Shamus Dust

by Janet Roger

  He crooked a smile across his teeth that promises to follow you in nightmares. “You might be careless of your own imperfect career, but I doubt you’ll condemn the lady doctor to a lifetime’s travail in some godforsaken wilderness. No more do I wish to see a murdered police officer’s record of service kicked about like a football in the gutter press. So let me explain. After the collapse of his attempted fraud on the grand scale, the lawyer Allynson turned in desperation to a series of appalling murders intended to cover his trail. Understanding he was about to be apprehended for those heinous crimes, he killed himself. Barely twenty-four hours later, while acting to detain the lawyer’s wife as accessory, Detective Inspector McAlester died tragically at her hands in your office. His errors of judgment along the way, even the rank disloyalty of Dr. Swinford, will be allowed a decent privacy for the greater good of the force. McAlester will therefore be allowed to go quietly. A hero if need be. Do I make myself clear?”

  I made a pad out of my pocket handkerchief and held it up against my mouth. So far, we’d had crimes and misdemeanors, heroes and loyalty, trust and betrayal. At the end of a long night with Junior it was a heady mix. In the end, all I did was nod that he made himself clear, and mumbled past the handkerchief, “So you found her.”

  Littomy stretched back to look me over, gratified his class had been paying attention. His hands spread as if he might applaud. “Indeed, we did. Our colleagues on the flood recovered a body at first light this morning. Though it carried the identity papers of the late Nurse Greer, it is unquestionably the corpse of her sister. The victim died from a single gunshot wound, no doubt one of the rounds fired by McAlester himself, since recovered from your office wall. Of the airman’s Gladstone bag you say she was carrying, there was no trace.”

  I went on dabbing at my mouth. It was one version. And it was fine. Provided you weren’t interested in the detective inspector’s shakedown, or where the flight lieutenant’s bag had disappeared, or how Willard had been bypassed without a mention from beginning to end. Instead, all it asked you to believe was that the lawyer’s widow died from a trick shot, loosed off by McAlester with all the angles wrong, and from the kind of gunshot wound that doesn’t bleed; not on your office floor, not along your corridor, not in the elevator cage or down four flights of stairs, and not in the entrance lobby either. Then again, you might prefer the simpler version. The one that had two of Willard’s bellhops stooging outside the Thornburgh in the fog, waiting to relieve the widow of the bag she was carrying when she exited and to invite her to a waiting car. She wouldn’t run. There wouldn’t be any point.

  According to Littomy, the body had been picked up at dawn. It was fast work. But that was just the prose. A rich widow mortally gunshot in my office, who crossed half the nighttime City to die alone on the river; that was pure poetry. And when the acting examiner found the gunshot was point blank in the head, as she surely would, it would class as a bona fide miracle. As for Charlie Ross’s bag with its royal ransom inside, plus the diamond collection the widow was wearing for travel, River Police had a better chance of finding Amelia Earhart. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. They found the body on a gravel heap on a half-sunk lighter in St. Katharine’s Dock, not a quarter-mile from the police launch jetty.”

  Littomy eyed me sidelong, got as close as he allowed to a show of surprise and in the end decided not to ask. He patted his knees instead, as if the commissioner was waiting to jump in his lap, then unfolded from the chair and stood stooping behind it, his fingertips spread along the seatback. “Be satisfied, man. You’ve avoided an unholy mire: for the esteemed councilor, your client; for the Beaufort family and their lady doctor; and not least for yourself. The burdens of policing this fair City are not your concern. We know our streets. We understand our officers and their lapses. Leave us to deal with our own. We have the practice.” He straightened up to move for the door, then paused for effect. “No airman’s Gladstone. River Police did however find the victim’s own handbag beside her body with a cartridge box half-full inside; six more rounds for her Webley revolver. No doubt that fact helped Inspector Fels credit some small part of your story.” The treacled smile broke again. “But we can’t have you leaving us with your bruises undoctored. Our medical examiner must take a look.” He slipped a dull silver watch out of his pocket. “Dr. Templeton will be along presently when he returns from luncheon.”

  It’s not often you get what you thought you wanted at the end of a long night in the tank. When Doc Templeton walked in, I was still wondering why I didn’t feel better about it. The doctor was small and clipped, his wardrobe a little off-key for a police employee, so fastidious you marveled that he left off the spats. He set his bag down on the table, didn’t waste an introduction, pushed his spectacles flat against his eyeballs and had a syringe loaded before he looked around to see who else was in the room. The hand with the syringe waved me to open my shirt, then put a shot in my side and snapped the apparatus back in the bag. It was the work of a motorcycle mechanic, and Doc Templeton was out of there in small, quick steps in less time than it takes to grease a cable. He left the cell door wide. Ready to stroll through when I was dressed. As if the last twelve hours passed with City Police was their way to let me get to know myself better. In the corridor outside, there wasn’t even anybody to point the way out.

  It was chill afternoon on Snow Hill, the fog all but gone. Courtesy of Doc Templeton, I floated up the rise two feet off the ground, went on past the Thornburgh, turned west to Holborn Viaduct, then dropped down the stair to Farringdon without touching the ground. I headed for Fleet Street with the blood singing under my fingernails, planning to sleep through the rest of a year that had started badly before it got a whole lot worse, but in a room with windows and a light that switched off and a lock on the door I had a key to. I pulled the wires out of the buzzer when I walked in the door. Took the telephone off its cradle and closed the drapes at the windows on the street. Say what you want about The Doc, he knew his poisons. I slept in and out of needle fever for two nights and days, laid out on the couch like a corpse.

  Unsubtle Private Lives

  I heard the come and go of the City, faint outside. Sweated and froze and got crawled over by a thousand blind white mice on stilts. For countless hours I waited on the gas flame to make one special shadow play across the ceiling and grinned like a lunatic on vacation each time it came around. I liked it a lot. In all the jagged dreams and racing demons the Doc had cooked up and bottled, it was the thing I liked best of all. It gave me a view off the top of a mile-high mountain, out over a thirsty plain that had a river winding through it. I could trace the river’s course right across the ceiling, back into the foothills to the spring where it began, purling out of the tip of a hollow needle from behind an open door. It was Doc Templeton’s door. It had his name painted on it. And after his name the strings of letters and sometime alma maters that the Doc could list like a stock price ticker. Through two long nights the letters had danced across the ceiling shadows like starlings homing on a roost, until by now the doctor’s needle was running thin and they were lining up, hardening out and separating. I got up on an elbow, wiped a hand across my eyes and tried spelling out six words forming on the door glass in heavy black italics, like a citation. The six words said: A Bedside Manner Can Be Overrated. I got right up off the couch, stumbled to the bathroom and put my head under an ice-cold faucet.

  Two hours before sunrise, the street alight with traffic, newspaper offices flaring yellow at every window and the night shift spilling into breakfast bars. Ask anybody down there about a lawyer and a lawyer’s wife and a police detective shot dead and they’d wonder what happened to your weekend. It was Monday morning, dry and cold, and except as color on inside pages the story was through, last week’s headlines already and a history of the kind that no one ever can put a name or date to. I dropped the curtain back on the street and went looking in the closet for a suit and a shirt, socks and shoes and a neckt
ie. It didn’t matter to me what. All I wanted was to get some air, and put on something that didn’t smell to me of a killing.

  On Hatton Garden, all that lasted of the snow was heaped in gutters, soot-black in a sharp morning sun that lit up the west side of the street. It whitewashed shop windows, dazzled unaccustomed eyes, pepped the talk of early passersby. I stepped in a door that had its blind drawn up behind the glass and a card at a slant that still said Closed. The doorbell made its high, crystal jingle. It was a little before nine o’clock.

  At Mayhew’s Outfitters to Gentlefolk, a week passed by was but the flicker of an eyelid. Gaslight still burned. The wine-colored drape hung across the back wall. Shelves waited on supplies no supplier had for sale. All that had changed was the heartthrob mannequin in the bow tie and plus fours. This morning, he was wearing a rugged homespun sweater, and all things considered I thought it agreed better with his coloring. His look said he thought so too. Then the drape rattled back on its rail and Mrs. Mayhew was giving me her morning smile that wondered if we might have met before. She was looking spry in a pepper-and-salt tweed, cut so she seemed to fill it all by herself. The trick was putting a spark in her eye. I turned the stiffened side of my face away and waved a hand at her mannequin. “I’m the fellow that bought the scarf Mrs. Mayhew, practically a week ago now.”

  We waited to let her think back. She brightened when she recollected. “Why yes, of course!” Then thought some more and touched a finger to her bottom lip. “Dear me, I do hope there isn’t a flaw.”

  I gave her back the smile. “No flaw. The scarf is fine. It isn’t what I came about.”

  Since the night in the bright room with Tully and Fels, the councilor’s check had been weighing on my wallet. Not that my client was complaining. We hadn’t started well but somehow Councilor Drake’s business interests and his personal reputation had survived a very tough week that might have come out a whole lot worse. He’d kept his name out of a police murder investigation, avoided a scandal that would have blackballed him from the City, and seeing his daughter leave Joe Willard for a different continent might even have salved whatever conscience he had. All it had cost him was a check, still in my pocket, and a handful of blushes, if you granted his skin was that thin. But a client is still a client, and there hadn’t been a way to keep the councilor out of the story I gave Detective Tully. Even when you’re being fitted for murder, and even though Tully couldn’t use what I gave him without burning City Police, himself included, there are rules about that. It was how I came to be on Hatton Garden discussing stylish neckwear with an outfitter to gentlefolk. I began explaining what I was doing there.

  I said I did some work for an important City councilor, locating respected enterprises that would help bring on go-ahead young women in the City. As one of its legion of well-satisfied customers, it had occurred to me that Mayhew’s of Hatton Garden might be one such enterprise. I said I thought a keen worker could expect to be useful there, learn something about the high-fashion business and generally broaden her outlook. Not only that, I had someone in mind; a personable young woman who exactly fit the bill. If Mrs. Mayhew was willing, I was authorized to sign over a check from the councilor’s charitable fund to cover employing her for a trial period. I had one in my pocket to show. And even though I was certain the firm wouldn’t regret giving this particular young woman a try, if it didn’t work out for either of the two parties there were positively no obligations. The councilor always insisted on that. I took the check out of my wallet, laid it flat on her glass counter and asked Mrs. Mayhew how the idea sounded to her.

  fifty-three

  Commercial real estate has its highs and lows. Ask the Thornburgh. One day you’ve got a desirable address renting at a premium on the west side of the City. Next day a police hero dies there and the address is a headline for all the wrong reasons in every news sheet in the country. It wasn’t the kind of advertising the Thornburgh needed. Added to that, its tenants were going to pieces meeting me alone on the stairs. The building’s agent wrote, proposing to move me urgently elsewhere, entirely at the owners’ expense. But I liked the setup I had, my contract didn’t exclude third-party gunfire and I declined their offer. Days later the owners lost their nerve and their agent got the holes in my wall fixed. It was the last I heard. All the same, a week after the murder mayhem I was still getting the cool look on the stairs, and the bookish secretary didn’t stroll in any longer for slow drinks at strange hours. Even George was handing me the mail every morning without a whistle.

  It was the middle of a dead afternoon. Fat rain dripped off the roof edges. My neighbor was snapping at her typewriter the other side of our connecting door and I was waiting on a call. I had the Courier folded to Carl’s column on an inside page. Since Doc Templeton blessed me with his needle arts, it was as close as I wanted to get to the Garfield story. Carl had been wrapping up the City killings all week, using Littomy’s script released one day at a time and springing no surprises. On Monday it had been the history of a fraud, perpetrated by a ruthless and murderous lawyer. By Friday it was the tragedy of an upstanding senior police detective in his prime, cut down by the lawyer’s wife while resisting arrest. The detective inspector had fallen victim to a train of events he’d remorselessly pursued; a trail of deception and cold murder that City Police had now closed for good. In the circumstances, his rough handling of a young man in questioning was a forgivable and forgettable blemish on a fine career. Carl quoted Littomy on that, and printed a pocket version of the superintendent’s stock picture in mid-column, to help us all take his word for it.

  I pushed the afternoon edition aside and sat on by the telephone. The call I had out was a routine trace that police could have made ten times faster, for a customer who had no pressing desire to try that avenue. Out of such inhibitions my office rental gets paid. A letter on my desk, arrived that morning, was a longer shot. I picked it up and read it through again. It was from a bureau vice-president of the Carne Organization Inc. of Beverly Hills, California, a heavyweight and exclusive investigative agency where the mink and Cadillac crowd could buy discretion. My name had been mentioned by somebody who knew somebody else, and the bureau chief thought I might make a useful addition to his overseas roster. He wrote that he hoped to hear what I could offer. On the one hand, it was a chance to raise some associate business that wouldn’t otherwise come my way, at least not before the Americans came begging to be let back in the empire. Against that was crafting a work of fiction to keep Carne interested. I was mulling for and against when the telephone rang. I lifted it. A loose drawl, lately grown familiar, said, “You’re as good as your word, Newman. I’ll give you that.”

  It might have been the days of endless rain. Or the cold shoulder I was getting for lowering the tone of the office neighborhood. More likely I was wearied of fast advice, cheap payoffs and cheaper threats, and not in a mood to let Willard pin a medal on my chest. I cut in. “Is there a point or is this our anniversary?”

  There was a pause while he sent somebody out of the room. “You were right about McAlester. When we gave Vivien some time alone, she was able to recall the deal they struck. You set both of them up. I don’t even want to know why. A talent like yours should be working for me.”

  So it was settled. Now I had talent. On the confession of a sometime B-movie actress and racketeer lawyer’s wife, who knew she was making her last car ride and had nothing left to lose. Willard wouldn’t waste sentiment, and you doubted she was given much time to recollect; no more to him now than the new-minted brunette his two guns had picked up outside the Thornburgh, wearing jewels he’d paid for and carrying false papers, a steamer ticket and a bag with his missing million dollars inside. “Neither of them was set up. Vivien Allynson had a way out and didn’t take it. McAlester went there for the shakedown and got in her line of fire. They made choices. They could have made different choices and surprised us both. But surprises aren’t in your book. When you see your n
ext one you still won’t like it. Go make your pitch at somebody else and stay off my line. It gets me a living in ways you won’t understand.” Willard let the silence hang on the wire, said Have it your way and ended the call.

  I sat listening to the afternoon drift by, thought about calling the doctor and decided she needed time to herself. Then the snapping typewriter wound down, heels tapped across the room behind me and lights switched off. A quiet Friday ended early for the weekend and a door locked shut. The corridor echoed heels again before the whole floor muted to a string of clicks and empty murmurs. I still had the telephone in my hand. It started ringing the instant I dropped it back on the riser.

  The call still wasn’t the trace I had out, but for this one I lost the wearied mood and sat up and listened. When it ended I got up from the desk and collected my coat off the rack. It was at the top of Snow Hill I remembered I hadn’t turned the key in my door. I should have. In light of recent events, the Thornburgh’s agent had circularized all tenants. He said the answer to everybody’s peace of mind was for us all to get stricter with security.

  fifty-four

  I paid the taxi, walked the drive to the Beaufort place in a rain shower and dragged on the bell-pull under the porch. The smell of wood smoke was blunting the chill on the air and Ernest seemed satisfied to see me again. He led along the hallway with the log fire and showed me to the same study as before, left with my coat over his arm and came back with a silver tray and two straight whiskies. Mr. Beaufort, he said, would be along to join me shortly, and left the glasses on the cartwheel table by the hearth, one either side of a journal with a marbled hardcover. Ernest would know better than to bring out the Buccleuch tonight, and I hadn’t thought about Garfield’s diary in a week. I turned my back on both of them and looked around the study.