by Janet Roger
Being set up by police is like a summer rain; by the time you smell it on the air, you’re already caught in the storm. You wonder that you didn’t see it coming and tell yourself next time you’ll be wiser and stay dry. But you’re wasting your breath. Because the truth is, police sit at a high table where the rules are their own, and honest or dishonest is just a matter of who they’re working for. Kathryn Swinford’s cheeks colored and her eyelids sprung open. “Damn him for it! What do we do now?”
I’d been thinking about that. For one whole week McAlester had kept his investigation on a leash so tight it was choking; neglecting a trail of payoffs and shakedowns and five-star police protection that would finish more careers than his own if he let his detectives loose on it. Fixing Allynson’s suicide would square it all, no question. But it was a big risk. To fit a dead lawyer for the City murders, McAlester had to be very sure the killing was over, and if it turned out it wasn’t, he had no way back. Another homicide would give the press a field day, certainly end his rank, necessarily leave him worthless to Willard and likely take Littomy down with him. You wondered how he could be so sure. But the doctor was right about one thing. It ought to see Henry Beaufort walk free. Likewise Terry Reilly, assuming he still lived. I looked over at the blue countess. “What do we do? The dead lawyer gives us a widow of our own, and her money troubles are only just started.”
FORTY-SIX
For a one-client lawyer, Allynson had kept an elegant brick row house, four floors with white stucco detail around the windows, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Its entrance stepped up off the sidewalk, set back inside two lime-washed pillars. From the second floor, three tall windows overlooked the treetops in the park, which would make satisfying viewing on this or any late afternoon, even if you had company. And there was company. An Armstrong limousine was parked right under the windows, polished as a button on parade and sparkling from the last rain shower. Sydney sat limp behind the wheel, wrists rested on the spokes, his neck arched over the seatback and his eyelids hooded against the smoke from a cigarette slotted in his teeth. I walked up on the Armstrong’s blind side, stopped at its rear door and brought my hand down flat and hard on the roof over his head. Sidney jackknifed, bit through the filter of his cigarette and buried his chin in the roof lining. He had one hand clamped across his nose, the other batting out the cigarette burning in his lap, when Mrs. Allynson answered her doorbell. She lifted her eyebrows to tell me I wasn’t expected, then invited me inside.
Grief takes people in different ways. Mrs. Allynson’s had moved her to change her chalk-stripe costume for a soft, blue housedress that fitted in her waist, fell loose along her arms and clung from her hips down. The blue was livened by a string of cut stones of a lighter shade, a dark silk flower pinned high on a mandarin collar, high-heeled matching slippers, straight seams and a scent of jasmine blossom in her hair. We didn’t speak. She seemed a little out of joint. Following close behind her to the top of the stair was work you don’t expect to get paid for.
At the second floor, she led directly across a hall to a sitting room on the grand scale, furnished in old gold and dark crimsons and low-lit along the walls like the lounge car of a night express. It had easy chairs in corners where you could be solitary, and a maps collection in the spaces between the wall lights to stroll by and study on a foggy day. A quiet hour alone in there would have appealed right then, but you never can have it all. Willard was sitting at a low table with his back to the last of the daylight, wearing a suit cut wide at the shoulders and a silk tie louder than the room could bear. He had a cigarette pinched in a knuckle while he tipped a powder in a glass of water, swirled it, swallowed it and winced. He set the glass on the table, hooked the cigarette in one side of his mouth and talked out of the side he still had available. “What brings you?” The cigarette jounced as he talked in the hard-boiled manner they practice in a mirror until they can scare themselves to death.
Mrs. Allynson sat across from him and knitted a frown. I said, “News concerning your late lawyer, but don’t leave on that account. It ought to interest you both.” The afternoon was giving up, exhausted, turning the room’s windows to mirror-glass. Night clouds rolled by so heavy they bumped against tall chimneys on the roofs. I took a chair and started before I hit the seat. “City Police are deciding Allynson killed himself at some time last night with his own service handgun. It was near his body and likely the same weapon that killed Garfield and Jarrett and the nurse. No gun was involved in Miss Valentine’s murder, but they’ll work on it and take him for all four.”
Willard snapped a thumbnail between his front teeth. “Why would they do that?”
“Because it appeals to their sense of economy. Also, because they can make a case for it faster than you can lose your headache. None of us has to believe it. They don’t even have to believe it themselves.”
Willard pulled the cigarette off his lip, dipped it in the water at the bottom of his powder glass and let his eyes dull with poison. “There are harder things to believe. Take our widow here. She can’t think what kept her husband at his office overnight. Or why he signed away a million dollars of mine before he died to people I never knew, for something I didn’t want. The widow says she never knew them either and their names don’t mean a thing. Isn’t that so, Vivien?”
For somebody at the center of a conversation, Mrs. Allynson had been preoccupied since we walked in the room. She sat with her chin tilted at the prowl of traffic on the square. I raised an eyebrow for mild surprise. “She knew one of them.” Her chin swung in my direction. Willard’s lip lifted off his front teeth. I said, “Boyd. Ralston. Seeley. Irving. The counterparties to the contracts your lawyer made. You read me their names in your office this morning, and any one of them alone probably wouldn’t have meant a thing to me. But all four together? Not a mile from here there’s a memorial for a fighter squadron and they’re listed on its honor roll: Flying Officer Walter Boyd Headley Hammond DFC; Pilot Officer Edwin Rollo Ralston Walcott; Warrant Officer Owen Evan Seeley Ryle; and Flight Lieutenant Charles Irving John Ross. Names like that stand out in a crowd.”
Mrs. Allynson stiffened and sat up with a look of wild, unvarnished disbelief. “Charlie?”
Willard hooked a patent shoe over his knee and contemplated her like a boat cut adrift from the shore. It isn’t enough that they dress like Robert Taylor, they have to act like him too. “You know these people, Vivien?”
I shuffled for a cigarette while she sat and looked hollow. “Mrs. Allynson knew Flight Lieutenant Ross because her sister was his girl once. It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is her husband knew them all. They flew together, and by summer ’44 he was the only survivor. The others were lost in action. They’re names Allynson pulled out of the air. Their signatures are make-believe. Your title contracts are a fraud. And it still doesn’t tell you how your lawyer died.” A pulse started fluttering in Willard’s cheek. I put in the cigarette and talked through it. “If Allynson shot himself it’s because he skimmed on you and knew there was no disguising it any longer. That makes it not pretty. But if he was shot, it means somebody set you up in style. And that makes it a problem.”
Mrs. Allynson started as if I’d stepped out in front of a tramcar. Willard dropped the contemplative air and got to his feet. When I arrived his mood had been corrosive and the powder hadn’t done a thing to lift it. He was halfway to the door when he spun around. “Be at the Garden tonight, Vivien.” Then to me, “You’ve got a loose mouth, Newman. Don’t let it be the way you’re remembered.”
Mrs. Allynson didn’t move until the street door closed, then unwound out of her chair. She took the cigarette off my lip and walked along the room with it, lifted a lighter from the mantel over the hearth and steadied it in both hands. It flamed till she heard the Armstrong pull from the curb, then snapped shut. “Did you have to be so brutal?” She had her thumb pressed against her temple, watching the curl from her cigarette c
limb to the shadows on the ceiling. It gave her a fragile look I didn’t know she owned.
“Willard? He’s adjusting to being on the wrong end of a shakedown. It’s unfamiliar territory. Let him adjust. He thinks you’re not leveling, and if I give him nothing at all his next stop will be McAlester, in which case brutal will not be the word. Besides, he’s right. You’re not leveling.” The coal fire flickered and put dark red lights in her hair. Sometimes you talk to somebody half a room away and they might as well be in another country. “City Police still have to decide who shot Jarrett, but you would already know. It was the conversation you had with your sister at the Viaduct.”
Vivien Allynson didn’t argue or show any surprise, just stood a long, still moment, let the heat from the coals burn pink in her cheek, then glided back along the room to stand behind my chair, slotted the cigarette under my lip again and rested her hands on my shoulders. “Of course, but what could it matter now that Estelle heard the gunshot from inside the church? Or that when she ran into the porch it was my husband she saw standing over Jarrett’s body? The little fool was trying to protect me. If she’d told me before, we’d have gone to the police together and she might still be alive.” Her hands ran around the back of my collar and squeezed, close enough to feel the sway of her necklace. “She knew you never had believed her story and wanted to explain. She thought you’d know what to do. I said I thought so too. At least it was something we agreed on.” Her grip loosed and pulled away. “Then next day she was dead and what was I supposed to say to the police? That Estelle had been lying all along? That I was so sick with fear I couldn’t bear to be near my husband? Or that when I found him this morning the only thing I felt was relief? Who else but you can I say that to? Not to Joe. He thinks if his lawyer cheated him then his lawyer’s wife had to know, though what he imagines I can tell him I have no idea.” She went back to her chair at the window, toying with the buttons on her cuff. Evening was crawling up the sky. The room sighed and stretched out along the rug.
“Since when did you know him?”
Her eyes wondered if I’d been listening, then decided they could humor me. “Since the summer of ’41. At about the same time he met a new lawyer—a flyer invalided out—and promised him the law would never be dull again. Joe made an impression, as he does. We saw a lot of each other. Then he was introduced to a councilor’s daughter and soon they were married. Not long after, so was I. Consider me the lucky one. I already knew more about Joe Willard than anyone should.” A line of moisture was glossing the top of her lip. She touched the back of her wrist there, as softly as a moth lands. We left it at that.
FORTY-SEVEN
George had put two items under my office door. I put on a light and read them both. The first was a telephone message to return a call. The second was an envelope, hand-addressed and hand-delivered. I dialed the return number and ripped open the envelope flap while the line connected. Inside was a note from Carl Hamnett, wanting to explain about the picture in the afternoon edition of the Courier. I took my copy out of a coat pocket and dropped it on the desk, already folded to a headline, Lawyer’s Suicide Link to City Murders. Below it, a fuzzy portrait of Allynson showed him looking cold and miserable, cropped out and enlarged from a long-shot taken in Hampstead cemetery. The Courier’s editor had decided the picture was a gift, and Carl was contrite because we had an agreement. Our agreement had gotten Carl his scoop on Henry Beaufort’s run-in with City Police. In return, the Courier was supposed to lose its photographs of a private funeral for a murdered nurse. Strictly speaking, his editor had kept Carl’s promise. The Courier hadn’t printed the funeral pictures, which was all I asked. But Carl felt shabby about it, and the reek of his black tobacco on the notepaper was like having him standing there in the room, shamefaced.
The receiver picked up at the end of the line. A wheezing voice steadied itself. I flattened out the Allynson item on the desk and cut in. “You called me, signora. You read this afternoon’s Courier.”
The signora dredged a sigh and said she had. She was calling because the lady police doctor said to if ever she saw the man again who used to dine in her restaurant with the nurse. Didn’t I remember the lady doctor? I said I did, but she sounded doubtful. “I never think to see this man again, and now he is a picture on a newspaper. Ev-ery-body is dy-ing.”
I commiserated on another customer lost and pulled the lawyer’s portrait closer. “Signora, are you certain the man in the newspaper is the man the nurse came in with?” We had a second’s silence while she caught her breath. Then she blew a fuse and cut a high squeal, called on Mary and all the saints, told me how the nurse always looked, what her friend in the photograph wore and what each of them ever ate at her table. She knew her customers. Did I think she needed glasses or did I think she was losing her mind? I tried to tell her neither, that it was just something I was supposed to ask, but the chance never came. We went around her grievances until her breath gave out, then she cursed and slammed down the phone. In Italian it passes for conversation.
While the signora ran down her oxygen supply a silhouette had drifted past my office door. Half a minute later it came back and stopped to read the letters on the glass, as if they were instructions for opening. When my call ended, I got to my feet and went over, yanked open the door and nodded at the gilt letterwork. “It says Private Inquiries, and you’re meant to use the buzzer.”
Edgar Levin peeled off his hat and used it to brush rain off his gabardine, looked sheepish, stepped inside and closed the door. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. This business of calling on a private detective is new to me.”
I never yet had a client who said it wasn’t. Not unless they came to argue expenses. Levin slacked his raincoat, took the customer chair and hooked his hat over his knee. I settled opposite and let him find a cigarette, flared a match on my thumbnail to help him with the mood, and asked, “Why would you want to start now?”
He leaned across the desk to dip at the flame. “I had a telephone call this afternoon from Henry Beaufort.” The lighted match licked at my finger. I shook it out and tossed the stalk on the desk, sank back and said to go on. “He was barely able to talk, but he said you’d asked him to go through Michael Garfield’s diary and photographs. He gave me a list of things he needs for reference from the professor’s office at Guildhall, and if you can credit it…”
I credited it. “Garfield had his best thoughts in dead languages. I know.”
Levin’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Then how long can you wait? He sounds all in.” I sat staring at Levin, wondering why Henry Beaufort not acting on advice should surprise me. Next time I’d put a gag on him, rip out the telephone cord and leave him tied in a chair. For now, it was something else added to my long history of omissions.
Henry had telephoned to Edgar Levin. Edgar Levin had called on me, and if McAlester still had me watched, a City detective would tail Levin back to Guildhall, then to Temple Inn. After which, Levin might as well stand in line with the City’s acting medical examiner and her distinguished Uncle Bernard, put his head between his legs and kiss his career goodbye. I eased up in the chair and turned the Courier’s headline around where Levin could read it. “He is all in. He also wants to know who killed his boyfriend. As of this morning, City Police are working on it being Willard’s lawyer, who they say killed himself with the same handgun he used in three murders. It’s a blind, but the Courier says Littomy likes the theory so much he’s put all his detectives on it. Which is where you’re in luck, because it ought to mean you won’t have a police tail when you leave here. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t wait that long. And maybe nothing Garfield ever wrote in Greek or photographed from an airplane will point at his killer. Without Henry there isn’t a way to find out. If you need to, you’ll talk your way into Garfield’s office faster than I can. So go get our boy what he needs and do it now, while City Police have higher things on their minds.”
Levin looked
startled at the idea of being shadowed by the forces of law and order. Then acclimatized and went through the one-handed maneuver that got him on his feet. He was buttoned in his raincoat, standing square in the doorframe and batting his hat against his knee, needing to get something off his chest. “About the diary Sybil brought you. She really had no idea how Willard was using it.”
“When I thought about that, I didn’t expect she had.”
His hand motioned with the hat, satisfied. “What will you do with the diary?”
“That depends what Henry finds in it, don’t you think?”
He nodded, then his mouth slanted in the closest I ever saw him to a grin. You thought he ought to try it more often. “I also wanted to tell you I’m leaving Beaufort Partners.”
I sat up and gave him the grin straight back. They can be infectious. “If that means with Mrs. Willard, better head for Tasmania, and soon.”