Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

  Mr. Slocum took a breath, blew it out. “Yes.” He nodded. “Yes, I think that’s a splendid idea.”

  I asked Boyle, “Do we have time?”

  Boyle grinned. “We?”

  “You mean I can’t come?” I thought I kept the pout from my voice extremely well. “Annie Holmes has been there. She says it’s not really a saloon, it’s more like a restaurant.”

  Boyle glanced at his watch. He turned to Mr. Slocum. “What do you think? Is she ready for Mortimer’s?”

  Mr. Slocum smiled at me. “So long as she promises not to turn into a flapper.”

  “I promise,” I told him. I would, of course, have promised Mr. Slocum anything.

  Boyle said, “And maybe you better not mention this to Miz Borden.”

  I said, “She’d want me to go. Really.”

  Boyle laughed. “Okay then.”

  We said good-bye to Charlie and we walked down the flagstone walk to the cars. As Mr. Slocum was getting into his Cadillac, Boyle called out from beside the Ford, “Hey. Where’d you learn to box like that?”

  Mr. Slocum smiled. “Yale,” he called back.

  Grinning, Boyle nodded. “Figured that was Hornsby’s problem. Never had the benefit of a college education.”

  As the Ford rattled back down the road toward Main Street, I said to Boyle, “Do you still think Mr. Slocum’s not tough?”

  Without looking away from the road, Boyle smiled. “Never said he wasn’t, kid. Said I didn’t know if he was or not.”

  “Well, what do you think now?”

  Still smiling, he sucked on a Fatima. “Tough as nails.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Hey. Me too.” He glanced at me, turned back to the road. “He’s tough, all right. Lotta guys wouldn’t get up from a punch like the one he took. He’s got moxie, no question.” He inhaled on the cigarette. “Can’t help won-derin’, though, what he’s doin’ in a little one-horse town like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He flicked his cigarette ash out the window. “Guy like him, money, brains, what’s he doin’ out here in Podunk? How come he’s not up in Boston, or New York? Philadelphia, even.”

  “Maybe he just likes it here.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just likes being a big fish in a small pond.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “You’re judging him, and you don’t even really know him.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t got to judge people, kid. You leave ’em alone long enough, they show you who they are, all by themselves.”

  “You don’t like him.” I was less angry than surprised. It was preposterous that anyone could not like Mr. Slocum.

  “Hey,” he said, and turned to me. “I like him fine. I think he’s a peach. No kidding.”

  “Well then, how come you’re saying bad things about him?”

  Boyle grinned and shook his head. “I wasn’t. I’m not. I really think he’s jim dandy. Okay? You two get married, I wanna be best man.”

  “Married?” I could sense the blush beginning along my cheeks. “Who said anything about getting married?”

  “No one,” Boyle said, and he laughed. “No one. Look, I really think he’s a good guy. I sincerely mean it. Okay? So we still friends, you and I?”

  Once again I felt the lumpishness of embarrassment. For most of my life I have been unable to accept a direct offer of kindness or friendship without it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Shake on it,” he told me. Cigarette between his lips, eyes narrowed against the smoke, he took the wheel with his left hand and held out his right. We shook hands.

  Certainly, when we were sitting at our table in Mortimer’s Boyle seemed to like Mr. Slocum well enough. He and I brought him up to date: Boyle told him what the two of us had learned from Charlie, which was very little; I told him what Miss Lizzie and I had learned from Mrs. Marlowe, which the lawyer pronounced “intriguing.” Boyle said that he would have a little chat with Mr. Chatsworth this evening and with Mrs. Archer tomorrow.

  And then the two of them started to talk about boxing, Johnson and Dempsey and Carpentier, uppercuts and jabs and crosses. After rather a lot of this, they moved on to a discussion of the acquittal, just two days before, of eight White Sox players on the charge of fixing the 1919 World Series, trading names back and forth—Jackson, Johnson, Comiskey, Rothstein—like boys trading baseball cards. I found all this, despite Mr. Slocum’s involvement in it, less than fascinating. There is something about the smell of alcohol and the company of other men that compels otherwise intelligent human beings to revert to preadolescence.

  The alcohol, in this case, lay discreetly in the coffee cups sitting before each of them, a scotch and soda for Mr. Slocum, a bourbon on the rocks for Boyle. In my cup lay only coffee; but since it was my third helping of the stuff in one day, more than I had ever been allowed before, I was fairly well pleased with myself.

  They moved on to the possibility that the Red Sox, who were apparently in third place, whatever that meant, might this year win the pennant, whatever that was. While they analyzed this, I gazed around me.

  The room in which we sat was the dining area. Dark, low-ceilinged, it held perhaps thirty tables, all of them filled now with couples or families. Off to my right, set into a wall covered with flocked red wallpaper, was a steel door, painted black. Through this, periodically, single men and more couples came and went. It led, so Boyle had told me, to the bar.

  Mortimer’s was, however, no speakeasy. There were no passwords here, no Charleston dancers, no wild and desperate gaiety. The place was as sedate and ordinary as a Woolworth’s. It could have been any restaurant, anywhere, at any time. In this first year of Prohibition, the people who ran it, and the people who came here, were local folk who simply did not believe in the Noble Experiment, and who never had, and who expected a drink or two with their meals.

  Presumably, if the establishment had been within the city limits, Chief Da Silva would have done something about it. (Reluctantly, I suspect, for according to Boyle half of Da Silva’s police department could be found, at any given moment, behind the steel door.) But it did not, and, as Boyle told me, Mr. Mortimer had an “arrangement” with the local state police barracks. There was in fact no need for the dining-room liquor to be served in coffee cups; this was done, Boyle said, partly as a joke and partly to “give the customers the idea they were gettin’ away with something.”

  I was, as I say, gazing around the room, lost in thought, wondering about William, why he had lied, wondering what had happened to Father, why he had gone so suddenly to Boston, when I heard Boyle say: “So suppose we find the guy, and he clears the kid? What happens then?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  SLUMPED BACK IN his chair, one hand idly toying with his coffee cup, Mr. Slocum shrugged. “That’s up to Miss Borden. She seems to believe that we can discover who the actual murderer was and somehow prove that to the police.” His fingertip tapped lightly against the lip of the cup. “I get the impression, from what she says, that she has some idea, or thinks she does, who it is.”

  I interrupted. “Does she think it’s Mr. Chatsworth?”

  He turned to me, and I saw that a bruise was beginning to flower along his left cheek. “She didn’t say. It was only an impression, really. Something I picked up from talking to her this evening.”

  Boyle said, “Guy I’d like to pin it on is Hornsby.”

  “He’s a charmer, isn’t he?” said the lawyer with a smile. “You know, I’ve often asked myself what Mr. Hornsby’s precise function might be. In the cosmic scheme of things, I mean.”

  Boyle took a drag from his Fatima. “So far, looks like his function is to wander around and get beat up by everybody.” He jerked his head toward me. “It’s the kid’s turn next.”

  Smiling, Mr. Slocum said, “Pity we can’t give him some of his own medicine. Slip him a Mickey Finn and cart him off somewhere, persuade him to tell us what, exactly, he was doing on Water S
treet last Tuesday.”

  Boyle sipped at his cup. “Lookin’ for someone else to beat him up, probably.”

  “What’s a Mickey Finn?” I asked Mr. Slocum.

  “It’s—ah, here’s exactly the man to answer your question. Mr. Mortimer, good to see you. Have a seat.”

  Beaming expansively, Mr. Mortimer said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

  He was one of those heavy, hearty, middle-aged men who did nearly everything expansively—sit, stand, talk, listen, breathe. His was a comfortable expansiveness, genial and genuine. I had met him only twice before, but both times I had liked him. Bald, florid, barrel chested and big bellied, today he wore a vested suit of a brown-and-yellow checked material that might perhaps have done better service as a tablecloth. He plucked a large black cigar from between his teeth, grinned happily at Mr. Slocum and shook his hand, grinned happily at Boyle and shook his hand; and then, sitting down, turned to me with a frown of sympathy, broad and awkward but obviously genuine.

  “Young Amanda,” he said. “Mrs. Mortimer tells me she talked to ya today and told ya to come by if ya need anything. Well, I just want to say to ya, that goes double for Donald J. Mortimer. You need anything, you come to us, me or the missus, and we’ll take care of it. That was a terrible thing what happened, terrible, and if folks can’t stand together in times of trouble, then what good are they to anybody. Hey?” He stuck the cigar back in his mouth with a flourish: in much the way, I imagine, a medieval copyist might have stabbed the nib of his quill to the parchment at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sure, Mr. Mortimer. Thank you.”

  “And so how’re you doin’, exactly?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Amanda’s got a question for you,” said Mr. Slocum, smiling.

  “And what might that be?” asked Mr. Mortimer, raising his sandy eyebrows expectantly and removing the cigar once again.

  I asked him, “What’s a Mickey Finn?”

  He grinned. “Now why would a young lady like yourself need to know a thing like that?”

  “Why?” I asked. “Is it something bad?”

  “Well now,” he said, and slapped himself affectionately on the stomach, clap. “I s’pose that depends on your own personal point of view.” Delicately, using only his middle finger, he tapped the cigar’s ash into the ashtray. “What it is, see, there used to be a barkeep by that name, down in New York, in old Manhattan. And he had a habit, whenever one of the customers got a little too obstreperous-like, of putting a little something special in the fella’s beer. And what happened was, just a wee bit later the customer all of a sudden ceased being obstreperous. Suddenly he got to be as peaceful as a little babe.” He raised the cigar to his mouth and gave it a definitive puff.

  “But what did he put in the beer?” I asked him.

  “Well now”—Mr. Mortimer grinned—“being the respectable restaurant owner that I am, how on earth would I know somethin’ like that?”

  Mr. Slocum smiled at Mr. Mortimer. “I thought every barkeep on the East Coast had some of the stuff around.” He turned to me. “Chloral hydrate. It’s a sleeping drug.”

  He turned back to Mr. Mortimer. “And just how is the respectable restaurant business doing these days?”

  Mr. Mortimer waved an expansive hand, indicating the busy room. “Couldn’t be better. Not unless the good Lord himself was making the lobster rolls. This prohibition nonsense, it’s the best thing ever happened to me.” He punctuated this with another grin and another puff.

  “No problems with supply?” Mr. Slocum asked him, smiling. “You didn’t, by any chance, have any liquor coming in on the Henry Marshall?”

  The Henry Marshall was a rum-running schooner. Three or four days before, flying the British flag, it had become the first ship ever to be seized by the Coast Guard outside the three-mile limit.

  Mr. Mortimer beamed. “No sirree bob, I did not. I saw all this comin’ years ago, back before the War. Before I went off to France, I had Kevin, my brother, come down from Boston and run the place. And I told him, day I left, I said, Kevin, you sell everything that’s not nailed down, and you and the missus take all the cash outta the bank, and you convert everything we got into bottle inventory.” He puffed on the cigar and nodded firmly. “Smartest thing I ever did.”

  Mr. Slocum nodded. “Admirable foresight.”

  “Bet your life.” Mr. Mortimer grinned and slapped his belly again. “I could show that What’s-her-name, Madame Helene, a thing or two, hey? Give her a run for her money.”

  Exhaling cigarette smoke, Boyle asked him casually, “You know Mrs. Archer, huh?”

  “Course I do,” said Mr. Mortimer. “Doesn’t the missus go to see her once a week, regular, like she was goin’ to church?”

  Boyle sat back in his chair. “So whatta you think of her?” he asked as though only mildly curious.

  “Well, she’s a fraud, natcherly. Those mumbo-jumbo seances, talkin’ to ghosts and all. Bunkum, pure and simple, hey? Fakery. And tellin’ the future? She’s no more got a line on what’s comin’ down the pike than I do. Less. Give you an example.…”

  Leaning forward, he braced his thick elbows on the table and took a puff from the cigar. “Like I say, the missus goes to see her once a week. So this week, this past week, she goes over there, and the silly cow’s not even home. The missus, she’s got an appointment, like usual see, and so she stands there and she knocks at the door forever. But this Madame Helene, she never shows up. The missus finally just leaves. So you tell me—how do ya go around sayin’ ya can look into the future and all, when ya can’t even keep a simple little appointment? Hey?” He puffed on the cigar, shook his head, and then stared at the cigar ash, smiling ruefully. “Not that the missus can see it that way, natcherly.”

  Boyle asked him, “When was this?”

  “Tuesday,” said Mr. Mortimer. “This past Tuesday. She always sees her on Tuesday.”

  “What time?”

  “Eleven.”

  I saw Boyle and Mr. Slocum, both their faces without expression, exchange glances. My stepmother, I remembered, had been killed sometime between ten and eleven.

  Mr. Slocum said to Mr. Mortimer, “She’s an unusual woman, Madame Helene. What else do you know about her?”

  “Looks like a basset hound,” said Mr. Mortimer, and chuckled. “And she’s a phony. What else I got to know?”

  Looking over his coffee cup as he raised it to his lips, Mr. Slocum asked, “Do you know where she’s from?”

  “New York. I think I remember the missus sayin’ New York. Came here about four years ago.”

  Mr. Slocum set down the cup. “There must’ve been a Mr. Archer, sometime, somewhere. What happened to him?”

  Mr. Mortimer shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Can’t say. Never heard.” He chuckled again. “Stuck in a kennel somewhere, probably.”

  A tall round-faced man in a tuxedo had materialized behind Mr. Mortimer, and now he tapped him on his broad shoulder. Mr. Mortimer turned, the man bent forward and whispered in his ear, and Mr. Mortimer nodded. As the man moved away, Mr. Mortimer turned back to the table. “Got to go. Good to see you. Mr. Slocum. Boyle. And Amanda, you make sure you come by now, visit with me and the missus.” He pulled his heavy body out of the chair.

  “I will,” I said. “Say hello to Mrs. Mortimer for me.”

  “I’ll do that.” He grinned and clamped the cigar between his teeth, then turned and lumbered off.

  Mr. Slocum said to Boyle, “Perhaps we should have another word with Mrs. Archer.”

  Boyle nodded. “I was thinking that myself.”

  “So Mrs. Archer,” I told Miss Lizzie over the remains of my steak and baked potatoes, “wasn’t home when Mrs.Mortimer went to see her. And that was at eleven o’clock.” I delivered the phrase with a portentousness I found infinitely agreeable.

  Miss Lizzie only nodded.

  As I had expected, she had received the story of my visit to Mortimer’s not onl
y with calm but even with curiosity, asking me about the decor, the customers, and about Mr. Mortimer himself, whom she had never met.

  “Perhaps we’ll learn something tomorrow,” she said easily, “when Mr. Boyle speaks with her.”

  This was not quite the reaction I had expected. I said, “Mr. Slocum thinks that maybe you’ve got some idea who the murderer is.”

  She frowned slightly, puzzled. “I don’t recall having said that to Mr. Slocum.”

  “He said it was an impression he got.”

  She smiled. “Well, then. No one has any control, finally, over someone else’s impressions.”

  “But is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That you’ve got an idea who it is?”

  She shrugged lightly. “Perhaps. But at this stage, Amanda, I don’t really think we should be naming names.”

  “Who? Who do you think it was?”

  Gently she shook her head. “It wouldn’t be right for me to say. Suppose I were wrong?”

  “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

  Smiling softly, she said, “Amanda, I’m sorry. It’s the sort of thing one ought not say until one is completely certain. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I supposed so, but this did not, of course, stop me from wanting to know. “But what if you just give me a hint?”

  Looking at me with mock severity over the pince-nez, she intoned, “No.”

  I sighed elaborately.

  “Miss Lizzie,” I said. “You’re not fair.”

  “Like life,” she said, and smiled again. “Let’s clear the table, shall we?”

  We were doing the dishes—Miss Lizzie washing, I drying—when the phone rang.

  “Can I get it?” I asked her. “It’s probably Father.”

  “Of course, dear. If it is, ask him if I could speak with him for a minute, would you?” She reached out, turned the faucet to shut off the hot water. That particular faucet had been loose for several days now, and, as I scurried from the kitchen, I heard her accuse it: “Stupid thing.”

  It was Father. “How are you, Amanda?”