Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “Just loved runnin’ her errands, an’ carryin’ her Kleenex around, I s’pose,” Asey commented, and noted that his thrust hit home. Miss Shearing’s face was very pink, and her hands, as she lighted another cigarette, weren’t as steady as they had been.

  “Yes, I have been bored, and tried, and annoyed with some of her errands!” For the first time, she sounded on the defensive. “And yes, I’ve often bitterly resented being whistled at—oh, not literally, of course! Just that Fido-come-here-at-once-sir attitude of hers. But there are irritations in most jobs. Carolyn had the trustees on her neck, for example. She had to carry their Kleenex!”

  “Tell me,” Asey said suddenly, “what was she like? What did you think of her?”

  Once again Miss Shearing’s mind seemed to ply its bull-dozer tactics.

  “She was invigorating, enthusiastic, one-minded, shrewd rather than terribly intelligent. She was an opportunist, and she took herself very seriously. D’you know that at one time, she offered quite seriously to mediate with Hitler? And at another time, she seriously suggested leading an expedition to comb Patagonia for him?”

  “So?”

  “And I remember sending out five hundred confidential wires and cables explaining to various government leaders her four-point program for permanent world peace. You’ve got to take yourself very seriously, you know, and feel that you really throw a lot of weight, to go in for that sort of thing! And yet she cried her eyes out the year she was left off the list of the ten best-dressed women!”

  “An’ did you like her?” Asey inquired.

  “She could hurl herself at causes like that man who’s launched from the cannon at the circus, she could grab headlines from anyone, and she must have had simply incredible glands! No, Mr. Mayo, I didn’t particularly like her. But I got along with her very well. You could never complain,” she said with a smile, “that life with Carolyn Barton Boone was ever dull!”

  And that, Asey knew, was all he’d ever get from her on the topic of Mrs. Boone if he questioned her for a decade, and alternated thumbscrews and rubber hose with the Iron Maiden.

  “Mind clearin’ up some odds an’ ends for me?” he asked. “Like did she have any other husbands besides Senator Boone?”

  “One. A Mr. Branch, I believe.”

  “What became of him?”

  “For all I know,” Miss Shearing said, “she ate him.”

  “Ouch!” Asey said. “To me, that smacks of summin’ her up in a very nasty little nutshell! What about her secretaries?”

  Miss Shearing made a wry face.

  “Frankly, all of them made me faintly nervous, Mr. Mayo. I always had the uncomfortable feeling that they were going to leap up and trim the back of my neck. They’re what I think of as hairdresser types. Amiable enough, but their principal task, of course, was to squire her around.”

  “Think she was ever seriously taken with any of ’em—Eric, maybe?”

  “Never! Not Eric, nor any of the others—and I’m not insinuating that she preferred girls to boys, either,” she added. “Actually, I don’t think she liked women very much, unless she had something to gain from them and could use them. She used men more. Particularly the secretaries. Whatever the poor things advance to when she’s tired of them, they’ve certainly earned it!”

  “Was there any chance of Stinky or Briggs failin’ heir to Eric’s job?” Asey said.

  “You’ve done some probing, haven’t you!” she sounded surprised. “Yes, I know that she asked them both, and they both very politely refused her. I think she meant to work on Jack Briggs, though. He has some important political connections.”

  “An’ now tell me,” Asey said, “why Gerty hates her so.”

  Miss Shearing shook her head. “How you must have probed to know that! It’s a horrid little story. Carolyn accidentally discovered from the records that Gerty had practically never gone to school—she got into Larrabee on an intelligence test. Then she found out about Gerty’s war record, and Bronze Stars, and battle stars, and saw the wonderful publicity angle. It was pretty grim.”

  “Boone turned the spotlight on her, huh?”

  “The works, including newsreels. I couldn’t stop her. I tried.” She got up from the chair-arm. “Oh, you can imagine what it was like. This lovely illiterate. Orphan asylum. Night school. Chorus girl. Stage career. Wonderful army record. Real heroine. How many medals did you get, Gerty? Just a little louder, right into the mike! Let’s have your profile, Mrs. Boone—now the old smile, Mrs. Boone! Take her hand, Gerty. Kiss her, Gerty. Thank her for letting you get an education, Gerty. Smile!”

  Asey whistled softly as he tilted back in his rocker.

  “An’ didn’t Gerty black her eyes an’ tear her ears off?” he asked in astonishment.

  “Gerty wasn’t in any position to, and she knew it. She had to take it. I heard her comment only once. She pointed down at the rug in Carolyn’s outer office and said very softly, ‘Don’t those teeth look cute in that little heap!’ I didn’t catch on, and asked her what teeth she meant. She said, ‘Oh, pardon me! I didn’t kick ’em out, did I! Just a dreamer, that’s me!’ She handled it well, but it was tough on her. From then on, she was a marked girl. She couldn’t move or speak without someone gawping at her.”

  “Waitin’ for her to make a slip. I see,” Asey said. “Lovely illiterate—huh! That explains why she’s so sensitive about her grammar!”

  “I saw her mimic Carolyn one day,” Miss Shearing remarked reminiscently. “It made my blood run cold—but look here, Gerty has nothing to do with this business! I wouldn’t believe otherwise if you’d found her standing over Carolyn’s body with her hand clutching a smoking gun!”

  “Smoking bud vase,” Asey corrected her. “Matter of fact, she an’ Layne were together on the beach most of the afternoon.” But he made a mental note to check up again. “What about Eric—you seen him around today?”

  “Eric? Here? No, but I’m not surprised to know he’s been here. His idea of hard work is a display of intense activity—I’ve known him to take a plane to the west coast to see if Carolyn wanted certain letters signed with her initials, her first name, or her full name.”

  “Any reason you might suspect him? You see—” he went on to tell her of his meeting with Eric. “An’ then he was seen around Pochet Point, an’ variously described as sneakin’, an’ glowerin’.”

  “I’m quite sure,” Miss Shearing said with a laugh, “you’ll find out he wished to know whether invitations were to be printed on cream or ivory paper, and just what weight, and if the engraving was style eight, or nine. He could fret and glower just as much over a thing like that as I could about cholera breaking out among the sophomores. Why, a crooked centerpiece at a luncheon party can distress him for several days! Eric couldn’t have had anything to do with this either, Mr. Mayo! He’d never kill the goose that’s thrust his golden eggs on him!”

  “Who would be your candidate?” Asey inquired.

  “I’ve been racking my brains to remember if we have any pet cranks in this vicinity,” she said. “There are a lot of them, you know, who write to people like Carolyn—sometimes they don’t like what she’s said, sometimes it’s what she hasn’t said, sometimes it’s her clothes. But the really threatening letters have stopped entirely since the war, and I can’t remember any cranks on the Cape, ever.”

  “Huh!” Asey said. “An’ next to some crack-pot, who’d you pick?”

  “None of the project,” she told him with finality. “The undergraduates all worship the ground she walks on. And not the Douglasses. I know Harold and Louise disliked her, and I’ve heard Harold rant on about her, but that’s only his jealousy. I feel guilty saying this, somehow,” she hesitated, “but you asked me! I find myself thinking about Mrs. Framingham. Aunt Mary.”

  “Oh? An’ why?”

  “She loathes Carolyn. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven her for getting the judgeship that her son was slated for,” Miss Shearing said. “It was all dirty polit
ics, and as it turned out, he went on to much bigger and better things. But in Aunt Mary’s eyes, it was unquestionably Carolyn’s own personal ruthless chicanery that did her son Ralph out of the position he deserved.”

  Asey stood up.

  “I wonder,” he said as he picked up the bud vase, “if you’ll come downstairs an’ call Eric from the pay station in the hall, an’ see if you can find out what he wants Mrs. Boone for, an’ why he came down here today.”

  Eric’s problem, Miss Shearing informed him fifteen minutes later as she emerged from the telephone booth, was whether the Trustees’ Annual Luncheon was to be held in the Blue Room or the Green Room.

  “For that vital data, he drove down here,” she continued, “and searched Pochet Point and combed the beach—because he’d called Carolyn quite early this morning about something else, and she said it was such a gorgeous day, she intended to spend it resting on the beach. He went to the Douglass’s house once, but there was no one home. I told him the Blue Room, and he’s now relaxed.”

  “Fine!” Asey said. “If you believe him!”

  “I do, Mr. Mayo. He hasn’t sufficient imagination to think up a story like that.”

  “Would Eric,” Asey said, “be inclined to have one of Mrs. Boone’s green scarves with him?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’d have one to tuck in his pocket before he met Carolyn,” Miss Shearing returned. “Eric has tact. He wouldn’t be found dead with it out of her presence, or without it in it, if you see what I mean—where are you going?” she added as Asey entered the lobby.

  He pointed to the glass brick and mirrors.

  “Must be some way to get through this to the back quarters without smashin’ a path!” he said. “Which strip is a door, d’you s’pose? I want a door. I want to find a Smalley. Any Smalley!”

  While locating the door proved to be difficult enough, they found the task simpler than locating any of the Smalley family. It took them the better part of ten minutes to find the oldest son inside the refrigerator out in a remote ell.

  He stopped tinkering with an electric motor long enough to tell them that everybody else had gone to the moving pictures.

  “Ma said she needed to relax after a day like today—anything I can do? Oh, I forgot all about your pipe, Miss Shearing! Gee, I’ll go right up!”

  “I’ve fixed it for the time bein’,” Asey said. “But you’ll need a plumber on that. Tell me, was there any callers for Miss Shearing, or any messages?”

  “Gee, didn’t you get ’em, Miss Shearing? Pa must of forgot. He meant to. I’ll get ’em,” he paused to wipe his fingers on some cotton waste, “right away! Pa’ll feel awful sorry!”

  He led the way back to the office in the lobby, pawed around under the glass brick counter, and finally came up with a fistful of telegrams, notes, and slips of paper.

  “Trouble with these new glass walls,” he said as he passed the collection to Miss Shearing, “is they had to take down our old pigeonholes. Things in those pigeonholes caught your eye, but this way, things slip your mind.”

  “I think—yes, they’re all from Eric,” Miss Shearing said as she ran through them. “Wires saying he was coming, and when he was coming, and for me to be here because he was coming. Notes saying he came and I wasn’t in, and that he went to find Carolyn and couldn’t, and that he had to go because he had to be back to make arrangements with a caterer—he murmured something on the phone about trying to find me. Want to see them?” She held the sheaf out to Asey.

  “Say,” young Smalley paused with his hand on the door. “Say, there was a caller I forgot to leave a note about. Just after dinner. I think you were out talking with some of the crowd in the orchard, only pa and ma thought you’d gone off in your car. I meant to write it down, but that ice chest has been—”

  “Who?” Asey said.

  “From the Douglasses. That aunt of theirs. Mrs. Frampton.”

  “Mrs. Framingham?” Miss Shearing demanded.

  “I guess so. Big woman. She wanted to see you, but she was on her way to the movies and wouldn’t wait. Anything else I can do? Ice water? I don’t think we got any ice, but I could get some cold—”

  “Thanks,” Miss Shearing said, “I’ve had plenty of cold water!”

  She looked quizzically at Asey as young Smalley, after two false grabs at a mirrored panel, at last found the door.

  “Well?” she said. “Well? Aunt Mary called—and I go up to find the flood, and you find the bud vase. Well, Mr. Mayo?”

  Asey looked at his watch.

  “We might get to the second show an’ catch her as she’s leavin’—come on!”

  “Me? Why? What for?”

  Asey took her arm and hurried her outside to the roadster.

  “What is this, protective custody?” she inquired as they started off.

  “In a backhand sort of way,” Asey said, “yes—doggone, look at the stream of cars already headin’ home—I’m afraid we’ve missed her!”

  By the time they reached the theater, the home-going traffic had thinned to a trickle. Asey stopped and watched till it ceased almost entirely, and then he swung the roadster around to the parking space in the rear, and checked the dozen-odd beachwagons among the cars belonging to the second-show crowd.

  The Douglass’s beachwagon was not among them.

  “Now what?” Miss Shearing said.

  “Now,” Asey told her with a grin, “we’re goin’ to step out. We’re goin’ to the juke joint.”

  He caught the sound of a smothered chuckle, but she looked surprised when they drew up a few minutes later in front of Mike’s Place.

  “Come on,” Asey said as he locked the bud vase in the glove compartment. “We’re goin’ in.”

  He stood for a moment in the entrance, peering through the thick haze of tobacco smoke, and trying not to be distracted by the smell of frying onions and the deafening din of the juke box.

  “I’m proud to see my little charges are reasonably quiet,” Miss Shearing said, pointing to the corner where Gerty and Stinky sat with the fat boy and the girl with the bangs.

  “I hoped they’d be here!” Asey beckoned to Gerty. “Golly, what a racket!”

  “Isn’t it ghastly? I wonder how they stand it.”

  Asey informed her drily that she was about to find out.

  “Uh-huh,” he went on as she stared at him questioningly, “in the interests of your own personal safety, Miss S., you’re goin’ to surround yourself with this group, an’ stay surrounded by—hi, Gerty! Miss S., you trot over to the corner, please—you probably won’t suffer anything that a couple of aspirin won’t cure! So long! Gerty, come outside a second, will you?—how in thunder can you take that din!”

  “You don’t notice it after a while,” Gerty said. “Or the air, either—say, how are things?”

  “I haven’t time to go into ’em with you,” Asey said. “Look, you kids, an’ particularly you, are to ride herd on Shearing! You’re not to let her out of your sight. You—”

  “Nun-uh, Mr. Mayo! Not her!” Gerty interrupted. “You’re all wet! Shearing’s okay! She never killed—”

  “I don’t think she did, either,” Asey said quickly. “But it’s possible she might be in a bit of danger. Don’t you let her out of your sight till I say so! If she washes her hands, you wash yours—you see what I mean? You stick with her every second. If she complains, or tries to duck, knock her down an’ sit on her. Okay? Now, one thing more. You an’ Layne were on the beach from after twelve-fifteen or so. You left early—”

  “That’s right, a little before you found me there by the mud hole.”

  “Before you went to the beach, how long were you two together?”

  “Why,” Gerty said, “from the time we left your house! We were in her car!”

  “You were together, as in each other’s sight, all that time? She didn’t leave you, an’ you didn’t leave her?” Asey persisted.

  “Well,” Gerty said slowly, “I did wander around and try to find
some wild strawberries, but I gave it up because there was so much poison ivy—but Layne knew where I was. I could see her, so I guess she could see me. And she swam out further than I did, out to the raft and the boats—but hell, I saw her all the time! I don’t know how we could’ve been any more together!”

  “Know where Stinky or Jack was from around twelve to one?” Asey asked.

  “Stinky was eating lunch somewhere in the town,” Gerty said. “I don’t know where Jack was. Stinky was just wondering about him. Said he hadn’t seen him since early today.”

  “Okay—you mind Shearing, now! Watch over her!”

  From Mike’s place, Asey drove on to the church, where Jennie, who had apparently been watching for him, at once emerged bearing a paper plate with a small slab of ice cream on it.

  “Refreshments,” she said, handing him the plate and a wooden spoon. “Asey, nobody knows a thing about Sylvester! They’ve begun to make up stories about where they think he may have run away to, now. And there’s nothing to the secret room business—nothing at all!”

  “Doggone!” Asey stabbed at his ice cream. “Jennie, are you sure? I almost been countin’ on that!”

  “Mrs. Phinney says goodness knows the Hoveys were a queer lot, and one Hovey brought home a Chinese wife once, only she died of the fever, and one of the women wore pants—real pants—while everyone else was wearing proper hoopskirts,” Jennie said. “But she says it’s nonsense that they ever had any secret rooms. She’s positive she’d’ve known if there was, because two of her brothers did carpentry work when they weren’t at sea, and if there’d been any secret rooms being built, she thinks they’d’ve been pretty sure to tell her about ’em. Considering how much else I’ve had to listen to about other houses that got built about the same time, Asey, I must say I think she’d have known!”

  “Wa-el,” Asey said, “if someone didn’t heft that body into a nice convenient secret room, then I s’pose someone took it somewheres else. Thanks, Jennie. Mind beggin’ yourself a ride home? I’m goin’ over to Pochet Point an’ have a talk with Aunt Mary Framingham.”