Murder in the O.P.M.

by Leslie Ford

  All my property is hers by definition. The chair was one I’d taken to the cabinetmaker’s to be reglued a month before and forgotten all about.

  “I’ll do it now, Lilac,” I said. I attached Sheila’s leash, never dreaming that Lilac was the ebony fleshpot in which Fate had chosen to reside that morning.

  CHAPTER 14

  MR. KALBFUS’ SHOP IS IN AN OLD shed and loft that was once the stable of one of those red eighteenth-century Christmas-card houses that still line Wisconsin Avenue. You get to it through a narrow bricked passage, stumbling over garbage cans and startled cats and uncollected milk bottles. The smell of boiling fish glue and varnish remover is the only sign, since LET KALBFUS FIX IT appeared last fall over the game-room mantel of a well-known defense-contracts lobbyist in Rock Creek Park.

  I imagine there was an ostrich in Mr. Kalbfus’ family tree. There’s no other way to account for his extraordinary head, or for his disregard of the broken tables, chairs and chests that sit around for months before he gets to them. The head, looking like some very old, long-buried egg, was bent over the gluepot when Sheila and I came in.

  “Lilac wants our chair, Mr. Kalbfus,” I said. I could see it under a great pile of other broken bits in the corner against the rickety wall.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Mr. Kalbfus said. “You never come to see me any more. That’s why I keep your chair so long.”

  He pushed his big steel spectacles up on his bald old dome, wiped his hands on his leather apron, brushed the sawdust off his bench, reached for his blackened stump of a clay pipe and sat down. My chief reason for staying away, of course, was that nobody’s work would ever get done if many people came in. I knew, however, that Mr. Kalbfus was not only by way of being a sage but was also a first-class cabinetmaker, whose family had been cabinetmakers before they came from Germany in 1848.

  Then I noticed what he was working on. “Mr. Kalbfus!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed!”

  I pointed to the armchair stuck rigidly in the vise at the other end of his bench. It was Mrs. Hilyard’s.

  “My chair’s been here months!”

  As a matter of fact, I was startled to see it. I was also very curious to know how she’d found Mr. Kalbfus in the first place. His old customers try to keep him for themselves.

  “The lady had to have it right away,” Mr. Kalbfus said, a little abashed. “She brought it in yesterday. She’s leaving town right away. Right away. Someday, maybe, somebody’s coming in and say, ‘Mr. Kalbfus, I don’t need this right away; I don’t need it for three years.’ ” He wagged his head and chuckled. “Maybe. Maybe that’s the end of the world I’ve been hearing about.”

  He pulled out a drawer full of big brass-headed upholsterer’s tacks and fished around in the back. I gave a very definite start this time. What he brought out was a little sheaf of the leaflets like the one Mrs. Hilyard had dropped the night before. I looked at the chair again, wondering.

  Mr. Kalbfus put his spectacles back on and puffed at his pipe, sorting through them.

  “Here’s the one,” he said. “The lion and the lamb will lie down together.”

  “Where did you get these, Mr. Kalbfus?” I asked.

  “An old fellow wandered in here one morning, two, three weeks ago. He gave me one of these. We got to talking. He was all covered with snow, and he looked dead beat. I was trying to fix a brass lock on that tilt top over there. He knew all about it. Took off his coat and helped around all day. A first-class mechanic. About five he said he had to go. I said, ‘Where are you staying?’ He said he had no place, so I said he could come back and stay here. I fixed him a mattress up in the loft. He’s been here ever since.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What’s he like?”

  Mr. Kalbfus tapped his forehead. “But the nicest old fellow you ever saw. He cleaned up, up there, and helped around. No trouble to anybody. I bring him over some coffee and bread in the morning. He goes out and peddles his little sermons and comes back and helps. Don’t say much except when he gets on religion.”

  “Where is he from?” I asked.

  “Never said, and I never asked.” Mr. Kalbfus gently tapped the ashes out of his pipe. “Seems like he was wicked once. He did some fellow dirt, or some fellow did him dirt—I never made out. He’s always talking in parables, like. Seems he’s got to atone for whatever it was before Judgment Day. And that’s just around the corner, like Prosperity. Well, everybody’s got some kind of a knot in them, just like wood. Judgment Day’s his, I reckon.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “He hasn’t come back, so far. Said, when he left, his work was almost finished. He only had a couple of things left to do.”

  I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “He was about out of pamphlets,” Mr. Kalbfus said. “The only money he’d take from me was a dollar to get another batch. He wouldn’t take any pay. The lady that brought that chair saw the ones I had, and she left him an envelope with a dollar in it yesterday evening. I thought it was right nice of her. I expect that’s why I’m doing her chair so quick.”

  “Did he go out much at night?”

  Mr. Kalbfus shook his head. “I don’t know. I let him make a key the second day he was around. He was real handy like that. He just came and went. Such a nice old fellow, I liked having him around.”

  I hesitated a minute. Then I said, “The police have been hunting for him for a couple of days. Don’t you read the papers?”

  He shook his head again. “No, I don’t read the papers. All that’s in them is war, war, trouble, trouble, hurry, rush, right away, right away. There’s too many newspapers and too many radios. I don’t pay any attention to either one. My customers tell me all I need to hear.”

  He reached for a knife and started digging around the bowl of his pipe.

  “So the police are after him. They’re always after somebody that’s not doing anybody any harm. When somebody stole my sign, they didn’t do anything at all. One of my customers saw it and told me about it. I told the police. One of them brought me around ten dollars and said the party that had it wanted to keep it, and he was a big shot, so he was paying me instead. I gave it to the first poor old nigger woman that came along. But they’re hot after an old lunatic that don’t do any harm except pestering people about the hereafter, because nobody wants to think about that these days.”

  I didn’t see any point in telling him why they wanted his lodger, or, what he also apparently didn’t know, that the woman who wanted her chair right away was in the newspapers too. I picked up Sheila’s leash. He came to the door with us.

  “I’ll get your chair right away,” he said.

  “Any time will do.”

  I decided, on my way home, to tell Colonel Primrose, but not the police. Mr. Kalbfus wouldn’t tell them, I was sure of that. Colonel Primrose was different. He understood odd and simple people, and he had a genuine respect for the rights of man that a uniform seems to dull in some people. I called him up as soon as I got in the house, but he was out. I called again twice before I went down to the Samarkand to lunch with Bartlett Folger and the Hilyards.

  I did leave a message with Lilac to tell him I had some news, if he called; but I should have stopped by his house and left a note. It didn’t seem that important or that immediate just then. I’ve tried to tell myself it was Fate, just as it was Fate that took me into Mr. Kalbfus’ shop that morning. But mostly I try not to think of it at all, especially when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep.

  I nosed my car into the iron fence in the parking space at the end of the fish market on Twelfth and Maine Avenue. Ahead of me to the left, a couple of blocks back across a narrow ribbon of water, I could see the columns and low flat rotunda of the new Jefferson Memorial. On the right, above the long roof of the market warehouse, the Washington Monument gleamed stark and foreshortened in the winter sunlight. The clock on the octagonal brick tower said twenty minutes to one as I got out and made my way across t
he wharf.

  A few hardy people were eating lunch outside on the narrow balcony of a sea-food restaurant upstairs in the market, and a bug-eye, painted blue and pink, was lying in the slip. Beyond it and the oystermen and the colored boys shucking oysters, at a farther dock out in another world where no fish smelled, lay the yacht Samarkand, trim and white and lovely against the silver stretch of the Potomac and the flat snow-covered expanse of Hains Point, its graceful willows etched sharply against the winter sky. I went on board. A servant took my coat, said, “Just here, madam,” and led me to a mahogany door at the end of a narrow corridor. I went into a charming paneled room with a wood fire burning on the hearth, and gay with flowers and chintz.

  The abrupt silence that met me was certainly neither charming nor gay. It was as cold as the piles of rock salt and chipped ice that I’d passed behind the market stalls. What I’d innocently run in on had not been just friendly chitchat. I found myself facing the exceedingly solid back of a tall young man in a tweed coat and gray flannel trousers, who’d evidently been doing the listening, with my host, Bartlett Folger, facing him, doing the talking. It was a kind of instantaneous stillness that lasted only that long before it broke and the young man wheeled around. It was Bowen Digges.

  Mr. Folger recovered himself sharply and came forward, smiling, his hand open.

  “This is splendid,” he said. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham? This is Mr. Digges.”

  Bowen Digges hadn’t quite the social presence of my host. It took him definitely longer to say, “How do you do?” which he did eventually with a kind of guarded ease that was non-committal in the extreme. I saw he was wondering what I was doing there. I suppose it was fair enough, as I was doing the same about him.

  Bartlett Folger turned back to him. “We’ll finish this another time, Bowen. My guests are due just now.”

  Mr. Bowen Digges didn’t move except to take out a cigarette and light it. There was an electric crackle in the air.

  “I … think not,” he said coolly. “Your other guests can wait a minute, Mr. Folger. I’d like you to go on. It so happens that Mrs. Latham is one of the people who heard about it. She might be as interested as I am.”

  He turned politely to me.

  “You see, I’ve now been told three times (a) that Mr. Hilyard offered me twenty-five hundred dollars to get out of town because he didn’t want his daughter to marry me, and (b) that I accepted with thanks. As neither one happens to be so, I’ve decided I’d like to get things straight.” He turned back to Bartlett Folger. “From the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

  I thought Mr. Folger looked a little irritated in spite of his great self-possession.

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t think Mrs. Latham can be very much interested in your problems, frankly——”

  “This is your problem, Mr. Folger,” Bowen said.

  I resisted the temptation to say that I was interested, very much indeed.

  Bartlett Folger went on, choosing his words carefully. “I admit it’s unfortunate it happened. At the time none of us had any idea you had the stuff in you to do the job you’ve done. What you’ve——”

  “We can skip that,” Bowen said. “You have guests coming.”

  Mr. Folger nodded. “My sister and brother-in-law thought Diane was too young to marry.”

  “We weren’t planning to get married for some years,” Bowen said. “But go on.”

  Bartlett Folger glanced at him, his face flushing a little. “You ought to understand,” he said coolly, “that they thought you were a smart-aleck young pup trying to marry a rich girl. And Diane’s as headstrong and stubborn as a——”

  “What’s that about me?”

  I hadn’t heard the door open. Diane Hilyard was standing there with her back to it, her hand still on the knob. She had on a tweed coat and a tan sweater and plaid skirt, with tan socks and brown-and-white saddle shoes, and she was hatless, as usual, and infinitely at ease.

  She didn’t look at either Bowen Digges or me.

  “Go on, Uncle Bart,” she said calmly.

  “I forgot to tell you, Mr. Folger,” Bowen said, “that I asked Diane to come around. I wanted her to get this straight too.”

  He said it easily, but not so easily as he’d spoken before. She did something to him that tightened his face and made his voice almost harsh.

  It was a lovely yacht we were on, I thought, but at that moment I didn’t envy Mr. Bartlett Folger in the least. Personally, I would just as soon have had a tank brigade facing me as those two perfectly composed and level-eyed youngsters standing there waiting for him to go on.

  I thought Mr. Folger was thinking something of the sort too.

  “This is … pretty tough on me,” he said sardonically. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, except to soften the blow as much as I could. I thought the thing would die a natural death. The family were for kicking you out. We decided to put it on a different basis. You’d been puttering around the laboratory and you’d rigged up a filter that was better than the one we had. I suggested to my brother-in-law that while we weren’t under any obligation to pay you for it, since it was done on our time, he could make it the excuse to pay you and let you out without too much of an injustice. It was worth about two hundred dollars, as you probably know now.”

  Bowen Digges was staring at him very steadily. He hadn’t even looked at Diane.

  “It would have been worth more if I’d patented it,” he said coolly.

  “It wasn’t yours to patent.”

  Bowen nodded. “I guess you’re right. I probably owe you a lot more than twenty-five hundred for letting me have the run of the lab. I couldn’t have got in Tech if I hadn’t had that behind me.”

  He stood there silently for a moment. I looked at Diane Hilyard. She was still there by the door. The corners of her red mouth were drawn down and her eyes were fastened on the floor, two dull spots burning in her cheeks under the long sweep of her eyelashes.

  “And so the truth is,” Bowen Digges said quietly, “that I really was paid twenty-five hundred dollars, not for my filter, but to get out of town.”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “Is there any other way to put it?”

  “Then that’s it,” Bartlett Folger said coolly. “I’m sorry if it——”

  “Oh, on the contrary,” Bowen said. There was a kind of grim cheerfulness in his voice. “It’s my own fault. I should have known the Promethium Corporation wasn’t handing over twenty-five hundred dollars for something they could have for nothing. I’m just a—a little surprised that I wasn’t bright enough to see it without having to be hit over the head. I must have given you all a good belly laugh. All the time I was swallowing the home-town-boy-makes-good stuff. Glad he can enlarge his opportunities in a broader field. Well, it certainly had me buffaloed.”

  His laugh had some genuine amusement in it. I looked at Diane again. The spots in her cheeks were hotter and brighter. Her eyes were smoldering, ready to burst into blue flame.

  “And just to show you I don’t mind,” he went on, “I’ll tell you I had it all figured out that my filter must be damned good, worth at least twenty-five thousand, for you to loosen up on twenty-five hundred. I did you an injustice, and I apologize.”

  “You don’t have to say ‘you,’” Folger said, with some irritation. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, except … try to make it easier. I’m glad it helped you to go on and make something of yourself.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Bowen said.

  “There’s no use of your getting sore about it.”

  “Oh, I’m not sore at you.” He couldn’t have been calmer. “I’m sore at myself, for being such a bloody fool. After Diane let me down, it came as a sop to the ego. I wasn’t good enough for her or the family. Carey Eaton was, but not me. Nevertheless, something I’d worked out was good enough to be used in the factory, and good enough to make you disgorge twenty-five hundred bucks. Carey couldn’t do that. So it’s a litt
le tough to find it was—let’s say charity, or hush money. On the whole, I’d rather have had a plain kick in the pants. I don’t like fancy ones.”

  He hadn’t looked at Diane since she’d come in, and he didn’t look at her now.

  “So go ahead, all of you. Tell everybody you paid me to get out and I was glad to settle. I’d rather people would think I’m a louse instead of a cockeyed fool.” He took a couple of steps toward the door. “I trust you still think in terms of six percent,” he said coolly. “I’ll get a check to you, for Mr. Hilyard’s estate, this afternoon. If I have to beg, borrow or steal it.”

  Diane Hilyard moved aside from the door.

  “So I will run along,” Bowen said. He closed the door behind him.

  Diane looked up at her uncle. I’ve never seen such burning scorn in anybody’s face.

  “Just a minute, Diane,” he said. “You don’t understand. Your father and mother——”

  “I understand all I need to,” she said. The contempt in her voice was like a thin rawhide lash drawn across his face. “You lied to him, and you’ve lied to me for years—you and my father and my mother, and Joan and Carey. They knew, too, didn’t they? Every one of you.” The whole room seemed to vibrate with her low, passionate accusal. “What else did you tell him? He said, when I ‘let him down.’ That’s something else you’ve done. No wonder my father wouldn’t let me know he was here: And all the rest of you. I don’t believe now you didn’t know. I won’t believe anything any one of you ever tells me, ever again. No wonder my father wanted to resign and go back home. He was the only one of you with decency enough to be ashamed of himself. I don’t wonder you didn’t want me here to lunch. I don’t see how any one of you can bear to have me around at all!”

  She put her hand on the doorknob. Her uncle took a step forward.

  “Oh, I’m not going to run after him and ask him what it was you told him!” she said hotly. “I’m too ashamed of the Hilyards ever to ask him to speak to one of them again! He can go on thinking I’m as contemptible as the rest of you! It’s what I deserve for being one of you!”