by Janet Roger
For a time, his eyes wandered over the tilted ceiling, lost in the mystery of why I would need it explained. His chin sank deeper in his coat and muffled his answer. “I just know, don’t I? I have to know.” It was what I thought. And all I was likely to get. The strain of entertaining me was killing him. I left Reilly with his shakes, left my chaperone in the foyer, traded Mrs. Allynson’s ticket at the coat check, and walked out onto Charlotte Street carrying Charlie Ross’s bag.
For two weeks, the cold had been brushing aside the winter fog like a curtain at daybreak until it left you feeling light-headed. On a good day you might see a horizon. At nighttime, even a star. And then last evening the Courier had forecast a rise of two degrees, and made it sound like the difference between north and south Siberia. Today, Carl’s cartoonist had put Marjorie in a parka peeking out of an igloo, explaining to a shivering polar bear, It’s a Heat Wave! but hadn’t said anything about a fog. She ought to have. Tonight a wand had waved and made a city disappear in a broth at the bottom of an ocean. Streetlights floated in a fog of the kind that rims your eyes red, fills your mouth, and coats anything you plan to touch or breathe or swallow with a slick film of sulfur grit. A regular London fog.
Traffic was thin. The city stole back its bleak midwinter look of rotting from the inside out. You could hear it softly choking. I walked south to Oxford Street, found a cab and climbed in. The driver locked his meter and pressed up against the windshield, took the weather on the chin and stayed with the avenues that crossed the city in straight lines. Subway stations on the Central line were barred and locked, the last trains gone. The cabbie counted off the passing station signs—Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Chancery Lane—just to hear a voice in the night. Unseen city dragged by the cab window. I drew a knuckle across the misted glass and made three vertical marks in a row, like a tally on a slate. One for the Gladstone bag on the seat beside me with most of a million dollars inside. Two for the B-picture actress, handy with a .38, who was waiting to take delivery in my office. And three for Willard, who wanted them both—the money and the woman who’d double-crossed him—and wasn’t about to rely on me handing either one of them back. I scrubbed the window clear and told the cabdriver to pull over at the top of Snow Hill.
FIFTY
The Thornburgh’s night porter had his door shut tight and dance tunes playing on the short wave of his radio. I put on all the lights in the lobby, took the stair and switched on more on every floor, then cut out at the fifth. At the end of the corridor, in the recess outside my office, a ceiling light threw a beam across a wreath of cigarette smoke, turning slow circles under a green metal shade. From where I stood the row of seats tucked out of sight. All I saw was a slim ankle fitted in a two-tone shoe and a wrist rubbing out the cigarette. The wrist wore a bracelet around the cuff of a tight kid glove, catching the light at every turn. Even at that distance the cut stones looked the kind of class the Thornburgh had always promised. I put a key in my office door and switched on a light of my own, hoisted Charlie’s bag on the desk and took a bottle from the drawer to shake off the fog. Then I went back to invite Mrs. Allynson in. I had two stiff measures poured and the stopper back in the bottle before I looked her over. She was standing behind the customer chair taking out a hat pin, coat unbuttoned and a purse hooked under her arm. A strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth. She flicked at it and raised a private smile. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
It had been a long day and anybody else would have looked threadbare. Vivien Allynson was dressed for travel in first class. On a winter night in a cold climate she was wearing a dark blue costume fitted to the hemline and enough jewelry to help the bracelet blend. But the jewelry wasn’t the surprise. Or the outfit either, when I remembered where I’d seen it before. As for the dark electric in her eyes, it had been there from the first. She set the hat on a corner of the desk, touched at the strand of hair again, and this time pulled it across her cheek where we both could consider it. “You don’t think brunette suits me?” Her little finger looped the hair over a dark wave that lifted off her forehead, exactly like her sister’s. “We were the same color, Estelle and I. It was Estelle who changed. She always hated being the redhead.”
But it wasn’t only the brunette that would let her pass for her sister. In build, in looks, in height, they were already close enough. With the new-dyed hair and the nurse’s papers she’d stroll through border control anyplace, as near to looking like her passport as anybody ever does. As for Charlie’s bag, she’d pull a mouth at a customs officer and he’d carry it over the frontier for her. She loosed the scarf at her throat. “How far did you expect me to get tonight in high-heels and an evening gown? I needed to change, you said not to go home, and Estelle had a wardrobe full of clothes I’d grown tired of.” As if her choices were always between being practical and being sentimental. She cast an eye over the Gladstone. I nodded for her to open it. “Go ahead. Look inside. I never had a key.”
She hesitated, then took a step and loosed the straps, got the key from her purse, turned it in the lock and yanked the top wide. For thirty seconds of sweet wonder she stirred close to a million dollars in new, hundred-dollar bills, just to breathe their scent; checked they were the way she left them, fastened up the Gladstone and set it on the floor where she could tap it with her two-tone shoe. I slid one of the glasses across the desk, invited her to take a chair and sat looking at her over the liquor.
Mrs. Allynson wasn’t the redhead any longer, but that was just to travel with. The rest she wouldn’t know how to change. Wouldn’t know how to take the glide out of her walk or the night time out of her look or the money out of her calculation; and especially not how to give up her touchiness about the men in her life who disappointed her. You could say disappointment had set in as long ago as Charlie Ross, a schoolgirl regret, but even he still rankled. As for Joe Willard, he’d trampled on the grown woman and there was no chance of her forgetting it. If learning that he meant to marry Drake’s daughter had been a jolt, being passed along to his lawyer had been pure humiliation. The way Willard saw it the payoff had been handsome. It just would never balance out the slap in the face. He’d made a lot of missteps, but his biggest by far was crossing a woman who could even the score. I said, “Allynson asked you for a divorce.”
She looked up blankly.
“What else would he do? He’d long ago worked out that he was only ever a commercial arrangement you made with his employer. He wanted to be old-fashioned about your sister and knew you wouldn’t even stop to wonder who his new flame might be. He was right. All you asked was how he planned to afford it.” She gave some thought to that, then held her glass straight out across the desk. And while we sipped at two new drinks she relaxed and filled out the rest, perhaps because she was the only one who could.
Being around a racketeer’s personal lawyer had taught her how unrefined a high-earning fraud can be. She saw word come down from the councilor, noticed her husband creating private companies for Willard, then watched as those companies bought up bombed-out lots around the City. Next thing you knew, Drake’s committee released the lots for reconstruction, land values went through the roof, and after a decent interval, Drake, Willard & Co. bought out the private companies, leaving Willard richer twice over. Vivien Allynson marveled at the simple felicity of it all. “I told my husband if he wanted a divorce, he’d better find a way to cut in on Joe. That was two months ago, about the same time the councilor advised buying land around Cripplegate. I believe you worked out the rest.”
Cut in on Joe. Add a fraud to a fraud. As a way of paying for an expensive divorce, she made it sound as elegant and unfussy as falling on a sword. You wondered if she’d ever heard of Michael Garfield before the plan went sour. She drained her whisky. I shrugged. “Some. Not all. When I went to the Garden tonight it was to bring you out of there. You’d murdered your husband, but even so, leaving you to Willard’s tender mercies didn’t answer. Then
you walked in his office and showed me what I’d been missing all along. You’re a very attractive woman in any light Mrs. Allynson, but a few hours ago in the shadows of a darkened room you were a lot more than that. You were unmistakable.” The last part got me the bored and disheartened look. Naturally it would. Since the day she first walked out in a tight dress she’d been hearing it from any man with half an eye for symmetry, and with plenty more to offer. Except for the bag sitting by her toes, I had nothing that interested her even faintly, and its contents were already promised. I said, “Terry Reilly thought you were unmistakable too.”
Her air of boredom died.
I waved my glass at her travel costume. “The boy notices detail. I mean somebody’s build, the way they move and wear their clothes. He reads the signs. In his line of work, he has to. Get it wrong and he can end in a heap in an alley, or in a police cell if he’s in luck. Reilly never did get a real look at Michael Garfield’s killer, he just read the signs. Then hours later he read them again when the same figure followed the nurse into Cloth Court. And we both know that wasn’t your husband.” She drank lazily and listened, but not as if the idea interested her. “Sure your husband cut in on Joe. And when it all went wrong he made the calls you told him to make: first to Guildhall to leave the professor a message, then to Jarrett to set up a trick at the Raglan, last of all to Garfield’s pilot to try to get back the film. But it ended there. He didn’t have the stomach for murder.”
The building ticked soft as clocks in empty parlors. A breeze rattled the glass panel in the door. “Meantime you knew you were both dead if Willard discovered the shakedown. Not even you would convince him you were the innocent bystander. So you put on your husband’s coat and hat and shot Garfield at the river yourself. It was either him and Jarrett or you. And right up until you heard Garfield’s car drive away it could have been that simple. After, it was nothing but complication. You sent your husband looking in Jarrett’s haunts across the City. His address off Cloth Fair, you went to find yourself. Then at four-thirty in the morning, on a bombed-out lot two blocks away, there he was. Trying to start Garfield’s convertible in the freeze.”
It had been early in her trigger career, and even though she leaned in under the canvas top to take aim, Jarrett had survived. By the time she caught up with him in the church porch, she had Garfield’s house keys in her pocket, and the only thing left was to put the gun to Jarrett’s head and squeeze. Then the little sister arrived on the scene, fresh from lighting candles at the crib, and her problems went on multiplying. “You followed her home and for a time you coaxed her out of talking, until in the Viaduct you saw she was too scared to rely on anymore and it was back to being either you or her. Who are we kidding? You didn’t need me telling you not to go home tonight. You were never planning to. Your clothes, your sister’s passport, even her regular hair color were all at the house in Cloth Court. Her identity card you already had. You took it from her bag when you killed her.”
A scent of licorice was crawling under the door.
I turned the telephone around and pushed it where she could reach it. “Wake Littomy. Tell him you’ve got a suitcase full of money that doesn’t belong and you’ll explain later. Littomy’s decisions are made already. They’re too big to unmake. He’ll put the murders on your husband and leave you accomplice to a fraud. Meaning five years, less if you wear that costume for the jury. Call him. Tell him to get somebody here fast.”
She looked thoughtful about the telephone, but when she reached over it was only to slide her glass toward the bottle again. I poured another. I was doing the same for myself when she lifted the purse out of her lap, slipped off its clasp and pulled out a Webley .45 that only made her wrist look slimmer. Her gun hand rested on the arm of the seat and pointed it around the side of the telephone at my stomach. It might not have been the model she was used to, but she wasn’t letting the novelty wear her down. “Really, how can I? Besides, I already have my ticket on a slow boat. You approve. Don’t you remember?” We sat that way listening to my heartbeat, until she noticed it was the moral support in her right hand that had all my attention. Her fingers flexed around the grip and the muzzle pointed two inches higher at my chest. “This? Charlie gave it to Estelle. In those phony war days when there were invasion scares. Odd isn’t it, how one man expects you’ll go down fighting and the next expects you’ll just go down?”
I still had the bottle poised for pouring, but it felt weightless. I set it very slowly beside the glass and spread my hands flat on the desk where they wouldn’t make her hysterical. “Mrs. Allynson, it isn’t that you’re not free to leave here, it just isn’t advised. You stood Willard up tonight, we were both seen at the Garden and we can expect company. Call the operator and talk to Littomy. Do it now.”
She sat stiff and flawless as an Egyptian queen. The hand resting on the purse started buttoning her coat, unhurried. In the end, all she said was, “Your concern is touching but I’ll take my chance.” Shallow wheezing floated on the silence. The room swam on the scent of licorice. Her eyes lifted over my head. A cool draft chilled the sweat under my collar and cold metal jabbed hard at the cotton wad behind my ear. Mrs. Allynson sighed, raised an eyebrow and went ahead with the same level candor. “Detective Inspector McAlester. Such a surprise. Though hardly what we agreed on.”
Two guns in one room and neither of them pointed at anybody but me. I had my chin pressed in my shirtfront. The lump under the cotton wad had a high-voltage current running through it. I hissed at her between my teeth. “The detective inspector is here protecting his investments. He was doing the same when he murdered Dillys Valentine. It surprised her too.”
McAlester took the weight off the gun and let my head up. His wheeze turned to the dry gasp he used for a voice. He put a shrug in the gasp. “You find Newman, you find a tramp.” And made it sound like Wittgenstein’s eighth proposition. “With her ticket bought and money to travel and a gun that’s making him nervous because she never used it before. His luck is the police are here. Her luck is they’re not here to take her back to the Garden. If the tramp heeded advice, Newman would tell her to stop thinking with her hips and put the gun on the desk.” Sometimes it can take a beautiful woman to bring out the poetry in a soul. I thought about what McAlester saw in front of him and decided it wouldn’t lose him any sleep. What did he have except a gumshoe he always had the drop on when it mattered and a sometime redhead whose future he owned? Added to which, the .45 in the right hand of the sometime redhead was aimed at the gumshoe, not at him. It amounted to more police arithmetic, and the arithmetic was telling him to add another fiction to the file, subtract the two other people in the room, multiply his chances of tranquility and leave there with the money, undivided. It felt like a bad time to be on the wrong side of the calculation. From where I was sitting, Mrs. Allynson’s gun hand looked as if it felt that way too.
The next half-second went as well as it ever does. I was already out of the seat when her lips pressed together. Out of her firing line while her shoulder dipped. Heading flat out for the floor before her hand jerked the .45 from the right arm of the chair. And then McAlester moved. A steam shovel hit flush between my shoulders, and where I was aiming to be when the shooting started took on the remote glow of plans you make in winter for a vacation in the spring. He clawed a handful of my coat while I was taking off sideways and twisted it in a ball, dragged my shoulder half around and used my own weight to slam my face down hard on the edge of the desk. My jaw took splinters out of the wood veneer. I heard my cheekbone crack. The room lurched at an angle and my eye clammed shut, and when the claw let go my jacket, I was already gliding chin-up off a cliff into a night of a thousand constellations. In a room far off in another part of the city a fist beat hollow on a closing door: …three …four …five. Too many to count, until in time the fist stopped hammering, the constellations slipped one by one over the rim of night, and a shutter fell like an axe blade burying in a lo
g. Wittgenstein does that to me every time.
FIFTY-ONE
It might have been daylight. There was no telling. In the bright room time moves undivided and there’s no clock on the wall. A bug-eyed desk sergeant had taken my wallet and necktie and belt with the brass buckle, my wristwatch, shoelaces and pocket change. Then made out a receipt for it all as if it bought me a ticket to get in. It’s the one contract police ever make with you. For the rest, it’s understood that they own your present and intend to lean on your past, and your future is theirs to hand back when and if they decide. Aside from that, you’re at liberty: at liberty to reflect on what they might have on you, and the man-hours they can put into making something of it; at liberty to become reacquainted with your own sweat and theirs while they make up their minds.
The bright room was on the snug side of intimate. It had no windows. Only two steel-tube chairs across a bolted-down table, so narrow you could feel their breath in your face, as sour as their mood and as permanent as their point of view. I hadn’t seen either of them before. Two City detectives, one older and seated opposite, the other younger and leaner and on his feet, with the chiseled look of a Hero of Soviet Agriculture. The Hero had been straining at a leash all night long, leaning against the back wall and baring his teeth as if the whole point of being there was to help him work up an appetite. All night long we’d been running up against the same thing that bothered him. And since it was something that wouldn’t stand aside, no matter how we came at it or how often, we kept on going back and starting over again; because police work had taught him that any ending can follow from any beginning, and his method was to stick with the ending he thought of first.