The Lamorna Wink

by Martha Grimes

  “Well, it ain’t my fault, is it? Come on, let’s see the peep shows.”

  The boy sighed. A peep show was a poor second to a train ride, but it was a free poor second, so the boy followed Melrose.

  They were side by side and with their heads lowered, looking through the peepholes at the intricate interiors of the boxes, when Melrose heard a voice behind him.

  “Oughtn’t to be showing that child the peep shows, it might give him ideas.”

  Melrose turned. “Bea!” he exclaimed. She looked to him, at the moment, quite beautiful. The hair that had been dyed an awful eggplant purple when he’d first seen it was its own self again, browny-gold and warm like buttered toast. There was something of solace in it.

  The boy, seeing what must have appeared to him an especially boring interlude between two adults, walked away, back over to the train.

  Melrose saw the boy’s back was turned and, in one of the few ungallant acts of his life, took Bea by the shoulders, pushed her back against the row of boxes, and kissed her unmercifully. She did not protest.

  Not until the fun was over, that is. When he finally set her free, she was all indignation. “Never would’ve thought it. Fancy you!”

  “Which you do, I hope.”

  “Never mind. Fancy doing that in a public place, and you an earl!”

  “I’m not. And why do I find your outrage unconvincing?”

  She shrugged. “Because you’re so pleased with yourself, I expect.”

  He denied this, but she disregarded his denial as she walked away. Turning and seeing he still stood there, she said, impatiently, “Well, come on. I’m off.”

  Melrose followed. “Where to?”

  “Home. I’ve got some steak and potatoes fritz.”

  Melrose was entranced. Home. “Not ‘fritz,’ it’s frites.”

  Bea ran down the wide stairs. “Don’t know why you bother with me, someone clever as you.”

  Melrose smiled. He knew why.

  “Home” was a roomy flat up three flights of stairs. No elevator. He would gladly have driven a Tin Lizzie up Pike’s Peak had Beatrice Slocum’s flat been at the top of it. Once inside, she flicked on the light and he flicked it off.

  “There you go ag-”

  He kissed her. It was a very long and lush kiss, and she joined in, after scant resistance.

  “So,” he said, separating only long enough to say it, “where’re the potatoes frites?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “Mm.”

  This time she kissed him. “With the steak.”

  Her arms were still wrapped around him and her chin on his shoulder when he said, “Do you ever think of marriage?”

  “Me? Sure. A lot.” She rolled away and looked up at the ceiling, sighing. “We’re not good marriage material, us.”

  He turned to look at her. “No, I expect ‘us’ aren’t, not if you look at us like bolts of cloth to be cut and stitched.” After another moment’s reflection, he said, “I’m pretty rich.”

  “Uh-huh.” Peacefully, she yawned.

  Melrose turned to look at her as she yawned again and did something blubbery with her lips. “You look like a fish.”

  “Ta, very much. That’ll really get your proposal up and running.”

  “Who said I was proposing?”

  Bea spread her hand to catch a beam of moonlight. “What are you trying to sell, then, if not yourself?”

  Melrose reached up and took her hand and kept it. “I’m doing an inventory.”

  “Of what?” She yawned, loudly.

  “Myself, my things.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s true. I try to do one every year. It’s quite extensive. For instance, down in my wine cellar, I have a whole case of a Premier Cru from Puligny-Montrachet. And that’s just for starters.”

  She lay in silence, turning this over. She said, “Down in my basement cubicle I have a case of Malvern water, fifty cans of mixed nuts, and a giant cactus. Just for starters.”

  He looked at her sideways, surreptitiously. She’d found some gum-not, he hoped, a plug from under the end table. She was chewing raucously: crack crack crack. “I could never marry a woman who did that in my ear all day.”

  “Good thing, ’cause I could never marry a man who’s so snobby.”

  This brought Melrose up and resting on his arm. “A snob. Me?”

  “Um.”

  “Well, I’m not.” He fell back on the bed again. “Haven’t we strayed from the point?”

  “We? You’re the one strayed; I was just listening to you go down your wine list. You should’ve been one of them blokes like at Dotrice’s.”

  Dotrice was her favorite restaurant, French and expensive. “The sommelier? Thanks. Anyway, we were talking about marriage-in a general, very hypothetical way.”

  She did not reply. Her eyes were closed.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No, but I’m considering it.”

  She was just trying to irritate him. “What are you thinking?”

  “About this painting I’m stuck on.”

  Not terribly complimentary that here he was maybe proposing and all she thought about was work, work, work. However, he’d humor her. “Exactly what are you stuck on?”

  “The mouth. It’s a portrait.”

  “Who of?”

  “A friend. Just a bloke I know. But I know a lot of blokes. Friends-like, you know.”

  This friendly bloke-ness irritated him, as he knew the bloke himself would.

  “Come on, get up”-she was sitting up herself now, pulling at his hand-“and I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t want to get up.”

  “Suit yourself.” She was out of bed and putting on a man’s white shirt that she kept on a hook behind the door as if she were used to wearing it. Melrose frowned. Given the size, the shirt must belong to a very big man. Now she was out the door. “Hell,” he said to himself and fell back against the pillow. He heard her rummaging around in the living room. Crash. Clang. Bloody hell. Was she so enmeshed in her art she couldn’t leave it behind for one night?

  Then she was back lugging a large painting, which he was quite prepared to dislike. She turned it around for him to see and his mouth opened in astonishment. “My God. It’s me.” He could scarcely believe it.

  “Clever of you to recognize it.” She was chewing gum again and trying not to smile.

  In the painting he was seated in a leather wing chair, but leaning forward a little as if talking to an invisible companion. The viewer might have been that companion. The eyes were a gritty green that stonewalled any attempt to glamorize him, just as she’d kept the firelight from sparking his hair.

  “My God, Bea, how on earth did you do this without me?”

  “I guess I wasn’t.”

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Without you.” She grinned and chewed. Crack.

  PART II. A Dealer in Magic and Spells

  20

  ISLINGTON

  On her way downstairs from her flat, Carole-anne Palutski heard the telephone ring in Superintendent Jury’s flat and quickly took the chain from around her neck where his key was warm from her skin (as the Super said, “That key could defrost the stubbornest lock”). She unlocked the door. By the time she got across the room, the ringing stopped. Hell, she thought. Hell. Her spirits had lifted momentarily, thinking it could be him calling. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message. She had bought this answering machine secondhand for a couple of quid. The Super hated answering machines, which she said was really strange for a policeman, as police lived by emergencies and what if there was one? What if she got arrested (wrongfully, of course) and only got to make the one phone call? He said he didn’t think there was much chance the answering machine would go along to the nick and bail her out. “Ha ha, always quipping, aren’t you?” she’d said. “An answering machine’s a way you can call and leave messages. You know, for me or Mrs. W.” Well, he actually had called and left messages
, four for her and two for Mrs. W. He told Mrs. W he really missed her chicken soup. He told Carole-anne he really missed her fortune-telling and wondered if this Irish lass he presently had his arm around was in the cards.

  Ha ha, she thought, winding the tape back and listening again to his last message and wondering again what the background noise was, all of that loud yelling and what sounded like exploded glass. Was it bombs going off? Or just a room full of loud people breaking windows in their drunken, loutish ways?

  He hated e-mail, too. He’d said, “There was always that bit of suspense after you wrote a letter, thinking about the other person reading it and wondering when and what he’d answer. And the self-righteous feeling of, There that’s done. Proud of yourself because you’d finally written that letter. But now? You send e-mail; before you can even think or feel those things, the answer’s back, no thinking between yours and theirs. It’s all too fast; everything’s immediate, now now now.”

  He didn’t think she listened to him. Well, she did. Now she went to the calendar tacked up on the wall and took it down and filled in another square. She wrote in all sorts of things she and the Super had done, like going down the pub or to the Nine-One-Nine to listen to Stan or seeing some film or other. Again, she wondered why he’d gotten it. It was put out by some farming association and she couldn’t see how the Super would have been put on their mailing list. Each month had a picture of a farm animal. September’s was a cow, with its head turned to face the camera, looking squarely at her as if it knew she was filling the squares in with false information.

  He’d been gone for nearly a month. September was filling up with all the entries she’d made. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see how busy he’d been? She looked back at August. Nothing, blank squares all. It was the same for July and June. Why did he have a calendar, if there was never anything on it? Her own calendar was so heaped up with entries she had to write along the sides.

  Yet she thought it was strange that his July and August looked full, and when she pictured her own calendar in her mind it looked empty. Carole-anne wondered if there were people that, when they weren’t there, it made you wonder if you were. Made you wonder if you were real. When they weren’t there to tell a person she looked like a Key West sunset, did she look like anything at all?

  Holding the calendar, trying to think of something to write in for today (how many times could they go to the Angel?) she went over to the phonograph. It was the only one she’d seen and it fascinated her. She had tapes and CDs (The whole world is miniaturized, he’d said), but he had actual records. He had “September in the Rain.” She put it on and lifted the arm over the record.

  For a hard surface, she put the calendar against the window and wrote in Ireland. Rain.

  Into the square for the last day of September she wrote Home again.

  Down in what was referred to as the “garden flat” but was really a basement, Mrs. Wassermann sat in her favorite overstuffed chair, hands folded. There had been a few days she had even spent in bed, but she forced herself up and dressed at a decent hour, mustering what self-regard she had.

  For three weeks now, except the times when Carole-anne had insisted, she had not been out of the flat, not on her own. The world beyond the door could be pitiless, unless you were protected by amulet, charm, or spell. It was the way she’d been years ago, just sitting and looking out of her low window upon the feet of passersby. She’d been this way until Mr. Jury had fitted the door with extra locks, “Locks not even a bunch of drunken Irish rebels could kick through.”

  The trouble was that he wasn’t here. Oh, she’d not minded when he’d gone out of London other times, for he’d only been away a few days at a time. But this time it had been nearly a month. And he’d gone to Ireland-Northern Ireland, which, as everyone knew, was still a dangerous place to be. He should’ve been back by now.

  Mrs. Wassermann sighed and propped her head on her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair, and watched feet walk by her window.

  VICTORIA STREET

  Detective Sergeant Alfred Wiggins sat at his desk in New Scotland Yard and looked dejectedly over at the other desk, behind which no one sat. He had lined up his usual anodynes: nose drops, eyedrops, black biscuits, Bromo Seltzer, apricot juice, a few herbs, and Fisherman’s Friends. He looked at all of them without spirit, without interest, without needfulness. He did not feel headachy, croupy, nauseated, muscle-sore, or feverish. That was the trouble; he missed his ailments. He needed them, usually.

  One would think it would be a relief, this failure of need. But it wasn’t. It had always been a bit of a lark, mixing up the apricot juice with a tablet of Bromo Seltzer (that cure-all he had found when they’d gone to Baltimore), maybe with a little rue; or tossing back a few pills with the afternoon tea, which he would drink with a black biscuit or two. When he knew Superintendent Jury-his guv’nor-was going to Northern Ireland, Wiggins had made him up a travel packet of small vials with precise “indications” (Wiggins fell quite easily into pharmaceutical jargon).

  He had been gone for nearly a month now. When Mr. Jury was sitting over there at the other desk, hands behind his head, watching one or another procedure of Wiggins’s mixing potions, commenting on the vanity of it all, quipping, Wiggins felt it was worth it. But now he felt more like the tree fallen in the forest with no one around to hear.

  Was he, then, there?

  As if to test out his there-ness, the phone by his hand rang.

  Richard Jury! he hoped against hope. But it wasn’t; it was Brian Macalvie.

  The next best thing. Wiggins smiled.

  Fiona Clingmore sat at her desk, looking at her sponge bag, her Cucumber QuikFix facial, the new mascara wand and eyeliner, sighed, and with her forearm swept them into her desk drawer. Hardly seemed worth it these days.

  But to put a good face on it, when Alfred Wiggins came into the office, she picked up her shell comb and ran it through her hair, before using it as an anchor to hold it on one side. She said to Wiggins, looking at the cat, Cyril, sitting and watching the door to the outside corridor, “Cyril does that all the time. He thinks your guv’nor must be going to walk through it any moment now.”

  “Maybe he needs the vet,” said Wiggins, having the urge to cheer things down. “Maybe he’s sick.”

  Fiona waved a deprecating hand, sweeping away such a suggestion. “Cyril’s not like you. I’ll tell you this, though. He”-and here she bent her head in the direction of the inside door to Chief Superintendent Racer’s office-“hardly knows what to do with himself with Mr. Jury gone. Why, he can walk right past Cyril, here, without so much as a ‘bloody damn’ or trying to kick him or setting those sardine traps. It’s like all the starch’s gone out of him. It’s like when you don’t get any sleep and then you don’t have any dreams, so you go kind of queer all over. Kind of crazy, you know. That’s him. When Mr. Jury’s not here it’s like he”-she nodded again at Racer’s office door-“goes berserk; he doesn’t have anyone to put a lid on him and so he keeps blowing off. You know, kind of like a pressure cooker exploding.” Fiona shook her head and sighed as she went about rubbing some cream into her cuticles.

  For the cat Cyril, it was like imagining fish; he could look at the water until a darkness, a blotch, or a shadow in the riverbed slowly surfaced. Even if it wasn’t a fish, even if it was only a bit of paper that had unhooked from a rock, or maybe it would be a fortune cookie or a Christmas cracker, a shoe or a shark.

  But the shark was already there, wasn’t he? On the other side of his office door, flapping and splashing, going at Cyril whenever he could, too stupid to be an imagined fish.

  Cyril sat still as still water waiting for Him to come through the door. Any moment now. He always did sooner or later, but if Cyril stopped watching, He wouldn’t. He’d get away like a fish’s shadow. Cyril was sure if he put his whole being into watching, and not be distracted by sardines and fax machines, he could open the door and have Him come through it. Just like that.

&nbs
p; Presto.

  DUBLIN

  The old priest wrapped his hands around his pint of Guinness as if it were a cross.

  “What happened was they picked me up in the Shankill, kidnapped me you could say, if ordering a man t’get into a car at gunpoint is kidnapping. We drove a distance from Belfast. It’s hard to say how far, for I scarcely recognized anything we passed, so dark it was. I’ve never seen a blacker night, dark as devil’s dung. I think where we ended up was Ballykillen, that’s north; I think we were near Craigavon.

  “They talked the whole way, as if they were just a bunch of the lads out for a night on the town. There were three of them, a three-man unit-IRA, of course. And then they told me why they’d picked me up; they needed a priest to administer last rites.

  I said to them, ‘You could surely of got a priest nearer to wherever it is yer taking me, now, couldn’t you?’ He said, ‘Ye looked good to us, Father.’ I asked, ‘Who’s sick-to-dying they had to scrape a priest off the streets?’ They laughed harder. ‘It’s an execution, Father. We’re about to kill a man.’

  “I told them, no, I couldn’t do this, watch a man be murdered.

  “ ‘But you won’t have to watch, Father.’

  “Finally we stopped in front of this white cottage that in the pitch blackness looked like a moon against the sky. We went in. They’d taken a sledgehammer to the door, which I’d learned was just the IRA’s way of knocking. In the parlor, or what was left of it, for they’d pretty much trashed it, sat a man tied to the chair he was in. I don’t know if I ever saw a more pitiable sight than this fellow asking me to help him and knowing he was going to be executed. Every man there had a machine gun. I asked them what he’d done but they just waved the question away and told me to get on with it. I told this poor devil that only God could help him now and it was better to die absolved of his sins. Those words sounded so empty, what good were they to him? The three of these IRA boyos standing round with their guns. I did what they wanted. They took me back to the car and told me to wait.