Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  So we went back every time. Back to the architect who bought his liquor on his highland vacations. Back to the councilor’s daughter who saw a newsreel in the Charing Cross Road. Back to the nurse who gave up a flight lieutenant’s uniform for a charity cause. And always back to the nurse’s sister, who bought herself a cop so the cop would buy a suicide. That was the part the Hero had a problem with. He levered himself off the back wall, walked around to my side of the table and jerked my chin sideways on the point of his thumb. “McAlester did this? Not a chance. Why would he stop at a busted nose?”

  A hot needle stitched my eyeball in its socket. I swerved out of his reach. “My nose was busted when you were still in short pants. McAlester was trying to fix it for me.” And to his boss, “Junior tries that again, we’ll both need a doctor.”

  We hadn’t been introduced. Since he entered the room, he hadn’t said a word. Even silent I liked him. He was a man in his fifties, short for a cop, wore a soft striped collar and a relaxed brown suit and had the comfortable build and fugitive eyes of somebody’s Irish uncle. He also looked as if he slept nights. The Hero wrapped his fist in his hand and mimed to be let alone for five minutes in the room with me. His boss combed his fingers through a hairline he hadn’t seen in twenty years. The room waited, breathless. “Detective Tully is a mite overwrought. Understandably so. He took the call for the dreadful murder of Miss Valentine, and learns tonight you were present at the unfortunate woman’s demise. He no doubt thinks, as I do, that you might have mentioned it at the time. As for your story concerning the late detective inspector, now what in the world do you suppose he might do with that?”

  Detective Tully. Who listened all night to how McAlester fixed a lawyer’s suicide and took it in his stride, yet every time we got to how Dillys Valentine died, acted as if he had stomach cramps. I pulled hard up against the table and leaned across at his boss. “He knows what he can do with it. I was there. As soon as she started in about Jarrett and police protection, Miss Valentine was a dead woman. Detective Tully is overwrought because he wants McAlester left out of her killing and doesn’t see how to do it.” I squinted past the glare from the hanging light. “It’s the thing he’s been right about all night. It can’t be done. McAlester’s under every stone the detective doesn’t want to turn. Check the station record. McAlester hauled Jarrett in for hustling once and once only. Chances are he made him known to Joe Willard at the same time, because three years later when the councilor was honey-trapped, they were all on Willard’s payroll. Jarrett was the bait, McAlester made the bust, and Willard’s lawyer arrived in the bleak hours to spring him. Obviously it was a setup McAlester kept off the record, but Tully would know. There was a second detective on the vice detail with McAlester that night. Why not ask him who?”

  Tully’s boss laced his hands on his stomach, stretched and stifled a yawn. A tic had started up along my cheekbone. “Always it’s McAlester. McAlester who took over the investigation when Jarrett’s murder was reported. McAlester who called the councilor to tell him there was a problem. And when Drake hired me to find out what went on, it was because McAlester had set him up pathetically once before.” Drake, eight days ago. The one client I ever had who doubled my rate and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Even when your head says it can’t be Santa Claus, your heart still goes out to the principle. “So I arrived at the Jarrett murder, and later that morning got a call to meet the acting medical examiner at the Great Eastern Hotel. She’s smart, but also new to police work and likely left word where to reach her, which is how McAlester found me at the hotel and tailed me from there to Dillys Valentine. Don’t take my word. Talk to Louis in the hotel barbershop, then check police prints at the Valentine murder, because they better not include McAlester’s. You just said he let Detective Tully take that call, and it makes sense. Why would he go there himself when he already knew who killed her?” Tully stirred, felt in the breast pocket of his jacket for a toothpick, started using the point to scratch last night’s dinner off his sleeve. I peered around the bright light at his boss. “Is Junior not naturally inquisitive? Or is he just strict with himself? There were three people in my office last night. If you think I’m off base about McAlester, tell him to park the toothpick and start with the widow.”

  Tully brushed off his jacket sleeve and burnished his handiwork on a shirt cuff. His boss looked around as if he might have been in the wrong room all night, then sighed and kicked back his chair and led Tully out the door. A bolt slammed behind them. The light burned on with a generator whine. I got to my feet, walked slow circuits around the bolted-down table and started thinking about cops.

  Another day, another headline. Lately, McAlester had been collecting them. But last night in my office he’d hit the heights, and for twenty-four hours he was set to be bigger news than Stalin. Plenty enough to put the commissioner in a spot until Littomy cooked a version of his own for the late editions. Meanwhile, Detective Tully was trying to remake himself as the innocent in the park. And for that, if his boss let him be sporting with the evidence, I was a gift. All I had going for me was a gunshot pattern across my office wall, a face I could have collected in a barroom brawl and a story that ended the second the shooting had started. None of it was impressing Tully. He said what he wanted from me was my part in the gunplay at the Thornburgh last night, and up to now I wasn’t even close to the way he wanted to hear it.

  All I remembered was getting on my knees, alone in the room so far as I could tell, feeling as if the left side of my face had been split off with a hatchet. My office door was wide open to the corridor. The ceiling light still burned. The scent of gunfire so heavy on the air it started me retching and dragged me onto my feet. My wristwatch had cracked apart when I hit the floor. The clock on my wall said it was past one in the morning.

  I was partly right about being alone. Vivien Allynson was gone. The bag along with her. The Webley .45 was tossed on my desk and the chair still sprawled where I dragged it over on my way down. Two gunshots had drilled the plaster, one high in the wall, one close by the window. A third had clipped the window blind and splintered the frame, and a fourth had taken off the right-hand corner of my desk. On the whole, it left the room looking roughed-up rather than rugged. Then again, at the other side of my connecting door there was ruggedness to spare.

  The door to the adjoining office was folded back at an odd angle, hanging loose on a shot-through hinge and jammed against the heel of McAlester’s shoe. The rest of the detective inspector was stretched along the floor on his stomach, his right hand pinned under his chest, his head turned aside, his left arm reaching overhead in a lazy swimmer’s crawl across the Styx. I went in through the door and squatted down, grabbed his shoulder two-handed and heaved him onto his back. The Browning semi-automatic that had shot up my office slipped from McAlester’s fingers, spun slowly in a blood pool on the linoleum and stopped like a roulette on red. He still had on his homburg.

  You didn’t need to be Barnes Wallis. For five short seconds Vivien Allynson had aimed and emptied the Webley from ten feet away while McAlester stood framed in the door. She’d missed her aim once only, and from that range whatever she didn’t miss with would have stopped a train. The Webley was built to do that. Flight Lieutenant Ross had given it to his girl to keep the Wehrmacht at bay if need be. But then the gun is only ever a part of it. The detective inspector’s luck had been to step in the way of the finest shooting of Mrs. Allynson’s short career. A flowering red stitched the right side of his coat from his shoulder to his hip.

  Her first shot had notched out the top of McAlester’s right arm, left him unable to take aim and made him a barn door for target practice. Jerked high and wide under the impact, his gun hand had loosed four harmless shots and then locked solid on the trigger. From left to right, from start to end, the holes in my walls and desk traced the pattern. The rounds McAlester didn’t call on were sitting in the palm of my hand. All thirteen of a fully loaded Browning
accounted for. Meaning that Vivien Allynson had walked out unhurt from her introduction to a gunfight, temporarily deafened and certainly shaken up. For the first time, somebody had started shooting back at her, and from ten feet away it’s a bracing experience.

  I reached the telephone closer and thought about what lay ahead. At that hour, Littomy would be sleeping off the Garden’s champagne twenty miles south of the river in some stockbroker lane in Camelot. I could wake him and tell him one of his detectives was dead in my office or I could wait and let him hear it secondhand, which wasn’t that much of a choice. Harder yet was to see any bright spots. I’d been in the room when the shooting happened, the murder weapon was in my hip pocket and the widow who used it had flown. It had been that kind of a night. The kind even a police chief has to get out of bed for. I took a deep breath, dialed the operator and gave him Littomy’s home number.

  City Police don’t keep the customer waiting. I pulled the doctor’s carbon notes on Jarrett out of a drawer, grabbed the photographs Sybil Willard had handed me with Garfield’s diary, dropped them in my wastebasket and tossed in a lighted match. While they burned, I got Garfield’s wallet out of the safe, put it on the desk with the Browning and Vivien Allynson’s .45 and went back to stir over the ashes. Then I settled in my neighbor’s office chair, listened to rain beads jittering in the corners of the window glass and waited. Twenty minutes later, Detective Tully stepped into my office, damp-straw hair plastered back to his scalp and a jaw right off a poster in a Moscow tractor plant. His boss was two steps behind.

  Tully had arrived already on edge. As the night wore on and he began to understand what he had, his mood went backward. You could see his point of view. A fellow officer had been gunned down, four murder investigations meant to be closed were unraveling in front of his eyes, and sooner or later Littomy would have to learn that a recently dead lawyer wasn’t the City killer after all. The prospect had started crawling over Detective Tully’s skin. What his boss thought about it there was no way to tell. But I could wait. Come morning, Littomy would be putting out his certified version to the press. And before he did that, somebody would want to explain it to me.

  Police like to explain. Even when you’re satisfied that you’ve got a thing worked out for yourself, they want to straighten out those ideas in which you are entirely mistaken. They have to clarify the things you saw, or thought you saw, or heard or smelled or tasted, and then tell you how you felt about them, what you were doing at the time, what you remember you were thinking or saying or were thinking of saying. It’s a humor with them, like flat feet and colic. Soon, somebody would be arriving to help me out with all of those things, to explain to me what I ought to know and what I would never know about how a senior officer had ended shot dead on my office floor; a result of events too complicated for me to understand, or ever to think of go prying in again. The way a cop sees it, he’s the one getting paid to know. You’re just the itinerant who happened to be there at the time. So I waited and paced the bright room, no way of telling how long, until somebody dropped by to enlighten me.

  Littomy arrived in a business suit half-brother to the one that had graced dinner last night at the Garden, breaking the kind of smile a bank teller will use when your credit doesn’t stretch. He dropped a large envelope on the table, set his chair side-on, loosed the top button of the suit jacket and stared at the wall over my head. It drew from him a sigh and a contented look, as if the blank wall was his view over a park in springtime where small children chased and ducks sunned around a pond. I sat on my hands. It’s hard to enter in the spirit with somebody who took away your shoelaces.

  As if it wearied him, Littomy said, “You were fortunate in encountering Detective Inspector Fels this long night. He finds your account engrossing. Some of its substance he has been able to verify. It appears the late detective inspector did, as you say, bring in your client for questioning those many years ago. Detective Tully, when pressed, concedes he was also present, though our station record omits the event. As to the appalling murder of Miss Valentine, Fels finds that police fingerprints at the scene do indeed include McAlester’s. Our forensic colleagues it seems, failed entirely to grasp the anomaly.” Littomy weighted the colleagues part, then grimaced at the glare flooding in through his private window onto the park. “The question remains how far any of this takes us. Can it be, as you suggest, that McAlester colluded with the lawyer’s wife to disguise a murder? It is scarcely conceivable. Might she have offered to reward the detective inspector for his complicity? We have only your surmise for it. What evidence do we have that this lone woman contrived to shoot and kill a trained, armed and highly experienced senior officer? None whatever. We have no trace of her prints on the weapon. Nothing but your own account to indicate she was ever in the building, let alone present in your office last night. Yet your tale is not only that she shot and killed the detective inspector there, you say she left behind both McAlester’s handgun and her own. This despite your warning that she was in the gravest personal danger.” His jaw jutted so far sideways it looked dislocated. “Does that not seem rather careless of her? In conscience, Newman, your version of events beggars belief.”

  He said it as if I could include the ducks around the pond in that, and let his gaze wander over my shoulder. A superintendent of police does not seek to impress or win an argument. He means only to let you watch yourself losing, no contest, so that next time your appreciation of police work will be more rounded. It was a reminder that what started in his office late Christmas afternoon was ending in the bright room without my tie or shoelaces. I didn’t see it making one of my hundred great cases. I felt for my lip to find where it had grown to. “So, you’re skeptical. Tully is skeptical. His boss says so. But even police make mistakes. McAlester’s was walking into my office with a gun on me, not on the widow, and that mistake got him killed with the Webley she left behind to frame me for his murder. The gun is clean. I wiped it myself. What else would I do? Mrs. Allynson shot her husband with his own .38 and put his prints on it. She was guaranteed to do the same for me. McAlester’s Browning she wouldn’t even see, because when the shooting ended he was sprawled on top of it. Besides, with McAlester dead she thought she was safe. Carrying either one of the guns would locate her at a police killing. It would have been next best thing to a signed confession.”

  There are suits made of stuff so fine they only look better the closer you get. They make them in whispers for old maharajahs, behind soft-lit windows on quiet streets, then line them in silk that weighs less than their eyelashes. Littomy’s was such a suit, the shadowed green of burned willow wands flecked with soft ash. I sat wondering how many like it a police superintendent affords. Littomy lifted a corner of his mouth. His fingers played with the row of small buttons on his cuff. “One sees why Detective Tully is affronted by your candor. You admit to entering Jarrett’s rooms after being at the scene of his murder. Hours later you were at the Valentine killing, but left to report it anonymously. You hand us Professor Garfield’s wallet for mercy’s sake, and own that when you removed it from his body you were impersonating a City Police officer! Need I continue? Detective Tully would have you behind bars for any one of those infractions, let alone the events of last night. Yet your candor is highly selective, is it not?”

  Littomy’s hand flattened on the envelope and slid it across the table. It’s the police way; they hand back the things they took from you as if they remembered it’s your birthday. I pulled the envelope into my lap and shook out my shoelaces, dropped my wristwatch and wallet in a pocket and kicked off my shoes. Littomy interested himself in a thumbnail while I threaded the laces. You can be bruised and sleepless, shaky and not thinking straight, and still recognize the etiquette for a heart-to-heart.

  I slipped my shoes back on and double-tied them, rolled down my shirt collar and ran my hands through my hair. I was tipping a handkerchief out of the envelope, feeling a little less rustic, when Littomy said absentl
y, “McAlester was no doubt a flawed officer. Nonetheless, he noted the interest both you and our medical examiner were taking in the Jarrett murder. Having observed you meeting at the Great Eastern Hotel, he charged Detective Tully with monitoring Dr. Swinford’s movements. The detective’s reports prove absorbing.” He set his chin on his knuckles and gave me his consideration. It was the first time I’d had his eye since he walked in and ducked the hanging light. “This past week, Newman, we observe a pattern. We have a killing on our hands, our temporary medical examiner examines, after which she again meets the private investigator she first summoned to the Great Eastern Hotel following the Jarrett murder. This pattern troubled us. Easy to imagine why the private investigator would maintain contact with our acting examiner; he has a political client with reason to keep abreast of police inquiries. Far harder to imagine what in God’s name our examiner thought she was doing. That is, until thirty-six hours ago, when our press was good enough to inform us of our mistreatment of the Beaufort boy, with all pertaining medical detail. Good Christ, man, she ministered to the boy’s injuries at my request. Then chose to aid him after he absconded from police guard. Whereupon we discover she is not only the Beaufort family doctor, but close friend to the invalid mother. In plain, and with your assistance, the woman has systematically shielded a suspect from our murder investigation. Why deny it?”

  But there wasn’t any denying it. Tully had done a job on the doctor, and it didn’t make me feel any better that I hadn’t once set eyes on him before tonight. Littomy’s tone honeyed. “You offer an otherwise fulsome account of this past week’s events, yet scarce mention the role of our acting medical examiner. Perhaps because you see more clearly than she does herself that she has entirely betrayed her trust. Therefore, understand me. We may lean toward your version of McAlester’s murder. We may even see fit to curb Detective Tully in his pursuit of your most recent crimes and misdemeanors. But as things stand, there is not one hope in hell that the good Dr. Swinford will ever again practice medicine, except in some relic of empire where neither her past nor her future will interest anyone but herself.”