by Janet Roger
I prodded the saucer across the table. “Bridget is safer than the post office.”
Kathryn Swinford fooled with the saucer, weighed something she had on her mind and picked off one of the sugar almonds. “Good, but there’s something I ought to tell you. I mean about where Henry is.”
“For now, I don’t have to know. When I do, I’ll ask.”
She blew out her cheeks, as if it always made such slow work because I never could grasp the basics. “Yes, I understand that. But if this all goes horribly wrong, I may not be here to ask.” She nibbled at the sugar tip of the almond. “You’re the private investigator, I know, and you’re used to finding people, but where I took him…” I lifted the glass, took a mouthful and let the syrup coat the back of my teeth. There is no legal way to stop a high-bred Englishwoman telling you what she thinks is good for you. She leaned in across the table as if we were rehearsing for her first prison visit. “Look, Sir Bernard Hirst is a senior judge and a Master of the Bench at the Temple. He’s been reviewing the courts in East Africa since the war ended. The point is, Henry was in no state to travel this morning, Sir Bernard’s private rooms in chambers aren’t being used and the Temple was a two-minute taxi ride away.” She moved the stem of her glass in a tight diamond on the table. “It’s awkward of course, but there really was nowhere else close at hand and Sir Bernard is my uncle. On my mother’s side.” As if that side of the family ought to swing it for me.
I sputtered wine back in the glass, reached for a handkerchief and dabbed at my chin. “Doctor, understand this. There are things not even Women of Good Family can square. Awkward is if they find young Henry hiding out in the Archbishop’s skirts. This is way more special. What did you do? Make a shortlist headed Large Buildings Crawling with Lawyers? It’s Littomy’s backyard. He knows it better than you know Debrett’s. How long do you suppose Blanche’s boy can last in there? Meanwhile, a senior judge and knight of the realm is harboring a murder suspect you put in his chambers without his knowledge or consent. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to him? He might as well take the hemlock now. Because out there on the savanna, where Uncle Bernard sits in his grass skirt swapping learned opinion with the natives, one unholy mess is about to fall on him out of the African sky. He might not have caught it on the wind yet, but believe me, when it happens, he will not fail to notice.”
Kathryn Swinford looked from under her eyelashes as if I were pitiful. “Must you always treat me like an upper-class idiot? Of course I understand the risk, and when this is all over I shall own up. What else would you have me do? Guy is desperate, Blanche knows absolutely nothing of what’s happening and their son has been assaulted in police custody. I hate all this cloak and dagger, but I work for people who are trying to frame the boy for murder. To let it pass without lifting a finger would be shameful. Anyway, the Temple is absolutely the last place police will think of looking, and lawyers are only ever interested in other lawyers’ fees. They won’t have the faintest idea what’s going on.” She snapped open the bag beside her, drew out an envelope and laid it on the table, set a key on the envelope and slid it all my way. Her tone honeyed, the way you talk a dog into letting go a ball. “The key is to Sir Bernard’s rooms. I really do think you should take it. And those are the photographs you asked for. I meant to give them to you last night, but events rather took over, didn’t they?” She popped the last sugar almond and raised the wineglass. “Anyway, don’t be silly about the archbishop. Henry’s a good Catholic boy. It’s the first place they’d look.”
The signora had her wine bottle hoisted over the heads of her customers, pushing through the tables. The doctor saw her, wagged a finger over her glass to stop her pouring more, then checked and slid along the seat toward her. “We’ve not been introduced. I’m Dr. Swinford.”
The signora blinked and eyed the physician’s bag at her side. “A real doctor?”
“A real doctor for policemen, and I can see that something’s upsetting you. Why not sit down and tell me what it is?” She put a hand to the signora’s elbow and guided her into the booth. It was all the invitation she needed. “You don’t see the newspaper? Of the dead nurse who is so young? It is very, very bad.”
There was something in the way she said very, very bad. Kathryn Swinford heard it, turned to where she could search the older woman’s eyes, then took both her hands and balled them in her lap. “You knew her, didn’t you?”
The signora looked under stones for words she wasn’t born with. “Of course I know her! She comes here with her man who dresses good and don’t talk so much. Without her, I think he don’t come no more.”
Kathryn Swinford was already taking a card from her bag and writing. “But perhaps he will. And if he does, I want you to telephone Mr. Newman at this number. Will you do that? It really is important you should.” The signora looked the number over, then gave it the shrug-off my success rate was due. She slipped it in the bosom of her dress, shuffled along the bench, filled my glass again from the bottle meant to make me holy and went back with it to her kitchen. I added a memory for telephone numbers to the doctor’s many wonders.
FORTY-ONE
When I walked into the Thornburgh lobby it was past three in the afternoon, back among people who’d put in a day at the office already. Regular people, decent people, reliable people who answered their mail and returned their calls, had a line in conversation and a smile they didn’t need to practice in a mirror. People who’d put in another solid day toward another solid week, would take the same bus tonight they left on this morning, and go home more or less satisfied. All things considered, I thought they might be on to something. I had my office door pushed open, heard footsteps hurrying along the corridor, turned to see the post clerk and stepped aside. He went straight in ahead of me, stirring a new perfume on the air, unmistakable. I caught his elbow. “Hold up, George. Since when are we wearing Texas Dew? There are cops in this town who don’t need that kind of excuse.”
George was three months in the job, fifteen years old and passing for twelve. Ordinarily, he went around the building in a cloud of Dixie Peach, and what was on the air today was not it. He dropped the mail on my desk and coughed in his fist, then glanced past me at the line of chairs in the recess outside. I craned around at a visitor seated in a corner, peeling off her gloves and dropping them one at a time on a package in her lap. I patted George’s elbow and nodded him to leave.
Mrs. Willard was dressed for noticing, had a purse tucked tight under her arm and a wide-brim hat set over one eye, a fur that started up around her ears and cut in below her calves, so orange it would have looked gaudy on the fox. I raised the window blind on the last of the daylight, then went back to invite her inside. She handed me the packet on her way in. “Texas Dew hardly sounds flattering. Ought I to ask?” I sat her in the customer chair, leaned back in mine with the packet unopened and said probably not. But Mrs. Willard wasn’t ready yet for any other kind of talk. She set her purse and gloves on the desk, touched a stray wave of hair off her cheek and asked anyway.
It had been the winter of 1944. Four months after the Americans landed at St. Tropez. Three months after a Seventh Army NCO introduced himself to the madam of a cathouse behind the old port in Marseille. The NCO was from Wisconsin, with access to a supply of aviation spirit liberated from a navy seaplane base, forty miles along the coast. The madam was from the hill town of Grasse, inland from Cannes, where before the war they made the finest French perfume sold on Fifth Avenue. The NCO and the madam agreed on a trade, Guerlain for gasoline, and turned her basement into a depot for both. It meant the girls were entertaining daily on top of sixteen thousand gallons of high octane and perfume racked in US Army jerry cans, likewise liberated. Mrs. Willard picked at a fold of the fur and let it fall back on her knee. “Such an interesting war you had.”
“Marseille? I was in transit. Two days before I got there the cathouse had blown sky high and not a German in five h
undred miles, only the NCO with a lighted cigarette, checking inventory in the basement. It was Sunday morning. The girls were all at mass. At any other hour of any other day, he would have taken an entire company of infantry with him. When the aviation spirit burned off, the air in the old port was filled with The Blue Hour—the perfume you’re wearing—and Marseille never smelled so good, before or since. The GIs kidded it was the smell of oilfields in early morning: Texas Dew. The locals said it was the smell of a miracle and they’d better believe it.”
She watched me hook a finger under the brown paper wrapper on her package. “You make it sound like Götterdämmerung.”
“Who’s she?”
“It’s an opera by Wagner about a country boy out of his depth in the big city. He meets a bad end. Everything goes up in smoke.”
“That’s it?”
“More or less.”
Mrs. Willard’s package was half the size of a shirt box. I had the wrapper loose at one end when a handful of photographs slid in my lap. At a glance, they were more of Jarrett’s work, as dull as blackmail pictures ever are and dynamite for anybody who could use them. Mostly of Henry cozying with his professor in the flounce bars and private burlesques where they supposed they were among friends. I tore off the rest of the wrapper, put it in a desk drawer along with the pictures and turned to the other item in the package. It was a diary for 1947 with a marbled cover, filled with names and appointments, telephone numbers and addresses, and the journal entries Garfield crammed tight against the margins in the same dead languages that had stopped being a surprise to me. I riffled through the pages then closed them up for some other time. Mrs. Willard waved a manicure over her gift. “My husband’s interest in Professor Garfield seemed important to you last night. After you left, I went looking in his room. I daresay he’ll notice eventually, but when he does I won’t be there. I thought I owed you more than just an explanation for the way I’ve been behaving.” She slammed shut her eyelids. “I’m sorry. This… might be more difficult than I imagined. Is there a drink in the house?”
Her hand dropped in her lap. She sat straight and took deep breaths. The explanation she thought she owed me looked a long way off. “It isn’t necessary to do this now, Mrs. Willard. I can call you a cab.”
“But it is necessary. I simply can’t do this by myself any longer and there’s no one else I can tell, especially not Edgar. I don’t know where to begin, but if I don’t begin at all I think I shall start screaming.”
I weighed that, went around her to the file cabinet, pulled out a tumbler and broke the seal on a fresh bottle and half-filled the glass. The rest I filed back in the drawer and put the drink in her hand. “Begin with how the councilor met Jarrett. Whenever you’re ready.” She nodded and took a sip for appearance’s sake, sat back and closed her eyes again. Her mouth softened and her cheeks took on a bloom. I went back to my seat to give her time to put down whatever she needed, and when I got there, she was dabbing a handkerchief at the corner of her lip. The glass was drained.
The way Mrs. Willard told it, she’d gotten the real story from her husband soon enough. Her marriage had been poison, Willard was brittle and she learned fast how to rile him, up until the day he snapped and acquainted her with two new facts of life. One, that the trade their marriage had been a part of was never for money, but only for the coverup of a single, sordid rendezvous; and two, that however tough she might try to make life for her husband, it wouldn’t even get close to the misery he could promise to arrange for her. Mrs. Willard didn’t recall which of the two hit her hardest at the time, only that she’d gotten good and tight before she went to brace her father for an explanation. Drake had listened, couldn’t deny what his daughter had already heard, sat her down and filled out what had happened.
The councilor had long had an unsafe fondness for young hustlers. Raymond Jarrett was merely his introduction to the problems that can arise: a late-night pickup at a cab rank that had played out on an operetta stage at an address in Cloth Court and—as such things go—had ended in the third act, when two City detectives dropped by. For Jarrett it had been all in a night’s work. For the councilor, it was his first acquaintance with a police shakedown and the sainted look of two vice detectives eyeing his birthmark and his silks tossed in a chair. The irony being that Drake owned the address where the detectives pulled their shakedown, and didn’t know it at the time any more than they did.
The councilor’s interview in the bright room with City Police had taken place sometime in New Year, 1943. By then, he’d already met Willard in the way of business and had even introduced him to his daughter once, though like everything else since Edgar Levin went missing the occasion had passed her by. Then or later she hadn’t any idea that Willard was taking an interest in the Drakes. She thought her father hadn’t any idea either. So that in the dead hours with the two detectives, cold-sweating through a night of dark wonders, the biggest wonder was when Buchanan Allynson arrived in the bright room with the look of a man late for an appointment. It was no courtesy call. As things stood, Councilor Drake was two hours away from an appearance at morning court on a gross indecency charge, at which point he might as well start waving goodbye to his commercial interests, his name and his standing in the City. When news got out about the court appearance, they would all be gone. What puzzled him was why Willard would send his lawyer in the middle of the night to tell him what he already knew.
Allynson operating wasn’t hard to picture: the permanent smile of apology, the consoling that even the worst nightmares are ones you wake up from, the urging that for two more hours the councilor still had a choice, and that a public humiliation was avoidable. Willard had sent him with an alternative on offer. Take it and what had passed overnight would be nothing but a forgettable inconvenience. It was guaranteed.
When the councilor walked back out onto Snow Hill, it was winter dawn. A gray Armstrong limousine idled at the curb, waiting to bring him home. The rest followed as Allynson predicted. Drake’s appearance at morning court dissolved in broad daylight. There was no entry in the Snow Hill desk log. City Police had no record of an interview, or of any late-night call two detectives might have made on a rented property in Cloth Court. By way of return, next day saw the councilor announcing not only a new business partner, but the marriage of his only daughter, and the future Mrs. Willard began sporting an engagement diamond bigger than her knuckle. As for how to explain the hurry to the bride-to-be, Willard let Councilor Drake decide that for himself. Mrs. Willard rolled the rim of the tumbler across her lip in a reverie of chances missed. “I daresay that all sounds terribly harsh of me. My father knew a court appearance would utterly destroy him.”
I went to sit closer, across a corner of the desk. “Mrs. Willard, homosexual importuning would get him nothing but a ten pounds fine at morning court. The magistrate is a man of the world. He expects the defendant will give a false name and occupation and then apologize, or better yet his word to go see a doctor about these unsocial urges he’s getting lately. That’s all. Court was never the problem. The problem was Allynson making sure a court reporter would be primed. That was his message from Willard. Now better tell Levin what you just told me. It’ll make you both happier.”
Her mouth buckled. The eyes glazed and looked in mine. “How can I tell Edgar when he won’t even see me? I really don’t understand why not. What difference can it possibly make now?” The guileless, desolate look, deep enough to drown in.
I handed her the purse and gloves. “Go talk to him. You’ll find a way. And tell him you brought me what your husband had on Garfield. He’ll like to know.” I lifted the telephone and ordered a cab to take her wherever home was.
FORTY-TWO
The Courier’s offices took the whole of a Victorian block, across the street and less than fifty yards east of the Tipperary. I paid a cab under its corner clock then climbed the shallow steps. A florid usher waited sentry at the entrance,
dressed for the Prussian cavalry and complete with curled moustaches. It was after four-thirty. Inside was a lobby where gilded columns ran around pink marble walls. A wide stairwell climbed from its center, and running upward through the well, rising and falling like slow pistons, a line of elevators inside a wire mesh shaft. A small painted sign said No Staff, and next to the sign an attendant lounged beside an open cage door. He folded his copy of the evening edition, stepped in the cage behind me, clattered shut the gates and slotted a brass lever on the control box. The cage shuddered up through the floors while the Courier’s employees overtook us on the stair.
The sixth floor hadn’t heard about gilt or pink marble. I arrived opposite a door that had Marge! handwritten on a card taped at eye level, knocked and got no answer, tried the handle and walked in. The room had a radiator hammering from overwork, tobacco haze stiff enough to cut through a head cold and a tray of tea steaming on an open rolltop desk. I unbuttoned my coat. There might be reports coming in of Red Army tanks rolling down Pall Mall, but Carleton Hamnett of the Courier was sure to be back before his tea cooled.
Carl had been Royal Navy and knew how to organize in a tight space. His office amounted to the rolltop desk and a set of file drawers inside the door, reference books running around the three other walls and an extra chair he could stand on to reach them. An outdoor coat hung beside the file drawers. Rubber overshoes warmed against a heating pipe behind the desk. There was no window. The only decoration was a framed picture on top of one of the cabinets of a sleek navy frigate edging into Malta’s Grand Harbor. It was barely creating a bow wave, on the kind of hot June afternoon that can make even a warship look serene. The office door rattled open and Carl stepped inside, threw back his shoulders, stood extravagantly at attention and saluted with the file he was carrying. “Newman, old man! How the devil are you?”