An Author Bites the Dust b-11

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An Author Bites the Dust b-11 Page 14

by Arthur W. Upfield


  “No, it wasn’t,” she said. “He had his room built in the garden. It’s just plainly furnished with a bed couch, an arm chair, a felt carpet, and a writing desk. There’s hundreds of books in cases and a big typewriter on its special table. In a cupboard he kept brandy and dry ginger and a glass. A great man for his drink. He even had a cupboard in the garage.”

  “In the garage!” exclaimed Bony.

  “In the garage,” she repeated. “I never knew a man like him. The more he drank the plainer he spoke and the steadier he walked.”

  “Did he keep drink in the garage as well as in his writing-room?”persisted Bony, and the green eyes smouldered. She spoke slowly to emphasize the truth of her words.

  “I saw him at the cupboard in the garage that night he brought Miss Chesterfield from the city. I had a headache and took a couple of aspirins, and cook advised me to get out in the cool of the evening for a little while before dinner was served. It happened I was at the side of the house when I saw him drive the car into the garage. He went to the cupboard in the far corner, and he took out a glass and a bottle, and he poured himself a drink and dashed it down. A sneaker, I called it. And then he hurried outside and shut and locked the doors.

  “And Mrs Montrose waiting on him hand and foot,” Ethel went on. “Came into the kitchen herself for his jug of milk and glass, and took them to his writing-room, saying he’d have had a tiring afternoon in the city and the milk would steady his poor stomach. A slinky, scheming woman, that. Making eyes at him all the time and Mrs Blake laughing up her sleeve at her. Not that he took any notice of the Montrose woman. Not a bit. I reckon he had used her up long ago.”

  “He always drank milk before dinner, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Cook said it was to settle the booze in him he’d had in the afternoonso’s he could begin again sober in the evening.”

  “Mrs Montrose is a well-known writer, too, isn’t she?”

  “Oh yes, written a lot of books, I think. She was telling the Pommy writer about them for hours, and he was putting it all into a large note-book. Insulting, filthy beast.”

  “Mrs Montrose, or the-”

  “The Pommy writer. Man by the name of Marshall Ellis,” Red-head said aggressively.“Thought it was clever to be rude. Food stains on all his waistcoats. Little piggy eyes, and picked his teeth after eating. But his voice! Oh, his voice, when you weren’t looking at him! If they pushed a voice like his into afillum star, there’d be a screaming riot with all the bobbysocksers in the world.”

  “A peculiar man, Miss Lacy. Please go on. What of the others?”

  “The others? Oh! Well, there was Twyford Arundal. He was lovely. Give him two gins and squash and he’d recite poetry. Give him four and he’d compose it, and Ella Montrose would take it down. They had to be careful with him after the sixth, because when he’d had about six, he’d still go on composing poetry but nothing would come out of his mouth.

  “Then there was Martin Lubers. He’s in the wireless, you know. More than once he’d say something that would rile them, but theycrawfished to him no end. I was telling cook about it one day and she said it was because he had a high job in the wireless, and got them all a lot of publicity. It’s all wheels within wheels, she said, and I think there’s a deal of truth in that.”

  “H’m! Well, that’s all most interesting,” Bony said. “Er, they often had people from overseas staying with them, Mrs Farn tells me. Were you there this time last year when Dr Dario Chaparral was visiting theBlakes?”

  “Yes, I was. There was the same crowd almost. Wilcannia-Smythe, Ella Montrose, Twyford Arundal, and Martin Lubers, and Miss Chesterfield some evenings. The doctor was a character, if ever there was one. I just used to like waiting at table when he was there. The stories he told! Ooh! Tales about the people in his country. All sorts of tales, and about the natives who cut off the heads of dead people and reduced them to the size of an orange, and that kind of thing. Mrs Montrose would write them down sometimes, even at dinner. And all the time, the little doctor would laugh and smile and look as though he was telling smutty stories.”

  “He brought his own ping-pong balls with him, didn’t he, Miss Lacy?”

  “Yes, he did. Before he came theBlakes didn’t have one and they couldn’t be bought, either. He gave a whole box of them to Mrs Blake. My! Could he play! He was like lightning.”

  Bony thoroughly enjoyed the evening, though it cost him an effort to tell of his own activities in the newspaper world of Johannesburg. Mrs Farn provided a light supper of tea and sandwiches and her brother came inin time to join them.

  At half past ten the party broke up, Bony gallantly escorting Ethel to her parents’ home. He was her very first escort who did not evince a passionate desire to kiss her good night, and for several days she was unable to make up her mind whether she was pleased about that or not.

  He reached Rose Cottage at eleven. Miss Pinkney had retired, leaving in his room a bottle of whisky and a barrel of biscuits. He spent two hours going through the official file again, and when eventually he poured himself a drink and munched a biscuit, he was frowning.

  Chapter Nineteen

  An Unexpected Ally

  IT was Friday morning, and Napoleon Bonaparte strolled along the shady side of Swanston Street, pleased with the world in general and with the prospect of meeting Nancy Chesterfield in particular. He had dawdled over morning tea and the newspapers, and now intended interviewing the Australian publishers of the internationally known I. R. Watts.

  Arrived at the offices of the Monarch Publishing Company, he asked to see someone in authority.

  “My name is Napoleon Bonaparte,” he said bluntly to a large man behind a resplendent desk. “I am a visitor to this country from South Africa, where I am known as an author and journalist. I am a strong admirer of the works of I. R. Watts. You publish his books, and you would be bestowing a great favour on me if you gave me his address.”

  “That, I regret, I cannot do, Mr-er-Bonaparte,” stated the large man. “It would be against the fixed policy of this firm to give to anyone the address of its authors. However, if you care to write to I. R. Watts, I’ll have the letter forwarded.”

  “I thank you. Yes, perhaps that will be the best way,” Bony agreed. “Could you relent so far as to inform me if I. R. Watts is living in this State?”

  “Oh yes, that is so.”

  “Thank you. Forgive me for presuming once more. Can you tell me exactly whatis commercial fiction?”

  The publisher smiled as he might at a harmless lunatic.

  “Commercial fiction is any piece of fiction that will sell.”

  “Oh! What, then, is literature?”

  “Same thing, with the addition of non-fictional writings up to standard for offering for sale.”

  “Ah! The same thing!” Bony murmured. “Thank you. I have been given to understand that in this country there is a distinct difference between literature and commercial fiction.”

  The publisher smiled, saying, “The distinction doesn’t exist in any publishing house anywhere in the world.”

  “Again I thank you, sir,” Bony said. “I haven’t read any Australian authors other than I. R. Watts. May I assume that there are other masters of Australian literature?”

  “Thousands of ’em, Mr Bonaparte, tens of thousands of them. A master of literature is the man, or the woman, who enters a bookshop or a library with money to spend on books.”

  “Just so! Very neat indeed,” Bony exclaimed. “I thank you. Good morning. I’ll write to I. R. through this address.”

  Still pleased with the world, Bony walked down Swanston Street, strolled in and out of several book shops, filling in time until he came to stand outside the main entrance of the newspaper building where Nancy Chesterfield marketed vanity. He continued to stand there until three minutes past one o’clock, the time set for his luncheon appointment. When he went up in the lift it was four minutes past one, and when he entered Nancy Chesterfield’s office he was ex
actly five minutes late.

  “Why, it’s Inspector Bonaparte!” she exclaimed.

  “My apologies for being late, Miss Chesterfield. I was detained on a quest for information. There is no need to ask after your health.”

  “Neither is there need to ask after your own,” she countered, her brows arched.

  “My health concerns me less than my appetite. I could eat-anything.”

  She was putting on her gloves, and she looked up from them to say, “You have no regrets for having deceived a poor female?”

  “I am the gayest deceiver in the country.”

  The blue eyes clouded. “What is it you want from me?” sheasked, her voice brittle.

  “Table companionship, the envy of other men, and to be informed on the difference between literature and commercial fiction. In return, I am able to give-well, very little. You see, I am a person of no importance in the political, the social, or the literary world. How did you unmask me?”

  The cloud vanished from her eyes, and her voice shed its brittleness.

  “That was easy,” she said. “After you left the other day I rang through to the morgue-that’s our Records Room, you know. They found your name easily enough, your profession, all about you, even that you caught a swordfish weighing over four hundred pounds.”

  Bony laughed without restraint, and she laughed with him.

  “And I went to no end of trouble in having the editor of theJohannesburg Age prepared to receive an inquiry about me. Alas, I am becoming too famous. Well, do we go along?”

  “Of course, Mr Bonaparte. I would have been disappointed had your courage failed you.”

  He opened the door and she passed into the corridor. He said, before they reached the lift, “My courage often fails, Miss Chesterfield, but my will to succeed, never.”

  “To succeed in what?”

  “In what I set out to accomplish.”

  They talked of nothing as they descended to the street level, and he accompanied her to her car parked outside the building. They continued to talk of nothing as they drove to a women’s club in Spencer Street.

  “Being a foreigner in Victoria, Mr Bonaparte, you are lunching with me,” she explained. “You want to talk to me, don’t you? Cross-examine me, and the rest of it? As a matter of fact, I want to talk to you. Here we may talk.”

  “You are being exceedingly generous,” he said, quietly.

  She examined him with thoughtful appraisement, liking the cut of his light-grey suit, the expensive shirt, the tasteful tie. She liked his face and the shape of his head, and the way he did his hair. He was a new experience to her, and shewas liking that, too.

  Herself smartly tailored in a blue-grey suit, with a suggestion of flame in the soft red of her blouse, and wearing a small black hat that threw into relief the tint of her perfectlycoiffured hair, Nancy Chesterfield was an experience quite new to Napoleon Bonaparte. As they faced each other across the white and silver table, the eyes of two fencing mastersclashed, held firmly. She was the first to speak, and she astonished him.

  “If you want any assistance in this Mervyn Blake business, I’ll give you all I can.”

  “Mervyn Blake business!” he echoed.

  “It is why you are staying with Miss Pinkney. It is why-” and she smiled-“you are pursuing me.”

  “It is admitted, Miss Chesterfield.”

  “I have a friend in the C.I.B. who knows something of you,” she told him. “He said that in certain circles you are known as the man who never fails.”

  “Partially true, only partially, Miss Chesterfield. I have failed to instil into my eldest son’s mind the necessity for conservative spending. I have failed my long-suffering wife. I have-”

  “Never failed to-the word isfinalize, and I like it-never failed to finalize an investigation.”

  “I have certainly been fortunate in my professional career,” he said, unsmilingly.

  “To what do you owe your uninterrupted successes? It sounds as though I were interviewing you, doesn’t it?”

  “I think I owe it to patience, to a disregard of inconvenient orders from superiors, and to a slight knowledge of human psychology.”

  “And,” she took him up, “to an extraordinary mixture of pride and humility. You had a lot of hurdles to get over, didn’t you? Almost as many as confronted me. We have the same type of mind, Mr Bonaparte. We started, I imagine, from the same scratch line. Mervyn Blake was like us, but he failed. We have been successful because we love our work. He failed because he wanted the rewards with all his passionate heart, without having to work too hard for them. For him, writing was a means to an end, and the end was fame. With us, were we creative writers, the end would be the joy in creative writing and the fame to go to hell. I liked Mervyn Blake. He had many fine qualities. I want to help you unearth his murderer.” Her mouth tightened, and then she asked, “May I call you Nap?”

  It brought the flashing smile.

  “If it pleases you,” he told her. “If you want to please me, call me Bony.”

  “Bony it shallbe, and you shall call me Nan. Don’t think me swift, because I’m not really. I want you to treat me as an ally, not a suspect, and I want you to accept the relationship without any waste of time. Don’t let us fence any longer. We both know that Mervyn Blake didn’t just die.”

  His gaze dropped to his food. Of what he was thinking she could not guess, but she was sure he was not seeking an advantage. For a full minute neither spoke. Then he was looking at her as no man ever had regarded her. In another it would have been an insult. His bright blue eyes began with an examination of her clothes, and continued with an examination of feature by feature until finally they gazed with penetrating steadiness into her own eyes.

  He said, “Are you prepared to give me your full confidence and be satisfied with only a portion of mine?”

  She nodded, and he asked, “When shall we begin?”

  “Now, if you like.”

  “Very well. Why are you so sure that Mervyn Blake was murdered?”

  “I don’t know why. I can’t tell you.”

  “Do you know of a probable motive for killing him?”

  She shook her head.

  “You must not be offended if I throw your words back to you,” he warned. “You said just now that Blake wanted the rewards but did not like the work that earned them. Will you enlarge on that?”

  “I didn’t say that he disliked the work of writing,” Nancy asserted. “He liked it well enough, but it took second place to the ambition to be famous. He wasn’t the great man a number of people thought he was, and he knew it. He had in high degree the gift of word painting, and in low degree the gift of telling a story. The division of those two gifts is even greater in Wilcannia-Smythe, but he is more accomplished in deluding himself.”

  “I confess that I don’t see where this affair begins and where it ends,” Bony said. “I find myself unable to make a reasonably accurate assessment of the importance of these people. I am very feminine in my gift of intuition, and I have felt, and still do, that the motive for killing Blake, if he was murdered, lies somewhere in a distinction between what is termed literature and commercial fiction. Bagshott may have thrown me out of gear. On the other hand, he might very well have pointed out the track for me to follow. Am I right in assuming that a great novelist has in high degree the gift of story-telling added to the gift of word painting?”

  “Yes-and the gift of taking pains.”

  “Apply your measure to I. R. Watts.”

  “He can paint word pictures and tell a story, but he lacks the gift of taking pains.”

  “And Clarence B. Bagshott?”

  “Bagshott is a born story-teller, but he lacks the gift of taking pains with his word painting. He is too slipshod ever to become a great novelist. But a story teller-he is certainly that.”

  “Was Blake conscious ofhis own limitations?”

  “I think he was. You see, he must have realized that when his books were refused pub
lication in London and America they were not-well, good enough.”

  “Go on, please.”

  “I know this much about Mervyn Blake,” she said. “When he could not publish overseas, he strove to exert his influence on Australian literature so that he would secure an undying place in it. Long ago he and Wilcannia-Smythe planned it all. Fitted only to be flunkeys at the Court of World Literature, they decided it would be preferable to be joint dictators of the local Court of Literature.”

  “What influence did they exert on Australian literature?”

  “Actually very little. They tried to lead it. No one can do that. A nation’s literature goes on and up or on and down in accordance with the mental virility of its writers.”

  “Was there, or rather, is there a great deal of what is termed back-slapping going on among author-critics?”

  “Quite a lot, but, as Abe Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all the time, and in the long run it doesn’t do them any good. They have news value, not because they are authors but because they succeed in having themselves elected office bearers in literary societies. They don’t influence the unbiased critic.”

  “Thank you, Nan. We are getting along very nicely.”

  “I thought we could move once we got started, Bony.”

  “Of course. Let’s attack the problem from a different angle. Was there any other woman in love with Mervyn Blake?”

  “Ella Montrose was very fond of him. But-”

  “Don’t think it. Was any other man in love with Mrs Blake?”

  “Little Twyford Arundal worshipped her from a distance,” Nancy replied. “I think that Martin Lubers liked her.”

  “Only liked her?”

  “That is all, I think.”

  “I have read the record of what occurred that last afternoon and evening of Blake’s life as set down by you. Did you forget anything when you made your statement?”

  “No. InspectorSnooks saw to that.”

  “Was Blake interested in women?”

  “I don’t think so. He liked me. Liked me; no passion.”

  “What about his private life? His relations with his wife?”

 

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