by T. W. Emory
Mrs. Arnot walked me to the door.
“Britt didn’t exaggerate about you,” she said.
“How’s that?”
She smiled. “Well, now that I’ve had a chance to talk with you awhile, I do see that there is indeed a bit of Cary Grant’s charm about you—and like him, you’ve also mastered a certain relaxed breeziness.”
“Breezy I can do. It’s the dimpled chin and carefree saunter that need work.”
I gave her my card.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you, young man. I wish you luck.”
It was 9:15 when I left. I stopped at The Twin TeePees off Highway 99 across from Green Lake. As the name suggests, it was a roadside diner built in the shape of two large adjoining teepees—one of those oddball monuments to advertising boosterism.
I used the payphone to call Rikard Lundeen. He told me that Addison Darcy would be staying around home the next day and that I was welcome to stop by at any time. I put a clove in my mouth and took a table looking out at the highway.
I ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of pecan pie. After the waitress brought my order I watched the pavement strain with night traffic. I let the cars mesmerize me for a while as I chewed and mulled over what the aging and seasoned Ziegfeld girl had told me.
Before the war, Lou Boyd and I came to the rescue of a lawyer named Grant Lincoln Presswell. He’d come to the Bristol Agency with a recurring problem. A crazed weakness, really. Presswell was a whimsical old reprobate who seemed unable to restrain himself around the pretty office girls who worked for his firm. He’d never touch the current focus of his adoration. Not so much as a grope, pinch, or a wink. Instead he’d write her love songs. Love lyrics. Lewd lyrics. Pages and pages of them. Lucky for Presswell, the girls never took him to court. They were usually too embarrassed or intimidated to do anything. Presswell generally exhausted his emotions or ran out of paper and ink—I never knew which. It was our job to try and retrieve the love songs amicably, or simply buy them outright—if the girl hadn’t already burned them, that is. Eventually, one of the girls did turn adventurous and tried to get hush money from our client. He came to us in a four-alarm panic. Before we could do anything, he died of a heart attack. The girl had obviously carried things a little too far. But, then again, so had Presswell.
I parked the Chevy in its usual spot in front of Mrs. Berger’s. I’d thrown my coat on the passenger side and remembered it only after I stepped into the street. Normally I’d have left it to rumple overnight. But the suit was new. Plus, I planned to wear it the next day when I saw Britt Anderson again. So, I turned and stepped back toward the car.
That move saved my life.
I heard the tires squeal as the car shot past me. I don’t know if I leaped or was propelled, but I slammed into the side of my Chevy. As I slid to the ground I cursed the driver and all his forebears, and hoped he’d stop and apologize so I could curse him to his face. But when I looked in his direction I saw the dark outline of a sedan hurtling down the street like a rocket.
“Are you all right, Gunnar?”
It was Walter Pangborn, a little winded from running out of the shadows.
“I … I think so,” I said as he helped me stand. “That idiot could have killed me.”
“I think that was his intention, old socks. I think that was his intention.”
Walter had been sitting on the front steps with the porch light switched off when he saw me drive up.
“I’d just tamped and re-lit my pipe. I thought it peculiar that the driver of that sedan didn’t turn his lights on when he pulled away from the curb. He was waiting for you, Gunnar. He meant to kill you.”
“Did you get a look at him?” I asked.
“Sorry. Not a clear one.”
It figured. I was parked too far from the streetlight.
“Was it a Packard?”
“As for that, I can only say that it might have been. I can say for sure only that it was a very dark sedan. I must admit, old thing, as the lyricists might say, my eyes saw only you.”
“I’m touched, Walter.”
Walter’s assessment got me to drop the idiot-driver theory. I’d angered plenty of people and racked up my share of enemies over the years. The driver could easily have been somebody out to settle an old score. But my profession made me wary of coincidences. Given the timing, it was just as likely that my close call had something to do with my nosing into Christine’s murder.
We went inside. Sten was still out. Mrs. Berger was making Zs, her insomnia being no match for several of Walter’s gin and bitters.
Walter poured us each a shot of Black & White as I went over the details of my day with him.
“I’d like to meet this Blanche Arnot,” Walter said. “She sounds enchanting. I’ll wager she has quite the photo album to go with those reminiscences.”
“Overall, Walter, what do you make of this pretty kettle of fish?”
“Ah, yes, a reference to the salmon and trout Scottish picnickers cooked in kettles for their picnic meals. Arguably, not a pretty sight. A mucky, jumbled mix. And when you also consider how chaotic a picnic can often be ….”
I held up a hand. “Walter. Please. Your thoughts about what I’ve told you so far. What’s your take on Dirk Engstrom?”
Walter held his shot glass to his nose and sniffed the whiskey. “Prisons are filled with people who insist on their innocence, of course. Still, the way you characterize the lad and his story, I’m inclined to think he’s being framed. That near hit-and-run outside would seem to confirm it.”
I agreed.
“Gunnar, if we combine some of the details you’ve gleaned, I’d say it’s fairly safe to assume that Christine Johanson was involved in an affaire de coeur with an older man—presumably one of her customers.”
“Sure looks that way. It would explain why she told the Engstrom kid she wasn’t good enough for him. She was a two-timer with a grain or two of conscience.”
Walter nodded and suddenly drained his glass. “The eavesdropping Meredith Lane said Christine sounded nervous and angry when talking on the phone. What was that other word she used to describe how Christine felt?”
“She said Christine sounded like she’d been cheated.”
“Cheated? You’re sure that was the word? Not deceived or betrayed?”
“I’m sure. She said ‘cheated.’ What’s the difference, Walter? Maybe she’d been a sucker to the old routine. ‘I’ll marry you, cupcake, after I divorce my wife.’ The whole sleazy nine yards. Only, her lover boy didn’t mean a word of it and Christine found out she’d been played for a sap.”
“Perhaps. However, I’m certain Miss Lane would have put a different word to it had Christine been the victim of a lover’s broken promises. In such a case, I see her using a word like betrayed or duped.”
“Walter, I know these girls are getting groomed by Mrs. Arnot, but Meredith didn’t exactly strike me as a budding lexicographer.”
“You’d be surprised, old top, how exacting people can be when it comes to labeling the emotional state of another.”
“So you’re thinking cheated as in money?” I said.
“That makes more sense to me, although I admit I don’t quite see how it all fits together.”
“Well, you’re in good company, Walter. Christine’s behavior with me the other night may have hinted at something shady, but I pegged her as a sweet kid overall, just self-involved. You make her out to be a shakedown artist.”
“Possibly she was all of that. You must admit, old socks, you were taken with her looks. You were in one of your … drooling moods. No one—especially a libidinous male—wants to think the worst of a beautiful face. But, it’s likely that poor Christine wasn’t as sweet as you might like to think. It would also fit with Mrs. Arnot’s excellent theory about the murderer acting to protect himself.”
Kirsti had her lower lip between her teeth and was staring at me with rapt attention, as if I was the wise old man of the mountain. S
he got up off the wood bench and came around behind my wheelchair.
“After a few more minutes of conversation, I told Walter goodnight and went to my room,” I told Kirsti casually, as she pushed me toward the cafeteria. She and I had decided a cup of coffee was in order.
It was between feedings, but since it was Sunday, pockets of visitors and Finecare inmates loitered here and there in the cafeteria dining hall, glibly talking about old times and ditheringly passing on what might be new. A few kitchen ladies were robotically preparing meals. Another one of their number was going around bussing recently abandoned tables and being dogged all the while by a grizzled golden-ager, younger than me, who was trying to get her to listen to a letter he clutched in his hand. There were printed signs on a couple of walls about not sharing food, and not taking your trays and silverware with you, and not sitting on tables, and keeping hands, feet, and objects to yourself. If you weren’t careful, it was the kind of place that could make you forget there was anything right with the world.
As sensitive and perceptive as Kirsti was, I wondered if she saw Finecare as I did. I decided probably not. After all, this was her time for defining moments and not for grappling with moments trying to define her.
Kirsti found us a private spot, looked at me with the expression of a veteran waitress, and said, “Black, right?”
I said “Right.”
Kirsti got us our coffee and then positioned a chair across from me and sat down, placing one of her dimpled knees over the other. She held her cup in both hands and perched its edge on her top knee.
“That Walter sure read you right,” Kirsti said, after a few moments of silence. “About you drooling over beautiful women.”
I laughed. “I was young.”
“You were … horny,” she said with a shrewd glitter in her eyes. “And all the time, it sounds like to me.” Suddenly she had a pink tint on each cheek that ran to the temples and was not completely hidden by the crescent-shaped locks of her pageboy.
I coughed, and then took a big swallow of coffee. “I admit to having had a full array of youthful impulses,” I said defensively.
“For sure,” she said, the flush on her face deepening. She raised her cup to her lips to take a sip.
“How about we let this old jaw of mine rest up a bit while we soak up the ambiance,” I said as I waved my left hand at our surroundings and brought my cup to my mouth with my right.
She nodded and we finished our coffee in silence.
Kirsti brought our empty cups over to the gal doing the bussing, and then she wheeled me back to the outer courtyard. She continued to keep quiet, so I said nothing as we bumped and jolted across the gravel and flagstone walk.
“So, you were in danger. Someone tried to run you over. Someone was out to get you,” she said when we reached the wood bench and she’d turned her recorder back on.
“Looking back, I’d say that’s putting it mildly.”
I kept my snub-nosed .38 in my desk drawer when it wasn’t riding on my torso. I pulled it out of its hiding spot and placed it on the little nightstand near my bed. It became anchor for a Pep Comics magazine starring Archie Andrews as well as a tattered copy of Spinoza’s Ethics that I’d recently picked up at Shorey’s Bookstore downtown.
Setting my gun out in the open was the only precaution I took, but I knew I was going to sleep like a guilty baby. Or was that a selfish rock? Whatever. For, no matter what I said to dissuade him, Walter insisted on standing guard all night. He planned to paint toy soldiers until the wee hours. Nearby on his workbench he’d have one of his few souvenirs from France that a buddy smuggled home for him after he’d been wounded. It was an 8mm Lebel revolver, popular among French troops during the First Great War. I fluffed my pillow and pitied anyone foolish enough to break in the house on Walter Pangborn’s watch.
I dreamt I was running in a Sadie Hawkins Day race with Dirk Engstrom. We’d looked over our shoulders but couldn’t see the girls chasing us. But we could hear them. They were gaining on us, and we were worried. Dirk tripped and a shell exploded near him. The dream shifted and I was with a buddy named Mike. I banged away with a carbine as Mike blasted the air with his BAR.
I woke up wet and clammy with a tom-tom thumping in my chest.
Mike was killed in the Hurtgen. He was a state-the-obvious pragmatist who didn’t mind the sleet. We were running through a creek when a kraut machine gun started stuttering. I didn’t know Mike before the war, but he’d come to us from Seattle via the replacement depot. It was one of those “Repple Depple” flukes that put him in my platoon. More a chocolate fiend than a nicotine addict, he traded cigarettes for Hershey bars. I liked him. He was dead before his knees hit the water.
I reached over to the nightstand and broke open my revolver to make sure all the chambers of the cylinder were loaded.
I decided it would be keeping me company for a few days.
Chapter 8
Miss Peterson wasn’t with a customer when I entered the Hanstad Building on Friday, June 9th. I made sure to keep moving and met her beckoning look with a vigorous wave that bordered on frenetic.
I found Cissy Paget alone in the anteroom of Dag Erickson’s suite. Only her left leg was showing in the kneehole of her desk, the other comfortably tucked under her left haunch. This told me no clients were in the offing. She had the telephone cradled in the nape of her neck as she rolled fresh paper and carbon into her machine. Whoever she was talking with was jabbering away, because Cissy was repeating a litany of yes, uh-huh, I know, and I won’t. We exchanged waves and I sat down across from her in the waiting area.
I picked up a stale copy of the Seattle Times. The heading told me that the Park Board had approved the $235,000 Aqua Theater. The headline below announced that an oil tanker was grounded by an ebb tide in nearby Shilshole Bay. A picture accompanied the story. I hadn’t been paying attention to local events and was wondering what happened when Cissy hung up the phone.
I looked up and saw exasperation on her face and heard the sigh that went with it. I put the paper down.
“And how’s Mother, Sweet Knees?” I asked to be cordial, deducing the source of her aggravation.
“Oh, Mom’s fine. Just fine. She’s off visiting her sister in Bellingham for a few days. The one I told you was recently widowed. When they get together they bake and cook up a storm. It’ll help to distract my aunt from her loss.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yes, but then they both put on weight and get depressed and start to bicker.”
“Oh, well, that’s not good.”
“No, but it does give me a needed break for a few days.”
“And that is good.”
“Uh-huh, except Mom worries about picayune details. So of course she’s got to make sure I’m feeding this, and watering that, and that I’m buttoning up my overcoat when the wind blows free. The usual. I have to tell you, her little departures might renew her spirit, but they take their toll on my nervous system.”
I rolled sympathetic eyes.
“But say, tough guy, that’s also a good thing. It means I’ll have the place to myself tomorrow night, if that matters to you.”
“Sounds like it’s got possibilities.” I’d almost forgotten our date for Saturday night. “Am I hearing an offer to cook dinner before we hit the Trianon?”
“Not on your life. Dinner’s still on you. My idea is that if you behave yourself, I might invite you in later for a nightcap.”
I promised to be a regular Eagle Scout.
“How’s his nibs this morning?” I asked, nodding at the door to Dag’s office.
“He’s in court all day today,” she said, a slight lilt in her voice.
“Sort of cuts into your combat pay, doesn’t it?” I said, reaching in my pocket for a clove.
“Be nice,” she said, giving me a glare over the tops of spectacles that rode precariously on the end of her cute nose. Then she grinned. Cissy had let it slip more than once that spending all day
with Dag gave her a headache. She liked and respected her boss, but he emitted nervous energy and passed on stress like a runner in a relay race, hands off the baton.
“I’m surprised you’re in so early,” she said. “I thought you’d be sleeping one off after your little reunion.”
“And what little reunion is that?”
“Didn’t your army buddy get in touch with you?”
“What army buddy?”
She looked puzzled. “Yesterday afternoon some guy called. He told me he was in the same gang or troop or squad—or whatever it was you were in together. He wanted to surprise you and begged me for your address.” She took her glasses off and studied my face. “He seemed okay, so … I gave it …. It wasn’t okay, was it?”
I shook my head and told her about the near hit-and-run.
“Gunnar, I’m so sorry.”
“Forget it. I’d have done the same thing. Anything distinctive about this guy’s voice?”
“Uh-uh. Sorry. He sounded like the average Joe. That’s why his story convinced me. Again, I’m so sorry.”
“He missed me. That’s what matters.”
“Are you still in danger? Maybe he’ll try again.”
I was touched by her concern, but was determined not to show it. “I’m on the look-out this time. Not to worry.”
Gunnar the Brave. Gunnar the Vigilant.
I asked if she had any messages for me.
“Just one,” she said, picking up a slip of paper. “The phone started ringing this morning before I even had my coat off. A Miss Britt Anderson called.”
The name piqued my interest and Cissy noticed.
“At least I think she said it was Miss. She sounded very officious in a sensual sort of way. Is she pretty?”
“Yes. I’d say she is. Pretty in an officious sort of way.” I thought it was a clever comeback.
Cissy didn’t. She handed me my message and started pounding out a funeral march on her Smith and Corona. It sounded like Requiem to a Gumshoe, and it left me wondering if our friendship had developed a new wrinkle when I wasn’t looking. Gunnar the Clever-by-half.