Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “You like the policeman, too, don’t you?” asked Long with an effort at nonchalance. “Despite what he is.”

  She slapped her forehead with her palm and energetically ruined her hairdo. “Why the hell shouldn’t I—

  “Hey, fella!” She stopped. “Where did you get that passport?”

  “What does it matter?” He seemed completely sober now, looking down at her rumpled head.

  “They’ll check up on it.”

  “That’s fine. It’s a valid passport.” His smile was too broad for beauty.

  “You were born in Hong Kong? Sixty-three years ago?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Martha gave an exasperated sigh and a gull dove close over her head. “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing. Then I’ll only have to worry about Pádraig’s.”

  “Ah!” Long watched the gull and let his gaze drift to the water. He had become vastly more tolerant of things oceanic in the previous five years. “So you picked up on that too? A young man whose mother is not his mother. You are subtle, Martha. I suspected nothing until he told me the riddle just now.”

  “Suspected? Bullshit! I know Peig Ui Súilleabháin! She’s no Yank! The boy’s here on a false passport.” These last words were spoken in an angry growl as she threaded her way among the bright-shirted holiday-makers of Santa Cruz. Long followed, touching no one.

  The little man with the beard and the double-headed crystal pendant was acting nervous, but that was not too surprising, for Elizabeth Macnamara often made people nervous. She had sat him down on the chair beneath the light, more by command than invitation, and her inquisitorial attitude was combined with a general feeling that she shouldn’t have to become involved in the affairs of Teddy Poznan.

  “He calls you late yesterday and says to be here by nine this morning?”

  “I’m late,” the man mumbled.

  “Late, hah! Tell me about it!” she answered angrily, but did not explain why the simple statement roused her so. “Why did he wait till yesterday? He had plenty of time to contact old friends in Santa Cruz during the weekend, and they would have been off long since, if this mess hadn’t happened.”

  The visitor, who was from Cotati, and who had had a long drive, shook his head. “If I know Teddy, it was something of a spiritual nature. Or dietary. I am his counselor on such matters.”

  She sneered in most unladylike fashion. In self-defense be brought both hands down around his save-the-humans belt buckle and breathed from his center. “Find him and then maybe we’ll both know,” he suggested. “Didn’t he say where he was going?”

  “To me?” Elizabeth straightened to regal height. “Hardly. For all I know he’s back at the police station.”

  “…—lice station?” he echoed and he stood up, scraping the chair. “Gawd! Teddy? What kind of trouble is he in?”

  “Murder,” she said almost viciously. “He finds a body and dumps it on my mother.”

  “Dumps? On your…?”

  Elizabeth took hold of the telephone receiver as though she were wringing a neck. “I’ll try the station for him. What’s your name?”

  There was no answer at all, and when she turned, the room was empty.

  The road was covered with white dust which coated the windshield of the Dodge van almost beyond usability. The awkward old vehicle bucked at every dry rivulet and, pothole in the dirt, and when she floored the accelerator to pull her out of the ruts, the air was touched with the’ ominous smell of slipping fan belts. The van had taken the whole crew of them, plus instruments, luggage, and sound equipment, from Massachusetts to Santa Cruz, breaking down completely only once. Elen doubted it would ever make such a trip again.

  Redwood trees, flanking the single-lane road, were coated in dirt ten feet off the ground. Elen parked the van where last winter’s rain had washed the remnants of the road away and walked the last hundred yards to the cabin, picking dirt out of her nostrils. The windows were caked in dirt also, but she could see Sandy’s head moving behind one of them.

  There was noise as she got closer. Sandy opened the door and Elen stepped into the darkness and found a chair. “It doesn’t smell good,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sandy. Her green cotton harem pants were stained down the front. “I’m not very good at this kind of thing. I told you.”

  Elen shrugged and slumped forward. “I had no right to speak. Just tired.” Her friend’s arm helped her to her feet and she went to make sure everything was all right. “How many people would do this for me?”

  The thin woman wrung her hands. “I just feel so sorry….”

  Sandy waited for Elen in the front room of the cabin. Steller jays outside the ceiling-high window made a great racket. She sat with her hands tightly folded, and when Elen came back, she said, “This is terrible, isn’t it?”

  Elen Evans choked, caught her breath, nodded, and started to cry.

  Detective Anderson read the preliminary, medical report under the light of the window. He wore bifocals to read, and he adjusted his focus by wrinkling his nose. “No great surprises, so far,” he said to Officer Scherer, who had folded his long body into the scoop of a plastic chair. “Neck broken. That’s a mercy, at least.”

  Scherer came to half-attention. “Neck broken? Quite a strain on the rope.”

  “I know. Ugly, wasn’t it? Could be”—and the detective’s words slowed to an uncertain pause—“a weakness in the vertebrae. Or if—if he flung himself off headfirst, the angle would be more likely…”

  Scherer grimaced and turned his face away from his superior. From the thing that happened to him whenever he closed his eyes, he guessed he was going to have trouble sleeping.

  Everyone got depressed. Scherer himself got moody, when he thought about his job too much, or the divorce. It would be so easy to go off one night after too many Seagrams, full of anger at Kate’s family or his own. To take a dive, literally: a good dive, as in the local pool, to fool one’s reflexes… To come to one’s senses too late. In the air.

  Don Scherer shuddered, shaking the chair.

  Anderson watched quietly, thinking the Macnamara woman might have been right. Perhaps the boy should have been given time, after finding the body. He wasn’t even on the detective team. But he’d asked, and it was only fair. Besides, time for what? To go back to his apartment in Capitola? Scherer was alone, he seemed to remember. The usual divorce.

  Let him shudder his shudders in company.

  “Other things,” continued the detective, flat-voiced as though he hadn’t noticed. “A crack in the skull at the back of the head. Don’t think we can do much with that; it was right where it would hit the square post. Some needle marks. Not a lot. Not a heroin habit, I’d say Jaundice Isn’t that what the Chinese guy said? Jaundice. Hey Scherer, did you know Orientals could tan like that? I always thought they just went darker yellow.”

  “I never thought about it,” answered Scherer in the jaded-cop tones he affected very poorly.

  “Big bruise on the left arm. Broken toe improperly healed. Poor sod. Five teeth missing. Poor sod, what a list of miseries!”

  “Did anything come back about his relatives in Canada?”

  Officer Scherer mumbled. He wasn’t in any position to know such things, having been with the detective all morning. What was more, Anderson knew the man wasn’t, but he asked anyway. He turned on the intercom and asked again, getting a negative reply.

  “Shame, when there’s a body and no one left who cares.”

  Scherer’s mumble grew fainter and he rolled his eyes away from Anderson’s.

  “Aside from Macnamara, who is going to discover what happened for us. By some Buddhist rite, perhaps? Dunno.

  “But it’s easier on us this way, huh? No more ‘I am sorry to have to tell you’ and fried-egg stares and weeping and wailing and then us going home feeling like shit? And why haven’t we caught the guy already? All that.” Scherer nodded blankly, obediently, as his superior wandered on.

>   “Do you think it was murder?” He threw the question at Scherer without warning and the young officer shied like a horse.

  “Murder? No. My idea is he did it himself,” Scherer said, “Seems obvious.”

  Not to me, sonny boy, said Anderson to himself, and spared one nearsighted glance for Scherer’s brooding face. “It wouldn’t shock me either way,” is what the sergeant said aloud.

  It was only five minutes later when Pratt, on front-desk duty, came in with Donald Stoughie.

  “This is kind of odd,” he said to Anderson, “but it might tie in with this—uh—strangulation case.” He spoke very softly, for the sergeant’s ears only, and then gestured the reluctant complainant forward. “Tell him the story, as you told me, Mr. Stoughie.”

  “Again? The whole thing?” Stoughie’s face fell and it seemed, for a moment, that he would turn and walk out of the station.

  Pratt’s eyes flickered from Anderson to Stoughie. “Sure. If the guy tried to kill you, it’s worth telling twice, isn’t it?”

  Anderson’s face went expressionless by habit. “Who tried to kill you, Mr….”

  “Stuffy, S-t-o-u-g-h-i-e,” he replied. “It was a man named Maxwell Long. Chinese.”

  Anderson stared more blankly than ever. He motioned Stoughie to a chair. “When?” he asked. “How?”

  “It was yesterday morning, in my office. He claimed I owed him money and he tried to throttle me. I barely escaped with my… with my health.”

  Anderson’s regard was unwavering, and Stoughie, turning his head, found that Officer Scherer was also looking at him. The policeman looked very like a cowboy, with his long jaw and sideburns and his large, loose-framed body, and he looked at Stoughie as though the man were some dubious horse. Stoughie didn’t find either of them supportive.

  “This was Mayland Long?” asked Anderson.

  Stoughie stirred. “Yes. That’s it. You already know about it? You were listening when I told—”

  “No, Mr. Stoughie. I merely know the name.”

  Stoughie relaxed as much as one could into the plastic scoop-chair, for he had never regarded it as a mark in one’s favor to have the police know one’s name. Unless, of course, one is connected with the police. With this thought, he sat up straight again.

  He explained at length how the man Long had come raging into his office with a demand for payment for services not even rendered, let alone payment due, after wrecking the premises too. How he had refused to listen to reason, but picked the agent up by the neck—by the neck itself—and flung him about the room, doing damage thereby both to the room and the person of Donald Stoughie. Which was no more than to be expected out of someone who went about wrecking theaters.

  Anderson listened, and the expressionless quality of his face faded before a sort of mystified concern. He rose, pulling on the knees of his trousers, and stepped around his large desk. He squatted on the floor beside Stoughie and put one finger to Stoughie’s neck. The man stopped in the middle of a sentence.

  “Here, let’s see.” Anderson’s voice was that of a solicitous nurse, but Mr. Stoughie still flinched as he felt the touch.

  “Isn’t the mark obvious?” asked Stoughie bitterly.

  “I think I see a red mark,” replied Anderson. “Probably it was much worse yesterday, though. Why did you wait so long before coming in?”

  “I was afraid,” said Stoughie, balling his hands in his lap. “He said if I dared go to the police…”

  “Yes, don’t leave it like that. If you dared go to the police, what?”

  Stoughie’s jaw clenched and relaxed. “He’d be back for me.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew the curtains in and filled the cubicle with salt smell. Both Anderson and Scherer followed the movement with their eyes, and Scherer took a hungry breath of the outside air. Anderson sighed.

  “Long is… what? About five eight? And you’re maybe four inches taller and forty pounds—”

  “What has that got to do with it? Is it okay to assault people that are bigger than you? I’m not used to violence.” Stoughie wrapped his arms around himself as a sort of protective casing, and his eyes of bathtub blue puckered around the edges.

  “I was just wondering how he managed to pull you over the desk, Mr. Stoughie. That’s quite a feat for a small man.”

  The booking agent’s face tightened even more. “I think it was karate.”

  “Karate?”

  The gauze shirt billowed with Stoughie’s exhalation. “Or something. Some martial art.”

  “T’ai chi maybe,” offered Pratt, who was standing behind Stoughie, casually reading the morning’s report. “Considering Long’s age—”

  Stoughie rose angrily from the chair. “Enough! I don’t need to stiffer this, as well as getting beat up.”

  Anderson forestalled him with one arm. “No, Mr. Stoughie. I’m sorry. We are taking your report seriously. Very seriously, in fact. But before I move on it I want to make very sure we have the whole truth here. It may be more important than you think.”

  Stoughie turned, half-mollified and half-frightened. “What’s more important than somebody’s trying to kill somebody?”

  “Somebody succeeding,” replied the detective. Stoughie sat down.

  “I don’t know. Some hippie friend of his,” said Elizabeth to her mother, offhand.

  Martha sputtered a laugh and sank gratefully down into a chair by the air conditioner. “You don’t know how funny that sounds, coming from someone your age. I think you just do it to be shocking. Besides, what is a hippie, in the year 1986?”

  Elizabeth was cleaning an unexpectedly dirtied pair of child’s panties and her voice was barely audible over the flush. “It’s a guy with beads and a headband and too much bare belly. As well as tatoos. And drugs.”

  “What drugs?” her mother asked languidly, but her relaxation had become no more than a pose.

  Elizabeth emerged with her hair in her face and her nose screwed up. She dried her fresh-washed hands on a motel bathmat. “I don’t know what drugs. I’m not a walking pharmacopoeia.”

  “A walking Physician’s Desk Reference is what you mean, dear,” said Martha faintly.

  “I’m not an authority on drugs. But I know the type; my God, how could I not, after Stanford and living in Silicon Gulch? The guy called himself a counselor or something, and that usually means—”

  “Teddy’s on a mucus-free diet,” said Martha, as though that proved something.

  “Well…” Elizabeth dabbed the damp mat on her face. “What does it matter? He was looking for Poznan and the creep isn’t here.”

  Martha turned her face from her daughter, just as Long emerged from the next room. Both women looked up at him.

  “She’s still crying,” he said. “But I think she is almost asleep.”

  “God!” Elizabeth invoked heaven with both arms. “I’m so sorry I did this to her. And to you,” she added, with a guilty glance at her mother.

  “If I had really remembered what it was like, on tour…”

  Martha said nothing. “A murder is not the usual climax of a tour, I don’t think,” said Long gently. “At least, not with Celtic traditional music.”

  Elizabeth looked at him askance, but she was chary of contradicting her mother’s dignified suitor. “Is she still on this Judy trip?”

  “Yes. ‘Judy’s lost.’”

  Elizabeth’s mouth tightened and she sat down on the end of a bed. “I don’t know. There just isn’t anyone by that name that she knows! I… have a friend in San Rafael who does regressions. Maybe—”

  “Hippie!” called Martha genially. Elizabeth showed a glint of anger and then buried it.

  “Where’s Pádraig?” she asked the air. Long and Elizabeth glanced at each other expectantly. Long went out the door and was gone for perhaps a minute.

  “He went into his room,” he replied, coming back quietly.

  “Is anyone else here?”

  Long shook his head. Martha looked very sad. “My dea
rs,” she said. “We’ve got to think about this, and it’s very confusing. We have to figure out how George died.”

  Elizabeth showed the whites of her eyes, looking as though she’d rather do anything but. Long, without a word, sat down cross-legged on the carpet, close to Martha’s feet.

  “Either George killed himself last night, which is too terrible, or some stranger killed him, which is worse, or one of our close friends killed him, which is…”

  “Quite possible,” Elizabeth concluded with a snap of her jaws. Both Martha and Long stared up in surprise. His eyes were cold yellow.

  “It’s true!” Elizabeth took a step back before the combined gaze. Her beautiful face was stony. “Mother, you trust the weirdest people!”

  “Sometimes they prove very helpful, when I need help,” replied Martha, very angry. Long looked away.

  Elizabeth wiped the hair off her face again, and at a noise from the next room, all heads rose. But Marty settled more deeply into steep, and Elizabeth filled her lungs for argument. “Sometimes very rarely, and usually they eat your savings and run. These particular weirdos—”

  “The finest traditional players I could get together!”

  “Whoopie! And one of them’s a murderer, isn’t he? Or she?” Elizabeth’s mouth was tight and she glanced repeatedly from the door to the bedroom where Marty slept to the face of her mother, and the same concern and resentment showed. “You’re just lucky it wasn’t you found with a hand-knit rope around your neck.”

  “No one is going to hurt Martha,” said Long softly, and his face was a set of angles in tarnished bronze.

  Martha, fully enraged, stood next to her daughter, staring into the face six inches above hers. “Who, then, is your candidate for the position of murderer?”

  “Teddy,” came her reply, and as at a signal, Ted Poznan entered the room.

  “I hear at the front desk there was someone looking…” he began, but then he read the emotion in faces before him and fell silent.