Shamus Dust Page 7

  I squinted at the darkness outside. “What time is it?”

  There was a pause. “Seven-thirty. Look, I don’t want to stay here in the house. I’ll leave the door on the latch.”

  The line went dead. I got the receiver back on its stand, groped across the hall and felt for the light-pull. A dull flare struck hard chrome, lit up a mirror and green tile checker patterns around the walls. In purgatory you can enjoy the same bathroom model, only warmer. In two seconds, the sweat was icing on my chest. In ten I had the washbasin filled, my shirt stripped off and my head under the faucet until searing cold jerked me upright. In thirty minutes, I was shaved, dressed and standing in the yard at Cross Key Square.

  The janitor was tall and underfed, stooped over the short spears of his breath and halfway to sweeping a path around the courtyard in a dragging gray dawn. He had on the muffler and frayed cord jacket that he wore the afternoon before, straightened at the slam of the cab door and watched me in through the arch. I took the path he’d cleared already, caught whisky on the frosted air as I came up, and made an admiring mouth at his handiwork. We smiled at each other; two members of the same union, who knew what it was to be out and working on a winter day before the sun was up. I looked over at Garfield’s house, on the opposite side of the yard. “When did the boyfriend leave?”

  The janitor stood with his hands cupped over the top of the broom stale, knees flexed, elbows splayed like a jockey waiting for the tape. His forehead crinkled while he figured it. “After seven o’clock. I was out here clearing snow.”

  “You saw him arrive?” The question drowned in the moistness of his eyes. I tried again. “Was anybody else in the house since yesterday?”

  He brightened at that. “Police, like you said there would be. Two of them last night, wanting the key to Mr. Garfield’s house. By eight o’clock they’d gone. Nobody else I saw.” He confided, a little shy. “I took to celebrating Christmas myself last night.”

  I nodded and dug out a photograph. The janitor patted for his wire-rim glasses in a pocket, wound them around his ears and fixed on Jarrett’s portrait as the shop-soiled odalisque. He took it in his stride. “He was here a week ago, could be more. Looked at the names on the residents’ board and went away again. People come, people go. I don’t ask.” Where Garfield was concerned, he wouldn’t need to ask. He took off the glasses and lifted his gaze across the yard. “You going in there, Mr. Newman?”

  “It crossed my mind.” I left him leaning over his broom, watching me along the path he’d cleared up to the professor’s front door.

  I took the same route through the house as the first time, as far as Michael Garfield’s private museum. From there a short hallway led to the galley kitchen where Henry made tea, and off the hall a door he’d kept closed. Today it was wide open, and Henry was right; it wasn’t as if things were just out of place. The study’s bookshelves had been stripped, its picture frames torn from the walls, desk drawers turned out and the contents strewn around the floor. Whoever had been looking, there was no way to tell if they found what they came for. But what they came for was plain. Photographic prints and negatives lay everywhere. They were emptied out of cabinets, shaken out of books, turned out of files; from anyplace the professor had ever stored them or set them aside or mislaid or forgotten about them. And with a thoroughness that didn’t just look impressive, it looked frantic. As if Garfield’s special brand of orderliness had sent somebody over the edge, the way a Belgian will feel when he first sets eyes on Switzerland.

  What the two detectives had made of it there was no knowing, but it was hard to see the bright side for Henry Beaufort. I sat for a time across the corner of Garfield’s desk, then picked a directory off the floor, found a number, found the telephone and dialed. A housekeeper’s voice answered at the second ring with an old-fashioned calm, inquired who was calling, and said if I cared to wait, she’d find out if Councilor Drake was available. I waited, reached over a litter of typed sheets with doodles in the margins and lifted a pencil out of an old cigarette can. The can had a Sweet Afton label, primrose yellow, a dozen upturned pencils, a ball of rubber bands and paper-tags, a matchbook, sealing wax, pencil erasers. Was it among or along? I never remembered, pulled the can closer and read the verse on the label: Flow gently, Sweet Afton, among thy green braes …

  The line crackled. The same soft, distant voice told me it regretted the councilor was unable to come to the telephone, but said his lawyer wished to see me at his office at my earliest convenience. She read me the lawyer’s office address in St. Mary Axe and asked would I also care for a telephone number. When I said there wasn’t any need, he could expect me in half an hour, she said, Very well, Mr. Newman, and hung up. You could hear the rustle of her curtsey. I took the matchbook off the lip of the cigarette can, wrote the address inside the flap and put it in a pocket, then slotted the pencil back where I found it, point down in the drum.

  There was a captured reel of Wehrmacht film I saw once of a German rocket test at a base on the Baltic coast. A switch is thrown in a bunker, the rocket motor fires up, and at a gantry in the forest an early-model V-2 lifts house-high off the ground then keels over, poleaxed like a dynamited smokestack. Next to my knee, the pencil I’d put back in the cigarette can was giving a passable imitation of the rocket test. It eased back up and out of the drum, got to where it turned top-heavy, teetered on the rim and tipped in my lap. I sat watching it, at a loss, until the von Braun in me prodded the pencil back in the slot it vacated and let the performance repeat. Then I snatched up the drum and shook the contents over the desk. Spooled inside the drum, a slim, translucent envelope had buckled where the pencil point snagged it. I got a fingernail under the lip, wound the envelope around a finger and flipped it in a curl on the flat of my hand. Two minutes in Garfield’s museum found me his magnifying glass. I snapped on the switch of a floor lamp in a corner of the room.

  Inside the envelope was a strip of negative film divided in five frames. At a glance they looked more or less blank, but backlit against the lampshade and magnified under the glass, a small world opened up. It had rail tracks and crossroads and traffic frozen in motion, driving by empty lots on streets blotted with snow. In time, I saw they were five camera shots of the west-center of the City taken from the air, the outline of St. Paul’s unmistakable in all five, even in reverse. Not so different in the detail from Henry’s wartime barrage balloon drawing, if you didn’t count the magic. I slid the strip back in its envelope and pressed it flat in my pocket, put back the professor’s lens on his exhibition catalogue and made for the stair. What the photographs meant or who else but Garfield would be interested, I had no idea. Until I did, they might as well be Santa Claus’s holiday snaps, taken on a flypast.

  A rising wind was shaking the night’s snowfall from the branches of the lime trees. I went out through the arch under the janitor’s rooms, turned along Little Britain and walked the short, bare strip of Postman’s Park. There was an entrance for hospital deliveries across from the end of the park and a salt-gritted path leading around a nurses’ residence into the main quadrangle. The path turned aside at a fountain frozen solid, then climbed a ramp into a foyer filled with the smell they bottle just for surgery and painted in shades of the North Atlantic in February; so dismal that if you weren’t already dead on arrival you at least could know how it felt.

  It was deserted except for an administrator in half-glasses sitting at a desk behind the counter. She was clattering at an Underwood, upright in a Norfolk homespun, gray hair fixed in iron-hard waves to match the décor. At the sound of the opening door she heaved a sigh, peered over the half-moons and took in the tape on my hand. I was standing at the counter, waiting while she tightened the belt around her jacket, when an accent from the heart of Midlothian said, “St. Bartholomew’s Hospital treats accidents and emergencies only upon completion—”

  I cut in. “It’s neither. The name is Newman. I’m here to talk to Nu
rse Greer.”

  She went back to hacking at the typewriter, long enough to let me know I was invisible. Then, since it was in her gift, relented. Her mouth bunched and lifted out of her typing again. “Not here.”

  I gave her my air of surprise. “Isn’t she meant to be?”

  Her hands lifted from where they rested on the keyboard. She leaned her wrists either side of the machine, eyes closed, jaw clamped. “Mr. Newman, each morning I am sent a list of non-arrivals. Young nurses not being noted for their reliability at this time of year, today’s list is longer than usual. If Nurse Greer were not meant to be here, she would not be on my list.”

  I patted the counter top with the flat of my hand, looked up at the vault of the ceiling, then back at the logician at the typewriter. “But she is on your list.”

  “That is correct, Mr. Newman. She is on my list.”

  “Not arrived this morning.”

  “Not arrived.”

  “Well, Miss …?”

  “Hartridge.”

  I tipped my hat and confided, “I didn’t mean to be so hard on you. Frankly, hospitals put me on edge. But if you’ll give Nurse Greer a message that I called, I’ll know to write her a letter next time. It’ll be easier on my nerves. Good day to you, Miss Hartridge. It’s been a pleasure.”

  Her fists clenched and she closed her eyes a second time and let the sounds of my going pour balm on her fraying soul.

  ELEVEN

  The Trelawne Building straddled a corner between St. Mary Axe and Bevis Marks, a yellow-brick façade with long windows making mirrors of the morning light, pale as tinplate. The street door opened on a silent lobby heady with wax polish, where a waiting elevator glowed behind a wire-glass slit. At one side of the glow, the first rise of a staircase coiled upward around the lift shaft. I shook out some more aspirin from Louis’ bottle and climbed the stair.

  Buchanan Allynson’s offices were on the second floor, off a quiet anteroom. A rosewood desk with a bell on it had a sign reading, Ring for Attention. I brought my palm down flat on the button and went ahead to a windowless study furnished in the way of a smoking room at the jockey club; too large to be cozy, too small to be a public library. The kind of room where the trained legal mind has everything in reach to figure out its next percentage. It had a pair of high-back armchairs at an angle to a japanned table, an antique rug in the center of the floor, three walls tiered with numbered legal volumes, and a fourth, between the room’s two doorways, taken up by a rustic hearth with firedogs and no fire, only a tall Chinese vase filled with holly berry.

  The bell’s echo had died before a flat rustle arrived at the far side of the hearth, and following on the rustle an observation delivered in a low, slow throwaway that didn’t ask for an answer. “Aren’t you late?”

  She was five feet and a half of deep-cherry redhead pressed against the door edge, fitted in a costume with a soft chalk stripe. Eyes wide-set, a crimp in her chin and a mouth that made the fall of dark-red hair look incidental. We lingered on her entrance just long enough to consider what else she might add to a winter morning. Then she touched at a silk flower pinned high on her shoulder, gave me the look that says Welcome is for doormats and murmured through close, even teeth, “Take your hat off, I’ll call my husband.” She turned on her heel and took the rustle with her.

  I dropped my coat and hat in one of the armchairs and waited. A motor crawled by in the street below, gnawing on a frozen gearbox. It was two blocks off, still spitting out the pieces, when a figure entered at the door I’d come in by and closed it behind him. The redhead’s husband didn’t waste an introduction either, went directly to a cabinet, poured two straight jolts and brought them over to where I was standing. Without any ceremony he handed one over, stood at a loose attention and raised the glass in his left hand in salute, “Mea gulper.” The drink inhaled as if we were about to jump out of an airplane.

  I nodded and saluted back. “Christmas.”

  It was ripe, refined, heady stuff, of an age meant to bring warmth and happiness, but not to the masses. The morning stirred and brightened to the sounds of birdsong, snows melted and leaves unfurled. The lawyer cracked an unexpected gap-tooth grin, took both glasses back to the cabinet and said without turning around, “I believe we’re going to get along, Newman. Do sit down.”

  The brandy settled, spread and pirouetted around the aspirin. I took a seat and watched him freshen the glasses. Allynson looked standard legal fare: slim, medium height, boyish and dressed for sixty-five, in a charcoal three-piece with a watchchain and a squadron necktie knotted with a pipe wrench until his shirt collar buckled. He had a soft, indoor pallor, bad skin and rimless spectacles, and the tight, careful accents that glide around the law in any language, in all places, at any time. But that wasn’t how he made an impression. What impressed was the way he didn’t keep an unsteady grin in check, or the nervous flex in his step, or a look he had of lolling in the shade of an airplane wing on a grass strip in summer, waiting for the next call to scramble and the short odds it would be his last. It gave him an uneasy appeal, but of the kind you want to see in the other fellow’s lawyer.

  Allynson fitted the stopper back in the decanter then turned and declared, “It’s a damned nuisance about our tenant.” As if Raymond Jarrett had been behind with his rent. He set my glass in reach on the table, then lifted the lid of a hammered-silver box and pushed it toward me. I stopped patting my pockets, pried out a cigarette and slewed the box back around. He pulled a wry mouth and tapped his chest. “I’m afraid not. Doctor’s orders.” Then lifted a lighter from its slot in the box, snapped it and held out the flame at arm’s length, as if we were shooting pistols at dawn. “I’ll come to the point, Newman. The City is a tightknit community where reputations are as indispensable as they are vulnerable. I speak not only of Councilor Drake’s business affairs. He’s a Freeman of the City, Chairman of Planning, very likely a future Alderman. Police interest in one of our tenants therefore causes us embarrassment no less than surprise. Your report to the councilor was timely. It allows us to spare the worst of our blushes. You did well. You did very well.” Allynson dropped the lighter back in its slot and gave me the grin again, his drink clutched under his chin.

  I tipped my glass and said, “That’s as may be. But police won’t stop at embarrassment. Set aside whether Councilor Drake ever met his tenant, or knew about his record. Raymond Jarrett was using the councilor’s property to make introductions for a City clientele, had a studio for camera work and a one-way mirror for blackmail shots. City detectives will take even that in their stride. Their surprise will be that the first the councilor knew about it was Christmas morning, when his tenant took a .38 slug in the back of the head. They’ll wonder if it takes Warner Brothers moving in before the councilor asks what goes on.”

  Allynson folded his arms high across his chest and let himself come to a decision, then raised up on his toes to make me a confidence. “Look, Newman, we’re frankly astonished that our property office hadn’t the least whiff of this. Naturally, we shall undertake our own inquiry and fully cooperate with City Police, but our priority is to handle this with sensitivity. We shall have a damned awful mess on our hands if we don’t.” He swallowed the polite third of his refill and reached inside his jacket. “In this regard, I feel certain you can continue to be of service to us. I give you this to include a payment on account.”

  I ground my cigarette in his ashtray, took the check he handed me and looked it over. Aesthetically speaking, it was a collector’s item colored in pastel shades and silky to the touch, watermarked discreetly, made out in a clerical style that had a way with zeros and signed off in a tighter hand that was the councilor’s own. A check like that takes a plain, old-fashioned transaction for pieces of silver and makes it a solemn sacrament, mordant as a marriage. You can frame it on a wall and invite in connoisseurs to view. It even smells good. This one, written on a very private bank that
ordinarily wouldn’t let me through the door, was proposing to pay me four hundred in sterling, in cash if I cared to take it that way, which as proposals go was both pleasing to the eye and satisfying to the mind. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Allynson, what I did yesterday on behalf of your client amounted to less than two hours of my time. This check will buy a month, and that’s a lot of investigation. Maybe the councilor can afford to be lavish, but first I need to know how he expects me to earn it.”

  Beyond making him thirsty, the question didn’t appear to trouble him. Allynson emptied his glass again and waved it at me. Evidently his doctor’s orders didn’t mention brandy. “Your actions so far have been well-judged. Councilor Drake values your work. Continue to assist us in the same vein and your fee will be well enough earned. Quite how you go about that I believe we can leave to your discretion.”

  He pressed a buzzer at the side of the hearth, the brandy setting light to his eyes as good brandy will. I folded the check in a pocket where it wouldn’t bruise, watched him leave and waited. Mrs. Allynson swayed in unhurried, took me through the anteroom to call the elevator and turned on her heel. And did it all as if she’d broken a thumbnail. I lit a cigarette there and wondered where she fitted in. Wondered also since when the councilor had become we in her husband’s conversation. It might be a lawyer’s royal way with a pronoun. More likely, it was an accessory he’d acquired, like the watchchain and the five-star liquor greeting and the redhead running on ice.