Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  Balloons started popping like firecrackers. A wave of cheering broke out. Then wild applause. In the mirror, a patron with a thirst was cutting glassy-eyed across the crowd, aiming directly for the bar and making uncanny progress, the throng opening up ahead to let him through like Moses headed for a margarita. My two hats were in his way. Nurse Greer eased aside like everybody else who saw him coming. In the angle of the mirror, her companion made a quarter turn and did the same. The drop of her shoulder, the curve of her throat, the high cheekbones that gave her the wild-pearl look were unmistakable. Then the crush closed around her and she disappeared again in a welter of damp faces and squealed conversation. “Did it occur to you that Jarrett had charmed relations with the law? He made an entire career hustling in the City and only once got the hook dropped on him. After that his police record is white as snow. Sure I went to see Dillys Valentine that morning. I wanted to hear how Jarrett stayed invisible for so long to City Police. She was ready to explain when somebody cut her short and left me a warning to lose interest.”

  The anger around her eyes turned fugitive, then tried for disbelief, and finally settled for confusion. She took a lick from the glass and touched a knuckle at the corner of her mouth. Pale and startled she said, “You think Miss Valentine was killed by police? Are you serious?” She churned the thought as if I’d broken the news that there are fallen angels.

  “Jarrett could be protected by just two or three officers. It’s all it takes. Only one of them had to decide Dillys Valentine was better dead than talking to me. And who else needed her dead right there and then? Garfield’s killer? He would have waited until she didn’t have company and used the .38 he’d used twice already. Unless you think the sound of gunfire was beginning to fray his nerves.”

  She squinted at the idea as if the brightness of it troubled her, then began working through it in a murmur, like long division. “So, when you arrived unexpected at Jarrett’s murder and took too close an interest in the victim, it made them nervous. Worse still, you went looking for Miss Valentine, who could name police who’d been shielding Jarrett for years. You’re saying one of them followed you there, aren’t you?”

  Working the thing out for herself wasn’t what took time, any more than deciding a patient had whooping cough or swollen ankles. What she needed time for was believing where it led. Her pale green eyes widened at the possibilities. I said, “When Littomy decided he had two related vice killings on his hands, it put some of his detectives on edge. They knew a murder investigation would trip over vice rackets they were a part of themselves. So they needed a different version. One that spared Jarrett’s history. Two days later, the professor was dragged from the river and they were gifted one. It says Henry shot and killed his boyfriend who was cheating on him, then gunned Jarrett down hours later with the same weapon. In their version, Henry tried to hide the coat because he’d been wearing it himself, complete with bloodstains from both his victims. They even have Jarrett’s wallet with its photographs of Henry and the professor to back up their story. Then Henry going missing this morning gave the detectives their best break yet. It put Littomy on the front pages and leaves Jarrett’s history in the shadows where it always was; nothing but a rumor.”

  She frowned at a headlong rush of low behavior that left her feeling giddy. “If knowing Jarrett’s police connections was what got Miss Valentine killed, then what about you?”

  “Dillys Valentine died because I led somebody to her then asked questions that made her look dangerous. Nobody tried to kill me. Not even when they had the chance. It would have made them a problem when what they wanted was to solve one. I got a warning. They’ll wait to see if the warning takes.”

  It was one more idea the doctor had to make room for, but she’d stopped looking shocked or even surprised. The Saturday crowd at the Viaduct was guaranteeing no awkward silences. In the end she said simply, “Will the warning take?”

  The directness of her own question made her blush. It shouldn’t have. By leaving me out of her report on Dillys Valentine, the doctor was staking a lot more than her career. She was entitled to know what it bought her. “Littomy fed his line to the press because his detectives told him they’d got Henry cold on two counts of murder. And because the commissioner will sleep better on the news. Whether it adds up isn’t his concern. What are you asking me, Doctor? Do I believe Henry’s story? I said I might. Was leaving me out of your report the upright thing to do? That’s for you to decide. But if what you really want is a reason for keeping me out of a police cell, then it’s this. I’m the best chance Blanche Beaufort has of seeing her boy grow old. I might be her only chance.”

  Neither of us moved. Then the room drowned again in shrieks and liquored laughter and jolted her out of her thoughts. She got busy with the coat buttons, pulled on her gloves and smoothed them along her fingers, set her hat brim and threaded around me and out through the crush without a word.

  I put down another whiskey while the two hats finished their conversation. When they pushed for the exit together, I let them go. If I needed either one, I knew where to find her, and the whisky was dulling the screeching in the room. I bought myself another, then another that pricked at the back of my eyeballs. When I walked out on the street, the cold slammed me like a wave against a sea wall.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  This time I went into the hospital by a different route, avoided Miss Hartridge’s reception bunker and arrived in the fountain courtyard at a door heavy with brass work. The door opened on a high, silent hall out of an age of elegance and surgery without anesthetic, and a grand stair that mounted wide and shallow around three more floors. The staircase had a chandelier the size of a zeppelin floating high in the shadows, with only a handful of bare electric lights sparking in a thousand glass prisms on account of the power shortage. Add the reek of ether and walls hung with dark-painted canvases in dull-gold frames, and the hospital’s grand hall was giving a fair impression of the high style in outer Transylvania.

  I took the stair two floors, cut out at a high-lit corridor and followed along it to the common room I visited last night. A window blind was still drawn against the cold. A thin tobacco haze stirred in the warmth off an electric heater and I was thawing there, still a little jagged from the liquor, when Nurse Greer walked in for her next cigarette. She took three steps, pulled up when she saw she wasn’t alone and pressed a hand flat against her midriff. I said I hadn’t meant to alarm her.

  She put the hand to her cheek and a bright nervousness in her voice. Her uniform crackled as she let out the gasp. “Not alarmed. I’ve been trying to telephone you. If you came to see Miss Voigt she’s not here.”

  “Not here since when?”

  “She had a visitor this afternoon. I wasn’t on duty but I think it must have been the boy you told me about. Apparently, she got dressed and just walked out with him. Miss Hartridge is furious.” An electric wall clock ground the intervals like fine sand. Her jaw unknotted and she frowned at my bandaged hand. “I’d better take another look at that.” I walked over and she took my wrist, peeled off the tape and the gauze pad gummed with blood and rolled the dark eyes.

  There was a treatment room along the corridor, with a seat either side of a metal trolley and a chromium tray of instruments that glittered as if they’d just been minted. She brought in a basin of warm water, sat opposite and soaked off the rest of the bandage, cleaned out the mush in the center of my hand and then reached a small hooked probe from a sterile cabinet on the wall behind her. She laid the probe across the corner of the chromium tray and we squared off again.

  The room had a day bed in a corner, with a screen pulled aside and an anatomy chart framed on the wall. Nurse Greer spread out my hand and buried the point of the probe deep in the muscle at the base of my thumb, and while she sat working under an angle light, levering out small jewels of glass splinter, I started counting: the folds on the screen, the creases pressed in the bleach-whi
te sheet on the day bed, the vertebrae in the spinal column on the anatomy chart. Then I started counting them over again, until my eyes filled and the wall went out of focus and the chart was just a blur. I wiped a knuckle down the ridge of my nose. “How many vertebrae does anybody have?”

  “Thirty-three, why?”

  “Does it depend which end you start counting?” The hook felt as if it was scratching out a garden patch to plant tulips.

  “If this is hurting you ought to say so.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make you nervous.”

  When she was done she bathed the wound again, and while she inspected her handiwork asked casually, “Do you think the police will find out who killed Mr. Jarrett?”

  It brought my gaze up from the raw, spreading pit in my palm. There hadn’t been anything remotely that casual about Nurse Greer since the first time I set eyes on her. I said, “Don’t bet against them.”

  Her wide eyes lifted. The hand she held cupped around mine loosed its grip. “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s this way, Miss Greer. Sometimes a murder is a random, solitary affair. Two people who never met before collide one day like hermits in the desert and only one of them walks away. Police look for a motive, an explanation, reasons why their paths might have crossed, and don’t see any connections because there aren’t any connections to see. All it took was a place, a time, a flash in somebody’s brain. It might as well be a murder on Mars.” I shrugged. “Whatever else Jarrett was, he was no hermit. His murder was no random affair. There were reasons why and none of them will be pretty. For now, everybody who knew him is clammed up because they think it’s their way to stay safe. But they’re wrong. In the company Jarrett kept nobody is safe. Sooner or later, in a bright room with two City detectives, somebody will be persuaded of that fact and the detectives will have their lead.”

  It wasn’t the answer she wanted. She said nothing, just pushed away the angle light and listened to the humming quiet of the ward curling in under the door. It lapped around our shoes and crept up the walls until we floated on it. “Miss Greer, River Police pulled a body out of the water this morning, making three murders in three days, all of them connected. How many more are you waiting for?”

  The metal probe slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the chromium tray. She watched it, mesmerized until it stopped spinning, then collected herself. “Can you come back when I’m off duty? I have to make a telephone call first. Now I really must get back to the ward.” A line of fresh blood was oozing around her fingers and inside my shirt cuff. She laid my hand back on the trolley and opened it out again as if she meant to tell my future, then reached in the cabinet for a dressing and split open a fresh roll of gauze.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A freeze was falling out of an arctic night ragged with ice clouds, hammering on Gresham Street like the back of a shovel. A single streetlamp glowed a hundred yards ahead. I took aim at the lamplight, unbuttoned my coat as I went, and flattened my hand against my stomach like Napoleon marching on Moscow. Ten-fifteen struck close by. There was nobody else on the street to hear it.

  Past the streetlamp was the shell of Saint Lawrence Jewry wide open to the sky, sour with the permanent smell of charred timber that never leaves a blitz site. At its east end was the drive-in to Guildhall Yard. What survived of Guildhall was a long white-stone frontage roofed over in tin, three stories high with a carriage entrance in the center of the block. A bomb had taken out its entire east wing. Its west wing had two office floors over a disused courtroom, all still in one piece. Henry’s Morgan was the only vehicle in the yard, parked outside a lighted doorway in the angle of the courtroom. The only other light showing was at a second-floor window at the end of the wing, overlooking the bombed-out church.

  The doorway opened into a stone-floored arcade, where wall lights burned and flags of City liveries hung limp at intervals along the vault. A night porter slept behind a glass hatch, close up to a stove, arms folded across his chest and an alarm clock posted on the counter. Past the porter’s hatch a narrow stair climbed to the floors over the courtroom. I cut out at the second, found the spilling light at the farthest end of the passage and went in.

  The light was from a floor lamp behind a high-sided couch in the corner of a two-room office. A desk in the main room faced a window onto Guildhall Yard and the church. Henry sat hunched and ashen on the couch with two books balanced in his lap. The only sound was his long-drawn breath before he said, “Homer and Horace.” They were two volumes from an edition with the same fancy binding, one of them open at a page of verses, the left-hand column in Latin, a translation on the right. I waited for an explanation. “Two poets. This one is Roman from the first century BC. The other is Greek, and centuries earlier. This is how they were when I got here. Horace next to Homer. The Odes next to the Iliad. On the same shelf, as if they were alphabetical. Can you imagine that? In here? He looked wild-eyed around a room so hushed you could hear him blink away the tears. “The only thing we ever quarreled about was how stupidly fussy Michael was. Greeks and Romans are on different walls. Don’t you see? Someone’s been here.”

  I lit a cigarette and waved out the match, tossed it at a wastebasket at the side of the couch and watched it bounce back at my shoe. “The door was locked when you arrived?”

  He dabbed at the tears with the cuff of his sweater and nodded. I talked with the cigarette on my lip. “Henry, there are yards of books in here. One out of place doesn’t mean the room was searched. What does it give you anyway? Unauthorized entry by somebody who thinks Horace was a Greek? Now we’re really getting somewhere. That sound you hear is my bloodhound licking his lips.” The room was twenty feet square of dark wood and worn carpet that smelled like a pipe rack. The door to the second room was letting in a strip of pearl-white light. “Maybe the cleaner put it away and doesn’t know there’s a system. Or her attention wandered because Horace and Homer were two GIs she met on victory night.”

  Henry shook his head. “Not the cleaner. She hasn’t been in here since before Christmas.” He motioned at the wastebasket to make his point. A loose-rolled sheaf of manuscript jammed slantwise across the rim. I gave him the weary look and lifted the pages out, fanned them and dropped them in his lap to get us off the subject. “Something else in Greek. What does it say?”

  Henry thought about an answer then got up from the couch. He was inside the doorway to the other room before it occurred to him to tell me what he was doing. “It’s easier if I show you.”

  The adjoining room was windowless. A room without books and half as big again as Garfield’s office, lit from behind a pearl glass ceiling panel that made it perpetual high noon and with no furniture except for a single, heavy table at its center. It was bigger than a pool table, and laid out with a detailed model of a walled town on the north side of a river crossing, so different from the town and the river I knew that I hardly recognized them. This town was a grid of narrow streets beside a waterfront, set behind a protecting wall with gates to the wild country beyond. It had fine buildings and a central market square. Dogs slinked in its backyards. Legionaries marched broad avenues in column. There were bathhouses, storehouses, barracks and bordellos, and a fat-hulled trading ship loading at a dock where merchants tallied cargo. I tipped back my hat and squatted down to look along the rooftops.

  Henry sighed behind me. “Michael loved this. He said it let him walk in Roman London and watch the passersby. Some of the buildings we’re certain of, others are guesses. Roman towns repeat the same patterns, so we know what to expect and even where to look if we ever get the chance.” He swayed with the effort to concentrate. “You can’t possibly understand what it meant to Michael, to know there was an entire Roman city beneath our feet that he thought he’d never see.” Under the ceiling light, Henry could have passed for a cadaver. I straightened up to call a halt and tell him to go home and sleep, but he’d stopped noticing he had company. “Bef
ore the war, Michael would take his students down to the platform at Aldgate tube and tell us we were as close as we’d ever get to the street level of Roman London. Then came the blitz and in two nights of bombing a third of the City was left in ruins. Hundreds of acres where you felt you could reach down and almost touch the Roman streets. The possibilities for excavating were endless. It was his chance of a lifetime.” He rocked on his heels, lost in the idea, then remembered what we were doing there, pressed both thumbs hard in the corners of his eyes and leaned over Garfield’s model to show me.

  It wasn’t complicated. From where we stood, the Thames ran left to right along one side of the table to where a bridge brought in a highway from the south. From there, a wall enclosed the town in a half-circle north of the river. Henry’s finger traced the line of it and paused when it got to ten o’ clock, where the wall made a right-angle sidestep before it continued its arc. “The City’s medieval wall is built on the Roman wall’s foundations. We see it on old town plans and they all show the wall making this same sidestep at Cripplegate. Until Michael excavated there, no one realized the maps were showing the corner of a Roman fort. It was a tremendous discovery, but in the worst possible place.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch. We were close to midnight. I thought, Blanche, don’t worry. They’ll put your boy on the stand and by the time he’s through answering nobody will remember what the question was. I said, “Henry, there’s a faster way to do this. I can leave now, learn a dead language, come back and read this myself.”