Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  Carl was gangling, in a dark blue gabardine suit missing only the stripes on the cuffs. He wore a Service tie, crooked a thumb outside the side pocket of his jacket and kept a clench on the stem of a straight briar pipe, rigid in a slot in his teeth. You guessed he bathed and shaved with it there. He laid the file on the rolltop and shut the door behind him, pumped my hand as if the water in the hold was gaining on us and said, “Ah, that.” He nodded at the Grand Harbor photograph in my other hand. “Days of brine and poses. Showing the flag and taking photographs with tremendously pretty girls. After VE, it was all they asked of us. Can’t interest you, I suppose?” Carl levered the unlit pipe out of his mouth, slipped it in his breast pocket and lifted a squat brown teapot in both hands. He made circles in the air with it, as if it helped his divining, then poured black tea in a cup and added milk from a jug. The heel of his hand wiped across his forehead, he rolled out the swivel chair from under his desk, stretched out in it and tilted back his head and asked, “Don’t Forget the Bootees. How does that strike you?”

  I looked down at him slowly. He had his elbows planted on the arms of the chair, the saucer and cup level with his chin and his lips pursed ready to blow. I got a coy, sidelong glance straight from the wardroom. “Marjorie, old man. Vox pop tells us our distaff readers have no wish to be lectured about isobars and dew points as they ponder their day’s attire over breakfast. No indeed. They want down-to-earth advice. When Marjorie says Take a Mackintosh, she tells our lady reader all she needs to know. Plain talk, you see. Well then, the weather chaps inform us temperatures are on the up, whereupon the appalling white stuff will turn to something still more ghastly. Well and good. But the question is, what does Marjorie say?”

  Carl brought his gaze up from the tea and saw my wonder.

  “She’s a cartoon, old man. Well upholstered, tight skirt, nice legs; inside-back page under the racing form. You must have seen her. There is manifest research showing our representative male appreciates Marjorie not one whit less than the ladies. In fact…” He gave me the confidential eye. “I am reliably informed that until he read the Courier on the afternoon before D-Day, Eisenhower himself was entirely unconvinced by his boffins’ weather prognosis. Opens to our back page and what does he see? Marjorie! Saying, We’re Off to the Beach Tomorrow! She made the decision of his military career for him. Not a technical chap either, I gather.”

  I was still gawking at him. “You mean you’re Marjorie?”

  Carl sketched a deflated frown. “She is but one of the editorial functions I perform loyally for this august sheet. And insofar as I may be the judge, by no means the least. Vide Ike, old man. I rest my case.”

  He was reaching a pouch of pipe tobacco from his desk drawer. Not a week ago, Carl had been begging for anything at all on Jarrett’s murder and calling it an hour of need. Since then, his newspaper had reported three more City killings, and still he hadn’t asked what I was doing in his office. I leaned against his bookshelves, wondering where he was getting his news. “The Courier’s photographer was at the nurse’s funeral this morning. Her sister meant it to be a private affair. What will it take to pull the pictures?”

  Carl slid his cup and saucer back on the tray and swiveled around, scented a high card in his hand and gave me his artless look. “Of course, I’d like to help old fellow, but our readers ever clamor for more murder mayhem and we’re frankly scraping the barrel. Omit our graveside pictures of the victim’s family and yours truly would risk defenestration from a great height. Candidly, I would need to show exceeding good cause.” He buried the bowl of his pipe in the tobacco pouch, squared up in the seat and squinted off in the distance.

  “Carl, you’re right. Your boss will want to know what gives, and all you’ll have instead is a story to light a fire under City Police. Forget I asked.”

  Carl bared his teeth around the pipe stem. The idea bubbled behind his eyes. He looped a leg over his knee, set the tobacco on fire and chopped a hand at the rising smoke signals. The room relaxed with him. He grinned, seraphic. “Say on, old man. I truly am all ears.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Littomy’s office was hot as ever, its air thick enough to spoon. Four homicides had left him looking parched around the eyes. There was plenty for him not to like. Investigations were taking some of his detectives places they didn’t care to revisit, his officers’ conduct was getting the close attention of the press, an unsolved murder spree added no luster to City policing and mistakes were tarnishing his reputation. McAlester stood in a window bay overlooking the hill, white-lipped and wall-eyed, his features arranged in slabs. I took the customer chair at the desk where Littomy sat. He leaned back, fixed his eyes on the ceiling and thought out loud to the room. “This is not our finest hour, Newman. Three days ago, McAlester here brought in young Beaufort with a hand so heavy we were compelled to move the boy to a hospital bed. It is no small embarrassment that from there we contrived to lose him. Simply put, our invalid walked out of his hospital room. The officer on duty will assuredly never wear the uniform again. Of greater urgency however, is our need to find the boy and return him for questioning. Every hour we fail to do so makes us appear more inept. It also leaves a suspected murderer at liberty on our streets.”

  McAlester was a flat cut-out against the window glass. Littomy put his hands together as if he might be about to lead us all in prayer and eyed me past the tips of his fingers. “Tell me again of your interest in the Beaufort boy.”

  I gave him the bored look and put the edge in my voice that goes with it. “I already explained I don’t have any interest. My client either. If it’s what I’m here for we’re all wasting our time.” Littomy blinked and waited. No sound except the distant hum of the building, like radio valves warming in the basement. I fingered the necktie the doctor had picked out, wonderstruck at my eye for line and color. “You’re way off base. Henry Beaufort didn’t chalk off his boyfriend. The three other victims he didn’t either know, or know of. They died because Garfield’s murder unraveled and no other reason. Jarrett because he was hired to hustle Garfield in a City bar and drive with him down to the waterfront. Dillys Valentine because she knew Jarrett too well. The nurse because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and witnessed Jarrett’s murder. Your killer ends a life whenever there’s a need, and for that there are thousands on your streets better qualified than Garfield’s latest muse. Men who were six years in uniform, taught how to kill and handed medals when they showed more talent for it than the rest. Henry Beaufort doesn’t make sense as a murder suspect, even if you had the weapon. Without it he isn’t even a theory.”

  McAlester hadn’t noticed the temperature in the room, stood with his topcoat buttoned and his hat set square, staring at the wall over Littomy’s head, indifferent. He twisted a piece of his rock candy out of its paper into the palm of his hand, put his palm to his mouth like the wise monkey and let the wrapper glide to the floor. It got him everybody’s attention. “Newman ties his guesses in ribbons. They’re still guesses. Henry Beaufort is a sister jilted by his boyfriend and no alibi for Garfield or any of the others. The .38 we can find.”

  Strange the way you always wanted to clear your throat on his behalf. I looked over at where he blocked the window bay. Then at Littomy. “Well that’s swell. Only Garfield’s killer wasn’t jilted, wasn’t jealous or even in a rage. Just somebody with a problem two murders could have solved if Jarrett had died on the waterfront with the professor, where he was supposed to. But Jarrett didn’t follow the script. He sent an edgy kid named Terry Reilly in his place, and when Reilly heard the gunshots that killed Garfield he panicked and drove his roadster back to the City. It left Jarrett on borrowed time. The nurse and the hooker were innocents who got in the way. Or does the detective inspector think they all jilted Henry Beaufort on Christmas Eve?”

  McAlester parked the candy in his cheek. It was the sum of his interest. Littomy’s chin veered round. “And what of Reilly?�
�

  “Reilly is gone to ground, smart enough to know he’s your next corpse when Garfield’s killer finds out about him. But that wouldn’t be Henry Beaufort. The professor was murdered because he was City archaeologist, not because he chiseled on his boyfriend.”

  Littomy’s nose was built for a profile on old coins. He sighted along it. “How so?”

  “The professor thought he’d found another major Roman site in the City. There was a lot at stake. If he could convince the Corporation, reconstruction would grind to a halt.” I shrugged. “It didn’t happen. Garfield was murdered before he could show what he had.”

  The nose twitched and let out a long breath, tuned to the basement hum. “And this gets us where exactly?”

  “It gets you murder for money, not for a jealous mist. Reconstruction in the City is a long game, played by the well-heeled and well-connected, a collective enterprise of that happy band that bought itself a piece. By now, they have eye-watering amounts riding on Corporation planning. Every delay trims their percentages and disappoints them one and all. But Garfield wasn’t killed for a clipped percentage. He was killed by somebody so far in over his head that murder could look like deliverance. Take the professor out of the picture and construction wouldn’t miss a beat.” We let the idea find its own level. I smoothed my necktie and put shades of loss and sadness in my voice. “When this is over, it won’t be losing Henry Beaufort that makes you look ridiculous. It’ll be how you mistook him for Jesse James.”

  McAlester snorted. The candy cracked in his teeth like a plank splitting. Nobody spoke or moved. Littomy noticed his telephone was ringing, reached for it and asked some questions, then rang off and keeled back in his chair again. He took the same level tone he’d used on his caller. “That was the Courier. They plan to run an item in their late edition, from a source undisclosed. They have it that young Beaufort suffered no mere accident while being approached by police for questioning. He was, they say, so severely assaulted by a senior City detective, that in last night’s blackout the boy absconded from our care, fearful of further violence at our hands. The Courier will print detail of his injuries. The commissioner has been invited to respond. Should I wish it, they will be good enough to give my own reply due prominence in an edition on the morrow.” He stretched his neck over the chairback and shut his eyes, sucked in what oxygen the room still had left and breathed, “Good. Christ. Almighty.”

  I left Littomy reflecting on his upcoming interview with the Courier, took the stair down and went out onto Snow Hill for some reflecting of my own. Dress it how you wanted, the long view on 1948 wasn’t stellar. Italy and France might go commie, and when the Americans decided red wasn’t the color of money, we could all be back in uniform by summer. I thought the hell with the long view. The old year still had five more hours to run and I wanted to see them through without another corpse. Five hours free of committee politicians and crooked lawyers, racketeers and oversize cops, and free of clients with lives so far out of joint they thought only a private eye would answer. A handful of hours didn’t seem a lot to ask. I turned into the Thornburgh thirty yards up the rise, collected a package and a bottle of rum out of the file drawer in my office and rode the elevator back down to the street.

  There was a small newsstand on Cheapside at the entrance to the Central Line subway, two hundred feet from the east end of St. Paul’s. It faced across the sidewalk, side-on to a north wind, had an oil drum brazier to keep the news seller from frostbite and chestnuts blackening in a skillet over the fire. Just to stand there and inhale was worth the price of a newspaper. I walked over, picked up the latest edition of the Courier, pointed at the pan in the brazier and put down a coin. “One day Clem Attlee’s going to walk by here, Harry, and when he smells these he’ll want to nationalize you.”

  In winters before the war, Harry had kept a pool of hot grease in the fire all day long, frying eggs and bacon and bread in wedges thick enough to tile a roof with. Not anymore. Going into 1948, eggs were powder, bread was on ration and bacon wasn’t even a rumor. As for Fruits of Victory they were a menu item, just not in any restaurant I dined at. He stooped under the counter for a square of newsprint, made a cone and filled it with chestnuts, wearing so many layers under a long straight coat you didn’t see his knees bend. “Mr. Newman, if it gets me out of this weather, Attlee can pasteurize me.”

  Harry blew on his knuckles, felt for change in the satchel at his hip and wished me Happy New Year’s. I wished him the same back and put the chestnuts in my pocket next to the bottle, got in a cab going east and started on the headlines in the Courier.

  Mrs. Allynson had gotten the privacy she wanted. The Courier covered her sister’s funeral in a notice as bare as a telegram, about a City nurse killed three days before and buried today in Hampstead cemetery. It was lean fare for devotee readers of high crime: no photographs of mourners, no pictures of a burial in the snow, no purple editorial about a young woman caught up in the cold-blooded slayings of a heartless Christmas killer. Carl had been as good as his word. He could afford to be. The late evening edition had bigger news, and a lot easier to find.

  The Courier had run its Henry Beaufort story on an inside page, four columns to give room to develop a theme. The story began with a City officer assaulting the scion of a prominent family, ended in Henry’s flight into the night. In between, it detailed his injuries sustained in questioning, asked what had gotten into the heads of City Police, and said whatever it was it had taken over the place where they used to keep their brains and decency. Littomy’s picture was there under the headline. It showed the same thin smile, the lifted chin, the level gaze of probity, and the knowing eye of a superintendent who always got his man. They printed it bigger this time, in case you still couldn’t put a face to the name.

  The cab let me out at Tower Bridge, where a line of bombed-out warehouses ran downslope to the river. I turned east there along the waterfront, left the streetlamps behind, and in three hundred coal-black yards came on the disused ship entrance to St. Katherine’s Dock. A low slick of cloud looked as if it might start raining oil.

  Nothing was changed. A dead tide dribbled through the sluices. The lighter still rusted in the lock. Wrecked storehouses around the dock basin still leached their scent of wet, fried tires. I found the warehouse I wanted, and its doorway without a door, climbed the same stair I used when I left last time and worked up six floors to the top. Then, across ranks of cast iron pillars, past the section of blown-out roof, there was a glow of campfire and the soldier silhouetted, seated on a heavy beam and mumbling under his blanket like a medicine man. At four paces, Tiger twitched an eyelash and gargled low in his throat. I squatted and ruffled between his ears, then squeezed the soldier’s arm under the blanket and sat down beside him.

  It was the way we passed New Year’s; the soldier locked in a room he let nobody inside and giving no sign he cared for company. From time to time, he got up and put wood scrap on the fire, and in the spaces between we had a one-way conversation about whatever came into my head: the slow thaw in the weather, the Courier’s latest on the City murders, some talk of the town. Harry’s chestnuts cracked in the ashes. Water for the liquor steamed in a can. The soldier sat and listened, and sometimes his eyes lit up, just not in the places you expected. But you can’t have everything, not if you don’t want to drink alone. Tonight I needed sane company, even if he didn’t.

  We had a party and ate the chestnuts. The soldier found me a can for the hot rum. And at midnight, when the City church bells cut in one by one, we drank to whatever the New Year might bring us both. It might be that the shell shock that always plucked at him let him sleep sometimes. If it did, I never saw it. He stayed wide awake, and cold sober, and as the fire died and the liquor ran out, I got Mrs. Mayhew’s package out of my pocket and unwrapped her plaid scarf. I wound it around the soldier’s neck, tied it under his chin and pushed the loose ends inside his jacket. He had the military bearing
still, and if things had turned out differently, he might have worn it along the high street in some county town and looked very fine. I crossed the blanket over his chest and got up off the beam to leave. Tiger didn’t move a muscle. The soldier didn’t look up. He had the string untied from the package and wound around his fingers, the brown paper flattened on his knee, folding it in small triangles that opened out in stars. No doubt about it, Mrs. Mayhew’s parcel wrapping was his New Year’s present for a rajah. I never did tell whether he liked the scarf.

  The walk back through the City took most of an hour in a sleet as fine as sugar crystals. What was left of the night I had to myself and I was in no hurry. Not for any original thoughts I might have about four unsolved murders, but because at three in the morning Fleet Street would be a circus. New Year’s with the soldier had better suited my mood. As the quarter hour struck I was past the south side of Saint Paul’s, on the down slope of Ludgate Hill and right across the street from the Beaufort offices. I stepped in a doorway out of the weather. Levin’s apartment was in darkness, high in the office frontage. Even from where I stood, the news offices were burning so much electricity you could smell it on the air. It flashed in the signage, ran along the wires, setting and printing column inches as if tomorrow they might go out of fashion. Tonight, they had a currency acting like the Titanic and a war in Kashmir, Gable and Goddard romancing in Hollywood, and Hogmanay pretty much everyplace else that counted. It was no contest. Kashmir wouldn’t get a look in. City Police brutality would stay on an inside page. As for Marjorie, the Courier had got her syndicated until the A-bombs rained.

  I put my head down and picked up the pace. In ten minutes I was alongside a line of trucks loading from the presses, tail lights running red in the gutter. In two more minutes I had my key fitted in the lock, checking corners to see I was alone. No fugitives from justice waiting in the shadows tonight. No clients or nervous lawyers or steam-shovel cops. I counted it as progress, went in and closed the door, cut the traffic noise in half and climbed the stair. Inside was chill enough for penguins.