Shamus Dust Read online

  Voigt concentrated on the cigarette, unimpressed. I hardly liked it any better myself. He could hurt a man and enjoy the work. In the wrong mood, he might even leave him for dead. Except with Jarrett he wouldn’t see the need for a gun. I let the idea go and snapped my cigarette unlit in the hearth. “Then one freezing winter night Raymond Jarrett died of exposure to a .38 and your problem disappeared. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Voigt.”

  I let myself out of the house without going back in the kitchen. Outside, small boys from the neighborhood had wheeled a barrow from the empty market and hitched it to the gun barrel at the street corner. They were thin-faced, ragged and pinched with cold, having the best time of anyone I’d seen all day.

  FOURTEEN

  Smithfield was six acres of vaulted ironwork at the north-west edge of the Square Mile, a meat market high and wide as a cathedral, and by day as silent and solemn. By night it was a wholesale market that fed a city; a deafening, unhallowed vaudeville of selling and buying that decked its halls with gutted carcasses, gaffed on rails as if they’d been hooked as they swam by. So many rails you thought all they ever did was bait a line, throw it in the river and reel in a side of beef. How to make the gods smile? Tell them that every night at Smithfield Market they spill entrails enough to divine yours and mine and all men’s futures, then sell them by the truckload for dog scraps.

  I stood opposite the south side of the market in early afternoon, on a square wide open to the weather. A public garden made a traffic island in the center of the square, with a ramp at one side spiraling from the street to the market’s rail sidings underground. Beyond the garden, the half-timber gatehouse to St. Bartholomew’s churchyard. And beyond the churchyard, the porch where Jarrett met his executioner barely thirty-six hours before, with no other place he could run. I was back where it all had started, a hard freeze setting in clear, flat sheets across the City, daylight already draining from the sky.

  Behind me, a dozen steps down from the street, the Sesto was a basement diner catering to meat market traders. It was thirty feet by thirty, veiled in a cooking haze under a low ceiling, had four walls dark-stained as if it flooded at high tide, and a single crepe streamer twisted around a column in the center of the room to create the festive mood. Two customers ate at a counter. I took a seat in a booth close by the door and dropped my coat on the bench. A wall clock over the two diners clicked past one forty-five.

  The Sesto’s patrons relied on its clock. There was no other clue to the time of day. No windows except for one glass half of the entrance door, and a menu that was night and day permanent, lettered across the column holding up the rest of the building. The kitchen door jittered. A solid, sullen figure arrived in shirtsleeves rolled under his armpits, took my order and cleared somebody else’s dishes off the table. I watched him go, took the carbon of Dr. Swinford’s notes out of my pocket and wondered what exactly she thought she was doing.

  The doctor had typed out two paragraphs on a single sheet, then left the sheet in Jarrett’s file in an unlocked drawer in an office she hadn’t locked either. Even on a floor practically empty for the holiday, it was reckless. The whole building was alive with police. To leave her desk wide open then invite me to call by was borderline certifiable. She didn’t know me nearly enough to take that risk. I was interested to find out why she had.

  Her first paragraph said Dillys Valentine’s murder had been a messy affair that would have been messier still if her heart hadn’t stopped beating before she had time to bleed to death. It described how she’d already taken a drink from the whisky bottle she was killed with, how her prints were on the remaining half, and how the rest had been sheared off against the nearby iron stair rail before its jagged end was used for the murder weapon. What was left of the glass bottle had other prints, not good but usable, and excepting those belonging to City Police who arrived at the scene they hadn’t been identified. The question was for how long? The City crime laboratory hadn’t been introduced to Terry Reilly yet, but the whisky had been his Christmas gift to Miss Dillys and there were short odds that one set of prints would be his. What the boys in the lab had identified was the whisky, a rarity calling itself Buccleuch with a hand-stenciled label that said it was twelve years in the making. In short, a very refined example of high-class liquor, which likely was the last thing in the world Dillys Valentine had expected to die of.

  The second paragraph dealt with the topcoat Henry Beaufort claimed he found in his boyfriend’s closet then tried to hide to protect him. It was a dark, chocolate-colored wool and cashmere number, stylish and expensive, tailored for somebody slim-built and medium height, and from which the doctor had picked up two distinct blood markings. One, from the right side and sleeve, didn’t match with either of the murder victims. The second was on the coat’s lower left front, where the blood type matched for Jarrett. The forensic boys had found powder nitrates in the same area as the blood marks and had a theory about that. The powder burns, they said, likely indicated where the killer wrapped the skirt of his coat around the .38 before he fired into the back of Jarrett’s head, trying to quiet the gunshot in the echo chamber of the church porch. That was all. Nothing in the pockets, only a label sewed in the lining: Geo. Bryant & Nephew, Gentlemen’s Tailor and Shirt Maker, Cheapside.

  In the heat of the basement the carbon sheet started warming in my hand, sweating the doctor’s perfume as close as when we danced. Then a plate arrived at the table, heaped with something grayer than the daylight, and her perfume lay down and died. When I pushed the plate aside, the sound caught the attention of a matron in black pulling a lace curtain across the glass in the entrance door. In stub heels she was a little more than five feet tall, a little less than five feet wide, jet hair shot through with silver and braided in a bun. “You don’t eat?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have the heart. Whatever it was it deserved better.”

  The woman had brought a faint, sharp scent of her own from the kitchen. My nose lifted out of the doctor’s notes, sniffing the air like a hound. “Are you selling that?”

  She pressed her bulk against the end of the booth and leaned across to pull the untouched plate toward her. “You want?”

  I nodded. “I want.”

  She walked toward the shuddering swing door with the dish held in front of her like a sacrifice. When she came back, the woman’s coffee was a tablespoon of heavy, dark liquor sitting under the lighter distillation of its oils. She stayed to see how I drank it, hands on her hips, and when it was done I reached in my breast pocket for the matchbook from Garfield’s study. I set it on the table, turned it around where she could read Osteria Sesto, then snapped Michael Garfield’s photograph down beside it like a queen of hearts. “Remember him, signora?” I doubted she forgot anybody who walked through her door.

  The woman leaned in to peer at the photograph, caught a crucifix swinging from her bosom and rested the hand that caught it on my shoulder. She pressed hard up against the table, mouth pursed, square as a barn. “Of course. This man is a customer.” Tight-lipped didn’t come easy to the signora. She just needed to be coaxed. I took a card out of my wallet and put it alongside the queen of hearts, said her customer hadn’t been seen for two nights and had a friend getting anxious about him. It was enough. She spread her arms in a gesture that took in all Italy. “Before this war he knows Rome. He comes to here to remind the cooking. Last time ago two days. Christmas Eve. He is very excited.”

  “Excited about what?”

  “About he has pictures.”

  I asked what kind of pictures and her eyes rolled. “He don’t show to me! He shows to somebody with him I never saw before. Somebody who smow-ked cigars.” She went ball-eyed and puffed out her cheeks for the plutocrat look.

  I sat back against the bench, picked Garfield’s photograph off the table and eyed the menu on the column behind her. “I was in Rome myself once. This isn’t how I remember the cooking.”

&nb
sp; She twisted around stiffly and flapped a hand. “That I don’t know to cook. For that you ask to Stanley.”

  “I already asked to Stanley. He doesn’t know to cook either.”

  The signora tilted her head and gave me her eye of sorrows. She eased down onto the bench and shuffled along it until we were opposite, then sighed and confessed it was so. Stanley had arrived in Rome with a stripe on his sleeve and fitting his uniform like Mitchum, and even though the uniform was the sum of all Stanley’s appeal it was a time and place short on options. So her daughter made a wartime alliance of her own, hooked up with Stanley and brought her mamma with her to a god-forsaken city where the skies frowned, the cooking was lousy and the winters made her joints scream. The signora didn’t have all the words. She just looked me in the eye and told her story as if her daughter had been cursed in the womb. We sat in silence, weighing the calamity of it, until she stirred and prodded a finger that dimpled her bosom under the black dress. “To you, I give my Bocconcini di Coniglio.” Then, the closest she could get to a translation. “Raaaa-bit.”

  In Italian it sounded like the best offer I’d had all year. I hung a cigarette under my lip and broke out a match from her matchbook. “If the rabbit is as good as the coffee, we could be married before nightfall.”

  She turned her head to me and tucked her chin to consider the proposition. “You never had a wife?”

  “I’d have remembered.”

  “All right then, Mr. Private Investigator. You make good money?”

  “More than is good for me.”

  A bright light sparked in her eye. She leaned in from the hips. “Ha! You lie to me even before our wedding night. But I hate always to wear black, so therefore I accept.” She slapped both hands down hard on the table, tossed back her head and whooped a high, raucous peal at the ceiling. Her two diners at the counter didn’t bat an eye.

  When she came back from the kitchen, her last customers were gone and the door was bolted on the afternoon. The signora took the same seat. We ate her rabbit stew, drank some more of her coffee and some heady grappa with it, and while the basement went on heating we talked of Rome and I loosed my tie. Two hours later it was only getting harder to leave. I put a hand flat over the mouth of the bottle and stood up, before I got an invitation to dinner.

  FIFTEEN

  Snow on Snow Hill. No streetlamps. Only office windows lit up here and there on the outside curve of the rise. Inside the curve, a line of bombed-out lots softened by snowfall like a room under dust sheets waiting for spring.

  My rental was for one half of a two-room office, sublet from a City commercial agency that kept a desk and a secretary of its own in the other half. We shared a thin party wall and a connecting door behind my desk that stayed unlocked. The safe in her office was mine to use, no charge. She was young, a little bookish behind her glasses, quirky when she took them off, and decided early we’d get along fine whenever I fitted her mood. Sometimes, at the end of a dull afternoon, she’d walk in through the connecting door with two cups, lift the office bottle from my file drawer and pull up a seat. There to instruct me, she said, in how to recognize small talk if ever it should occur in my presence. But today was holiday and besides, what I needed were better ideas, not small talk. I dropped the window blind, wheeled my chair back against the party door, rested my head against the glass as if I meant business and sat in the light spilling from the corridor. Nothing doing. When the telephone rang, I picked up at the first ring. A clenched jaw in a Fleet Street news office said, “Newman, old man,” innocent of all irony.

  “Carleton Hamnett of the Daily Lama. Does anybody still read it?”

  It was the only prompt he ever needed. “Not only do they read it, old man, two murders have wonderfully stimulated our circulation. The Courier, as always, follows avidly the exploits of your constabulary confrères. Their calling compels a fascination among our readers second only to the weather. I’m a very busy fellow.” Carl’s pipe clattered against his teeth at the other end of the line. It’s the sound the coconuts make in a rumba band. He coughed raucously and went on. “Apropos the interests of the Courier’s readers, old man, a small bird tells me you happened this a.m. upon the murder of one Raymond Jarrett, otherwise unknown to us. I rather hoped you might have something for me. Professional insight and so forth. The lowdown, so to speak. Off the record, naturally.”

  “Coincidence, Carl. When I happened by the detective inspector had it wrapped up already. It was snowing. It’s about all I can tell you.”

  There was a crestfallen rasp of breathing. Carl jimmied the pipe stem back in his teeth and grunted. “Quite. But I am imploring, old man. Should you have anything, howsoever outré, the Courier is sorely in need. The simple frisson of Murder in the Square Mile will not sate our readership for much longer. Content as Superintendent Littomy may be to play his cards close to his chest, our public relies daily upon us for further revelation. Appreciate a hack’s dilemma, old man. Yours truly will be forevermore indebted.”

  I said I wouldn’t forget him and rang off, slid out a drawer from the desk and put my feet across it and went back to thinking in the dark. This time about a sick old man who didn’t sleep nights and his statement in Jarrett’s police file. The way he told it, he waited every dawn at his window, no different Christmas morning than any other. That being so, he could say positively that his neighbor left home at her regular hour that day, the same as any day she had an early shift. It was hard to argue, and no reason to suppose the old man would lie or make a mistake. But thinking is like putting ice on a hangover; when finally you get around to it, you know you should have tried it sooner. When I thought about it, I knew the neighbor’s story was wrong.

  I took my feet off the drawer and stood up, walked around the desk, sat down again and took the idea further. The candles she lit said Nurse Greer discovered Jarrett’s body before four-thirty Christmas morning. Time enough to return to her house on Cloth Court before she reported it. Why she might do that I had no idea. Only that she didn’t stay long. Around four forty-five she left again, this time for the phone booth on the square to call in a murder to City Police. It was when she left home a second time that morning that her light-sleeping watcher at the window saw her, and took it she was leaving for her regular early shift. Just the same, the old man thought, as any other morning he ever watched her at that hour. It was what he would tell police as often as they asked. The exact truth as he saw it. He just hadn’t seen the rest. I was still gawking at the ceiling, the way you sit waiting for a dentist to walk in the room, when the telephone rang again. I sat up and crimped the receiver under my chin.

  “Mr. Newman? This is Estelle Greer. I’m on duty at Bart’s. We admitted a patient an hour ago, an adolescent girl who’s been assaulted. She won’t give her name or address but she’s asking for you. It seems you know each other.” Then deep silence on the line, like a well waiting for the falling pebble. I said I’d be there in fifteen minutes.

  “You didn’t recognize me, did you Mr. Newman?”

  Irene Voigt’s bloated lips slurred the words, eyes vague with dope, nose taped down to her cheekbones. She had a livid, broken bruise running from her bottom lip along the side of her jaw, her left arm resting on the bedsheet in a web of strapping. She wanted to set me at ease, but couldn’t work out how to get the right expression on her face.

  “How did it happen, Irene?”

  Saliva drooled across her cheek and wetted the pillow. She pushed a finger at the corner of her mouth, too late to stanch it, and winced in dull embarrassment. I took out a handkerchief and folded it in the hand she could move. “He wanted to know where Terry was. I wouldn’t tell him.” The voice a flat shadow. She had the handkerchief gripped tight in a ball. “He hit me really hard this time, Mr. Newman. If he finds Terry, he’ll hurt him worse. He hurts everybody.”

  I touched the corner of the bedsheet against her cheek. “The only way he can
hurt him is if he finds him. Tell me how to find him first.”

  She wanted to talk but the words gummed in her mouth. “He said he’d be staying in the West End, I told you that. When I asked him where, all he said was Paddy’s. Don’t know who that is. Don’t know any of his friends. I should have told you, shouldn’t I?” Her eyes drifted across a thing she couldn’t fathom, past needing an answer. A voice behind me said the patient ought to get some rest.

  Nurse Greer led down a flight of stairs to a common room with armchairs pulled around a table with magazines. She put on a light, lifted a handbag off of one of the armchairs and found a pack of cigarettes before she said, “It’s not as bad as it looks: a broken collarbone, two possible rib fractures, her nose is a mess. The rest is largely bruising and shock. She didn’t run into a bus either, did she?”

  “Miss Voigt ran into her father. How did she get here?”

  “She walked into casualty not long after I came on duty. You seem concerned about her.”

  “I met Irene Voigt for the first time today. Her father didn’t care for me asking her questions. It’s why he put her in the hospital.”

  Her thumb coaxed a flame from a small, nickel lighter. She took the bag to a locker against the wall and eyed her seams in a mirror inside the locker door. “Miss Hartridge didn’t care much for your questions this morning either. Apparently, she’s been a bear with a sore head all day. A verr-ry unpleasant man arrived with the devil’s gray eyes and a dimple you could sink a putt in. You made quite an impression.”

  You had to hand it to Nurse Greer; the gooseberry mouth, the accent precise and mordant. It was a first-rate hatchet job. She wet a fingertip on her tongue and ran spit along her eyebrows. I went over to the table and dropped a photograph on one of the magazine covers. “This is Irene Voigt’s boyfriend. When her father gets to him, he’ll make Irene look like choir practice. If either one visits while she’s here I need to know.”