Shamus Dust Read online

  I put down the travel grip I was carrying, pulled out the chair and waved his question away. “It’s Christmas. There aren’t any.”

  He twitched his jug ears and levelled the pencil between his fingertips, and didn’t ask what I was doing there. A photograph on the wall behind him showed his children standing at attention in a line. They looked apprehensive. “Season of Goodwill though this may be, Newman, our newspapers tomorrow will be reporting not one but two murders on our doorstep. And while you may think that between these two high crimes my energies would be sufficiently occupied, you would be wrong. For as he dined today, Commissioner Stearns received a telephone call, a complaint that you called this morning at the home of a university professor and adviser to the Corporation, to question his junior assistant. In the name of all that’s wonderful, the commissioner was taking Christmas lunch with his family. This is the City. What were you thinking?”

  Littomy said the City. Not the city. In ’47 London was a metropolis crowding three million people in a hundred square miles, sitting at the heart of an empire and playing a long, losing hand to keep it. A city like no other or just like any other, depending what you had in mind. Most of the possibilities were on offer, and part of its charm was that while you were deciding which to go after, it would give you benefit of the doubt. Stay clear of trouble and its police would salute, hold the traffic and walk you across the street. Step out of line and they’d lose the rulebook faster than you could answer your name. Yours to choose. The city was liberal that way.

  The City of London was different. A single square mile, financial heart of the metropolis, where banks and insurance offices, trading houses and exchange floors mined the motherlode and squeezed out every other way of living. It had a resident population that could fit in the back of a limousine, and when its offices emptied and headed home at nights, they left behind a ghost town. Meaning that the possibilities for lawbreaking were rarefied, best appreciated by men who wore club ties and returned home late to wives with headaches and hearts of diamond. Meaning also that its police were left to concentrate on those things closest to the City’s heart. It had twelve hundred officers paid to keep the traffic moving, eject undesirables not the City’s own, and otherwise maintain an atmosphere congenial to the making of loud money. Ordinarily the setup worked like a Swiss timepiece. In the City a killing was strictly a figure of speech. Most days of the year you stood a better chance of getting shot at in a lighthouse. But the real beauty of the arrangement was this: all twelve hundred of its officers answered to nobody but the Corporation, and inside the one square mile they policed, no London metropolitan officer of any rank had any kind of jurisdiction whatever. The City’s finest were the City’s own. Which was cozy. Because they had their streets nailed down and barely a handful of residents to protect and serve. As for the Corporation, it decided long ago that who got law and order inside that one square mile was nobody’s business but its own. I unbuttoned my coat and jacket and waited to hear what came next.

  “Professor Garfield’s car was found abandoned earlier today; stolen, we may assume, in connection with the nearby murder of a known male prostitute. Meanwhile, your barefaced questioning of the professor’s young assistant has affronted the boy’s father. We have calmed the man, confirmed to him that Professor Garfield is subject to no police inquiry of any sort, and assured him we shall establish what in God’s name you thought you were doing interviewing his son.” He held up a hand to break his own flow. “There is more. It need not concern us.”

  Littomy was tall even sitting, better than six feet and a half, gaunt-thin in a uniform jacket. He ran one hand across a sparse, gray hairline and pinched the knot in his necktie with the other. His eyes hooded as he reflected. “Beauforts are society, Newman. This evening, Sir Hector and Lady Stearns will attend their Christmas ball. He will not have the Beaufort family troubled. We endeavor to locate the professor merely to seek his assistance regarding the presumed theft of his motorcar. However, since the matter also touches on a murder inquiry, it follows that your interest is at an end. Your questioning of the Beaufort boy was a grievous error of judgment. The commissioner has explained the same to his father.” He leveled out in his chair. It was the only way his knees fit under the desk.

  “And if it wasn’t an error?”

  Littomy didn’t move a hair, just let go the club manner the way he would drop a shirt in the laundry, and talked at shadows on his ceiling. “These are two vice killings. As inconsequential as they are most certainly connected. Detective Inspector McAlester will investigate them as such. And though our newssheets will doubtless question police vigilance and the safety of our streets, it’s eyewash and they know it. The victims were a common pimp and a whore, inhabiting the self-same gutter as their assailants. The perpetrators will be duly apprehended. Meanwhile, understand that Beaufort will not have his son even remotely connected. We have cooperated in the past, Newman. We shall again. Forget the professor. Forget his young assistant. Neither is your concern.” Then, as an afterthought, “Your client is a City councilor.”

  Fine dust drifted past the light on his desk, rising on the dry sourness you breathe in all police stations everywhere. They refine it out of passing falsehoods, routine evasions, threats and mean deceits. I flicked a speck off the band around my hat and motioned at the file on his desk. “The victim lived at a property belonging to Councilor Drake. I got a call from him to deliver keys to McAlester. When we missed each other, I returned the keys to the councilor. Your file ought to say the same.”

  Littomy put his hands behind his head and stretched against the seatback. “Perhaps. Though why, I wonder, would Councilor Drake dispatch a private investigator on an errand any of his own employees might have performed?”

  “He didn’t say. Besides, looking up the professor was my idea not his. I was curious, Garfield wasn’t home, so I talked to the boy. And still I’m curious. But then I don’t have a medical examiner on hand when a question occurs.”

  The superintendent’s gaze flickered across my face. “What question occurs?”

  Craning up at Littomy was giving me a crick in the neck. I pushed back my chair and stood behind it. “The court the professor lives on has a janitor. I didn’t see him when I went there this morning, but a visitor isn’t a thing a janitor misses. So, this afternoon I dropped by again to introduce myself. He doesn’t get a lot of company. We got along. I told him Professor Garfield couldn’t be located and how people were getting anxious, left a card and asked him to call when the professor got back. He promised he would do that, but evidently something was bothering him. When I asked him what it was, he said an odd thing happened after I left this morning. The professor’s young friend walked out of the house with a gift-wrapped box, emptied a garbage can in a corner of the yard and dropped the box inside. Then he put the garbage back on top.” Snowflakes drifted past the window. The room went on sweating. “It made the janitor wonder if the refined thing nowadays is to Christmas-wrap the trash. So when the boy left, he went over to find out. What he found in the garbage was a stylish leather travel grip, loose-wrapped in gift paper, with a classy winter coat inside. He thought they both might be worth money cleaned up and so set them apart. Then I arrived and the idea lost its appeal.” I reached down beside the chair and lifted the grip onto Littomy’s desk. “Because what needed cleaning off were blood stains. Maybe the janitor thought the professor’s Christmas turkey had put up a fight, but when he heard Garfield was missing, he could add things together as well as you or I can. Difference is, you can ask your medical examiner who the blood might belong to.”

  When I closed the door, Littomy was still strung out in his chair, fingers laced behind his neck like Huckleberry Finn in a hammock.

  EIGHT

  My taxi crawled west on Holborn, followed a snake of tire ridges past the City boundary and made south toward the river. On Kingsway the going got easier, the cab circled Aldwych and Bush House,
then drifted left across the traffic to a marquee with a red pitched roof connecting the Waldorf to the curb. A doorman stepped up in livery and a tall hat, shook open an umbrella, pulled on the cab door and let me out. He looked me over, let a greeting die on his lips and moved directly to a dove-gray Armstrong limousine waiting next in line. I was at the hotel entrance before I glanced back to where the doorman had the umbrella lofted over a woman getting out of the back seat. She was stretching an ankle for the curb and wore a flawless, high-shouldered fur that might have been matched for the pearl-white tuxedo following her out of the car. But I didn’t think so. Related, very probably, but one look said neither the fur nor the tuxedo would notice if the other was walking barefoot on glass. I moved into the lobby, checked my coat and followed the crush. I had on my dark navy suit, a sober tie, a mirror shine on my shoes, and blended so well with the money I could have been wearing my rainbow silk pajamas.

  This was Christmas night with the Beauforts, not Monday Night at Minton’s. The party was gathered in a ballroom lined with fluted columns and side aisles hung with streamers and cut-out Santa Clauses, its tables crowding three sides around a dance floor and a low dais where a band was playing. The band’s brass section sparkled under a glitter ball. A dozen couples walked through a version of Body & Soul with the lift taken out of it under anesthetic. The rest was a hubbub of loud talk and high spirits at a hundred tables, stylish women dressed to dazzle, exotic as birds of paradise, and men seated in between them dressed as a milking herd of Friesians. At a Beaufort party, it isn’t the hand taped like a prizefighter that gets you noticed. It’s the lounge suit.

  A duty manager trailed me in from the lobby, looking troubled. He caught up inside the double doors to the ballroom and parked at my elbow, coughed lightly and explained that what I’d mistakenly walked in on was an invitation-only, black-tie ball. I was looking around the room. I heard him. Perhaps it didn’t show. He tried again, his delivery as clipped as his moustache. “Pardon me, but in the case of someone who does not appear to be bona fide, Mr. Beaufort requires me to inform our house detective.”

  I left off looking and leaned aside, close in his ear. “If we’re talking about your houseman working the foyer, he’s Maxie Helmering. Last sent up on two counts of receiving, one of perjury. That was 1940, sentence suspended to accommodate his burning desire to serve in His Majesty’s forces. Naturally, the army put him in the pay corps, but it doesn’t mean you ought to let him loose in this jewelry store.”

  I pointed my chin at the table right in front of us, where a tough-looking battle-axe had an armlock on a gin sling and a wrist semaphoring the fleet in six colors every time it caught the light. “Me, I’d start with the bona fides of House Detective Helmering, then pass Mr. Beaufort the name of the born optimist who hired him. There are bracelets in here giving their owners tennis elbow.” I opened my wallet in front of his bow tie where he could read my card.

  The flat of his palm jerked along his hair gloss. He cleared his throat. “We may be able to find you appropriate attire, Mr. Newman.”

  “The attire is appropriate. If anybody asks, I’m here on divorce work.” I tapped the wallet on his silk lapel. “Why make it uglier than it has to be?”

  The band wound down to polite applause. The bandleader exited and his piano player doodled while couples drifted off the floor. I left the duty manager thinking it over and followed a waiter into the crowd, took a glass from his tray and found a table under one of the columns. The ballroom lights dimmed. Electric candlelight burned at every table. A spotlight moved across the dais and followed the bandleader back in. He led on a tallish honey blonde in a satin ivory gown that bared her shoulders and dipped at her back, close-fitted everywhere and split along her calf to let her use her natural stride. Applause picked up. Heads raised out of highballs. The hubbub quieted. Then, while I caught the turn of the blonde’s hips and the flash of an earring and waited for her to spin around, the bandleader let go her fingertips and stirred a slow introduction in the strings. He stepped aside, shot his audience a smile, watched the blonde lean into the microphone and gave her the tune.

  I didn’t move. Watched the singer’s forehead wrinkle and her eyes mist, saw her mouth hook down to meet the line and heard nothing. She skipped a small step in tall heels, swayed and stretched the gown across her hips, and still I didn’t hear a sound. An eyebrow arched. Her hands pinned around her waist. Long fingers spread at her sides and rose to touch her forehead. Not a thing. The band’s reeds swooned and faded. The blonde backed up two paces to lean into the curve of the piano, kicked a calf through the slit of her dress and breathed while the brass took up the reprise. Then she set her head at one side, wandered downstage, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and ran a gimlet eye over her audience. There was a hush. She nodded to herself, lidded the eyes, pressed her lips to the mike.

  When she tossed back her head and switched on a smile, I started. Then wild applause broke in, the tables around me got to their feet, she took a bow and hugged a bouquet and I lost sight. Lights went up. The band slipped a gear. Couples moved back on the dance floor. I drained the glass, didn’t have a notion what the song had been, was still sitting there stunned when a voice behind me said, “I confess to murder.”

  When I got to my feet she was leaning on the back of my chair, eyes greener than I remembered, lit up by the performance and the champagne in her hand. The bouquet had been parked somewhere. “Murder?”

  “Of a wonderful tune. But I do dance passably well.”

  I said I could believe it. She set the champagne glass on the table, stepped closer and slid her arm inside mine. Small bumps pressed at the corners of her mouth. “Newman, you’re such hard work! I’m pleased with myself and now I should very much like to dance.”

  “Better ask somebody who was invited, Doctor. It’ll be less embarrassing when I get told to leave.”

  She heeled right around at that and looked puzzled. Then stepped up toe to toe and purred in my ear. “Now see here, I’m the one inviting. And frankly, Detective, if you’re trying not to stand out in a crowd it’s not working.” I stepped aside to let her by, then followed her onto the floor.

  She danced a lot better than passably well. Moved taut and light across the crowded floor. Could work soft magic with a dip of her shoulder. I wasn’t any match, but I thought I was holding my own when the piano slowed, swerved into I Could Write a Book and she leaned away. “You’re out of practice, aren’t you? What happened to your hand?”

  “I jagged it on my magnifying glass. And dancing with the main attraction is making me nervous.”

  It got me a snort and another toss of her head and we closed up again. “The ball is a Blanche Beaufort charity. They have to applaud or we lock the doors and I begin again. If Blanche were here, she’d tell you the same.”

  Dancers drifted on and off the floor. The band shifted time. We steered around a couple moving only in straight lines, like marines drilling for parade. I put my cheek back against her hair. “Nonsense. In that gown they’d pay to hear you whistle. And this morning you didn’t mention knowing any Beauforts.”

  “Newman! You admit to noticing my dress.” She murmured it, wide-eyed and mocking, but too late. Her waist stiffened under my hand. She made her first misstep. The mood snapped and broke the spell. We were just two people dancing and reeling in a line of conversation, one of them high on excitement and champagne.

  I murmured back. “Frankly, Doctor, if you’re trying not to stand out in a crowd, it isn’t working.”

  To feel the ripple under her shoulder I swung her back into the crush, past the same tense-looking couple that had got out of the Armstrong, who danced together as if they had to be handcuffed. Then the band worked up another tune and the tide of dancers carried us back where we started, to the champagne glass she left under the table light with its small gold shade. Another, taller drink stood beside it, a cigarette folded in the asht
ray, still burning. The owner of both was sitting sullen against the fluted column, wearing black-tie as if he’d been weaned in it. Henry Beaufort slipped another cigarette out of a black enamel case, lit it and squinted through a tobacco cloud. “Am I interrupting, Kathryn? I supposed Newman might be looking for me.”

  The doctor was already moving off, as if she supposed I might be looking for Henry too. “Nothing we can’t continue tomorrow. Won’t you call into my office, Mr. Newman? I may have something for you. And even if it was against your better judgment, thank you for dancing with me.”

  “The pleasure was all mine.”

  She was turning to leave then checked, long enough to seem surprised. “Did you really think so?”

  Henry held the cigarette in front of his nose, between a thumb and a forefinger, watching her move off through the tables and across the room. “It seems I was interrupting after all.” We were letting that pass when a bellhop arrived with a silver tray, pulled up and looked over my suit, sniffed and handed me a note. I read the message through, held it out where Henry could read it for himself, then dropped a coin on the tray and told the bellhop no answer. The note was a scrawled, edgy longhand to tell me I was wanted in the Nile Room. It didn’t mention my earliest convenience. Henry turned his wrist over and glanced at his watch. “Then my father isn’t expecting the interview to last. At ten, everyone will be in the Nile Room for supper. I daresay I’ll still be here when he’s through with you. Just a little lighter and airier.”