Figure Away

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “Yes,” Cummings said, “why?”

  “He was there during the last part of Philbrick’s fireworks display?”

  “I’m sure of it. He stood near me – why yes, he was there. He made some crack about the last piece “That’s all I want to know,” Asey said. “Mary Randall was killed just before the final piece of fireworks went off. If Slade was up at the midway, that accounts for him. Seems to me it took a lot of pryin’ to get that out of you two. Now, Slade, let’s get back to your yarn again. Your idea in flippin’ that note was to get enough money from Madame Thingummy to take Jane an’ beat it. That’s what you was climbin’ the maple for, huh, to get Jane? Did it ever occur to you that the fellow who runs away is most usually considered the guilty one?”

  Slade opened his mouth and closed it again. “Why – uh – why, no. But we wouldn’t be running away from—”

  “No. But it wouldn’t help you any to run, would it? In fact, if you was in my place, how’d you feel if the two of you beat it?”

  “I suppose I’d – oh, what the hell!”

  “Just so. Will you give me your word, Slade, not to try to beat it with Jane?”

  “She and I are free, and we have every right to come and go as we please—”

  “You got the right,” Asey said, “an’ I’m the first to agree, but why be a damn fool? Will you promise to tuck that leavin’ idea away in lavender for the time bein’?”

  “Oh, well. Well, we haven’t any money, anyway. We’ve just got to stay here and be intimidated and exploited and—”

  “You poor things, you.” Asey said. “Let’s get back to another point. I’ll grant you that we’re keepin’ this murder quiet, but it’s legal quiet. You like the town, don’t you? Well, why not let the town make its money, instead of blowin’ things sky high over a murder? You blow, an’ your job goes, b’cause the town goes bankrupt. Thought of that angle?”

  Slade clearly had not.

  “Well, consider it. Now, why did you rush off an’ hide after Monday night, if you didn’t know about the murder until Jane let you know?”

  “I’ve told you, I won’t be intimidated! And I was going to hang around, and lay for whoever started that fire and stole my gun, and wrote that note! He thought I’d leave, and I was going to let him think I’d left, but I was going to stay around and see—”

  “Who thought you’d leave? Slade, can’t you stop fiddlin’ an’ tell me what you’re talkin’ about? Who suggested your leavin’? Who’s intimidatin’ an’ conspirin’ against you, an’ for what?”

  “This Old Home Week! I’ve got – that is, I had – a lot to do. He was jealous. He tried to scare me into going, and leaving my part for him, that’s what, and I won’t be scared! Not by him, I won’t. And you can tell him as much for me, too, and I’m—”

  “Who?” Asey asked wearily. “Who? Who? My lord, I sound like a hoot owl, an’ I feel like hootin’. Who on earth you talkin’ about?”

  “Brinley,” Slade said. “What a detective you are! You don’t seem to know anything! Brinley, of course. Little J. Arthur, he’s behind all this!”

  “You mean that poor fat henpecked man? That piece of Milquetoast? Oh, come now, Mike. Brinley’s a lot of things, but he ain’t hardly any master mind! That’s goin’ too far!”

  “What about the message he left after he started the fire up at my studio?”

  “What about it? Now, don’t say again that I’m a punk detective. But you ain’t mentioned this before, you know. This is news to me.”

  “Fish in my pants pocket,” Slade said. “You’ll find it there, a half sheet of note- paper, unless your filthy Cossack of a trooper spilled it out.”

  Asey found it, a much folded sheet of official Billingsgate town office paper, with the town seal and the names of the selectmen engraved upon it.

  Written on it in large three-inch letters were four short words.

  “Get Out. Stay Out.”

  “Brinley’s writing,” Slade said. “Now do you see?”

  Chapter 10

  It was nearly noon the next day before Asey began his solitary breakfast in the dining room at Aunt Sara’s. On the table before him was the message that Slade had found in his studio, and a packet of letters written by Brinley to Jeff, which Sara had found for him.

  There had been little doubt in his mind that the “Get Out. Stay Out” message was in Brinley’s handwriting, and Lane, who had just left, confirmed his opinion.

  “I can send it up to Max in Boston,” he said, “if you want me to, but I don’t see the need. I don’t often say I’m positive of things, but I am about that. Now, I’m going back to Hell Hollow and grub around for shells.”

  “Ain’t lost hope yet?”

  “See the sky?” Lane said. “We’re going to have a thunder shower today. Paper says rain, but I think thunder showers. It’s a chance.”

  Asey nodded. “You think there’s a chance of something washin’ to the surface?”

  “There’s always a chance of something coming to light, and I’m hoping for shells. Sounds crazy, but in that Bernstein case we had last year, a knife washed out of a mole hole after a storm, after we’d practically dug the place up. You can’t ever tell.”

  “No,” Asey agreed. “Only I looked around for mole tracks an’ couldn’t find any. But more power to you.”

  “Thanks. What about Brinley?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Asey said, “I wouldn’t know. I got to brood.”

  He brooded as he ate his breakfast, to the intense annoyance of Bertha, who finally couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “What’s the matter with those waffles?” she asked tartly.

  “What waf – oh.” Asey looked down. “That waffle? Bertha, it’s one of the finest I ever put into my mouth. I want another.”

  “Was Slade drunk last night? Aunt Sara said so. He made an awful racket, didn’t he?”

  “Certainly did. You won’t talk about it to—”

  “Oh no. Aunt Sara told me not to.”

  Asey ate another waffle, and still another, and still the problem of J. Arthur Brinley and the fire at Slade’s studio and the message left there all puzzled him.

  To begin with, the fire hadn’t been a very convincing fire; it hadn’t been a very efficient fire, if Slade found evidence of preparation for it. And it hadn’t been a very sensible method of scaring Slade out of town. Anyone who knew the man ought to know that opposition aroused him and he throve on it. Intimidation was the last weapon to force anyone like Mike Slade. The note was silly, just plain silly. It wasn’t possible that even a chump like Brinley could think for a moment that Slade would be moved by that. He amended his thought: it would move Slade and arouse him to action, but it wouldn’t move him out of town.

  The whole business was the work of a fool.

  “Whoa!” he said suddenly. “Oh, I didn’t mean you, Bertha. I – well, another cup of coffee, then.”

  It wasn’t the work of a fool. He had been the fool, working at it the wrong way.

  The fire hadn’t been set with the purpose of exciting Slade, or frightening him. The note might be genuine, but it didn’t mean a thing.

  Slade wasn’t the point at all. The point was the murder of Mary Randall.

  Fires drew crowds. People went to fires. It was as simple as all that. The whole crowd at the midway – everyone in town – everyone had gone to the fire. He recalled Zeb’s comment about the children who had been following him and his trophies, something about their difficult decision, whether to get plunder, or see a fire. And the children, along with everyone else, had gone to the lire.

  Now the road to Slade’s studio ran parallel to the road leading to Hell Hollow for a mile or so, and then it branched off, like two fingers spread apart. But there were no hard-surfaced roads connecting the two after they left town.

  There was the rutted lane which he himself had taken, but no car could possibly get through that swamp. There were other old wagon lanes, but none of them were passab
le as far as cars were concerned. Now the fire would draw crowds from the midway, and particularly, he thought, it would draw the men Weston counted on, the special constables and special firemen. It would draw people from the outer beach and the cottages there, people who might otherwise be passing by the hollow.

  It was not a serious fire because it was not supposed to be a serious fire. It had been planned so that by the time it was over, everyone would say, “Oh, the fireworks, it’s time for the first fireworks to go on,” and everyone would swarm back to town, leaving the murderer to take a short cut across to the hollow, even as Asey had, and to shoot under the cover of the fireworks noise. All in all, it was an excellent bit of thinking. It had rounded up a swarm of people not only from the midway but from all over town, and landed them all eventually at the ball park – except for the men who were still watching the fire, and those were the men who would have noticed anything out of order. And they were collected in one place, away from the hollow.

  Magician’s trick, that was it. While everyone was watching the right hand, two eggs and a rabbit came out of the left.

  And everyone except Slade called the fire the work of tourists, and Slade was given the note for something to think about, to draw his attention away from the main issue. Just, as in all probability, the shots fired at Weston and the Brinleys and Jeff and Sara had – why, of course! He’d been stupid. All the same sort of thing. All a smoke screen. Get people worked up about one thing, and they’d miss something else.

  He looked down at the “Get Out. Stay Out” message. It was written on an apparently genuine half sheet of official Billingsgate notepaper, with the town seal and names of the town officials engraved on the side.

  “Bertha,” he called. “Say, Bertha, you got a spare program? Can I have it?”

  He flipped through the pages until he came to a facsimile letter, a greeting from the town officials to Billingsgate’s guests. The heading was similar to the one on Slade’s message, but there were several differences. Underneath the town seal were the words “Old Home Week,” and at the foot were the dates of the founding of the first settlement and its later incorporation as a town.

  Bertha glanced over his shoulder.

  “That’s a nice letter, isn’t it? Aunt Sara wrote it. And that swell new paper. Uncle Jeff says that the new paper’s worth the trouble of Old Home Week, all by itself. He likes nice paper, and he never could get them to buy that expensive kind. Aunt Sara said to hear him talk, you’d think the only thing he done for this Old Home Week was to get that paper.”

  “You can’t tell much about it from this picture,” Asey said, “is it colored?”

  “There’s a box full of it in Uncle Jeffs desk,” Bertha said. “Why don’t you look at it? He wouldn’t mind. He shows it to everyone.”

  Asey strolled into the living room with Bertha, who produced the paper from a bottom drawer.

  “See? White with blue engraving. Brinley wanted yellow and blue, like the town colors, but Jeff put his foot down.”

  “An’ with due an’ just reason,” Asey said. “Yessiree, that’s swell. That’s a swell breakfast, too. Say, how do you feel about your jelly prospects up to the show? When’s the judgin’?”

  “Saturday they give the cups,” Bertha said. “Silver cups. I thought mine was pretty good, but there’s some mighty fine jelly up there. I went up yesterday.”

  “Don’t give it a thought, how it looks,” Asey said. “Looks don’t mean a thing. I seen some that was done up all fancy, an’ folks was sayin’ how nice it looked, but it was what my mother used to call spindlin’. Yours is probably dark an’ gummy, like it ought to be. Thanks, Bertha.”

  After she left, Asey took down the name of the printer from the cardboard box of town paper, and after several minor skirmishes with various phone operators, he got his man in New Bedford.

  He hung up the receiver with a feeling of elation. The last lot of old paper had been delivered to Billingsgate long before Christmas. The new paper had been ordered and sent in January.

  Asey sat down and pulled out his pipe. J. Arthur had written that message, but he had written it long ago, and it had been planted in Slade’s studio by someone else. He looked again at the paper. It had been ironed over, he decided, but near the top was certainly a place where a pin had pricked through. He rumpled the paper and held it to the light. Yes, the paper had been pinned somewhere, but not at the studio. Slade said he found it on his table, held down by an ash tray.

  “I wonder,” Asey said, “if – sure!”

  J. Arthur Brinley was an irascible sort. Suppose he were busy, making tax lists or figuring, and people interrupted him. Suppose it was around town meeting time, or the time of some celebration, and a crowd was outside as there had been the other day, laying for Weston. He could see J. Arthur, plagued beyond endurance, scrawling just that sort of thing on a paper, and pinning it up on the door outside, and feeling that he had taken a great step forward toward securing peace. It was a gesture that Weston or Jeff would never have found it necessary to make, but somehow it seemed like Brinley. At any rate it was a good guess.

  Then someone had happened past the door and taken the paper off. Perhaps for the fun of it and without any plan in mind, and perhaps to save it for something like this—

  Kay Thayer strode in and perched on the arm of a chair.

  “Sitting here looking pleased with yourself,” she said, “and breakfasting at noon! On waffles, too. I smelled’em. It’s disgraceful. It’s decadent. I’m up at the crack of dawn, and I get corn meal mush. I hate corn meal mush. We used to have it at school. I tell you, there is no—”

  “Don’t say justice,” Asey told her, “please. After listenin’ to Mrs. Brinley an’ Comrade Slade on justice, I don’t want the word brought up anywheres near me for sometime to come. There’s too many conflictin’ ideas about it.”

  Kay laughed. “How did you squelch Slade, anyway? He was up at the station, dressed like a filthy capitalist in white flannels and a blue coat. He was being polite to tourists and guiding old ladies to front seats and generally being the well-dressed man from Cook’s. Tremendously active man, and he seemed very efficient. How’d you work it?”

  “The doc,” Asey said, “is r’sponsible for Slade’s comeback. He out-talked Slade, an’ finally Mike give in an’ said he’d behave himself. I think he was itchin’ to get to his committees, really. An’ he was gettin’ sleepy, too, an’ it was the easiest way out. By the way, ain’t you playin’ hookey from all the governors? Think of ’em speechin’ away.”

  “I did.” Kay shuddered. “Of the three here today, two always station men around to make sure you don’t get away with less than six copies of any speech they make, and the other one never says anything anyway. Jeff promised to tell me the general trends. In fact, he said if I were really anxious about it, he’d tell me before they spoke. I like Jeff. Asey, he seems to know all about the murder, but he doesn’t say anything about it.”

  “Jeff knows,” Asey said, “he knew last night. While I’m sure Aunt Sara told him most everything, I give Jeff credit for havin’ guessed it mostly beforehand. He’s safe as a bank. That’s how he spent all them years in Congress, you know. Preservin’ a righteous exterior no matter how much he knew. I wish Slade took after him. Slade’s theory seemed to be you ought to tell all you know – which is righteous enough, but not very wise. What are your plans for the day?”

  “I’m free for a while. I sent up stuff about Philbrick and the golden-voiced Tripp – what an empty pot he is! Anyway, I banged out the celebrity stuff yesterday, and Shorty’ll take it up. The governors aren’t really my job. I’m supposed to be local coloring – oh, you haven’t heard about Win Billings. You know him, the last Billings of Billingsgate?”

  “I know the old duffer. They washed him an’ dressed him up an’ stuck him on display – did he get loose?”

  “Well, he got a flock of drinks somewhere, and he stole the show at the station when the governors came. He
kept yelling ‘Hurray for Grant,’ and fussing about the lack of decoration. He said when Grant came the time before, they had the station covered with all the best turkey red carpets in town, and urns with trailing plants, and the General, he thought it was fine! He said so. They finally got Win under control, but he escaped in the flurry of the special train coming in, and when Brinley got to presenting ‘This distinguished scion of our founder’s family,’ Win was gone. Brinley nearly had to be taken away in a stretcher, he was so upset, and your cousin Weston took command.”

  “Did they find Win?”

  “Oh, it was just a temporary loss. He was in the cab of the engine, pumping the engineer’s hand. The engineer had a black beard, and he did look a little Grantish. Anyway, Win refused to get off the train, so they let him go along with it. He was an awfully pleasant engineer and he seemed to appreciate the situation. I had Shorty get a picture of Win earlier, and he’s going to label it, Last Billings of Billingsgate Who Remembers Grant’s Trip, Welcoming Governors. I thought it might please the old gent, if he ever sobers up. I sort of like Win. He’s a rugged individualist, and oh, what he called Mrs. Brinley! It was such pure Anglo-Saxon that she almost didn’t know what he meant.”

  Asey grinned. “That was a thoughtful an’ charitable gesture of yours, the picture takin’, but from what I hear tell of Win, he won’t see the picture for some time. Kay, is Brinley a fool or a fiend?”

  “Fool, of course. I knew you’d been finding things out. It’s written all over you. What? Tell me.”

  “Oh, I been ramblin’.” He told her his ideas about the fire, and the notepaper.

  “That’s something, of course, but – oh, it couldn’t be Brinley,” Kay said. “What a silly idea! Think of J. Arthur as Macbeth, with Mrs. B. spurring him on! It’s absurd.”

  She lighted a cigarette, took a few puffs, then stubbed it out and walked over to the window.

  “Looks like rain. Too bad for Old Home Week. How do you feel about the weather problems?”

  “Thunder storm, maybe a little tempest. It won’t last. At least I don’t think so.”