Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

  “Bank on it.”

  Harry Madrid left and Cassidy crawled back into bed, the emerald under his pillow. Nazi green. He smiled to himself, blew out the candle, listened to the wind at the window.

  He was thinking about Mona Ransom. What was her number, anyway? Was she just a goony adventuress? A head case, a Section Eight? An old-fashioned nympho?

  He remembered her calling Tash Benedictus a drunken sot. He remembered her comforting the poor girl, Dora. …

  She had seemed very much in control then, able to dominate her drunken sot of a husband. And, God knew, she’d been totally in control when she’d come to his room. And she’d got precisely what she’d come for.

  But what had she meant: Tash … He knew you were coming. …

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CASSIDY DECIDED THAT TUGGLE, MAINE, under the blanket of snow, looked like a Hollywood construction on a backlot somewhere, the setting for one of those romantic comedies with a moral that would show Cary Grant or William Powell or Ronald Colman to good advantage with Loretta Young or Irene Dunne. Maybe a Pinnacle Picture, though hardly a Mona Ransom vehicle. All the sounds were muffled and you could hear the chains clinking as the wheels rolled through the snow. The cafe at the corner had grown a patina of ice on the plate-glass windows and everybody was smiling the way folks do when they’re drawn together by the elements having a go at them. It was all just the way a small town up in the piney woods was supposed to be, even with a castle nearby and the wreckage of a plane with a corpse in the cockpit providing a hearty repast for the local insect population.

  The Packard convertible, wearing its chains, moved in stately grace toward the corner cafe, Harriet’s Kitchen, and settled up against a drift half obscuring a mailbox. Harry Madrid got out and stretched, taking deep manly breaths. Cassidy stepped into the drift and hobbled out to the sidewalk. He was stiff but happy to be leaving simple little Tuggle, where he had yet to find anything that made much sense.

  They had left the castle at first light, showered and cleaned up the best they could, full of hot coffee, shivering in the cold. The butler had driven them until they’d located Tom Hayes’s truck, one of the larger drifts on the road where they’d left it two days before. They declined Tom’s invitation to join him and his wife for breakfast. Cassidy couldn’t face a family get-together and said they had to try to get to New York in one shot and you never knew how bad the roads might be.

  Once they drove away from the Hayes house, Cassidy turned to Harry Madrid. “But first, my good companion, we have a breakfast fit for men hitting the road. And I find a newspaper.”

  It was positively steamy in Harriet’s Kitchen. It was eight o’clock and the booths were mostly full. It was like a surprise holiday and you had the feeling that the morning regulars had been joined by fellows who’d normally have been doing something else. The boisterous holiday quality mingled with the steam and the aroma of coffee and frying bacon and hot toast and maple syrup and the sound of snow shovels scraping along the sidewalk outside.

  Cassidy saw newspapers in a stack by the cash register, newspapers from Bangor and Portland for the last few days. He slapped the change down on the counter and led the way to the last empty booth. “Harry, order breakfast for both of us and don’t spare the horses. It’s a long way to New York.” He sighed as Harry Madrid began rumbling to the fat waitress with tightly curled hair like copper filings. He found the sports pages.

  That first day out in the woods they’d played Game Four at Wrigley in Chicago. Dizzy Trout had gone all the way for the Tigers to beat a succession of four Chicago pitchers, 4–1. The Series was then even after four games. But yesterday, while they were wandering around out in the storm and finally finding the plane, Hal Newhouser had taken the hill for the Tigers and thrown a complete game at the Cubs, beating them 8–4. He struck out nine and benefited from Hank Greenberg’s three doubles. Detroit had a three-games-to-two advantage and could win it all today behind Virgil Trucks. Claude Passeau, whose artistic one-hit shutout had won Game Three for the Cubs, would be trying to even the Series again. Cassidy prayed for the Packard’s radio.

  Breakfast was arriving at the table by the time he put the papers aside. Fried eggs, bacon, corn muffins, stacks of pancakes, pots of maple syrup, on and on it came. Cassidy had the feeling that he would never forget a single mouthful he’d consumed in the state of Maine. Harry Madrid read the papers while he ate. Cassidy fell to the feast but his mind kept turning back to Tash Benedictus … who had known they were coming.

  Mona Ransom’s conclusion utterly baffled him.

  How could he have known?

  Who could have told him?

  And for God’s sake, why?

  It seemed to him that Benedictus—aside from his appalling performance while drunk, which was doubtless customary—had been a kind host. The man had obviously been through a hell of a lot, had suffered far more than his share. And he was a good if capricious host. So if he had been expecting his visitors, he hadn’t made any special efforts for them … had treated them as he would have any other orphans of the storm. So what was the point in his knowing they were coming?

  He felt as if someone were watching him.

  Right then, in Harriet’s Kitchen, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  As it turned out, someone was watching him.

  She was sitting at the counter, a forlorn waif with huge eyes that seemed to be habitually widened, as if everything she saw surprised her and, for the most part, did so unpleasantly. She wore a plain light brown cloth coat that matched the color of her hair and was badly frayed at the cuffs. Her wispy, mousy hair escaped untidily from beneath a cheap woolen beret. Her gloves seemed to match the beret and couldn’t have been much good against the cold. She stared at Cassidy over the rim of her coffee cup, clasped in both hands for the warmth. She dropped her eyes, then raised them again. He fixed them with his own. Her eyes were large, hazel, beautifully warm and passionate eyes that gave the impression of being strangers to passion, and they certainly didn’t fit with the pale, almost gray complexion, the short, rather frightened nose, the mouth that seemed perpetually prepared to sob. At her feet she’d put her suitcase, one of those cardboard jobs from the five-and-dime. She’d strapped an old belt around it to hold it together when the cheap locks inevitably popped. She wore short boots with buttons and imitation fur ruffed at the top. One of her gray knee socks had a hole on the calf and her pale flesh showed through.

  Cassidy slid out of the booth and went over to her. She quickly turned back to the counter, almost flinching. He stopped beside her and said: “It’s Dora, isn’t it? Why don’t you join my friend and me for breakfast?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t, sir. I’m sorry if I was staring, I wasn’t thinking. … I mean, I was thinking, but of something else. …” She looked up at the clock over the pie and pastry cabinet.

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “This is where the bus stops, out front. I’ve got an hour.”

  “Where are you going? Is this your day off?”

  “Portland. Back home.” She suddenly sniffled and he realized she was near tears, her red-rimmed eyes about to overflow.

  “Dora, I insist you come have a real breakfast.” He gently took her arm and she came, so easily, almost weightless. Somebody, he thought, really ought to kick some manners into Tash Benedictus’s fat ass. How much pleasure could there be in maltreating so manifestly defenseless a creature as Dora?

  “Harry, you remember Dora,” he said. “From the castle.”

  “Morning, miss,” he rumbled from the newspaper.

  Cassidy asked the waitress to bring more bacon and eggs and pancakes. Dora sat meekly in the corner of the booth, looking up at Cassidy. The windows next to her were sheets of ice and snow, opaque, which seemed to intensify the light from outside.

  “It’s Dora’s day off, Harry. She’s going to Portland. Your family there, Dora?”

  “It’s not my day off,” she said. She pulled a
crumpled hankie from her coat pocket and rubbed at her pink nose, which stood out like a cherry in a blancmange. “I’ve quit my job. My mother’s going to kill me.” Her cheeks were wet with tears. She hiccuped and looked up girlishly, shyly. “I couldn’t go on working for that man. … You saw, you saw how he—” She broke off and let herself go, sobbing. Harry Madrid looked over the top of his newspaper.

  “Come on, sister. It’s not the end of the world. Benedictus is a jerk. World’s full of ’em. I’ll bet you a nickel your mother wouldn’t work for him either.” He went back behind his newspaper as if that should have solved her problems. Dora’s breakfast came.

  “Eat up,” Cassidy said. The cafe was completely full now, booths and tables and counter. The two waitresses were running back and forth looking frantic. Somebody had turned on a radio. Somebody else yelled, “Hey, Harriet, shake a leg!” There was lots of laughter.

  Harriet herself poked her head through the window between the kitchen and the counter. “Shorthanded, Arnie. Sally left for Bangor. Gettin’ married, how’s that for a laugh? Keep your shirt on!” The head disappeared. The waitresses dashed.

  Dora had recovered enough to begin on the eggs. Once started she quickly got the hang of it.

  “So, you gave notice,” Cassidy said.

  “No, I just left.” She chewed and swallowed. “Serves them right. Serves him right. But he’ll never notice I’m gone. Not much satisfaction in that, is there?” She took a forkful of pancakes, said: “You’re very nice. …” She looked out of the corner of her eye at him. “What do you want from me?” Her wariness was sad.

  Cassidy shook his head. “You were getting a bum deal, that’s all. I don’t want anything from you. Don’t get a warped view of humanity, Dora.”

  “That’s a good one,” she said softly.

  “You’re not looking forward to going home.”

  “You can say that again—”

  “How long have you worked at the castle, Dora?”

  “Since February. I started on Valentine’s Day. I thought it was a good omen. Lucky …” She shrugged.

  “Why, then, you were there when the plane went down.” Harry Madrid lowered the paper and began folding it as he joined the conversation. “You remember the night the plane crashed out there in the back forty—”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about a plane crash. …” She looked at them as if she’d discovered what they really wanted. She drew back, wary again.

  Cassidy leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and smiled at her. “A plane did crash back there, but you weren’t the only one who didn’t notice—hell, nobody ever went looking for it. We’ve found exactly one guy who happened to hear it go down … and he was a poacher.”

  Dora relaxed again. “Well, good for him! The Guv’nor hates poachers. …” She grinned hesitantly and for the first time the huge eyes sparkled.

  “So you’re in good company, Dora—”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Dora, you’ve got to learn to relax,” Cassidy said. “We’re just buying you some breakfast. And you want to know what else?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to go home to mother, am I right?”

  She nodded. “I’ll have to live at home then, see. I’m nineteen and a half. I’ll go crazy if I live at home. She’s worse than the Guv’nor. …” She sighed as if she’d had a lot of practice. “Guess I should have thought of that before I … well, who cares, hunh?”

  “I’ll bet I can even find you a job—”

  “Doin’ what? I won’t—”

  “Right here in Tuggle. How would that be? You like Tuggle? Got a boyfriend?”

  “Well, sort of. I know this boy, Ned. … He worked on the shrubbery and stuff this summer, he helped the other man. He called me once. …” She slipped a dreamy smile across her face, like a gloved hand, then drew it away.

  “Well, let me tell you something else that happened about the same time that plane nobody saw or heard crashed—”

  “Look, I’m not kidding you, I never heard anything ’bout any plane! Now what kind of job are you talking about? How would you know anything about Tuggle? Are you planning to dash my hopes?” It must have been an expression she’d picked up somewhere else, her mother maybe. The family probably dealt in dashed hopes.

  “Never fear. But”—he paused, wondering just how to put it, reaching, trying to make the shot in the dark—“maybe you could tell me about the man who came to stay at the castle toward the end of the winter, you know the man—you remember him, don’t you, Dora? Had a foreign way of speaking?”

  Harry Madrid stopped the match halfway to his Roi-tan.

  The cacophony of voices, the swinging kitchen doors, the repartee between Harriet and the men having breakfast and the sweating waitresses: it all went on just as before. But for Cassidy it was silent as he waited for Dora to pay off. Or not.

  “Oh, him,” she said. “I remember him. That was Mr. Miller. Fred Miller. He didn’t say much but he didn’t seem foreign. He was an old friend of the Guv’nor’s, I guess. He kept to himself most of the time. But he was nice. He liked to work in the gardens. Y’know Ned, the one I told you about, he and Miller used to work together on trimming all the shrubs. They did that all summer.”

  “Did Ned ever talk about him?”

  “No, not much. Said he was a good worker, real quiet.”

  “Fred Miller,” Harry Madrid said. He was grinning. He drew the flame to his cigar.

  “Well,” Cassidy said, “Fred Miller is exactly the guy I meant, Dora.” Cassidy patted Dora’s shoulder. “You’d say he was a nice fella?”

  “Nice enough to me. Like I said, real quiet. He did have an accent, now I think about it. But not foreign, y’know? More like an Englishman. He said he’d lived in London for a while.” She shrugged. “If you want to know how nice he was, the one to ask would be Mona. … Mrs. Benedictus, I mean. She knew him well. If you know what I mean.” She patted her lips primly, washing her hands and mind of Mona Ransom.

  “I don’t know what you mean, exactly,” Cassidy said.

  “Well, Mona Ransom is just like those old movies of hers. My mom wouldn’t let me go to them when I was little and then she wasn’t in movies anymore. But I got the idea. She’s a plain old whore, that’s what she is. Everybody in the castle knew she was doin’ it with Mr. Miller. Don’t ask me why the Guv’nor didn’t do nothing, but he just acted like he didn’t know. Or care. Maybe he don’t really care. … But Mona Ransom and Fred Miller carried on all the time. Just somethin’ awful. Though I must admit she was always good to me.”

  “So what happened? I didn’t see Mr. Miller around these past two days—”

  “Well, you just missed ’im,” Dora said. “He just wasn’t there anymore one day. A day or two before you showed up.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Just gone. Like me, you could say. Nobody seemed to know where he’d gone to, but it wasn’t none of our business.” She nibbled at a crust of toast and finally flashed a smile at Cassidy.

  “Well, you really have been very helpful, Dora,” he said. “It was a stroke of luck we ran into you.”

  She nodded. “Now what was this you were saying about a job for me?”

  Snowplows were working on the highway about forty miles south of Tuggle on the Boston road, and half an hour later Cassidy pulled off onto the shoulder and removed the chains from the tires. The snow was melting, the heavy pine boughs dripping, a million tiny waterfalls. Another half hour and you’d never have known there’d been a blizzard up north.

  Harry Madrid looked over at Cassidy. “Maine seems like a dream—a fucking nightmare, you might say—that I never hope to repeat. Give me the city every time, Lew. Now, how did you fix little Dora’s situation back there? She’s going to work at Harriet’s kitchen, I take it?”

  “Well, you saw what a fix Harriet was in. Overworked and understaffed. Harriet saw the wisdom in my suggestion that another warm bod
y with experience at the castle could do no harm. She offered twenty dollars a week and I got her up to twenty-five, plus tips, of course. Nothing to it.”

  “Nothing to it,” Harry Madrid said.

  “Well, I gave Harriet the first month’s wages, just to give Dora time to prove herself. Won’t cost Harriet a penny and a month later little Dora will have proven herself indispensable. I paid Dora another fifty for the information, a little cushion money. Fred Miller. Manfred Moller. Not very original.”

  “You’re a generous man, Lew.”

  Cassidy smiled. “In this case it’s part of expenses. Sam MacMurdo’s money.”

  So, Tash Benedictus was a liar.

  He’d known the plane was sticking like a dagger up to the hilt in his pine forest.

  He’d given the survivor the run of his home—and of his wife, as well—for several months. Casual hospitality was one thing, but the red-carpet treatment for Manfred Moller was something else entirely.

  But why? Why would Tash Benedictus protect one of those bloody Germans?

  They listened to the sixth game of the World Series all through the afternoon and it was a honey. It kept Harry Madrid from his nap. The Packard devoured the miles like it hadn’t had a meal since its owner had gone off to war and never come back. And Cassidy kept turning the questions over and over and over in his mind.

  It was one of those games that no one who saw it at Wrigley or heard it over the radio would ever forget. Trucks was gone in the fifth. Passeau lasted into the seventh and departed with the Cubs hanging on to a one-run lead. But in the eighth the mighty Greenberg hit his second homer of the Series and tied it up. Then Hank Borowy, the ex-Yankee, came on for the ninth inning after going five in the previous day’s start and didn’t give the Tigers another hit, on through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. The tension was bubbling over, you could hear it in the announcers’ voices, the continuing roar of the crowd at Wrigley where they had no lights and the sun was going down. And then in the bottom of the twelfth, suddenly, in an instant, it was over, Stan Hack ramming a hot smash past Greenberg to the wall and the winning run had scored. Cubs 8, Tigers 7. It was one of those games. Cassidy had played in football games like that, a couple or three in his career, and they made whatever else came after oddly irrelevant. At least in a certain way. The Cubs and an exhausted Hank Borowy had got off the floor and tied the Series at three games apiece. It was too bad there had to be a seventh game to decide it.