First Gravedigger

by Barbara Paul

  First Gravedigger

  Barbara Paul

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  Hamlet: Whose grave’s this, sirrah?

  First Gravedigger: Mine, sir.

  CHAPTER 1

  The only way to have a friend is to be one, said Emerson or Shakespeare or the Bible or Ann Landers. Man’s best friend in need is a dog indeed. I came through when that cretin Charlie Bates started whining You’re my friend, Earl, you’re the only friend I ever had. I got him what he wanted, I helped him. You’d think that’d mean something, wouldn’t you? I could have kicked him out—hell, I could have refused to let him in in the first place, sprawled out in the hallway the way he was. In the hallway, for Christ’s sake!

  You’ve got to understand about the Broadmoor. It’s one of those ultrachic apartment buildings with a $$$$$ facade and a very visible security force. You can look through the glass doors and see this posh lobby with original artwork on the walls. The people going in and out wear expensive notice-me clothing—no tee shirts and blue jeans at the Broadmoor. Of course, inside the apartments the rooms are tiny, the kitchens better suited to dollhouses, and the closets downright microscopic. But the address is right and the tenants who pay the extortionate rents are clearly on their way up. At the Broadmoor, appearances count. So how do you think I felt when I came home from work and found this slob sitting on the hallway floor and leaning against my door and breathing out enough whiskey fumes to make the place a fire hazard and burbling Hi, Earl, it’s your old buddy Charlie Bates come to visit?

  “How’d you get past security downstairs?”

  “Gave the man my last ten bucks.”

  So much for the Broadmoor’s security system. Charlie’s getting by the guard somehow failed to surprise me—it seemed a proper climax to a week in which just about everything that could go wrong in my life, did. Murphy’s law in twenty-four-hour operation. If Chicken Little had shown up just then squawking his message of doom, I’d have believed him. Charlie Bates on my doorstep just capped the week.

  I knew why the guard had let him in. The guard then on duty was a sour-faced man who looked down his nose at everyone who crossed his path. Ten bucks wasn’t enough to buy him off. I’d once offered him a ten-dollar tip; he’d looked at me the way a king looks at a worm and then turned his back and walked away. He’d let drunken, down-at-the-heel Charlie Bates into the building just to embarrass me. The guard resented me the way he resented all the tenants. I lived in the Broadmoor and he worked there and that made the difference.

  One look at Charlie Bates was enough to tell the guard or anyone else that here was a grade-A, number-one loser. Charlie was one of those people you spend your life trying to avoid. He broadcast gloom and defeat wherever he went, Joe Whatsisface in Li’l Abner.

  Nothing Charlie ever tried had worked out for him. The first time I ever saw him we were both fifteen and he was getting hell from a woodshop teacher at Peabody High School. Our buddyship began to bud when I slipped him some answers for a math test we were both taking; thereafter he attached himself to me like a shadow. Charlie was useful. He was good for running errands and he fought most of my fights for me. His first venture into high finance came when he was sixteen and he talked the local Mafia lieutenant into letting him write numbers at the high school. He’d just gotten started when the state lottery came along and took most of his customers away from him. I don’t think another numbers writer in Pittsburgh was hurt by the lottery because the Mafia gave better odds than the state. But Charlie was wiped out in two weeks. Nothing improved after that; the pattern was set. Work, family, friends—one by one they all let Charlie down. His version.

  The other version was that Charlie took and took and took and never produced anything in return. Two of Charlie’s three fathers-in-law had financed a couple of his penny-ante business schemes only to see their money go straight down the drain. Over the years Charlie had hit just about everybody he knew for a loan or an investment at least once—and then wondered why he didn’t have any friends left. He’d moan and mutter something melodramatic about suicide and shame some soft-hearted, soft-headed soul into advancing him a few more bucks. Charlie Bates was a taker, but not a very efficient one. You might as well invest your money in surfboards for Bedouins for all the good it did Charlie. The only reason I still put up with him was that I’d never let him take anything from me.

  In retrospect I guess I’d have to say Charlie Bates served a purpose in my life. He was a reminder that we’d both come from the same slum background, that what had happened to him could just as easily have happened to me. Charlie and I had started dead even, but Charlie had collapsed on the first lap while I was still in the race. Whenever things went wrong for me, I could look at Charlie Bates and feel good.

  That’s probably why I let him into the apartment: habit. Normally I’d sit there for a couple of hours and marvel at the man’s stupidity—he saw nothing, he understood nothing. Once he’d tied his shoe by putting his foot on my American Hepplewhite chair and then looked like a wounded puppy when I’d yelled at him. The only thing Charlie valued was cash, enough cash to see him through next week. So I’d told him what the Hepplewhite was worth, and he’d treated the chair with respect thereafter. I’d added another dead bolt after that visit.

  But that was normally, and things weren’t normal for me now. I was in danger of losing everything I valued; I needed a stimulus stronger than anything Charlie Bates could provide with his usual moaning and groaning. I needed inspiration. An opportunity the likes of which I’d never see again was slipping away and for the life of me I couldn’t think how to hold on to it.

  I’m going to have to back up. Charlie Bates came into the story late, and when he did he changed everything for me. Without ever fully understanding what he was doing. He came at a moment when I was desperate, when I would have grasped at anything I thought might save my neck. Charlie Bates wasn’t much but Charlie Bates was what I had. So I used him.

  At least that’s what I thought I was doing.

  My name is Earl Sommers, and at the time I’m telling you about I was an agent with Speer Galleries in Pittsburgh. Speer’s specialized in antique furniture but we handled other pieces as well—we’d recently started buying Chinese wall hangings, for instance. We didn’t really have enough room for storage and display of such space-consuming items and old man Speer didn’t even like Orientalia. But he had a nose for where the money came from, so we were in the Chinese wall hangings business. Why the Pittsburgh rich should suddenly develop a hankering to surround themselves with silken scenes from the Far East was one of those little mysteries you learn to live with.

  Costly oriental curiosities had nothing to do with me, though. I was a furniture man, more specifically a chair man. I love chairs. But nobody at Speer’s was allowed that degree of specialization, so like everybody else I had to know a little bit about a lot of things. I’m being modest: I had to know a lot about a lot of things. We all did. Speer’s was a medium-sized outfit when compared to a giant like Sotheby’s, but Amos Speer had built an international reputation for himself as a man you couldn’t fool. He was not inclined to be tolerant of mistakes.

  Monday morning I was late. I’d spent the weekend at the Ballard estate, cataloguing. The Ballard consignment was a rich one—incredibly good pieces, and lots of them. Henry Ballard had been an old robber baron who’d hobnobbed with Andrew Carnegie and the rest of them, and his daughter Alice had recently died at age eighty-six, leaving an estate full of goodies. The heirs were understandably eager for the auction to take place as soon as possible. The Alice Ballard estate was the biggest job I’d worked on in a couple of years, but the only time I could seem to find for it was after I’d put in my eight at the gallery. So I’d been
up late Sunday night, I’d had trouble getting up Monday morning, and I was late getting in.

  Nobody punched a time clock at Speer’s, but everybody seemed to notice when everybody else came in. My office was just off the auction room, and I’d almost made it when I ran into Leonard Wightman talking to Peg McAllister in the narrow hallway that connected the offices.

  Now Peg was a good ole gal, but Wightman was one of those horse-faced upper-middle-class Englishmen whose voices carry for twenty miles. Amos Speer had lured him away from Christie’s New York office—not too difficult, I suspected. Wightman had been one very small fish there. But Pittsburgh didn’t offer that kind of competition; here he was the only English-born porcelain expert in town. Wightman had been living in the states for ten or twelve years now but his accent grew more Oxbridge every year. His schtick was needling people while pretending to be a hail-fellow-well-met type. He especially loved slipping it to me. When he’d first learned where I lived, he’d informed me with great glee that Broadmoor was the name of England’s best-known institution for the confinement and treatment of the criminally insane.

  “Well, well, well,” Wightman said when he caught sight of me. “The barefoot boy with cheek. Is that a worry line I see bewrinkling your ignoble brow? Been pushing too hard lately, old chap?”

  “You want something, Wightman? I’m in a hurry. Morning, Peg.”

  “Morning, Earl,” she said cheerfully. Peg was pushing sixty but she never looked tired or rushed. I wondered how she did it.

  “In a hurry, the man says,” Wightman whinnied. “To bring a little beauty into a philistine world, no doubt. Ah well, to that auspicious end let me not admit impediments. Hasten on your way, dear boy.”

  “Thank you,” I said dryly. “Now if you’ll just move your ass so I can get by—”

  Peg’s eyebrows went up.

  Wightman didn’t move an inch. I pushed by him and went on to my office. He waited until I was opening the door and then said, “Oh, by the way, old chap, you are wanted. The Speer has been roaring since dawn. ‘Is Sommers here?’ he cried aloud, and, alas, none of us could say him yea. Isn’t it nice to be wanted?” Smirk.

  “You really are an asshole, Wightman,” I told him in lieu of punching him in the mouth.

  Peg’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “What’s eating you today, Earl?”

  Wightman didn’t give me a chance to answer. “Guilty conscience, I shouldn’t be surprised. Did you ever see such a furtive look?”

  Peg glared at him. “I don’t think that’s the least bit funny.”

  Wightman’s eyes widened. “Neither do I.”

  I went into my office and closed the door.

  The phone was ringing; it was the old man’s secretary, June Murray. “Earl? I’m glad I caught you. Mr. Speer wants to see you.”

  “So I hear. What does he want, June?”

  “Something to do with the Meissen Leda. It wouldn’t hurt to bring your folder.”

  “Do I have it? I thought that went on to the file room.”

  “Didn’t you keep a copy of your evaluation?”

  “Hold on, let me look.” I did a quick search through my files. “No, I don’t have anything on it.”

  June came close to making a tut-tut sound. “All right, I’ll have a duplicate made.”

  “Thanks, June. Why does he want to see me about the Meissen? Porcelain’s not my bailiwick—I was just standing in for Wightman one day when he was sick.”

  “I don’t know, Earl. You’ll have to ask him.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said grimly. “Be there anon.”

  I was looking through my files one more time when a voice speaking my name made me jump. It was Peg McAllister, who’d just stuck her head through the door. “Earl, what’s wrong? You’re all on edge.”

  “Now what could possibly be wrong?” I said sarcastically. “With all this love all around me?”

  Peg stage-sighed. “I do try to be helpful and supportive to my fellow slaves, really I do. But sometimes one of them whose initials are Earl Sommers makes it ver-y dif-fi-cult.”

  “Sorry, Peg. It’s just that kind of day.”

  “Whenever I have one of those, I admit defeat early and go straight back to bed. What was Wightman needling you about?”

  “Nothing in particular—just needling for the fun of it. You know how he is.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Got to rush, love,” I said. “Speer awaits.”

  “Then go,” she nodded. “His bite is worse than his bark.”

  I mustered a grin and headed toward Speer’s office. If anybody knew about Speer’s bite, it would be Peg McAllister. She’d been with the old man longer than any of the rest of us, from the early days when Speer Galleries was a one-room affair showing a few select pieces of Federal period furniture. Speer had set up shop in Philadelphia, where so much of our good furniture originally came from. But so many had been there before him he’d had to deal in pewter and glassware and portraits and the like just to make a go of it. Then one year he paid a bundle for a set of Revere tableware he later learned had been stolen.

  So he’d hired Peg McAllister, fresh out of law school and totally ignorant of antiques. But she’d learned. She handled all of Speer’s legal affairs, but her main responsibility over the years had been to track down the legal title to whatever her boss was thinking of buying. Speer had never been stung again.

  Speer Galleries gradually earned a small, respectable reputation, but Amos Speer wasn’t getting rich. There were too many other small, respectable dealers in Philadelphia. So he started looking longingly toward western Pennsylvania. Why should all that nice Scaife and Mellon money go to out-of-town dealers? Wouldn’t an on-the-spot agent be of some value? So Speer and Peg and the one agent Speer had working for him at the time (long since departed) had packed up and moved to Pittsburgh.

  It had been a smart move: Speer virtually had the market to himself. The antique dealers in the area at the time had been the smallest of small time; what few good pieces they’d carried Speer had picked up his first week in town. And the money came in. Amos Speer was an international dealer now, but it was Pittsburgh money that had put him over the top.

  Agents had come and gone, but Peg McAllister went on forever. She had become Speer Galleries, as much the institution as the founder himself. Peg had been known to tell Amos Speer off in no uncertain terms whenever she thought he was taking a wrong turn. She was the only one at the gallery who could get away with it.

  God knows I couldn’t. Especially not now, when I was so far behind in my work. The reason I was so far behind was quite simple: my work load had more than doubled within the past month. No explanation offered. Cataloguing the Alice Ballard estate should have been a full-time job, and there should have been at least three of us on it. But I was responsible for the whole thing, and every day some new smaller job came in that would steal time from the Ballard evaluation. I’d tried putting the smaller jobs off until the big one was finished, but every day Speer or his secretary would call and want to know what about the spool table, anything on the Peter Cooper rocker, where’s your report on the Duncan Phyfe, how many spindles on that new Windsor chair. It wasn’t that we were all overworked; we weren’t. None of the other agents seemed to be straining unduly. Just me. I didn’t like what I was thinking.

  June Murray looked up from her desk when I walked into Speer’s outer office. She gave me a mouth-only smile and held out a sheet of paper, a photocopy of my evaluation of the Meissen figurine I’d examined about a week ago.

  “June, you’re a lifesaver. I owe you one.” I gave her a winning smile with no noticeable effect. June was one of those just-average-looking women who through unstinting effort make themselves attractive. She had to look good, being in frequent contact with purchasers of beauty as she was. So she was always perfectly groomed. Always. I was willing to bet she put on make-up to take out the garbage. No, on second thought, there wouldn’t be any garbage in June Murray
’s life. I started toward Speer’s door.

  “Ah …”

  I stopped and looked back at her.

  “Better not, Earl.” The tone was friendly. I took my hand off the doorknob and waited while she buzzed the inner sanctum. “Mr. Sommers is here.”

  I worked at keeping my face impassive.

  “He says he’ll be with you in a moment,” June told me. “Have a seat.” I sat down and she turned back to her work.

  From where I was sitting I had a three-quarter view of her face, and I wasn’t surprised at the little smile that kept playing about her lips. By warning me, she’d kept me from putting my foot in it. I was supposed to remember that, add it to my account of favors owed. But the very act of warning me had reinforced her own authority, had made me acknowledge how much more in the know she was than I. She had controlled my movement. Some folks are quite ingenious at finding ways of putting other folks down.

  While others like the old ways of doing it: Speer kept me waiting twenty-five minutes. I didn’t even have the door closed behind me when he snapped, “Did you bring the Meissen evaluation?”

  “Right here.” I handed him the photocopy and took the chair facing him. The Meissen figurine was on his desk, a deliciously dainty Leda perched on the back of her oversexed swan.

  He waited until I was settled and then said, “Sit down.”

  The bastard. I’d been coming in here and sitting down without an invitation for seven years, and now all of a sudden he decides my manners need correcting? It was a junior executive’s trick, designed to embarrass the other fellow and put him at a disadvantage. Speer deliberately allowed an awkward silence to grow between us. I looked at that carefully barbered face and that sculptured white hair and those manicured hands and that impeccably tailored suit and wondered what it would take to make that dirty old man fall on his face.

  Speer pointed a long finger at the Leda. “It is your considered opinion that this is old Meissen?” His voice had a sarcastic edge to it.