by Janet Roger
Drake dragged his eyes off the pattern on the carpet and looked perplexed. He hesitated while the library clock hushed the quarter hour. “I remember it. Professor Garfield and I meet regularly to discuss planning matters. Beyond that I recall no detail.”
I made a frown. “That’s a pity, but never mind. Let’s try the appointment you had with the professor the same evening. Chances are you talked about the same things you don’t recall talking about in the diner.”
“I had no other appointment with Professor Garfield. Is he saying I did?”
“Not exactly.”
Willard looked bored, picked a strand of dark tobacco off his lip and asked offhand, “What exactly does this Garfield say?”
“Professor Garfield doesn’t say anything at all, Mr. Willard. His body was lifted out of the river this morning and my guess is it had been there at least forty-eight hours. So if the councilor doesn’t recall having any appointment with the professor, he’d better give some thought to what he did do from around nine o’clock that evening. And in detail. City detectives will be interested to know.”
Mrs. Willard took two slow inches out of her drink and cradled the glass in her lap. Her brow clouded, faintly bemused, then she screwed around in the club chair, lost the puzzle in her eyes and looked in mine. “Daddy was here with me. It’s a Drake family tradition, father and daughter getting tight and miserable for a Jewish Christmas Eve. Why not join us for the next one?”
TWENTY-ONE
I beat on the basement doorframe of the Sesto and waited, not much later in the afternoon than my visit the day before. The signora pulled aside the curtain behind the door glass, softened her frown and let me in. I took the same seat, watched her back to the kitchen and closed my eyes on a dull ache working its way up from my toenails. When I opened them again, the signora was standing at the head of the booth with two small cups in her hands and the Courier folded under her arm. She dropped the newspaper beside me, prodded a sugar bowl and set down the cups, then eased into the bench opposite and butted along it, sighing at the effort. “You don’t find Mr. Garfield. And now such a terrible thing.”
I was reaching for the sugar, saw the afternoon front page and stopped dead. Under a headline Professor’s Assistant Wanted for Questioning, was the picture of Henry Beaufort from Jarrett’s dresser, with its kisses clipped. Littomy was pictured next to it, looking determined in a handsome uniform, saying his priority was to interview the young man, understood to be the last person to see Professor Garfield alive. The rest was Christmas-killer sensation and some career detail on the celebrated victim. It was the Henry Beaufort angle that bothered me. “I found him, signora. He just wasn’t alive.”
She wrinkled her nose, resigned. “I am sad for him. To find his colosseo and then to die so quick.”
I squinted at her over a mouthful of coffee, swallowed and said slowly, “The professor found a Roman coliseum? Here in the City?”
“Of course! He always knows there is one because this city is important and because Romans like to make them. One day he wants to find it and be famous. And now this!”
“Wait, signora. How do you know he found it?”
Her lip dropped in disbelief that I could be so slow. She hunched her shoulders and threw her hands wide. It was nothing personal. Oppenheimer would have gotten the same treatment if he wasn’t keeping up. “Because he shows the pictures to the man he brings here. The one with cigars. I tell you already.”
“No, signora, you did not. You told me you never saw what was in the photographs.”
The hands flapped at me. “I didn’t see! But what else can make the professore so excited to show to this man?” She was prying herself out of the seat, breathing hard, handing me my hat as if I ought to stop leaving my brains in it.
I slid along the bench and took it. Two nights ago, Edgar Levin had said it was going after the big fish that made the professor no friends. “The man with the cigars, signora. Did the professor give him the pictures?”
She caught up with her breath and eyed me. “Of course no! They are like pictures of his child. After he shows them, he puts them back in his coat, next to his heart.” She took two steps, raised up on her toes, put a hand on my coat lapel and patted where my heart ought to be. “My big, beautiful detective who wants to marry. Listen to me. A terrible man is killing my customers. Next time you come, tell me you catch-ed him.”
It was mid-afternoon. The daylight already spent. From the Sesto, I followed around the edge of the square then walked Giltspur Street as far as Holborn Viaduct. For a half-mile east, the landscape was an open grid of basements dividing up a snowfield like sheepfolds on high moorland. How it looked before the Luftwaffe arrived I hardly remembered, and if someplace out there under the ruins Garfield had found a Roman amphitheater, then it took more imagining than I had. I waited for a gap in a slow churn of traffic, crossed to the corner of Old Bailey and kept going, and at Ludgate turned uphill and halted halfway, outside a small church still more or less in one piece.
Across the street in the middle of an Edwardian block were the offices of Beaufort Partners, architects, and above them the apartment where Henry Beaufort claimed he stayed on Christmas Eve. I crossed the rise to one side of the main entrance, pressed the buzzer to the apartment and waited. Traffic on the hill passed shadows across the office windows. Downhill a goods train clattered over Ludgate as if somebody was tossing beer crates off the bridge. Passers-by shied from a wind filled with needles, and the church behind me rippled in the plate glass of the Beaufort offices, drowning at the bottom of a pool. Across the surface of the pool the shade of a Humber sedan pulled over from the uphill crawl and coasted to the curb. It was sitting there with its motor still running when Levin answered the door.
Edgar Levin didn’t look overjoyed to see me but stood aside to let me in. He led up three straight flights of stairs without a word and turned in through a door off a landing into an outsized sitting room, all-white and as Edwardian as a split atom. It had linoleum the color of gunmetal covering the floor, sofas and floor lamps in a square around a drinks table, and two paintings in the center of each of the blank walls, one gray on white, the other white on gray to ring the changes. They might have been Picassos from his plumbing period, or a layout for steam pipes in an igloo; either way, they gave the room the all-around charm of an automated milking parlor.
Somewhere in the apartment a radio played light jazz. Levin pulled at the empty sleeve of his sweater and didn’t want to start a conversation. I started one for him. “We both read this afternoon’s Courier, Mr. Levin. Boosting Henry for a murder suspect is today’s pitch to its readers, but his disappearance doesn’t improve the mood of the detective in charge. When he picks the boy up, as he certainly will, his methods are guaranteed to be as ugly as they’re thorough. Before that happens, I need to talk to Henry. My guess is you’d know where to find him. If it helps, I don’t think he killed anybody either.”
Levin eyed me a long moment, then nodded at a drink in a squat glass on the table, not started. “Better sit down. Take the scotch. I’ll get another from the kitchen.”
I walked around one of the sofas, flopped in a corner seat and reached for the glass. Breathe in a whisky and you hear its whisper. Most often, all it’s saying is to brace for firewater and it doesn’t mean you lasting harm. Less often, it murmurs a silken promise of soft rain fallen over purple heather, squeezed out, concentrated and waiting in your hand. This one said none of those things. All I breathed was the smell of a cold iron stair in an alley too cloistered for snow. All it whispered of was cheap perfume on a worn raincoat and blood on the air. I sprung a sweat and slid the glass back on the table untouched. When Levin brought the fresh drink in, I was still mopping under my jaw. I watched him put it on the sofa arm and motioned with the handkerchief balled in my fist, “What is it?”
“They call it Buccleuch. Guy goes shooting in the Highlands i
n season and sends down some cases to make Christmas gifts. Usually from a different small still each year. I don’t suppose you’d come across it otherwise.”
I didn’t suppose so either. What Beaufort had sent south was a straight malt whisky, made for blending with the industrial kind to make something out of nothing. Ordinarily, the natives set some aside as consolation for an arthritic climate. Ordinarily, they don’t intend it to travel or move in the circles I move in. But you never can tell. Because the day a Guy Beaufort drives over the hill, with his guns and his dog and the fat-apple appeal of his wallet, ordinarily jumps out the window. “Two days ago was my first. For now, I’m more interested in how Professor Garfield might have come across it. Last time we spoke, it sounded as if he didn’t make it onto the Beaufort Christmas list this year.”
Levin’s gaze clouded. “In the current circumstances, I doubt he did. What’s your point?”
I gave some thought to my point while he gave some thought to current circumstances. The Buccleuch sparked in the glass like dawn off a peat stream. “On the night he died, the professor stopped by the Raglan on St. Martin’s le Grand, got friendly there with a smile-for-hire named Terry Reilly, and not long after they wandered out together into the night. Forget what the Courier’s telling its readers today. As candidate for the last person to see Garfield alive, Reilly beats Henry hands down. That was Christmas Eve. Christmas morning, Reilly left some part of a bottle of twelve-year Buccleuch with a friend, and word is he didn’t make the Beaufort list either. My point is, where did he get it?”
The door from the kitchen opened behind me. A draft tickled the back of my neck. Slow footfalls crossed the room while Levin frowned and rolled the liquor around his glass. Henry Beaufort sagged beside him on the sofa, ghost-white, and murmured, “It was a present. I wrapped it and put it in Michael’s office when we broke up for the holiday. I left my Christmas card inside his diary at the same time. If you’d asked me before, I could have told you.”
Questions I didn’t ask. It’s a complaint I get. Also questions I asked the wrong people, in the wrong places, at the wrong time. In a shamus it’s not a recommendation, I admit, but you don’t have to let it grow into a complex. “Fine, so answer me this. Early afternoon Christmas Eve, Michael Garfield went into a diner in West Smithfield to show some photographs to a City councilor. My guess is they were taken from an airplane after the recent snowfall, but whatever they were I think he was too excited about them to let them out of his sight. I thought they might be in his pockets when he was found this morning, but I was mistaken about that. I also thought they could be why somebody turned his house over the night he died, and I could be mistaken about that too. What do you think?”
Edgar Levin’s gaze swung around. The low electric swoon of the radio fell back on the room. Henry got up off the sofa. “I don’t know whether Michael took any aerial photographs recently, but I know the pilot he always flew with. If you want to, we could go and ask.”
It was three-thirty. Last daylight was turning the street windows the color of the linoleum. Levin still toyed with his drink and I had no better ideas. I said yes, we ought to go ask.
TWENTY-TWO
We didn’t leave by the street door. Henry led out through a galley kitchen at rear of the apartment, down a back stair and out on to a cobblestone service road hardly wide enough for two cars to pass. Outside the exit at the foot of the stair a low-slung Morgan tourer was parked tight against the building. He cleared snow off the glass, got the stone-cold motor started, backed up along the alley and turned the car around, then nosed out onto Ludgate where the rail bridge crossed. Two hundred feet up the rise, the Humber sedan was still sitting at the curb, dribbling exhaust in the gutter.
The Morgan was a straitjacket two sizes too small that Henry drove hard and flat, north through Farringdon and Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell and across Gray’s Inn Road. He took byways through redbrick Bloomsbury to bring him out at Euston, slotted in the early evening traffic running out of the city and pointed the Morgan west. The car was chill as a morgue but Henry didn’t seem to notice, kept the quarter lights angled open to stop the windshield fogging and drove in a trance; out through Marylebone, across Edgware Road, but always west. On Western Avenue we joined a crawl from White City to Park Royal, until beyond the Hoover plant the traffic thinned and up ahead as far as Oxford was open country. Last light drained from a vault of polar cold. The Morgan plowed the mush of tire ridges in its headlights and settled to a low burble of exhaust. Henry spoke for the first time since we left Levin’s apartment. “Who’s Reilly?”
We were jigging in the glow from the dash, two puppets in a shadow play misting the inside of the glass with our breathing. I had my knees in a bear hug. “Reilly was a chance pickup on Christmas Eve. Nobody Michael Garfield knew. It wasn’t the reason he was in the bar.”
“Did he kill Michael?” It was a simple inquiry, spoken without rancor while the windshield wipers beat off a snow flurry. The boy was exhausted, thinking through gauze.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” No more houses at the roadside, only frozen hedgerows cut out against a moonrise. I scratched at frost riming the side window. “Terry Reilly was working that night. If he was the killer, he didn’t plan it or he wouldn’t have made his move in a crowded room. Two people behind the bar saw him operating, likely there were others. Reilly as the killer doesn’t make sense. Garfield’s killer didn’t take his wallet; it was still in his pocket with folding money inside. Yet twelve hours later Reilly was broke, went looking for his girlfriend and took everything she had in her purse. It makes him nobody’s idea of Prince Charming, but it doesn’t make him your friend’s murderer either.”
“Have you got a photograph?”
I twisted to reach in my jacket pocket, then angled Reilly’s picture under the light from the Morgan’s dials. Henry’s eyes drifted to it for a second, then fixed back on the road. “Somebody else you never saw before?”
Henry leaned to switch off the windshield wiper and peered ahead at a night dancing with frost, his voice flat as an amen. “Never. What did you expect?”
The silhouette of a single-engine Lysander skimmed a fret of trees, silent as a gull clipping wavetops, crossed the Oxford road close to stalling and floated weightless out of a sky dripping starlight. It yawed and dipped over a frozen swell of Quonset huts at the airfield perimeter, adjusted its trim and for a long moment let you hear the whisper of its motor, then glided in over a curling ground mist. It kissed the strip twice lightly, like Proust greeting his grandmother, and when it put its tail down I turned away from the car and followed Henry to the sliding doors of a hangar.
Inside there was a dry smell of cement dust, a string of lights hanging from the beam sections and a cinder block office in a corner. We turned to watch the airplane running on into a flat, dead cold, heading for the evening star until it made a tight turn off the strip at the far side of the field. It taxied a wide arc out of sight behind more Quonsets, then a hundred yards out came bouncing back in view. Twenty yards out and the hangar was echoing the plane’s motor louder than a steel mill. Then the roar throttled back, I took my fingers out of my ears and the Lysander’s propeller picked itself out of the blur, shuddered and rocked to a standstill.
A hatch swung open in shadow under the high wing and a figure in a flying suit eased out of the cabin and dropped lightly on the concrete apron. The pilot flexed fingers in heavy gauntlets, stomped around on the ground to get blood pumping, then saw Henry waiting hunched under the airplane’s wingtip and ducked under a strut to walk over to him. They clasped hands without a word, stood bowed and silent in the light spilling from the hangar, then turned arm in arm toward me. I stepped aside from the hangar door and followed them inside to the cinder-block office.
A kerosene stove reeked in a corner and made the small room swelter. A desk lamp lit its walls, crowded with photographs taken from the air. A hand of solita
ire was playing out on the grid squares of a map spread on the desk, split and frayed along its folds. The flyer yanked clumsily at a helmet strap, teeth bared, and worked numbed fingers at the buckle. Henry, gray with fatigue, remembered what we were doing there. “I… I’m sorry. Gerry Fulton, this is Newman. He’s a private investigator. He’s here to ask about some photographs of Michael’s.”
Fulton let the chin strap hang loose and thought about that, pulled open a drawer in the desk and set three tin mugs on the upturned playing cards. I leaned against the door, found a cigarette, tapped it on a knuckle and considered Garfield’s pilot. Hollow cheeks smutted with engine oil, light hazel eyes close-set, a mouth that pouted when it had the chance and all of it framed in a tight-fitted leather helmet and the fleece collar of a flying suit. From the neck down the suit was a balloon tucked into flying boots, not a lot more than two sheep stitched together inside out. The flyer wearing it was built slender, taut and small-boned. You wondered how often the professor’s burning interest in aerial photography had brought him out to visit. Fulton twisted the top from a fresh third of brandy, shared the liquor across the three mugs and motioned me to take one. “Ask ahead.” The voice as soft as the mouth, and with a catch in it. Its owner grabbed an earflap to peel away the helmet, then reached inside the fleece collar and shook out a sway of copper-orange hair that bounced around the shoulders of the flying suit before it settled.
I was lifting a mug off a ten of diamonds. My jaw slacked and the cigarette flipped off my lip, cartwheeled into the mug and floated in the brandy like a needle fixing on magnetic north. Pilot Fulton arched an eyebrow for the idiot American in the room. I gave her my rueful look, guilty on all counts, set down the mug and switched to the photographs pinned along her wall. “Miss Fulton, the day Michael Garfield died he was excited about some pictures like those. Henry thinks if he took them recently you would have flown him.”