by Janet Roger
EIGHTEEN
Bartholomew Close ran a curve south and east of the church, unscarred on the church side except for a corner site bombed flat where it joined Bartholomew Square. The other side of the street had been practically wiped out, the few houses left standing twice lucky because they were the ones with the view. Councilor Drake owned a black-brick, five-story town house facing the desolation. It had four tall windows on each floor, a half-basement with a bridge across from the sidewalk, a wide front door at the end of the bridge and a brass bell-push set in the wall. One lean on the button brought a young housemaid, who took my card and my coat and left me in the entrance hall. When she returned, she led along a passage where she tapped at a door, stood aside for me to walk in and without crossing the threshold announced, “Mrs. Willard. Mr. Newman.”
The room had sofas arranged around a hearth, and on the walls portraits so dark all I could make out were hands and faces. A floor lamp inside the door was lighting its own shade and not a lot else besides. “You’re not how I imagined a private investigator.” The voice was flat and thickened and came from the farthest sofa. A woman in a dark silk wrap stretched along the length of it, toes peeking out of rhinestone slippers flashing in the firelight. I hadn’t heard the voice before. The face and figure I’d been introduced to at the Waldorf, climbing out of an Armstrong limousine at the Beaufort Christmas Ball.
“You’re not how I imagined Councilor Drake.”
She took a noisy gulp from a tumbler, wagged a forefinger, then set the empty glass on the carpet. “My father isn’t here.”
I nodded back at the closed door. “Your maid forgot to mention it.”
“She said you were tall, dark and American. And I prefer drinking in company.” She waved vaguely at the far end of the room. “Over there.”
I crossed to a trolley and upturned a glass, tipped out a slug from a cocktail shaker and brought it over to put in her outstretched hand. A wide silk sleeve slid back along a slim wrist. “The detective isn’t drinking.”
“I’m here on business, Mrs. Willard.”
She shrugged and lifted the glass. “Then here’s to business.” She draped a bottom lip around the rim, knitted her eyebrows, downed the cocktail and handed me the glass. I went through the trolley routine again. This time when I came back, she was tucking the hem of the wrap around her ankles, pointing me to sit down on the sofa. I guessed she might be thirty, also guessed she’d been drinking all day and that today was much like any other. She had big, dark eyes and darker eyebrows, features getting a little waxed, high cheeks, a small bump of a chin and a mouth wiped with deep red to draw attention from her clouded look. Taken together with her tangle of dark hair and the way she had of rumpling it with her free hand, it gave her an air of floating over the rooftops.
“What’s wrong with drinking in Mr. Willard’s company?” I knew the name. There wouldn’t be two of them. The figure in the white tuxedo getting soft around the jaw, relaxed as a shirtfront and dressed to make George Raft look down-at-heel.
She put a shushing finger to her lips, a little off-center. “We don’t speak of Mr. Willard here. Nor of Drake, Willard and Company. And since the Drakes wish to continue being accepted in polite society, we never ever refer to my husband’s other business interests. Embarrassment most certainly, acrimony very possibly, are apt to ensue.”
“So, you argue. What about?”
“Oh, everything imaginable. Business. Money. Me.” She was lonely, flirting-drunk. Sometimes it can be too easy. “I don’t live with my husband, Mr. Newman. Joseph is not a nice man. After three miserably long years I upped and returned to daddy. Why did the lady stay so long you ask?”
But I hadn’t asked. I was thinking about her laughter of the night before, gay with her one-armed man in the shadows of an empty ballroom. “Last night at the Waldorf you were Christmas decoration. Is that it?”
The hem of her wrap lost her interest. She nodded absently and reached for the glass. I handed it over, let her put both feet in my lap and settle back against the arm of the sofa. “Duty called. When Mr. Willard wishes to keep up appearances, Mrs. Willard is available for balls, dinners, garden parties and the like. But”—she took a lift from the drink and wagged the finger again—”things that got worse, can get better. We therefore propose a toast. To the Past Obliterative.” The word tripped her. She drained the glass and lurched off the sofa, the wrap pulled tight across her stomach. “God but you pour a bloody awful cocktail. Don’t you know you’re supposed to shake?” At the trolley she made elaborate play of fixing her own, dropped in ice, shook it clumsily, filled her glass and downed it where she stood, then poured a reserve. She brought it back and sat alongside me, arranged the wrap and nuzzled her chin on my shoulder.
“So why marry him?”
She was silent so long I thought she’d passed out. Then she stirred, snuggled tighter and said dreamily, “Because when the Drakes were being bankrupted by those beastly German bombers, a prince arrived to bail them out, and when the shoe fits you absolutely have to marry the prince. The girl he left behind is in my debt forever.” She flapped a hand at her mouth and yawned. “I suppose you think I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“What difference what I think?”
“Quite. Anyway, the man I should have married went to war and didn’t come back. You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“It’s been said.”
She tried angling the cocktail glass to her mouth and fumbled it. Slopped the contents down the front of my jacket, filled my shirt pocket and tipped most of the rest down my tie. What little she had left she emptied over my shoes. Her eyes said it was hopeless. She raised herself on an elbow, registered I was wet through and pawed my shirt. “Your suit—”
“Forget the suit, Mrs. Willard. You wouldn’t let it in the house in daylight.” I lifted the empty glass from her hand and set it down on the carpet alongside the first, eased her upright and put a cushion on the sofa arm. Straightened out, with the cushion for a pillow, she was more or less how I found her when I walked in the room. By the time I got to the door, she was snoring lightly and rhythmically in the cuff of her sleeve.
The housemaid met me with my coat and hat in the hallway, saw the damage and didn’t ask. Just led me to a large back kitchen and started dabbing with a cloth as if it was part of her routine. She did what she could, but Mrs. Willard didn’t waste her drinking on small glasses and was generous with what she spilled. I got back to Fleet Street reeking like a bonded store, emptied my pockets, took off my tie and jacket and dropped them on the bathroom floor. Then went to the bureau to get a bottle of my own and stand with it at the darkened window. I liked the night view from there, and in the cab home I’d formed a plan—not sophisticated, but satisfying as far as it went—to plow liquor until the forge hammer eased up hitting the anvil in my head. The plan was on schedule when a car heading east braked hard, the traffic behind honked in chorus and skated to a stop. I leaned my forehead against the sash frame and watched brake lights pop red like skyrockets in the window glass. A Humber sedan had pulled out from a line of parked news trucks and slewed across the center line streaming exhaust, was halfway to Ludgate Circus before it found traction, out of sight before the vehicle horns died. Whoever was behind the wheel was good and didn’t care who knew it. Even cops want you to know they sometimes go home and sleep. You just have to remember they don’t all sleep at the same time.
A Night for Goddesses
By ten o’clock next morning I was clear-eyed and close-shaved, bathed and breakfasted, my bank credit was waxing on rumor of the councilor’s check in my pocket and the cigarette rolling in my fingers smelled of new-mown hayfields in the dew. A stray ribbon of sunlight cut across Littomy’s desk. Rime frost sparkled outside his window. I stared into a sky the blue of myth, leaned back in the customer chair as if I owned the lease and ran a thumb around the inside of my shirt collar. The ro
om was hot enough to ripen grapefruit.
Littomy stood gaunt and tall at a line of metal cabinets, raking through files in an open drawer. He lifted one out and walked around the desk, folded in his seat and in the level, disappointed tones of an accountant said, “Voigt.” He helped himself to a cigarette from a box on the desk. I leaned over with a lighted match and a pained look. “I can explain.”
His hand raised for silence. “There is no need. Voigt is not the reason you were summoned here.” Littomy swiveled in his seat, hooked one knee across the other. The toecap of his shoe had the mirror shine of a Steinway. “The man is a disgrace. Our temporary medical examiner informs me of his violence to his own daughter. Also, that the man sustained no serious injury. Voigt has been warned that his attempted complaint was sheer effrontery. For what purpose did you approach the girl?”
“She made friends with a boy named Terry Reilly, two kids each as lost as the other. Jarrett was running the boy on the street, and on the night of his murder the boy went missing. I thought she might tell me something I didn’t already know.”
“And did she?”
“Not a thing. She’d heard Jarrett’s name, nothing else. Voigt, on the other hand, had heard plenty about Jarrett and Reilly both, and didn’t like the sound of either. Putting his daughter in the hospital was his way of telling her to keep different company.”
Littomy leaned his head back and quartered the ceiling as if he read runes on it. “Indeed. The late Raymond Jarrett. Whose penchant for photography would explain your client’s interest in our investigation, would it not?”
I shrugged that it might, but his eyes were floating far over my head. “My client has an eye to high office in the City. This whole affair is an embarrassment. Not knowing enough about who tenants his properties reflects badly on him. The councilor wants no more surprises.”
Littomy let out a long breath through his nose. “I daresay. But should Detective Inspector McAlester find that your inquiries trespass upon his murder investigation, he will require you to desist. I could scarcely demur. You have already given him good reason.”
As if either of us supposed McAlester needed a reason. “McAlester doesn’t know I exist, cares even less, and he can’t expect me to take a vacation while he makes up his mind. The day he wants me he’ll find me. And nobody called it trespass when I brought in Garfield’s coat.”
It got his gaze back down off the ceiling. We sat looking at each other along the side of his nose until Littomy said carefully, “Evidence suggests only that the coat was worn by Jarrett’s murderer. We do not know it belongs to the professor, much less that he concealed it in his own home, and nothing yet connects Garfield’s absence in this holiday season with the ghastly shooting in his car. No doubt when we locate him, he will explain.” His attention wandered to the cigarette clamped in his knuckle. “Moreover, it appears young Beaufort has absented himself, let us hope simply out of sheer embarrassment. His actions thus far have been appallingly foolish. McAlester will doubtless return him to the fold ‘ere long, but to go to ground when his father has the Commissioner’s ear is, to say the least, ill-advised.”
Absented himself. I leaned forward in the chair and wondered if I’d heard. Because if I had, Henry Beaufort had promoted himself single-handed to first-grade police suspect. Suspected of what wouldn’t matter much, and to McAlester not at all, because Henry had given him license to toss away the rulebook. As bad ideas went, it was up there with trying to lose a blood-stained coat in broad daylight in the middle of the City. A telephone started ringing in the outer office. I heard myself swallow and say, “The topcoat had a label inside.” Not for any reason. Only to keep Littomy talking while I wondered how many stunts Henry could pull and still stay out of the tank.
He sniffed and swung his knees back under the desk, pulled his file closer and riffled through it till he found the sheet he wanted. The room went on cooking while he reminded himself. “Indeed. Of a bespoke tailor put out of business by the blitz. The address has been a bombsite since early ‘41. Our inquiries continue. However, were the overcoat to belong to Professor Garfield, it would be the only item in his wardrobe bearing such a label.”
“What about the nurse’s story?”
Littomy’s eyes lifted off the typesheet. He closed the file in front of him like a sermon, balled his fists either side of it and settled back far enough to get his chin down level with mine. This time he didn’t need any aid to recollection. “I have a memorandum here.” A pause to flatten a hand over the file, then the ghost of a private smile, of the kind that frightens small children at bedtime. “From Our Lady of the Immaculate Complexion, in which our deputizing medical examiner notes that Nurse Greer may have lit her votive candles some minutes earlier on Christmas morning than she recalls in her statement. It appears these few unaccounted moments in her story suggest to Dr. Swinford something altogether more sinister.” Littomy winced and reached for his ashtray. “For pity’s sake, what is the woman thinking? A young nurse falls across an horrific murder, a neighbor shot in the back of the head, his brains spread around the walls. Trained nurse Miss Greer may be, but in the circumstances can the good doctor not permit her a little vagueness about her timekeeping?”
There was a polite tap at his office door. A desk sergeant with apple cheeks stepped half-inside and propped the door open with his stomach. Littomy paid him no attention. I had it all. “We are dealing, Newman, with a gutter dispute turned murderous. Not one iota of evidence suggests otherwise. The nurse is a distraction and young Beaufort will surely prove the same. We must allow Dr. Swinford her inexperience, though some plain horse sense and Templeton’s steadying hand would be greatly to our advantage.”
The sergeant coughed and interrupted. “A call from Wapping, sir. A body reported on the river.”
Littomy squinted at the sergeant through a drift of smoke, stubbed his cigarette and dredged back the private smile. It was no hour to be a messenger. “And our River Police mean us to do precisely what with this information, Sergeant? For crying out loud, man, there are queues forming to jump off bridges at this time of year. They find it a more congenial alternative to Christmas with their families. Frankly, one can understand it as a point of view.”
The sergeant’s gaze fixed on the wall over Littomy’s head. “Inspector McAlester requested to be kept informed, sir. In connection with the missing professor. The launch will put out shortly on account of the tide running. If the detective inspector wishes to be aboard, they say he ought to go right away.”
All three of us looked at the wall clock. Littomy lost the acid bonhomie and said as if it hurt his teeth, “Then what delays you, Sergeant? Make a general call, get me Bishopsgate on the telephone and inform Wapping we endeavor to locate our detective inspector.” The sergeant backed into the outer office and let the door swing shut. I left Littomy to his sour mood and his telephone call and followed the sergeant out, reflecting on the short odds that McAlester was about to miss the boat. In two minutes I was at the top of Snow Hill on Holborn Viaduct, waving down a cab heading east.
The cab turned down a rattling cobbled alley parallel to the river and let me out at a warehouse fronting on a wharf. Fifty yards along the wharf, a gangway dropped to a pontoon pier chafing between steel piles. Two sleek, green-hulled police launches were berthed alongside the pier, ex-wartime air-sea rescue boats gargling their exhausts as they dipped in the swell. At the jetty, a muffled figure hunched over the head line of the nearest launch, its stern already slipped. I looked at my watch, then across the water at the Bermondsey shore.
Dock cranes tilted against a sky of tinseling blue. A slack tide the uncut color of sapphires was starting to turn. The launch’s diesels sputtered and snarled and gulls rose off the mud to soar on a festering breeze. With or without McAlester aboard, in thirty seconds River Police would be gone. I set my hat square and turned down my coat collar, cinched my belt Bulldog Drummond style a
nd hit a purposeful stride that took me out of the alley and brought me in view. Twenty yards out I glanced up long enough to see the muffled figure slip his line, step off the jetty onto the deck of the launch and stoop inside the cabin out of a slicing wind, too deafened by the engine roar to hear me yelling, too bone-cold to look back. Ten yards out, I clamped a hand over my hat and took off for the gangway. I was on the pontoon, still waving and yelling, when the launch cut its motors, stopped dead and drifted back in on the tide, close enough to grab its rail and step aboard while it pitched like a carousel. Somebody inside opened the throttle on the diesels again. The launch shuddered like a shunted train and moved out into the stream. I tipped back my hat and loosed the belt on my coat, jammed my shoulders against the forward cabin and let the beat of the engines hammer the breath out of my bones.
We headed downriver against an incoming tide, made a wide, rolling arc to the south shore, then straightened out along Bermondsey’s wharves. The engine note hardened and steadied. The launch pushed flat past a line of freighters riding high at a dock. Then, off Cherry Garden Pier, with the channel widening eastward and open water to stretch out in, they let go the reins. The deck blurred under my feet. Twin screws bit deep. The hull lifted on a creaming pad of bow wave and a trail of fractured blue glass unwound astern for a quarter mile. I grabbed the deck rail, followed it along to the wheelhouse, folded open the door and went in sideways.