by Zenith Brown
“Mr. Finlay wanted to go over after her.” It was the only thing Jenny said.
“Sheer suicide,” Colonel Randolph said curtly. “No swimmer could live down there.”
The lights of the Coast Guard cutter raked the platform minutes later, but no one was left there but the gray-faced old man, Jenny and himself. The others had gone, discreetly silent, up the steps through the roses, never a word spoken, only a glance and heads nodded in exchange.
The music was still playing under the weaving rainbow of light, the floor over the sunken garden still filled with dancing forms. The tables under the flower-colored lanterns were full of laughing people, the waiters still passing by with their silver trays still laden. It struck Fish with traumatic impact as he came back into it from the lonely surf-beaten hell on the fishing platform . . . nothing changed, he thought, until he looked at Polly’s uncle, shoulders rigidly erect, his head up, only his face gray as old death, and recognized the Spartan remnant of what Newport had once stood for . . . and still did, he thought then, remembering the girl they called Skunky.
“I’ll ask the police to go around to the guesthouse, Finlay. Will you please meet them there.” Colonel Randolph nodded his white head toward the rose arbor behind them and turned to Jenny. “If you’ll kindly go and find Skunky, Jennifer, and take her to the old nursery. Stay with her till I find her father. I needn’t ask—”
“Don’t, please, sir.” Jenny touched his arm quickly, the tears springing to her eyes. “I’ll find Skunky.” Her head was up too as she went off across the garden full of people. Fish stood a moment, bracing himself. I guess I’m not a thoroughbred. He looked around for an instant. Dodo’s place at the table was empty. Alla Emlyn’s hunchbacked companion, the fairy godfather of the improvident rich, was still at the smaller table, sipping a glass of champagne with Polly’s cousin from the receiving line. Fish saw Peter de Gradoff, dark and handsome, and saw Jennifer’s head with its coronet of butterfly orchids and her scarlet dress moving toward the little golden-haired girl who was with him. He turned away, sick for an instant, and went through the rose arbor to find the guesthouse.
The two policemen they’d brought in from the gate were already there.
“The dame’s wacky. She’s been wacky for years. But she’s never done anybody any harm before.”
“Except the time down on Mill Street.”
“Well, she was in bad shape, that night.”
They nodded to Fish as he came in, and the younger of the two got up and shut the door hard after him. “You’d think they’d have the decency to stop all that racket and get the hell out,” he said.
“Well, they don’t want to start a riot,” the older man replied. “That’s not the way they do things.”
He looked at Fish. “You’re Mr. Finlay, the eyewitness? I called the lieutenant. I hear you were on the top of the steps. They tell me you saw her shove Miss Polly over the rail, like she said she did before she passed out. They say you and Miss Linton both saw her.”
“Miss Linton didn’t see it. She isn’t tall enough to see over the bushes on the rocks. It was all over by the time we got to the bottom.”
“They oughtn’t to let a screwy dame roam around loose when she’s drunk,” the younger one said. He looked tough, but he was the one who was upset.
The older policeman nodded. “It’s sure bad, right at the beginning of the season and all. But like you say, it’s lucky we got an eyewitness that saw it. You’re at the Maloneys’? The lieutenant’ll want to see you, I guess.”
The lieutenant saw him down at the fishing platform. There hadn’t been much for Fish to add. He left when the waiters were beginning to bring around scrambled eggs and bacon. The music had gone and most of the guests . . . and Jennifer. He’d waited for her, but she hadn’t come. After that he got his car and drove around to the Coast Guard Station.
“You better go home, Mac,” the kid with the earphones at the radio sending set told him. “Get yourself a slug and turn in. You’re dead and don’t know it. We’ll let you know when we find her. It’s hell, but there it is, I guess.”
Fish went heavily on up the clock tower stairs, along the balcony hall to his door. Inside he stopped short, abruptly alert. Someone else was in the room. The furniture, the tables and chairs loomed, magnified in the misty yellow light seeping in through the open windows. Then he saw the black huddled mass on the sofa. His hand went to his pocket as the little waiter flashed into his mind. He’d forgotten him entirely. Asleep, he thought. He put his hand in one pocket, then in the other. They were both empty. The note was gone . . . dropped out, probably, the way his billfold had done when Jennifer had his coat, and blown out into the surf. He reached for the light switch and stopped motionless as a cold finger touched his spine. He stiffened, listening intently. There was no^ sound except his own breathing. The mass on the sofa was as silent as it was motionless. He took a quick step forward, his throat dry. The dark mass was a quilt covering a small inert figure. His hand shot out to wrench it off, and stopped.
“Well, for the love of God and the forty-nine angels,” he said.
It wasn’t the little waiter, dead. It was Miss Jennifer Linton, sound asleep. But for one ghastly hairbreadth fraction of an instant, the shadowy half-moon of her face on the cushion had been so pale, so still, that fear leaped with a knife at his heart. His violence was the reaction of a relief too intense to control.
“I ought to break her blasted little neck.”
He reached for the lamp on the table at the end of the sofa, to wake her without scaring the living daylights out of her, and stopped as he saw a light on in her mother’s window on the upstairs porch across the courtyard. Her blinds were drawn. His own weren’t, and there were other windows over there. The goldfish bowl was a two-way stretch. But it was fairly light outside now, anyway. Only the high-pitched dark-painted beams gave the loft the continual sense of darkness. The point was to get her up and out of there before everybody, not only her mother, was awake to see her.
“Jenny. Wake up.” He put his hand down and touched the quilt over her shoulder. She woke, not in a series of dopey stages, but at once, her eyes wide open and clear. It took only an instant for her to adjust herself to where she was, before she brushed the quilt aside and pivoted around, reached for her slippers at the foot of the sofa, wriggled her feet into them, pulled her blue wool bathrobe around her legs, sitting up and regarding him with no self-consciousness whatever.
“I was asleep,” she said.
“So I observed,” said Finlay. “In the wrong place. You’ve been home. Why the hell didn’t you stay there?”
“I would have if I’d known you were going to stay out all night,” she said, promptly and with spirit. “You needn’t be so cross about it. I made you some coffee, if you’d like a cup.”
“And what do you suppose your family—”
“They can’t see in the dark, can they? I didn’t turn the light on except in your kitchen.”
She stood up and tied her robe sash around her middle. She looked about ten, with her tousled curls and her shiny washed face and the lipstick gone. It made it easier for Finlay in one way, harder in another, Especially when her voice softened and she said, “I’m sorry you’re angry.”
“I’m not angry. Just . . . concerned.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have come,” she said simply. “But I . . . I wanted to know, about Polly.”
“They haven’t found her.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“All right. Just go home and go to bed, will you?”
It came out more sharply than he meant it, and she drew back, surprised.
“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said less abruptly. Then he relaxed and smiled at her.
“Look. My first duty is to protect the honor of the Trust Department of the Merchants and Mechanics Bank and Deposit Company, 25 Broadway, New York, New York, and of the personnel thereof. Now if you wish to roam around strange men’s apartments
in the bleak gray dawn, in a wrinkled old wrapper tied around you like a potato sack, that, Miss Linton, is your affair. But in view of my stainless past and my exalted position in the world of finance, I must beg you not to compromise me any further. Now will you get the hell out of here? I’d also like a little sleep.”
“Well, all right.” She smiled gravely at him. “If you want to go to sleep, I’ll go. I just thought maybe you’d. . . .”
She hitched her bathrobe sash tighter around her and went to the door. He watched her, his whole insides melting like warm jelly. If he could only keep her there forever. . . . But if de Gradoff, or any of the others, saw her. . . . He looked over across the courtyard. The lights were still on. He turned back as he heard the click of the latch as the door closed. But she hadn’t gone. She’d opened the door and closed it again.
“Mr. Finlay,” she said soberly. “Could I ask you something, without . . . without. . . .”
She came to a stop and stood looking at him, hesitating. “I don’t want to be unpleasant, or anything, but. . . .”
“Go on.”
“Well, it’s this. Had Polly had very much to drink, before. . . .”
He shook his head. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been wondering.” Her eyes rested steadily on his. “I’ve been wondering how he got her to go down there. You don’t suppose he wrote her that note the waiter—”
“Oh, Jenny.” He crossed the room to her. “Look. You’re dead wrong, Jenny. I saw what happened. You couldn’t see it, because you couldn’t see over the roses on the rocks. But I could. I saw it happen . . . believe me. It’s horrible, but it’s the truth.”
She shook her head.
“You just saw her . . . going over. I know it was horrible. But you don’t know Skunky’s mother. I do. She . . . she wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“But she did. Maybe she didn’t mean to, Jenny, but she did. You didn’t see her in the garden, when she had hold of Polly. That’s when Polly said she could have her job . . . just to get away from her.”
“But . . . that’s the point,” Jenny said evenly. “That’s just what I mean. Everybody knew she did crazy things when she’d had too much to drink . . . and when she went around telling everybody Polly’d promised her her job, that made her just a natural to blame it on.”
Fish shook his head. “I saw her, Jenny.”
“All right.” She took hold of the doorknob again. “Do you remember what she said? ‘Poor Polly, she looked so surprised.’ But Polly knew her. She wouldn’t just stand there looking surprised and let herself be pushed over. I don’t believe it, not for one minute I don’t. But if something . . . if something hit her that surprised her, and she was dead before she knew it, she’d go on looking surprised, and it’d be easy to push her over then.”
He shook his head again. “The way you calmly talk about people murdering each other makes my blood run cold, Miss Linton.”
“Well, mine ran cold when Polly was trying to scare Nikki,” she said warmly. “Describing his first wife in the room with the carnations, when she was already dead. . . . That’s what she got from the portrait in Washington. And Nikki was scared, all right, but it wasn’t a ghost that scared him. But if you think I’m crazy. . . .”
She opened the door again. “And anyway, they can tell when they . . . find her, can’t they? Whether she was drowned? If they do an autopsy. And it wouldn’t be fair to Skunky’s mother if they didn’t. Well, I’m going now. You better get some sleep.”
At the stairs she turned back. “I’d planned to sneak in the backway, Mr. Finlay. But the Maloneys defend the honor of the Maloney guests even as they defend their own . . . so I’ll walk straight in the front door with no subterfuge whatever.”
She took one step down and turned again. “You know, it’s very stupid for us to go on pretending we don’t know what I’m talking about, Mr. Finlay,” she said gravely. “Even dangerous. Did you think I wouldn’t notice all the locks you had put on my door and windows? So thanks, Mr. Finlay. And thanks again . . . the azaleas were the loveliest anybody’s ever seen.”
Her eyes were shining and her cheeks touched with color an instant as she smiled at him, before she turned and ran quickly down.
CHAPTER : 10
Fish Finlay stood in the doorway, punch drunk, trying to absorb the accumulation of shocks Jennifer Linton had produced with no intent to shock and with a simple sanity and quiet logic that was the most confounding shock of all. That she’d recognized him was the least. He’d been aware of her basic acceptance of him ever since Polly Randolph had left their table. Pretense, if any, had been a purely surface gesture, with no attempt to deny that each knew perfectly well what everything was all about.
But the locks. . . .
Did you think I wouldn’t notice all the locks you had put on my door and windows?
Caxson Reeves, of course. Reeves had been six jumps ahead of him all the way, letting him maunder around the edges, picking up what he could, while he was taking positive action behind his back, acting with one hand, protecting the bank with the other. And abruptly the light that had flickered once and vanished, hidden under the basket of his own stupidity, gleamed bright and clear. The little waiter with the waxed mustaches, who knew him by name and whom Polly Randolph had vaguely recognized, standing over there, when he last saw him, by Alla Emlyn’s table. . . . A whole series of unrelated incidents he hadn’t even been conscious of observing until then fell into place in his mind, and Caxson Reeves’s French detective emerged as bodily intact as if he were there in the room, as he’d said he’d be as soon as the ball was over.
He put his hand in his pocket, forgetting that the little man’s note had gone with the offshore wind.
So where is he? He looked around the room as if he expected him to pop out with a flourish. He’d probably been here. And Fish hadn’t come directly home himself and young Miss Linton had arrived in her pajamas and bathrobe. Fish grinned and looked at his watch. The little man, no doubt, had assumed another affair of gallantry, and with Gallic delicacy and a discretion of the most great had withdrawn, for the time being. Which by now was a quarter to six. Even discretion needed sleep occasionally. Even Finlay needed it, aware of it again as he was aware that now he had a glimmering of Caxson Reeves’s arid New England hand in there helping him he felt suddenly better about the whole thing. Or he did until he moved abruptly back onto the momentarily forgotten ground that Jenny Linton had dug up and seeded with the small teeth of the twin dragons, suspicion and grave doubt.
He scowled as he took off his coat and went through the kitchen to the bedroom, pulling at his tie. Granted her original assumption about de Gradoff, what she’d said about Skunky’s mother had an appalling logic.
That made her just a natural to blame it on.
Except that Finlay had seen the whole thing. Or had he? What would he say on the witness stand?
Can you swear of your own knowledge that Miss Randolph was alive when you saw her pushed over the iron-pipe rail?
I saw her arms moving and her golden sandals under her green skirt blowing in the wind.
He ripped his shirt open and pulled it off. He was bone-tired. His head wasn’t working. I saw her, didn’t I? He put it forcibly out of his mind. The autopsy would tell—if they had an autopsy.
He set the alarm clock he’d brought with him for half-past eight, got into his pajamas and lay down, pulling a quilt over him. A couple of hours’ sleep would clear the miasma. But somehow, on the hypnagogic beachhead between waking and sleeping, he knew the thing he’d been unconsciously rejecting. He must have spoken it aloud, he heard it so clearly spoken.
Jenny knows what Polly knew . . . or what Polly said without knowing what it meant. If that’s why Polly died. . . .
He passed then into a disordered dream filled with a dream’s intangible sweating horror, a cresting sea tossing what he knew was a framed portrait of a woman but that, every time he struggled through the pitchy night to seize and look
at, was nothing but a black mass of barnacle-encrusted mussels, their shells open to hold a small sodden slipper that he knew was dead because once he’d seen it alive and shining. Off somewhere, a bell was tolling, calling him out to sea, beyond the jagged rocks. Bees were buzzing among the carnations strewn on the waves. He struggled up through them, aware at last that the tolling bell was the clock in the tower. The buzzing of the bees was the telephone in the living-room. He barged blindly up and across the room, shaking himself loose from the clammy hold of the dream, through the kitchen, still only half awake, until he picked up the phone and Joe Henry’s voice hit with the impact of an ice-cold shower.
“For God’s sake, what happened?”
Fish told him. “The woman was drunk, probably crazy. I don’t know her name . . . but I saw her do it.”
“Her name’s Winton.” Joe Henry added evenly, “It’s her family’s name that counts here.”
When he spoke it then Fish caught his breath. It was a name fabulous in the economic conquest of the frontiers of America. All he’d heard her called was “Skunky’s mother.”
“That’s why everybody clammed up. Randolph was on the phone for half an hour. ‘Tragic and all that, but no help for it.’ They still haven’t found her. Look, Fish . . . you’re sure? You’re dead sure?”
Was he?
“They ought to do an autopsy,” he said.
“By God they will, Randolph or no Randolph, and to hell with the family name,” Joe said. “I just can’t get it, Fish. I loved that gal. I can’t believe that’s the way it happened. Listen. I’m sending a man up. He’ll bring you a letter she wrote me from D.C. last week. About a portrait. I sent a guy to the gallery to get a shot of it. He found a bowl of fruit and some dead seafood in its place. The portrait’s gone and no-body’ll say what happened to it. You stick at it, Fish. If the so-and-so killed her, we’ll draw and quarter the bloody bastard.”
