“Stop tasting it with that dirty knife. There’s stale egg on it. It seems to me Ruth ought to know her own husband.”
“She does. She’s ordered the body sent out to California for burial. But Creeby can’t change the records without affidavits all round and witnesses and seals and whatall. Therefore we rot in Migler’s till he’s run his course.”
“It’s the silliest bother I ever heard of,” said Katheren, and got up.
2
Silly or not, there was no escaping it.
Not only Ruth Shanley and Nick Leeds, but all of them had to testify twice over, and some of them three times. What had Shanley said to them? What had they said to Shanley? What had Shanley said to Ruth, to Nick, to Migler, or aloud to himself?
The storm had blown over, though, and as Katheren wrote in a letter to her sister in Greenwich, a very sunny, cheerful morning, a touch on the autumn side, and good for Caligula. He forgets his age and his breed and goes off woofing at tree squirrels, the idiot.
Good not only for Caligula, but for everybody. The Smalnicks thawed. They couldn’t do enough for Ruth; they couldn’t do as much as Nick Leeds only because he attached himself to her and refused to be pried loose. The Beardsleys too wanted to be helpful.
“She’s so alone,” Mae told Katheren. “Everything they had, money and furniture and all, sent to California. So I said to her, you’ve done what you can for Rex, now you’re coming with us. We’ll look after you till you get on your feet.”
And that was more or less the attitude of the whole camp.
“There’s plenty of room for her in my Nash,” said Henry Tozer, “only we’re going North. It’s to be one solid year on the road, fishing, hunting, seeing new places, driving on when we get tired of them—maybe you and Mr. Brendan would like to see my trailer?”
Fishing rods fitted in their own compartment in the ceiling; guns in a rattle-proof case alongside the bath. Pullman beds, stove, sink and table all vanished ingeniously into the walls. Katheren marveled at the workmanship.
“Of course, Connie helped me. Pretty curtains, aren’t they? She made ‘em. She’s as wild about this trip as her daddy. Mrs. Tozer says she can’t figure us two out—but she’ll get to like it. Sold my house in Pittsburgh, quit my job with the steel company—and I’m a free man for the first time in my life.”
“And you really built this yourself?”
“Took me three years, but I put every last bit of it together with these two hands!”
He showed the hands, strong and shapely; he twinkled his eyes and smiled the whimsical smile, and altogether managed to make the night before seem an improbable bad dream.
Creeby had gone away. His assistant sunned himself in a chair tilted against one of the gas pumps. When asked, he replied that he knew nothing about anything, which seemed quite possible.
The whole camp waited, patient and uneasy. Katheren decided she might as well buy groceries and cook some lunch.
Like Napoleon awaiting the outcome of a battle, Milton Smalnick paced Migler’s ramshackle porch, occasionally pausing to scowl and listen towards the telephone booth inside.
Bull-necked, jowlish, Smalnick was darkly handsome for so short a man. Inches shorter than Katheren, he was at least six inches shorter than his willowy Cicely. Except for a hard, intense gleam in his eye, he looked as unlike Katheren’s preconception of a famous Hollywood producer as possible—and he displayed an unhappy, absent-minded smile of recognition to Katheren, then resumed his gloomy pacing.
The reason was Mrs. Tozer, apparently.
She had a tight grip on the sleeve of Cicely’s fox fur, just inside the door. Her voice was pitched to carry beyond—to Smalnick:
“...Not merely elocution, she’s had voice training. She can read Shakespeare beautifully! I taught her French myself, and ever since she was a little girl she’s had to help in the kitchen and walk up and down stairs and all that with a plate balanced on her head. You can see she’s got poise, can’t you, Cicely?”
Cicely said, “Oh, rahther!”
“I made her the loveliest formal gown last winter. I only wish I had it here. But I tell you what I will do—I’ll have her dance for you. Constance, dance the snowflake dance for Mrs. Smalnick, will you, dear? Here’s a nickel for the phonograph.”
Connie unwrapped her long legs from about a stool at the counter. She was blushing. She said, “Oh, mother! Be yourself, please!”
She departed into the sunlight, to watch a football soar lazily back and forth between Ray Kemp and the Winter twins.
Katheren fancied corned beef hash with the remaining eggs poached on top. Canned corned beef hash, for some reason, had to be got down from a high shelf. While Mrs. Migler went for the steps, Katheren eavesdropped.
“A screen test, you say?”
“Cahn’t get a break any other way.”
“Would Mr. Smalnick consider—?”
“My dear Agatha, leave that to me!”
“How much do they cost?”
“I can arrange one for about two hundred and fifty. I have friends who do favors. It would cost you four or five hundred in a minute, not knowing the ropes like I do...”
The telephone rang. Agatha sprinted for it, and by the time Smalnick had crossed the store to the booth she was able to announce, “That was long-distance, Mr. Smalnick! She hasn’t located Mr. Leckman yet at the Hollywood Plaza!”
Milton snarled ungraciously.
“My time is money,” he complained to Cicely, without seeming to be aware of Agatha at all. “What do they think this is—Germany?”
“You can’t do anything about it, Milton.”
“Who can’t? We’ll see if I can’t!”
The door banged after him when he stormed out. He came between Creeby’s assistant and the sun. Whatever he said to that torpid underling, he started something. The underling called up Creeby. Creeby came out in a surprisingly short time, gathered up Smalnick and whisked him away towards town.
Meanwhile Agatha Tozer had buttonholed Cicely again.
She said in a voice of wistful intensity not intended for Katheren’s ears, “I’d give anything, I’d give everything, to start my Connie on a career. .
3
Two in the afternoon: still no Creeby, still no Smalnick.
Katheren began scraping cigarette ends and crumbs of hash from their plates. George lounged at her shoulder:
“Enjoy washing up, Katheren?”
“I loathe it.”
“That’s the spirit. So do I. Let’s do it together. This bit of travertine, I take it, is the soap?”
He pushed her aside, and with sleeves rolled up, plunged his bare forearms in the basin. Brown forearms, with long, whippy muscles on them. His quick lean fingers flipped the dishes dexterously, rinsing them under hot water, draining them with a flick, stacking them for her to dry. He made an absorbing conjurer’s trick of it.
“Don’t let my wife see you doing that,” said the hearty voice of Beardsley. “She’ll have me doing it myself in two shakes. How are you, folks?”
He came wreathed in smiles, bearing a white flag, willing for bygones to be bygones forever. He sat on the bed and crossed his legs.
“Thinking over what you said about Shanley last night,” he pontificated, “I came to this conclusion. Maybe you’re right, George—halfway right. Suicide. Ever think of that?”
“On a nice day like this?”
“Hal Yes, well—I wouldn’t say anything anyhow, because it’d do Ruth out of her insurance. Married seven years to a drunk like Shanley, she deserves all she can get. The insurance man’s seeing her and Nick now.”
“About Nosy Joe, Rex Shanley, or both?”
“Creeby’s a dope. The insurance company’ll pay off on Shanley all right, no worry about that. You know what I heard? Smalnick just went into Hendrysburg to look at the body.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe he knew Shanley. Could be, couldn’t it? Shanley’s a stage name, and Smalnick may have
met him once under another name, since they both grew up in the show business. I sure hope so, anyhow. If Creeby’s got to be so technical about it, I hope Smalnick identifies the body even if he didn’t know Shanley. Otherwise we’ll be hanging around here for weeks.”
Not merely to gossip, however, had Beardsley come visiting. He was ready at last to get down to brass tacks.
He glanced sharply out the window. He lowered his voice:
“Ruth, I mean. Folks, that girl is scared green.,,
“Of what?”
“Well, you know how she fainted last night. That’s only half of it. She’s scared of being left alone, and she told Mae as much. Mae spent the night with her last night in Number Six. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Mae woke up in the night. Somebody was talking in through the window to Ruth—not knowing Mae was there, I suppose. Mae quick as a flash asked, ‘Who’s there?’ and the talking stopped. Funny business, eh, Brendan? Ruth got pretty near hysterical, and it took a long time to quiet her again, and Mae couldn’t get a word out of her about who it was or what was said.”
He looked at Woar as if he expected comment.
Woar dried his hands, fished out his pipe and began filling it eagerly: “You know, Beardsley, I believe this case will—”
Katheren cleared her throat. Woar noticed, and resumed filling his pipe as if it no longer interested him very much.
“What were you going to say?” Beardsley asked.
“Nothing, really. It’s all very remarkable.”
“What’s she afraid of, we’d like to know?”
“Or who?”
“Yes, or who. And when I say afraid, I mean afraid. Now the Smalnicks are regular folks; they’re seeing she gets to the coast. We’re willing to take her in our car too. She’ll be looked after and protected all right, one way or the other, I can promise you. But who are we protecting her from?”
“Natural question. Isn’t it, Katheren?”
“Very natural.”
“So Mae mentioned you. She thinks you’re pretty smart about digging facts out of people, and maybe you’d talk to Ruth?”
“I talk to her?”
“Don’t kid me, George. You know what you pulled on us last night! Anyhow, she’s coming over when she gets through with the insurance man. See what you can do for us.”
He went away with that off his mind.
“I,” Katheren pointed out, “am not saying anything!”
“So I observe,” said George.
In a little while Nick Leeds and Cicely came across the court, helping Ruth as if she were an invalid.
Cicely made eyes at George, rested her hand on his arm and smiled intimately. Katheren loathed the woman.
Nick sat beside Ruth on the bed. He enveloped her in an aura of masculine protection.
Only a certain slight restlessness in Ruth’s eyes betrayed how nervous she was. Otherwise she waited as placidly as a patient in a dentist’s office—for George to produce forceps and extract her secret like a tooth.
The interview would have bogged down before it began if Katheren hadn’t made tea and offered the remains of a dismal cake. That helped, and Ruth helped further by starting on her story as if she knew exactly what was expected of her.
She had married when she was nineteen. Whether she had ever been in love with Rex Shanley or not was a question that apparently hadn’t arisen. Rex had brushed such finicky considerations aside.
For a time she sang with Al Whicker’s dance band at a second-rate night club on the Palisades; Rex was master of ceremonies in the same establishment, but not contented with his lot. He demanded more money—and lost his job. He drank to regain his self-assurance—and lost out on other jobs. He was, he felt, misunderstood, abused—and inevitably turned for sympathy to the other woman.
“It got so bad we couldn’t go on, so I asked him, Rex, please let’s start all over again fresh...And he promised he’d reform. We sold out everything we had, and bought a second-hand car to come out to California and begin a new life. Rex knew lots of big people in Hollywood. He thought he’d really get going out there. He didn’t see why he couldn’t be as big and rich as any of them. He just couldn’t be poor, it seemed...”
“Hence the large amount of insurance?”
“Rex always thought in big money. Forty thousand was all he could pay the first premium on.”
“But he stopped at auto camps?”
“It was getting stormy, Mr. Brendan, and—and he was drunk. I made him stop here.”
“Don’t you drive?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Did you know any of the others stopping here?”
“They—they were all strangers to me. But very kind.”
Cicely took the cue, and was kind. She put a hand reassuringly on Ruth’s shoulder. “How could anybody be anything else to her, I ask you? As for putting in here, I made Milton do the same. We don’t usually stop at these places, you know. The storm was simply frightful!”
“When did you put in?”
“We were not far behind the Shanleys. They were practically the first people to arrive—or did those college boys arrive before you, dear?”
Ruth couldn’t remember, and Woar wasn’t interested.
“Who are you afraid of, Mrs. Shanley?”
“I’m not afraid. I don’t know why everybody thinks so.”
“You were afraid when you knocked on my door last night, after the fire. Why?”
“I—I wasn’t,” and she looked helplessly at Cicely, at Nick, and out the window.
“You went to Nick Leeds’s cabin. Did you find him?”
Nick said, “She didn’t, so I guess I wasn’t there.”
“Or Beardsley?”
“I didn’t find him either,” said Ruth. “I only wanted to thank him for helping with the fire.”
She was not, Katheren thought, a convincing liar. She sat there folding and unfolding her fingers, and making transparent efforts to hide the lively panic that jigged in the depths of her eyes. But the mystery of Ruth’s fear somehow remained secondary to the pity she evoked. Katheren felt a compelling urge to help her, to protect her, and bother the reasons why.
As did Cicely, evidently, and Nick Leeds. From a total stranger the night before, Nick had lost no time becoming a devoted big brother—or was he in love with Ruth?
After all, she was beautiful as well as helpless.
And Nick, as Katheren knew, was not a man to hem, haw or beat about the bush.
4
The Woars’ tea party fizzled along in futility till Creeby’s car arrived. From the way it drew up, from Creeby’s respectful manner to Smalnick and from Smalnick’s businesslike haste, it was obvious that the best had happened.
Everything else suddenly seemed beside the point. Like school let out or bees on rumors of a swarming, Migler’s guests left off what they were doing and buzzed up to the store.
“Can we go? Can we really?”
“Is everything settled?”
“Do I get the keys to my car?”
Creeby himself hurried off immediately, but his assistant doled out the keys with maddening deliberation.
“Good-by!”
“Have a nice trip, everybody!”
Smalnick evaded Agatha Tozer who, with her reluctant daughter in tow, made valiant efforts to corner him. The Smalnick car was first to leave—a sleek, green Lagonda in all the glory of its English coachwork.
Cicely waved a lace handkerchief.
Fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of exquisite machinery swept out into the highway and vanished westward. The soft tone of its exhaust quieted to silence as Milton shifted into high. The Smalnicks were well away for California.
Then the Tozer trailer heaved like a wakening camel, and the Tozers in their elderly Nash pulled out. They too waved; they too turned west.
“We think it’s best this way,” Mae informed Nick Leeds and the world at large as she helped Ruth into the new Chry
sler. Alden came staggering down from Number Six with the Shanley luggage. George helped him stow it in the rear compartment. More farewells, more waving, and Ruth’s tragic eyes looked back through the rear window as Beardsley sped away.
Nick Leeds followed them in his Mercury.
“That,” said Katheren with a sigh, “is the end of that. We’ll never see any of them again.”
“Knock on wood.”
“I did. Well, having seen enough of Migler’s Mountain View to last a long time, suppose we get on our way?”
The spare was pumped up, Caligula had been walked, the luggage was loaded in the tonneau—but George Brendan Woar looked a dismal look at his bride and admitted:
“You were quite right about the handbill, darling. Its come home to roost.”
“George—Good Lord!”
“That’s what I say, Katheren.”
She clung to his arm and murmured, “I think you’d better tell me all, if you don’t mind.”
“I asked for the key to the Buick of recent vintage. I asked very politely. I was told I couldn’t have it. I was told we were to stay here and wait. Creeby’s coming back for us.”
Katheren let herself sit down on the steps of the grocery store.
She could see all of an almost deserted Migler’s—lifeless save for Boyd and Burnet Winter folding down the tattered top of their Model “A” Ford touring car. Ray Kemp shouldered out of Number Four laden with bags. He barked a bandaged hand. He put the bags down. He performed a little war-dance, swearing and nursing the injured hand...
“George, can’t we do anything?”
“I’m thinking,” he said, and got out his pipe.
“Please think fast, George!”
Five
AFTER a few minutes he put his pipe in his pocket and said, “Get in the car, Katheren.”
He sauntered casually over to the Winter car, before she could tell him about burning holes in his pocket with lighted pipes. She snapped the leash on Caligula and climbed into the Buick. Caligula snuffled expectantly and wriggled his tail. Katheren waited.
Woar came quickly with the keys, quickly unlocked the ignition and started the motor. Before she could ask questions, he sent the car flying through residual puddles towards the highway.
If A Body Page 5