Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  “California. We’re sailing in the morning.”

  I said California ought to be far enough and wished him luck. We might have managed more, this side of gushing and the other side of a handshake, but the phone started ringing.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  It had been five nights since I last stood in Guildhall Yard. A lot had happened in between. Five nights ago, Nurse Greer had been distracted and unhappy but still alive. Five nights ago, Joe Willard still had a lawyer with a fortune locked in his safe. And five nights ago, it hadn’t been obvious to me that the nurse and the lawyer even knew each other, let alone they were related. My visit to Guildhall that night had ended in a lecture—Henry Beaufort on Roman London: The Luftwaffe and Opportunities it Created—things that ought to improve my conversation over dinner but didn’t explain why anybody would want to murder on account of them. At least not until you added in Henry’s boyfriend. Because Michael Garfield hadn’t only been brilliant, single-minded and well-connected, he’d been a hard-driving publicist for his cause, which made him admired by some but also threatening to others for just the same reasons. Threatening enough in the end for somebody to want him dead. As for the lawyer, Littomy’s detectives would be working to wrap up their case on him before anybody blinked. It didn’t necessarily mean they had the wrong man. There was something to connect Allynson to every single one of the City murders. But that was strictly by the way. The City had its police, its crime laboratory, its overtime and its taxes to put to whatever end it had in mind, and at New Year 1948 what it had in mind was cleaning house. The lawyer was just a convenience, a rag they could wipe the slate with.

  There were cars reversing out of the parking lot around Guildhall Yard. Lights going out in office windows. Secretaries wrapped against the weather were starting home. This time, I could walk up to the porter’s window, say I was expected and count the buttons on his uniform while he wrote my name in a register, gave me directions to Drake’s office twice over and pointed me at the stair. It can be easier getting inside a building when you’re invited, just not always quicker. This time I climbed a floor higher than before, to an oak-paneled corridor out of the somber-deluxe school. It had a shaded light beside each door, a carpet sprung like a trampoline, the City coat of arms set in lozenges on the ceiling and a line of offices for City grandees overlooking Guildhall Yard. The side without the view had committee rooms named for Corporation big-shots too ancient or too dull to have enemies. It was the kind of corridor where you can make an entire career out of advice off the record, get counted a success and still not know what year it is. I turned left along it and checked the nameplates on the office doors.

  Drake’s secretary had left her desk tidied and her door unlocked, and enough perfume on the air to make the room feel human. I didn’t knock or put on a light, just walked inside and followed the sounds of an orchestra that came and went in waves so canned and hollow they might have been playing between decks in a submarine. Across from the secretary’s desk, another door spilled light through a round window at eye level. I peeked in.

  There were drapes drawn back at windows looking on the yard, life-size portraits hanging in the spaces in between, and eyeing me from their frames in powdered wigs and knee-breeches, a row of Lord Mayors long deceased, weighted in chains of office like Marley’s ghost. Drake was seated facing me with the windows and portraits at his back. He was slumped at his desk in the kind of chair a robber baron will dine alone in, his chins folded in his collarbone, vest riding high over his stomach, hands upturned in claws on the chair arms and his necktie skewed under one ear as if he’d been cut down from a lynching. I shook a handkerchief out of my top pocket, used it to twist the doorknob one half-turn and went in without breathing, got halfway to his desk on my toes when the councilor’s shoulders heaved and eased back in the chair. One of the claw hands twitched, tugged at a flap of his vest and moved to straighten the tie. His other hand motioned at the orchestra playing behind me. “If you please.” I sank back on my heels and put away the handkerchief, went over to a radio set flush in the oak panel lining the walls and clicked off the broadcast. When I turned around, the councilor was pointing the end of a fat Havana at the seat in front of his desk, the cigar lit up and smoking like a mill town. Except for a high-volume copper ashtray, the desk was clear. His chins had settled back on his shirtfront. “A brief interlude of repose from this most regrettable business.”

  I took the seat. “Your lawyer’s regretting it no end.”

  “Indeed. I summon you here because your work is done. City Police have their man, and such understanding as we have of his designs we owe to your enterprise and persistence. We are indebted to you, Newman. Mr. Willard appreciates your efforts no less than I.” Drake breathed his stomach in, inched open the desk drawer and slid out a check, poised it on its edge and stroked it with his thumbs to feel the pedigree. From where I sat, it looked pretty much a twin of the one I still carried in my wallet, for purposes of spiritual renewal. He laid the check flat, turned it around and prodded it where I could see my name written out on the line that matters.

  I looked along the portraits on his window-wall and at the pattern on his carpet, at the club chairs set around a licking coal fire where a bottle waited unstoppered on a liquor cabinet. It was a room versed in how to hush for quiet words under low lights, the pat on the arm and the payoff. I left the check where it lay. “As for my time, it’s already paid for, there aren’t any extras. As for Mr. Willard, he never was my client. I explained how working for both of you couldn’t be done. Remind him, he’ll remember. Then give him this back.” I twisted the check full circle and slid it between his thumbs.

  Drake said nothing, raised an eyebrow to register disappointment, pursed a lip around the end of the Havana and rocked it between his teeth. We sat watching each other while rain pitted the windows. He pulled the cigar off his lip. “That might be unwise. There are things it can be better for Mr. Willard to believe he’s bought.”

  I stood and walked over to the liquor, turned two glasses and lifted the bottle to let its contents catch the light. It was my first of the day. I didn’t want to hurry it. I said, “The check isn’t in appreciation Councilor, it’s payment on account. A backhand warning that in the past week I got to know more about Drake, Willard & Co. than is good for me. Which is progress of a kind because the last warning I got ended on a gravel heap in the docks.” I built two large glasses to keep the conversation oiled, and went back around Drake’s chair to put one in his hand. “It’s a week since you called me out of the blue, wanted a job done and told me practically nothing about it, then or later, that I wouldn’t have to work out for myself. Two days on I got introduced to Willard and it was the same story. Days passed. Things got more complicated. Innocent people were killed. And always they pointed back at Drake & Willard, at the rackets it operates, at the police it corrupts, at the lives it squeezes and rolls over. Allynson opened Pandora’s Box, and at the end of a long, nervous night in the Snow Hill tank you discovered his boss had set you up and life was about to change, one way or the other. You could put in an appearance at morning court and get blackballed from all the City’s best clubs, or you could take Willard’s offer and walk right out of there, name and reputation unharmed. Your choice. All you needed to add was a cockamamie story for your daughter about the Drake family going broke, to explain why she was a part of the bargain.”

  We lifted glasses to each other. Drake took a lick of the kind that takes practice. “My dear Newman, don’t be naive. You can have no more idea what was being threatened than did Allynson himself. One does not suborn a daughter to marriage merely to avoid the consequence of an indiscretion.”

  The hand with the cigar motioned from the tip of his coat lapel down to his shoelaces. It took in the loose-fitted, square black jacket with its buttonhole, the watchchain and necktie with its crest, the gray-stripe trousers and handmade shoes with toecaps and a high black shine. Even on Dra
ke, the outfit was roomy. It’s the City way. They get sent away for schooling at an impressionable age, in uniforms meant for growing into. The habit never dies. “We are a closed community, Newman. In the City we live by rank and badges. Some more desirable than others to be sure, but if we know each other at all it is by our guilds, our leagues, our associations. An appearance in court would have been difficult for me, and no doubt an end to public office, but not ruinous. It would simply have marked me out as a member of quite another club; one with many distinguished members. No indeed, the prospect of ruin lay elsewhere.” In the portraits behind him the wigs-and-breeches brigade sat up and cupped a hand behind an ear. “It was wartime. Some in the City, as we both well know, were more at war than others. Even while our armies fought and died, our bankers were open to business with Nazi Germany at the highest levels. Permit me then, if at the time I doubted their finer impulses. When Allynson arrived that night the calamity in prospect was not simply a court appearance. The calamity was to be Jewish at a time when one’s bankers had Nazi sympathies. The Soviets did not invent the nonperson, Newman. Bankers perform the same function every day simply by withdrawing one’s lines of credit. Had I been identified in court, there were those who would have destroyed me entirely, in an instant and with satisfaction.”

  Drake leaned for the ashtray and parked his Havana with the butts from the rest of his afternoon. He looked mildly surprised, as if we were touring in country he hadn’t expected to visit. “Unlike his lawyer, Mr. Willard had the advantage of also being Jewish. He therefore understood exactly what he threatened. Given time, I trust my daughter will understand that his method left me no choice.”

  I nodded she might but doubted she would. Yesterday she’d given a fair impression of a mind made up. “Willard’s method? It was trademark. You had control over construction and he had money to burn. How could you lose? Square your daughter to marrying him and your City bankers with a Jewish problem were a thing of the past.” I took my glass to one of his windows and looked down into the yard. The ebb of cars had slowed. Walkers hunched under umbrellas. A steady rain was turning the snowfall to mush. “Your airplane ride with Garfield never was committee business. Neither was the afternoon at the Sesto when he showed you the pictures he took. Sure you put in a call to Guy Beaufort, but your first call was to Willard. You’d already told him the professor could be a problem, and as insurance he’d set Garfield up for blackmail. It’s his way. But that afternoon you warned him off all real estate until Garfield’s report came in, and he passed word to his lawyer. Too late. By then, Allynson had bought four lots on his own account with company money, laid a trail of phony contracts and booked a million-dollar resale to his boss. He thought he was home free. Then out of nowhere Willard cried off and lit a fuse that left Garfield a corpse in the river. Everything else followed.”

  You can grow old reminding clients about the things they failed to mention when they hired you. I swallowed the councilor’s brandy, left my glass on his desk and made for the door with the porthole. I had a hand on the doorknob when the drawer in the hand-carved desk slid open again. Dull metal clicked in the way it sometimes will when your back is turned. Drake’s wearied voice said: “Professor Garfield died because a lawyer’s greed had the better of his judgment. You take a tragedy, Newman, and make melodrama of it.”

  In my circle, letting a client get the drop on you is hard to live down. Getting shot by one is enough to put you on the tourist map. I took my hand off the door, flattened my palms and raised them and eased around very slowly to face the click. Drake stopped what he was doing and upturned the doleful eyes, nonplussed. He had his next Havana pointed at me, lined up to a cigar cutter the size of a flat iron. I let in a breath through my teeth and put my hands down. If I didn’t get out of there soon, I’d be jumping at the rain showers scratching the windows. I said, “Greed got the better of both of you, Councilor, but Allynson was out of his depth. You knew it the first time you set eyes on him.” I reached across to switch his radio back on, then turned it to a murmur for one last question. “Two detectives shook you down that night you spent in the tank. One was McAlester. Who was the other?”

  Drake’s mouth turned down either side of the cigar. He struck a match against the ashtray and shrugged heavy shoulders while it flamed. How would he know? McAlester wouldn’t introduce anybody but himself, and when you’re in the councilor’s league you don’t trouble with the name of the clerk. I turned up the volume on his broadcast and let the door take care of itself.

  FORTY-NINE

  A wad of fog sat on the rooftops in Charlotte Street. Fine, steady drizzle slid down the night. It slapped at the darkness like wet sails, made the Paradise Garden’s neon glare grow brighter and slicked the coachwork of the cars on the street outside. I walked into the foyer on the tail of a party crowd, got ahead and crossed to where a trim brunette swayed to a tune of her own at the hatcheck. I said I didn’t want a new ticket, she could put my coat and hat with the bag she already had, the Gladstone with initials on its straps. The brunette stepped back from the counter to look along the line of checked bags by her toes. “C.R.?” It was all I wanted to know. The party crowd already had us surrounded. I backed up through the crush, turned and headed for the exit.

  Out on the sidewalk a doorman waited on arrivals under the Garden’s marquee. He was strictly theater, hired for a solid build and costumed in crimson and yellow to let the patrons know they’d arrived at the races. But business was slow tonight and he had no audience, so he’d stepped aside in the fog, lit a cigarette in the lee of the building and didn’t appear to care who was checking, so nonchalant it made me curious. I swung out through the entrance and bent against the rain slanting under the awning. The doorman killed his cigarette, curbed his native geniality and watched me out without a goodnight.

  The Paradise Garden didn’t have its employees arrive on Charlotte Street. The help went in with the kitchen deliveries along a service lane that cut through the block forty feet from the Garden’s flashing neon. The lane ran the depth of the building to a cobbled yard cleared of snow and ice, where a truck could unload. For the kitchen entrance, all you did was follow the reek of stale booze and rotted garbage across the yard, to a fire-door wedged open with a beer crate to change the air. I pulled down my hat brim and stepped in over the crate, as if I had some business being there.

  When you climb in a pit with the snakes, the snakes are supposed to notice. But not at the Garden tonight. Nothing happened. Not inside the fire-door or in the passage it led along, past a line of storerooms and noises from distant kitchens. No voice called out. No hand pressed my shoulder. No shadow stepped in front to push an arm at my chest or a gun in my stomach. All it took was a sense of direction, some wrong turns and dead ends, a switchback of stairs and service corridors and I was standing outside the black lacquer door again, uninvited and without a chaperone. For somebody who kept a small private army on his books, you wondered where Joe Willard was using it tonight. I pushed on the door’s nickel trim and let myself in.

  Willard’s room was in darkness, lit only by the stab of pink neon through the street window. I left the door wide, used the flashes from the street sign and moved along the wall to the davenport at the far end of the room. The window there was doubled to cut down the noise, the blind angled so that if you stood up close you could take in the dining at one side and the veranda bar at the other. It was early yet for the Garden’s night crowd. There were empty tables under the palms, a girl show hoofing in smiles and spangles and a band blowing hard to keep up. Then a slow murmur of applause arrived out of nothing, the girls were making curtseys and the band began doodling around a fresh tune. The clarinet was still teasing out a line when Willard stepped through the flush door at the back of the veranda bar, paused there to fix his cuffs and take the view, then headed for the two wide steps down to the terrace. He moved on through a scatter of diners, paid them no attention and ignored the waiters who stood
aside to let him by. I got up on my toes and pulled down a slat of the blind.

  There were three men seated at a table at the far edge of the room, solid-looking citizens who might have been company directors meeting over drinks and dinner. Willard walked up behind one of them, rested a hand on his shoulder and got introduced to his two other guests. Then he cast an eye over arrangements, summoned the maître d’, and left with a word to each man in turn as a waiter wheeled in champagne on ice, set down three glasses and popped a cork.

  The arrangements were impressive. They also explained why the Garden was left wide open tonight. All its available muscle had been fitted for white tuxedos and ranged at intervals around the edges of the floor, like a cordon thrown around a prison yard. I was counting how many when the black lacquer door snicked shut behind me. There was a silk rustle. The Garden’s neon lit up a silhouette against the window overlooking the street, and a figure that didn’t need to put on a light moved easily across the room, side-stepped Willard’s desk and dropped an evening purse in his chair. A drawer pulled open. A decanter clinked against a glass. I let go the slat on the window blind and said, “Make it two.”

  There was a small, high gasp. The decanter thudded on the desk. The figure waited on the next flash of the street sign, and when it came gasped again. “Newman!” Vivien Allynson let out a long, fluttered breath, fumbled at a clasp to the fur around her shoulders, laid the fur next to her purse and took a second glass from the drawer. “I’m here to see Joe. I have to wait, apparently. As you see it’s making me nervous.”

  I nodded past the window blind at the diners on the terrace. “You’re both nervous. Councilor Drake is down there entertaining the commissioner and his superintendent, and Joe’s handling it as if they both might get up and start shooting. But at least it gives you time to decide.”