Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  It went over his head. The boy was alone with himself in the room, slack with fatigue. He caught my lack of enthusiasm and his voice grew smaller. “But I want to tell you about Michael’s coliseum.”

  Sometimes it can be hard to put a finger on why you’re interested, or why you think you ought to be. But there are words you’ve been getting by without for a lifetime, then suddenly everybody is using them in conversation and you know somewhere along the line there was something you missed. First it had been colosseo. Now it was coliseum. First it had been the signora and now it was Henry, and both of them inside the last eight hours. I took the cigarette off my lip and motioned him to go ahead.

  Henry stood hugging himself, trying to find a way to explain that could possibly be simple enough for me. It took a while, but he got there. “Look, everyone thinks of games and gladiators, I know, but a Roman amphitheater was meant for drills and parade, close by the garrison fort and always outside the walls where they could site a large arena. So when Michael found the fort at Cripplegate, he knew his coliseum must be nearby. And that was the problem. The Corporation had bought up the whole area for reconstruction long before the war ended and already had plans for building everywhere Michael wanted to excavate. And the worst of it was, they were my father’s plans. We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” He laid Garfield’s manuscript soft on the edge of the table. “This is Michael’s draft for a report to Drake’s committee, his reasons why the Corporation should call a halt and let him excavate outside Cripplegate. It was hopeless. What we needed was something new and spectacular to make them sit up and take notice, but we didn’t have it. When the snows came and ended our excavations for the year, Michael said he’d write something I could type up after the holiday. This is it. He said his ideas were better when he had them in Greek.” Henry was staring straight ahead at some vision he saw on the wall. “I suppose when the weather cleared, he couldn’t pass up one more look from the air.”

  Maybe. But Michael Garfield wasn’t the only one not passing up a chance that day. The councilor had pinned on his medals for airsickness and gone along too, and got his reward two days later in the Sesto when the professor showed him the photographs. My guess was they were the something new and spectacular Garfield needed for his report. It would at least explain why he canned his first draft. But there wasn’t any point asking Henry. His eyelids slammed shut while I watched, then his chin hit his chest and jerked him awake again. The boy was dead on his feet. I turned out the lights, walked him into Garfield’s office and put him on the couch, rigid with exhaustion. It wasn’t the Ritz. Just less far for him to fall.

  St. Sepulchre was working through its chimes at midnight when I walked in the Thornburgh. I took the elevator, went straight through to my neighbor’s office and locked Garfield’s wallet in the safe, then came back and put on a light and sank in my chair as if I had a leg in plaster. The building hummed to keep itself awake. I hadn’t any idea of sleeping either. In the drawer at the side of the desk I had a china teacup, a jug with a teaspoonful of water left in it and a flat quarter of Whyte & Mackay. I emptied the jug in the cup, dipped in two fingers and dabbed the corners of my eyes, drank the rest of the water and then half-filled the cup from the Whyte & Mackay. I sat breathing it, let it work behind my nose like smelling salts and thought some more about Garfield’s office.

  Either I added Horace and Homer to a dozen other things that didn’t explain or I allowed that Henry could have been right. But if somebody really had gone looking in the professor’s rooms in Guildhall, the puzzle was still who and for what. The liquor wrapped the puzzle in warm, yellow light, then hardened it in clear blue flame. Sleep pricked my face like soft rain. I wiped a hand across my eyes, dizzy with the brainwork, and went out as if I’d been given a needle.

  I was walking a dog along a line of bookshelves—a waddling, liver-colored springer—reading off titles as I went, until the dog moaned and dug in its heels, put its weight against my leg and flopped on my shoe. I was ruffling his throat, looking into soft brown eyes as round as chestnuts and telling him that big and old and lard-tub that he was, I’d put him in a dogs’ home if he didn’t get off my shoe. Somewhere a boiler fired up. Heating pipes started snapping like flags in a breeze. I woke with my tongue fat as a herring, late already for an appointment I’d wanted to keep.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dawn was hours away. Streetlight washed the hospital entrance on West Smithfield. The market’s night-time circus was already winding down. In the middle of the square, two tall iron gates stood at the entrance to the garden, wedged open in drifts of snow. At the center of the garden under a bare canopy of plane trees, a life-size statue of a goddess was raised on a plinth. She wore a plaited crown of cornstalks in her hair, trailed a branch of olive at her side and reached one hand to a high, pale moon. A figure was sprawled across the steps at her feet. The steps were bloodied as a butcher’s stall.

  There is a compressed quiet you hear between the flash and rumble of distant heavy guns, like swimming underwater. I walked in through the gates, saw three figures standing aside from the body in the snow and heard it again. Miss Hartridge was looking rumpled, with hair wisped around the edges of a black tam-o-shanter and her jaw puffed with too little sleep. She wore black zippered bootees and a long wool coat thrown over a dressing gown in a hurry, like a down-at-heel duchess. A hospital intern was standing beside her blowing on his knuckles, shaken and shaking with cold. The same giant from Christmas morning looked up, decided I held no interest for him and went back to the intern. He said calmly, “You reported the body, sir. There’s nothing more you can do. Better wait indoors.” And when the intern didn’t move, took his elbow and walked him toward the garden gates.

  I went over to where Miss Hartridge sagged in the freezing air, breath flaring at her nostrils. “Miss Hartridge, Nurse Greer was planning to make a telephone call before she went off duty. Who she talked to could be important. If your operator connected the call she might remember. Who was at the switchboard?”

  Miss Hartridge smelled liquor on me, stiffened and pulled her coat tighter across her throat. “In the first place, Mr. Newman, we have two nighttime operators, both gentlemen. In the second place, if you refer to a personal telephone call, Nurse Greer would not have made it from hospital premises. Our rules do not permit.” She turned on her heel to pick a way back along the gravel path between the trees. A truck ground past the markets holding a low gear, snarled as it dropped downhill to Farringdon and headed for the river. I turned around to the body.

  Nurse Greer lay on her back along the steps at the foot of the statue, her right hand tucked behind her hip, left hand flung outward, one foot lifted and crossed behind her knee, as if she died dancing a reel. No disorder in her clothes, except where her cape lifted in a swirl and made an ink blue halo on the snow. Soft curls tricked along her starched white collar. Her mouth took the nervous twist it always had. More than that I couldn’t tell. A gunshot aimed point blank at the bridge of her nose had filled the cavities of her eyes with blood, clotted in blank, black tar pools by the freeze. It gave Nurse Greer a look of being masked for an end of year ball, and left her barely recognizable.

  The nurse’s outstretched hand grasped the leather fold that held her house keys. Her handbag lay across her stomach, its clasp sprung and its contents spilled in the snow. I squatted down, prodded aside her lipstick and cigarette lighter and picked up her brand-new pocketbook. It had a monogram blocked in silver on a dark blue cover, pages thin as a traveling Bible, a ribbon for marking her place. Two nights before, there hadn’t been any entries in it. Nothing was changed. Nurse Greer hadn’t written in any telephone numbers or circled any dates or added any names or addresses.

  A shower of ice crystals shook off the branches overhead and powdered her ink blue cape. They were sparking in the moonlight when a sedan entered the square fast from the south side, slewed over and pulled up at the gates to the garden. I
fitted the pocketbook back in its mold in the snow and got on my feet. A car door slammed. The sedan dowsed its lights and left its motor idling. Low voices carried and a City Police photographer came sliding along the gravel path loaded with equipment, two steps ahead of the giant. We saluted each other as we passed, the officer looking grave, the photographer red-eyed and breathing hard with a look of somebody suffering for his art. You sympathized with him. In his part of town, the murder rate was skyrocketing.

  Outside the garden, a Humber sedan sat at the curb with its windows misted and its motor running, shuddering under its skin like an animal asleep. I got in the back seat behind the driver and clicked shut the door. The motor wheezed gently far ahead, mixed with a closer rasp of breathing. A camera flash lit up the statue in the garden through the trees. From where I sat, McAlester blocked most of the car’s windshield, his right arm jammed against the side window and his frame heaving faint and slow, sucking the air out of the car’s interior with every heartbeat. He wore a dark homburg square on his head, and his head square on shoulders so wide they might have built the sedan around him. The rasp interrupted and formed itself in passing conversation. “Another day, another body.”

  McAlester had talked in whispers since a wartime brush with a US Army Ranger in transit, celebrating a birthday with some drinking laureates from his unit. The City bar they ended in was having trouble breaking up the party and closing for the night. The bar owner had called for assistance, and when McAlester walked in the trouble looked nothing but routine. Only two of the GIs could form whole syllables, the rest were catatonic. The birthday boy, his thoughts fugitive at the end of a long night of companionship, was slow to appreciate that the officer reining in his celebration was not only not military, he wasn’t even American. It was when that thought occurred that the detective sergeant found himself flat on his back on the bar counter, with the barrel of the ranger’s Navy Colt so far down his throat it bruised his instep. No question, the ranger made a big mistake. Just not as big a mistake as his next one. Overcome by hauling McAlester’s two hundred and fifty pounds onto the zinc counter and liquored enough to keep him sedated all the way to Casablanca, the ranger keeled over, loosed off a round from the Navy Colt and shattered the mirror wall behind the bar in flying, fractured diamonds.

  The ranger was still slow to grasp the nature of his predicament. The detective sergeant was not. While the bar owner got the rest of the party out the door, McAlester dabbed his fingers in the glass cuts across his face, picked the Army Ranger off the floor and beat him to death, slowly and methodically, with the crosshatch grip of his own Navy Colt. In a city at war it hadn’t been an incident to harm McAlester’s police career, but it added to his temperamental mistrust of his fellow man. And left him permanently hoarse. I fitted a cigarette in my teeth. “The nurse could be more than just another body. Your stand-in examiner thinks she might have put the bullets in Jarrett herself.”

  McAlester looked out the window, as if the scenery had better things to offer. “Littomy was never interested in the nurse. He likes Beaufort.”

  “Then the superintendent’s a lucky man. He can take his pick. As of now, he’s got four killings. Which one would he like Henry Beaufort for?”

  A hand scrubbed across the misted glass. “Any of them.” Another camera flash in among the trees. “All of them.”

  “So here’s a thought. Why not quit following me and go look for him?”

  The massive shoulders twitched. “Littomy says you’re interested in the boy. He says stay with you, you’ll find him. I say Newman wouldn’t find which end of a bottle to piss in, but he’s the boss.”

  McAlester might have had a point, but the Humber felt like the inside of a diver’s helmet without oxygen enough for both of us, and he didn’t need me to agree. I let myself out on the curb and slammed the door shut with my shoe. The sedan racked into gear, reversed out fast from the gutter, bought some traction in the ice ruts and slewed off around the empty square while its exhaust still trailed at my feet.

  I crossed to a streetlamp against the hospital wall, put a light to the cigarette there and wondered what ought to be the big surprise. That you can be so blind to a thing at the first time of asking? Or that at the second time of asking, the exact same thing is unmissable? Two nights ago, I’d taken Nurse Greer’s pocketbook out of the bag in her locker, looked over and through it and saw nothing at all. Tonight, even before I lifted it out of the snow, I knew where I’d seen its monogram before; in an anteroom to a study lined with law books, on a desk with a sign saying you’d arrived at the office of Buchanan Allynson, Ring for Attention. The lawyer’s initials were made in flourishes, tangled like creeper, and because Allynson was a believer in publicity, for New Year he’d had the same initials put on the cover of a pocketbook, the kind anybody can get given when they’re not fast enough with an excuse.

  Across the garden in the square, the Sesto was putting up a thin glow from its basement. Strong men would be sitting apart at the tables there, leaning on Stanley’s breakfast while the signora catnapped in her back parlor dreaming of goats and olive groves. I snapped the cigarette at the gutter. A quarter-mile ahead, the dome of Old Bailey pressed flat against the sky, and above its dome a gilded goddess weighed justice in her scales. It had been a night for goddesses. This one was catching the moonlight in gaps between scudding clouds, flashing off and on like a sign in Piccadilly.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I put a cushion on the sofa arm, sat with the telephone in my lap and dialed, then stretched out while the gas fire warmed the room by inches. It took a while before the connection clicked through. A rapid, shallow breathing came down the line. I said, “Mr. Beaufort.”

  “Who is speaking?”

  “Newman.”

  There was a pause while the voice steadied its flutter. “Mr. Newman, were your reasons for calling at this hour of any importance, Commissioner Stearns would already—”

  I cut him off. “We don’t have the time for this, Mr. Beaufort. Your son is about to get taken in for reasons the commissioner won’t even know yet. When it happens, I can promise you will not get a call.” I reached in my jacket for a cigarette and waited.

  The snatched breathing evened out. At length the voice said, “Go on.”

  “As of two hours ago, the commissioner has four unsolved killings on his hands. He needs an arrest so badly he wouldn’t care if Littomy pinned it on National Velvet. But the superintendent can do better than that. His detectives are telling him Henry is a natural for two murders, and they’re working on the others. Me, I’m supposed to give them everything I know and let Henry take his chances. What I’m not supposed to do is keep wondering why they don’t look anywhere else for their killer. Do I have your attention?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Beaufort. We haven’t spoken since Christmas Day. Your son is in Garfield’s office in Guildhall holding a wake for his dead friend. Get him out of there and do it now. The night porter is out cold with an alarm set fifteen minutes before his shift ends. Take Henry and put him somewhere City Police won’t fall over him.”

  “Mr. Newman, I still fail to understand your interest in my son.”

  “Just collect him, Mr. Beaufort. The commissioner will sit by and watch him hang. There isn’t anything else to understand.” I cut the line, sank back on the couch and tried thinking, one small step at a time, about the dark-haired nurse who died tonight in a moonlit winter garden. I saw her wearing a high-class dress for Christmas dinner, a tortoiseshell comb pinned behind an ear, the frown she had on call for any occasion, and heard the edge in her voice. You have no idea how hard you are to like. But it was as far as I could get. The eyes that fired up when she said it, I didn’t see at all. Not even the color.

  I lit another cigarette as the telephone rang in my lap, picked up and heard Henry, distant and hesitant as if he were talking
in his sleep. “I read Michael’s report after you left. The one he threw out. I think you were right, he did see something in the aerial photographs that we hadn’t noticed before. He’d put a red line through the final pages and written in some references instead. But there’s nothing to say what they mean. Probably they were the last thing he ever wrote.” He started choking on the ache of it.

  I got off the sofa, kicked the trail of wire clear and took the telephone to the window. “Henry, listen to me. Unless you stay out of McAlester’s way all this will go for nothing. He has enough on you already and your prints are everywhere, even if he doesn’t know it yet. A jury would convict Gandhi on less, and he’s vegetarian.” Thin lights burned in newspaper offices across the street. I took the prosecutor out of my voice. “Your father knows where to find you. He’ll be there soon. Take the report, leave with him and stay with him, and don’t try doing this any other way. Do you understand?”

  Only silence. Then, in the same hollow murmur I hear in bad dreams, “There’s someone outside in the corridor.” And the line went dead. I left the telephone on the bureau and walked to the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, pulled the blanket over my head and slept like a mummy.

  Thumbed-over Souls

  I woke to a voice too low to hear distinctly, as out of place as it was familiar. I rolled toward it. The voice was saying, “I said you look awful and you’d better drink this. It’s all I could find in your kitchen cupboards. Don’t you keep tea?” Kathryn Swinford held out a cup on a saucer. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in a glaze-green costume that crackled when she moved, her gloves and clutch purse and a dark astrakhan in a heap at the foot of the bed. I squirmed up against the wall, drank and couldn’t tell what, turned around the watch on my wrist and wondered where she’d found a saucer. It was barely ten o’clock. “Not indoors. How did you get in here?”