13
“Don’t mention the War!”
John Cleese
Fawlty Towers, BBC
ROXANNE WAS WEARING HER historian suit Wednesday morning, a simple blue jacket and skirt thing over a white silk blouse, a gold pin, a string of pearls, with her dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck with a white scarf.
She was also wearing a pair of gold-wire-frame glasses.
“Why do you wear those things?” I said.
“Why does anybody wear glasses?” she replied.
“Usually, to correct their vision. That’s why I know you’re a fraud. You don’t wear contacts, and I happen to know you can read the fine print on a packet of artificial sweetener at fifty paces. The glasses are pure disguise. I’m just curious about why you wear them.”
She made a face. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I’ll sound conceited.”
“You,” I told her, “have a lot to be conceited about,” I said.
“That’s why I keep you around,” she told me. “I love to hear you talk.”
She slid the glasses down her nose and looked at me over the top of them. She was gathering things up ready to go; I was at the breakfast table with the international edition of USA Today, finishing the last of my French toast and soaking up all the football and basketball news I could find. The one thing I really missed here was TV coverage of Giants and Knicks games. If Rox and I were going to settle down here for a long time, I might invest in a really serious satellite dish, one that would pull in programs from the States as well as TVStrato.
“So what’s the conceited reason?” I asked.
“I’m dressing down,” she said. “I’m pretty young for the circles I’ve been moving in lately, and most of the time I still dress like a kid. And since I border on the attractive—”
“False modesty doesn’t become you, honey. You’re a knockout.”
“I have short legs, my ears stick out, and my lips are too full.”
It occurred to me that I’ve never known a woman who wasn’t ready with an instant catalog of her shortcomings in the looks department, real or imagined.
“But,” Rox went on, “I do admit that in these circles I am fairly glamorous, if only by default.”
“So?”
“So I don’t want to be. I’ve worked like crazy in the field to get people to ignore the fact that I’ve got money. I don’t intend to have them dismiss me as a scholar because I happen to be good-looking. So I do whatever I can to downplay that.”
I stuck out my lower lip. “Too bad,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “In a better world we’d be judged only on the quality of our work, but for now we all bring a lot of baggage with us whatever we do.”
“No,” I said. “Too bad because your plan doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that right this second you are the most delicious-looking thing on earth, and if we didn’t have important things to do, I would be peeling that suit right back off you.”
She smiled at me. “That’s why God made the nighttime,” she said.
Then she asked me what I was smiling at.
“I was reflecting on the fact that we’re so far north it gets dark about a quarter after four in the afternoon in London this time of year.”
“Just make sure you wait for me,” she said.
“I’m hardly going to start without you.”
“Just don’t start with anyone else.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re going to lunch with Phoebe Arking today.”
“Yeah. I want to find out what the cops were asking them the other night. We’re building a fine relationship with Bristow, but we haven’t gotten to the point yet where he’ll just let me walk in and read the police reports.”
“‘Yet,’” she said. “I don’t like this word, ‘yet.’”
“I didn’t mean I was going to keep working on him until he would. For God’s sake, I didn’t want to get involved in this. I’m only doing it because I want to get it over sooner.”
“Famous last words,” she said, then raised a hand. “I’m not calling you a liar, Cobb. I’m just lamenting Fate.”
Now she waved the hand around, erasing the last few sentences. “But this is off the point, anyway,” said. “I was talking about little Phoebe. Watch out for her.”
“Huh?”
“I saw the way she was looking at you the other night. She wants your bod.”
“Oh, come on, Rox. She’s totally besotted with Stephen Arking, the Poet.”
“And you were afraid of getting cynical,” she said. “Sometimes you’re so innocent, I hardly know you, Cobb. Phoebe is besotted with being married to a poet. With money. And having a step-mother-in-law named Lady. As if that proved anything. I had a dog named Lady once.”
“And so she’s going to make a move on me?”
“It’s possible. You’re dashing. You’re glamorous, solving murders and all. In a weird sort of way, you’re even handsome. She’s a reach-for-the-stars type, the way I used to be, only she didn’t do what I did to get cured of it.”
“What’s that?”
“Reached for the stars and wound up having to be rescued from a shit pile. She idealized her poet; she can idealize you the same way. She went after the poet, and she got him, but now she’s used to the poet.”
“And you worried about being conceited,” I said. “Your humility is staggering. Phoebe Arking—ten Phoebe Arkings could never get me. I am already got.”
She bent over and kissed me on the forehead. “Don’t you forget it,” she said.
“I am good and got,” I told her. “Sheesh, the things you worry about.”
“I wasn’t actually worried,” she said. “I just think when women look as if they’re going to throw themselves at you, you should at least notice. Then I can feel triumphant, that you picked me over competition, instead of just keeping me on through inertia.”
“You have no competition,” I told her.
“I love you, Cobb.”
I told her ditto, and she left. After a quick call to Bernard to brief him (something I’d promised Lady Arking to do last night), so did I.
I picked up Phoebe at the modest row house she shared with the Poet in Kensington. Modest, that is, by Schick and Arking standards. The average Londoner, or New Yorker even, would find it pretty ritzy. Phoebe was wearing a green sweater today, and the skirt was a different floral pattern, but the look was exactly the same as it had been Monday at tea; sort of a post-hippie waif look, like a flower child hurt and bewildered by an early frost.
She was chirpy today.
“I’m so pleased to get a chance to get to know you better, Matt—may I call you Matt?”
“Sure, all my friends do.”
“And you must call me Phoebe. I know it’s a horrid name, but I’m used to it.”
“It means ‘light bringer,’” I said.
“Yes, I knew that. Are you a student of the classics, Matt?”
“Not Latin and Greek ones, no. I just pick up a lot of little facts.”
“Stephen took a first in Classics at Oxford, but he never uses classical allusions in his poetry. His poetry is very stark. Have you ever read any?”
“I must admit, I don’t read a lot of poetry.”
“Stephen says that’s why civilization is dying, because people don’t read poetry anymore.”
“Could be,” I said. I had my own theories on why civilization was dying, but they all took longer than a sentence to sum up.
“Matthew means ‘gift of God,’” she informed me.
“More classics?”
“No, we thought we might have a child once, and we were discussing names, and we liked that one.”
“My parents, too,” I said. “Only they got the meaning mixed up. They thought it was judgment of God.”
She laughed and told me I was wicked. I asked her where she wanted to eat. She told me that
she would adore to get a burger at TGI Friday’s.
“Interesting choice,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s American, and because it’s right around the corner from where Aliou got shot.”
Phoebe said, “Ooh. Do you think we ought to pick another place?”
“No, now that you mention it, I could stand a burger myself.”
Friday’s wasn’t too crowded. It was probably the most American place in London, not excluding the American embassy. It was dark, wood-lined, and multileveled, and decorated in the same miscellaneous-junk motif that marks all the branches of the chain (and of numerous competing chains) in the States.
More important, the food was the same. When you ordered something with ground beef, you got something recognizable as meat, not a fried-up version of stuff that had been macerated like baby food. The ice cream was real American-type ice cream, not the greasy, gritty stuff so common over here.
It didn’t happen too often (every couple of weeks, or so), but any time Rox or I needed a jolt of home, we went to Friday’s, and it was just like being back in the States. Until I went to the bathroom and tried to figure out how to flush the toilet.
The host at the door gave a little raised eyebrow as I walked in. He was used to seeing me with Roxanne.
Immune to vulgar curiosity, I asked for a nonsmoking table. We sat and ordered.
Friday’s is a friendly place. The waiters and waitresses are encouraged to add eccentric customizations to their uniforms. They ask you where you’re from. They ask you how everything is.
This is swell for the tourists, and the staff is (are, if you want to be British about it) bubbly and up and run to talk to, if you don’t have anything else to talk about. It can make conversation a little rough if you’re trying to get information out of somebody.
I did manage to get a few words in and elicit a few replies.
Bristow’s assistant, Detective Constable Griffiths, seemed to be a thorough, if uninspired, investigator. He’d done the whole routine, including asking most of the questions I’d asked myself.
“What is the point of that wretched English school?” she demanded. “They asked about it over and over.”
“Aliou was killed trying to alert your—your what?—step-mother-in-law about that school. He must have found something about it he knew she’d be interested in. He knew the only reason he was hired to look around in the first place was that Lady Arking had gotten the anonymous letter.”
“Maybe the broacher hid a secret message,” she said.
I smiled. “Read a few thrillers in your time, haven’t you?”
I was sorry the instant I said it. She drew back, and looked down at the plate where her barely nibbled-at hamburger lay.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I must seem awfully stupid to an expert. It was just an idea I had.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And it’s just an idea I had, and it’s just an idea Scotland Yard had. It’s a very clever idea; it unfortunately just doesn’t happen to be true.”
“No?”
“They tried every test know to cryptoanalytic science. It’s just a little cardboard folder about a one-flight-up school of English.”
“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Perhaps that explains why the police were so suspicious of us.”
“How suspicious?”
“They even asked Stephen, Pamela, and me where we’d been Sunday night. Of course, we didn’t know why at the time, but now we realize they suspect one of us of having killed that man who shot Aliou.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the whole thing was ridiculous.”
“No, I mean where did you all tell him you were Sunday night?”
“Matt!” she breathed. “Not you too!”
“Relax,” I told her. “Contrary to popular belief, that question does not indicate deep suspicion of the questionee. It’s strictly routine.”
She made a little moue of distaste. “It’s routine for a suspect. Pamela got so tense, I had to give her a neck massage after the police left.”
“It’s routine even before you know who’s a suspect and who’s not. Besides, it can be useful in other ways. If you know everybody’s movements, you can work out the pattern the killer had to work his way through in order to commit the crime.”
Phoebe’s tiny mouth took another little nibble on her hamburger; she chewed thoroughly and swallowed, then patted a drop of ketchup off her pink lips with a napkin.
“What you just said sounds good,” she told me when she was done, “but I don’t think I actually understood it.”
“Doesn’t matter, it was mostly hot air anyway. Where were you Sunday night? See, when you’re reluctant to answer that question, suspicion starts to creep in.”
“I’m reluctant because I don’t like the question, not because I’m ashamed of the answer.”
“Strictly confidential,” I promised.
“Oh, all right. I went to the cinema. The one on King’s Road in Chelsea.”
“What did you see?”
“The Fugitive,” she said. “You deduced yourself that I like thrillers.”
“So I did. How’d you like it?”
“I thought it was marvelous. I’m quite a fan of Harrison Ford, as well.”
“How did Stephen like it?”
“He didn’t go. He was in his studio, working. That’s what he’s doing now, in fact. He’s writing a play in verse; he says there hasn’t been a good one since Shakespeare.”
“I see,” I said.
I already knew, because Bristow had mentioned it, that Lady Arking was accounted for, having spent half the time in question with Roxanne, and the other half on the phone with her solicitor.
I’d been slightly suspicious of that. The first murder I was ever involved in had to do with a fake phone alibi, and that was before mobile phones caught on the way they have today.
“Especially in London,” I’d said. “You can’t get on the damn bus without some teenager with a mobile phone sparking up his girlfriend and arranging to meet her at Knicker and Garter or some such place.”
Bristow had wanted to know whose side I was on.
“Just the truth’s,” I told him. “It’s only the truth that’s going to get this business out of my life on a permanent basis.”
He told me there was no cause to worry; cellular phone calls go through the system a completely different way from calls made on land lines, and there was a way to tell the difference.
“Not that it cuts a lot of ice in Lady Arking’s case,” he expanded, “since I don’t really picture her personally putting three bullets at close range into Winston’s chest. She’s more the hiring type.”
So, after a pleasant American lunch with Phoebe Arking, I more or less knew where the cops stood. For the English school angle, at least as it pertained to the Arkings, they had two nonalibis (it turned out that Stephen’s studio had a private entrance to the street) and one ironclad alibi they couldn’t care less about.
As far as the non-Arking angle went, they had only the immediate world.
So you could say the field was wide open.
Time for me to get around, get in the flow, see things with my own eyes. I find that often helps, even if the cops have already checked a place out thoroughly. I’m not a big intuition man, but feelings have their place when you’re puzzling out a problem, and you might as well give them every chance.
“Sorry to be ungentlemanly,” I told Phoebe, “but the time has come for me to put you in a cab and get to work.”
“Oh, how very exciting. What are you going to do?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “I thought I’d go and have a look at the W. G. Peterson School of English. With luck, they may just take me for another cop.”
I thought about it for a second and realized I was being a jerk. “No, they won’t,” I said, yanking my brain violently back from New York. “The minute I open my mouth, they’ll know I’m an American.”
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“What are you going to do?” Phoebe asked. Her concern was all out of proportion to the problem.
I shrugged it off. “I’ll think of something,” I said. “I always do.”
“Let me come with you,” she said.
I knitted my brows and looked at her. “Why, for God’s sake?”
“Oh, just to do something mad once. Stephen says true poetry is found on the edge of madness. I haven’t done anything mad since ...” She frowned, thinking it over.
Then the frown turned into a mischievous grin. “Since I rang Stephen out of the blue and told him how much I enjoyed his poetry.” She put her hand on mine for a second. “There. You can’t deny that worked out well, can you?”
“I suppose not,” I conceded. “But this wouldn’t be doing something mad. Not unless one of your definitions of ‘mad’ is ‘boring.’”
“It’s only boring to you because you do it all the time. All I ever do is type Stephen’s poetry, go with Pamela to charity luncheons, and deal with the bank.”
“See?” I said. “Don’t sell your life short. I’ve never been to a charity luncheon. With or without Pamela.”
“You’re mocking me, but I don’t care. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll bring you to our next charity luncheon if you’ll take me along this afternoon.”
Something had occurred to me. I didn’t answer her right away because I was considering it.
“I won’t be any bother,” she said. “Not a bit of bother. I promise.”
I looked at her and started to laugh. She got younger as I looked at her. Finally, when she reached about eight years old, she said, “Please?”
“Okay,” I said.
She grabbed my hand in both of hers and squeezed. I got the impression that if I leaned forward an eighth of an inch, she’d vault the table and kiss me, and for the first time, I gave some credence to Roxanne’s breakfast-time warning.
“But,” I said sternly.
“Yes?”
“This is not a trip to the Barnes fete, okay? This is Yellowstone Park, and any creature may be a bear, and any bear may be hungry.”
“I thought you said it would be boring.”
Killed in the Fog Page 11