by Janet Roger
She left the mirror, stepped across to the table, folded at the knees to pull an ashtray from under the litter of magazines and took in the photograph. Her head tilted to let her lips spin a smoke ring at the ceiling. Not bad at that. “Well, he wears a moustache now, but it hardly makes him Clarke Gable does it? You didn’t show me this one before.”
I blinked. “You know Terry Reilly?”
“No. But yesterday you showed me a photograph of a young man in the Raglan on Christmas Eve, asking after his friend who’d already left. This is the boy his friend left with. I’d never seen him before and didn’t know his name. If you’d shown me his picture, I could have told you yesterday.” She lifted a loose strand of hair and fixed it at the back of her head inside the cap. “I don’t know the names of the other two either. You didn’t say. Remember?”
She was right, I didn’t say. The faces on a dozen magazine covers looked at each other and raised an eyebrow. They had a point. I’d been running across Reilly’s trail for the last thirty-six hours. In that time, I’d advised him on hotel decorum and helped him off a bar stool, talked to people who either knew him or knew of him or remembered seeing him, and caught up with his recent history along the way. All afternoon I’d had his photograph in my pocket. Not only that, I knew Garfield made a chance pickup in the Raglan on Christmas Eve. And still it didn’t dawn that the professor was Terry Reilly’s trick that night. Call me Hard-to-Hurry Newman and don’t rush me with the obvious, because when it comes to a hot lead, I aim to keep a distance before we’re formally introduced. I put his photograph next to Reilly’s and took a long breath. “Can we get this straight, Miss Greer? This is Michael Garfield. Two nights ago, he walked out of the Raglan with Terry Reilly. Later that evening, his boyfriend arrived asking for him. The boyfriend’s name is Beaufort. And though the names mean nothing and you never saw Reilly before, you’re still positive Garfield was his trick that night. Did I leave anything out?”
“I don’t think so. Aren’t detectives wonderful?” Nurse Greer stubbed her cigarette and said she really ought to go. I picked the photographs off the magazine, then followed out the door.
Miss Hartridge’s desk was two flights down, vacated for the day and left at attention. Her pencils were squared, blotter straightened, her in-tray and out-tray clear and the telephone switched to an operator overnight. I reached it across the desk and gave the switchboard the Kensington number on Kathryn Swinford’s card, fooled with the pencils until a porter answered, then held while he made the connection. When he put me through, her voice was choking on a level fury.
“Newman!”
“Doctor, I’m sorry. You’re rehanging the Gainsboroughs in your bathroom and it’s not a good time. I’ll call back.”
“Stop that right now, Detective,” she practically screamed. “And while you’re at it, call the fire brigade because Littomy is ready to set light to your career. Some local ruffian presented himself at Bishopsgate this afternoon complaining you assaulted him.”
Some local ruffian. I rubbed the corners of my eyes and said, “You’re crazy.”
“I was there.”
“It’s not what I meant. I meant you’re crazy if you think what I do amounts to a career. What happened?”
“I had a call this afternoon from Littomy to examine someone claiming you intervened, unasked, in a domestic dispute. Littomy wanted to know if the man was genuinely hurt.”
“Voigt.”
“Yes, Voigt. Who maintains you set about him and then interviewed his daughter, a minor, without his permission. He’ll live. Not that the superintendent is likely to lose sleep over an unprovoked assault. His own detectives appear to specialize in it, but you had no witness present to deny it happened, which breaks his first rule of policing. He’s hopping mad. Though why I bother to tell you all this I can’t imagine.”
I closed my eyes, saw Irene Voigt drooling on her pillow, mortified she couldn’t find a way to close her broken mouth. The doctor wasn’t looking for explanation. I should have let it go, but it was late in the day to start trading politenesses. “Yes, you can. You’re telling me because you want to satisfy your standards of fairness. You think there could be more to Voigt’s story than he says and in your book that means I get a right of reply. It’s gracious of you and you’re right, there is more. But tell me something. When you decide my standards aren’t up to scratch, what do you do next? Strike me off your dance card?” I flopped on Miss Hartridge’s chair, and before she could hang up, said, “Forget I said that. But understand this. Voigt is likelier to join a temperance union than walk in a police station with a complaint. Unless he was told. After you examined him, he went back home to pick up his domestic dispute where he left off and put his daughter in a hospital bed. This time it was her ribs and her collarbone and her nose. She’ll pull through. What bothers her more is what happens to her looks next time she gets his full attention, then the time after that. Tell me about standards, Doctor. Lately they interest me.”
For a long moment I heard nothing but the creak of radiators and the ticking of my watch. Then a pale voice, speaking close into the mouthpiece. “The man’s a louse. For my money, you could have tossed him out of the window.”
“We were on the ground floor.”
A voice fainter still, hardly more than a whisper along the wire. “What kind of an excuse is that?” Then the line went dead.
I climbed two floors back to the common room, where a single light burned. Nurse Greer’s cigarette still hung on the air. Her handbag was still in the locker where she left it. The bag had a flip-clasp and a zipper compartment inside with her purse and identity card, a worn leather key case and a sleek blue pocketbook for 1948, so new it creaked when I opened it. I lifted out the key case, closed the zipper, flipped the clasp and slid the bag back in the locker. Outside, the corridor was brighter than a sunlit sidewalk.
SIXTEEN
My cab crawled down Ludgate Hill and crossed into Fleet Street, the driver muffled like a Greenlander with a chill. Yesterday, Reilly had announced he planned to stay in the West End, gave Irene Voigt a name that meant nothing to her and no address. Today, I couldn’t get out of my head a fresh-faced priest celebrating the virgin birth as if it might go out of style. Two hundred feet short of Charing Cross the cab pulled across the Strand, made a U-turn and halted in front of Fruchtna & Patrick’s temperance lodging. A customer in a velvet-collar coat exited the building with a spring in his step, sniffed a gardenia in his buttonhole and climbed in the empty cab while I paid the driver. Last night’s No Vacancies sign had been switched out on the board next to the entrance. Paddy’s had a room to let.
There was a hall leading off the street entrance that made a side-step to the back of the building. It had a counter set across the angle and a sliding hatch in the wall behind it, all of it painted mud brown below a waist-high rail that ran along the hall. Above the rail was painted butter cream, for the full Pullman car effect. I’d reached the counter when a slim yellow-blond with slept-in eyes came sashaying along the passage toward me, twirling a key on a ring around his finger like Billy the Kid. Something about him was familiar. Twenty feet away he noticed he had company and slackened pace. Ten feet away he put his tongue in his cheek and asked, “Something I can do for you?”
I grinned at him. “Not unless you’re Father Dolan.”
Billy sighed and dropped the key on a ledge behind the counter. “It’s Christmas, dimples. He’ll be on his knees. Why don’t you ring his bell?”
He kept on walking, gave no sign we’d met before, took the button mouth and the lidded eyes and the yellow hair licked off his forehead and closed the street door behind him. The hip-swung walk, the soft, high accents, the dress sense that helped a little go a long, long way; it was hard to put a finger on. I leaned over the counter for the register and opened it at the latest arrivals. The hatch in the wall slid aside. A throat cleared and a voice scarcely au
dible said, “Our register is maintained strictly for perusal by the proper authorities. Please be good enough to return it whence you took it. Do you wish for a room?”
I didn’t look up. The hatch shuddered to and a door dragged open farther along the passage. From his pallor, the young priest was still taking his Christmas Day of prayer and feasting square on the chin. He lifted the countertop and installed himself behind it in short, straight lines, raised an elbow likewise and rested it across the register. Cold sober he looked as brittle as a relic, his complexion an unvaried shade of wet gravel. I glanced down the names on the open pages. “Father, we both know this is a work of fiction. And you can take it I’m acquainted with the proper authorities.”
The broad, unlined forehead thought that through. “Police? Forgive me if I appear a little under the weather. At this season of the year one indulges the flesh to excess. You’re not the officer we ordinarily have our dealings with.” His brow knitted. “Have we met before?”
“Not so you’d notice. I worship in a different parish.” I put down a photograph on the countertop. “Terry Reilly. He didn’t register in that name, I checked. But he’s been staying here. Have you eaten today, Father? You look as if you’re about to die.”
The priest went fish-eyed at the thought of nourishment. “Food is quite out of the question. Thank you.” He wiped the back of his hand across his lips, blinked behind his glasses at the photograph. “I really cannot recall the young man. An occasional resident perhaps? What did you say the name was?”
“Reilly. And so we understand each other, Father, he’s not a student of anything but older men, and Paddy’s has to do with temperance what a bishop has to do with a bathhouse. I can have it closed down and the officer you’re dealing with busted faster than the bursar can reach for an altar boy. Take another look.”
He fumbled his glasses off his nose and stooped over the photograph. “Well now, perhaps. You may have noticed our board exhibits a vacancy. This young man was away with the lark this morning and a night’s room rent owing. I fear the bursar you mentioned will be displeased.” I looked around the peeling cream of the walls. The priest straightened up and put his spectacles back on, followed my gaze. “Such unappealing colors are they not? At least when applied to a railway carriage one has hopes the train might leave the station. I have many times called the attention of Mr. Drake’s office to the spiritual abyss of our painted decorations.”
Deep in the building a door opened and shut. A faint breeze stirred along the passage and shook a flake of peeling paint off the ceiling. I put out a hand upturned, as if we were expecting rain. “Wait a minute, Father. Councilor Drake owns Paddy’s?”
“The same, I believe. Yes.”
The paint flake drifted weightless, see-sawed, slipped and spiraled, then settled rocking in the palm of my hand. And as my fist closed around it, I knew where I’d seen the button mouth before: in a photograph in a bedroom in a house on Cloth Court, also belonging to the councilor. Billy the Kid had been a full-length study in Jarrett’s picture gallery. A pinup on a closet door. The priest gaped unsteadily at my outstretched hand, green-black circles around his eye sockets, skin white as chalk. “Father, inside twenty minutes you’ll need food or extreme unction. Better eat.” I flattened out my palm and blew the paint flake over the countertop.
SEVENTEEN
The nurse’s key let me out of a wind that was freezing tears to my eyeballs, and on to the rug in her red-tile hall. Somewhere down the hallway a coal fire shifted and spat. I listened until it settled, eased shut the door and got a penlight from my pocket. At right, a door opened on a sitting room that ran front to back of the house. At left, the hall led to a kitchen where the coal fire smoked behind a screen, and from the kitchen to a walk-through pantry that had jars and cans hoarded on shelves either side and leftovers put away in a food safe. Beyond the pantry, another door let on a small backyard and an alley running behind the court. Not lavish as city living goes, but par for what a nurse’s pay afforded in a peacetime fit for heroes. I flashed the light around it all and went back along the hall to the stair.
The house’s top half had stayed boarded off since the blitz firebombing. The stair ended at two bedrooms set back-to-back on the second floor. The smaller bedroom had a washstand in a corner, a bedframe under a window looking over the court, and a closet with some very classy apparel in it for a hospital nurse. On the bedframe, a khaki service Gladstone bag with two initials on its straps sat open and empty. Alongside it, a metal trunk was layered with clothes not for wearing. In one side of the trunk Nurse Greer had put away her wartime Utility fashions. In the other half she was storing what belonged to the officer with his initials on the Gladstone bag: an airman’s rank braid, his shirts and collars, a field service cap with an odd, steel-hard bump inside it and a necktie with a squadron badge. I started with the bump in the field cap.
Keeping a serviceable Webley revolver and a twelve-box of cartridges in an unlocked trunk wasn’t the best idea Nurse Greer ever had. But I didn’t see it as a problem either. For one thing, the airman’s sidearm, assuming it was his, was clean and unloaded. For another, the Webley was the wrong caliber for Jarrett’s murder, a .45 not a .38, and all twelve cartridges were still in the box. I lifted the revolver out with a pocket handkerchief, broke it open and sniffed at it, then put it back where the nurse liked to park her artillery and moved on.
Her own bedroom faced the backyard and alley. It had an armchair and a tallboy against one wall, with a hairbrush set and a mirror on it and nothing in its four drawers to linger over. On a slim rattan side table beside the bed, there was an alarm clock on a lace runner and a marquetry box for trinkets behind the clock. I squeezed between the window and the bed and hinged back the lid of the box. It had dry stalks of lavender scattered loose inside, the nurse’s passport, letters bundled and tied in ribbon. And beneath the letters a snapshot of Nurse Greer, leaning against the iron rail of some foreign promenade with the beach behind her, arm in arm with a boy in rolled sleeves and tennis whites, a sweater around his shoulders, sunburn on his nose and sky-high summer in his smile. Nurse Greer had her free hand holding down a sprig cotton dress billowing on the breeze, and a mixed look of alarm and pure happiness dancing in her eyes. There was more. Under the photograph, in a cheap lacquer frame, she kept a squadron badge of an outspread eagle over a shield, embroidered with the squadron’s name and number; and with the badge, a set of thin, official forms folded in the order they’d arrived in. I didn’t need to look. I’d seen plenty of the kind before. And looked anyway.
The forms moved through the grinding service protocol that lists a man missing in action, then presumes him dead, and when the time arrives to confirm it, sends out a form for that as well. There was a form to finalize the airman’s pay, another from the Revenue doing the same for his taxes, a condolence from his King and Queen, then a list from a wing commander at Central Depository stating the belongings they had in store for the late Flight Lieutenant Charles Irving John Ross. It said the flight lieutenant’s effects were there to be collected or forwarded at the addressee’s expense. Alternatively, for unwanted uniform items there was a charity, care of Mrs. Jeanne Mayhew of Hatton Garden, London, that assisted fellow officers in cases of hardship. They’re thorough at Central Depository. I was thinking they might even tell me what I was looking for when a key grated in the front door.
I twisted off the penlight beam and pushed the forms back in the box, closed the lid and froze while a switch dipped in the hallway and threw a strip of light across the bedroom floor. The front door slammed shut. Feet stamped the hall rug. There was an intake of shuddering breath that couldn’t be the nurse because I’d got her house keys in my pocket and she had hours on duty still to go. Quick, light steps went along the hall. A second light snapped and lit cracks in the floorboards under my shoes. The coals in the kitchen range raked over, a woman coughed and dragged out a chair, clicked another switch
and Sinatra drifted in from the background static with Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.
I used a cuff to wipe sweat under my chin, measured the distance to the bedroom door, took three breaths and went through it fast and flattened in the shadows along the staircase wall. The hall light spilled across my shoelaces. No kitchen sounds except the radio. I took a step to the head of the stairs and counted them down, stayed hard against the wall, tried my weight on the inside of a tread, then eased down to the next and then the next. I was four steps short when the woman sniffed and coughed again, snapped shut her handbag, scraped back the chair and started closing up the kitchen range. I stopped breathing and sweated instead, thought about the parlor and didn’t remember its layout well enough, then dropped the four steps and glided along the lighted hallway on fresh air. One stretch more took me past the part-open kitchen door and I was pressed flat in the space behind it when the radio shut off. Heels crossed the floor. Sinatra gasped and slid under the surf of cooling valves. Another click and the kitchen went dark. The nurse’s visitor pushed the door wide, smack up against my nose, went through it close enough to hear the scratch of her silk stockings and turned out the hall light at the foot of the stairs. Then the street door swung shut and she was gone. I gave her fifteen seconds to let my heartbeat slow, soft-shoed to the front parlor window and peeked out over Cloth Court. Snowflakes stirred in the lamplight. Not a thing else. I let the curtain fall and followed the beam from my penlight back down the hall.
Nurse Greer kept a wood-and-wire letter rack at the back of her kitchen table, some seaside souvenir filled with store receipts and bills for paying, ration cards and reminders. Her visitor had torn a flap off an envelope, penciled a message on it and left it propped against the rack. The Viaduct Tomorrow. 7.30. Initialed with a V. The time underlined twice. There was a faint perfume I didn’t recognize. Nothing else in the room was changed that I could tell. As for the note, it might mean something or nothing at all, but either way it would wait. For now, I had Nurse Greer’s house key to put back in her locker and a call to pay on my client that was overdue.