Gift Shop

by Charlotte Armstrong

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  The Gift Shop

  Charlotte Armstrong

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  Chapter One

  The first passenger off the jet came darting around the corner, well ahead of the pack, with his right arm folded to his breast like a broken wing. A pink lei was incongruous on his dark-suited shoulders and incompatible with his pinched and sallow face. He veered erratically between clumps of meeters and greeters; his eyes shifted as if he feared lest he be met, as if he were driven, and, although in a great hurry, not at all sure where he was going.

  The waiting people had surged together behind him to absorb and impede the rest of the flower-decked travelers when, reaching the central space where the stairs march up and down, he took a sudden turn into the terminal’s gift shop.

  The fair-haired young woman who was realigning some costume jewelry on the counter did not look up as he entered like a blown thing, as if wherever a foot happened to come down there he must stagger. A low table of toys was placed against the high counter, near enough the entrance to lure children; he leaned over this to call to her.

  When she did look up she knew at once that he was in trouble and pain. She saw his right arm slide downward from its crooked position, but she could not see how he began to walk his middle finger delicately over the top of a small ceramic piggy bank that stood on the toy table, and she did not see him very carefully, very precisely, with thumb and forefinger, guide a tiny, folded piece of paper into the slot on the pig’s back and then, with his forefinger, gently push it through.

  He had fixed her with his bright and feverish eyes that were burning with concentration upon this secret accomplishment, although he was carefully not watching his hand. The girl came closer. “Yes, sir?” All her attention was on his face, to help him tell her what (she supposed) he so desperately required of her.

  But he said something quite foolish. “Where are the telephones?” And he stepped backward and gave her an owly look now, a momentary dimming and relaxing of his fierce gaze.

  “Why, both ways. Just around there, sir.” She pointed. “You must have passed them. Is something wrong?” He had turned his head to look behind him. “Hey, are you all right?” the girl said, stubbornly interested.

  He didn’t seem to hear. He turned his body and seemed to set his will for effort. By now a lean, middle-aged woman who had a child by the hand was standing in the wide entry. A purple lei and a white one framed her long plain face, which was composing to a simper, as if she intended to speak to the man.

  But he put his right foot down far to his right, made a mighty lurch, and as he caught his balance he snarled at her in a voice that betrayed too much pain and no patience left, “Get out of the way, sister, will you, please?”

  The tall woman bridled, blinked her pale lashes, and yanked at the child. The man went past them out the door, driving, with his head down, his right arm dangling, and now, from the ends of those fingers, there were falling slow drops of bright blood to make a trail along the floor.

  The gift shop girl gasped. Her name was Jean Cunliffe. She had normal human feelings, and her first thought was that he ought not to be allowed to bleed like that. She said to the woman, “He’s hurt!”

  The woman’s face had frozen. “Bobby, come see the pretty pictures,” she said, and with a scooping motion of her arm she guided the sleepy child toward the magazine racks. To Jean she snapped, “Why don’t you do something?”

  Jean sidled along behind the counter in a hurry to the telephone. She certainly would do something. The little boy with the sleek flaxen head was being hustled away from blood and trouble. A worthy excuse, Jean supposed. But she, employed here, had the list of numbers to call in emergencies. So she called the Airport Medical Center. After all, she was thinking, in a confusion of duty and dismay, this terminal can’t have people bleeding all over its floor.

  But she hung up with a feeling of having passed the buck. Where was he now? Surely she ought to go and see. Mrs. Mercer could mind the store. Jean simply went. Dodging for openings through the currents of people now flowing sluggishly around both sides of the moving stairs, she found herself entangled with a half dozen children who seemed to constitute a group, although they were of all complexions and racial origins: a little black boy, and one tawny, a freckle-faced redheaded lass, a small adorable Oriental female with a straight black bob. A blowsy white woman with a great knot of black hair sliding on her nape made admonitions and cheerful apologies as Jean threaded gently through.

  Had she lost the poor man? No, no, there was his trail. Happy chatterers were not noticing; gay feet were scuffng and blurring it, but Jean tracked him to the left, along the row of phone booths. Was he in this one? No, it was a meek-and-mild felt hat. Then here? Yes. Light fell on the pain-ravaged face in which the lids were down. He was waiting for a connection – or else he had fainted – braced there in the corner. She thought of shouting, “Is there a doctor in the house?” But she did not. She hurried on, because she had spotted a Security man. She noticed in the next booth, as she passed, a big man with a bland and listening face, wedged in with cascading flowers.

  Harry Fairchild was deep in a soft sofa that faced the glass wall of his high apartment below which the great carpet of the lights of the city of Los Angeles was beginning to set up its multicolored pattern. His well-shod feet were on the coffee table, his elegantly socked ankles were crossed. The girl’s high-arched feet, in her pretty green slippers, imitated his position in a comradely fashion.

  They had drinks in their hands, which they needed like a hole in the head, since she had (not very long ago) skillfully cut him out of the herd at the Winters’ cocktail party and arranged, not against any serious opposition from Harry, to go on to dinner somewhere. Sometime, that is. Later.

  Meanwhile Harry was worried about absolutely nothing. She was a very beautiful girl, about twenty-five years old (he presumed), with a natural self-confidence and even arrogance that he rather admired.

  She had said the casual “Tell me what you do, Harry.”

  And he had answered … all this as soon as they had settled down … in his usual manner. “Well, my father is an ex-oil-tycoon. My oldest brother is the governor of one of these United States. My next brother is a very high-class surgeon. There’s a whole lot of drive in the family, see, and I feel very strongly that this should be balanced off. So I don’t do a damn thing.”

  “Do you know, I doubt that,” Dorinda had said. Her smile was dainty. She gave him no wide view of too many teeth, too boldly white. On the whole, and so far, Harry was tending to approve of her.

  But, with mischief, he had launched into one of his little testing devices. “As a matter of fact,” he had told her, putting on his worried-cherub expression, doubly deceiving, “I more or less grub around in books, you know.” And then he had gone into an account of the decipherment of Linear B, which he contrived to load with as many difficult details as he could remember, quoting lavishly from Ventris, and concealing almost all the true excitement.

  It did amuse him to watch the dear creatures. They were so well-trained, so thoroughly indoctrinated. Eighty-five percent of the girls in the world, or so he had tentatively concluded from his private samplings, would hang upon a man’s words, and no matter what words, with some semblance of fascinated attention, if the man happened to be a neat and clean fellow, only thirty-one years old, healthy, wealthy and unmarried.

  True, about ten to eleven percent reversed violently and w
ere rude, but he didn’t doubt that this, too, came from the indoctrination. They were only being “different.” He didn’t know when he might come upon a truly different one, or what he would do, when he did.

  He droned along now, watching this Dorinda Bowie, about whom he knew nothing, except that she had, at least, known someone who knew the Winters, that she was beautiful, elegantly groomed, and possibly intelligent.

  She had a nice control, surely. She was hearing him out with serene and silent patience. Harry was beginning to think that if she were to allow one twinkling bit of humor, one clue that she was seeing through him, to cross her lovely face, why he might even take her to his other place, where he had no built-in chaperon and protector like Bonzer, his manservant, who was even now in the big room answering the telephone.

  But she hadn’t, up to the moment when Harry, with apologies, pulled his six feet from almost horizontal to moderately vertical and went to speak to whoever was calling.

  “Harry? This is Bernie B.”

  “Bernie-baby, to what do I owe …”

  “Shut up and listen.”

  “Is that any way to talk to an old school …”

  “Shut up, for once in your life.”

  Harry shut up, for the moment.

  “I’ve been after something for your daddy,” Bernie said.

  “Why sure, I recommended …”

  “Ah, listen. Listen!” The voice was melodious with an important despair.

  “Go ahead,” said Harry crisply.

  “I’ve got the dope your daddy wanted, but I can’t deliver. They roughed me up pretty good in Honolulu.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Some swine.” Bernie’s voice became explosive. “And one swine is right next door, listening now. So don’t talk. Listen, will you please? Because I’m going to give you the word, brother, and you better catch on.”

  “What the …” Harry was feeling lost.

  “Shut up. I’m at International. Pan-Am. And bleeding like a stuck pig, I am.”

  “You better get to a doc …” This was automatic.

  “I sure wish I was at old Doc McGee’s.” The voice was beginning to wail drearily. But Harry bristled up, to listen hard. “You remember old Doc McGee? I wish I was making a phone call from old Doc’s. Many is the phone call … You listening for the word?”

  “That’s all right, Bernie,” said Harry. “So why don’t you sit still, and I’ll buzz right down?”

  “Yah. Yah. Do that. But I’m not going to make it … all the way home.” The voice was fading. “Harry?” It sounded forced. “You get the message to your daddy and nobody else—because there’s got to be a rat in his house and I don’t care so much about getting myself dead for nothing.”

  Harry, hanging onto the phone, heard something go away, some breath, some life, some sense of a tie, a communication.

  In the airline terminal the man in the booth was collapsing, folding, sliding, falling.

  In a moment Harry heard another voice, a man’s voice, loud and urgent. “Hello? Hello, who is this?”

  Harry kept shut up. Very gently he hung up the telephone.

  “What’s the matter?” said Dorinda.

  “Damned if I know,” said Harry, passing his palms over his thick dark hair. “Couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it. But look, I … uh … guess I got to go somewhere. Raincheck, Dorinda?”

  “Must you?” She stood up with easy grace.

  “So let Bonzer put you in a cab. O.K.? And I’ll call you.”

  Harry, who could move a good deal faster than most people suspected, was already at his door. And out of it.

  He descended by elevator into the basement, winkled his car out of its slot, floated up the ramp. When he had to hesitate before entering traffic, the door on the right side opened and Dorinda got in beside him.

  “I thought I might be helpful,” she said gravely.

  “You might?” said Harry. “That’s possible. Also, we might just get that dinner date. Good deal, Dorinda. Me, I didn’t want to presume on an old acquaintance.”

  He had never seen her in his life, before five o’clock that afternoon.

  Now he was in the stream, driving shrewdly.

  “Where are we going?” she said in a moment. “And why? Now, tell me.” She was cozy.

  “Going to International. And I wish I knew why, believe me.” He was cordial. But he wasn’t talking.

  He had a word. He realized that he was the only member of his family to whom Bernie could have given this word, as he had done. Bernie Beckenhauer, the fraternity brother who had gone, quite freakishly, with dedicated drive, into the strange profession of private investigator.

  Harry didn’t know what he was going to do with the word. He’d have to see. Blood? Rats? What the devil was his daddy up to now? None of his seriously competitive, ambitious, driving, immediate relatives ever told him anything.

  He said to Dorinda, “Just hold onto your hat, honey,” and hit the freeway.

  Chapter Two

  In the terminal most people had nervously retreated, leaving a clear space around the trouble, but some had been drawn to make tight arcs at either end of the passage behind the line of phone booths. They stood and stared. Jean Cunliffe halted at this line as the young Security Officer burst through to the core.

  The door of the phone booth had been opened and the man’s body had spilled out on the floor. All strain had been erased from his face. He was unconscious. The big chap from the adjoining booth, with white flowers still cascading around his neck, was in a half-kneel, half-crouch, and seemed to be fishing into the man’s limp pockets.

  “Excuse me,” said the Security lad. “Look—uh—better not touch him, mister. Ambulance coming.”

  “Sorry,” said the big man. “I figured we ought to get his identification. Poor guy.” He rose.

  “Yes, sir,” said the Security lad. “I’ll take over. Please, folks. Please stand away now. Everybody.” He was spreading official and guarding arms. The arcs of onlookers shuffled and retreated. Jean fell back with them. She had done all she could do. Better get back to her job.

  But now a man in a gray suit, evidently a senior police officer, came bursting through. He exuded a dour patience, an air of weary experience. He knelt briefly. He conferred briefly with the Security lad. Then he said loudly, “Those of you who know anything about this man, I’ll want to talk to you in a minute.” His hard gaze told Jean that she was included.

  So she drifted apart, to wait obediently, although surely Mrs. Mercer, her superior in the shop, would be having fits by now. Somebody behind her called, not loudly, “Oh, Miss? Oh, Miss—from the gift shop?”

  So she turned and saw the angular, long-faced woman leaning through the glass doors to the waiting room proper and beckoning urgently. So Jean pushed through to her. Now the woman stood like a mountain peak among foothills of children. Why, there was that little Oriental, and the redheaded one! The children were tugging at garlands of flowers. The lean woman stood plain in her gray costume.

  “How is the poor man?” she said to Jean with a greedy simper.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” said Jean honestly. “He’s fainted or something. I don’t think … I mean he isn’t … hasn’t died. And help is coming.”

  “You are a good girl.”

  Jean blinked at this. It surprised and offended her. She now saw that the white woman, with the falling-down mass of dark hair, was seated, holding on her lap the little blond boy whose gray eyes were watching everything drowsily.

  Jean was about to excuse herself when the big chap with the white lei was suddenly before her. “Excuse me, Miss.” He seemed to surround her. His little eyes licked at her from his heavy flesh. “I wonder if you have any idea what could have happened to my poor friend from the plane. He spoke to you in the gift shop, didn’t he?”

  “Why, yes, he did,” said Jean. “But he just asked me where the phones were. I guessed he must have been a little bit blind, you know? Of
course, then I saw that he was hurt so I …” She felt herself embarrassed.

  “I see,” said the big chap. He seemed to assess and dismiss Jean’s soap-and-water-fresh young face. “You were in the shop,” he said, turning so abruptly as to seem to accuse. “Did he speak to you, ma am?”

  The lean woman’s face was bleak and hostile. “He did not,” she snapped.

  Now the police officer in the gray suit was coming toward them. “Word with you?” he said to the big chap. Then to Jean, “And you, in a minute.”

  “Sir, could I go back on my job. I work in the gift shop.”

  He nodded permission; the two men stepped back into a clear space near the phones.

  But the lean woman said fiercely in Jean’s ear, “That man’s a liar! He’s no friend. He’s a liar!”

  Jean looked up at her grim face. “Some people are,” she said softly, and set off.

  Now the children surged suddenly in a mass and went scampering past her. The pack of them began to froth around a newcomer, rather a startling figure. This was a man, a burly fellow with a perfectly bald head and a whiskered chin, dressed in a tight-fitting knitted orange sport shirt and a pair of tight black trousers that did not quite contain his paunch, which hung over at the beltline. He had a guitar case slung around his neck. His expression was either sleepy or “way out.”

  The children—he seemed to have two on each hand and one around each knee—were bubbling. (All of them, black, brown, pink and tawny!) “Papa, here we are.” “Here we are, Papa.” “Aunt Emaline is here,” they said. “Mama’s got Bobby.” “In here, Papa.”

  Jean, changing course to get around them, found herself slipping under the noses of the conferring men and she distinctly heard the big one say to the policeman, “… stranger to me. Didn’t even notice him on the plane. I’m very sorry.”

  Well! Jean Cunliffe was just a poor girl trying to get along; she had a summer job she had better keep; she hurried back to it. If she didn’t understand what was going on here she probably never would—and such was life. But people—although it was none of her business—people lied like breathing! Darned if they didn’t!