Pick Up Sticks

by Deaver Brown

  “Don? I do all my business with him. He did his training at some New York bank, then came back here to take over from his father. Old Cavers is the one who financed The Pepper Mill.” Henry sighed nostalgically. “Those were the days.”

  Long experience had taught Thatcher that everybody looked back longingly on the days when payments to the bank constituted a monthly crisis. Nothing could convince Henry he had everything now that he did then, except the suspense.

  “Where to next?”

  Henry looked shamefaced. “Now, I suppose, we’ve got to go to that damned shopping center.”

  At the supermarket Henry seized a shopping cart with one hand, clutched Ruth’s list in the other, and cantered down the aisles. A rain of staples flowed into his basket, from onions to canned soup. This orderly program collapsed at the delicatessen counter. Here he abandoned lists and took the bit between his teeth.

  As Thatcher watched smoked salmon, fried rice and Greek olives succeed each other, he found himself wondering what kind of menu Henry had in mind. It was, he saw, providential that weight restrictions on the Appalachian Trail confined them to unimaginative freeze-dried foods.

  Henry noticed his companion’s look. “Women,” he said largely, “don’t understand delicatessen food.”

  “Don’t you think you have enough?” asked Thatcher. Henry had just ordered some cheesecake as a last-minute inspiration.

  “That’s right. We still have to get to the lumberyard.”

  But fate was cooperating with Henry that day. At the check-out counter they took up their positions behind a familiar plaid shirt.

  “Alec!” said Henry happily.

  Alec Prohack, chief of the construction crew at Fiord Haven, turned to greet them over a basket filled with six-packs of beer and pretzels.

  “Having a few of the boys over to watch the game,” he explained with a wave of the hand.

  “Not working at the site?” Henry inquired.

  “The cops aren’t letting us start until tomorrow.”

  “Too bad,” Thatcher sympathized.

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” Prohack said heavily. “You can’t get on with the job unless the guys you’re building for make up their minds what they want.”

  “Don’t they know what they want?” Thatcher was surprised. Indecision had not seemed characteristic of Fiord Haven.

  “It’s not them. It’s the professor. You know, with the long hair and the lapels. I told Finley at the beginning, he’d need closer roof joists. Now he agrees. But he’s in a huddle with the cops. And, with Quinlan screaming about the extra cost and Valenti worried about the time schedule, nobody’s willing to give us the go-ahead.”

  Henry brushed aside irrelevancies. “What’s Finley doing with the cops?”

  “They found out about some argument between him and that guy, Lester. Naturally if you have a bust-up with a guy who’s murdered, you have to explain to the cops.” Prohack shrugged. “Hell, the cops just want to be able to file it away. No one thinks Finley hammered Lester.”

  “Why not?” Henry asked baldly.

  “Never picked up a hammer in his life,” Prohack said simply.

  Protests from the rear of the line and beckonings from the cash register broke up the conference. Prohack passed through the check-out and into the parking lot. But he left Henry’s ever-fertile mind busily whirring.

  “I don’t think that stands up,” he said, eyes agleam.

  They were back in the car, and Thatcher had not kept pace with his companion’s internal monologue.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “This business of Finley not being the type. After all, he’s as much the type as Amanda or Eunice. The police theory is that somebody lost his head and acted out of type.”

  “But Amanda and Eunice might conceivably have a motive for losing their heads,” Thatcher objected.

  “How do we know about Finley’s motives?” Henry demanded unanswerably. “That’s what we’ve got to find out. Why, we don’t even know how much he’s got riding on Fiord Haven. Or—wait a minute!”

  “Yes?” said Thatcher, fearing the worst.

  “He’s from California, isn’t he? Maybe Lester and Finley knew each other a lot better than we’ve assumed. I can see there’s a lot of work to be done here.”

  Thatcher reminded himself that someone else had undertaken the commitment to cleave to Henry for better or worse.

  “The first thing to do,” he said firmly, “is to tell Ruth about it and see what she says.”

  Ruth, looking firmly into space, said that she thought it was all very interesting. She personally agreed that the master key must lie elsewhere.

  In California.

  Or in Boston.

  In fact, anywhere—far, far away from Captain Frewen.

  “That’s right,” Henry seethed. “What we should do—”

  “What you should do,” said Ruth inexorably, “is go down to Boston.”

  For a moment, Thatcher had feared it would be San Francisco.

  “And see what we can find out,” Henry finished happily.

  “Yes,” said Ruth, giving Thatcher a long look.

  Like Miss Corsa, Ruth was a virtuoso of wordless communication.

  “Boston it is,” said Thatcher.

  And if that was not performance above and beyond the call of duty, he didn’t know what was.

  Chapter 11

  UP A TREE

  FOR THOSE millions of Americans who pile into the family car and speed across this vast continent via six-lane tollways, the Appalachian Trail is pretty small potatoes. True, it extends a respectable two thousand miles from Maine to Georgia, but it boasts no gas stations, no hot dog stands, no Holiday Inns. In the land of Henry Ford, the Appalachian Trail is, after all, only a footpath.

  It is not even an historic footpath. Once upon a time, a considerable stretch of today’s trail was paralleled by the Great Indian Warpath, stretching from the Creek territory in Alabama northward into Pennsylvania. But the Creeks were no fools; they traversed valleys and lowlands, not crests. And today, the Red Man has given way to traffic jams, garbage dumps, and the other amenities of civilization.

  Indeed, contrary to widespread belief, the Appalachian Trail is not a relic of America’s hardier past. It is a mammoth creation of modern man that has generated comparable housekeeping chores. After every winter, after every summer storm, miles of trail must be cleared, then carefully blazed so that no feckless city folk can wander into danger. Apartment dwellers, lulled by air conditioning, have lost their forebears’ healthy respect for nature. The Appalachian Trail has to be kept very safe indeed to allow Americans access to a great wilderness, without overloading rescue squads from Mount Katahdin to Springer Mountain.

  These onerous responsibilities rest on the combined backs of many thousands of men and women who themselves value the exhilaration of the trail and who exert themselves to keep it available to others. Naturally, these enthusiasts have formed clubs: the Green Mountains Club, the Susquehanna Club, the Eastern Branch of the Sierra Club, among others. They hold meetings, they enroll members, they offer programs, they dicker with other clubs. But, above all, they maintain the trail.

  In a very real sense, spiritual and temporal leadership emanates from the Appalachian Mountain Club, on Joy Street, in Boston. The Appalachian Mountain Club is ninety-three years old, the oldest mountaineering group in this hemisphere. The Club maintains three hundred and sixty miles of the trail and has nearly twelve thousand members.

  It is a matter of deep pride, to the Appalachian Mountain Club, that it has preserved many scenic attractions. So, too, is its extensive mountaineering library, open to the public.

  “What do you hope to learn at the Club—besides the fact that Lester was a reliable trip leader and a serious hiker?” asked Thatcher as the taxi from Logan Airport finally emerged from the tunnel to a distressing view of the New Boston.

  “Don’t you worry,” Henry assured him. “They won’t fois
t off that Scout’s honor stuff on me!”

  Henry, Thatcher knew, had an ambivalent approach to the Appalachian Mountain Club. He was, of course, a stalwart in good standing, as he had been these many years. Indeed, Thatcher recalled that Henry was chairman (emeritus) of the Committee on Appalachian Mountain Leadership and Safety, and had guided that body through a hotly fought revision of guidelines. Back in the early days before 1937, Henry, ax in hand, had been one of the pioneers in the field, venturing into uncharted and uncleared territories.

  But in the last decade, a change had taken place. Henry accepted, and discharged with brilliant success, responsibility for the maintenance and marking of 3.6 miles of the Appalachian Trail (from Pepperton Gap to Lumley Crossing). This suzerainty had altered his values. His interest in the Appalachian Mountain Club had not abated, far from it. But his view of self had shifted. From loyal club member, Henry had become a potentate in his own right. The AMC, with 11,500 members, maintained three hundred and sixty miles of the trail. Henry Morland maintained 3.6 miles. All things considered, he was inclined to feel that this left them just about even.

  Oh well, thought Thatcher, they knew Henry pretty well at Joy Street.

  “New Government Center over there,” said the taxi driver, morosely breaking the silence in the immobilized cab. Whatever else they were doing in the New Boston, they were not abandoning a street grid resembling a plate of spaghetti.

  Without much interest, Thatcher and Henry leaned forward to inspect a nightmare of concrete stretching, as Henry put it, in too many directions.

  “Tables,” said the driver bitterly.

  Henry was, inevitably, curious.

  “They got new tables in there,” explained the driver, starting up Beacon Street with a crash of gears. “Cost seven hundred bucks each.”

  The Appalachian Mountain Club, although occupying an ancient building across from the gold dome of Charles Bulfinch’s great State House, promised moral, physical and spiritual distance from the New Boston.

  Thatcher did not look forward to what was coming. Henry never hared off unprepared. On the contrary, if he had a fault along those lines, he overplanned. The trip from New Hampshire to Logan had been spent, from Thatcher’s point of view, learning what Henry hoped to accomplish. Henry wanted to learn more about the late Stephen Lester. To this end, he proposed to talk first with young George Philips who had done Mount Mansfield with Lester last summer and then with one Harold Downes. At lunch Bradford Ogburn, noted geographer, conservationist and AMC eminent, would be pumped.

  “Then,” Thatcher had commented caustically, “I suppose you propose talking to Lester’s secretary and his dentist.”

  He was alarmed by the effect of these words and reminded himself to curb his tongue. His role on this expedition was to brake Henry, not add fuel to the flames.

  “. . . real reliable,” young Philips was earnestly explaining ten minutes later. “In fact—”

  “Yes,” said Henry alertly.

  Philips looked around helplessly. “Well, for my money, he went by the book a little too much.”

  “A perfectionist?” asked Henry, himself a perfectionist.

  George Philips was abashed and Thatcher took pity on him.

  “I take it you mean that Lester was overly rigid.”

  Philips was better with rocks than with words. “That’s it. He was a nice guy, you understand. But if things didn’t go just the way he thought they should—well, he’d let you know about it. He was always laying down the law about one thing or another.”

  By now George Philips was profoundly unhappy. At a guess, Thatcher would say that he was a young man who liked to think well of people. Pressing him for unsavory details about a man now dead was an unkindness.

  It was not one from which Henry shrank.

  “Made a lot of enemies, I suppose,” he said. “Strange how I never noticed this assertiveness when I was on the committee with him.”

  Philips grinned at Henry.

  “You didn’t give him a chance to sound off,” he pointed out. “Anyway, I don’t say Lester made a lot of enemies. But he was the kind of guy who thought he was the only one who never made mistakes.”

  “If that doesn’t make enemies,” Thatcher remarked, “I don’t know what does.”

  Philips was ingenuous. “People just shrug it off,” he said. “Nobody bothers.”

  Somebody, Henry pointed out, had bothered.

  But they had exhausted George Philips’ meager supply of perceptive insights long before the phone told them that Harold Downes was waiting for them in the library.

  “Now we’ll really get some information,” Henry said confidently as he bustled forward. “This is the man who sponsored Lester for membership. Said he’d known him for twelve years in the application.”

  But Harold Downes, while admitting the friendship, dashed Henry’s hopes. First, he insisted on asking them questions.

  “It was a shock, reading about the murder in the papers,” he said, earnestly wagging his head. “I couldn’t believe it was Steve they were talking about. You must know all about it, since you were there.”

  Decency required that they provide an abbreviated account of the murder of Stephen Lester. Henry, audibly champing, did his duty.

  Harold Downes said he would never understand it, not if he lived to be a hundred. This was not as impressive a confession as it might have been. Downes’s kindly, bewildered face made it clear that life presented him with unfathomable mysteries almost daily.

  “I’d like to know about the funeral,” he said soberly. “Alison and I want to attend, as a mark of respect.”

  Thatcher suggested that he call the Lester home in Weston for details. This was enough of an opening for Henry.

  “That’s the second Mrs. Lester out in Weston,” he said pointedly. “But I guess you know all about that, having been a friend of Lester’s for so many years.”

  Downes blinked uncertainly. “Well, I don’t know that I’d say that,” he said cautiously. “You see, I knew Steve when we were both students in Cambridge, graduate students, that is. We were in the Outing Club together. We saw a lot of each other in those days. But, of course, when he went out to the Coast, we lost touch. I hadn’t heard from him in years when he called up one day and said he’d moved back East and wanted to join the Appalachian Club. I was glad to sponsor him. He’d been active in the Sierra Club in California, and worked on their conservation committee. And, of course, I remembered what a good rock climber he was—”

  Henry moved to forestall yet another dissertation on Stephen Lester’s excellence as a mountaineer.

  “But then you must have known Lester during his first marriage,” he said accusingly.

  Downes was certainly anxious to oblige. He frowned harder than ever. “You know, when I was reading the story in the paper about the two wives, I was trying to remember about her. I think, in fact I’m almost sure, that I did meet her at one of the Club’s Christmas parties.”

  “You mean you only met her once?” Henry was outraged.

  Downes looked up in mild surprise. “That’s right. She never came on any of our trips, or anything. I think she had a job and couldn’t get away. Besides, Steve wasn’t the type, you know.”

  Before Henry frightened his fish, Thatcher decided to take a hand. “I’m afraid we don’t know, Mr. Downes. I never met Mr. Lester alive. What type wasn’t he?”

  Downes responded to gentler methods by displaying a surprising aptitude for social commentary.

  “With married students, one of two things happens. You understand, I’m talking about someone who gets married but moves in a crowd that’s mostly unmarried. Either the guy goes domestic and his house becomes the natural clubhouse for gatherings—there’s always a refrigerator full of food and drink and a comfortable living room and a wife who’ll get out cheese and crackers—or else he keeps his marriage completely apart and comes out for a beer just like anyone else. Steve was like that. I don’t think any of us we
re ever invited up to his place.”

  Henry obviously disapproved of this mode of life, but whether because it was hard on the wife at the time or because it was hard on the detective years later, Thatcher could not say.

  “And you all accepted this?” Henry said sternly.

  Downes was not one of nature’s warriors. “What would you have expected us to do?” Then he shrugged. “But, hell, sure we accepted it. We didn’t know anything about marriage. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it until now. And, now, I’m a different person. I’ve been married for eight years. I’ve got three kids.”

  “So now it does seem odd. You don’t think that’s the way you’d treat your own wife.”

  Suddenly Downes grinned broadly.

  “I’d like to see me trying. You don’t know Alison.”

  En route to their luncheon engagement, Henry tried to summarize. He did it in one sentence.

  “Nobody liked Lester.”

  “I don’t think it’s that straightforward, Henry. Nobody liked him, but nobody seems to have realized it.”

  “These outdoor types,” said Henry with fine contempt. “You can’t expect them to analyze their feelings.”

  Thatcher opted for diplomacy. “Certainly you have a point there. But I wonder if Lester may not have had some chameleon quality of his own. He seems to have had a talent for being accepted as the conventional norm in any group he moved into.”

  “It’s simpler than that, John.” Henry gave a short bark of laughter. “Lester just told everybody he was a man of high standards and they believed him.”

  But they were about to meet one man who had not.

  Dr. Bradford Ogburn, who frequently lectured on Our Ascent of Everest or Twenty Days on Manga Pan, was more critical.

  “No, I know you didn’t notice, Henry, but Lester was basically not a good committee man. Oh yes, he did his homework but he was stubborn as sin. To be frank, he didn’t know how to get along with people.”

  This cool assessment was made over lunch in the Men’s Bar of Locke Ober’s. Ogburn had listened to the details of Lester’s dramatic death without particular distress.

  “Like him?” he replied to a broadside from Henry. “No, I didn’t particularly like him. That doesn’t mean I hit him over the head, Henry. Believe me.”