Black Sheep, White Lamb

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Yes,” Johanna said. “Is the kindling in the basement, Mrs. Tonelli?”

  The old lady was looking at her with a sort of wicked merriment in her bright, dark eyes. “Ho, you are blushing too much. All the girls blush when I talk about Father Walsh. It’s as well he is a priest. Otherwise he would have been gone long ago. I want to show you something, Johanna.” She gave the girl a small gold key. “Go into my bedroom, to the top drawer of my dressing table, and bring me the jewel box.”

  Johanna did as she was bidden. She liked to be sent into the old lady’s bedroom. It was scented with perfumes and powders. The huge bed was fitted in the daytime with a yellow silken counterpane that matched the draperies. Or, when it was turned down as it was then, Mrs. Grey having prepared it before leaving, she liked to see the pale green sheets and pillowcases and touch the elegant monograms. She had never seen anything so exquisite as the gold and mother-of-pearl brush, comb and mirror, and the cut-glass container that refracted light as it was said that diamonds did. Inside it were curled strands of hair, which Mrs. Tonelli had gathered from her brush and wound around her finger. Johanna did not covet any of the things; she merely liked to look at them, and sometimes to touch them, especially the sachets, for the scent lingered some time afterwards on her fingers.

  She wondered, unlocking the drawer and taking from it the Florentine jewel box, at the ball of black tape that lay, filthy with grass and dirt, smudging the white paper lining of the drawer. But she would no more think of inquiring about it than she would about, say, the numerous medicines she had seen in the bathroom cabinet when sent to fetch something from there.

  She half-listened and half-enjoyed the old lady’s account of the various occasions on which she had worn these or those beads, an opal pendant. She liked the stories rather more than the jewels with which they were associated. That Hillside, having once been so gay and bright a place as Mrs. Tonelli described, was such now as she had seen and heard on the street that night was too terrible. If it weren’t for Martin she would hate the town—sometimes. Listening to his grandmother, she knew now where his dreams of a better, happier living for his own people came from. And because Mrs. Tonelli was Martin’s grandmother, Johanna listened with affection as well as politeness.

  Toward midnight the old lady began to get peevish. She was bored with her own stories. What she had hoped for that night was that Martin would have come to see Johanna, that she might herself have insisted on going into her bedroom off the parlor, leaving them in privacy. How much of her life had been spent alone in the great, wide bed, listening in the darkness for any little rustle of courtship beyond the door. In the midst of the dark silence then she could put her hand to the emptiness beside her and remember the man who had lain there … and who had died there at the age of thirty-seven, leaving her a rich woman.

  “Don’t you worry when your brother stays out so late, Johanna?”

  “Yes.” The girl automatically reached for the knitting she had put by while the old lady was talking.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Tonelli mimicked. “Is that all?”

  “No matter how much I worry, it doesn’t change anything.”

  The old lady smacked her lips. Her mouth had gone dry with so much talking. “Do you think he is a good boy?”

  “No,” Johanna said after a moment, and then added with utter frankness, “but I try not to think about it very often. Is he worse than other boys his age? I don’t know. And when I think what I was like at his age, it makes me ashamed on my own account, so I can’t be too hard on Georgie. Adolescence is a terrible time really.”

  The old lady looked at her with a mixture of amusement and mockery. The girl was only two years older than her brother. “Oh, a terrible time,” she said solemnly. “When will your mother be able to leave the hospital?”

  “Soon. Early next week, they said.”

  “So soon. And such a serious operation.”

  Johanna suspected that Mrs. Tonelli was trying to fetch information. She rarely asked directly what she wanted to know most. The girl said nothing.

  “Why doesn’t that boy come home?”

  “I’m sorry,” Johanna said.

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m enjoying myself.”

  At a few minutes past twelve Georgie let himself in the side door and came directly to the parlor, for once not even stopping to comb his hair. He looked much as though he had just come off the football field, his plump cheeks flushed, the small eyes sparkling.

  “I was afraid you’d gone to bed,” he said. “Hi, Jo.”

  His sister nodded.

  The old lady gave a little flourish with her head. “Hi, Georgie.”

  “I brought you something, Mrs. Tonelli,” he said, and drew from within his sweater a brown, red and yellow feather. It was long and curved, almost a plume. She took it and turned it around in her fingers, her rings again glistening. Then she recognized it and burst out laughing. It was a tail feather from one of Mayor Covello’s handsome cocks.

  “Georgie Rocco, what have you been up to?” It was said with a glint of wicked understanding in her eye.

  “What is it?” Jo said as Mrs. Tonelli laid the feather atop her jewel box.

  Georgie knew then that he had been right: the old girl was with him. “Well, I’ll tell you, Mrs. Tonelli, I don’t think there’s going to be any gambling raids in Hillside—not by outsiders, there isn’t.”

  The old lady clacked her teeth, working her mouth excitedly. Her head quivered a little, nerves, impatience with her own infirmities. “Johanna,” she said, “it is a long time since supper. Get us a sandwich. You would like that, Georgie? And some hot chocolate?”

  “Man, would I!”

  Johanna put down her knitting with great deliberation, carefully arranging the needles to hold the stitches. She did not like to be sent from the room like a child, and she suspected that was what was happening.

  “Thanks, Jo,” her brother said when she finally got up.

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” she said and left the room.

  The old lady was leaning forward in her chair.

  “Make a lap,” Georgie said.

  “What?”

  He did not wait to explain. He took a fistful of dollar and five-dollar bills from his pocket. She made a lap as wide as a kite. He dumped the money in it. “You aren’t to say anything,” he said then. “I mean, we’re all pledged. Nobody talks. What you’re supposed to do with the money, you give it away, or save it up for something special. Sometimes maybe you can give me the price of …” he almost said cigarets, “… a haircut. But that’s all I’m to have, see. That’s part of the pledge.”

  “Whose pledge?”

  “Me—and some other guys.”

  “What happened, Georgie?” she demanded.

  “I can’t tell you, Mrs. Tonelli. You’ll see it in the papers maybe, only I don’t think so. But I already told you more than I was supposed to. Can’t you guess—from that feather and what I said?” Mentioning the feather, he observed the box on which she had laid it. He hadn’t seen that before.

  “Secrets,” she said. “I am so full of secrets if I had a nickel for every one of them I would be a millionaire.”

  “Put the money away,” he said. “I don’t want to have to tell Jo. She’s got no sense of humor.” He plopped a fist into the fat of the other hand. “Man, you should have seen it!”

  “If you aren’t going to tell me everything, don’t talk at all,” the old lady said, folding the bills together. “Thirty dollars.”

  “Is that all?” Georgie blurted out.

  “Do you want a certified accounting?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  He had hoped she would put the money in the tooled leather box so that he might see what was in it, but she unsnapped her high collar and tucked it away in her bosom. “Am I the only beneficiary of tonight’s—high jinks?”

  “Certain other … ladies,” Georgie said, immediately unsure of whether he had chosen the right word
.

  “Ladies?” she mocked. “There are all kinds of ladies.”

  “I mean the good kind,” Georgie said.

  She chortled. “Go and help your sister. She was worried about you. So was I.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I enjoyed it.”

  Georgie grinned, but he sure couldn’t dig this old girl. You couldn’t be sure whether she was going to spit at you or wink at you. But one thing he liked about her, she wasn’t always pawing him, the way some old people did. Even his mother. He didn’t like to be touched, not by anybody, except maybe in a fight. His mind ran to Rosie. He’d given her a crack tonight for mauling him, poking her hand up under his sweater. He shouldn’t have done that, but she shouldn’t either. When he and the guys left the joint at eleven, she was sitting up on the stool, whimpering. Sitting there in her snug little skirt. How he hated flesh, his own, anybody’s. That’s why he liked the old lady, maybe. She was all bones in a skin bag.

  “Give me your hand, Georgie.” She pulled herself up. “Now, go and help your sister.”

  “Can’t I help you?”

  “No, thank you. I had to manage before you came, and I will have to manage after you go.”

  “I’m not going,” Georgie said. “I mean, I’d rather stay here. You know what I mean.”

  “I think I do. Goodnight, Georgie. Tell Johanna to bring me a cup of chocolate to my room.” Using her cane with one hand and taking the box under her arm, she didn’t exactly skip from the room. But she could get around all right once she got started.

  Georgie went to the kitchen door, lolled against the frame, and watched his sister take the pot from the stove when the milk came to a boil. “What’d you do all night, Jo?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I asked you first,” Georgie said.

  “We talked.” With a nod of her head, she indicated Mrs. Tonelli. “Mostly about things she remembered in Hillside—dances and parties, and what people were like then.”

  “What’s in the box?”

  “Some old jewelry. Things she’d worn a long time ago.”

  “She ought to keep ’em in a bank,” Georgie said.

  A little uneasiness stirred in Johanna. Mrs. Tonelli should keep such things in a bank or somewhere safe, living alone as she did. Seeing the jewelry, she had supposed some of it valuable. She wondered now. She didn’t like to think Georgie might be tempted—that way. But it passed through her mind. She knew quite a lot about temptation. He could be tempted without even knowing it at first. “I’ll have my check Monday, Georgie, if you need some money.”

  “A couple of bucks maybe,” he said. He went to the table where Jo had set out the cups and saucers. “The old lady wants me to bring her a cup of cocoa. She’s going to bed.”

  “Don’t call her the old lady,” Johanna said in a low voice.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t fill it too full. I don’t want to slop it in the saucer.”

  A moment later, he tapped at the bedroom door.

  “Come!”

  He opened the door. The old lady was sitting in front of her mirror, trying to put a great hunk of jewelry around her neck. The box was open.

  “So! I have a new chambermaid. You are going to be more useful than I thought.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Georgie said, and by really concentrating, he managed to carry the hot chocolate across the room without spilling it. But by the time he reached her she had put away the pendant and closed the box.

  14

  BASSETT, DESPITE HIS INTENTION of putting Hillside out of his mind for the weekend, spent Sunday afternoon going over the reports of the laboratory technicians. One particularly pertinent piece of evidence was the presence in the head wounds of the victim of a black, resinous, adhesive substance common to electrical tape. It would seem that the killer had taped his weapon. Why? Among the possibilities, Bassett reasoned, was that a familiar tool, say a wrench or a tire lever or even a large screwdriver could have been used and immediately returned to its place; the removal and destruction of the tape would banish all clues as to its deadly use. He made a note to have the plant tool shop searched immediately for the possible weapon. The removal of the tape would remove all prints, distinguishing the tool in that way.

  Another possibility was that MacAndrews’ assailant had taped his weapon to lessen its lethal potential, to make of it a sort of blackjack. He studied the photographs of the wound, and read the analyst’s conjecture. One wound had been comparatively light, a second had crushed the skull: strong but inept, possibly scared killer. What had scared him? Having a weapon so doctored, he must have planned to use it. Bassett wondered if he would not have got some of the substance under his fingernails in removing the tape. There were a great many fingernails in Hillside and not a few of them could do with scraping—with or without police provocation.

  He turned in the report of the two stockings found in the vicinity of the boxcar: nylon, not a pair, the brand name(s) worn away, variation in size and style. There were no dry skin flakes such as were usually present under the microscope when the hose had been immediately removed from a woman’s leg. There was a perfumed and slightly oily substance discernible in one of them, suggesting to the examiner the possibility of sun lotion. This would account, too, for the absence of dead skin tissue. Both stockings had been twisted at approximately the knee area, suggesting that the stockings had been rolled at the knee. And there were no marks of supporters at the tops.

  Bassett scowled. He did not like interpretations of evidence in such instances, preferring to make his own, fresh. A woman, he reasoned, might wear an unmatched pair of hose, but it was unlikely, even in Hillside. And rolled at the knee? With skirts at their present height? Sun lotion in October? He doubted it. And on only one stocking? Hair dressing more likely. It had been in his mind from the beginning that MacAndrews’ assailants had used the stockings as disguises. This made possible the assumption that at least two people were involved … one of them a killer.

  For the first time he was sanguine of his and Kearns’ chances. A murderer could live with himself; a great many of them did; there were not many Raskolnikovs in the world. But the man who has seen murder, perhaps especially an accessory, is a bad security risk to the murderer.

  He drove over to see Kearns at the Hillside police station. The chief had been at his desk for some time; the air in the small room was pudding-thick with cigar smoke. Kearns pulled continually at the lobe of his ear while the county detective elaborated on his theory about the stockings. He said finally, “A lot of kids in this town use pomade—or some kind of guck on their hair.”

  Bassett thought for a moment. “That’s interesting—what you just said, Chief—a lot of kids. Do you think it was the work of youngsters?”

  Kearns grunted and rode a squeaking swivel chair back from his desk. He lighted a fresh cigar. Bassett felt impacted in the smoke. “I better tell you what happened here last night,” Kearns said. “I don’t know just what to make of it myself. I’ll tell you this—there’s some pretty damn sore men biting their tongues this morning. A gang of our own kids pulled off a gambling raid last night. Cleaned out every game in the town.”

  Bassett’s first impulse was to laugh. To cover himself he murmured, “I’ll be damned.” He remembered that just two nights before Kearns had said he didn’t know of any specific gambling in Hillside. It had been obvious long since, however, that he had not wanted to know.

  As though following Bassett’s mind, he said, “Makes me look like a clout, don’t it?”

  Bassett wasn’t going to moralize at this point. He shook his head and waited for the morose policeman to go on.

  “They even cleared out Covello’s cock-roost.”

  This time Bassett could not suppress a grin.

  Kearns squinted at him through the smoke, a twist of grim humor on his own lips. “Yeah,” he said, “think of all the poor bastards that’ll be eating cock for their Sunday dinner.”

  Bassett lau
ghed.

  “Only it ain’t funny,” Kearns said. “The kids went in armed with broken bottles—and wearing stockings over their faces for masks.”

  Bassett sobered. “How many of them?”

  “Maybe twenty. They hit five places at once.”

  “Twenty,” Bassett said disconsolately. Then he added, “Well, it’s not two hundred anyway. I think we’d be on the right track looking for our killer among them. Don’t you?”

  Kearns pulled at his cigar and shot the smoke toward the ceiling. “The trouble is, nobody’s talking. Ask any teenager where he was last night and he’ll shrug and say, ‘Around.’ Even kids who weren’t in on it. I asked my own boy at lunchtime where he was last night, knowing for a fact he was in a movie with the wife and his sister. But what does he say to me? ‘Around.’ I wanted to smack him across the face, but it wouldn’t do any good. And that’s how it is around the whole damn town.”

  “The Vigilantes,” Bassett said after a moment, “the children’s crusade. No chance, I suppose, of finding out who organized it?”

  “Not from inside the organization,” Kearns said.

  “You think there’s an organization?”

  “It ran last night like one—like the Democratic primaries.”

  “Mind if I ask you a touchy question, Kearns?”

  “The answer is yes,” Kearns said bluntly. “I see no goddamn harm in a Saturday night poker game. I was eighteen dollars ahead when the stinking little punks moved in on us.”

  “All right,” Bassett said. “How did it happen? Give me every detail. I wish to God I’d been in one of them.”

  “I wish you’d been, too, because you ain’t going to understand this, not being there. It was a stiff game—four of us sticking it out. The fifth man was the dealer, and he was concentrating just as hard as the rest of us. It was me finally called. So did the guy next to me, and the guy next to him. The minute we showed cards, one of the young punks said, ‘Keep your hands on the table and nobody’ll get hurt.’ I could feel the jagged end of a bottle in my back. I didn’t know what it was till later, but I knew it was something sharp. ‘Push all your money in the middle.’ You couldn’t see a thing—you know, we had one big light hanging over the table, a lot of smoke, and all you could see was shapes—and those stocking heads, one behind each man at the table. One of them scooped up the money—just the paper money-tipped over the table and they were gone. The guy who’d been dealer said, ‘Let ’em go. They got raw glass. Somebody could get hurt bad.’”