Trouble in Rooster Paradise

by T. W. Emory

  “I understand he’s one of your neighbors in The Highlands.”

  “A distant neighbor, yes. We were partners and good friends from nonage to long past juvenescence. We made business trips and regularly raised hell together a long, long time ago. But we’ve drifted apart. I rarely see him. He lives in semi to near-total retirement and cultivates his garden without fanfare. He attends church most every Sunday now and has settled into the staid role of community pillar.” Mr. Lundeen laughed. “What’s the saying son? You wind up fulfilling your destiny in your desperate attempts to avoid it. When would you like to call on that boasting bundle of bones?”

  “Any time tomorrow would be fine.”

  “Give me an hour, son. I’ll set you up for a visit.”

  I thanked him and told him I’d get back to him.

  I called Britt Anderson.

  She was all business until she recognized my voice.

  “My, but you have a very alluring voice on the telephone, did you know that?” she said.

  I told her that I knew that, and that it was a curse, and that if it mattered to her, flattery made me extremely vulnerable.

  She laughed. A genuine snicker, not a polite one.

  The information I wanted from Britt could have waited until morning, but I felt like hearing her voice again. I asked how she was coming along with that list of repeat customers.

  “It’s waiting for you on my desk.”

  “Thanks. So very prompt, Miss Anderson.”

  “At Fasciné Expressions we specialize in prompt service with a gracious smile. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed. I’ll be by for the list tomorrow. But tell me, is an Addison Darcy one of the names on it?”

  After a half-second check she said that he certainly was. “Is it significant?” she asked.

  “Probably not.” I told her about the witnesses to Dirk and Christine’s fight.

  “I can help you out with two of them. I’ll call Guy de Carter and see if I can set you up with a lunch appointment tomorrow.”

  “You’re too kind, Miss Anderson.”

  I gave her my office phone number to call in the morning to confirm. “I was hoping to stop by Blanche Arnot’s this evening.”

  “I’m sure that will be fine with Blanche,” Britt said. “Let me telephone and tell her you’re coming by. When exactly do you intend to go see her?”

  My Longines said 5:40. I planned a stop home for a quick bath and change.

  “Would seven o’clock tonight be too late?”

  “I’m sure it will be fine. You’re in luck in two ways. Blanche has become more of a homebody since her husband died, and she’s always been a bit of a night owl.”

  “You sound like you know her pretty well.”

  “Oh yes. She and my aunt were very close despite the difference in their ages. They shared the same passion: they performed with a local theater group. Blanche helped me a great deal with my aunt during her decline. I think seeing Alexis fall apart was as hard on her as it was on me. When Blanche’s husband passed away shortly afterwards, it was extremely unsettling for her. It was as though she’d been cut from her moorings. It’s one of the reasons I asked her to work for us. I thought a new focus in life would be a good distraction for her.”

  Britt told me a few snippets from Blanche Arnot’s theatrical past. “I think you’ll like her. But be warned, she’s … quaint.”

  We bantered a bit and then I thanked her and hung up.

  “You two were sure getting cozy with each other, weren’t you?” Kirsti yelped with delight.

  I pretended to ignore her question as I swallowed the last of the pastrami sandwiches she’d brought me. I then took a sip of the bottled water she handed me and decided to shift her mind in a different direction.

  “My friend Walter Pangborn had a high regard for our landlady. Actually, Walter was in love with the woman.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. But Mrs. Berger didn’t seem to have the slightest clue as to Walter’s true feelings.”

  “Oh, come on, Gunnar, a woman knows.”

  “Well, it sure didn’t show.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Walter had been a boarder at the Berger’s for years. From a few remarks he let slip, his feelings had developed after Otto Berger died. Hell, it took Sten Larson and me months to make sense of the obvious indications.”

  “Who’s Sten Larson?”

  “Mrs. Berger’s nephew. He was a boarder too.”

  “And so what were these obvious indications?”

  “Little things. Walter’s agreeing to write Mrs. Berger’s play—which meant spending an hour or more every Sunday brainstorming with her as she reminisced and created; his siding with her in discussions at mealtimes, however ludicrous her opinion; his chuckling at her idiotic anecdotes; his despondent retreats to his room when she went out on the occasional date. Why she didn’t see it was beyond me.”

  “Trust me. She saw it.”

  “Well, eventually … yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll get there, Blue Eyes. Be patient.”

  She stuck out her lower lip in a playful pout of resignation.

  “Walter and Mrs. Berger were close in age, and I fully understood his physical attraction to her. She had a handsome, angular face, with those classic planes and hollows. She had long slim legs with taut calves, and though the sand was in mid-drain at that time, her hourglass proportions were still suited for a passable fan dance.”

  “It sounds like you made quite the study of her yourself. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Well, I’ll confess to my own disturbing moments of lusty curiosity when it came to Mrs. Berger. In my dreams she was often making a play for me or trying to lure me into bed.”

  Kirsti looked horrified. “She had to be twenty years older than you.”

  “I’ll admit to some ambivalence, Blue Eyes. But, age disparity sometimes has a way of disappearing in amorous half-light.”

  Her eyes eluded me for a few moments of puzzled silence. I finally interrupted.

  “But what I didn’t understand was why a learned and sophisticated man like Walter so ardently adored a crass and poorly educated ex-stripper.”

  “Oh, come on, Gunnar. I think it’s sweet. That whole ‘opposites attract’ thing.”

  “Maybe so. But I filed the whole thing somewhere between Sweet Mysteries of Life and Riddles of the Orient.”

  Chapter 7

  Before the war my home had been a fifth floor studio apartment on Eighth Avenue, north of Seneca. I worked a lot of out-of-town jobs for the Bristol Agency, so my tiny little flat was literally a place to hang my hat and flop between assignments. It was Walter Pangborn who steered me to Mrs. Berger’s boardinghouse after my discharge.

  I met Walter in 1939. Actually I found him. His estranged sister had hired a Philadelphia detective firm that had arranged assistance from the Bristol Agency. We’d been told Walter was badly burned on one side of his face and body, so I was braced for how he’d look. What I wasn’t prepared for was his reaction when I called at the Berger’s house in Ballard.

  At that time Otto Berger—the man who’d deprived the burlesque world of its bump and grind queen—was still alive. After Otto relayed to Walter my name and mission, he returned to the front door and said in his faint German accent, “Walter thanks you, but he wishes to stay lost.”

  I was not deterred. I figured Walter for a twilight trekker. He proved to be an after-dark ambler.

  I followed him to The Moonglow Eats on First Avenue, where I’d had my conference with Rikard Lundeen. After he’d ordered, I sat on a stool beside him, asked for coffee I didn’t need, and struck up a conversation. Walter wasn’t embittered or unsociable, as I’d expected. I explained to him that his sister had become infirm and simply wanted to make amends. He listened graciously, thanked me for my efforts, and told me the matter now rested with him—a polite way of saying “butt out.” I n
ever bothered to ask what he did about his sibling, but I’d made a good friend that night.

  Walter embodied the wisdom of not judging a book by its cover. Thereafter, every week or two, I’d pop in at the Bergers’ or at one of Walter’s nighttime lairs to visit with him. At his suggestion, I came to live at the Bergers’ after the war.

  Mrs. Berger’s house was what they call the Classic Box style—a two-story gabled-roof affair originally built by a prosperous shingle mill owner around the time Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders. Otto Berger enclosed the porch and painted the place forest green to set it apart from the blander hues of its immediate neighbors.

  As senior boarder, Walter Pangborn parked his DeSoto in the driveway. It was a ’36 Airflow coupe—that ill-fated, nontraditional model, so ahead of its time that time never did catch up.

  I hadn’t seen Sten Larson’s Buick outside, but the blast of cigarette smoke that greeted me told me he was home. Sten was one of those match-conserving smokers who lit his next cigarette with his last one. I pictured him getting out of bed in the morning and pressing the end of a fresh smoke up against a light bulb. His raison d’être seemed to be keeping that flame going till bedtime. He was a glowing success if you’ll pardon the pun.

  Sten was sprawled on the porch sofa with an ashtray on his stomach, the never-ending cigarette in one hand and a gin and bitters in the other. I recognized one of Walter Pangborn’s special tumblers. Gin and bitters was Walter’s spring and summer drink come Saturday night. “The secret is to get gin of the first chop,” Walter would say. “Distilled London Dry.”

  “Walter’s serving drinks on a Thursday?” I asked Sten. “What’s the occasion?”

  “When dinner broke up Aunt Nora was in one of her antic moods and Walter was bit by the artistic bug.”

  “So, what’s keeping the young and unsettled housebound?”

  “Kenny’s got my car. He’s picking me up in a bit and we’re heading to the 211 for some pinochle. But no reason not to be sociable first,” he said, holding up his tumbler. “This sucker’s good.”

  Sten’s homes away from home were downtown. He was a devotee of the noisy and dimly lit world of card playing and billiards, either at the 211 Club or at Ben Paris. Usually it was the former since it had first-class pool tables, all the better for a penniless shooter with a little talent to eat and drink to his heart’s content just for sinking more balls than the other guy. As Sten put it, “Sinking shots on one of those babies ruins you. Anything less is like dropping marbles down a drainpipe.” When he was at his hangouts, heaven was not on his mind.

  Sten was in his late twenties and the only son of Lena Larson, sister to the late Otto Berger. Otto was a plastering and painting contractor, and before Uncle Sam sent Sten off to fight in the Pacific, he’d worked with his uncle. Otto died of a heart attack just after the war. So Sten was working for Otto’s old partner Sully and boarding at his aunt’s house in one of the rooms in the basement. The basement entrance suited his comings and goings.

  “Aunt Nora’s got a kind of hybrid divinity percolating on the stove.”

  “Hybrid?”

  “No nuts. Cornflakes.”

  As I made a move to leave the porch, Sten said in a subdued voice, “Walter thinks he’s got that eye thing finally figured out.”

  Sten and I edged into the living room-turned-studio.

  “Shall I concoct a refreshing libation to gladden your heart, old top?” Walter asked, palette in one hand, brush in the other.

  “No thanks, Walter.”

  “Sten, be a dear,” said Mrs. Berger. “Go and see how the candy’s doing on the stove. I’m going to call them Snow Flakes.” She sat in her Boston rocker, posing solemnly for Walter, a drink balanced precariously on her lap.

  Walter was a fair caricaturist and a dabbler at painting still lifes. But Mrs. Berger was convinced that he was the ideal person to paint a life-size, posthumous portrait of her departed Otto sitting beside her. Frankly, if it hadn’t been Nora Berger who made the request, Walter wouldn’t even have considered the project.

  “Can I take a quick sip, Walter?” Mrs. Berger asked.

  Walter nodded as he brushed.

  The past week Mrs. Berger had been trying to stop biting her fingernails. She’d put Band-Aids on all her fingertips as deterrents, most of which looked a bit gnawed on and frayed.

  “I think it’s hardening now, Aunt Nora,” Sten hollered from the kitchen.

  “Take care of it, Sten. And on your return voyage from the kitchen, go ahead and feed Popeye. He’s looking like he’s about to eat the shredded newspaper again.” Popeye was Mrs. Berger’s hamster, which had one eye in a perpetual squint.

  Anyway, progress on the portrait dragged at first, because Walter agreed to paint only when the mood struck him. And it didn’t strike often. However, recently this had changed.

  “Not to rush you, Walter, but the sooner we finish this picture, the sooner we can start the showpiece,” said Mrs. Berger.

  “Showpiece? What showpiece is that?” I asked, though Walter had already told me.

  “I’ve decided I want a full-length picture of me for the shrine. When this picture is done, Walter and me are gonna rummage through my old valises to hunt up all my promotion stills of me at my best. You know, to help come up with the right motive.”

  “That’s motif, Nora,” said Walter.

  “Whatever.”

  “Sounds thorough and even professional,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. I’m gonna pose in just my G-string and my fans. You know, to make it … to guarantee more …. What was that word you used, Walter?”

  “Verisimilitude,” Walter said.

  “Yeah. To make it more that,” said Mrs. Berger. “We want it to ring true. Me posing in costume was Walter’s idea.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I said, with my back to my landlady. Walter ignored me. His brush strokes had seemed to quicken lately and his artistic moods had noticeably become more frequent. Artists get inspiration where they can find it. It was the “eye thing”—as Sten called it—that was the rub. Mrs. Berger’s right eye tended to wander, especially when she was tired, stressed, or tipsy. I learned to look at the bridge of her nose when we talked.

  I walked over to Walter’s side of the easel and took a look. Walter had finished the Otto Berger portion months earlier. I stared at the middle-aged, bald-headed, bespectacled Otto.

  “You’ve definitely captured him,” I said. “The rascal comes through loud and clear, despite the puritanical grimace. I think it must be the shine in the eyes. Well done, Walter.”

  “Why, thank you, Gunnar,” he said.

  When completed, the picture would resemble a cartoonish version of American Gothic, sans pitchfork. But Mrs. Berger loved it so far and her belief in Walter’s talents was unshaken. But the “eye thing” was a real obstacle. It stood between Walter and the coveted showpiece project.

  “That eye is driving me crazy,” Walter would confide to me. “I don’t know where to leave it. And she insists the painting should look life-like.”

  “Maybe she’d agree to pose wearing sun goggles,” I’d suggested once. Mrs. Berger wore dark glasses when she had a killer migraine. “It would add realism. You could call the painting, The Dead and the Dying.”

  Walter didn’t laugh. He was a bit touchy on the subject and remained inconsolable.

  “I really think the nightmare is finally over,” he whispered to me, the left side of his mouth lifted high to form a big grin.

  I told Walter I had a question for him in private, and if he’d ask Mrs. Berger to take five. Over near the stairs I said to him, “I’m curious about a local nabob.”

  “Ah yes, ‘nabob.’ A Hindu word referring to a provincial governor of the Mogul empire of India. It’s come to mean a man of great wealth or—”

  “Ever hear of an Addison Darcy?”

  Walter nodded. “A Seattle haberdasher. Very successful. He’s part of Darlund Apparels. His name and picture appear
in the newspapers from time to time for charity events—things of that nature. He resembles C. Aubrey Smith.”

  The craggy features of the elderly British actor came readily to mind. “Know anything about this Darcy? Anything of a personal nature?”

  He shook his head. “Are you considering him for a client, or making inquiries on behalf of one?”

  “Sort of the latter. I’ll fill you in later. By the way, fresh greetings from Olga Peterson.”

  “Duly noted,” he said graciously.

  “She misses those mesmerizing crumbs of knowledge you’re so generous with.”

  He nodded, but I knew my message left him in a state of indifference bordering on the narcoleptic.

  Mrs. Berger’s back was to the stairs. So, before ascending, I sneaked a sidelong glance at her three cheesecake photos. I tried to find my own solution to Walter’s dilemma—maybe detect what the photographer had done with her straying peeper.

  “There was no one quite like me,” Mrs. Berger yelled over to me, causing my spine to tingle. “I did a fair muscle dance but an exquisite hootchie-cootchie. I worked hot and did all the kicks. The muscle, the hitch, and the fan kick. Those were good times. Good times.”

  I vaulted up those stairs.

  I grabbed the new Silvertone portable radio I’d just bought at Sears. I placed it on a shelf in the upstairs bathroom next to a couple of porcelain swans. The bathroom had lately taken on a swan theme. It was a veritable swandom, as Walter put it. There was a swan soap dish, swan-shaped soap, and towels and dishcloths with interwoven swans. The latest purchase by Mrs. Berger was a plastic set of shower and window curtains with swans printed all over them. In our Northwest climate, I rightly suspected they’d become great mold and mildew-makers.