Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  A muffled piano tune broke in from the other side of the blinds. Allynson cleared his throat and put his palms together between his knees, gave the room his strained, gap-tooth grin and hesitated as if he were about to start on a proof of Euclid. Willard swung back around, picking at the gloss on his fingernails. He motioned one of them at his lawyer. “He’s anxious to hear your point.”

  Allynson swallowed aloud. I looked along Willard’s office, at the dark, heavy furniture a racketeer will order from the catalogue to give himself a personality. In a room like that, they can put an arm around your shoulder, be grave and wise, offer you the fruits of their philosophy and experience, then tell you to fall in line or get all your toes cut off. I gave Willard the long, wearied look that comes with free advice. “Last night, McAlester took the boyfriend in for questioning and damn near killed him. Think about that. He knows who the Beauforts are and the influence they can call on, knows they’re so select they even get the Willards at their Christmas ball, both at the same time. And still he went ahead and made a hospital case out of their son.” I loosed a silent whistle and turned for the door, awestruck. “McAlester in that mood is nobody’s idea of protection. Worse, he’s a liability. Let him have Reilly and it’ll be plain murder. The point is, why be an accessory? You don’t need it. Ask your lawyer.”

  I picked up my chaperone outside on the stair, went ahead of him down to the tables and out through the same thin crowd of players to where I started, at the bar with its view over moonlight on the bay. Mrs. Allynson was gone. The hostesses on the terrace had the fast money wrapped and sold, their breath so hot in their faces it kept their teeth bared. The lumberjack’s client leaned over to mumble in her ear. Across the table the councilor sat out the end of a fat cigar. And then the hilltop villa’s lights dimmed outside and in. Electric starlight guttered and fizzed overhead. There was a flat, hollow snap like a stud popping and the whole Riviera blacked out. Liquored groans rippled through the darkness then a muted squeal. I bumped against one of the high stools at the bar, edged around it and put my back against the counter. A chair scraped. A glass shattered. Voices called between the tables and the maître d’ asked for calm. Catcalls started. Then one, then another, then every cigarette lighter on the terrace rasped in turn to make jittering rings of fairy lights around a couple of dozen diners. A scatter of applause broke out.

  The Garden’s lights stayed off. In ten unhurried minutes every dinner table had a wax candle butted in a wine bottle, the veranda bar lit up a line of its own, and the last cigarette lighter flicked off. I pushed away from the counter, cut through the stalking shadows to a table at the far side of the room and pulled out a vacated chair. The girls had taken advantage of the blackout to move their clients on. The table was a litter of unfinished drinks. Drake sat heavy-lidded and alone, tilting an empty glass at the candlelight. “Your guests are otherwise engaged, Councilor. Can we talk?”

  He made a wry smile. “Mr. Willard’s guests.HeMy presence this evening, you will observe, was entirely unnecessary. What do you wish to talk about?”

  I lit a cigarette off the candle flame and took the chair. “About a trip Michael Garfield took a week ago in a light plane out of Northolt aerodrome. It had been snowing, and after a snowfall you sometimes see things from the air you missed on the ground. Even if you’re City archaeologist.” The councilor’s ebony cane lay across the table like a hand on a ruined clock face. The half-smile took leave of his mouth. “But you don’t need that explained, you were in the airplane. Your pilot, Miss Fulton, thinks you could be the world’s worst flier. How would you forget?”

  Drake caught a shallow breath. Just thinking about being airborne was giving him vertigo. “Indeed. Miss Fulton was most considerate. What is your object?”

  “On Christmas Eve, a caller left a message with the switchboard at Guildhall, gave your name and a time and place you wanted to meet Garfield that evening. You’d met Garfield once already that day, at the Sesto, to look over photographs he’d taken from the plane. Pictures so sensational the professor assumed you wanted to talk about them some more. So, at nine o’clock he went to a bar in the City where the message said to meet, and when you didn’t show somebody new caught his eye. They left together. An hour later the professor was dead in the river. In short, Councilor, he was set up.” I looked around the Garden’s endless imitation nights, turned cool and starless in the gaps between candlelight. The piano was playing with a soft pedal. Palms on the terrace made their shadows on black. Waiters moved around invisible, waiting on a handful of diners who’d liked the mood better and stayed on. “There’s something else. The morning Garfield’s body was found, Miss Fulton got a telephone call, also from someone who gave your name. The caller asked to speak to his pilot—Mister Fulton—and when they got that one straightened out, he asked if she still had the plane’s film from three days before Christmas. Miss Fulton thought you must have been so airsick you hadn’t any idea what went on. Otherwise, how could you miss that Garfield was taking his own photographs that day, with his own camera? Miss Fulton never did have the film. She straightened the caller out on that too.”

  I rubbed the cigarette in a champagne glass and gave him time to think. First, about a train of killings that started with somebody using his name, and how awkward that could prove to be. Second, about who else would care what Garfield saw in his airplane pictures in the snow. Maybe the councilor could tell me who, but even if he couldn’t, when it’s your client you want him to try, just to hear how it might sound in court. “Councilor, at the Sesto that afternoon Michael Garfield showed you photographs that could stop City planning cold. Somebody who couldn’t let that happen either killed him or had him killed just hours later, took his photographs and then went looking for the negatives for insurance.” A draft swayed in the umbrella pines and guttered the candle on the table. “So tell me who else he might have shown them to.”

  Drake lifted the edge of the linen tablecloth, ran it under his lip and called over a waiter to take an order. He took the silver-top cane and levered up on his feet, pulled a watch from his vest and sprung it open. “You will excuse me. My car is waiting.” He looped the watch back in his vest pocket, set his shirt cuffs and turned on his heel. A whisky arrived from the private bottle and took care of the next quarter-hour. Then I left the Mediterranean behind and walked back out onto Charlotte Street.

  The Garden’s marquee flapped under a quilt of low, wet cloud the color of sump oil. Charlotte Street was oblivion so black you blinked to see if your eyes were shut. Far back along the street, two headlamps flicked on and lit a faint trail. I stepped out from beneath the marquee and started walking. The auto with the headlamps came up behind me at the pace of an expensive funeral, drew level before I heard the motor ticking, passed by and became a silhouette in its own rear lights. Fifty feet ahead, it braked and pulled over, opened a rear door wide across the sidewalk and waited. When I caught up, a voice from the back seat said, “Get in, Newman. We travel in the same direction after all.”

  The Daimler moved off in gears of spun silk and headed south to Oxford Street, like a warm bath with the lights out and soft rain beating on the windows. Drake was a shadow talking at his reflection in the quarter light. His car’s insides smelled of new shoes. Warm air from its heater was lapping my ankles and crawling up my shins. For my money he could talk to himself all night. We moved in a hush through a full-scale blackout while the councilor gave me his introduction to civics, as if I should have asked before. He said Garfield had the gift for persuasion, but that his radio audiences and broadsheet readers and even Churchill himself were just the professor flying a kite. When it came to City planning, the people he needed to convince were the committee members that voted, and the committee had other things on its mind. The councilor spread a fat hand on a fatter armrest. “Professor Garfield saw the City’s devastation as an opportunity for his own advancement. My committee saw the vital needs of our banking and commerc
e. It fell to me to reconcile their differences.”

  It hadn’t always been a problem. Until last spring, the committee hardly knew it had a City archaeologist, let alone who or how he filled his days. But that was before the professor found his Roman fort under the rubble and made headlines saying he wanted to go looking for more. The editorials called it a national disgrace not to let him. Their cartoonists had a field day. One of them showed a pack of hyenas labeled City Money tearing apart a carcass labeled Reconstruction. It put the councilor in a tough spot. His committee had promised a masterplan and the Corporation needed to see progress. It wanted to hear how the City could get back to making money, not another highbrow lecture on the radio. Drake’s driver slipped past a line of buses into Charing Cross Road. I said, “The masterplan was Beaufort’s.”

  The councilor’s eyelashes ruffled. “Quite. I sympathized with Professor Garfield, but in order to consider any delay to planning we needed more certain evidence than he offered.” Then ten days ago the snows turned the landscape to sugar icing, and when the weather eased the councilor got his invitation to an airplane ride. As committee chairman, he said he felt obliged to go up and take a look. Which was heroic of him when you considered he could have stayed in his office, waited until New Year and read all about it in the professor’s report. But Drake hadn’t spun a City fortune out of waiting to read a thing in print. If it put him a step ahead, he would have climbed out on the airplane wing that day. Airsick if he accepted Garfield’s invitation, heartsick if he didn’t. We made a battleship turn, joined a line of traffic into Trafalgar Square, passed by the flank of the National Gallery and slowed for St. Martin’s Lane. The car’s wipers shunted sleet in the corners of the glass and gave the windshield eyebrows. “I next met Professor Garfield, as you say, two days later on Christmas Eve. He showed me photographs, spoke of making another monumental discovery and was plainly exhilarated. As always, he wanted to investigate further. It was our final conversation. I left him no telephone message. Whoever might have been using my name I have no idea.”

  I dropped my hat on the armrest between us. The Daimler nosed around a cab rank on the Strand as if we were on rails. Three days back, in his library and in front of his lawyer, my client claimed to recollect no detail of his last conversation with Michael Garfield. Now the memories were flooding back. Such things are heartwarming. “Fine, but after you left the Sesto that afternoon you called Guy Beaufort, told him about your talk with Garfield and put Beaufort Partners’ work on hold. If we’re still interested in sparing blushes, you could tell me who else you called.”

  Passing headlights set Drake in profile, padded in the fox-collar coat and derby, holding a strap in front of his ear. He let go a small, sad sigh. “Beaufort I informed as a matter of courtesy and trust. I spoke of the matter to no one else, though Professor Garfield may have. His enthusiasms were not easily contained.”

  Drake went back to window-gazing. The limousine ran on past Aldwych, lit up black drifts of snow, skirted the burned-out shell of Clement Danes then straightened up for Fleet Street. Newspaper trucks were backed up for blocks, waiting out the power cut until the presses restarted. I leaned forward to slide the glass partition, said to let me out and closed it again. “Councilor, what I think is that Garfield’s pictures were his proof of a Roman coliseum buried under the City. What I know is you wouldn’t have got in the airplane unless he promised to show you something special. So far you didn’t say where.”

  The Daimler eased over and pitched to a standstill. Drake’s hand dropped from the strap, took the ebony cane and rapped the side window. “My dear Newman, the photographs were merely an exhibit. Professor Garfield was subject to the fiercest professional rivalries. It is inconceivable he would reveal a location before he published his report. Not to his colleagues, nor to his intimates one suspects. Most certainly not to me.” Drake’s chauffeur had my door open, standing at attention in the gutter in a sleet shower. Fleet Street was colder than the bottom of a loch.

  The Daimler pulled out around lines of delivery trucks parked nose to tail both sides of the street. Offices were deserted. The presses stilled. Every newspaper’s night shift camped out in the bars until the lights came back on. The Tipperary was buzzing, kerosene lamps yellowing its saloon windows. I was standing in the recess of my street door, jigging a key in the lock, when a voice behind me said, “Newman?” I spun around. At an arm’s length across the shallow recess a low moan switched to a stifled spasm of coughing. A shadow-figure slumped inside a corner of the entrance, wrapped in a thin robe and wet through. There was a gasp and then the head lolled and the figure started buckling at the knees. I shoved hard in his chest to pin him upright against the wall, kicked open the door, took away my hand and dropped on a knee and let him pitch forward over my shoulder. We went in through the street door that way in a fireman’s lift, backed up to click shut the latch and got a balance, then started on the stairs. My side felt as if a road gang was hitting it with shovels.

  Kathryn Swinford was dressed like a country vet come to sit with a sick heifer, in riding boots and breeches and a heavy sweater that rolled up under her chin and flopped around her shoulders. Her patient lay curled under a hill of blankets, shallow-breathing and bright with sweat. She put away a syringe in a physician’s bag at the foot of the sofa. “It’s as well you called me. He has pneumonia. I’ve given penicillin and something to make him sleep and he’ll need to stay warm and rested. How on earth did he get here?” As if all you ever do is sprinkle shamus dust and the police suspect of the year floats in.

  But Blanche’s boy hadn’t needed any magic. He just took his chance and didn’t see what he had to lose. While lights blacked out all across the City and his police guard went to check with the night staff, Henry had walked straight out into the freeze wearing a hospital robe and slippers. He’d taken a bad beating from McAlester, understood that he was prime for a murder rap, and knew while the blackout lasted, he could be invisible. The gas fire burbled in the hearth. Night shifts drifted back out of the bars. Lights were switching on all over Fleet Street. I looked away from the window and said, “Running out on City Police won’t improve Henry’s chances with a jury.”

  “Hardly. But if I take him back to Bart’s, what chance he’ll ever go home again, innocent or not?” She pulled a stethoscope from around her neck and coiled it, already decided. “Anyway, he plainly can’t stay here. Help me get him downstairs and I can promise the Beaufort family will stop making such an utter nuisance of itself.”

  It was an attractive idea, if a little late in the day. But it had everything wrong with it, and the truth was there had been everything wrong from the minute I carried Henry in at the door. Still, it would take some explaining to the doctor. When you’re raised on the playing fields of England a losing hand is just another opportunity for a magnificent gesture. “It’s gallant of you, Doctor, but lately I have the full attention of City Police. Leave now and we could all be picked up before we get to your car. Besides, Henry hasn’t been here. I called you in because I’m getting dizzy spells. Your records will show you gave me a sleeping shot and penicillin, and you stayed the night because you’re a regular Florence Nightingale.” I went over to the cabinet and poured two stiff nightcaps. “Wait till morning and my police tail will leave with me. Take Henry out of here then and you can put him wherever you want. All you have to promise is to keep him there.”

  Kathryn Swinford had been staring beyond the window, at a vision playing out against the night. It might have been a grandstand view of her career slipping beneath the waves. Or she was looking for one good reason why we still ought to do things her way, not mine. Whatever she saw, when I turned around, she was standing on her toes on the tile hearth, warming her back at the trickle of gas flame, the stethoscope draped on the sofa arm and her boots kicked off across the rug. I brought over the two glasses and put one in her hand, level with her eyelashes. She sighted me across the rim. “There was
someone who asked you to dance with her in the long, long ago. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, that wasn’t Florence Nightingale, Detective.”

  Taking the Hemlock

  I got out of a taxi on Liverpool Street bathed and shaved, in a clean shirt, a dark navy suit and a tie I didn’t remember ever seeing before. The entire outfit had been laid across the foot of the bed, and on the seat of a chair beside it a pair of black leather Oxfords with a sock rolled like a soused herring inside each shoe. When they expect to see you suited up for breakfast that way, you don’t want a dinner invitation from the Swinfords.

  She had come to lean against the bedroom door while I dressed, arms folded, ankles crossed, eyeing her work with a bandage as if we ought to put in for a prize. I was sitting on the bedside, working out how to bend and tie my shoelaces, when I saw her standing there. She had on one of my shirts without a collar and a pullover wound around her shoulders, breeches tucked in a pair of long wool service socks and her hair tied back as if she’d wandered in from my fruit orchards. On her it not only looked fine it looked everyday, and better yet the effect entirely passed her by. Then Henry moaned in a drugged sleep on the sofa and she left to go check on her patient. I finished up the shoelaces and knotted my necktie single-handed. There is no end or limit to Newman’s accomplishments.

  Under my shirt, I was strapped in a bandage that looped around my side and made a bandolier over my shoulder, Mexican bandit style. It left me a lot less sore. It also left me climbing out of the cab as stiff as Mrs. Mayhew’s window dummy. I paid the driver, took four steps across a broad, wet sidewalk and entered Louis’ barbershop. The doorbell tinkled bright as sleigh bells.