“Doctor Shenstone! Of course.”
Shenstone came bounding up the stairs two at a time in answer to her summons, so breathless was her account of my condition, which was certainly by now ghastly enough. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked. He was a lean, pale, rather wild-eyed man, though perhaps in less frenzied circumstances his air might be simply one of preoccupied timidity.
“Well, my heart is pounding so, and I feel so—so—”
“Flushed,” Mrs. Calico put in from the foot of the bed.
“Flushed, yes, that’s it.”
He lowered his ear to my chest and listened. I don’t know what he heard but I could certainly hear his own thumping, which struck me as an odd lack of detachment in a man of science. I also thought it funny that a medical man should be conducting this kind of examination without a stethoscope. The situation was almost immediately cleared up when he suddenly raised his head in answer to a remark one of us made.
“I’m not a physician,” he said. “They call me doctor because I have a degree. I’m a Ph.D.”
I hitched myself up on one elbow and gave him a glare.
“In what?”
“Egyptology.”
“I see.”
I bundled him out the door without any further formality and in my pajamas, overriding his apologies and protestations of concern by assuring him that I would in all likelihood live, for what that was worth.
“Sorry about the misunderstanding,” he said, casting me a wild glance, his thin gray hair flying. “We must get together some time …” His departing aspect belied that any initiative in such a development would be taken by him. Perhaps he had heard of my criminal background? That gave me my strategy.
It came to me in a flash how I must disencumber myself of Mrs. Calico, but I was two days of careful thought in planning it in detail. The evening of the second day, I sat in a living room chair with a highball. She was knitting in the corner, with Fatima snoozing at her feet.
“Pippa?” I said.
“Yes, Andrew?”
“Do you have any life insurance?”
She looked up and adjusted her glasses.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Why do I ask that? Because a man likes to know how a woman he is going to marry is fixed. Financially.”
There was a pause, broken by the sound of her needles clicking, albeit at a slower rate, and another dollop of bourbon going into my glass. I drank this off and, plowing ahead, said:
“Did you plan to change the beneficiary?”
“Change the beneficiary?”
“Yes, change the beneficiary.” The colloquy seemed to be proceeding on the antiphonal lines developed by vaudeville comedians for arriving at payoffs. “Well, you might think about it.” I yawned artificially and went to bed, taking my glass with me.
It was the next day but one that she came upon me in the basement, examining a shotgun. “Thing needs oiling,” I said.
“What are you going to use that for?” she asked.
“You never know, do you?” I said, licking my lips and ogling like Barrymore in his prime. I tramped upstairs to find her sitting in the living room with a feather duster in her hand and a preoccupied expression on her face.
“Do you know what I like about you, Pippa?” I said, with a smile neither too maniacal nor insufficiently so for my purpose. “You’re a realist. You’re willing to let bygones be bygones. You know what I mean? About a man’s—past?”
“What do you mean? Mr. Mackerel, I don’t think I quite—”
“Follow me? Ah, but you’re way ahead of me, I can see that.” I flicked her nose with my finger, leaning over her. “You know what I mean. It’s not for nothing they call me a lady killer.”
She rose with a gasp and tugged at her bodice. “Are you implying,” she gasped, “that there actually was something to those—those charges?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “they can’t pin anything on me.”
She turned and fled tentatively to the foot of the stairs. She surveyed me, breathing heavily, her hand on the newel post. “Why are you chattering away like this? Are you drunk, Mr. Mackerel?”
“Naw, I just don’t think two people should have any secrets from each other. Do you? What in Tophet is the matter with you, Pippa?”
“This is not a subject to joke about!”
I walked over to her, my fists in the pockets of my bathrobe. “On the contrary,” I said, “I’d say it’s something not to get too serious about. I want you to remember that. Because if you turned out to become a bore about it, you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.”
She fled up the stairs. I went back to my chair, in which I was having a quiet brandy when I heard the thump of luggage upstairs. Fifteen minutes later she was gone, Fatima with her, and I sat, brandy in hand, savoring the quiet of an empty house.
“Would you like to talk about it? Go on, tell me about some of them. I’d like to hear.”
Turnbull and I were slouched in easy chairs on the screened porch. It was Friday night, the night of the prayer meetings. A good day for it, or the reverse, according to how you looked at it. The air was dead, like a damp vestment clinging to one’s skin. It had been ninety-three all day, and the mercury still stood at ninety, though the sun had set. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. No precipitation was foreseen by any eastern weather bureau for as far ahead as they dared look. A real challenge to believers like Evans, whose contingent of the community rain dance could already be heard gathering in the nearby church. Turnbull was going to the rain dance but had dropped over early to see if I couldn’t be persuaded to come along, a vain remonstrance, of course, and we were having a drink and a quiet chat before he went on. As he pressed me to open up, it occurred to me that I probably owed him something in exchange for his own regalements.
I pushed an ice cube down with one finger, as though experimenting with the possibility of its remaining submerged out of sheer discouragement after it had been poked enough times.
“I’ve never told you about a little interlude I had in Innsbruck, have I?” I said, striking up that tone of prudent indiscretion suitable to club chair narrations of this kind. I was fabricating, but that seemed of little importance. I knew at least one Italian episode in the other’s repertory to have been fallacious, in that Turnbull had had Mussolini in Rome a good two years before the Fascists had marched on it, and in an English summer also dear to his memory, he claimed to have had an affair with a woman whose name I remembered as that of a character in one of Galsworthy’s novels. “Well, sir, I was detained by engine trouble on a motor trip through that part of the Austrian Tyrol in 1947—no, perhaps it was ’48—when, rolling up in a Daimler to the door of this little inn on which I had luckily chanced, was the most …”
I saw soon enough that he wasn’t listening. I laid this to some fault of improvisation on my part, but that wasn’t the reason. He had something on his mind, I presently found out. He moistened his lips and rubbed his palms together between his knees.
“What is it, Turnbull?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of getting married again.”
“Wonderful!” I leaped to my feet with honest delight. “That’s great, old boy, I’m glad to hear it. This calls for a drink!” The exclamation was rhetorical, since we were both supplied with fresh ones. I raised mine and quaffed his health. He took a perfunctory sip of his. “Who’s the lucky lady?” He glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry about Mrs. Calico. She left my employ yesterday. Come on, who is it? Anybody I know?”
“It’s her. Mrs. Calico,” he said. “She’s the one.”
When I had finished wiping the rattan porch rug, I refilled the glass I had spilled on it. I came back from the living room where I’d gone to replenish myself.
“Well, well. I’m delighted to hear it. How long has this been going on?”
“Oh, since she’s been here. Didn’t you notice anything?”
“Ahh, well … That accounts fo
r why she skittered out of the room every time you showed up, and then you’d go sneaking back in the kitchen, making time for yourself while I was up there with my nose in a book.”
“Sorry.” There was a disturbance in the even line of his mustache that could only be construed as a smile. “I haven’t actually popped the question yet because, well, I have a feeling she may be worried about the difference in our ages—or may think I am. But I’m not. By God, I’ve got a few years left in me yet and she’s jolly well welcome to them … Didn’t she let on to you anything was up?”
“Well, ahh, not in so many words, but I could sense there was something on her mind, and I wasn’t so far wrong was I you old rascal there’s somebody at the door excuse me.”
I was grateful for deliverance from that passage. But scarcely ready for the one that followed on its heels. It was Hester at the door.
“Why, Hester,” I said. “Hello, hello, hello. Come in.”
“Hello, Andrew.”
We stood in the vestibule, nervously prolonging greetings and inquiries as to how we were and remarks on the heat. Then she paused and said, “I thought I’d come and see you tonight because—well, it’s a big night for you. Oh, I don’t mean that,” she laughed. “That’s ridiculous. I was thinking of the prayer meetings going on all over and you alone in your stubborn corner. When I said a big night I was thinking of something like election night. Waiting for the returns to come in—or not come in.”
“There won’t be any returns,” I said. “The whole thing is absurd, and, as you know I’ll add, an insult to God through a debauch of the use of prayer. The conditions are meteorologically impossible for rain. The only thing that could bring it on would be a miracle.”
“That’s what they’re praying for, isn’t it?” She looked down at the floor and laughed self-consciously again. “And it’s you against them. That’s why I thought I’d come and keep you company. But it was a silly idea, wasn’t it?” She turned and started out again.
I took her by the shoulder. “No, no, of course it isn’t. It’s very sweet of you.” A car had stopped in front of the house and I drew her away from the screen door, aware that somebody emerging from it was listening to us. “Come in and sit down.”
She came in but she remained standing in the living room. She took it in. “It looks pretty clean.”
“I do all right,” I said. I immediately repented this churlish remark. “No, I’ve had a housekeeper. She’s gone now. None so good as you.”
“Sent her packing, did you? I—” Hester turned, open-mouthed, at a knock on the front screen door. As I went to see who it was, the bell in the church steeple began to ring out the call to prayer. I could hear others in the distance take it up, and the air was suddenly a sweet jumble of golden peals.
The figure on the porch was that of a stout man wearing a soft black hat.
“Mr. Mackerel?”
“Why, Fat Chance, come in.” I opened the screen door for him. Over his shoulder I saw another man leaning against the back door of the car. “You know Inspector Chance? This is Miss Pedlock.”
“I believe not,” Hester said, offering him her hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Pedlock.” Chance glanced meaningly at her and then to me. “I’d like to see you alone if I could.”
“No, it’s all right. You can speak in front of her. What is it?”
“I’m sorry to say it is my painful duty to arrest you on suspicion of murder.”
“On what new evidence?” I asked. As though I didn’t know.
“Testimony of your former housekeeper—Mrs. Calico. She claims you blurted out you did it in her presence. I’d like to ask you to come to the station and make out a statement concerning these charges. I must warn you that anything you say may be used against you.”
“I can explain everything,” I said. “I just said that to, er—” I saw Turnbull materialize from the porch where I’d left him. “Maybe I’d better tell you at headquarters at that.”
Hester had turned away to the front window. Now she wheeled around and at the same time drew something from her bag. “Here’s the film,” she said. “Let’s have this business settled once and for all. This ought to put an end to it one way or another.”
She thrust it into Chance’s hand. He hefted it in his palm, looking at it, as though weighing it might weigh the merits of what she had suggested. I snapped on a light, for it had grown dark. The box in Chance’s hand was a yellow square one, of the sort in which negatives are mailed between customers and the factory. “All right, we’ll have this developed,” Chance said. “Thank you for this evidence. The law appreciates it.”
“You don’t have to get it developed. It’s already been developed. I got it and sent it in and got it back and there it is. So you don’t have to take it in either, or impound it, or whatever you call it. We’ve got a projector. Sixteen millimeter, just like this.”
“General Delivery, Bridgeport,” Chance said, reading the return address. “That’s how you escaped the mail watch. You’re a very clever girl, Miss Pedlock.”
“I know,” Hester said, meekly. She turned to me and said, “Andrew, get the projector. You haven’t used it for years but it’s probably still good, and I’m anxious to—”
“Why, I don’t believe I know where it is offhand …” I said.
“I do,” she said, putting her bag down on a table. “It’s back in that basement bin among all that stuff I’ve been trying to get you to sort out. You wait here. I think I can dig it out without any trouble.”
We stood watching her walk out through the dining room and then the kitchen, to descend the cellar stairs. “Well, here goes,” Fat Chance said, opening the package.
I noticed, with a wave of emotion I didn’t quite understand at the moment, that he had to break the seal on the lid.
Chapter Seventeen
WE ARRANGED the chairs in the living room so as to face one wall. The screen couldn’t readily be found, but the wall was white plaster and would serve the purpose, after a picture, a Dufy reproduction, had been removed and set to one side. Hester dusted the projector off with a cloth in the kitchen and Fat Chance carried it in. He took charge of getting it set up on a table, and also offered to run it, being experienced with his own home movies. “Should see the ones I take,” he said with humorous self-deprecation. Turn-bull had stayed, skipping the church service, and sat in the rear of two improvised rows, in a deep chair, steeped in funk, his chin in his hand or drumming his fingers on the arm. Chance had called in the henchmen he’d had with him in the car, who turned out to be two in number. He referred to them as Fred and McIver, and did not formally introduce them, out of politeness. They seemed rather keyed up, or at least self-conscious.
“O.K., we’re ready now,” Chance said at last. “Would somebody turn the lights off please?”
I snapped a switch on the wall beside the vestibule, sauntering on out of the room after I had done so. My free hand was in my trouser pocket, masticating loose change in a way that is habitual with me.
I went into the kitchen and began to slice bread for sandwiches in case I would be starved. I got some roast beef, tomatoes and butter out of the icebox, and put them on the table. I could hear the soft, steady whirr of the projector, and occasionally low voices. A man said, “Who’s that?” and another, “Must be his mother. Yes, that’s Mrs. Hale.” I counted the number of slices I had cut. They were seven. To even it, I cut one more. Then I put the loaf back into its wax wrapper and stuffed it into the metal bin on the counter beside the sink. “… playing with her dog. I don’t know what good this is doing us.”
“Wait. There’s the beach.”
I saw that the door to the cellar was open and the light on the stairway lit. I went down. I made directly for the storage stall, formerly used for coal, to tidy things up there. I shoved a few things back that Hester had dragged out, a folding table, a half-decayed carton with croquet materials in it, and then swung the door of the stall to witho
ut altogether shutting it. Just then the oil furnace, which had been going for hot water, stopped. In the silence, I could hear the voices upstairs much more clearly than I had in the kitchen, because I stood directly under the floor where the group sat. I heard a footstep move out of the living room toward the kitchen, and recognized it as Hester’s. The projector clattered softly on. I thought: if I hadn’t complained about the Jesus Saves signs, all this wouldn’t have happened.
Suddenly I heard Chance say, “Mackerel—he’s gone! That’s enough for me! He’s lit out! Fred, you take the back door and search out the yards. McIver, take the car and circle north around the block. I’ll come around the other way and meet you. Radio headquarters to alert all prowl cars. And tell them to phone the state police to issue a general wanted! Hurry!”
There was a great bumping and scraping of chairs, and a thud of footsteps in all directions. When they had vanished out the front and back, and the shouting voices with them, there was silence in the house. Except for the faint whirring of the projector, which somehow only emphasized it, made it more than total. I gave a last look around and walked back upstairs, snapping out the basement switch.
Hester was slicing the roast beef for the sandwiches. “Here, let me do that,” I said. I fixed two sandwiches, divided them diagonally on saucers and shoved them away. “Who’s out there?”
“Just Turnbull.” Hester sat down on a tall kitchen stool beside the sink and crossed her legs. “What’s that noise?” she asked. “Not the machine—that other. That funny ticking, rustling sort of sound.” She glanced up.
I listened a moment. “Squirrels on the roof again probably.” I set coffee to brewing in the electric percolator. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw Hester thrust an arm out the open window and hold her hand a moment palm up. She drew it in and tugged at her dress. It was a white cotton print splashed with red flowers.
A sharp flapping clatter in the living room indicated that the film was finished. It stopped as the projector was turned off. Presently there were heavy footsteps and the swinging door to the kitchen opened. Turnbull came in, groping his way, his hand to his eyes.
The Mackerel Plaza: A Novel Page 22