by Janet Roger
I played along. “That and the late Professor Garfield, and a jailbait named Terry Reilly who was helping your late tenant pay expenses. For all I know, he could also be the late Terry Reilly by now. He’s been working at it.” The glass icicles trembled on the tree at the end of the room, as if they caught the wake of a passing specter. Willard looked over the work on my face, but not as if it interested him. I said, “The thing is where to begin. Why not take it from where you had Garfield tailed and photographed with his latest crush, up until Reilly handed you the professor’s briefcase in the Raglan bar? That was around twelve hours after Garfield was shot dead and dumped in the river. The rest we’ll get to.”
A fairy with a wand was bobbing at the top of the tree, putting the room under a complicated spell. Willard tossed empty shells in the coals and watched them flare. “Reilly told you that?”
“About the Raglan? He wouldn’t need to. There was a noonday Christmas crowd, but it didn’t make any of us invisible.” The wry salute from the figure in a camel coat, caught in the mirror behind the bar before I passed out.
Willard reached for the dish on the table and rooted in it, leaned his head back and tried recalling his Christmas Day. “You were following Reilly?”
The fire spat nutshells back in the hearth like firecrackers. Sparks drifted up the chimney. “Not Christmas or any other day. Forget Terry Reilly. He’s not the problem. But the lowdown you had Jarrett collecting on the professor is evidence in two murder inquiries. That could be a problem.” Willard’s gaze flickered. He shrugged, but not enough to put a wrinkle in his shirtfront, then looked past me and his gaze congealed. I turned around.
Mrs. Willard had pushed open the pocket doors to stand right behind me, unsteady on her satin heels. She wore the quilted robe still, buttoned to her calves, a bath towel piled in a turban and a cold cream mask gouged out around her mouth and eyes, her expression behind the mask unfathomable. Willard slid an arm along the back of the chesterfield and composed the look of somebody who could handle his wife. It took him time, and cost him his nonchalance. He put on the cool, honeyed tone of a capo who calls over the waiter to send back his dessert. “I pay a maid to see you’re dressed and ready. What the hell does she think she’s doing?”
The remoteness of what her housekeeper might be thinking of left his wife wide-eyed. Willard observed her from a distant planet, emptied a handful of nut shells on the table and dismissed his own question. He unwound from the sofa, touched two fingers on his show handkerchief and pointed one of them my way. “See me later at the Garden.”
Mrs. Willard pulled her robe tighter and swayed on the sounds of her husband’s going: his light, fast tread down the stair, the help-on with his coat in the hallway, the street door’s open and close. She remembered the cold cream and wiped across her chin with the towel. “I… You’ll need a taxi. Rose will call one.”
We heard the Armstrong’s starter motor flutter. The slick of its tires from the curb. “On a night like this there aren’t any taxis, Mrs. Willard. When the snows come they fly south with the ducks. I’ll walk.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Paradise Garden was on Charlotte Street, in a low-rent quarter at a distance from the bright lights. Far enough from the West End to thrill its patrons with the idea of crossing the tracks, not so far that their drivers wouldn’t know their way back. Outside it might be cold war, where high-living felt as permanent as bubbles. Inside, the Garden still blossomed, kept refined prices, a French kitchen and good-looking waiters and liked to call itself exclusive. Tonight, it was so exclusive it had tables reserved for Eskimos. The street lay under a polar cold. Pink neon flashed Paradise in the night, then Garden, then both together against the coal-black emptiness of the spheres. In daylight you might walk right by and not even notice an entrance. But on a night like this, its lights glowed solitary in an icebound waste, whispering promises to the frozen soul. The whisper was the sum of all its charm. In the foyer, they had the heavy-set choirboy they always have, who thinks conversation is for ballerinas and gives you the look twice-over because it’s all the exercise he gets. He jerked a thumb at the hatcheck and a tawny-blonde in house uniform followed me over. She wore a cool, private smile, a matador jacket with gold braids and epaulettes and a walk that doesn’t teach. In back of the counter, looping my coat on a hook, she fumbled the check ticket and watched it land at her feet. The matador swore softly under her breath. You saw why. Under the clip jacket she had on a yellow-sequin dress that fitted like snakeskin down to her ankles. To try picking the ticket up she hitched the dress past her calves and flexed at the knees. When that didn’t work, she grabbed at the hem and started rucking it higher, and when I couldn’t watch any longer I stepped inside the counter. “Don’t do that. It’s not good for me.”
I kept my ribs stiff and stooped for the ticket, got it between my fingers and stopped dead. Slotted under the counter, in a line of bags and umbrellas, there was an air force khaki Gladstone with a metal initial fixed on each strap. The matador was eyeing me, wrapped in a scent as tight as her yellow dress. “Well, what do you know. You take somebody for a customer and it turns out he’s a gentleman. What a flutter-brain cluck!” I put out a hand to the countertop and straightened up. “And I took you for drum majorette. We’re both flutter-brain clucks.”
It got me the cool smile again and she walked me to the back of the foyer, where a sign over two swing doors flashed Welcome to Paradise in electric-green loops. The blonde lifted her chin at the enticements within. “No drum majorettes in there either, Galahad. Watch your step.” I thanked her for the advice and said I would do that.
On the other side of the doors was midsummer night in dreamland, set on the terrace of a Riviera villa perched high above the sea, where stars twinkled, high cloud drifted and sailboats made specks of china-white on a calm, moonlit bay. The terrace had palms in giant jardinières, waiters gliding around them in long aprons and cutaways, a scent of mimosa and a concert grand playing soft as the gurgle of a fountain. It even had a handful of diners making low conversation over the tune. But on a night when it was marooned in a frozen city, in limbo between Christmas and New Year, the Garden’s restaurant could have raised dahlias sooner than a party mood. It was barely a quarter full.
At right of the diners a trellis trailed a wall of fake bougainvillea and vines. Two wide steps climbed to a veranda built to catch the sea breeze, and on past the veranda to a sundowner lounge, with slow-beating ceiling fans and a couple in a corner sitting over daiquiris. There was a bar on the veranda, with a line of high cane chairs to give a view over the tables on the terrace. I took one of them and pointed at a bottle behind the counter. The bartender slid a glass between my thumbs, reached for the bottle and uncorked it, then poised it over the rim of the glass. “What else?”
It lifted my chin off my chest. “Tell Willard I’m here to see him.”
The bartender’s hand stayed poised, mouth pinched in a bow as if his gums hurt. He had years left yet to grow into his shirt collar. “Tell him who’s here to see him?”
I looked past him through the bougainvilleas to the diners under the starlight. There was a table for six, its occupants frosted by the same winter mood as everybody else in the joint. Willard and the councilor and two guests ate and talked. Allynson fussed with a napkin. The seat next to him was vacated. I got my left arm by the wrist and lowered it in my jacket pocket where it ached less, then looked from the still empty glass deep into the bartender’s eyes. “He knows who. Did they show you how to pour that or only how to point it?”
He tipped the bottle as the seat beside me dragged back. A hand rested lightly on my sleeve and I turned aside. Mrs. Allynson had on a black satin gown, too chic for mourning, too long for a swimsuit, that covered her arms and shoulders in a gauze so fine you wanted to brush it off her skin. She leaned an elbow on the zinc counter and pointed the cigarette where I could light it. Her head tossed. The fingers flexed
to wave away a cloud of tobacco smoke. She pouted and leaned in toward my cheek, confidentially. “Otherwise respectable people are losing their shirts in there. Why don’t we join them? I might like to see you lose yours.”
Her eyes were bright and she was slurring a little, the smile she lit was meant for diving into and it was a line in conversation I hadn’t been pitched in a month of Sundays. I followed her gaze past her shoulder. At the end of the bar, standing either side of a door that blended in the wall of the veranda, two more choirboys sweated gently in tuxedos, hands rested over their stomachs. The barkeep had left without a word when she sat down. Now he was setting a shallow glass on the counter, stem so slender it might snap in a breeze. A green olive cradled at the bottom of the glass. “Then again, your husband might not. Or did he already give permission?”
Mrs. Allynson eyed the yellowing putty connecting my ear to my chin and started prodding in her drink with a cocktail stick. “You think I was sent to talk to you? Don’t be silly. I don’t run errands. Joe’s guests are an awful bore so I excused myself. Oh, these things are detestable.” She had the olive spiked and levered out of her martini onto a coaster. I reached over and put it between my teeth. She said, “I suppose we may not have so very much to say to one another either. Though you might tell me where you got that awful bruise.” It took her two seconds to think better of it. “No, don’t. Tell me instead what a private investigator does in daylight, and whether you’re any good at it.”
The martini olive had been pickled in kerosene. Mrs. Allynson watched me pucker, raised an eyebrow, prodded the coaster with a long fingernail and didn’t say a word. I spat the pit in the coaster, made a paper screw out of it and dropped it on the counter. As for her question, it was one I’d been asking myself lately. “Opinion differs. Before the war, I worked insurance cases at Lloyd’s for an investigative genius name of Maurice Lynagh. I thought I was pretty good at it, but it turns out I was a minority. After Poland fell, he got drafted to run an army unit chasing down supplies fraud and said I ought to join him, because as far as he could see I had no future in the City. When I asked what he meant, he said I didn’t have any esprit de corps—imagine that! —and not to take it to heart because where he planned sending me it would help me fit in. Nobody there had any esprit de corps either.”
She asked, “Which was?” And made it sound illicit.
I said, “Washington, DC.” And made it sound hush-hush.
She kept her quizzical look, so I explained. It got us off the subject of what I do in daylight.
It was December 1940. The fighting had hardly begun. Roosevelt had just announced the United States was the Arsenal of Freedom and the British were already in hock for a billion dollars of war supply. Just to last another year out they needed plenty more and fast. Meanwhile, some of their American suppliers were betting that the British couldn’t fight Hitler and still find time to check their billing. They weren’t wrong. It took them a while to catch on. Then some clerk in Whitehall noticed deliveries were shy of payments by a country mile, and next day Lynagh was called to the Cabinet Office. His orders were to question the military, the Americans, their suppliers and contractors, find out what the British had been paying for and follow the money where it led. And as money generally does, it led everyplace: to truck motors shipped to Lima not to Liverpool, to oil stores nobody could find on a map, to Long Island estates billed as production lines in Los Angeles, and sand tires for tanks. For some patriots, the war in Europe had been their biggest break since Prohibition. But that was before they started supplying the US Army for a war in the Pacific. I said, “I got a telegram. Lynagh had it from my file that I was raised by a great-aunt in Washington. His wire said to stay with her and save the army a hotel bill. I wired back the great-aunt had died, and anyway my file said Wenatchee, Washington State, which his map ought to show is three thousand miles from DC. Then I got another telegram: You joined Supply Fraud not Intelligence. Get a hotel.”
She registered polite amazement. “You were an officer in the British Army?”
As if in 1940 it was a club so exclusive you needed Herbert Marshall’s accent to get in. I tipped a salute. “Major. Lynagh’s Light Inventory. Motto, Don’t Shoot! They Might Shoot Back! I came here after the ’29 Crash and didn’t go back. America wasn’t in a war yet. And you’re the second person who asked me that tonight as if I owed the military an apology.”
She let a smile light up, emptied her glass and called for two more, then let the smile die even before the bartender glided them back across the counter. She put out the last of the glow, watched her next martini pour and said a little nervously, “Estelle will be buried tomorrow morning. I suppose I wanted a professional opinion about why anyone could possibly want to kill her. I still don’t understand, and Inspector McAlester told me nothing.” Nurse Greer’s murder had been only three days ago. Mrs. Allynson watched me count back. “The police hadn’t any objection so the coroner released her body. Do I take it there’s nothing new?”
I lifted my glass to where it caught the light. “Not a thing. Unless you recall your sister buying a classy winter coat three years ago. You might. For a nurse it would be an expensive item.”
She turned again to look me over, her forehead knotted with the effort at understanding. “No, I don’t recall. And I don’t follow. Even in wartime she would need a warm coat, and Estelle would hardly buy one she couldn’t afford.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t, but Nurse Greer didn’t buy it for herself. This was a man’s overcoat, chocolate-colored with a gold silk lining. Custom made by a firm of City tailors.” Mrs. Allynson twirled the stem of the martini. I shuffled on the bar seat so we could both look uncomfortable. “Look, Mrs. Allynson, this isn’t only about your sister. Crime editors don’t get this excited about a string of incidental killings. They scent four murders joined up in a single story and each editor has a million readers waiting to be told how. They could be right. There were already three victims before your sister died. The blood matches say that when two of them were shot dead their killer was wearing the custom coat she bought. It’s the only one of its kind.”
The bartender arrived back behind the counter, cut a glance at the diners and dropped the corner of his mouth. “Boss wants to see you.”
Out on the terrace, Willard and his lawyer had left their guests care of the councilor, their places at table taken by two tough-looking hostesses in tight-spangled dresses. They were already occupying themselves. A body wearing long ruby earrings was rubbing lipstick off her teeth in a powder mirror. Her friend was emptying a champagne bottle around five glasses the way a lumberjack dowses a campfire. I stepped down from the counter. Mrs. Allynson sat slim and very straight, slotted another cigarette between two lips that trembled, and aimed it at a flame the bartender held out, so shaken you didn’t want to break her concentration. At the end of the bar one of the choirboys patted down my jacket with the back of a hand, then led me through a door that slid aside like entrances in fairytales.
The Garden’s greenroom was a chain of baize islands set in a shallow pit the size of a paddling pool in the park. It drowsed on a handful of players, and on the distillation of a cordial promise that in the cloistered hours, when the late crowd is gone and the fast money stirs, any game of chance you cared to play could be accommodated, for as long as the night lasted and your nerve held. It was a promise for keeping later. For now, the tables were cleaning out their scatter of patrons from nothing but force of habit, and the two hardshells in spangles had the fast money all to themselves. My chaperone led me around the edge of the pit to where another tuxedo heavyweight loitered at the far side of the room, guarding the foot of a stair.
Willard’s office was at the top of the stair, behind a black-lacquer door with nickel trim. A room so much wider than it was deep it should have been a corridor to someplace else. The room was soft-lit by shades along the walls, stale with talk in whispers. It had a president
ial desk at center, a davenport at both ends, each face-on to a broad window with slatted blinds. One window gave a view on arrivals on Charlotte Street. The other looked over the diners and the bar. The greenroom would have its own window someplace else. From all three together a practiced eye would figure a night’s take from first principles, know whose pocket it went in and whose percentage was getting clipped. The door clicked shut behind me. I stood motionless inside it, waited and watched. Willard lounged behind the desk, his right hand out of sight and his left hand splayed. The slab of polished jet he wore for a finger-ring was drawing off the light from a shaded lamp. He drawled, “Talk in front of the lawyer. Where were we?”
Allynson sat in a wing-chair at right of Willard’s desk, rigid behind a tight smile and black tie. He said nothing, only lifted his wrists an inch off the chair arms, in the gesture that asks what can a man do when he’s only the hired help? I stood—hadn’t been invited to sit—sighed and said, “We were getting to Garfield and how Jarrett had been following him around for weeks. How a Cinderella named Terry Reilly rented out to the professor the night he died, and how you ordered Reilly out of circulation until the cops fit Garfield’s boyfriend for his murder. What’s wrong with you remembering where we were?”