Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “Maybe it is something wonderful. Maybe it is an old jim-dandy, a crackerjack peach of a daisy!” he said when Asey finally strolled back to where he was standing. “I’ve done my level best to look at the thing and see something more than a small green Pullman with a red roof. I’ll concede it’s shorter, and littler, and narrower than most, and more violently decorated. To coin a phrase, it’s quite cunning. But I’m damned if I can see any reason for you to become so nostalgically carried away!”

  “That baby Baldwin engine!” Asey said. “I got to take—”

  Cummings grabbed his arm and hung on to it.

  “You don’t need to go inspect that!” he said. “You’ve already gazed at it hard enough in the last five minutes to have it engraved on your mind forever. Asey, you can play with the nice choo-choo as long as you want to if you’ll only just come inside the house first and help me meet Carolyn Barton Boone. Just tear yourself away long enough to walk over the threshold and help get the ice broken, and then Harold Douglass’ll probably let you play conductor and engineer and punch tickets with him—oh, my God, no! Don’t!”

  Asey had gripped the filagreed iron grab-rail and swung himself up the single step to the end platform of the Lulu Belle.

  With a loud sigh, Cummings followed him.

  “Asey—”

  “This was the smokin’ end, see?” Asey said as he slid open the panelled mahogany door. “Here’s where old Cap’n Porter an’ his business friends used to sit, in these fancy wicker chairs, an’ toss more millions around than you an’ I ever dreamed existed. That door—”

  “Asey Mayo!”

  “That door there’s the wash room—all solid mahogany, as I remember. Here’s the main part of the car—oh, they must’ve done a lot of refurbishin’ to make it like this, but they refurbished it just the way it used to be, back in the early nineteen-hundreds! Yessir, they even kept the old observation end up yonder, with the red plush settees!”

  “Yoohoo!” Cummings, standing behind Asey in the narrow passageway, punched him in the back. “Yoohoo! Asey!”

  “Oh, golly, those old chandeliers with the jinglin’ glass prisms, an’ the old red silk curtains, an’ the gold plush swivel chairs, an’ the tidies with the red tassels, an’ the gilt mirrors, an’ the silver-plated spittoons, an’ the thick red carpet—the thick red carpet—the—”

  Asey stopped.

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to add that on the thick red carpet lay the body of Carolyn Barton Boone!

  3

  “NEEDLE STUCK?” Cummings inquired. “Oh, move along, man, get on with your tour of the past! Don’t bother considering my project! I’ve altered my objective. My goal now is merely to meet Mrs. Boone before her blonde hair turns to silver and she’s taken to a cane!”

  Asey swung around suddenly and looked at him. “What’s the matter?” Cummings demanded sharply. “What’s wrong?”

  “Doc, I never hated to say anything half as much,” Asey began unhappily. “I never—”

  “What’re you blocking the aisle like this for? What’ve you—get out of the way!”

  “But, doc—”

  Cummings pushed past him.

  His facial expression never changed as he gazed down at the still figure on the thick red carpet.

  “Honest, doc, I—”

  Asey broke off and watched the doctor’s professionally impersonal survey of the situation.

  After all, he thought to himself, Cummings knew perfectly well that he was sorry, knew how he was regretting that this projected visit to Mrs. Boone hadn’t got under way earlier in the morning. But there wasn’t any need for him to run on and on, being sorry, and regretting the whole business. There wasn’t anything that could be done now about meeting Carolyn Barton Boone.

  As for what had happened to her here in the Lulu Belle, it was all there for Cummings to look at and to put together.

  Mrs. Boone, dressed in the perfectly fitting white slacks and white jacket which were almost her trademark in the newsreels, had been murdered. There weren’t any two ways about that. By no stretch of the imagination could she have managed to inflict on herself that ugly head wound.

  Cummings, kneeling on the carpet, turned and looked up at Asey.

  “Actually a rabbit punch, you know,” he remarked. “Beautifully placed. Magnificently placed. But not very expert. Right?”

  Asey nodded.

  “Someone,” Cummings continued, “could have achieved the same result—and a far neater effect!—by using about one-fiftieth as much force and energy. In fact, I’d say that someone hauled off and just blindly smashed away at the back of her head, and landed where they did just by dumb luck! And what a nasty thing to use for a weapon!”

  With a brief gesture, he indicated the pointed silver bud vase that was lying in the middle of the aisle a few feet away, apparently where the murderer had casually tossed it.

  “They wrenched it out of the ring-holder above Seat One,” Asey commented. “See the gap back there? Someone reached out an’ grabbed it as they came into the car.”

  “I will say that your cunning little Pullman is certainly a fertile field for blunt instruments!” Cummings said. “Although I, personally, would never have chosen that bud vase. I’d have taken my chances with one of the silver cuspidors, or one of the little umbrella holders. Or even with one of these mahogany footstools.”

  “Workin’ on the theory that the heavier your blunt instrument is, the lighter the blow you’d have to strike with it?” Asey asked.

  “Of course. No need to have been quite so damn brutal with that pointed thing!” For a split second, Cummings’s voice betrayed his real feelings. “Well, let’s see, now, let’s consider!”

  He squinted up at the gold plush Pullman seat beside him.

  “That’s what I thought,” Asey said. “She was sittin’ there—it’s the only chair not lined up facin’ into the aisle. She was sittin’ there, an’ had half-swung it around so as to look out of the window. Then, all of a sudden, she hears a sound behind her. Not enough to make her turn the chair. She just turned her head an’ looked, an’ then she started to her feet. I’d say she’d almost stood up when she was caught off balance with that blow. That’d explain her pitchin’ into the aisle.”’

  Cummings gave the plush chair an experimental turn. “It sticks a bit,” he said. “That’s probably why she just turned her head. Wonder if that particular chair—no,” he shoved at the seat ahead of him, “they’re all hard to get started. Well, she may have guessed what was coming at her, but she didn’t feel it—now, for heaven’s sakes, Asey, don’t say how wonderful it was that she didn’t suffer, will you?”

  “Why, I never intended to say any such—”

  “Because,” Cummings went on, “that’s an idiot point of view I intend to make quite an issue of in my memoirs. There is no death, however quick or painless, which quite compensates one for the joys of being alive, however dubious they may occasionally appear. What time is it now, one-forty? Well,” he got up and dusted the carpet lint from his knees, “if I hadn’t gone home and changed into this suit, and then frittered away so much time going over to get you, and listening—or not listening, rather, to the Question—”

  “Are you try in’ to say that she hasn’t been dead longer’n an hour?” Asey demanded.

  “Oh, I’m putting myself way out on the end of a limb, of course. But if I’d arrived here at noon, I think I might have met her.” Cummings paused. “Heavily made up, isn’t she? Not as young as I’d somehow imagined. There’s a phrase I’ve often heard my wife use about some of the summer people—‘well taken care of’. She means—oh, very well-groomed, very carefully dressed, every curl in place. That sort of thing. I never thought before, but she always uses it of women who seem much younger than they really are. I’d have said that she,” he nodded toward the aisle, “was about thirty-five or so. She’s easily fifty. Maybe more.”

  “Jennie calls that sort of thing stage-managin’,’’ A
sey said. “An’ it is, if you stop an’ think. With her slim figure, that white suit gives the impression of her bein’ youthful, an’ that green scarf around her neck is just the right shade to make her hair seem more gold, an’ her skin whiter. An’ she doesn’t wear a lot of sparklin’ rings to call your attention to her hands, which might sort of tip you off to her real age—huh! Now I didn’t notice that before!”

  “What?” Cummings asked curiously as Asey bent down.

  “See what she’s grippin’ in the palm of her hand? I thought it was the edge of a green handkerchief, but it’s a ticket!”

  “I missed it too,” Cummings said. “Hm. It’s a punched ticket, furthermore. Looks as though Harold Douglass had started to give her a ride—that’s an ugly way for me to put it, I must say! Well, where do we go from here? All hell will break loose on this business, I suppose. And Halbert’ll be delirious with pleasure!”

  “Albert who?”

  “Halbert. The new state cop in charge of this area. Hanson’s been transferred to the western part of the state. Halbert’s got some splendid new equipment, and I rather suspect,” Cummings said, “that he’s been praying for something like this to happen so he could use it.”

  “Experienced man?” Asey inquired.

  “Halbert? Experienced? Why, he virtually ran the Counter-intelligence of the United States Army with his own two hands—I assure you,” Cummings said with irony, “that no army corporal since Napoleon was ever more essential! I try not to think that his three uncles who actively engage in politics have any possible connection with his present position. In fact, in my official capacity as medical examiner, I try to think of Halbert just as little as possible. But we’ve got to call him, I suppose—and get my grisly duties properly under way. Think one of us should stay here?” he added, as Asey started to walk to the end platform.

  Asey shrugged. “If no one knows she’s here except you an’ me an’ the murderer, I don’t think any guard’s necessary.”

  Neither of them spoke until they were crossing the gravel turntable by the house.

  “Seems incredible!” Cummings said absently. “I mean that the Douglasses actually don’t know about this! But they can’t know, or there’d have been some hue and cry, and of course it explains their thinking she was lost, too. I suppose they must be out hunting around the point for her, or they’d have seen us when we drove in—my, my, that couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes ago, but it feels like years and years!”

  “This is a pleasant place.” Asey surveyed with approval the neat white Cape Cod house with its dark green blinds. “Nice lilacs, nice iris, nice lawns.”

  “Oh, they take good care of everything.” After a perfunctory knock, Cummings shoved open the panelled front door. Then, just as perfunctorily, he sang out Douglass’s name several times as he stepped across the spattered floor of the wainscoted hall to the telephone. “Notice all their ship pictures, Asey. All of old Aunt Della’s family stuff, all the Hovey family ships, and some corking other ones that Louise picked up at auctions—” He broke off as a tall, dark, powerfully built man in his forties, wearing khaki shorts and a white crew-neck sweater, entered the hall from a door to the right.

  “Douglass!” Cummings said in surprise. “We didn’t think anyone was home!”

  “It’s providential, doctor—was it you she called? I phoned your house at once, but your wife didn’t know where you’d gone. Really, I’m terribly worried about her.” He turned to Asey and smiled politely. “Mayo, isn’t it? Glad to see you—she’s still out, you know, doctor. Out cold!”

  Cummings looked from Douglass to Asey, and then back to Douglass again.

  “Who,” he said crisply, “is out cold?”

  “Why, Louise! I heard her making a phone call, and then she called me—but she’d fainted before I got to her. I haven’t been able to bring her to. She’s in here.” He led them into the living room from which he’d just emerged. “I carried her in here—”

  The sight of the woman stretched out limply on the chintz-covered couch in front of the long fireplace was awe-inspiring enough, but Asey found that he was almost too impressed with the room itself to notice her much.

  He hadn’t, he decided, seen so many miscellaneous objects enclosed by four walls since he’d been a small boy living in his sea-going grandfather’s house.

  And they were exactly the same sort of things.

  Like those mercury glass goblets, with ships’ names etched on them, that stood on the mantel, and like the vast, gold-tooled family Bible sitting the exact center of the Chippendale table. It was Old Home Week to see again such a collection of sailors’ scrimshaw work, and odd chunks of coral, and ivory tusks, and peacock fans.

  And shells! Small pink shells from the Indies, and conch shells from India, and one huge African shell large enough to bathe a baby in!

  “Golly!” Asey said with a chuckle of pleasure. “Golly!”

  He had hardly started to look at the gold-knobbed captains’ canes in a Canton stand before he caught sight of a Swiss village under a glass dome, and beyond that, on the wall, a cluster of wax flowers in a wide walnut frame. A set of ivory elephants jumped at him from their teak-wood stands on a whatnot shelf, and an enormous palm fan swept them away in favor of a full-rigged ship in a bottle.

  Every inch of the floor was covered with hooked rugs, and every inch of wall space was filled with pictures of ships, with hull models, with framed daguerreotypes and crayon portraits.

  “See what you can do with her, doctor, even if you haven’t got your paraphernalia with you!” Harold Douglass was saying anxiously to Cummings. “Do something! Louise never fainted before in her life!”

  “She’ll be all right!” Cummings said shortly.

  “But her color!”

  “Her color’s all right! Stop worrying!”

  “Oh,” Douglass said. “It’s been changing so—well, I suppose you know!” He turned somewhat hesitantly to Asey. “I notice you’ve been looking around at the room, Mayo. I do feel I should explain that we promised Aunt Della Hovey when we bought this house that we’d keep certain things just as she’d always kept them. It’s rather a clutter, I’m afraid. Of course we’re so used to it now, we take it for granted. But it—well, it is startling to people seeing it for the first time.”

  Asey smiled.

  “Startlin’?” he said. “This’s the first native house taken over by an outlander that I ever felt at home in, if you want to know the truth. Usually, the summer folks paint the walls a sort of sickish pink, or sickish blue, an’ the only thing they ever have in the livin’ room aside from a few sticks of aluminum furniture is a picture by—what’s that fellow’s name, doc? Not the sunflower one they all used to have. This other fellow.”

  “Picasso,” Cummings said as he strolled over to the window. “Only lately they’ve taken to Dali. Guts, and watches.”

  “Well, anyway, they always call the result a real quaint old Cape Cod room,” Asey said, “an’ to a real Cape Codder, it sure is just that! But this, Mr. Douglass, is the real McCoy! What’s the matter with Mrs. Douglass, doc?”

  While he couldn’t fathom the expression on Cummings’s face, Asey knew that something was wrong. It wasn’t the doctor’s habit to stand idly by, staring out of a window and drumming his fingers on the sill, when he had a sick patient stretched out before him.

  “Well,” Cummings said, with his eyes focussed somewhere down the shore, “she’s had a severe shock, and she hasn’t come to. But she will!”

  “I never felt so damn helpless!” Douglass said. “I didn’t know what to do with her when I found her lying out there in the hall! In a house filled with books, you’d think there’d be something in one of ’em about what to do when a person faints, and stays fainted—out cold! But all I could find was an old tome of Aunt Della’s that advocated burning duck feathers under the patient’s nose—and lacking them, a spoonful of melted ambergris thrust under the tongue! If I’d known where to find eit
her, I’d have tackled ’em willingly—doctor, there must be something constructive that I can do! I can’t just stand here doing nothing any longer!”

  Cummings swung around from the window.

  “Go get a glass of water,” he said briskly. “Put two—no, three—put three ice cubes in it, and just a pinch of salt. Three grains.”

  Asey raised his eyebrows questioningly as Douglass bolted from the room.

  Cummings answered with a wink, and then he went into an elaborate pantomime from which Asey deduced that Mrs. Douglass was not any victim of a prolonged faint, that she never had fainted at all, and that her present condition was just a lot of bluff.

  “Huh! Her color’s good,” Asey said interestedly as he strolled over to the couch and looked down at the motionless figure. Mrs. Douglass, he decided, was a lot younger than her white hair indicated. In her thirties, perhaps. “Color’s most normal, wouldn’t you say?”

  Cummings winked again. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “but I don’t like her breathing. I’m going to write out a prescription—you can whip up town and get it filled, if you don’t mind.”

  Asey wasn’t sure whether the faintest trace of a frown flitted across Mrs. Douglass’s face, or whether it was just a passing shadow. But he had no doubts whatsoever about her black, unplucked eyebrows. They had very definitely wiggled.

  “Funny about this sort of thing,” Cummings said casually as he scratched away on the prescription blank pad which he’d drawn from his coat pocket. “Nine times out of ten, when the patient regains consciousness, you’ll find they can’t remember a thing. The psychiatrists’ explanation is extraordinarily interesting—here, take this and give it to Billy at the drug store.”

  With some difficulty, Asey managed to decipher the doctor’s minute handwriting.

  “She’s ok,” the slip said. “Faking. This is all fishy. You pump D.—I’ll pump her. Both stalling.” “Both” was heavily underlined. “D. took 1st Aid & shd certainly know faints & what to do! I don’t get this, don’t like it!!!!!”