Shamus Dust Page 6

  The Nile Room was as Egyptian as armadillos. A high, wide oval named for its frieze of the world of mysteries awaiting the well-heeled traveler east of Suez. All of them in shades of green. It was an orient where rickshaws rushed past the Taj Mahal and green flamingos waded in surf, where camel caravans wound through Himalayan passes and where, because the Nile Room aimed for wide appeal, a thousand stars of David made a zodiac across the green dome of night in the light of a green crescent moon. Club chairs and candelabras filled alcoves around the oval. A loaded supper table ran down the center. There was nobody else in the room. I took a piece of toast from under a napkin, started lifting lids on a line of silver tureens and had the toast buried in a black hill of caviar when a compact figure with a pained look and a buttonhole entered through a door at the far end of the table.

  “Newman?” Beaufort was a handsome man late in his middle years, with long, weighted features and a complexion that flushed in the light from the candelabras. Black-tie gave him the seasoned look. A flop of white hair swept off a high forehead and added enough of the bohemian so you wouldn’t mistake him for the maître d’. I made a mouthful of the folded toast and nodded in greeting. He took rapid steps over, passed me a napkin and started in. “For someone not invited, you not only make yourself at home you make yourself conspicuous. No doubt as you intend. So let me be plain. Commissioner Stearns understands that I will not tolerate my son’s questioning by some chancing private investigator. He has given me his personal assurance on the matter. Someone should have spoken to you.”

  It might have been the secret of his success, to talk straight ahead on anything he wanted done and make it sound as fixed as farm prices. I wiped my chin with the napkin and said, “Somebody did.”

  “But you choose not to heed a warning. Is that it?”

  I looked around the walls at tigers slinking over green sand beaches and swallowed while Beaufort fidgeted his shirt cuffs. “Mr. Beaufort, my talk with Superintendent Littomy this morning covered a lot of ground. He has two vice killings on his hands, a thirty-year-old male and a female closer to fifty. The superintendent isn’t sentimental about either of them. In his book, they took risks that go with their trade and came off badly. Still, it doesn’t look well, and the idea that it makes his streets appear unsafe depresses him.” I ran my tongue along the back of my teeth. “What I’m trying to say is that City detectives aim at all times to make their lives uncomplicated. They don’t miss the obvious and they get sensitive about not making arrests. Right now, they hardly have a line of inquiry, except that one of their victims, the thirty-year-old male, kept a signed photograph of your son on his bedroom dresser. Whatever reassurance you got from the commissioner, his detectives will not overlook that fact. And if they have no better lead, sooner or later they’ll use it. Count on that, no matter who you telephone or how often. When it happens, young Henry will need a stronger story than the one he has now, because those boys will not only grind him to powder and take him for snuff, they’ll do it while they tie their shoelaces.”

  In the ballroom, the band’s clarinets made a run that ended in a high swoop. Faint applause ran over into the next number. While the brass picked up its new theme, I let him give some thought to Henry alone in a room with two City detectives, overgrown, underdeveloped, and ready to make a point. Beaufort dug out his show handkerchief, wiped his palms and gave me a thin, tight smile. “Mr. Newman, leaving aside what exactly you think you’re doing here tonight, do not waste your time or mine trying to shock me. It is scarcely possible. My children have long taken it upon themselves to explore the licenses a rarefied upbringing makes available. Those few things they were denied, they sought out for themselves. Doubtless there is recklessness in the blood. I do not complain. Judgment I leave to the better qualified. It falls to me only to shield them from the consequences of their native waywardness, and to that end I will employ the very considerable means at my disposal. You may rely upon it. Now goodnight.”

  Beaufort straightened his bow tie and wheeled around for the door he came in by. I watched it swing shut and took in the room one last time. There was a pyramid of candied fruit at my end of the table made up in different colored bands. At the foot of the pyramid a sucking pig with an orange in its mouth was stretched flat in a pool of aspic, wondering whatever happened to austerity. I patted it on the jaw, popped a glacé cherry, then headed back to the ballroom. Henry had been right. We were two minutes away from supper.

  The ballroom with its lights up was a stale, echoing hangar, using the supper break to get its ashtrays emptied and its spilled drinks mopped. A carpet sweeper moaned at the far side of the room and somebody was putting a shine back on the dance floor under the glitter ball. Henry Beaufort was sitting sideways across his chair at the table where I left him, his head tilted back against the pillar. He was plying another tall drink, his empty glasses collecting in a line under the gold lampshade. “How was the dressing down? The conversation as my father would have it.”

  I sat opposite. “He doesn’t want me bothering you. It makes me wonder what he thinks we talked about this morning.”

  He mulled that. “I was late for Christmas lunch. He asked me why. I saw no reason to lie.”

  “That’s a fine principle, Henry. Let’s apply it. After I left you at the professor’s house this morning, you cleared out an item of trash; a winter coat, dark brown, gold silk lining, handmade. Also, blood-soaked. You know the one I mean. Right now, it’s with City Police, along with the travel grip you dumped it in. By tomorrow they’ll have the grip fingerprinted and the blood on the coat analyzed. Why not try explaining it to me before you have to explain it to them?”

  He registered the idea with no show of surprise or any evasion. Three cocktails ago it might have been different. For now, he rolled a mint green bead around the bottom of his glass and pouted. “I was annoyed when you left, so I went to see if Michael had taken an overnight bag.”

  “To join up with whoever he met at the Raglan? And?”

  “He hadn’t. His travel case was still there at the back of the closet. But with an overcoat inside it I hadn’t seen before, wet through from the weather. Obviously, Michael hadn’t left it there. He would never have put it away in that state.” He spread his palms on the table either side of his glass, in wonder at his own naivety. “The coat was so wet I thought the color had run. Then I looked at my hands and knew it wasn’t dye at all. Beauforts are raised on blood sports. The coat was reeking of it.”

  So Henry put it all together. From me he’d heard about the small-time hustler who kept his photograph on a bedroom dresser, knew the hustler had been found shot dead near Garfield’s abandoned car and that its owner hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Then, even though he claimed not to know who his boyfriend met in the Raglan last night, when Henry found a blood-soaked coat in Garfield’s closet he’d panicked. It would have bothered me more if he hadn’t. The carpet sweeper wound down like a distant siren. The ballroom’s bright lights snapped out in sections. I said, “Is the professor being blackmailed?”

  Henry’s three-cocktail manner bid him au revoir. Tomorrow, in broad daylight, the idea would not only look plausible to him, it would look obvious. For tonight, he needed to write it off as tawdry and ridiculous, strictly for somebody in my line of business. He turned hissing in the flutter of an eyelash. “No, he is not being blackmailed. I would know. Throwing the coat out only made things look worse, I can see that. But what would you have done?”

  His gaze lifted to the entrance from the foyer, to where a couple walked arm in arm at the back of the ballroom. They turned into the aisle behind the columns, strolled around and found a table of their own in shadow and out of view from the entrance doors. From the way she moved, the woman was younger. Or perhaps she was just gayer; dark, handsome in a blue gown, and looking more relaxed than the last couple of times I’d seen her that evening. Her new companion had a reserved, serious look, and an
empty right sleeve tucked in the pocket of his dinner jacket. It forced him across and behind her to hold the chair when she sat. When he took the seat beside her, she gave him the small, dreamy laughter her company in the pearl-white tuxedo would never hear. No question, the money that had followed her out of the Armstrong limousine was the husband. The one-armed man getting all her attention was not. Sometimes you don’t have to be Freud.

  Henry shook off the interruption and lost his hissing fit, decided he needed a dignified exit and raked back his chair. “You know, I might have got to like you, Newman.” He got to his feet unsteady, squared up and gave it to me between the eyes. “But you really disappoint me.”

  NINE

  Black cabs plowed by with halos lit around their for-hire signs. Snowflakes side-slipped, so few you could count. I stepped from under the hotel marquee and headed west through theaterland. Its stages were dark Christmas night, but no matter, the Beauforts had put on a gala performance all their own. I’d had the patriarch with the high style who could call in a favor, the college boy who should have been locked in his room, the mystery woman who came alive when she slipped out on her husband, and the friend of the family who knew how to steal a show. In a theater, it would be Coward and manners tighter than a shirtfront. Or Novello and tunes you can whistle, with a hard-gloss heartthrob, a heroine born to play a migraine, and a young blade with a profile and a phony eye for the girls. Not original. And not King Lear either. Just the Beaufort ball with better poise and faster dialogue, and a cast that knew how to rehearse.

  Streetlights glowed thin and ran ahead along the Strand to Trafalgar Square. I walked and thought over what I’d got. Two unexplained murders. Footprints on a fire escape filling with snow. And an overdue professor, who since last seen might have gone back home and left behind a blood-soaked coat. Added to which I had three nervous men, the boy Reilly, not currently advertising his whereabouts, and an amnesiac nurse with a hearing problem. It wasn’t much and it wasn’t promising.

  The three men were right to be nervous. The first was my client, his civic career threatened by a fruit-for-hire and extortion racket operating from a property he owned. The second was Beaufort senior, aware his son had thrilled to more than the missing professor’s poetry and already calling in favors to protect him. As for the third, young Henry Beaufort had grown the not-so-wild idea that his boyfriend could be implicated in a killing. Certainly he’d tried to conceal evidence, but in a way that was so ham-fisted it only looked naive. His problem being that City detectives never yet awarded marks for naivety. Then there was the nurse, who not only failed to hear the gunshot that executed her neighbor, but affected haziness accounting for her time early Christmas morning. According to the doctor, the candles at the crib allowed her forty minutes between lighting them and calling in the murder. Give her ten minutes inside the church, then ten more to decide Jarrett was dead and get to a telephone. It still left twenty minutes unexplained. That is, unless you were acting medical examiner and you thought Nurse Greer could have pulled the trigger herself. It was conceivable she had. But then, what of the footprints on Jarrett’s fire escape? Or the bloodied coat in Garfield’s closet? And if Jarrett’s murderer hadn’t left behind either the footprints or the coat, then who?

  A taxi horn sounded close by Charing Cross, aimed at a fresh-faced figure in round glasses that recoiled, then retreated under a streetlamp on an island in the middle of the Strand. From there, he surveyed the miracle of the horseless carriage collected all around him, gathered himself and tried again. He stepped off the curb, weaved through a line of traffic and pulled up in front of me at a signboard beside an entrance that read Saints Fruchtna & Patrick, Catholic Apostolic Temperance Lodging & Dining Hall, Eammon P. Dolan S.J., Bursar. Below it, another sign said No Vacancies. The new arrival planted his feet, twisted and pulled a key fob out of his coat pocket, then aimed a key at the lock over the entrance door handle. He was easing his chin back to get the building in his sights when my nerve cracked. I reached past him and closed my hand over his, leveled his key, slid it in the keyhole and turned, then pressed down the door handle with my free hand and set the door ajar. The young man bent at the knees in triumph, and in a southern-soft accent exclaimed, “Ha! Civil of you.”

  “Don’t mention it. It must have been a heavy day.”

  His brow clouded in mildest contradiction. “Not the least bit. It is Our Lord’s birthday, a day of joy and feasting for all those that do His work. I bid a good evening to you both. God bless.”

  I acknowledged the admonition and the blessing. “Good night to you, Father.” Then went on ahead to the square.

  “The Norwegians say they plan to send a tree every year.”

  The priest would have called it civil of them. For six war years there had been no cutting any down and all Christmas trees were fake, so small they were taken into bomb shelters when the sirens sounded. Some things get better after all. I looked around the rooflines of Trafalgar Square, black against a frost-black night, then up at a tall spruce sparking enough electricity to light a fairground. A clutch of soldiers on a pass yelled and snowballed. Girls in mittens fooled about on the ice in the fountains. The voice at my shoulder said, “You were in Norway?”

  My gaze dropped from the star fixed at the top of the tree. “No. You?”

  “You might say a part of me still is.” The speaker left his gaze on the tree and flicked at the empty sleeve of his coat, tailored into the pocket. “You made quite a splash at tonight’s party, Mr. Newman.”

  “Not intended. I wasn’t invited.”

  “So Guy Beaufort told me. He says you’re a private investigator, and was not charmed.” He pulled a card from inside his coat and handed it to me. “Edgar Levin, Beaufort Partners.” Levin was lean and dark and somewhere in his thirties, less tall than I remembered in the ballroom, with a mouth at a slant, not built for a ready smile. It gave him an odd kind of good looks, geared for a disappointment, and might have been a part of his appeal.

  We went on watching the fooling and snowballing until it was too raw-cold to stand around, found we were headed home in the same direction and made for the Whitehall side of the square. Levin flagged a cab there, got in and skewed in a corner. I slid shut the glass behind the driver’s seat, took the corner opposite and growled, “Who does charm Guy Beaufort? Tonight, I got threatened with the police commissioner. It was all we had time for.”

  Levin turned from his view over the square through the taxi’s rear window, surprised I needed it explained. His forehead dipped at the City up ahead. “Your answer’s there. When the Square Mile rises from the ashes it’s not going to be a free-for-all. Government demanded a master plan for reconstruction and the Corporation commissioned Beaufort Partners to provide it. If you’re a developer in the City, charming Guy Beaufort is where you start. Don’t be too hard on him. He’s got a lot on his plate at the moment.”

  “He’s got a train wreck on his plate. He calls it family.”

  The taxi ran the length of the Strand, skirted the burned-out shell of Clement Danes, then started into Fleet Street. Levin was looking out the rear window again, wondering how much he ought to tell a stranger about his boss’s family. “Guy is being protective. His youngest has taken a serious shine to a senior adviser to the Corporation. It puts working relations under strain. Then tonight a private investigator arrives uninvited at his Christmas ball. Guy was unhappy about that. What did you expect?”

  The cab ran past the Reuter Building to pull over at the end of a block. Levin got out and stepped across a frozen gutter to the curb. I paid off the fare and followed him to the sidewalk, looking up where he looked, back across the street at a tall spire silhouetted over the rooftops, pointed at a faded star. “You do churches?”

  The cab eased out from the curb and back into the traffic.

  “Right now, nobody’s doing St. Bride’s. Someone climbed down into the crater the Luftwaffe left an
d noticed Wren had built his church over a medieval crypt. Then the archaeologists found the crypt was built on top of something Roman.”

  “Professor Garfield?”

  It brought his gaze back to earth. “Excavating St. Bride’s? It’s sure to interest him, but the professor has far bigger fish. You’ve met him?”

  “I met his reputation.”

  Levin made half of a shrug. “Well, the reputation’s growing. If only for keeping us planners at bay. But he has a point. There’s an entire Roman city buried under the Square Mile and he’s got a few fleeting months to excavate it before we start pouring concrete. The professor thinks construction should take a back seat to scholarship and he has the ear of people who matter. It makes him no friends in the City when they’re geared up for a gold rush.”

  Levin said home was at the top of Beaufort Partners’ offices on Ludgate Hill, hardly ten minutes’ walk away, and we shook wrong-handed and said goodnight. I watched him go then started across the traffic crawl. One side of my door was a cleared bombsite. The Tipperary’s saloon bar was on the other, dark as a cloister at an hour when drinking migrates to backrooms like flocks to winter pasture. I put a key in the lock and climbed the stair, went in my apartment and on into the lounge. Streetlight filtered at the windows, enough to find a match and put it to the gas fire at the end of the room. I loosed my necktie, dropped my coat and jacket on the sofa, sat down beside them and listened to the hearth ticking softly, just it and me. My toes touched the bottom of an ocean before my shoulder hit the cushions.

  To the Past Obliterative

  The gas fire still ticked and misted the windows on the street. Snow crystals slipped down the outsides of the glass. The telephone was ringing again. I reached around the sofa arm, tipped the receiver off its cradle, heard the connection make and then a subdued voice hesitating before it said, “There’s something I should have told you.” It’s the line that always makes me feel lightheaded, the feeling that one day I’ll need it for an epitaph. The voice waited to be interrupted and when it wasn’t, went on, “Yesterday when you came to the house, I said I was tidying up, but it was more than that. Someone had been in here. Not Michael. It was a complete mess. I should have said, I know, but I thought…” We both knew what he thought. “Michael still wasn’t answering his telephone this morning so I came back to straighten his study. But I think you should see it first. I mean, it’s not just that things are out of place.” Henry Beaufort sounded close to tears.