Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  Wittgenstein’s Eighth Proposition

  Daylight scratched at the window. Traffic was building in the street. The gas fire burned and left its smell of dead matches on the room. I eased upright against the arm of the couch while the telephone went on ringing, lifted it off the floor and heard Willard’s voice. “Get in the car. I want a collection made from the lawyer’s office. Now.”

  He was hanging up when I said, “Wait.” I got off the couch and trailed the wire to the window. The gray Armstrong was at the curb, parked under the same streetlamp as the councilor’s Daimler a week before. It’s not that you don’t expect the talking tough, the limousines and their drivers in fancy uniforms or the everlasting I want. It’s that a racketeer doesn’t have it in him to disappoint. Sidney was prowling the Armstrong, rubbing the nickel trim with the cuff of his hourglass jacket, getting the office girl vote while traffic backed up. I slotted the mouthpiece under my chin, put my nose against the window and craned to see the clock at the corner of the Courier Building. It showed eight twenty-five. I said, “Can’t be done. Councilor Drake is my client already. Send one of your wallflowers, they work for less.”

  Willard sighed. “What concerns the councilor concerns me. Talk to Mrs. Allynson.” The connection hummed. I listened to it the way you look skyward on a rainy day, as if it changes anything. I was still listening when Willard cut the line.

  The staircase of the Trelawne Building had the dry echo of a mausoleum. Six days ago, the second-floor door to the lawyer’s anteroom had been wide open. This time I had to push it ajar. I stepped in sideways, heeled the door shut behind me, then went through to his study. The high-back armchairs were set at the same angle, side by side. The japanned table shone dull under a hanging light. Decanters glittered on the tray in the recess and holly still filled the vase in the hearth. So far as I knew, Crown versus O’Shaughnessy, Volume IV, 1752 was on the shelf where it always had been, and in the anteroom the sign said to ring for attention, just as it did before. But there wasn’t any need. The lawyer was waiting for me.

  Allynson was folded over the arm of the nearest chair wearing the working suit he always wore, his right leg tucked so far under the front edge of the seat he was almost kneeling. One heel splayed at a wild angle. His right shoulder jammed in the seatback. The left hand twisted and cupped on his hip and his cheek rested along the arm of the chair. It gave me his left profile, gaze fixed on his shoe, the rimless spectacles slipped in front of his chin and his shirt collar filled with blood. On the side of the lawyer’s head, a scorched and ragged wound gaped, as if a white-hot bar of metal had been forced through the cavity of his ear, spilled the insides of his skull over the shoulder of his suit and passed on through the wing of the armchair. At his left, a liquor glass had pitched unbroken on the carpet at the foot of the bookshelves. Across the carpet pattern a dull rain of blood radiated, as if the lawyer died at the center of a cloudburst.

  I let out a long breath between my teeth and went over to the chair, reached for his wrist and lifted it, ice-cold already. A .38 Enfield revolver pointed at me from under the table. I pulled a handkerchief from my top pocket, squatted down to reach it by its trigger guard, dragged it out and broke it open and sniffed. The cylinder held one spent cartridge. Its five other chambers were empty. A shot had been fired, but not recently, and the lawyer had been dead for hours. It fitted well enough. All things being equal, the .38 ought to have Allynson’s prints on it. Likewise his overturned liquor glass. You wouldn’t necessarily want to believe them, but it would be a beginning. I sat on my heels and snapped shut the gate of the .38, slid it back under the table, then went around the lawyer’s chair and stooped to touch the carpet, damp where his drink had spilled.

  One thing that feels cheaper than going through a dead man’s pockets is doing it when you know there isn’t any point, then finding nothing there to prove you were wrong. That apart, I left him the way I found him: doubled over the arm of the chair, hair tousled and his clothes awry, looking younger in death than I ever saw him in life. Maybe younger than on any day since they dragged him out of a burning cockpit and laid him choking in the grass. Dead, he had an air of letdown I hadn’t appreciated before. I liked him better for it. Some people leave it late to make their best impression.

  I quit the room by the door Mrs. Allynson had walked in the first time I visited, went through a shoebox office for a typist, then along a passage that arrived at a corner suite at front of the building, dim in a crawling winter dawn. Mrs. Allynson was sitting between two windows that overlooked the street, behind a desk that cut off the rounded angle of the room. She was dressed in the chalk-stripe she wore for a workday in the City, her hair loose around the collar of a lilac silk shirt. On the desk in front of her, a metal deedbox with a carry handle, and in her lap, one of those chromium-plated calendars the office cleaner flips so the boss will know what day it is. I moved to the corner of the desk and sat across it.

  Mrs. Allynson didn’t look up. Just went on flipping dates on the calendar, humming to herself and rocking in her chair, as if we were on some fairy lawn under the moonlight making daisy chains. The kind of thing, if you’re a paid-up psychologist, you can snap somebody out of with a slap across the mouth. I lit a cigarette, leaned over and put it an inch from her lip and waited for smoke to get in her eyes; then when she blinked and slipped the cigarette from my fingers, let her take two deep, shaking lungs-full before I said, “You called Willard?”

  Her eyes flashed their small purple lights while the question percolated. She fumbled the cigarette to an ashtray on the desk. Her head still didn’t lift. “No. Joe calls my husband every morning before business. I hadn’t long got here. When I told him what had happened, he said there was a box he wanted from the safe and not to call the police until you collected it. How could I say no?”

  She noticed the gadget in her lap and put it back on the desk. I nodded Willard could be hard to refuse, then said, “There’s a gun on the rug in your husband’s library. Is it his?”

  Her eyes rounded. “Whose else could it be? Doesn’t it look that way?”

  I reached over to grind out her cigarette still burning in the ashtray, and thought about how any dead husband will look when there’s a lately used handgun and a brand-new widow close by. “Mrs. Allynson, you don’t have a secretary today. The way it looks is you were the only one arriving here this morning. Let’s take it you knew your husband wasn’t home last night, and since that obviously didn’t alarm you, let’s also take it you assumed he’d worked over and his not coming home wasn’t unusual. Your husband was a war veteran, invalided out, and they can find it tough being civilians again. But you didn’t think his problems were serious, and even if you knew he’d kept his service revolver, you had no call to think he might use it on himself. The shock of finding out how wrong you were might explain why you didn’t call police right away.” We listened to traffic slowing at the crossroad below. “Any City detective will see how it looks two minutes after he walks through the door. They get the practice. When they turn the place over and start asking questions is when it gets rougher. They have the men, they have the time and they’re thorough, and they’ll stick with it until they’re satisfied that the way it looks is no different to the way it was.” One long breath let her get accustomed to the idea. Then I asked, “Was it any different?”

  She looked out past a misted window while she made up her mind. “I suppose not. Not so very.” At that, she clamped a hand over her mouth and her eyelids squeezed shut. Tears welled along her cheekbones and turned her fingers sticky.

  “Call the emergency operator, Mrs. Allynson. It won’t wait. And when they get here, try talking to the detectives as if they know what they’re doing. Generally it helps.” But it was wasted. Darwin says somewhere that the fittest to survive will always be a recently widowed redhead with brains and looks and style. Any door will open for her. A car will collect her rain or shine. She will never need
to light a cigarette or dine alone or carry folding money. And for one wild, dark glance a policeman will make her allowances he makes for nobody else, because she brings out the Walter Raleigh in him. Daylight hardened in the windows. I pulled the deedbox off the desk and left. Whatever Mrs. Allynson might need to get her through the rest of her day, advice from me wouldn’t be it.

  A back stair dropped from the shoebox office to the lobby and brought me back out on the street, thirty yards from where Sidney had reversed the Armstrong into a tight alley, out of sight. I turned my back on it, went fast around the corner into Bevis Marks, found a phone booth and dialed the Bishopsgate police switchboard. When Kathryn Swinford came on the line her voice was guarded. “Newman, this might not be the best—”

  “It isn’t the best. I’m in a jam. Have you ever used a public telephone?” There was an indrawn breath. I cut in before she could get started. “There’s a line of booths outside Liverpool Street subway. Call me from there. Do it now and take some loose change. They don’t take a check or put calls on account.”

  She took my number and hung up. I left the receiver under my chin, jabbed a thumb on the cradle, closed my eyes and watched her leave. I saw her grab the purse beside her chair, put on her coat and hat from behind the office door, walk out through the laboratory without a care in the world, then pick up her stride along the corridor. She took the stair down to the entrance hall, put her shoulder to the swing door, stepped right over the sidewalk and off the curb and let the Bishopsgate traffic honk. From there she had less than two hundred yards along one side of the rail station, a cut across the frontage of the Great Eastern Hotel, a sidestep onto Liverpool Street and then the phone booths at the head of the subway stair. At that hour, one ought to be free. I had her still clipping the front of the hotel steps when the connection clicked in my ear. My thumb snapped off the cradle. Coins clattered in an empty bucket at the end of the line and she said, “I’m here. Go ahead.”

  Not even out of breath. You wondered if she’d saddled up and taken the bridle path. I looked both ways along the street. “Doctor, this is important. In an hour you’ll get a new customer, name of Buchanan Allynson. Willard’s lawyer until sometime last night. Right now, he’s in his office looking like a suicide, next to a .38 Enfield his wife will say is his. When word gets out, the press will tag the lawyer as the City killer and write off Henry as a sad mistake police made along the way. Don’t buy it and don’t let Henry buy it. He made McAlester trouble he won’t forget. Until this is over, he needs to stay care of Uncle Bernard.”

  She said All right, but without enthusiasm. Then, “Do you think it’s the .38 police have been looking for?”

  “The thought occurred to me.”

  “But if Allynson’s revolver was used in three killings and he took his own life with it, how can McAlester still be interested in Henry?”

  “I didn’t say he took his own life. I said it looks that way, and it’s a gift horse. For the front pages because neat answers make good copy. For McAlester because it can shut down every one of his murder investigations. For Littomy because by now he’ll take anything that squares him with the commissioner. All Henry has to do is stay out of McAlester’s way and not give him any better ideas.”

  She said All right again, as slowly as the last time. “So you found the body? Is that the jam you’re in?”

  “The jam is if and when McAlester learns I was anywhere near. Tell Henry to stay where you put him.” Passersby were leaning into the weather and holding on to their hats. Taxicabs plowed wet snow. I cut the line and stepped back out on the sidewalk and made a circuit of the block, came level with the Armstrong and got in the back seat before Sidney looked up from the racing news. He folded the newspaper and tossed it, then took a studied interest in the blank wall of the alley. I slid aside the glass partition behind his ear. “Boss wants to see me.”

  Sidney eyeballed me in the mirror. He’d had a tough morning. The idea of driving me for any more of it was weighing on his bonhomie. “Wants to see you where?”

  “Wherever you left him.” He didn’t answer. The Armstrong edged out of the alley and onto the street. At right, a hundred feet away, a Humber sedan had pulled across the sidewalk outside the Trelawne Building, where its driver had left it in a hurry. Sidney saw the Humber, pressed further back in his seat and peeled the Armstrong left. I wound my hand around the glass partition, reached for his newspaper on the ledge behind his head and opened it to the inside back page. I was interested to know how Marjorie saw the rest of the day panning out.

  Inside ten minutes, the Armstrong was crossing over London Bridge into Southwark, went left on Tooley Street, doubled back along the river and drove the quarter mile to a converted block of offices between the cathedral and the wharfs. The block was four stories, empty lots both sides, shored with heavy timbers and slicing a stiff, chill wind off the water. It had an entrance set back from the weather and a board listing tenants. Drake, Willard & Co. occupied the whole third floor. No elevator, only a stair climbing to a door marked Reception and an office with a low wooden rail across the center of the room. There was a gate in the rail, opposite an inner door, and a secretary seated at a desk guarding the gate, pert and pretty with her hair cropped in a fringe, fragrant as a warm breeze.

  She was bent over a heavy-duty typewriter, the Willys jeep model, her bottom lip clamped under her front teeth and her chin tucked, trying to feed it a sheet of paper when what it wanted was a pulp log, whole and raw. I peeked at her around the side of the machine. She glowered back across a dozen fans of crimped paper scattered across her desk, said Mr. Willard was expecting me and to go on inside. Then she started pumping the roller feed again and the Willys spat out another paper fan. She squealed and snatched at it as I went through the gate. I had my hand on Willard’s door and heeled around. “Why not climb in? We could try to jump start it.” It lifted her chin out of the typewriter, far enough to give me the bleak look. Then she put her lips together, spluttered into the keys and broke out a grin from her best collection. I grinned back and went through the door.

  Willard was standing at a window with a view across the river, turned my way when the door closed and watched me across the room. I put the deedbox flat on the desk between us where he could open it and moved to a window of my own. A tugboat hooted mid-river and poured soot on the water. Willard found a key and used it on the box, sat down at his desk and began reading in a slim file he took out. Each time he turned a page a lump hardened in his throat and his mood clotted. He twisted in the chair and rapped a knuckle on the file. “Mrs. Allynson says what about this?”

  The click of a typewriter started up on the other side of the door. “Mrs. Allynson was in the nursery cutting out paper dolls, probably because her husband was in a room nearby with his brains in his lap. It didn’t help conversation, and besides, my mind was on other things. As for instance her upcoming interview with City Police, and the guarantee that if they learn I was in Allynson’s office ahead of them, they’ll first stand me in hot coals and second put me out of business. I mean for good. No more private inquiry ever. You already knew that when you sent me there, and one small part of me is curious to know why. Every other part thinks I ought to break your ankles.”

  It got me the elegant, irritated look. His perfume so heavy on the room you wanted to open the door and let it run down the stair. He dropped the file beside the metal box, settled the stud in his tie and wound his wristwatch as if my time was his money. “She says her husband killed himself last night. What do you say?”

  Wall lights burned low in the corners of the room and only made the day seem darker. I said, “Consider it his New Year present to City Police. What’s in the box?” Willard leaned forward in his chair and told me what, in the listless, detached way a dealer will announce the house just lost, the better to conceal the heartache. Snow White can sound like conspiracy if you tell it that way. It wasn’t what bothered me. Wha
t bothered me was why Willard would be telling me at all.

  He said what was in the box were sale contracts on four City properties, bought by his late lawyer for a private company Willard owned. What else his company owned he didn’t say. Only that on the last day in December Allynson had added a wholesale dairy, an industrial coal yard, a small brassworks and a produce warehouse, lately used by a dry goods distributor. But only in a manner of speaking. Because none of the four properties had been a going concern. What the lawyer had bought were four joined-up bombsites in the City, where even the rubble had been trucked away. Four lots that cost their new owner nigh a million US dollars, in hard, straight cash. American dollars because, owing to a range of services rendered to United States personnel in wartime, Willard had greenbacks to bathe in. Also because sterling was in a crisis that could make it stage money before long, and the dollar talked. I lifted my chin at the view over the river. “You bought four empty lots. So cut the grass and learn tennis. What’s wrong with them?”

  All he said was, “The date.”

  According to Willard they were deals he’d had his lawyer working on for the past two months. Then, come the week before Christmas, Allynson had arrived to get a signature on four contracts, ahead of making the transactions between Christmas and New Year. He’d left with the deedbox, carrying dollars enough to float a banana republic. It might be sixth sense. Or it might be overactive glands. But when the commercially gifted brush up against an unsound investment it can break them out in a rash. Willard hardly knew how to explain it himself, only that days after he signed the contracts he had a change of heart, called his lawyer late afternoon Christmas Eve and told him the deal was canned. Just like that. Willard considered the matter closed and hadn’t given it another thought until a little more than two hours ago, when Mrs. Allynson took his daily call and explained why her husband wasn’t answering the telephone this morning. The news had rocked him. And in her time of loss, Willard’s thoughts had naturally gone out to the king’s ransom in hundred-dollar bills locked in his lawyer’s office safe. He didn’t want it distracting City detectives when they arrived at the scene of a suicide.