Angels of Mercy

by Duncan, Alice

  “Let’s take Buttercup with us.”

  The statement didn’t come from me. Rather, it had been spoken by Lulu, who was clearly as unsettled by the concealed nature of Mr. Gossett’s former home as I.

  “Good idea.”

  Buttercup thought it was a grand idea, too. She nearly tore the leash from my hand in her eagerness to dash up the walkway past all those hedges and trees. I took this enthusiasm on her part as a good sign, figuring if danger lurked ahead, surely she’d detect it sooner than we mere humans. Weren’t dogs supposed to be good at sniffing out trouble?

  Lulu and I followed my poodle up the path, which curved a few yards along, revealing the front of the house, which had a big porch.

  “It looks empty,” said Lulu.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hoping it’s empty.”

  “You can’t back out now,” I told her bracingly.

  “I’m not backing out. But I sure don’t much like the looks of that place.”

  Neither did I, but I thought I’d better not say so. “Well, there’s no harm in knocking on the door,” I said, still trying to be bracing. In truth, the place was giving me the creeps.

  However, Buttercup remained keen on her journey up the path, and I took her attitude as assurance that there was nothing to fear by continuing on our way.

  Nevertheless, I still felt creepy as I climbed the porch steps and pushed an electric ringer button. My own home still had one of the old-fashioned twist varieties of doorbells, but Mr. Gossett must have tried to be up to date with the times. He’d had a relatively visible position in Hollywood to uphold, after all.

  “Nope. Nobody’s home,” Lulu said with great relief approximately six seconds after we heard the bell toll in the house.

  “Nonsense. Nobody’s had time to get to the door yet,” I told her, even though I, too, had the urge to turn around and run back to the car. But I kept my faith in Buttercup, whose tail still wagged.

  “Nuts, Mercy. I’m scared.”

  “Buck up,” I told her, not letting on that I was scared too. “I’ll just ring the bell one more time and then—”

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because the door opened in our faces. I know I jumped, and I suspect Lulu did, too. Buttercup just kept wagging.

  “May I help you?” asked the woman who stood in the doorway politely. “What a sweet doggie!”

  That comment sealed the deal for me. I decided anyone who appreciated Buttercup couldn’t be all bad. I smiled ingratiatingly at the woman. “My name is Miss Allcutt, and this is Miss LaBelle. My dog is named Buttercup. We came here today because we have a few questions about the late Mr. Gossett’s untimely demise. I,” I continued, as I saw the woman’s eyes widen, “work for Mr. Ernest Templeton, who is assisting the police with their investigation.”

  The woman glanced from Lulu and me to Buttercup and back again. “You always go investigating with your dog?” She gave me a squinty-eyed look.

  I laughed unconvincingly. “Oh, no. But Buttercup loves to go for rides, and I didn’t think her coming along would do any harm.”

  “You got any identification? You with the cops, you said?” The woman appeared quite doubtful.

  Looking back on the situation, I can’t say that I fault her much for being dubious. We must have presented an odd picture as investigators.

  “No,” I said, and tried to explain the inexplicable. “I work for Mr. Ernest Templeton. Mr. Templeton is an investigator who’s working on the case. I’m just here to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “What questions? The cops already asked me every question they could think of.”

  So I decided to dive right in. She might slam the door in our faces, but she might not. “Well, for instance, I understand you told the police you saw Calvin Buck, the fellow who’s been arrested for the crime, in Mr. Gossett’s home on the day of the murder.”

  “Yeah? So what?”

  “But the first time the police spoke with you, you didn’t tell them about Mr. Buck being inside the house. I just wondered why that was. Did you recall later that you saw him? Did you speak to him or anything like that?”

  “Speak to him? No. I just seen him, is all.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “What do you mean, where did I see him?”

  Oh, brother. The woman wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box. “I mean, did you see him inside the house? Did you see him on the grounds?”

  “Oh. Naw, I just seen him on the sidewalk when I was going to church on the other side of the street.”

  “I see.” In other words, she hadn’t seen Calvin Buck at all, but only a Negro fellow walking on the sidewalk. Racial prejudice was a terrible thing. “You also mentioned a man and a woman who came to the house that day.”

  “Yeah? What about ’em?”

  “Can you give me a description of the two?”

  The woman cocked her head to one side and thought. I hoped she wouldn’t burn any of her little gray cells by doing anything so unusual for her. “Well, I didn’t see the girl too good. The guy was a slick customer.”

  “A slick customer? How so?”

  “Oh, you know.” She flipped her hand in the air, as if to describe what she meant, although the gesture meant nothing to me.

  I waited for a second, but she didn’t seem inclined to continue, so I said, “Um, no, I don’t know. What does a slick customer look like?”

  She chuffed out an aggrieved breath. “Oh, you know. Had his hair slicked back with grease and wore one of them, what do you call ’em? One of them slick suits like the gangsters wear and one of them whattayou call ’em. Fedoras.”

  I hadn’t known gangsters wore any particular types of suits, and I didn’t know what was sinister about a fedora hat, but I’d be sure to ask Ernie about these items of men’s fashion the next day when I went back to work. “And you didn’t see the woman who was with him?”

  “Wasn’t no woman. She was a girl.”

  “A little girl? You mean she was a child?”

  “No. More of a young woman, like. Seventeen. Eighteen. Somewheres around there. She looked a lot younger than the slick customer, I can tell you that.” She sniffed. “Looked like a flapper to me in that short skirt.” She chuffed again.

  Instantly I thought about Peggy Wickstrom. Then I reminded myself that Los Angeles was full of young women who’d come to the City of Angels with the hope of becoming movie stars, most of them tried to look all the rage, and the rage was focused on the flapper at the moment. It was quite unlikely that Peggy Wickstrom had visited Milton Halsey Gossett on the day of his demise. The man with the woman might well have been Johnny Autumn, however, bringing Mr. Gossett one of the fallen women from his flock. Darn it! Now I wished I’d got a description of Autumn from Ernie. Or, since he probably wouldn’t have obliged me, from Peggy herself.

  “Do you know why the man and the young woman called on Mr. Gossett?”

  She gave yet another sniff and appeared undecided for a moment or two. However, her pent-up emotions managed to get the better of her at last, and she blurted out, “No, but I can guess! If I’d’a known what kind of a man Mr. Gossett was, I’d never of took up keeping house for him, I can tell you that. Why, the man was a gambler! And he visited—”

  Her mouth clamped shut, as if she couldn’t say the words aloud. I tried to help her along. “Loose women?” I suggested, trying to show her that I shared her opinion of men who frequented gambling establishments and other dens of iniquity.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “What’s worse is that he had loose women visit him. Right here. In this house! I didn’t know it, or I’d’ve quit months ago. His chauffeur told me all about the evil things the man did after he died.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been so took in by a fellow.”

  “Learning he was of low moral character must have come as quite a blow,” I said, my voice oozing sympathy.

  “You can say that again.”

&n
bsp; I didn’t get the chance, because she continued, “Say, I was just about to make me a cup of tea. I haven’t had the chance to talk to anyone in days and days, trying to get this place cleaned up and ready to let, except the chauffeur, and he’s a chump. You gals want to take a cup of tea with me? I have some fruitcake, too.”

  “Thank you very much! That’s awfully kind of you.”

  “Nuts. There’s no reason I can think of why I shouldn’t use up Gossett’s supplies so long as I gotta stay out the rest of the month here. But I’ve got me another job lined up, and this time I know the place is respectable, because I’ll be working for a family. Goes to show you should never work for a bachelor, I guess.”

  Ernie was a bachelor, and to the best of my knowledge, he was a man of good character. Of course, I couldn’t vouch for his non-working hours, but still . . .

  “Thanks,” said Lulu. “Mind if we bring in the dog?”

  The woman waved her arm to beckon us into the house. “Why not? Nobody’s here to complain, and that there doggie’s better company than most of the people who’ve been through those doors.”

  “It’s so good to meet you and for you to speak with us like this, Mrs. . . . um . . .” I murmured as we followed her.

  “Name’s Wallace. Mrs. Wallace.”

  “This is very kind of you, Mrs. Wallace.”

  She grumbled some more about if she’d known about Mr. Gossett’s immoral habits before she’d been hired for the job, she’d never have taken it as she led us through to the kitchen. In order to get there, we had to walk through the living room, and I interrupted her monologue for a moment.

  “Is this where you found Mr. Gossett on Monday morning?” I stopped and, I regret to say, pointed. My mother would have a fit if she ever saw me pointing. Phooey on my mother, say I.

  “Lord a’mercy, what a jolt that was,” cried the woman, fanning her face with one hand and pressing her other one to her bosom. “No. He was more over there, near the staircase.”

  I looked toward the staircase. “Was his head toward the staircase, or were his feet pointed at the stairs?” I asked. God knows why. I certainly couldn’t come to a conclusion about who’d shot the man by knowing the position in which he died.

  The woman surprised me, though. “Here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” In an aside, she said, “The coppers took out the rug, or I wouldn’t do this, but there’s no harm in helping you with the investigation, I figure. Might help. I think they ought to hire more women in the police department. Females got more sense than men, most of ’em.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly with this pronouncement and decided not to remind her we weren’t with the police. I knew that the police sometimes used dogs in their investigations, but to the best of my knowledge, the dogs they used weren’t toy poodles.

  “My first name’s Aggie, by the way. Aggie’s short for Agatha, just like that lady who writes them books.”

  “I see. Thank you, Mrs. Wallace. Is there a Mr. Wallace?” Don’t ask me why I asked that, because it was surely none of my business and nothing to the purpose.

  “Not any longer. He died. That’s why I had to take up working as a cook/housekeeper. Mr. Wallace, he kept me pretty well when he was alive, but he didn’t have no savings.” She heaved a huge sigh as she got to her knees a few feet from the foot of the staircase. To my surprise, she lay on her stomach. “This is how I found him.”

  “My goodness,” I said. “For some reason, I thought he’d been lying on his back when he was found.”

  “Nope. Whoever done it shot him in the back of the head, like a dirty coward.”

  I considered shooting people cowardly no matter how they did it—well, unless one were defending oneself, of course. And then I understood Mrs. Wallace’s point. If a person was heading away from one, shooting him in the back of the head did seem a cowardly act. However, it looked to me now as though whoever had shot Mr. Gossett had done so as he’d been walking away from the staircase. Could the shooter have been on the stairs? Did it matter? Crumb, I didn’t know.

  Lulu and I each took one of Mrs. Wallace’s arms and helped her to her feet. “And you have no idea who did the ghastly deed?”

  “It was that boy they arrested, of course. There was no reason for him to come by the house on a Sunday.”

  “Were you working on that Sunday?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

  “Well, no, but I go to church on the corner. That’s when I seen him. What else could he have been doing in this neighborhood, a colored man and all?”

  I could think of any number of reasons for a colored man to be walking on Carroll Street on a Sunday morning, ranging from leaving or going to the home in which he worked to walking to church just as Mrs. Wallace had been doing, but I didn’t offer them to Mrs. Wallace, who seemed determined to see things her way.

  “And you’re sure that man was Calvin Buck?”

  “Listen, I know it was him, ’cause he was the only blackie I ever seen in the neighborhood.”

  “I see. No one else on the street has a colored maid or a colored man working in his or her employ?”

  “Well . . . as to that, I can’t say as I know for sure,” she admitted.

  By that time we’d made it to the kitchen, and she gestured Lulu and me to take a couple of chairs arranged around a small table. The kitchen in Mr. Gossett’s house reminded of my own, which made me think kitchens must all be pretty much alike in the overall scheme of things: a table and chairs, a stove, an ice box or a refrigerator, knives, a cutting board, a pie safe. I suppose there’s some variation in decoration schemes, but kitchens were kitchens.

  “You knew Calvin Buck pretty well by the time of the murder, didn’t you?” I asked as Mrs. Wallace turned lit the gas under the tea kettle.

  “Not to say I knew him well. But I knew him. He served meals here and tidied up for Mr. Gossett.”

  “Had he ever seemed to be a boy who was drawn to trouble?”

  “How should I know that?” she demanded. “He’s colored. What can you expect?”

  Oh, boy. I could see what Ernie was up against in attempting to help the Bucks. I’d venture to guess most of the Los Angeles police department believed as firmly as this woman did that colored people were naturally drawn to criminal activities.

  “But he was always polite to Mr. Gossett and his guests? And to you?” I tacked that on at the end just to make sure she didn’t feel left out.

  She shrugged. “I reckon.”

  To my surprise, Lulu took up the conversational gauntlet. “Just because a boy’s colored doesn’t mean he’s a criminal,” she said, sounding a shade defensive of Calvin Buck, probably because she knew and liked his parents.

  “Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Who else could have done it?” asked Mrs. Wallace, a distinct whine in her voice.

  “My money’s on the man and woman who visited him that Sunday,” said Lulu. Then she asked, and astutely, I must admit, “Say, you said you weren’t working here that Sunday. How’d you manage to see those two, anyhow?”

  Mrs. Wallace had turned away from the stove and was reaching for a canister of tea. I could tell it was tea because the canister said so. She also blushed a bit. “I seen them, too, getting out of a machine when I walked past Mr. Gossett’s place.” She measured some tea into a tea infuser and laid it aside.

  “I see,” I said, thinking there surely ought to be a follow-up question to that one.

  Fortunately for me, Lulu thought of it. “What kind of machine was it?”

  “Mercy sakes, child, I don’t know automobiles! It was big and black. That’s all I know.”

  Big and black. Big help. Half the cars on the road were big and black.

  “Did it look sporty?” asked Lulu.

  “Sporty? I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Wallace, although her voice carried doubt.

  “Was it low-slung?” Lulu again.

  “Low-slung? Naw. It was big and boxy. You know, like one of them big Buicks or something.”

  “Did it
have any kind of hood ornament?” asked Lulu.

  Hood ornament? What in the world was a hood ornament?

  Mrs. Wallace apparently knew, because she thought about Lulu’s question for quite a while. Then the kettle began to boil, so she returned to the stove and poured hot water into the teapot, rinsed it out, put the tea infuser in the pot and then added more hot water. I determined to ask Mrs. Buck if that pouring-hot-water-into-the-teapot thing and pouring it out again was something one was supposed to do before making tea. Maybe it was some sort of cooking rule. I really wanted to learn more about cooking!

  “You know,” she said as she set the teapot on the table and returned to a cupboard for some teacups, “now that you mention it, I think I did notice a hood ornament. It looked kind of like a red Indian chief. In one of them what do you call ’ems? Head dresses? You know, with the feathers and stuff?”

  Lulu’s hand slapped the table, making me jump and Buttercup bark. “It’s a Pontiac! The nineteen twenty-five Pontiac has a hood ornament just like that!”

  “Oh, yeah? I never much noticed ’em before. Hood ornaments, I mean.”

  Boy, and here I didn’t even know what a hood ornament was. I could learn a lot from these two women, which just went to show that you never could tell about people. These two might not have a whole lot of book-learning, but they had practical knowledge that was much more important in investigative work than literary knowledge.

  “A Pontiac,” I mused, wondering how I could find out what kind of automobile Johnny Autumn drove.

  “I guess it was, if Miss LaBelle says it was,” said Mrs. Wallace.

  We drank tea, ate fruitcake and chatted a while longer. It seemed to me that Mrs. Wallace had managed to give us all the information she had to bestow when we took our leave around three in the afternoon.

  As soon as we got home, Buttercup and I ran up the stairs, and I jotted down a list of things to tell and/or ask Ernie when I went to work the next morning. I was rather proud of Lulu’s and my excursion onto Carroll Street that day.