Shamus Dust Read online

  The doctor seemed entirely at ease with the broad expanses of the room, its faded patterns on Indian carpet, its bowed attentiveness; with the kind of Englishness that accommodates to privilege effortlessly, because it never noticed it had any. We hadn’t met before, but the temporary medical examiner wasn’t hard to spot. She had honeyed hair and a cream-colored coat draped across her shoulders, dressed for wisdom and experience when she looked hardly more than thirty-five. Which made us more or less contemporaries, the only customers the Great Eastern was entertaining that morning who obviously hadn’t been at Mafeking. By the time I walked up, a waiter in a white mess jacket was unloading from a tray, the bellhop was leaving my cigarettes on a napkin and the doctor was fingering her wristwatch, motioning at the seat opposite. “The coffee is for you. We’re rather late starting.”

  I slipped the pack of cigarettes out of the napkin and into my pocket, poured a half-cup of burned black coffee from a silver pot, added some scalded milk from another and watched the result churn and clot in the cup. The doctor had a slim document case zipped open in her lap. I lit one of my own cigarettes, waved out the match and asked, “So who was he?”

  Dr. Swinford straightened a small cameo pinned at the throat of her blouse, hesitated, and then lifted out a file, opened it flat on the table in front of her and set the case by her ankle. She had a high, clear forehead, and a mouth that might have a spectacular smile. Just not here or for now. For now, the doctor would let me decide myself who Raymond Jarrett was, and for that she cut a furrow across her brow and began reading to me softly from the file.

  Raymond Jarrett had been thirty years old, a sometime street hustler hauled in once on a gross indecency charge seven years before. After his brush with the law, he’d moved off the streets and worked a string of addresses in the City, noted in his file. That was all. There were other priorities in wartime. From his one and only bust, right up until his final crowded hours, the victim’s police record amounted to postcards on a career grifter that Vice always knew where to find.

  Evidently Jarrett had been working his Christmas holiday. Dr. Swinford hadn’t completed her postmortem, but preliminaries showed he was hopped to the hairline and trade was brisk. The next thing certain put him in the driver’s seat of a Singer Roadster, abandoned without its keys on a bombsite in Cloth Fair, with evidence indicating Jarrett had been shot there from the passenger side of the convertible. His assailant had pushed a .38 into his left side below the armpit, and fired once. The bullet had lodged in the angle of the car’s bodywork behind the seat frame on the driver’s side, removed part of the victim’s shoulder traveling through, and left a sweep of blood and muscle that started at the roof lining and trailed slantwise across the windshield. Perhaps because the killer hurried the shot, it hadn’t killed Jarrett where he sat. Or else the victim saw it coming and scrambled to get out of the seat. Either way, the gunshot and his weight on the door had pitched him outside the car.

  From there, Jarrett had picked himself up and headed in the direction of St. Bartholomew’s church. Blood in the snowfall traced his route along Cloth Fair. There were cuts on his palms and wrists where he’d fallen, his arms were bruised, but still he kept going. So did his killer. Jarrett had flopped on the bench inside of the porch when his assailant caught up, pressed the .38 in the back of his head and fired a second time, inward and downward, left side again. No more getting up and running. The second gunshot had sprayed Jarrett’s brains in a shallow arc across the whitewashed walls and embedded itself in the bench’s backrest. The body carried no identification or any keys, but that lost City Police no time at all. The nurse reporting the incident had also given the name and residence of the victim and since the investigating detective happened to know the owner of the building was a City councilman, all he did was call him to get access right away.

  The doctor’s gaze lifted, deep and distant as hills after rain. “Nurse Estelle Greer who found the body claims she was inside the church and heard nothing of the gunshot. You were there this morning. Do you really think she might not have?”

  I pushed aside the clotted coffee. Wondered if the doctor had any idea of the noise the .38 would make inside a church, then decided it was the wrong question anyway. You didn’t have to believe Nurse Greer’s story, but it was hard to picture her shooting Jarrett twice over, and trailing him in the snow like a wounded animal to do it. Harder still to see her leaving him for dead and then coolly calling in the murder to City Police. Nurse Greer had been edgy and guarded when we talked, but fall across the bloodied corpse of a neighbor early Christmas morning and edgy is how you’re supposed to be. “It’s possible she didn’t hear. On the other hand, if you really want the nurse for this, she didn’t have to be inside the church at all. She could have been in the porch standing over a dead man, pointing a smoking .38. Though if she was, she would have been a mess. Two gunshots at less than arm’s length would bloody her hands, her face, her clothes, her hair. When you run to a callbox to report a murder it’s not how you want to be remembered by a chance passerby. Unless you think she had time enough to go back home and clean up.”

  “She might. I timed a taper you took from the Christmas crib inside the church to compare it with the two Nurse Greer left burning there. I’m not sure it’s science, but it seems they were lit at least an hour and a half before the police officer says you arrived. That was around six o’clock this morning, meaning she might well have left the church before four-thirty. Yet it was after five o’clock when the duty officer logged her call to Bishopsgate police. Once we know exactly when you extinguished the candles at the crib, we can be more precise. Don’t you agree?”

  It wasn’t an inquiry. She laced long fingers under her chin and stitched back a frown while I went on wondering about her. Dr. Swinford was straight-ahead and determined and a little intense, probably well-connected, and schooled where they don’t burden you with diffidence in dealing with your fellow man. It had made her innocent of needing to fit a system, handed her a gift for making a room grow small around her, and a dress sense there is no other way to acquire. Taken altogether, it’s a start in life. “If it isn’t science, Doctor, it won’t make any difference if I agree or not. Anyway, how temporary are you?”

  The pale eyes rounded slow as moonrise, her mouth working at a basement obscenity. Then, unhurried as if she wouldn’t want me to lose her meaning in translation, “I was physician here at the City Police Hospital for more than three years, trained under Dr. Templeton in legal medicine. Until he returns from Christmas leave, I’m standing in for him as forensic examiner. Hard as it may be for you to take in, Mr. Newman, the police board did not appoint a novice. Not even temporarily. Try not to be disappointed.”

  I ground out the cigarette and watched a faint stripe flush at her throat above the cameo. Besides the chime of china cups, it was the loudest thing in the room. “Then why the rush to make an impression? Leave the nurse to City detectives, stay out of their hair and don’t think of trying to ritz them the way you’ve been ritzing me. It’s quaint of you, but those boys have no notion of gallantry. They’ll poison their own grandmothers before they ask your advice.” She stiffened and caught her breath, then relaxed extravagantly, squared Jarrett’s file in her lap and slotted it in the case down by her shoes. “The roadster Jarrett got shot in, was it his?”

  The doctor straightened up, put a festive mood in her voice and gave me the bright-eyed smile that said never mind that this had been strictly business, she would always look back on our half-hour together as the high spot of the holiday. “No, it wasn’t his. The car belongs to Professor Michael Garfield. You may have heard of him. Principal Archaeologist to the City Corporation, discoverer of our Roman fort in the City. These last six months he’s been all over the broadsheets and wireless talks. Highly regarded from Mr. Churchill on down.”

  “Does he say his car was stolen?”

  “So far as I am aware, he’s not answering hi
s telephone this morning.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’s still making friends at wherever Jarrett was partying last night. Do you know the professor, or is he just a pinup in the police canteen?”

  She hoisted the slender case to her knee, kept the bright, tight smile posted and still resisted wasting the obscenity on me, however gratifying it might be. “We’ve never met. Now excuse me. I have Christmas presents to deliver.”

  I got to my feet and stayed there while she threaded the room, past an all-weather type in heavy tweeds and ginger moustaches, breakfasting alone. He had soft, dewy eyes that searched for pheasants croaking in stubble fields, waiting for the beaters. I’d been watching him feed bacon rinds off his plate to a liver-colored Springer that lay huffing under his chair, close enough to hook its tongue around the rinds without a strain. The doctor skirted his table and nodded wistfully at the tweeds, got back a shuffle of the ginger moustaches and went out through the double doors. Her waiter loitered under the room’s Christmas tree, appreciating her exit. When he’d gotten the rubber out of his neck, I waved him over.

  “Sir?”

  “Breakfast.” I pointed at the customer with the dog. “I’ll take whatever the colonel had. No coffee.”

  The waiter fluttered his lashes at the dining room’s longcase clock. “Breakfast is served until ten o’clock, sir. Luncheon service will commence at midday.” And glided away, past tables laid with linen crisp enough to cut him off at the knees. The long hand of the clock moved to two minutes past the hour.

  I pushed out through the foyer’s revolving door and lit a cigarette at the top of the hotel steps. It was hardly mid-morning and I’d had four different conversations about the murder of a hustler whose loss nobody regretted, but still made them uneasy. It troubled Louis to speak ill of the dead, no more than that. Why the nurse and the councilor and the City’s acting examiner were on edge was harder to tell.

  While I stood there, a figure in an ex-army greatcoat made an abrupt about-face off the sidewalk and started an untidy diagonal up the hotel steps. He was steadying a briefcase tucked high under his arm, deep-breathing for the ascent, and when his progress slowed only five steps short of the summit you wanted to urge him on. I snapped the cigarette, went down to meet him and put a hand under his elbow. “Things being equal, pal, you’re about to enter the Great Eastern Hotel. On the whole they prefer decorous and sober, but they absolutely insist on collar and tie. Want to change your mind while you’re still ahead?”

  He had to be older than he looked, wore a shadow across his lip for a moustache, a pallor the gray putty of overworked glands and an air of unraveling surprise. I didn’t doubt he heard me, but in the way a deckhand hears breakers in a fog. It took time for the idea to percolate. When it did, he braced against the hold I had on his arm and with elaborate politeness announced, “I can absolutely promise to be decorous.” He was high as a kite. I got him up the last steps and into a quadrant of the revolving door, where he could hold steady with the brass rail. Once in there, he squared up, filled his lungs and said cordially, “You’re a pal, pal.” Then leaned his forehead on the glass and let the revolve propel him inside the hotel foyer. I left him to it and dropped down to the street. I had a Christmas present of my own to deliver.

  Eighty yards along Liverpool Street, past the empty cab ranks, was a high, narrow, soot-brick alley named Sun Street Passage for a joke. It ran between two City rail stations, each the size of a small country town. On its east side, Liverpool Street terminus was closed for the holiday. On its west side, Broad Street station was a stretch of abandoned platforms, walled-off and bombed to dereliction. The alley was so sheltered, the night’s blizzard had stopped dead inside its maw, a scatter of powder stirring on the flagstones as if it had blown in under a door. Brick arches with deep recesses ran its whole length, and on a dead winter forenoon Sun Street Passage was passing for warm if you were desperate enough. Dillys Valentine was sitting hunched on a packing crate in one of the east-side recesses. The one she called her morning room.

  She was gazing over a private horizon with an elbow rested on a knee. Wore a flyblown trench coat belted tight at her waist and a red beret with a raddle of mouse-blond hair pushed under. Her chin propped weightless on one gloved knuckle. A cigarette hooked under the knuckle was trying to set the fingers of the glove alight.

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  She rubbed a thumbnail under her nose and didn’t look up. “Oh, for God’s sake, Newman, it’s not a private parlor. Got a cigarette?” The voice was gravel. The face worn beyond a powder disguise. I took out the pack of Passing Clouds the bellhop had brought me and put it beside her on the crate. Her fingers dropped the lighted cigarette stub under a heel.

  “Louis said I should talk to you about Reilly.”

  Miss Dillys’s gaze flickered. I sat opposite her on the tread of an iron stair that climbed to the level of the station platforms. She coughed thickly and took a long minute to consider. “Terry’s all right. He was here earlier. Left me a present.” She patted the weight of a bottle inside the trench coat. “And now you’re here. Must be Christmas.”

  “I heard he disappeared last night. I also heard Jarrett was his wicked fairy.”

  Miss Dillys made a mouth. “If it wasn’t Jarrett it would have been some other sod. Terry needed somebody keeping an eye on him.”

  “Now he needs somebody else. You saw him last night?”

  She picked up the Passing Clouds and turned them over and around. The pack was pink, of the kind that can get a petunia a reputation, and in the center a portrait of a cavalier, languid in lace cuffs and hat feathers, shimmering in silks. “My, my, are these for me? Not your color I suppose.”

  I shrugged a why not and she asked, “Why would I tell you about Terry?”

  “Because when a cop asks, sooner or later you’ll tell him. And I’m twice as polite.”

  She pushed open the flap and pried out the foil with a fingernail, waved the open pack under her nose and pouted, then slotted an oval cigarette in the pout. It stayed there while I found a match to light it. “Louis sent you?”

  “That’s right.”

  Miss Dillys turned back to her private horizon, flattened the silver foil across her knee and smoothed the creases while she thought about that, “I didn’t see Terry last night. I saw Jarrett.” She sniffed and tilted her chin at the stair behind me. “At the office.” The iron stair climbed to a platform at the west edge of the station, freight-only since wartime, where a clerk left a stove burning in a waiting room after the last night train left. In a winter freeze and a coal shortage, Miss Dillys’s office was her special draw, for a fading clientele and acquaintances alike. “Jarrett said Terry was working. He was expecting him. But come one in the morning there’s no Terry and Jarrett ups and goes. It was the last I saw of him. Then an hour after, a City type walks in. Nice clothes, not bad looking. Never saw him before. I thought Christmas had come early. Then he asks me where he can find Mister Jarrett, as if he’s lost his bleeding bridge partner. Well how would I know? Nice manners though. I said to try Mister Jarrett’s social secretary next door along and he wished me goodnight.” She pushed a rat-tail back under the slope of the beret with the lift of the chin that was her social secretary impression. “You know the rest.”

  “Some of it. Would you recognize the City type again?”

  “We’d recognize each other, wouldn’t we?” She dragged a heel across the powder of snow. Something in the conversation made her nose twitch and set her head on one side. “Are you kidding me, Newman?”

  “Kidding about what?”

  “About City coppers being interested in how Jarrett got himself killed. Do me a favor. They’d have to explain how come they left him alone all these years wouldn’t they? It would embarrass the poor dears. Not to mention their employers.” She wagged a gloved finger in front of her mouth, the lips painted the same front-door red as
her beret. “You are kidding me.”

  “Miss Valentine, I am not.”

  She leered at that and dug in her pocket for Terry Reilly’s Christmas gift, prized the stopper from the bottle and wiped a palm across the neck. “Come off it, Newman. They only ever call me Miss Valentine in court. Just for that, you can have lesson one on Mister Jarrett and City Police.”

  Her hand held out the bottle. I was halfway to taking it. And then I didn’t have her attention any longer. She was looking straight past me slack jawed, eyes wide and fixed in wonder, her free hand brushing past her mouth so that the glove smeared red across her cheek. I rolled hard against the rail at the side of the stair and jumped an elbow high alongside my face. Just not high enough or fast enough to beat a black, pulping blow that bit deep behind my ear and pitched me across her knees. I felt thin arms around my shoulders. Smelled cheap perfume in her lap. Heard shattering glass. Then the high, distant wail of a small girl playing in the street who trips and grazes her shins. Nothing serious, just unexpected. Then the wail shut off like the closing of a vault.

  My head felt as if somebody was trying to break in through the roof. Every lift of an eyelid made me clammy and sick. I was learning how to breathe and not move a hair when a sudden, sour smell of barroom filled the back of my throat and I gagged, rolled on my side and sat up. A bloodied mess trickled through my fingers. Glass splinters sparked like diamonds on the blue-brick floor. I found a handkerchief and ripped it in two strips, knotted them around my hand with my teeth and looked over at Dillys Valentine.

  She was just out of touching distance, knees drawn under her chin and arms at her sides, slumped against the packing crate with the beret slanted across an eye. Her hair fell loose. The rat-tail dabbled in a stain that covered the shoulder of her coat, saturated her upper arm, welled in the crook of her elbow and spread in a pool at her hip. The jagged end of the whisky bottle had hit so hard it was still bedded in the angle of her jaw.