The phone rang and Martha went to answer it. She stood before the object with her eyes half-shut and breathed heavily for a few seconds before picking it up. “Hello?”
There was another knock at the door and Detective Anderson came in, looking apologetic. Looking at Long.
It was Sandy, Marty’s babysitter of the night before, on the phone. Her message, delivered with trepidation and hardly intelligible, was that Elen Evans was at her house and too sleepy to make it back to the motel. She was, in fact, asleep already.
Martha listened with half an ear and finally cut her off. “When she wakes up, dear, you might tell her that Mayland’s been arrested for murder. She’ll be interested.”
The response was an explosive gasp. Martha found she was listening to a dead line and she hung up the phone.
“Not arrested, no,” Anderson was saying. “But we really would like to speak with you at the station. Not about Mr. St. Ives’s death, however.”
“Not about the murder?” It was Martha who spoke. Long merely stood, looking patient.
“No…” There was a sort of drawling qualification in Anderson’s word, making it an almost-no rather than a real negation. “It’s about a complaint filed by Mr. Donald Stoughie.”
“That?” Martha gaped and even Long gave a start and a short laugh, followed by a series of coughs. “I am made to see again that all one’s acts return home. When… one least expects, always.” He took out a Kleenex and held it to his mouth for the racking coughs would not let him be. As his cold was starting to loosen, they were very unpleasant to hear.
Anderson looked down at the glossy black head and wondered if the man dyed his hair. According to the passport he was older than Anderson by a good five years, and what hair the detective had left was more salt than pepper. At least, he reflected, he was in better health than, Long, whose bony fingers were cupped around his mouth, half-hidden in the tissue. They looked like dead spiders, those hands, and Anderson could see the points of Long’s spine through the thin fabric of the suit jacket. His sympathy with the unappealing Mr. Stoughie reached a new low, and he wondered if Long had tuberculosis.
“Of course, Sergeant. I expected some such action from Mr. Stoughie yesterday or this morning at the latest, and this sad business drove it completely out of my mind.” He patted his pockets methodically, checked his gold wristwatch (it was one-forty), and said, “Quite ready now.”
“Wait. I’ll need my purse!” Martha snapped her fingers and stooped under the bed. Long gave her a wary glance.
“I don’t believe the gentleman asked for you, Martha,” he said.
“Not just yet,” said Anderson, and his tone suggested that maybe this entire business could be settled without fuss, if no one made a fuss. His tone suggested that, but gave no promises.
“That’s because he doesn’t know I’m relevant to the matter. Very relevant, since it’s my band you are managing, and that Stoughie was prepared to rip off. And since… well, we’ll talk about it there.”
Long remained standing, in place, with Anderson, staring at the wall beside him. “It isn’t worth your trouble, Martha.”
She snorted. “Don’t give me that. An accusation of assault, following closely on the discovery of a body, is nothing to sneeze at.”
Long wiped his nose on yet another tissue. “Inapposite,” he murmured and glanced expectantly at Anderson, who shrugged.
“I can’t tie her to the bedpost,” the detective said, and followed them both out of the room.
Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin was in the hallway, looking like the bad beginning of a hangover. “Is there any aspirin?” he asked Martha, and then he saw Anderson and noticed the intent progression of the group. “What is this?”
“We’re off to the police station again,” answered Long, trying to sound bored.
“Mar sinn é? Is that so?” The boy caught up with them, stumbling on the pile of the carpet, and he blocked their way at the doorway into the lobby. “Who is going, and why wasn’t I told?” Anderson took him by the upper arm, to keep him upright, and felt the unexpectedly heavy arm harden belligerently. For just a moment, he wished he had brought Scherer.
“It’s not about George at all,” said Long. “It’s about the tour business.”
Pádraig blinked and made a face. “I’m not that drunk. At least, not anymore. What have the police to do with the music business?”
Martha pushed past Pádraig, clearing the way for the rest of them. “That horrid booking agent has filed a complaint against Mayland. That’s all.”
“Mar sinn é?” said Pádraig again. His shoulders swelled in his nylon polo shirt and he stuffed his fists into his trouser pockets. “That gaimbín man? I’m with you, Mayland.” And Pádraig would not be dissuaded.
Anderson and Long, silent and dressed in sport jackets, got into the unmarked car. Martha got in beside Long, but Ó Súilleabháin had to walk.
“Be careful,” said Anderson, in the privacy of his cubicle. I have not asked you for any admissions, and if you are going to start throwing them around, I will read you your rights.”
“I merely admitted to having lost my temper,” said Long judiciously. He sat curled into the plastic bucket seat as though his spine had been made for such curves. His arm was over the chair back and he looked more at ease than he had yet in Anderson’s presence. The detective guessed the fellow was glad to be alone with him. “That is not always a violation of the law. But I think it will save much time if you do ‘read me my rights’ so that the truth can come out.”
Anderson smiled. Closing his eyes he quoted the précis of Miranda v. Arizona very clearly, following it with the traditional injunction. Long nodded with appreciation of the ritual. “And you did not have to read.”
“Not for years.” He touched a button on the machine on his desk. “Anytime, Mr. Long.”
Long cocked his right foot onto his left knee and pulled it up to his hip. The left foot remained on the floor. He straightened up and lay his curled hands in his lap, and in that hybrid Eurasian position he began:
“In February of this year I contracted with Mr. Donald Stoughie for the group called Macnamara’s Band to play at a hall he manages in Santa Cruz. Landaman Hall. Mrs. Macnamara warned me that Stoughie had a very bad reputation in the field for paying late or not at all, and so I took the precaution of getting a written agreement to pay after the first of the two concerts. Had it not been for the location and the very good acoustics of the room, we would not have bothered with the man. And as it turned out, though the acoustics were good, the location was inauspicious after all.”
“I would agree to that,” answered Anderson solemnly.
“Friday last they gave the first of their two concerts, and he did not show up to pay.” Long fell into a moment’s brown study. “You know, had I not made that agreement for a flat fee, we’d have been better off, for the house was more crowded than Martha expected.”
“Good music,” murmured Anderson and Long glanced sharply at him. “That’s right. You were there.
“I came to Mr. Stoughie’s office on the following morning, and it became clear he had no intention of paying at that time, if at all. He claimed that one of our party had worked some damage on his property, though he had no proof, nor even anyone in particular to blame.”
I know about the practical joke,” said Anderson. “Mrs. Macnamara told me this morning.”
Long’s teeth showed in a grin. “Well, then. It was not the time to play such a game with me, for I was not feeling well. This virus… Then he made comments about Mrs. Macnamara I had no choice but to regard as slighting.”
Anderson’s expression brightened for an instant. He chewed absently on a pencil and almost smiled.
“And I lost patience with the man. I laid my hand on him.” He fell to brooding again, his hands a circle in his lap.
Anderson raised his eyebrows at this unusual gallantry. “Hand? Singular?”
Long glanced up in amusement. “Yes, one hand. I put it
around the man’s neck.”
Anderson grunted without surprise. “And did you lift him out of his chair, by the neck?”
There was a ten-second silence. “I… may have. I was quite angry for a moment. My memory is hazy.”
“Do you remember flinging him about the room, also by the neck?”
Long’s jacket rustled like dead leaves. “I could hardly do that! And if I had, he’d surely be dead now, with a broken neck!”
“Like St. Ives,” added the detective.
Long pushed back into the chair until his back reflected the arch of it. His neck and head, too, continued this serpentine curve, and be contrived to rear over the taller man. “But Donald Stoughie does not have a broken neck, because I did not fling him about the room. Nor did I hang George St. Ives up by Pádraig’s súgán.”
Anderson nodded to Long with a wealth of sympathy. “But you must admit it was a bad time for such an incident to come up. It is difficult to believe that two acts of violence, coming together in time so closely…”
“Are unrelated. I admit it readily.”
“Are they related?”
Long seemed offended momentarily. His narrow chest swelled. “Of course. All actions are related. Some in the human sphere of dharma and others in ways beyond. I am quite aware how this particular series of events appears to the observer’s eye, and I agree that the response of a reasonable official must be to arrest me.”
Anderson looked out the window and scratched a silvery stubble on his face. A reasonable official. Who on earth aspired to be “a reasonable official”? He thought of the meaty face and bathwater eyes of Mr. Stoughie and felt very unreasonable. “Tell me, Mr. Long. Have you ever studied karate?”
Long’s astonishment at this question resolved itself into laughter, and then to roaring coughs. “Karate! Never! Can it be you think that every person of Asian—”
“Or perhaps another martial art,” the sergeant pressed. “Even t’ai chi?”
“Such studies have never come in my way. They were not necessary. Zen sitting, however, I do study. Martha is my teacher.”
Anderson nodded, as Long had merely agreed with an opinion that he, Anderson, had stated. “I regret it, Mr. Long, but as you say, I am going to have to keep you here with us.”
“On a charge of murder?”
“On the charge of having assaulted Mr. Donald Stoughie and worked battery upon his person.”
Long’s resigned nod was formal.
Rights of Man
Teddy Poznan slumped’ miserably in the chair that was usually Long’s. “Oh, friends and neighbors!” He stared at his hands in his lap as though they were the key to his perplexity. “That’s an act that will come back on somebody. What goes around, comes around, you know, and to do harm to such a very old soul as Mayland will really set the gears to meshing.
“Still, I don’t know what Wolfie’s visit had to do with the Dragon being arrested.”
“Don’t call him that.”
Elizabeth snapped this out in quick fury and then turned away from Teddy. She went through the connecting door into her daughter’s bedroom.
Teddy’s oxlike brown eyes wrinkled all around the edges. “I left a message this morning for him not to bother. Coming, that is. That… we’d be leaving before he could get here.”
“Didn’t you know that when you asked him to come?” Elizabeth said, having stuck her head back through the door. Teddy flinched away from her. “He… was supposed to be here yesterday, not today. He gets things screwed up.”
“Swell kind of a spiritual director, I think,” called Elizabeth, and then shut the connecting door between them.
Martha sat in the nicely appointed lobby of the Santa Cruz police station, listening to the sound of Dixieland jazz from Cooper House and swinging her feet. She had swung her short legs over the carpet when she was three and she did the same at the age of fifty-four. Especially when she was nervous.
Was Pádraig even now jogging the half mile or so between the Bright Sands Hotel and the station, or was she expected to carry the ball alone? Carry it and do what with it?
What a mess. Mayland had had every right to bop that miserable, wormlike Don Stoughie, who had spent twenty years doing her friends out of their pay, and George St. Ives was quite within his rights (though completely deluded), in deciding not to watch the sun rise anymore. But putting those two things together… what a mess.
She couldn’t even blame Sergeant Anderson, though her enthusiasm for him had certainly cooled. When one of the suspects in a suspicious death turns out to have committed a minor act of violence the day before, it is natural to make a connection. Though a really good investigator might have seen that the sort of person who would become outraged at Stoughie was exactly the opposite of the sort who would …
No, that wouldn’t wash, for Martha knew very well that her dear and closest friend was exactly the sort to kill a man in cold blood, if he thought the man’s death a good idea. Despite the jokes paid out regarding his docility with Martha, Long was no tame beast.
(Cooper House sure had a fine trumpeter. Listen to him!)
The way to remove the suspicion from Long was to find the killer, of course, if there had been a killer, or elsewise discover a note or something. She had already promised Sergeant Anderson as much. She had a few ideas already, but nothing of immediate help.
Officer Scherer walked by, saw Martha, and recognized her. She saw him take an involuntary step away from her, and she suspected it was because he suddenly recalled her boyfriend had been arrested and she might press upon him, asking the kind of help a police officer was in no position to give. Martha smiled and nodded and stared blandly ahead again. Her indifference pulled the tall policeman closer.
“Anything I can do to help?” he found himself saying.
Her blue eyes were cool but not resentful. “The only thing I can think of is to prove somehow that George committed suicide. Or if he didn’t, find me out who killed him. It wasn’t Mayland.”
Scherer said nothing, but Martha answered as though he had. “I say that not because he’s the sort who couldn’t kill, but because he’s the sort who couldn’t tell a lie. Never. And he told me he didn’t kill George.”
Officer Scherer’s shoulders started to crawl upward “Murder isn’t what he was arrested for, ma’am.” He had a funny, cowboyish way of saying “ma’am” that caught Martha’s ear. It made a whole with his rangy size and a peculiar rough tan he had, even darker than the detective’s. She wondered if the effect was premeditated on his part.
“No, sir, but murder is what is at question here, all the same,” she said very calmly. “If George did not kill, himself, someone killed him.”
Scherer shifted in his chair and gazed vaguely up at the fluorescent lights. “But you, Mrs. Macnamara, think he killed himself.”
Martha straightened as much as she could in the bucket chair. “I didn’t say that, Officer Scherer. It seems unlikely to me, in fact. But I don’t claim to have understood the mind-workings of George St. Ives.” She regarded the tall policeman closely, noticing that all his underneath aspects (the only kind she could see at close range) were pale and all the upper surfaces a brickish brown. Except for his forehead, which shaded smoothly down from fair to dark.
“Where did you get that striking farmer’s tan, Officer? Surely a patrol car is no place to catch some rays?”
Scherer blinked, both embarrassed and inordinately pleased by the observation. He fingered his nonregulation belt buckle. “No, ma’am. I guess I picked this up doing endurance racing.”
Martha wasn’t sure what sort of race an endurance was, whether of horses or autos. Or feet. She said in exploratory fashion, “That must take up a great deal of your spare time.”
He nodded and his wary face grew positively animated. “It does, I’ll tell you. And I can’t be regular about the training, either, and that’s really rough on a horse….”
Horse, echoed Martha in her mind.
&
nbsp; “Sometimes I’m up riding her in the first light and then the next day nothing and the next it’s the heat of the day or moonlight.”
“That sounds like a lovely life,” said Martha sincerely. “Though I know very little about riding.”
Scherer cast her a glance of surprise touched with distrust, for rarely did people admit to him that they weren’t au courant with horses, even when that was proved lamentably true. He reminded himself that this woman was from the East, and that might make the difference. “Well, it’s wearing, for sure, but I guess I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it….”
Pádraig pulled into the shadow of the station blowing much like a horse himself. His child-featured face was shiny and his shirt stuck to his back. He wondered how it was that people could live in this unforgiving climate. It was almost eighty out there. Standing within the glass doors, his eyes adjusting to the light, he remembered his errand and turned from ruddy to pale. He made for the front desk, hoping his shyness would not rise up and embarrass him, and he asked for Martha.
There she was, sitting in a pink plastic chair in the lobby, looking all rosy and fragile, while a terribly tall policeman loomed over her. Pádraig, not too tall himself, felt a hot ball of protective anger grow in his chest.
“Now, ‘English’ people might say I’m too big for her,” the garda was saying. “But actually, if she was any bigger, she’d have more work in pushin’ herself along. I’m easy on her, telling her to ease off, when by herself she’d die in a headlong rush. She’s a girl that works hard.”
Pádraig Ó Súilleabáin stopped dead, his fine anger leaking away into puzzlement. What was the man confessing to, in front of Martha that way? And what by seven saints had the opinions of English people to do with California? Two round fists unfisted, and their scarred palms were clammy and cold.
“Now the English-type people do a lot worse to their big bruisers, whippin’ em over fences. There’s more sound old endurance racers than there are hunter-jumpers, believe you me!”
Twisting the Rope Page 15