The Smiling Tiger

by Lenore Glen Offord

  He knocked at door after door, and when no one answered, used a master key and marched unhesitatingly into the squalid rooms. They were in varying degrees of messiness, but almost all were untenanted. Todd peered over his shoulder when he entered the second-floor front, darkened by its tattered green window-blind, but withdrew without speaking, and as if he hadn’t expected to see much. There was one answer to Shere’s knocking, given in an ancient and feeble voice. A crone came inching to the door and looked out at them suspiciously, but she seemed almost blind and was certainly hard of hearing, and Shere gestured to indicate that it was nothing, they’d made a mistake…

  There were three floors to the building, and on each one were three or four incredibly small and noisome rooms, their wallpaper peeling, their iron beds in a late stage of sagging dissolution. Georgine went unsteadily along the black passageways, her handkerchief pressed to her nose, her shoulders compressed so that she need not touch the walls. There had been something wrong in this house, she knew it with a certainty deeper than thought. Perhaps it had vanished, but it had left a sort of psychic trail behind: a clamminess, an odor that had nothing to do with the physical atmosphere. She knew that she might be needed—perhaps for identification. She would have given anything she owned to be out again.

  The last room they came to was the third-floor rear. Shere gave his usual bang on the door, but this time a low grumbling sound came from within. “There is someone here,” he said in surprise.

  He fumbled at the doorknob; the door was unlocked, and he flung it open to release an overpowering stench of stale whisky. In a tangle of dirty covers a man was lying on the bed, his face turned away from them.

  Georgine wheeled about as if she meant to run away, but her feet would not carry her more than two steps. She stood there gazing unseeingly at the grimy wall of the corridor, her handkerchief pressed so closely to her nose that it almost strangled her. —No, I can’t, she was repeating helplessly to herself. —I can’t take it, they mustn’t ask me to look—

  “Your pigeon, Shere,” said Todd agreeably, stepping back beside her. She leaned against him, shaking uncontrollably.

  “He’s alive, all right,” said David Shere from inside the room. There was a squawk from rusty bedsprings, and a querulous mutter from the man on the bed.

  “And I know him,” Shere added. “Been here for years— name’s Burch. He works at night, and gets swacked every night after he’s through, and sleeps it off all day. You want to look?”

  From some deep source Georgine dragged up the strength to turn. The unshaven, unconscious object on the bed was a man about sixty years old, with hair which had once been flaming red and was now mostly gray. She had never seen him before.

  She said so, in an almost inaudible croak. Todd nodded. “Now let’s get out of here,” he said, and propelled her down the perilous staircase as fast as he dared. Shere came at their heels, breathing heavily, and all three of them tumbled out the door, the house-owner barely waiting to close it before he pursued them down the lane.

  Todd got Georgine to the car just before her knees gave out entirely. He said nothing, but put his hand on her shoulder for a quick hard pressure. David Shere clambered into the rear seat, and wiped sweat from a colorless face. “Man,” he said plaintively, “I don’t know why I got so scared all of a sudden; for a minute I really thought that bird was dead! And even when he wasn’t, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “How do you suppose my wife felt?” Todd inquired.

  “Worse, I guess. Hell, I’m sorry, but you know I didn’t have anything to do with—what went on.”

  “Are you sorry enough to talk?” Todd said with a gimlet glance over his shoulder.

  “Sure, but I don’t know anything!”

  “You know who the Trumbull woman is.”

  David Shere gave a sort of wriggle which made him look like an enormous schoolboy. “She turned up two or three years ago, I was just out of the Army and the old bag who used to run this place had died, and I needed somebody. It’s worked all right. Trumbull’s paid up on the nail every month—and a good thing, too, or I’d be sunk.”

  “She just turned up out of the blue? Where had she been before that?”

  “I dunno. Somewhere down south, I guess.” The young man seemed to feel that his business acumen was being questioned, for he added defiantly, “She posted a guarantee fund, and then—she always paid up.”

  “And that’s all you know about her? How did she happen to come straight to you?” McKinnon prodded gently.

  Shere said nothing for a moment. Georgine, by now somewhat revived, wondered what had happened to the waves of vitality that he usually sent out. Maybe she was too tired to feel them—or maybe he had withdrawn them like a snail’s horns. He might not be feeling too well himself; he was certainly rather white.

  “Look, Shere,” said Todd in a tone of controlled exasperation, “if you go around with that hole in the head any longer, you’ll catch cold. It’s no use trying to keep secrets forever.”

  “I’m—trying to think,” said Shere in a muffled voice. He waited for a moment, looking at the floor and grinding his big hands together. Then he glanced up, wet his lips and said, “I guess you’re right. The—the Johnson girls heard I wanted to rent the place, and they said their aunt might know of somebody. And so—Mrs. Majendie sent her to me.”

  “Yes,” Todd said. It was the merest exhalation of breath.

  There was the tie-up, Georgine thought. There was the pattern: at first shaped to touch only the Beyond-Truth and its supporters, and now spreading to take in others, like Hugh Hartlein, and like herself. She could almost see the shape that had covered her. It would be like a great feline paw, with its raking claws unsheathed.

  “All right, Shere,” said Todd abruptly. “I may ask Nelsing to talk to you about this.”

  “Oh, God, not again!”

  “There’d be one way to avoid interviews,” Todd said, twisting around so that his eyes met the younger man’s.

  Shere looked at him for a long moment. “I know,” he said, “but I can’t take it. Good-by, Mrs. McKinnon, and—I’m awfully sorry for everything. I hope you’ll be all right.”

  Georgine said she would. He got out, and Todd started the car and headed homeward at last. Not until they had turned down Fell Street, toward the Bay Bridge, did he speak, and then it was to say, “Georgine, when the Trumbull woman answered the door today, did she come from upstairs?”

  “She was on the ground floor at first. Then for some reason she went upstairs before she let me in.”

  He nodded. “Getting instructions as to the change of plan, I’d bet you.”

  “Was—was Chloe Majendie up there?”

  “No, I don’t believe she was,” said Todd, settling himself into a firmer position behind the wheel. “And I hadn’t really thought it was Trumbull. You see, as I came down the street I glanced up at that second-floor window.”

  “You didn’t see anyone? The shades were all down.”

  “No, but I saw a hand. It was holding the shade aside, so the person could see who I was; and it wasn’t Mrs. Majendie’s hand. It had long finely shaped nails with deep red polish on them.”

  ***

  The family across the street from the McKinnons was mildly astonished that evening when Todd appeared and asked to hire the seventeen-year-old son as a wife-sitter. Georgine, it seemed, had taken a number of aspirins and gone to bed, and he didn’t want her left alone in the house. Once this new category was defined, the youth was willing to oblige, and showed a commendable lack of curiosity as to why an able-bodied woman should need protection during the early evening hours.

  Todd, with the firm planes of his face looking perceptibly harder than usual, drove himself up the switchback roads to Cuckoo Canyon. He had Miss Godfrey’s alligator handbag as an excuse for his call, but the Majendie house, where it might most normally have been left, was dark. The absence of Chloe suited his purpose well enough.


  He coasted down the street and put on his brakes opposite the garage of the Johnsons’ cottage; then, walking silently on the grass, he approached.

  There was a light on the small porch, but none in the upper part of the cottage. Around the corner, however, on the north side where the ground fell sharply away from the house, a flood of light poured out, reflected on low bushes and the tops of trees across the Canyon. Todd, who had said good-bye to scruples that afternoon, went as quietly as he could around the house and found a narrow foothold on the north corner close to the foundations.

  He could not have got far enough to see in the window, but at the outset of his career as spy, beginners’ luck was with him. One casement of the big window had been set open, and dimly mirrored in it he could see someone moving inside. It was one of the girls; she seemed to be alone, and presumably she thought herself unobserved, since she never looked toward the window.

  She was sitting on a stool in the middle of a studio room. There was a table in front of her, and several square flat objects which looked like canvases were stacked against the table leg. The girl—whichever it was—seemed to be doing something to one after another; each canvas was lifted to the table, one point on it was scrubbed with something—probably an artgum, for there was that motion as of brushing away crumbs—and then a label was licked and affixed to the same spot. It looked like an innocent employment, certainly, and yet her body—if it were not a trick of the oblique reflection—seemed to be hunched over the table with unnatural tenseness. Todd told himself that you could imagine a counterfeiter working in that pose, with the constant possibility of the tap on the door…

  After a time the girl set the last canvas on the floor beside her. He could make out a blob of black on a lighter background, but that was all the window reflected. She rested her head on her hands for a moment, in a gesture of utter weariness that was almost like despair; and then she pushed off the turbanlike covering so that her hair fell long and sleek over her shoulders, and pressed her hands here and there along her scalp. He could make out, now, that it was Ryn Johnson who sat there.

  Todd began to inch back along the wall. He couldn’t make much out of what he had seen, and the evening was getting along. He reached the front of the house safely, and without noticeable noise, brushed the leaves and twigs meticulously off his suit, and rang the bell.

  It was several minutes before he heard any answering stir in the cottage. In the interval he kept his eyes fixed on the flaming scarlet of the door. Presently, however, the tiny Judas window framed a pair of eyes, and the door opened. “Oh, Todd, it’s you,” said Ryn in a somewhat bewildered tone. “Come in, won’t you?”

  Todd stepped inside, proffering Miss Godfrey’s handbag, which he had previously removed from inside his coat. “Your aunt isn’t at home, I’m afraid,” he said easily. “I wonder if you’d return this to her companion? It was left at our house.”

  Ryn glanced at the bag, and her olive-leaf eyes widened. “Return it—to Joan?” she said, and moistened her lips. “But— she isn’t at the big house either. She—Aunt Chloe doesn’t know quite when to expect her.”

  “Oh?” Todd said, moving a few steps into the room. “Then perhaps I may leave it here for safekeeping.” She made no move to take it, and he laid it down on a bookcase. “I’ve never seen your house before. Charming room.”

  The living-room had, indeed, given him a slight shock. It was not what one expected of a painter, somehow; there was a medium-sized Persian rug, there were woven draperies across the western window, there were some handsome pieces of furniture which might be either genuine or good reproductions, there was a record player. It all struck a curiously reminiscent note, of a personality that was housed in an older body than either of the sisters’, and that had come to its full flower in the redwood house on the hill. “Charming,” he repeated. “Who is the decorator in your family?”

  “Oh, we both did it, Cass and I.”

  “That looks like you,” said Todd appreciatively, looking toward the one original note in the room: an abstraction in deep jewel-like colors above a low gray sofa.

  “Yes,” Ryn said. “I did that last year. Won’t you sit down? I—I was just going to have some coffee, may I pour you a cup?”

  “Only if you’ll let me carry in the tray,” said Todd agreeably. “I’m a domesticated man, you know.” She turned toward a half-open door and he followed her, commenting vaguely on the size of the place, these small houses were so deceptively roomy… There was the kitchen, brilliant with deep red linoleum surfaces, and there on the wall at an angle to the window was a cupboard with its doors painted in a design of comic and impossible vegetables. Todd looked at it steadily while Ryn Johnson heated coffee in a glass pot. He let her open the gay doors and get down the cube sugar before he informed her that he took nothing in coffee, and thereby saw a bright tin labeled “Cornstarch” on an upper shelf. He moved to examine the cupboard as she closed it, and said, “I imagine there’s nothing else quite like this in Berkeley. Your aunt, now—I can’t see her with anything but plain enamel in her kitchen.”

  Ryn said, rather absently, that he was right. She gave him a nervous look as they went back into the living-room, but he had begun to talk about her painting. “Last year you did that one over the sofa? Yes, that must have been before that green period of yours set in. About how long do you find yourself, uh, impelled to use one color like that?”

  Ryn said that it varied, and stirred her coffee round and round and round. “I should very much like to see some of your recent work,” Todd pursued smoothly. Almost without volition, he found himself adding, “I know a great deal about Art, but I’m never sure what I like.”

  Ryn smiled faintly. “Then it would be a pleasure to show them to you—if they were ready to show. I never do let anyone see them, you know, for months after they’re done.”

  “So your sister said. But there was one she spoke of, with a good deal of black in it—”

  Ryn’s coffee cup went down with a crash into its saucer. “Cass hasn’t seen them!” she said loudly, almost with a questioning inflection at the end.

  “Oh, you don’t show them even to her? But I had an impression—never mind, it may have been something entirely different she mentioned,” said Todd, watching her intently.

  “When did you meet her—without me?”

  “Oh, the other day. It just happened. Don’t tell me you two go everywhere together.”

  “No, of course not. Only—”

  “You are devoted, indeed. No one could help realizing that. This afternoon, for example, I suppose you were in each other’s company?”

  “This afternoon? Today?” Ryn set down the cup and saucer which she had just lifted again from the table. A little coffee was spilled, but she did not take her eyes off his. “What—what happened this afternoon?”

  “Nothing,” said Todd. “Nothing at all—or so I’m told. You and Cass were together?”

  “We—why, no, we weren’t. Is that so remarkable? I—I was over at the Legion of Honor, to see the new exhibit. And Cass was—I don’t know exactly where she was—she got up this morning before I did and went out, and I haven’t seen her since.” Her beautiful hands gripped each other in her lap, their nails a burnished red against the muted plaid of her wool skirt. She said, “What difference does it make to you? Why are you asking?”

  “To frighten you, Ryn,” said Todd pleasantly.

  “Me?”

  “You, or somebody. Perhaps you’ll be good enough to pass on what I have to say to your family—and Miss Godfrey.”

  Ryn’s clear pallor had gone almost gray. She wet her lips. “But—what about?”

  “That’s what I don’t quite know,” said Todd in his lightest and most casual voice. “I’m shooting in the dark, I’ll admit, but I’m shooting into a very small room with five persons in it. A bullet’s bound to hit somebody.” He chuckled, all but inaudibly. “Metaphorical bullets, of course. I shouldn’t want to use physical violen
ce—unless I had to.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Some one of you does, and the rest probably have a fairly good idea. You’re all in a conspiracy of lies, that’s been evident from the beginning.”

  “What beginning?”

  Todd shrugged. “No telling how far back it really started. Maybe with your Uncle Nikko’s death, maybe with your sister Sibella’s.” He saw her eyelids stretch and her look grow vacant. “Maybe just with Hugh Hartlein’s.”

  “You—you’ve got some kind of obsession, it’s all wrong. Even the talk about Hugh has died down. Nobody’s been near us for days about that. It’s all over.”

  “It’s not over. It’s set up a sort of slow chain reaction, things blowing up all over the place, things that don’t seem to make sense at the time; but they will, Ryn, they will.” He waited a minute and then went on. “His death, and those others, could have stayed unsolved till Doomsday for all of me—until today. I’m not a detective nor a judge, but I’m a man with a family of whom I’m rather fond; and when Georgine and I get roped into—into the enclosure where things are blowing up, I do care.”

  He sat immobile, facing her across the coffee table near the hearth. His head was at its usual angle and his face expressionless, but his voice had taken on a metallic twang which his wife would have recognized with respect and a little foreboding. Ryn said nothing, but her eyes still looked into a void.

  “You’ve been using us, of course,” he went on. “Every li’le act that you put on, any of you, was rehearsed for us first: trying it on the dog, I imagine, so you could see how it might go over with the police. But that’s all right, I’ve been using you too. We were fairly even—until this afternoon.”

  “What happened this afternoon?” Ryn burst out.

  “We met your friend Mrs. Trumbull.”

  Something happened to her face. A faint shade of color stole back into it, its taut muscles relaxed a trifle. She met his eyes at last, with every sign of complete bewilderment. “Who?” said Ryn Johnson, blinking.