Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  Willard needn’t have worried, because all the box now had inside were four separate contracts, making him owner of some high-priced fresh air in the bombed-out heart of the City. The money was gone. The lawyer who could explain where was dead. Making two inconveniences, both of them in the past, when Willard was only looking to the future. Pale sunlight ghosted the water. Tall buildings glinted on the north shore. Willard gave me the blank, bored look that passes in the rackets for an exchange between minds and took up the file again. He read me the four addresses in the City and the names on the contracts as if they gave him heartburn, tossed the file back in its box and with the level reasonableness of a New Year’s resolution said, “I want to know who these people are.” Then slammed the deedbox shut like a train door. The typing in the outer office stopped dead.

  I nodded at the broken skyline. “Sure you do. Noblesse obliges if somebody took you for a million dollars and left your lawyer dead as a calling card. On either count, if they don’t end in the river you lose your sense of worth. So ask McAlester. It’s work he enjoys.”

  I turned, made across the room and opened the door to the outer office. The secretary shot a nervous glance from under her fringe. Behind me, Willard said, “Last time you called McAlester a liability.” I waited. He read off the four names like a catechism. “Boyd, Ralston, Seeley, Irving. Find them. I can guarantee you stay in business.”

  A racketeer’s largesse is Maundy money. You get tossed something you didn’t ask for, it doesn’t change your economics in any way whatever, and still you’re meant to tip your hat in gratitude. Down on the street, the Armstrong was waiting with its windows misted and its motor ticking, burning gas enough for a small village. I left it sitting at the curb. The addresses Willard had given me were just a walk across the river. As for the names on the contracts, they could wait. We were already acquainted.

  I crossed back north on Southwark Bridge, leaning into an upriver wind that cut strips off my chin. Two hundred yards downstream, a solitary locomotive steamed in the opposite direction above a tide roiling past the bridge piers in lumps. I took a straight line across Cannon Street, turned west onto Cheapside and walked halfway to St. Paul’s, then went north again on Wood Street. From there, a vista opened that might have been Rotterdam or Warsaw or the outlook from the Brandenburg Gate. I stepped in the shelter of a boarded-up storefront, put my back against it and took the view.

  East and north of St. Paul’s, the street grid cut through a checkerboard of snow-covered basements. Nothing left standing but a scatter of shored-up ruins in a wasteland of empty lots, nothing moving but a drift of traffic with no reason to stop. Up until a week ago, Willard had been ready to pay a dollar fortune for just four pieces of it. Now he owned them and there was no disguising his sense of loss. Sixth sense to one side, you wondered what or who had changed his mind. I held onto my hat and moved out into no-man’s land.

  Away from the river the wind had dulled its knife-edge and a thaw was crawling out of the ground like waking spiders. I followed telegraph wires that marked out the through streets, as far as a City block that ended at Aldersgate and had Bart’s hospital along its west side. On its south and east, the block ran to the edge of Cripplegate. In between it had been bombed flat as tulip fields and you saw its appeal. Forget rolling blue hills or hay carts or fat cattle fording water meadows. If you plan to buy and develop it, not paint it in oils, there is no landscape easier on the eye than a city block blitzed to rubble.

  Cripplegate. Henry had shown me it was once a gate in the Roman city wall. Centuries later it was a Jewish quarter, and later still the neighborhood where Milton spun lines of Paradise Lost when he was old and blind and republican enough to get himself arrested. The night it was fire-bombed it had been a close-built factory quarter. Hardly anybody had lived there for a generation. Now, all it had to show was the rat-run pattern of its medieval streets pressed in the ground like a mold in sand. That, and the street names. They hadn’t changed either. Not since before the time they tossed Milton in the slammer.

  By Christmas 1940, the Luftwaffe’s bombers had been working the same shift for months, took a few days’ break for the holiday and came back rested. Then one night before New Year’s—eight years ago almost to the day—dropped a hundred thousand incendiaries in a single raid and started a firestorm. Somewhere in front of me, a coal yard, a dry goods distributor, a brassworks and a dairy had gone up in flames. Exactly where the buildings had stood was impossible to tell. I didn’t see it mattered much. What mattered more was a kind of alchemy. On that one night alone the bombing turned a third of the City to brick dust. Every day since, the City Corporation had been working at turning the brick dust back into gold. The same alchemy had gotten Councilor Drake airborne, flying circles over the City while Michael Garfield took pictures from the cabin window. And two days later, on Christmas Eve, it was alchemy that brought the councilor to the Sesto to see the results for himself. The signora had seen the light in Garfield’s eye that afternoon and had an instinct he’d found what he was looking for. She wasn’t alone. The councilor had an instinct about it too, and when he left the Sesto he’d called Guy Beaufort to tell him so. I turned west and headed to Smithfield.

  The slow thaw was putting a gloss on the tire tracks. The path through the churchyard had boiler ashes underfoot. Snow was slipping off roof pitches and piling in the gutters around the church. Nowhere outside of Littomy’s office had been this warm in a week. I pushed inside from the porch along an aisle I’d taken twice before, through the same pulsing quiet, the same veil of incense, as far as the wrought iron gate to the lady chapel behind the altar. Gray daylight drifted in overhead. The chapel swam in the waters of a cold ocean, filled with dates and histories, verses and valedictions, on its walls and on its floor and in its window glass. Everywhere crowded with the dead. If they hadn’t pulled him out of his burning airplane with his lungs on fire, Allynson would have been there himself, at the head of his squadron’s honor roll, in company with Charlie Ross and a score of others. I read through the names behind the glass again. It was illustrious company. The lawyer just hadn’t been destined to keep it.

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was one of those midwinter afternoons where the sun comes wrapped in high fog, and hangs by a thread so fragile you’re ready to put out a hand to catch it. I was on New Bridge Street, walking south to the river at Blackfriars, the sidewalk had a spring under my shoes and the sun was on my face for the first time in days. Two hundred yards before the bridge I turned aside into a street blocked in shadow, buttoned my coat to the chin and left the top hat and tails mood behind. Tudor Street was as dank as a fish cellar.

  The street ended at a gatehouse on the east side of the Temple, a part of the Inns of Court that reached west halfway to Waterloo Bridge, and from Fleet Street south to the river. Temple Inn alone was the size of a city park, an ancient warren of lawyers’ chambers and residences where trained legal minds deliberated on the statutes the way a clam deliberates on an ice age. Until the Luftwaffe’s bombing opened up the view, it had looked much the same way it looked to Dickens. King’s Bench Walk was a Georgian brick row looking out over the parkland, leading down to the river from inside the gatehouse arch. There were frayed and blackened gaps in the row. But out there in Africa, sitting under a shade tree in his safari wig, Uncle Bernard didn’t have to worry. His chambers stood in a section the blitz had skipped by. I went in under a lantern set beneath the hoop of an iron gate, climbed a short rise of steps to the door, let myself into a narrow hallway and put on a light. The hallway breathed the scents of silk and old port that high court judges’ dreams are made of.

  Sir Bernard’s private rooms were closed up and shuttered just the way he left them. Dust thickened in the parlor. Clocks had stopped. The air was stiff with the smell of animal hides. Walls, tables and all spaces in between were stuffed with a colonial’s collection from darkest Africa. The judge had enough fly whisks and native dr
ums, antelope rugs and witch doctor masks to fit out a high-class bordello in Bulawayo. Through the parlor, there was a study with a coal stove set in a corner. At one side of the stove, a screen gave some privacy to a daybed where Henry lay in a heap under the covers. I pulled up a chair. Henry shifted, looking feverish, blinked and waited to get me in focus, then croaked, “I thought you were Kathryn.”

  I poured water from a decanter by his pillow, got him sitting upright and passed him the glass. “It’s hard for her to get here. City Police know she’s a friend of the family and she can be followed. Besides, she’s got another body to work on.” He took a sip, set down the glass, and bunched a blanket under a jaw still ballooned from his run-in with McAlester. Add his curls and sickroom pallor and he could have been Shirley Temple acting the mumps. “A lawyer named Allynson—Drake & Willard’s lawyer—was shot dead in his office last night. It might have been suicide or it might not, but either way a .38 revolver was found next to the body. Pretty soon, City Police will know if it was the same gun that killed Michael Garfield, Jarrett and the nurse. If it was, and if McAlester decides the lawyer killed himself, he’ll fit Allynson for three murders straight off, find a way to make Dillys Valentine the fourth, and close his files. It will be fast, clean and his suspect is already in the morgue. So don’t complicate it for him. Stay here, stay out of his plans and let him make his play. Understood?”

  Henry sweated and shivered at the same time and tried to make sense of it. “Why would the police think Drake’s lawyer wanted to kill Michael?”

  Good question. How to tell him it was nothing but convenience? Convenient to Littomy because he had a policing disaster on his hands. Convenient to his detective inspector because he needed better press. Convenient to a commissioner desperate for a success to dine out on, and convenient to every Fleet Street crime editor scouting for something fresh. I dragged a chair where it put me in his line of sight. “Henry, they don’t need reasons. It’s one policeman’s arithmetic, and if you’re not a part of his calculation then take it as a gift. Either that or tell me who else but you in this entire city doesn’t have an alibi for any of five killings. Then tell me why McAlester would care.”

  He pulled the blanket across his mouth and folded in a racking cough, and when the fit ended went slack as if he’d been hit in the stomach. I leaned closer. “You want to know who killed your friend. I want to know too because the arithmetic is making me unwell. So listen to me. Michael Garfield’s airplane pictures were enough to grind City planning to a stop. Around lunchtime Christmas Eve he met Drake to tell him so. Eight hours later, the pictures got him killed by somebody with too much at stake to let him chase a dream.” I was emptying my pockets, setting what I had on the bed cover: a draft report Garfield had dumped in his wastebasket, an envelope with the airplane pictures he took, his diary written in languages out of fashion for a thousand years. What the professor wrote I couldn’t read. What he’d photographed I didn’t understand. For what it had cost it wasn’t much return, and without Henry’s help it was nothing at all. “The diary was in the professor’s briefcase on the back seat of the roadster. The photographs were likely taken from his pockets after he was murdered.” I shook Garfield’s pictures out of the envelope. “But his killer couldn’t rest without the negatives and he had the professor’s house key from the car ignition. He walked the quarter-mile to Cross Key Square, ditched his blood-soaked coat in the closet where you found it and took the place apart. And still he missed the negatives that printed these.”

  Henry’s eyelids flickered while he worked at a problem. “If Michael’s killer couldn’t find the negatives, how did you?”

  “The way I find everything. I hear voices. Like Joan of Arc.” His eyes shut and he nodded, as if he thought so all along. “Henry, there’s something special in those pictures. It’s a longshot, but the diary might say what. I want you to read it for me.” But I’d lost him, his face buried in the covers, snorting like a seal. I dropped his two keepsake pictures with the rest; Henry and his professor photographed one hot summer afternoon in the dapple of a summer lawn, before either of them knew they had a care in the world.

  The telephone had started ringing in the hallway. When I picked up there was a faint catch at the end of the line. I said, “He sleeps, Doctor. Even jungle drums won’t wake him.”

  Kathryn Swinford’s voice cut through, low and pressing. “I need to see you, but not here in the office. I can take my lunch break and we can meet by the Countess of Albemarle. In half an hour?”

  “I’ll find it. But it’s getting near closing time.”

  I heard her eyes roll. “It is not a public saloon, it’s a painting in a quiet room in the National Gallery. You do know we have a National Gallery?”

  I put the receiver under my chin and felt for a cigarette. “We do?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Then I’ll be there.”

  She said Good and hung up.

  The Second Countess of Albemarle was a Georgian society widow with a pallor and time on her hands. The portrait showed her busy at her lacework in a black-edged bonnet, and a shawl covering a blue silk dress. She was forty years past her prime, not overjoyed at having a new likeness taken. She needn’t have worried. The painting hung in a room so out of the way only the guard ever saw it. He was standing outside in a corridor with his arms folded, flapping at a yawn. Having him there for company wasn’t improving the countess’s mood. “She’s a relation?”

  Kathryn Swinford said, “Distantly. Why? Is there a resemblance?”

  I considered the idea. The Second Countess had been a beauty once. “The nose.”

  She stiffened at that. “What’s wrong with my nose?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it. I like it. It’s just that hers looks as if it doesn’t want to be here either.”

  We stood shoulder to shoulder at one side of the picture, two swells admiring the brushwork on the flesh tones. She had her coat belted, a fine wool scarf tied at her throat. The gallery was a refrigerator. “The Earl left the Countess in debt when he died. She didn’t stump up for the portrait until years later.” Then, offhand, “You found Henry.”

  “What I found was the source of the White Nile. Henry was in the next room. I said to stay where you put him, but the advice might not take.”

  The guard lifted a watch from his vest pocket, swayed on his heels and headed off to find another crowd to marshal. Kathryn Swinford waited till his footsteps died, then turned her back on the countess and watched the entrance to the room, small talk over. Her voice lowered. “I saw Allynson. McAlester telephoned soon after you did and insisted I should see the body before it was moved. How did you come to be there in the first place?”

  “Willard called, wanted a collection made from his lawyer’s office and didn’t say what. He also didn’t mention his lawyer had taken a bullet in the head. I walked right into it. Was it suicide?”

  A rain squall started beating on the roof lights. Shadows in the room turned to sick yellow. “Hard to say. He died between late evening and early morning from a single gunshot, very close, that entered behind the left ear and exited into the chair frame. His prints are the only ones on the revolver and on the glass he was drinking from, though they’re not the best. Against that, there was no suicide note and the powder nitrates pattern isn’t that convincing. Mrs. Allynson’s prints are everywhere of course. Other prints will take time to check against his secretary and known visitors. Yours will be among them, I suppose.” Her eyes lifted to the drum of heavy rainfall on the skylight. “Meanwhile, McAlester seems to have decided that Allynson took his own life, with the gun he’s been looking for since Jarrett’s murder. I doubt the lab report will contradict him. It will at least be better for Henry this way. You think it sounds all too neat for words, don’t you?”

  She said neat and made it sound like an allergy. Maybe she was right. Since my first call from the councilor and m
y first interview with Littomy, there were things giving me an itch. Things that passed in shadows, unasked, unanswered and unremembered, as if the asking and remembering would break a spell. Hoodlum or harlot, policeman or politician, the spell had cast across the City and marked whoever it touched. Last night it had touched Willard’s lawyer, and McAlester planned to call it suicide as if I wouldn’t know or care. “So the lawyer’s prints were on the gun and on the glass. Which hand?”

  It got her attention back from the weather. “Left-hand prints on both. Why? Wasn’t Allynson left-handed?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he was. When the .38 was fired point blank he had the glass in his left hand. It hit like a steam hammer, the glass jerked over his left shoulder and ended at the foot of his bookshelves. The rug behind his chair was still damp from spilled liquor. Meaning he didn’t shoot himself. He was shot. Not even a lawyer will hold a stiff drink in the same hand he shoots himself with. It’s how it looked when I got there. Also, how McAlester saw it when he arrived.”

  “But it wasn’t on the floor…”

  Everybody does it the same way, more or less. They go back over a room in their mind’s eye, move around in it and place the things they can recall. Some are more reliable than others, some are even photographic, but it’s rare, and Kathryn Swinford wasn’t one of them. She had to fit the lawyer’s study back together one item at a time: the legal books on the shelves, the holly in the vase on the hearth, and the lawyer curled over the arm of his chair as if he’d been searching for something he dropped. Fitting it together wouldn’t be the hard part. The hard part would be realizing McAlester had been two steps ahead of her, and that Doc Templeton’s classes ran short on police method. She shook her head at the low humiliation of it. “When I arrived, Allynson’s drink was unfinished on the table. McAlester saw the same murder dressed up as suicide that you did, but he meant it to stay that way. And if the glass and the revolver both had the lawyer’s left-hand prints on them, then obviously suicide wouldn’t wash if the glass was empty on the floor. So he tidied up. He put the glass back on the table, poured another drink, then called me to the scene before forensics arrived. I’m his corroborating witness, aren’t I? He’s made an utter fool of me.”