Shamus Dust Read online

  “I’m sure you would have. What time was this exactly?”

  She bit behind her lip and put pale dimples in her cheeks. “Normally I leave here at around a quarter to five, a little earlier this morning so I could go into the church. I might have spent ten minutes inside. I’m afraid I don’t know exactly.” An idea was bothering her. It swung her gaze up off her shoes for the first time since I walked in her door. “I was told to wait until a policeman came. But aren’t you American?”

  In the photograph behind her a young flyer with a diffident smile looked surprised at finding himself in uniform. He was barely twenty, recently passed out of air school, still wearing the innocence he lost the first day he found out what the training was for. There is no way back to it, and every time she walked in the door it was the way she wanted to remember him. I opened the top of my coat, pulled a card from my wallet and put it in the fingertips peeking out from her cape. “I’m here for the owner of your neighbor’s house, Miss Greer. Anything you want to tell me will help, but you don’t have to say a thing. The only questions you absolutely have to answer are the ones a police detective will ask.”

  Nurse Greer blinked at the card, as if she recalled a promise she once made not to talk to strangers. “What else is there to say? When I first saw him lying there, I supposed it was someone sleeping off Christmas Eve. Then when I saw blood everywhere and realized who it was, I tried to find out where he was hurt, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing anyone could have done. So I ran to the nearest telephone box, in West Smithfield.” She bit down hard on her lip again and waited for the story to grow on me.

  “Did you know your neighbor, Miss Greer?”

  “I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was living opposite.” Her chin jutted. “Most houses in the court are rented. People come and go. We spoke once or twice at most.”

  “You knew his name?”

  “He said Jarrett. Raymond, I think. I told him mine. It was practically all the conversation we had.”

  “But you noticed his callers. I mean the good-looking boys and well-dressed older men.”

  Nurse Greer stiffened then took another breath. “No, Mr. Newman. I’m hardly here to notice. When I’m not at the hospital, I’m working behind a bar. Why don’t you ask someone who has the time to pry? Now please…” She stepped across the hallway and reached for the latch, flattened against the wall not to get too close. You had to hand it to her. She hadn’t any powder on her nose or color on her cheeks or lipstick on her mouth. The hospital would have its rules. But there in the hallway, close enough to feel the flutter of her breath, hospital rules were doing Nurse Greer no harm at all.

  I put a shoulder against the door. “The call you ran to the square to make. Did you see anybody else out walking? Think about it, Miss Greer. When City Police arrive, they’ll want to know.”

  For two seconds her eyes drew the light out of the room, then saw the whole idea was ridiculous and gave it all back. “Before five o’clock on Christmas morning, in this weather? Did you see anyone? Look, I’ve already told you everything I can think of. I want you to go.”

  “You didn’t tell me you lit a candle at the crib.”

  Her knuckles whitened on the latch. She gave a small gasp of disbelief, put her head back against the wall and looked along the rose pattern on the wallpaper. “Because I didn’t imagine it could possibly interest you. As a matter of fact, just lately I light two. If a real police detective should ask me, I’ll be sure to tell him.”

  I pulled my shoulder off the door and stepped aside, to give her room enough to throw me out.

  THREE

  I was renting an office in the Thornburgh Building that year, a stucco-fronted block near the top of Snow Hill. It was about the one building on the rise that had a good war. Plenty of its neighbors hadn’t come through so well. Barely a hundred feet downhill a police station had taken a direct hit. Beyond it on both sides, the street was level rubble. Where the curve of the hill dropped into Farringdon, buildings still billowed under tarpaulin as if they had plague inside. Uphill, on the crest of the rise, the blast of a near miss had taken out the stained glass of St. Sepulchre, and its mystery along with the glass. Next to it, all the Thornburgh had to show were the pickaxe scars of bomb splinters in a rash across its face. Its windows had been fixed, and the luck of it was, it never had any mystery to lose.

  An office anyplace in the City was overpriced and hard to find. Harder still when the address had a ring to it and liked to guarantee a better class of customer. Maybe it did at that, if what you had for sale was fancy accounting or imported fashions or a quarter-mile of chalk stream running off the downs. But nobody had walked in my office yet in a better class of trouble, and all the Thornburgh was bringing me were better fed accents living past their means, wearing the high-hat manner in half sizes.

  Sometimes they glided in, languid and exquisite, leading complicated lives they needed to make less expensive. Others came high-strung, hesitating before they stepped inside, looked downhill at a police station and uphill at a church and decided they were in their kind of neighborhood after all. But some were just plain scared, and looking up and down the hill was no help because police were a part of their problem and their problem was way beyond prayer. So they leaned on the buzzer, waited to be invited inside, and took the customer chair as if they’d found the last seat in a lifeboat. Lately, I’d been seeing my share of the scared variety.

  Trouble was in the air. Right now there were Soviets in Berlin, Communists in Manchuria, Zionists in Palestine. And the Americans on Bikini Atoll weren’t there for the beaches or the coconuts. But in the end, those were just headlines in the foreign pages. The City of London had troubles of its own. It had an empire waving goodbye, a currency stepping off a cliff, and some high-toned citizens with singular tastes and private arrangements they couldn’t buy off anymore. Berlin and Bikini passed over their heads. What walked them through my door were the tastes and the private arrangements. A chrome-plated address on Snow Hill made no difference. They would have found me anywhere.

  The fifth floor of the Thornburgh was one long corridor with offices either side, most of them with a name stenciled on a half-glass door, some of them with a string of letters after to impress anybody who wasn’t in the business. Currently, their doors were advertising commercial agencies, bookkeeping or import-export, and for all I knew they were making an honest living in regular hours inside, doing just what it said on the glass. At daybreak Christmas morning the whole floor was hung with paper streamers and silent as craters on the moon. My office led off a waiting recess at the end of the corridor. I pushed open the door, switched on a light and picked up the telephone. It had been ringing since I left the elevator.

  A woman’s voice, clipped and wide awake, said, “I’m pleased to find you in your office, Mr. Newman.” And in case I mistook it for a holiday greeting, introduced herself. “I’m Dr. Swinford, acting for the City forensic medical examiner, responsible for the postmortem on a body found earlier this morning. You were at the scene in some capacity. I have your card, together with a message you left for Detective Inspector McAlester, whose case this is. The inspector is currently unavailable. You might care to explain the circumstance to me.”

  I didn’t know whether or not I cared to, but I explained anyway. “The circumstance, Doctor, was a gunshot murder, in the porch of St. Bartholomew’s. I was there looking for the detective inspector but he wasn’t available then either, so I stepped into the church. There were two candles lighted at a Christmas crib inside, left by the nurse who reported the body. I thought they could be important, and if they were then they wouldn’t wait until McAlester arrived. So I snuffed them out and passed them to the officer on duty, along with the rest of the packet they came in. Burn a sample and it ought to tell you what time the nurse lit hers and confirm or deny whatever story she has, as well as the time your victim died, near enough. The message for Mc
Alester was that I could explain what I just explained to you. In case he thought he had to beat a confession out of the candles.”

  The electrics in the elevator shaft whooped like a train in a cutting and shook the thin party wall. We had two seconds of silence while she thought around the situation. “I see. Well, you certainly were thinking on your feet, Mr. Newman. No doubt the detective inspector will be most grateful for your prompt action. To do as you suggest, of course, we should need to know exactly when you extinguished the candles.”

  “That’s right, Doctor, you would. And when my notes get typed I promise to send a copy. Today, I don’t have a secretary.” It was strictly the truth. Not Christmas Day, or any other day of the year. But then, I didn’t have any notes to type either. We took another break while she absorbed it all. When the voice returned it had added an edge where the sparkle had been.

  “No, of course not. But we might go through this sooner, mightn’t we? Shall we say the Great Eastern at nine-fifteen, in the breakfast room?”

  I said yes to that and the forensic examiner’s stand-in hung up. I was still thinking about why the hurry when a chair scraped outside.

  The lounge seats in the recess floated in a blue fog. In the middle of the fog, a heavy-set figure in a derby sat with his palms crossed on the silver top of an ebony cane. He wore a fox-collar coat open on a necktie with a City crest and might have been sixty, but it was hard to tell. His hand scooped at the cigar smoke as he levered out of the seat. I looked along the line of chairs and the magazines on a low table in front of him, at a dozen sprigs of paper holly pinned around the walls and thought, Lucky man! The floor linoleum wore a holiday shine. I had my window blind pulled down over the view and my name on the sugar glass in the door didn’t have any letters after to confuse him. It would never look more enticing. I shooed the door wider and motioned him through. “Merry Christmas, Councilor. Won’t you step inside?”

  I took his derby, laid the hat next to his keys on the desk and let him get arranged in the customer seat, palms crossed over the ebony cane as before. His narrow eyes saddened. His hair shone in flat stripes across the dome of his head, where you could count them if conversation ran thin. “You cause me embarrassment, Newman, by not following my instructions. Our understanding was to deliver those keys, not to return them to me. I have received a further telephone call from Detective Inspector McAlester, requesting them urgently.” His voice was level and deliberate, not as embarrassed as it made out.

  I squared a pencil on the desk blotter and tilted back in my chair. “You had two instructions, Councilor. Making a delivery was one of them. The other was to find out why City Police called you in the first place. When I got to the address, it turned out the detective inspector was otherwise engaged and waiting there to talk to him wouldn’t have worked. He’s not the outgoing type. But I had your keys, so I took a look inside for myself. Now it’s done and your driver can deliver them, along with an apology. As for the embarrassment, save it. Right now, McAlester wouldn’t notice if you were rolling naked in the snow. He has other things on his mind.” The councilor flicked ash off his cigar. “Indeed?” He had a way of tasting words before he uttered them. “And what might be on his mind?”

  I flushed a cigarette from a hollow pack, tapped it on the chair arm and thought how McAlester would answer that. It didn’t translate. “His immediate concern is a body discovered this morning. Male, early thirties, last name Jarrett, lately residing at the address you own. But his immediate concern will be as nothing compared to the ones he’ll have when he uses those keys. Did you know your tenant, Councilor?”

  Drake stiffened, lost some of his high color along with his air of irritation, and asked, “Dead? How?”

  “Well I’m not the medical examiner, but my impression is that his wounds were not self-inflicted.” I set my elbows on the desk edge, propped my chin on my knuckles and gave him the sad eyes back. “Councilor Drake, your tenant was paying for his expenses, his clothes, his records, his perfume and your rent by photographing good-looking young men on your premises. Pictures of the kind that circulate in plain covers to the jaded, who need a map to peek at before they can travel. As a going business, it was way outside the law, and that might be awkward for you. Just not as awkward as the photographs Jarrett was taking of the young men’s admirers. Acts of gross indecency have been a felony in this country for sixty years. Which not only makes life difficult for citizens that way inclined, it invites other citizens to a land of wild opportunity. Your tenant was working a blackmail racket. Meaning that soon a City detective will be asking you the question I just did, and he’ll notice when he doesn’t get an answer. How well did you know Raymond Jarrett?”

  Drake blinked and tasted words again, then squinted past the light on the desk. “As I recollect, not at all. You say he was a tenant. It is conceivable our paths may have crossed. Though I would hardly expect to have known him personally. I own many properties in the City, Mr. Newman. Residential and commercial, large and small. Naturally, records can be made available to any police inquiry that may follow. As for the rest, I had not the least idea.”

  I pushed back my chair and moved around the desk to bring him an ashtray for the cigar he was letting die between his fingers. “Well that’s wonderful, Councilor. Tell it the same way to McAlester when he drops by. You’ll have him spellbound.”

  FOUR

  A cab dragged by on Liverpool Street hushed by snow, rolled past the entrance to the Great Eastern Hotel and used the empty rank at the rail station to turn around. Daybreak shied at the window of the hotel barbershop. I was its only customer. Louis had something on his mind.

  “Did you know this was Bethlehem once, Mr. Newman? Right on this spot used to be the hospital of St. Mary Bethlehem. Bedlam. The madhouse. Only they don’t put up a sign to say so.” He coiled a hot towel around my face and kidded me with a high, keening laugh. Louis was compact and dapper, wore a wisp of goatee on his chin and a graying Cab Calloway over his lip.

  I settled in his chair, drowsy on the fat smell of shaving soap, the hot towel chasing a murder out of my thoughts. “This whole town’s a madhouse. Tell me about Christmas on the island.”

  Louis unwound the towel and considered. “To say the truth, Mr. Newman, I don’t recall Christmas but as a child.” I murmured nobody ever does and we agreed on that. He worked a brush in the soap and laid a stripe of lather from ear to ear. “The island starts Christmas on St. Lucy’s day, December thirteen. To a boy it seems holiday is come for good. So every morning I set off along the dirt road to Vieux Fort, to where it has a left turn to the ocean, a right turn to the sea, and a fig tree I could sit under and decide which way to take. Most days, the breeze in that fig tree would make up my mind. But the Atlantic in December is always too cool. No matter what breeze was blowing, Christmas Day I went swimming in the Caribbean.” His fingertips eased out my jaw.

  “Sounds hard to leave.”

  “Mr. Newman, when you get invited to a war you leave. Hard or not makes no difference, you know that. All I decided when it was over was to see the country I was fighting for. I had an officer tell me I would be made most welcome and I took him at his word. Now I think of it, I don’t believe that lieutenant ever did reside in Limehouse.” The high laugh again while the razor flopped on a leather strop. A thumb gouged soap off my mouth and stretched the beard along my jaw. Louis took one stroke from my ear to the point of my chin, wiped the blade on the heel of his hand and started back in a figure eight. We got to what was on his mind. “You hear about the shooting last night, Mr. Newman?” I said I’d heard. His wide eyes lidded. “It’s unchristian to say ill of the dead, I know, but that man had a real bad reputation. They say a boy he was running on the street is skipped out.”

  He had my nose pressed flat against a stud on his jacket, working across my cheekbone. The blade scraped my top lip and snapped back in the bone handle. The rest of the lather wiped off with
a towel. I could still see his fig tree swaying in the breeze. “You didn’t learn this business barefoot on the beach.”

  His palms patted talcum into the razor burn. “I did not. Momma had a chandler store, and five growing boys to fetch and carry around the port. It made fine, free living. But I was a young fellow that relied on eating and I needed to take a trade. Choices you make, Mr. Newman, are not such a complicated thing.” He stepped behind the chair, took away the cotton cloth and wound the seatback upright.

  I peered at him in the mirror. “The boy who skipped last night. Does he have a name?”

  Louis’ head tilted. “All I hear is Reilly. Took his custom from the rail station, they say. He has a friend works as housekeeper right here in this hotel. I never saw the boy myself, but I don’t doubt he’s better off and gone. You want to know about him, most likely Miss Dillys will know. She’ll be where she always is at this hour.” We went back to small talk. Louis brushed off my jacket, handed me my coat, then went ahead to pull open the door. Not the door to Liverpool Street I’d walked in by, but his exit at rear of the barbershop that led into the hotel foyer. I checked the coat at a counter by a curving stair, called over a bellhop and sent out for cigarettes, then followed a sign pointing upward to the breakfast room.

  Breakfast at the Great Eastern Hotel was a colonial affair, a hush of chintz and chiming silver where ancients in fly collars sat under a colored-glass dome and waded through kippers and kedgeree. There were barely a dozen people still eating, scattered through the room in ones and twos like an anarchists’ convention. Along the south wall there were window bays looking out on Liverpool Street high above the sidewalk. In the farthest bay, remote from the other customers, Dr. Swinford sat at a table for two.