by Kin Platt
“A Carver armchair,” Mr. Newbury said at last. “Why, yes, I do believe I do,” he said puffing blue wreaths of smoke. “And why would you be interested in my armchairs, my gay young blade?”
“They’re supposed to go with this kind of house, aren’t they?”
Mr. Newbury nodded. He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “I’ve seen you around. You’re the boy with the bulldog.”
I nodded and he said: “Fine looking animal. Bring him in with you someday. Always had a liking for the breed.”
“Okay, sure,” I said. “And by the way, Mr. Newbury, how much is that silver dollar worth?”
He studied the summer beam across the room. He spoke to it in his soft rolling burr. “Knows a Carver armchair, mind you, but doesn’t know the value of money.”
“I’m gonna study up on it,” I said. “Real soon.”
“Too bad,” he said. “I’ve been looking for a bright boy to help out here.”
“You mean a job?” I practically yelled.
“Meanwhile we’ll both have to think about it, won’t we now?”
I had to admit we did. My first chance for a job and I lost it by being stupid. “What do I have to know to get it?” I asked.
“Little things,” he said. “Small things. Things of no great import to the world. For example, that this silver dollar weighing 412½ grains would be worth four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred!”
“When do you want the money, my young mercenary?”
My head was really in a whirl. “Not yet,” I said. I shoved the envelope closer to him. “And you better hold on to this for me, too. If I don’t come back you give it to Minerva Landry.”
“Minerva Landry,” he repeated and wrote it down in a small neat handwriting. “Your mother, I presume?”
I had to laugh at that one. “She’s the Police Chief’s daughter.”
He didn’t know what to say now. “I’ll be back in a few days,” I said near the door, “with my other silver dollars. What’s one from about 1804 worth, Mr. Newbury?”
“It’s not about anything, young sir. It must be it exactly. And it exactly would be worth exactly twenty-nine thousand dollars! That’s what the last one of that year brought in auction. I’ve never seen that one, my boy. You bring that one in. You bring that one in and you’ve a job with Peter Newbury.”
“Wow!” I yelled. “Thanks a lot!”
I was going out the door when I heard him say, still to the old wood beam, “‘Thanks a lot,’” he says. “fancy that!”
CHAPTER 19
Mystery Of The Man With The Hooked Nose
My next stop was at the office of our town newspaper, the Hampton Observer. The building wasn’t as old as Mr. Newbury’s. The date engraved on a metal plate at the cornerstone said: EST 1817. It was a three-story red brick building with the white, raised stone quoins at the corners. Over the entrance, Doric with an elliptical fanlight, was one of those great Palladian windows.
The circulation manager was Mr. Manning Bagler, a nice middle-aged man with a lot of red hair missing and freckles all over his arms. I’d worked for him a few years before, delivering papers on my bike. I had to give it up when Sinbad came along. He made such a fuss in the morning when I left he woke up the whole house. And Mom said when someone loves and misses you so much it’s not fair to ignore it. So I let Sinbad have his way. But don’t think I wasn’t pretty annoyed at him for a few days. I intended working my way up to be their star reporter. It meant I had to wait another ten years.
Mr. Bagler was glad to see me, asked about Sinbad and so on, and told me he was sorry there wasn’t any newspaper route open just then. I explained about the River Queen.
“Do you remember it, Mr. Bagler?”
He looked down his flattened red nose at me. He’d broken it playing football. “The River Queen?” he said. “That was the fire in the early 1920’s, wasn’t it?”
“The newsreel the other night said 1920.”
Mr. Bagler stretched his wide mouth a little wider. “Well, that was about fifty years ago. And you want to know if I remembered it. What do I look like, Methuseleh?” then he smiled. “Wait, don’t answer that.”
He picked up the phone and dialed once. “Hello, Defoe? Bagler here. Listen. I’ve a boy here that requires some information. Yeah, research. Could be for school.” He looked up at me through bushy red brows. His eyes were red-rimmed, too. I guess Mr. Bagler didn’t get much sleep. “He’s a good friend of mine,” he said. “Take care of him, Don. Put him in the morgue.”
He hung up. “Okay, he’ll be waiting for you.”
I just stood there licking my lips.
“What was that part about putting me in the morgue?” I asked.
His face broke into a lot of tiny cracks when he laughed. “Don’t you know what a morgue is?”
“I sure do. That’s why I don’t get it.”
“This is a newspaper, son. Newspapers don’t have too much respect for things. Events, institutions–whatever happens, we’ve seen it all. Hundreds of times. The room I’m sending you to has all the old news. All the dead items. All the dear dead dreary past. That’s why we call it the morgue. You get it?”
I got it.
He left his chair, took my arm, and pointed dead ahead. “Go straight down that corridor. Take a left at the second door, a right at the next opening and then a right again at the third desk. Turn left at the water cooler. Then right at the green door. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks, Mr. Bagler.”
He waved and went back to his desk and picked up his phone. I walked in the general direction he’d pointed out trying to remember what he’d said.
Typewriters were clicking all over the place. I never knew so many women worked at a newspaper. I passed a lot of openings and desks and water coolers. Then, much to my surprise, I found myself standing directly in front of a green metal door. I pushed in.
The room was large and not well lit. There were long oak tables, four of them, and a lot of oak chairs with side armrests. All along the walls were magazines and newspapers, stacked in racks and shelves. There were maps, large ones in color, of every place in the world. There was an Atlas globe on top of one of the shelves and some of the biggest dictionaries I’d ever seen. The room was empty. At least until I came in.
Then this fellow Defoe came in. he looked like he just got out of college, or maybe was still going. He didn’t wear a coat or a tie and his white shirt had the cuffs rolled up. His features were so even nothing stood out. He was just a tall good-looking guy with gray eyes and blond hair, who might be an athlete.
I saw how quick he was on his feet right away. I had started to spin the Atlas globe just as he came in. I looked at him and tried to stop the spinning, only instead I knocked the globe off the shelf. This fellow Defoe took three quick steps and caught it, a foot before it hit the floor. He put it back on the shelf. He looked at it a second. Then he spun it himself, stopped it, and looked closely at the spot. Then he smiled.
“You the boy Mr. Bagler spoke about?”
I nodded.
“What kind of research you doing? Housebreaking?”
He smiled easily and with no mean expression. Well, it wasn’t his old globe, I realized. Anyway, I thanked him for catching it and he said to forget it. I told him what I wanted to know and that seemed to puzzle him.
“Getting to be a lot of researchers lately,” he said. “That old River Queen must be quite a subject. I’ll have to read up on it myself one of these days.”
“You mean some other people have been here lately?” I asked.
“That’s what this room is for.”
“But I mean, people who don’t work here,” I said.
He smiled down at me. “Do you?” he asked. I got the message.
“Was one of them a Mr. Snowden?”
“Who’s he?”
“My science teacher.”
“We get ten teachers a day in here,” he said.
&n
bsp; “How about two men? One light-haired. One dark, with a busted nose.”
“We get a lot of men in here. Light hair. Dark hair. No hair. Straight nosed. Busted nose. Mr. Bagler has a busted nose.”
“How about —” I started to say but he stopped me.
“How about you just looking up what you wanted and letting me get back to work,” he said pleasantly enough.
“Okay,” I said.
He pointed out the various sections. “Starting at the left there, it’s 1900. Figure about ten years each section. You want 1920, that would be two sections in. if you need me for anything I’m in the big room outside. Two aisles down and about ten desks. Near the window.”
“The Palladian one?” I asked.
He coughed. “Is that what it’s called?”
I told him it was.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I only work here.”
He walked out and closed the door. I found what I was looking for and lifted it out on the near oak table. The green door opened and this Defoe fellow walked in again.
“What makes it a Palladian window?” he asked.
“It’s a group of three sashes,” I told him. “The center one is higher and has a rounded top. It used to be called a Venetian window. It’s 16th century.”
“Thanks, he said. “Maybe I can use it someday in a story.”
“Are you a reporter?” I asked.
“That’s my opinion,” he said. “If you want to know the truth you’d have to ask the managing editor.”
“What’s his name?”
He grinned. “Get lost,” he said and went out again.
The headlines said MYSTERIOUS FIRE ON RIVER QUEEN.
The newspaper account told about the panic of the people on board and the attempts to put out the fire. There were a lot of pictures. Some on the front page, some on the second and third, inside. A lot of people, pretty prominent in those days, were there at the fire, according to the captions.
Under one picture the caption read: “Millionaire Sportsman and Gambler Disappears.” In smaller type it said: “Did Big Nick Murdock go down with his ship?”
Then a lot of stuff about how it was the sea’s noblest tradition. But Big Nick Murdock only owned the ship. And he wasn’t a sea captain. He was a big gambler. That was part of the mystery.
Then I read some more.
Big Nick Murdock, fifth in the line of Murdocks, swore he would bring Saratoga and its excitement and gambling fever to the sleepy little town he was born in or die in the attempt. Last night’s fire brought to an end whatever gambling fever had ever touched this hamlet. And Big Nick Murdock is gone. So perhaps it is fitting to say that in one way or another the colorful dashing Murdock, last in his family line, kept his word.
There was a two column picture of this Big Nick and he looked dashing and colorful all right. What puzzled me was that he looked familiar.
The picture showed him standing on his ship, near the rail. Close up. I could see the lettering on the side and make out the letters R and Q. That struck me as familiar, too. Then I remembered I’d seen the newsreel of the ship burning. But there was nothing else.
Where had I seen somebody like Big Nick Murdock? I looked at the thick black hair, the black moustache, the big hooked nose, the confident air and arrogant smile. You don’t see many faces that interesting.
Then I remembered. It was the hooked-nosed man in the old sepia-toned photo at Mrs. Teska’s. The man she tried to hide.
CHAPTER 20
Some People Have To Die
I looked through some other old newspapers, starting at the left. It was a good morgue, with a lot of what Mr. Bagler called dead news. There were papers from other towns on Long Island, and big city papers like The New York Times and Herald Tribune. I spent more time looking than I expected.
When I finished it was around lunch time and the big editorial room was practically deserted. I looked toward the Palladian window but didn’t see that Don Defoe reporter.
I found my way out okay. Past the water cooler and the desks and the hall openings, to my friend, Mr. Bagler, still at his desk. I stopped to say goodbye and thank him.
He blew smoke out of a thin cigar. “Find what you wanted, son?”
I told him, just about. And asked, “Can everybody use that room? That morgue?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “We reserve that right for people we know something about. It’s for use of our staff, primarily.”
That let out the two men anyway.
“But other papers have different standards. And, of course, that kind of information is available in almost any good library. They keep old newspapers, too.”
That let them in again.
There was something else I had to find out. “Do you think if the River Queen didn’t burn down they would have made a big gambling town out of Hampton? Like this Saratoga?”
He leaned back in his chair and thought about it, his eyes fixed on the high ceiling. The Hampton Observer had a lot of modern equipment for such an old building. Pipes and nozzles overhead that worked automatically in case of fire.
Mr. Bagler frowned and shook his head. “I doubt it. I doubt it very much. This Murdock was a very popular man with a lot of personality and money. And he knew how to use both those assets. I don’t imagine a boy your age knows much about politics in a small town.”
“No, sir,” I said.
Mr. Bagler considered that a while. “It’s pretty much the same in any town. Or city, for that matter. There are always people whom we call operators. They want something and they know how to go about getting what they want. Let’s just say that when Murdock wanted something done, he knew whom to see and the best way to go about having it done.”
“You mean he bribed people?”
He looked at me steadily. “That’s one of the words used. It might be the correct one. We can also say that men like Murdock rewarded people for being helpful. That sounds better, now, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “What did they have to do to get rewarded?”
He smiled a little. “My job here is to try and sell newspapers. I’m not supposed to be giving a course in the seamier side of life. Like politics. But… .” He waved his cigar. “Let’s say you’re an operator. You want to do something. Not everybody likes what you want to do. There may even be laws against it. Or at least regulations. Some on the books a long time. Not everybody knows them. But sometimes the one person who does manages to forget that he knows. Now you can’t blame a person for forgetting something, can you?” he added drily.
“What happened later?” I asked. “After the fire?”
“Wait a second.” His voice was unexpectedly harsh. “That’s not all of it. Don’t jump the gun on me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He leveled his cigar at me. “You said you didn’t know much about politics. Well, politics is people. That’s the first lesson.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Other things work in favor of the operator. It’s the dream they have, the vision of something out of the ordinary. It spellbinds people who listen. After all, what did Columbus have to sell when he came to the court? Nothing. Nothing but a dream. The King and Queen went for it. Right?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“The operators all have one thing in common. They can charm people. They can wrap people right around their little finger. People like that you just can’t say ‘no’ to.”
I thought of Minerva Landry. She was that type.
“Sometimes people will throw a favor their way just out of friendship. It may be a mistake but to these people that kind of loyalty overrides everything. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then there are people who are afraid. For one reason or another. The operator finds them very pliable. Sometimes they get rewarded. Sometimes the operator is too disgusted to reward them. They’re grateful for that, too.”
He looked at the cigar moodily.
�
�Some people call it coercion. Another word is blackmail. Still another, bootlicking.” He spat the last one out in disgust. He looked at me and his face changed and softened. “You beginning to get the idea now?”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I could go on and on. Sometimes the weak people surprise you. They can be strong. And the ones you thought were strong crumble up right in front of you like a stale biscuit.”
I thought of Mrs. Teska. She was an old woman who wasn’t afraid, who’d stand up and fight if she had to.
The telephone rang twice and he answered it, making notes. Then he got back to me. “Now you want to know what happened later. After the fire.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“There were a lot of people who didn’t like Murdock or go along with his ideas. They had their own ideas of what kind of a town they wanted this to be. A town they could bring their kids up in.”
“I thought it was always this way,” I said.
“Nearly always,” he said. “So the citizens got together, formed committees. They started by throwing a lot of people who thought they had influence out of jobs. They even kicked out the mayor. Said he was as crooked as the rest of them.”
“What was his name?” I asked.
He stared at me bleakly. “I thought you knew,” he said. “Same as mine. Bagler. Sam Bagler. He was my father,” he said shortly.
I never expected that one.
“I guess the next question you’d like to ask me is, was my father a crook?”
“No, sir,” I said. My cheeks felt very hot and my eyes hurt.
“I’ve have to live with it,” he said slowly. “You’re old enough to start forming your own opinions. I’m not ashamed. I’m not proud, either. The truth is, I honestly don’t know. He never told me. And he was my father and I trusted him.”
“What happened later, Mr. Bagler?”
He drew his lips back making his teeth look longer. He looked at the end of his cigar. His voice didn’t have much expression. “As I said, I trusted him. A lot of other people didn’t. I guessed my opinion wasn’t too important. Anyway it broke his heart. He killed himself.”