Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  His idea of picking the inn where the project was staying by their noise was not, he discovered, going to work out. Both the larger inns and the neighboring guest houses were all peaceful and quiet, and entirely devoid of any youthful swarm.

  He drew up at the nearest, an old-fashioned, rambling, yellow-frame structure with a cupola, to ask for some information.

  The roadster had hardly come to a stop before a tall, lanky, boyish-looking fellow with curly red hair jumped briskly from a rocking chair on the porch, and fairly leapt to the side of the car.

  Asey surveyed his white flannels and blue, brass-buttoned coat, and at once diagnosed him as an assistant manager eager to provide service.

  “Is the Larrabee College project stayin’ around here anywheres, do you know?” he asked.

  “Here, sir. Mr. Mayo, I’m Bill Cotton.”

  “Oh?”

  “Stinky, sir,” he explained as he saw that the name didn’t register. “I think Gerty mentioned me.”

  Asey looked at him thoughtfully for several moments.

  “So you are—for Pete’s sakes, ‘why Stinky? Why not just plain Red?”

  “Little problem in elementary chemistry, sir, that’s followed me since I was a kid in grammar school,” he said with a laugh. “For a long while they called me ‘Eggy’. But never Red. I never liked Red. Sir, I’m sorry about taking your car—that fancy job. I thought it was Manderson’s. Eric Manderson’s. Mrs. Boone’s secretary’s, that is. Case of mistaken identity.”

  “How’s that again?” Asey inquired.

  “Eric Manderson. Mrs. Boone’s secretary. I thought it was his car.”

  “That’s what I thought it sounded like. Er—how come?”

  “Well, sir, I saw Eric going into the telephone office in the village—”

  “When?”

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly when—” Stinky paused. “Did you say something, sir?”

  “I said that was a fool question,” Asey told him, “an’ I certainly ought to know better than to ask it, by now! Go on.”

  “I’d guess it was somewhere between one and one-thirty,” Stinky was obviously trying to cudgel his memory. “Anyway, I called to him—I didn’t know he was coming down here, and I was surprised to see him. We talked a few minutes, and he said he had a batch of calls to make, and I said swell, and could I take his car to transport a case of beer that Jack Briggs and I were promoting. And then—”

  “You rehearsed this very much?” Asey asked him casually.

  “Oh, yes, sir! Gerty made me. She said I was to deal it out quick,” Stinky said. “No hesitations. And then Eric said he’d prefer not to lend it to me because this was his brand-new car, but brand-new! So I said wasn’t he being just a little damn snooty about his new buggy, and kidded around—you can’t help kidding Eric, Mr. Mayo,” he added earnestly. “That guy just stands up and begs for it. And he swallows it—whole!”

  Judging from his own experience of the quohaug inspection and the ‘Pass’, Asey felt that was an accurate summary of Eric.

  “I said,” Stinky continued, “I didn’t think I’d ruin his car, just taking a case of beer over to the Inn, and all right, if he didn’t want to be helpful and cooperative, why the hell with it, he didn’t have to be—I didn’t really give a hoot, you understand, sir. I was only just needling the guy! And Eric put on a long face, and laid his hand on my shoulder in a fatherly kind of fashion—that’s a habit he’s got that burns me up!—and said I just didn’t understand, that was all!”

  “Understand what?” Asey asked.

  “Understand what a wonderful new car his new car was. He said actually, I probably couldn’t handle anything so new, or even start it, for that matter. And while he always tried very very hard to be cooperative with the undergraduates, he didn’t feel—oh, stuff, stuff, stuff, and so on and so on, far into the night!”

  “In a nutshell,” Asey remarked, “he wouldn’t let you have his wonderful, brand-new car, an’ so you took mine?”

  “In a nutshell, yes, sir—only I want you to get more of the picture first, see?” Stinky said seriously. “Here’s this stuffed shirt patting me paternally on the shoulder—why, he’s a year younger than I am, the big fat-head—and yapping about his wonderful, wonderful car, and how it isn’t that he hasn’t got the true Larrabee spirit of friendly cooperation, it’s just the principle of the thing, and how hurt and upset 7’d be if I hurt and upset his car! And—well, sir, I’d started it all just kidding, but then I got plenty sore, and I decided I was damned if I wouldn’t take his car. See?”

  “Uh-huh,” Asey said, and thought how Gerty’s influence crept out in little spots, like that explanatory “see?”. “I think I begin to get the picture.”

  “Well, sir, I got the beer, and then I saw that car of yours—mind you, I hadn’t seen Eric’s. He didn’t ever point the gorgeous creature out to me. But your roadster was so exactly what his sounded like when he’d told me about it—well, I took it! It was wonderful, and brand-new, and shiny, and complicated—and I said to myself, bingo! Eric’s new toy!”

  “You didn’t feel it was maybe a mite too costly for him?” Asey suggested.

  “Oh, no.” Stinky shook his head. “Eric’s family are lousy with dough. That’s how he got that job with Mrs. Boone—they gave the college a nice new wing, and Eric got the nice job! Anyway, it’s the sort of car he might’ve had, and God knows it certainly sounded like the one he’d been describing to me!”

  “How in time did you land out on the point in it?”

  “I took the wrong turn at the traffic lights, sir, and found myself on the road going out to the Douglass’s, and I suddenly took it into my head to show Eric’s new car off to Gerty. I thought I might as well get him good and sore while I was at it,” Stinky said with a grin. “Then I took another wrong turn and landed on the lane by the mud hole, and met Gerty coming back from the beach, and she gave me hell! Honestly, sir, there’s nothing you can dish out that I haven’t already had thrown at me!”

  “Let’s see, now,” Asey said. “Gerty told me she’d sent you off to find Layne. Where did you go? What became of you? What happened to you and Gerty later? I’m curious,” he added, “because my roadster finally turned up two other places, an’ bein’ driven by someone else!”

  “But we left it at the Douglass’s for you, sir!” Stinky said with a touch of anguish in his voice. “Just as you told Gerty! The rest had left, and she and I hitch-hiked back here to town on a truck full of live hens—it isn’t smashed up or anything, is it, sir?”

  “No, the car’s okay. What happened after you went for Layne? I’d sort of like,” Asey said, “to figure out this mess!”

  “I went off in the direction Gerty said I’d find Layne,” Stinky told him, “and almost just around the corner from the mud hole, I spotted Eric—yes, sir, Eric! He was stomping around on another of those lanes, and looking as mad as anyone I ever saw. The guy was livid. I ducked him. I thought, of course, that he’d got hold of another car and come after me, and I didn’t feel like being bawled out again quite so soon. Not by him in that mood!”

  “So?”

  “So I sat down under the pine trees, waiting for him either to find the roadster, or go away,” Stinky said. “I thought if he found Gerty, he’d at least prove to her that I’d been telling her the truth when I said that the car belonged to somebody I knew, and I wasn’t stealing it! So I sat there and sat there, and Eric disappeared, and nothing happened, and the sun was hot, and I just fell asleep—did you say something, sir?”

  “Just cleared my throat. Go on.”

  After all, Asey thought, he couldn’t quite come out and tell the fellow that in all his experience involving corpses, this was the first time that anyone whom he’d been questioning in such detail had nonchalantly brushed off a few vital hours by going to sleep in the sun!

  “Gerty finally found me,” Stinky went on, “and gave me another tongue-lashing, and told me who the car really belonged to, and we took
it back and left it at the Douglass’s, on the turntable there. Honestly, sir, I’m sorry about the whole thing! I don’t know who could’ve taken it from there!”

  “What d’you think Eric was stomping around the point there for?” Asey asked. “Now that you know it wasn’t his car that you made off with, an’ that he wasn’t huntin’ for you?”

  “Oh, I suppose he must have been trying to locate Mrs. Boone,” Stinky said. “But I never thought of that at the time. I didn’t understand till later, from Gerty, that it was yours. I’m very sorry, sir. The whole damn thing sounds so crazy!”

  “No crazier than—”

  Asey paused and thought better of commenting on Aunt Della’s Annual Dahlia Planting Party, and the quohaug inspections, and the pink fainting-medicine.

  “Than I’d expected,” he continued. “Tell me, what’s become of all the project crowd? No one’s gone an’ chloroformed ’em, I hope?”

  “No, sir, they’ve scattered for the evening,” Stinky said. “Some to the movies, some to the juke joint, and some to the library, believe it or not. And very, very quietly, too. You wouldn’t guess that we were in town any more.”

  “My Cousin Jennie,” Asey remarked, “makes a sound that’s the perfect answer to that. It’s sort of half way between ‘Phooey!’ and ‘Yeah?’ ”

  “But I mean it, sir! We’ve all been chastened. Been beaten over the head by Miss Shearing—see these?” He pointed to his clothes. “Orders! For once on one of these tours, Miss Shearing hasn’t been called away, or sent on errands by Mrs. Boone, and did she go to work on us when we came back for dinner! Lined us all up and let us have it—she can make it stick, too! Gerty thinks they were just about to boot us out of this place when Miss S. took over.”

  Asey chuckled, and gave it as his opinion that maybe the change might on the whole be for the good.

  “That’s just what Gerty said, in an unexpurgated sort of way. Uh—she’s waiting for me at the sandwich joint next to the drug store, and I haven’t eaten yet—she was positive that you’d come by here some time, and she planted me in that rocker with orders to wait until you did. Er—will that be all, Mr. Mayo?”

  “Run along,” Asey said, “an’ tell her it was a very complete explanation!”

  After Stinky had departed at a fast gallop, Asey got out of the roadster and walked up the wide wooden steps to the inn.

  He was thoroughly unprepared, after viewing the same old rows of the same old cane-seated, weather-beaten rockers on the porch, for the renovations which had taken place inside, in the lobby.

  The transformation struck him like a slap in the face.

  The old rattan furniture and rubber plants and lace curtains had disappeared. In their place were quantities of chromium-framed, imitation leather chairs of a brilliant vermilion color, with little matching tables. The walls were alternate strips of glass brick and mirror, the windows were a sea of Venetian blinds, and the lighting was so indirect as to be almost nonexistent. Pale blue neon signs pointed the way to the Dining Salon, the Cocktail Lounge, and the Grand Ball Room.

  Asey’s immediate curiosity as to where such innovations as cocktail lounges and grand ball rooms could possibly be located in such modest-sized premises was quenched by a crudely lettered placard under the neon signs. It said simply, “Under Future Construction.”

  While his footsteps made no sound on the new blue linoleum floor as he crossed over to what another neon sign designated as an ‘Office’ in the corner, Asey found that he was automatically side-stepping the inserts of vermilion porpoises and assorted small white fish. It was something about their mouths, he decided, that gave the impression that they might jump up and snap at your ankles if they had half a chance.

  But with all the alterations, he noted with amusement that the service remained unreconstructed.

  There was no one behind the glass brick counter of the office, and no one appeared when he thumped the old-fashioned round bell.

  No one even materialized to answer the wall telephone, an obvious relic of the past, when it suddenly began to ring.

  After listening to its imperious pealing for five solid minutes, Asey vaulted over the counter, and answered it himself.

  “Desk!” he said briskly.

  An agitated voice wanted to speak at once with Miss Shearing.

  “It’s vitally important! This is Mr. Manderson calling from Boston!”

  “Oh, yes,” Asey said. “Want me to take the message? She isn’t available right now.”

  Mr. Manderson said excitedly that Miss Shearing absolutely must have Mrs. Boone call him at once, at college. Absolutely, without fail!

  “Okay,” Asey said. ‘Til tell her.”

  Replacing the receiver on its hook, he turned around to the register on the counter, and ran his finger down the names of the guests who had arrived that morning.

  “ ‘Elizabeth Shearing. Suite A.’ Okay,” Asey murmured, “we’ll go find it!”

  The modernization of the inn, he discovered as he walked through the lobby to the hall, did not extend beyond the ground floor. There were the same old creaking stairs, carpeted by the same old straw matting that was held in place by strips of pock-marked metal. The second floor landing even had a brass spittoon and a few of the refugee rubber plants standing in its corners.

  The door to Suite A was wide open, and from where he stood, on the threshold, Asey could see that the bedroom decor, like the office telephone, was not only prewar, but pre-several wars.

  The carved headboard of the walnut bed directly in front of him reached to within an inch of the cracked ceiling. And once your eyes became focussed on that ceiling, Asey thought, you were lost. You couldn’t possibly tear them away.

  First there was the outer molding, a network of leaves and fruits and flowers, and then there was the inner molding, which confined itself merely to flowers. In the middle of that was the electric light fixture, a cluster of six small globular jars. Wires sprouted from five of the jar-tops, and only when you got to them, Asey thought, could you let yourself begin to look down again.

  Then, of course, came the fascinating task of trying to figure out just which wires and which extension cords went to which of the five table lights.

  By the time Asey finally found himself staring at the faded peonies of the carpet, he felt almost too tired to look up again and attempt any diagnosis of the scenic wall paper. He merely noted that it was mostly a mustard color, and exceedingly busy—nowhere near as busy, however, as the chintz curtains, and the easy chair’s slip cover.

  He hardly wasted a glance at the huge walnut clothes-press, the marble-topped walnut table, the gilded wicker rocking chairs, or at the numerous steel engravings scattered over the wall.

  After all, he had to get to Miss Shearing some time that evening!

  He knocked, and then after a moment, he knocked again.

  “You’ll simply have to wait!” a harassed voice announced from the bathroom. “I don’t dare to leave this shower thing—or are you the one I asked to fix it, several years ago?”

  “No, ma’am,” Asey said, “I’m not, but I might be able to help.”

  “Come in then!”

  The bathroom was considerably larger than the bedroom, and at the far end there was an enormous, old-fashioned claw-foot bath tub, with a short flight of steps leading up to it.

  Perched on the tub’s rim, her hand gripped firmly around a pipe running up to the overhead shower fixture, was Miss Shearing.

  Asey at once told himself that she couldn’t be Miss Shearing. She wasn’t old enough. She didn’t look much older than Gerty, or Layne. She was tall, slim, and dark-haired, and she wore a smart yellow tweed suit and harlequin glasses with green rims.

  “Miss Shearing?” he said hesitantly.

  “Yes. Look, the trouble is, if you let go, it spurts—see where it’s spurted there against the wall? And see that frightful lake behind the tub? I’ve mopped it up with bath towels, but the place was simply afloat when I came in.
And you have to hold this pipe—I tried adhesive tape, but it just blows right off!”

  Asey surveyed the situation.

  “Can you play Dutch boy a minute or two longer,” he said, “an’ keep your finger in the dyke while I go an’ get some tools?”

  Five minutes after his return with a wrench from the tool kit of the roadster, he managed to locate the shutoff, and stop the flood.

  “Of course,” he remarked, “I sort of doubt if you’ll have any water in here at all, this way, but it ought to be a lot simpler than sittin’ here stemmin’ the tide with your bare hands—golly, I missed that wreath of blue flowers runnin’ around the inside of the tub! Now isn’t that something special!”

  “The brown wreath in the wash bowl is much worse. One flower has two petals missing, and you keep hunting for them. I suppose,” Miss Shearing said as she looked thoughtfully at her hand, “that I’ll probably be able to use this again some time, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way now—oh, dear, which one of my little charges is it this time? I just noticed.”

  “Noticed what?” Asey said.

  She pointed to his badge. “That. When I see things that say ‘Special Deputy’, I have no further illusions. I can no longer let myself believe that you were asked to drop up here by those charming incompetents who run this horrible spot, and render first aid to my pipe. Just who’s in trouble now?”

  “Look, are you really Miss Shearing? Miss Elizabeth Shearing?” Asey asked.

  “ ‘That Old Hag Shearing’,” she said with a grin, “is very misleading, isn’t it? But of course, from the project’s point of view, anyone with a few academic degrees is virtually toppling into the grave. Please tell me what they’ve done now, Mr. Mayo!”

  Asey raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you know me?”

  “I recognized you when you drove up to the front door a while ago. I was in the lobby—that was just before I came up and found the flood and phoned down for help. Until I noticed your badge, I innocently thought that the Smalleys had called on you to pinch-hit as a plumber—is it Stinky Cotton again?”

  “S’pose,” Asey said, “that we detour out to them gilt rockers. You know,” he added as she preceded him into the other room, “I originally intended to flaunt that badge at you, an’ then I thought of playin’ messenger boy, an’ then you gave me the part of plumber. I could still use any of ’em, but now that I see you, I wonder if it isn’t goin’ to be easier to tell you the truth.”