by Janet Roger
Kathryn Swinford pulled the Austin over at the edge of Hampstead village in front of the single, rusted pump of a motor garage. The forecourt was closed up, the heavy wooden doors of a repair shop nailed shut with a sale board. She stopped the motor and left on the car’s sidelights, shivered in the silence and pulled a silk choker up under her chin. The Austin’s engine clicked as it cooled. An underslung moon was rising on the late afternoon.
“Please pass my gloves.” I looked along the dash, gritted my teeth and shuffled around to search the back seat. “Try the glove compartment.” I twisted around, paused to get breath and opened the glovebox, took out a pair of dark kid gauntlets and handed them over. Salt sweat trickled in the corner of my eye. “Not much of you still works, does it?” She leaned across me to close up the lid. “Where did it happen?”
I turned half toward her, my shoulder wedged between the seatback and the car door, cradling the arm. “A Soho flytrap called the Pelican. I found Reilly there and ran into somebody else who was looking.”
“Someone with a name?”
“Voigt.”
She wrapped the skirt of her coat around her ankles. “What would Voigt want with Terry Reilly?”
I watched her busy with the gloves, fastening them at her wrists and flexing her fingers as if she were next man in to bat. “Reilly was around Jarrett. Enough to know who supplied the clients and the blackmail targets, the picture studio and the protection. Willard put him in a safe place, but the boy understood that being in Jarrett’s circle can be life-shortening. It made him restless. So he skipped and went looking for a friend, who happens be Voigt’s daughter. She’s gritty, determined, also persuasive, and she called me to say Reilly would be at the Pelican, ready to talk.” I eased upright in the seat until my head hit the roof lining. “So we talked. Then outside I walked into Voigt. He hadn’t come alone.”
The doctor tilted back against the side window looking serious, green-lit in the glow from the dash. “Voigt arriving at the Pelican can’t have been coincidence.”
I didn’t think it could be coincidence either. And the tall cadaver taking so little interest had to be a phony. “Word was out. Reilly had been marked before I got there. I’m guessing McAlester told Willard to get the boy off the street and Voigt was sent to collect him. Running into me was cream in his coffee.”
Kathryn Swinford sat up abruptly, an elbow crooked on the wheel. “Willard sent Voigt because McAlester told him to? Why would he?”
“Because the only way McAlester can take Henry down for four murders is if everybody forgets about Terry Reilly. Remember him? He’s the one who knew all four victims, the last to see two of them alive. And still it’s a name nobody raises in police time. The last thing McAlester needed was for some vice detail to pick him up by chance, working a late bar.” Headlights swept around the bend behind us, spangled the frost on the sale board, turned the insides of the Austin into a fishbowl and passed on. I watched them around the next bend. “Reilly can connect Jarrett to Michael Garfield. Also to McAlester, who likely recruited Jarrett the first time he ran across him, seven years ago. Added to that, he can connect all three to Willard. Now that Willard has him back, running out a second time will not be in his stars.”
“And where does Littomy stand in all this?” Her breath misted the windshield while she thought her own question over. Moisture pricked beads on the cold metal dash. “We’d better go, before I ask why you waited to tell me about this damned whisky bottle in front of Guy. That was below the belt Detective. I thought we had an understanding about things I’m entitled to know. How naive of me.” The starter motor cranked, teetered and gave out in a dry cough. She flipped the choke and tried again, and then a third time, groaned and sat back. Her hand dug in a door pocket for Garfield’s cast-off report to the councilor’s committee. “You were right about these. Henry had them with him when he ran into McAlester. They were at the back of his file. I daresay no one had the least idea what to do with them. My Greek’s too rusty. How’s yours?” It wasn’t an inquiry. The words ground between her teeth while she squared the sheets and dropped them in my lap, her gaze held flat on the windshield. “Next time you need assistance with police matters, write to the commissioner.”
Her left hand yanked the starter-pull again. The car shook on its springs. I folded Garfield’s report and opened my coat, got the narrow, translucent envelope between the tips of two fingers and flipped it out of my pocket as the Austin’s motor heaved and caught. Kathryn Swinford’s brow melted. She sat back again, puffed out her cheeks and let the motor hum at a fast idle. I propped the airplane film on the dash in front of her. “I need these made into prints, Doctor, large and clear.” Slowly and without enthusiasm, the way she would open a can of whale meat, she slipped the strip of curling negatives out of its envelope, flattened it on the hub of the steering wheel and held it up against the dashboard light. Her nose pinched, her mouth set in a pressed white line and her eyelids shuttered as if she saw her soul burning in hellfire. I said, “Better do it for Blanche.”
The motor gunned. She grabbed her purse off the seat between us and flipped the clasp, pushed the strip of film inside and snapped it shut. Her wrist worked at finding a gear. “And the prints her son left on a murder weapon? What am I supposed to do about those?”
But if either of us had an answer to that, we wouldn’t have been sitting freezing in her car. “You’ll think of something.”
The clutch bit hard and slammed me against the door, clawing at my shoulder. She circled the Austin tight around the garage forecourt and swung it back up the hill into Hampstead.
thirty-four
Bunny Lush’s Academy leased the floor over a commercial laundry in Bride’s Alley, a cobblestone passage that took a dogleg off the south side of Fleet Street, ran eighty yards and found it had no place else to go. He kept the Academy spare: a regulation ring with benches for spectators around three sides, speed balls along the fourth, floor mats frayed with sweat and rubbing alcohol and heavy bags strung from the ceiling in front of a whitewashed window. More than that Bunny said was decoration, and he didn’t need to tout custom. He was right. Lush’s Academy was flypaper for any fighter aiming to train in the warm glow of silk stockings and gasps of admiration. It was a haunt of showgirls and hangers-on, and it did no harm at all that Fleet Street was just a sports writer’s stumble along the alley. Not that the fight pages made a difference to Bunny. He hadn’t read them in thirty years. He said for his money, sports hacks one and all could kiss his ringside seat and go spit on somebody else’s floor.
Boxing had been good to Bunny. Very likely it also saved his life. In 1915 Kitchener’s army had been all-out for recruits, but when it found one with a pig iron jaw and a right cross that could stop a light truck, there wasn’t the ghost of a chance his service career would be wasted fighting Germans. Instead, Lance Corporal Lush passed his army years in a depot kitchen in Palestine, boxing middleweight for his regiment and collecting the two outsize ears that earned him his nickname. He’d also collected agoraphobia, a forty-two-inch waist, flat feet and a rare and unsightly form of venereal disease known only to Bedouin. But that was all right by Bunny. He’d seen what else Palestine had to offer, and was relieved when his army chaplain told him it had already been promised to Abraham. What he didn’t expect was that it would be the agoraphobia that called time on the fights. A kind of paralysis set in when he left his corner, so that in a strange ring under bright lights it was like being back at the edge of the desert with the ropes dancing in the afternoon heat; so mesmerizing, he was taking knockdowns before he could raise a glove. So Bunny quit the ring, and decided a training gym was his only way to carry on breathing canvas, sweat and resin. The way he saw it, the army had taught him two trades, and no civilian on six continents was going to pay money for his cooking.
The street door to the Academy led up a single-rise stair, twisted right and passed a glassed-in office and
a thickening in the air. Beyond a locker room was a ring under a haze of overhead lights. In the out-of-hours of a winter afternoon there were no onlookers, only two men in shorts and undershirts cuffing at each other and raising dust with their footwork. Bunny Lush was the one with no expression and a nose spread across his cheekbones, a military back-and-sides and a forty-pound advantage. He was back-pedaling in a lazy circle, elbows pinned either side of his stomach and flat on his feet, taking shots from the other man on the heels of his raised gloves. Once in a while he looped a low right under the other man’s guard, careful not to break sweat. The figure following him around the ring was twenty years younger and not any prettier to watch. He pushed awkward, straight lefts into the waiting gloves, crowded in each time to catch his balance, then got back up on his toes to throw another left. I walked to the ringside while the two men took another turn around, clinched, broke off and touched gloves. Bunny turned and ambled to the corner where I stood, climbed out through the ropes and stepped down next to me with the bounce of a sandbag. He put a gloved thumb up to my chin and took a professional look at the side of my face. “Anybody I know?”
“Anybody you know would have made a better job.”
Bunny’s tortured nose crinkled. He flipped my chin aside, turned in the direction of the glass office and said, “Next time make him lead. Stay in shape.”
I watched him go and thought, in shape or not, I had four inches height and reach over Bunny and the only way to put him on the floor would be to shoot him. A voice behind me said, “You’re here to talk to me?” Edgar Levin was leaning over the top rope, looking around the deserted gym for any other possibility. He had a limp towel draped across his shoulders and a mouth guard hooked under the thumb of his glove, his head lolling and his chest still heaving from the ring work.
I glanced up at him and nodded. “About Willard. Your office said to try here.” Levin blinked in the lights and waited to have it explained. “I already talked to Mrs. Willard. She doesn’t flatter her husband, but her story doesn’t add up. I think you would know about him.” The staleness of the room itched at my throat.
Levin steadied his breathing and said, “Born Benjamin Josef Wilhardt. Quite right, I know about him.” He spelled out the last name and followed with the history of an East End Jewish boy with a bad lung, who made a mark in the rackets and then climbed the ladder catering to more expensive tastes. Along the way, Wilhardt became Willard, a club owner passing for legitimate if you didn’t have to be rigid about it, with a grade of associates and interests that made him hoodlum aristocracy even before war broke out. The lung that caused him to miss the shooting held up well enough. It let him move in on the City’s black market and cut out a share all his own. By 1942 he had an interest in every freight shipment north of the river, and owned a string of burlesque and clip joints magnetic to the US Army dollar. It was no secret. So when Willard introduced himself one night in the blackout, when the councilor and his daughter were dining at one of his tables, they already knew the score. Mrs. Willard had admitted as much. But then a family need arose at a time when she wasn’t in a mood to care, and she went ahead and married him anyway.
“For that,” Levin said, “you can blame me.” He caught up both ends of the towel in his fist, dried under his jaw and hung his arm out over the ropes. I turned his glove over, unlaced it and pulled it off, then dropped it on the canvas and stripped the bandage off his hand and wound it around my fingers. The way Levin told it, by 1942 Willard was already looking beyond the duration, to a time when he would dress in quieter suits, live on an elegant street and even pay some income taxes. Setting eyes on Councilor Drake’s handsome, distracted daughter that night had filled out most of the rest. When he introduced himself and she looked straight through him, what he recognized in her was class, and buying some of her kind of class was a part of Willard’s plan for peacetime.
I thought about Mrs. Willard, drowning in the cocktail she was shaking with the devil, slipped the roll of bandage off my fingers and tossed it beside the glove on the canvas. “Why would I blame you? The lady doesn’t. According to her, the councilor lost everything in the blitz, Willard stepped up to rescue the family fortune and marriage was her part in the payoff.”
A ceiling fan flapped. Dust eddied in the lights overhead. Levin spread his hand, flexed the stiffened knuckles and snorted. Not as if the idea amused him, but as if the notion of Drake getting cleaned out by the bombing had something ridiculous about it. “I’ve heard her story. Her father was and is a land speculator in high political office. He didn’t need rescuing, then or now. On the contrary, the blitz turned the City into a vast construction site, ready and waiting for the councilor to make his next killing. Drake lied to his own daughter. I have no idea why.”
I dipped the center rope. Levin held the stub of his arm and climbed down from the ring, dropped from the apron and stepped to where the heavy bags hung off the ceiling. He set himself square to one of them, put in four hard, short lefts, then leaned in with his right shoulder like a bird trailing a wing. He twisted around with the bag to keep balance. I shrugged. “Maybe not, but promising to stay away from her would be sporting of you. And not only for getting Henry off a hook. Garfield was on the Corporation payroll and Willard’s pictures of him fritzing his young assistant would make them a scandal. You know they owe you. You also know it won’t mean a thing come the day City Police take Henry down for murder. Drake’s committee will back away from Beaufort Partners in the blink of an eye.”
Levin steadied the scuffed leather with his hand and sagged against it, breathing hard. “Oh, come on, Newman, keep up. Drake has already backed away.” He put in another crabbed shot, higher and harder, hissed with the effort and lined up the next.
I took a step and swung the bag aside before he broke his hand on it, waited while he wiped sweat out of his eyes and asked, “Why would he do that?”
Levin dropped his arm at his side and sighed as if I ought to start writing some of this down. “Out of the blue Drake telephoned Guy on Christmas Eve, with news that Garfield might have made another big discovery and we were to stop all work.” He went over to claw the glove and the bandage off the canvas. “Quite a Christmas present. Who knew what Garfield might turn up? Another find like his Roman fort would delay us indefinitely.”
Except now Michael Garfield was dead, and the radio talks, the columns in the press, the high-society arm-twisting, would all die with him. Drake’s committee never would see his report, and if the councilor decided it was business as usual, who was there to argue? Levin moved off across the gym headed for the locker room. From his office, Bunny was switching out the lights row by row. Just to stir the flyblown emptiness, I said out loud, “Business as usual.” And waited on the echo, business as usual …as usual …as usual.
thirty-five
I hailed a taxi on Fleet Street and headed east in a freezing mist that smeared the lighted office windows and followed me inside the cab. At Ludgate the cab made a left into Farringdon, along the same crawl of storefronts Henry had followed in the Morgan, then ran under Holborn Viaduct and swung left again into the jewelry quarter. Streetlights thinned, the goldsmith and gem trader lockups were already closing for the night. The taxi slowed and made its next turn. I dragged a sleeve across the side window and took in the stores on a street I didn’t recognize at first, then lunged at the glass behind the driver’s head and hammered for him to pull over. I sat crouched forward, recalling the frontages the cab had just driven by. There was the charred brick facade of a fire-bombed charity school, a canvas blind flapping over a shuttered café, a silversmith, name and initials etched across a rubbed glass window that turned the light inside the showroom to a sodium glow. And then there had been an outfitter’s shop behind a curved window set back from a step, with a slim mannequin on show inside the curve: trim cardigan, silk blouse, pencil skirt; dressed for a manor house on a fall afternoon. I paid off the cab and let myself out on
the street.
Right inside the outfitter’s shop door there was a second mannequin, another county type sporting an Eden moustache and plus fours, a bow tie, a newsboy cap in plaid and scarf to match. He had his hands cupped in front of his stomach holding a card printed with snowflakes that read, Selected Seasonal Sportswear for the Discerning Countryman. Gaslight puttered in glass shades along the walls and soured the air. Except for the discerning countryman promoting his plus fours, the store was as empty as the street outside.
The outfitter’s was a single room with a counter of glass cabinets running front to back along one side. The wall opposite had a tall cashier’s desk with a high chair under it and framed advertisements for garment manufacturers strung beneath the gaslights. Behind the glass counter, a wall lined with shelves had a library step for reaching down merchandise, from the years when the store had merchandise to reach. Scarcity being what it was, all the seasonal sportswear it could muster was ranged along the countertop in plain, flat boxes labeled for size. I lifted the lid off the nearest while the doorbell went on tinkling on its spring.
In time, a white-haired old lady drew aside a curtain in the store’s back wall and peered out. She was spare and a little stooped, handsome in a loose-fitting two-piece and a string of garnet beads, smiling faintly out of faded blue eyes behind her half-glasses. Once she spotted me the novelty of a new customer seemed to surprise her, but she took it in stride, closed the drape and moved unhurried to stand behind the cashier’s desk. She stroked the high chairback with knotted hands, ran her eyes over the side of my jaw and cleared her throat to help her concentrate. “From a Scottish woolen mill and not your size I’m afraid. I always tell the manufacturers they must think everyone is built like a crofter. Anyway, I imagine they must be terribly itchy to sleep in and I’m quite sure you would find a cotton nightshirt much more comfortable.”