first place and told you what she wanted and you said it was all right. I never knew until this evening that you represented Harper or his family or his company or any part thereof and when I got it, it didn’t come from you. I saw a file on your desk. As for the present employment, it might have been improper two minutes ago but it is not improper now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A partnership is terminable at will. Ours is terminated now. I hereby terminate the partnership of Mead, Opdyke, Smallwood, Garrison & Henry and you can call in the auditors and figure what’s coming to me, if anything.”

  It is curious the way the human mind sometimes digresses in moments of stress and seizes upon the most absurdly inconsequential aspects of a matter, like people who run out of a burning building and at the moment see nothing illogical in taking a chamber pot with them. What Mr. Mead said, after a long moment of study, was: “We’ll have to send out announcements.”

  I said, “Yes, won’t we?” and then I took Ruth by the arm and we walked into headquarters and left him standing there.

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  There was an officer who looked like he might be in charge and we told him we wanted to talk to Tim McClure. He said we couldn’t do it, but I told him I was Tim’s lawyer and he said that he guessed a man had a right to see a lawyer so he could be sent to the electric chair all legal and proper. This view of the matter did not particularly appeal to me, but I didn’t think I would solve any of the world’s problems in a conference with this cluck, so I let it go at that. He disappeared down a hall and pretty soon he came back and said:

  “Wouldn’t see you. Says he hasn’t got a lawyer and doesn’t want one and if it’s a little fat guy bunged up pretty good, it’s all right by him if you dissolve in sulfuric acid.”

  “Never mind him,” said Ruth, taking my arm, “I’ve hired a lawyer for him whether he likes it or not. Let me go in and talk to him and we’ll see.”

  The officer knew Ruth and didn’t think it would hurt anything for her to go in, so she went. I sat down and pulled a package of cracker-sandwiches out of my pocket and ate them slowly. They were as dry as a hard boiled egg. I offered one to the police officer and he took it absent-mindedly and popped it into his mouth.

  “How come the city’s working on this case?” I asked companionably. “The newspaper said the sheriff was called in.”

  “Don’t know. I do what I’m told. I got a job and they pay me to do it and what do I care who’s right and who’s wrong.” Then he relented a little. “Harper place is part in and part out of the city limits. Everytime something comes up around there, it’s been little and nasty, and then the county says it’s in the city and the city says it’s in the county and we wind up doing whatever Mr. Harper says. Now we got something big and just between you and me it’s the other way around and everybody wants to get wrote up in the newspaper. Us fellers and the county fellers do the work and the sheriff and the chief will fight about the headlines.”

  Ruth came to the door about that time and beckoned to me and I went back into the city jail with her. There were just a few cells and the whole place smelled bad. There was a drunk asleep in one of them and Tim was in another and the rest were empty. Tim was defiant and sullen-looking at the same time but evidently Ruth had talked him into seeing me and if he was going to see me at all, he was going through with it the right way just to please her.

  They unlocked the door and we went in and they locked it behind us. I wondered uneasily whether they were going to let me out when I was through what I was doing, or whether they were going to charge me with something in the books and let this be my permanent address.

  Tim said impatiently: “All right, ask your questions and hurry up and then go away.”

  I said: “Were you there or weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was there.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I think I left the house about ten minutes after eight and stopped at a store in town and bought a coke to see if I would change my mind and I didn’t. I would say it’s about a ten-minute drive to the Harper place from home and I may have taken five minutes or ten minutes at the store.”

  “That would make it around half past or a couple minutes one way or the other.”

  “I guess so. That’s about it. I couldn’t figure it any closer than that.”

  “How long did you stay?”

  “I don’t know. We were having a talk and then we didn’t get along so good and time gets away from you when you aren’t thinking about it.”

  “Drove away in your own car, of course?”

  “Yes, I drove there in it but I didn’t go into the driveway. Left the car out on the street and walked up to the door.”

  “Who let you in?”

  “A man who drives for Mr. Harper and sometimes for Mrs. Harper. He wears a uniform and everything.”

  “Did he show you out?”

  “No. I lost my temper and was feeling pretty upset and went out through the French windows. There is a terrace there and some bushes and then the drive leading back to the rear entrance and the garages.”

  “See anybody when you left?”

  He frowned in concentration and I could see him following himself to the driveway and out to his car, trying to get it all back clearly. He shook his head and said:

  “No, I don’t remember seeing a soul, either on my way out to the car or on the drive to town. If I had seen anyone I doubt if I would remember it, anyway. I had lots to think about.”

  “What, for example?”

  A clam has never shut up more visibly than he did. He said:

  “Because Ruth wants it, you ask all the questions you want about what happened. What I think about is my business.”

  “All right, you think about it yourself then. When you talk, that’s something happening and I can ask about that. What did you talk about?”

  “I think we’ll just skip that too.”

  I turned to Ruth and shrugged my shoulders. “I am supposed to be his lawyer for my benefit instead of his. Maybe he’s not so far wrong at that. Between wrecks and people slapping me over the head, it’s a tossup who’s in trouble and who’s out of it. We can come back to this later. Right now I think we had better run out to the Harper place and see what we can find.”

  “You go out by yourself, Gil,” said Ruth. “I don’t think they would let me in anyway and I want to talk to Tim awhile.”

  Tim was taking a good look at the lump on the back of my head.

  “S
omebody sock you?”

  “You should ask.”

  “I mean back there.”

  “Does it look like a fungus growth?”

  “Leave out the comedy. I socked you in front but that doesn’t give you a goose egg behind. Not like that one, anyway. Maybe you aren’t so popular.”

  “I think that’s a very conservative way to put it. I went from here to Louisville and stole some records trying to figure out your puzzle for you and before I got through, I felt as if the whole town was alive with policemen peering at me from behind telephone poles and from under automobiles. I flew back to my office and got knocked cold in the hall and somebody searched my room at the YMCA. I nearly got arrested for attempted blackmail right here in Harpersville and I’ve quit my law firm. I am rewarded by the undying love and affection of everyone concerned—I don’t think. I wouldn’t trust myself with a quarter as far as from here out to the water cooler. I’ll see you subsequently.” It sounded worse when I talked about it than it had seemed before. I walked out madder than a hatter and got my car and drove out to the Harper home.

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  The house was set back maybe 200 feet from the road and there were so many trees and shrubs you could hardly see the place. There were two parallel drives, one for you to use going in and the other for you to use coming out. In front of the impressive portico, there was a circle with a welter of flower beds in the middle so that you could drive in and go round and round and back out again if you wanted to. Another branch of the drive led around the house to a battery of garages with servants’ quarters over them. Every flower in the place looked healthy and happy and every shrub had just had a haircut. To one of my plebeian tastes and experience it looked like Buckingham Palace in one of its more palatial moments. There was a big sign where you could see it from the road with a name like Elmhurst or Oakland or Parkbourne and under it the name of William Jasper Harper in gold letters and no abbreviations.