Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  Louis was seated in the barber’s chair reading a morning paper in front of a mirror in the center of the wall. He eyed me in the mirror, got out of the chair, dropped the newspaper on one of his waiting seats opposite and stepped up to take my coat. “You’re not looking so good, Mr. Newman. And you look set for a funeral.” He helped me out of the coat sleeve, seemed out of joint himself and started on what was upsetting him before I settled in the chair. “A funeral can hit you hard. Only yesterday I went to see where they laid Miss Dillys to rest, and I don’t mean to judge for none of us is blameless before the Lord, but I was unquiet about how that lady ended her life.” A cotton cloth shook out. Louis moved behind the chair and prodded my chin on my chest. “I had trouble even to find her because they didn’t put a marker on her grave. I don’t know they ever will. But do you know what? Across the ways there was a tree letting fall the prettiest pink blossoms on the snow, spread around her just like flowers from an admirer. I was most glad to see them. It made me hope I was too quick to fear for her soul. You think I was too quick, Mr. Newman?”

  The door opened in from the hotel lobby and Louis broke off. Measured, easy steps moved to the seats along the wall, halted to pick up the newspaper Louis had dropped there and then walked up behind him. I raised my head. The mirror had both of them framed; McAlester twice as wide, twice as heavy and a head taller, conservatively speaking. I let go a long sigh and nodded at the headline rolling in front of his stomach. “It’s fifteen below freezing in a socialist winter, Bevin still sends boys down the mines and electricity is decadence. They call it news.”

  The newspaper twisted in McAlester’s fist, his features gray dough under his hat brim, eyes the gloss of wet sand, his eyebrows two shades lighter. The blank eyes pitied that I always had it wrong. His mouth hooked at the corners and his patent on a whisper said, “Bevin is front page. News is inside. It says the Beaufort boy went missing last night in a blackout. They call it unexplained but what do they know? What I know is, three hours later Newman gets a visit from the Beaufort family doctor and we don’t see her leave. So what kept her spitshine? Did you have a heart attack? Or does she get the sweats when you start talking politics?”

  I caught Louis’ eye in the mirror and nodded him to go on with the haircut and talked with my chin back in my chest. “Henry Beaufort? I read about that. How City Police wanted him for interview and the boy tripped and fell on a question. Now he barely walks. So they took him into the hospital, set a guard on the door and still they lost him. Coming from anybody else it would be a letdown, but City Police say not to lose any sleep; they put a full-time tail on me so they know their streets are safe.” I pulled aside to find McAlester in the mirror again, lips pursed as if he’d found a loose tooth. Sometimes you start the regrets even before you know what you’re going to say. “I needed a doctor. You would know why. I keep running into people who act like they think they’re police.”

  The rolled newspaper lifted inches, chopped down fast and hard across Louis’ knuckles, jumped the scissors out of his fingers and left him watching them skitter across the shop floor and under the row of seats. McAlester’s neck was a livid purple band lapping his shirt collar. His voice strained at the leash that choked it off the way it always did, like a yappy dog that never learns. “Beaufort’s a lucky boy. He was going nowhere last night unless he found a doctor who doesn’t ask questions. I think he found her. I think she patched him up. Her problem was where to send him next. So she went for advice to the only shamus she knows.” There was enough truth in it not to argue the detail. The leash eased off his throat and let him breathe again. “She’s out of your class even in daylight, but at one in the morning she makes you a house call that takes all night. So tell me she stayed for your big blue eyes. Because the thing is, Newman, you don’t look that sick to me.” He tossed the newspaper in my lap, turned away and quartered Louis’ glass shelves with their patent scalp rubs and shaving sticks, hair oils and bay rum. “Littomy says be in his office at six. Disappoint me and be there.” McAlester flipped his collar and left by the street door, hunched against a slow, icing drizzle and joined the passersby. The doorbell stopped chiming. Louis didn’t move.

  I said, “The detective inspector can be excitable.”

  Louis twitched his moustache and collected his scissors from across the room, then took a seat to let the electricity out of the air. “I know it. I met him once before.”

  He waited for McAlester’s ghost to follow him out the door, then got back up to finish the haircut. We were done, I was getting change from my pocket and asked, “Met him when?”

  Louis flicked a brush over my jacket and didn’t need to think. “That was Christmas morning, Mr. Newman. You went out of here into the hotel. Sometime later the gentleman walked in from the street and asked where you went. The truth is I didn’t know where, but he saw there was a door through to the hotel lobby and didn’t wait for his answer. I think the inspector didn’t know you could leave that way.”

  I went over to the street door to pull it open. Louis was standing at his cash till in the window, writing down the sale. He tucked the pencil behind an ear and looked up. I said, “Never fear for Miss Dillys’s soul, Louis. She’ll get by. Fear for the soul that killed her.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Hampstead cemetery was a snowfield gridded with pathways across the side of a hill, freighted with monuments and wintering trees and cut in two by a poplar avenue giving a view south to the city. It was situated off a quiet-money neighborhood of high-pitched roofs and tall brick chimneys, wood smoke and diamond-leaded glass, where children toboggan down private driveways cutting through broad, sloping lawns and even the snowmen wear derby hats.

  My cab let me out at a gatehouse at the entrance to the drive, snow-cleared as far as a mortuary chapel halfway along. A stooped priest in a black beret waited at the doorway shaking with cold in a cloak that reached to his shoes. I ducked inside, took off my hat and made my way to a seat. A lamp flickered in a corner. Gray-glass windows fought off the morning light. The silhouette of a mourner sat bowed and alone beside an aisle. The chapel’s only other occupant sat bolt-upright in a pew in front of me, her lean frame fitted in a long, plain coat, an iron permanent under a black felt hat, balancing a handbag square on her knees. I leaned forward, close enough to murmur in her ear, “Where is everybody?”

  Miss Hartridge stiffened. We sat there cheek to cheek, her jaw knotted and her gloved fists balled on the handbag. Without turning her head, she arched backward over the pew. “As no doubt you are aware, Nurse Greer was with child. She was also unmarried. In view of our rules, we could not encourage the attendance of young nurses. I am here to represent the hospital.”

  I looked both ways along the empty rows and sat back. “Nobody better.”

  Nurse Greer’s sister and her husband hadn’t encouraged attendance either. The Courier’s photographer, waiting under the poplars in the snow, was going to be disappointed. Motors cut. Car doors slammed on the drive outside. The doors to the chapel flapped open and four bearers scuffed in on the wet tile. Miss Hartridge got on her feet, ramrod-straight, the Raglan’s landlord turned in his aisle seat, I pushed up off the pew an inch at a time, stiff as Lazarus. We were five mourners, not even a quorum for a secret society, and one hollow-eyed priest who patted a handkerchief at the corners of his mouth and kept the talk about Providence as simple as it ever is.

  Carl’s photographer leaned against the empty hearse taking pictures of the family at the graveside with a long lens: of the lawyer standing loose at attention, his pallor white as lime-wash, and of his wife looking weightless as her veil in the breeze. Behind the photographer, the poplar avenue followed the ridgeline as far as the gatehouse, past where a Humber sedan had pulled under the trees thirty yards inside the gates. The committal over, the priest muffled in his cloak and stood aside. The landlord of the Raglan, blind with tears, grasped his hand and stumbled after Miss Hartridge. I wa
tched them climb the path back to the chapel, then crossed to the fresh-turned earth of another burial, where almond blossom scattered over the last snowfall.

  “I suppose we can expect to see our pictures in every newspaper.”

  I hadn’t heard her footfalls, looked from Dillys Valentine’s grave to the cars parked uphill in front of the chapel then along the drive to the Humber waiting under the trees. There were no agency photographers. Or any photographer at all, excepting Carl’s.

  I said, “You can count on them being in one.”

  Mrs. Allynson lifted the veil on a hat I hadn’t seen before, wore a coat cut to pinch at her waist and swell at her hips, black velvet gloves, and tall heels that made her stand tiptoe in the snow. You wondered just how much black she kept by for mourning. Her shoulders drooped. A sigh of frustration spun a frosted cloud on the air. “It was perfectly obvious the funeral was meant to be private. Do you think we could ask them not to print their photographs?”

  It was a novel idea. “Appeal to the editor’s better nature? Only if you’ve got something he wants more.”

  She folded back the veil and bit her lip. “I’m sorry. By private I didn’t mean… It was good of you to come. I expect the older man was Estelle’s employer at the Raglan. He seemed terribly upset. And the lady who looked so stern?”

  “Miss Hartridge is a hair shirt, here to pay the respects of the hospital. She has to act tougher than everybody else or it doesn’t work. It wasn’t personal. She thinks Job gets treated with kid gloves.”

  She made a taut smile that emptied her eyes. “Then the service might have offended her, I suppose.”

  “There were two funerals just now, Mrs. Allynson. The padre only knew about one of them. What offended Miss Hartridge is that he didn’t have all the facts. Not setting him straight was a big effort for her.” She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and cast around at the blossom at our feet. I motioned with my hands inside my pockets. “Miss Valentine was buried here yesterday. Until the freeze lets up, there’s nowhere else they can break ground. Hampstead isn’t a place she expected to pass a lot of time in.”

  The horizon was closing in so fast you could reach out and touch it. Her eyes leveled along the almond trees while she registered the name. “Still, it might have pleased her, mightn’t it? And the blossoms could be her special mark of grace. Didn’t the padre say that in the end each of us receives what we’re deserving of?”

  It didn’t need an answer. It wasn’t even meant for conversation. We were passing words at a graveside to save on the silence, signifying nothing. The day being what it was, I should have let it rest. But what with the priest and his mysteries, Miss Hartridge and her book of rules, the funeral talk and the trees dripping petals as if a thaw was setting in, the morning was giving me a nose bleed. I followed her gaze to a line of low gray cloud hemming the south of the city. “Mrs. Allynson, I don’t have the gift for thinking in signs and symbols. For all I know the padre could be right. But what if he’s wrong? What if there is no grace and there are no just rewards and the blossom falls where it falls because a wind blows in the night? Who gets to put Dillys Valentine’s murderer in the dark and lonely place where he belongs?”

  She turned her cheek as if she’d been hit and took a moment to recover. Then pirouetted on her toes, traced her own footsteps in the snow and climbed the almond walk to where her husband waited. Allynson was standing at the open rear door of the funeral limousine, bent back at the knees like a strung bow, taking a long, steadying pull from a hip flask, as if he’d climbed out of the clouds onto a mountaintop and saw there was no place else to go but down.

  Beyond the rows of headstones, down at the farthest edge of the cemetery grounds, a strip of bare woodland glinted in the slow thaw. Past the copse, a street of garden-city dream homes ran at the foot of the hill, made a right-angle to a bridge crossing some rail tracks and ended where it met the highway back into the city. I’d had police company all morning. It was time to part. I put my head down and took off in a straight line downhill for the trees, plowed in between lines of headstones and kept going, went fast down a snow slope, waded knee-high across a last, flat eighty yards and pulled up in the shelter of the wood, breathing hard. I sank on my heels there in thick brush, and took the view back up the hill.

  A quarter-mile off, the funeral cortège was riding out through the poplar avenue to the lodge gate at the east end of the ridge, passing by the Humber sedan pulled over on the verge. It had passed the Humber’s driver already. He was the one running flat-out along the drive in the opposite direction. Say what you want about City detectives, they’re game. This one sprinted as far as the mortuary chapel before he thought of quitting. Then he took one look at my tracks down the hillside, and another across the city spreading all around him to the horizon, stopped running and started thinking. Not about me. Not even about what his next move ought to be. It wouldn’t be his pressing concern. Right now, his only thought was how to explain to McAlester that his tail job had given him the slip, on foot and in broad daylight in the middle of Hampstead cemetery.

  FORTY

  The Sesto’s basement ran beneath a row of store fronts off the north-west angle of West Smithfield. At the street corner there was a record store closed for lunch, with a sign over that read, Old Time Favourites, Swing, Hot Jazz, Popular, Classical, Opera and Foreign. The rest it was leaving to the competition. The shuttered markets on the north side, the hospital through the plane trees on the square, the street running west to Farringdon past the walk-down diner; from the record store’s front step, I saw it all. A mother and her small daughter tramped the sidewalk toward me, muffled and hand in gloved hand, both of them hooded like Hudson Bay trappers. Ten feet away, the mother drew aside to look in a grocery, but her daughter wasn’t interested, wriggled out of her grip and scuffed through slush to the record store window. She put her nose up against the glass, where a dog with its ear in a gramophone horn was advertising new arrivals. The girl’s mouth worked at the sales line handwritten on the poster. “Hhhh. Mmmm. Vvvv.” She took a breath and tried it again. “Hhhhmmmm. Vvvvv.”

  I had my back to the shop door, looking out across the square. The small frame next to me went rigid and readied for another lungful. Concentration was sending her cross-eyed. I said, “H.M.V. His Master’s Voice. It isn’t the name of the dog.”

  The girl clammed shut her mouth and backed up from the window to give me the squint, then squeezed two steps sideways and climbed up on the step so we were standing toe to toe. She sank her fists in her hips, rocked back on her heels and mouthed in case I was deaf as well as stupid, “I know how to spell it. I only don’t know how to say it.” Out of nowhere, her mother grabbed her arm, rolled eyes at me over her daughter’s head and dragged her off.

  A truck crawled up the ramp from the rail siding under the markets. Somewhere out of sight a locomotive huffed. A taxicab pulled over at the Sesto’s entrance and Kathryn Swinford got out and hurried down the stair. The sidewalk had emptied. The garden in the square had been chained since the nurse’s murder. I quartered the area one last time and followed the doctor into the basement diner.

  The Sesto’s tables were busier than before, thick with the blue smoke that was the marvel of Stanley’s cooking. Kathryn Swinford sat in the booth by the door, dressed the way she’d arrived to fix up Henry, looking as much at ease in the company of meat market traders as at breakfast in the Great Eastern. She had the physician’s bag at her side and her coat draped over her shoulders, her fingers pushing the sweater collar up around her ears. Before I hit the seat, she was saying, “Could we find another table? I sat here because you said to but it’s absolutely freezing so near the door.”

  I sat opposite and looked for somebody to take an order. “From here I see who comes in.”

  Her alarm bells rang. “Why? Were you followed?”

  Not unless Littomy was recruiting six-year-olds with mittens and
snub noses and scarves crossed under their armpits and tied behind their backs. And the mother’s style was too refined. I pulled a mouth that said no, I didn’t think I was followed. “But I suppose I might have been. Shouldn’t you be able to tell?”

  I sagged and shuffled back around to face her. “Doctor, there are a million things I should be able to tell, but for insurance I put your shoes outside the bedroom door last night and my trusted valet turned the heels around. Anybody trailing you here in the snow will think you already left. How do you tell when a patient doesn’t have a cough?” She was staring past me, not answering. I twisted around. The signora stood wheezing at the corner of the booth wearing the black dress she always wore, a thin black cardigan buttoned at her throat, black stockings, flat black shoes. She had a bright metal tray pressed across her stomach and a wounded look. “The lady doesn’t drink coffee, signora, and I need something stronger.”

  She tugged the cardigan across her bosom, left without a word and pressed back through the diners to the kitchen. Kathryn Swinford watched her go, looking puzzled. Her voice lowered to a murmur. “It all went the way you said it should this morning. Bridget telephoned for a taxi and between us we got Henry downstairs and out through the rear of the saloon bar. I didn’t go into my office and I haven’t been home yet either. My car’s still parked where I left it last night.” She paused to reflect. “Bridget didn’t ask any questions. Has she done this sort of thing before?”

  The signora squeezed back up to the booth with a tray, set down two small wineglasses and a saucer with two sugar almonds. She filled the glasses with honey-colored wine, set gimlet eyes on me and rested her weight on her fingertips on the table edge. “Vin Santo. To make you more holy.” She gargled on the H, took the bottle and her tray, and left.