The Palace Guard

by Charlotte MacLeod

  He kissed Sarah’s hand all the way up to the elbow, pounded Bittersohn shatteringly between the shoulder blades, and waddled off.

  “I wonder,” mused Bittersohn, “why he never answered my question about C. Edwald Palmerston?”

  Chapter 6

  PUNCTUALLY AT THREE O’CLOCK Monday afternoon, Sarah Kelling tapped on Dolores Tawne’s door in that wonderful anachronism, the Fenway Studios. Dolores greeted the guest effusively enough to make it clear she wasn’t really welcome and made a great fuss of getting her seated.

  Sarah had found the outside of the building exciting architecturally and well worth the efforts being made to preserve it for its original purpose. Except for the little balcony and the flight of stairs that led down to the floor, Dolores’s studio was something of a letdown: merely a large, squarish room unusual only in being about a story and a half high with enormously long windows. A half-finished still life of vegetables and a dead pheasant was set ostentatiously on a heavy easel. The place reeked of turpentine.

  Feeling a bit queasy from the smell, Sarah remarked that the painting looked as if it would be quite lovely when it was finished. Mrs. Tawne agreed, pointing out the more potentially delightful spots with a mahlstick. Sarah asked if Mrs. Tawne had other works in progress at the moment and Mrs. Tawne said no she hadn’t. Sarah said she herself worked mostly in pen and ink and it must be fun to handle color. Mrs. Tawne gave Sarah a lecture on color theory that Sarah had learned when she was twelve. Then she presented Sarah with a scrapbook to look at while she made the tea.

  None of the clippings was very recent. Most of them dealt at what Sarah found to be unnecessary length with the centennial celebration of a corporation for which Dolores Agnew Tawne, prominent Boston artist, had painted a series of presidential portraits. There was a blurry photograph of Dolores having her hand shaken by a prognathous executive in front of a regrettably exact likeness of himself. There were photographs of the other portraits. To Sarah, brought up among works of art, they showed technical competence and no spark of genuine creativity.

  She was conscientiously trying to interest herself in the history of Amalgamated Enterprises when her hostess came back from the small inner area that must serve as bedroom and kitchen staggering under the weight of an overloaded tea tray.

  “I can still enjoy my food, thank the Lord,” Mrs. Tawne remarked as she set down the tray. “Try a sandwich. That’s egg salad and here’s deviled ham and”—her recital of the menu was interrupted by a loud knocking on the door—“and there’s my star boarder, no doubt. I swear she could smell food all the way from Kenmore Square. Excuse me.”

  She bounded up the stairs and flung open the door. “Why, Mr. Palmerston!”

  C. Edwald Palmerston, for it was none other as Sarah noted to her consternation, removed the pearl-gray fedora that had been set with geometric precision across his balding head. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Tawne. I happened to be in the neighborhood on a matter of business and took the liberty of dropping by. There are some important matters on which I should greatly appreciate the benefit of your opinion. Might you have a moment to spare for me?”

  Sarah ate a sardine sandwich and mentally cursed her luck. Mrs. Tawne came as close to fluttering as her utilitarian contours permitted.

  “Mr. Palmerston, you know I always have time for you. Let me take your hat. Come right down and join us for tea. I believe you’re acquainted with Mrs. Kelling?”

  “Kelling? Why, I—”

  Sarah fought down an impulse to scream and said politely, “How do you do, Mr. Palmerston? We met at Mrs. Lackridge’s and you also came to our house when you served on the festival committee with her and my mother-in-law.”

  “Ah, yes. Yes indeed. This is an unexpected pleasure, Mrs.—ah—Kelling.”

  Judging from C. Edwald’s expression it was a pleasure he could have done nicely without. The late Caroline Kelling, though both deaf and blind, had been far from dumb in any sense of the word. She had called Mr. Palmerston a harebrained old fool in open meeting and proven her case. Sarah had been present on that occasion and Mr. Palmerston must have remembered. The silence became strained.

  Dolores, however, was not the girl to let a party die. She bustled back and forth plying her guests with food and drink, twitching the gauze curtains over the huge studio windows to shield Mr. Palmerston’s august eyeballs from the outside glare, chattering without a break. Just as she’d got everything and everybody arranged to her own satisfaction and plumped herself down with cup and plate, another visitor knocked.

  “There she is now,” she sighed. “What a bother. Excuse me, folks, I’ll try to put her off.”

  Mrs. Tawne did not succeed. When she came back downstairs she was closely followed by the much bedizened wreck of a woman who must once have been quite breathtaking.

  “This is my neighbor, Countess Ouspenska, Mrs. Kelling. Have you met the countess, Mr. Palmerston?”

  The countess gave Sarah an absentminded glance, then turned the full glare of her eye shadow on Palmerston. “You do not see me.”

  “I—er—see you quite plainly. That is, I—er—in fact, it has been some time since—er—would you care to sit down?”

  Looking even more foolish than he had on that historic day when Aunt Caroline put him through the wringer, Mr. Palmerston straightened his lanky frame and went through the motions of offering Countess Ouspenska his chair.

  She spurned him and took Dolores’s instead. “I sit here. Who is this pretty little girl you make a fool of yourself over now?”

  After a dazed moment, Sarah realized the countess was talking about her. “I came by myself,” she said firmly.

  “This is Mrs. Alexander Kelling, Brooks Kelling’s cousin,” snapped their hostess.

  “Kelling? But that is the name of the woman who murders everybody and lives with the beautiful Max! Can it be? Ah, yes, I see it can be! There is excitement in your face. Adventure! Passion!” She bit hugely into an egg salad sandwich. “Naturally a grande amoureuse like you would not bother with an old poop like this Palmerston. Tell me confidentially as one adventuress to another, how do you get away with it?”

  Sarah didn’t know whether to laugh or flee. “First, I wish you’d understand that I’ve never murdered anybody. Second, if you’re referring to Mr. Max Bittersohn, I don’t live with him. He lives with me. That is”—she felt her face getting hot—“I have a boarding house and he happens to be one of my boarders. There’s very little adventure involved in being a landlady, I assure you.”

  “Ho! Never mind, little one. If I could get the magnificent Max to live with me I would keep my secrets also. It is so beautiful and so sad.”

  “Why is it sad?”

  “Because he chooses you and not me. All joy is sadness. That is life. I will have more of your good tea, Dolores, and many of these amusing little cakes. Then I will take this so demure little seductress to my studio and we will talk of love and Max Bittersohn.”

  “That’s a splendid idea,” said Mrs. Tawne briskly. “Will you have another cup of tea before you go, Mrs. Kelling?”

  Sarah thought she might as well because she couldn’t resist the countess’s invitation and it didn’t look as though they’d be leaving for some time yet from the way the woman was tucking into the refreshments. At last, however, the point of satiety appeared to have been reached. Countess Ouspenska wiped her lips on the fancy paper napkin Dolores had supplied, carefully wrapped the few remaining sandwiches in it, and announced, “We go.”

  Sarah picked up her handbag, thanked Mrs. Tawne for a delightful visit—it had been an unusual one, at any rate—and followed her exotic new acquaintance down the hall. Countess Ouspenska’s studio was similar in architecture to the one they’d just left but totally different otherwise. Dolores Tawne’s had been antiseptically neat, this was an exuberant welter. There was a great deal of furniture, none of it any good, all of it in desperate need of dusting. There were tapestry runners and vases of paper flowers. There must h
ave been at least a dozen icons sitting about and to Sarah’s astonishment these looked like the real thing.

  The countess set the packet of sandwiches with care on the shelf of a broken-down Chinese étagère. “Dolores is dull but kind of heart,” she observed. “This week for me is rent so not food.”

  Sarah blinked. She’d thought she herself was hard up, but so far she’d never had to miss a meal. “Surely those icons,” she stammered, “they look as though they’re valuable. Couldn’t you—?”

  “Sell? Not. Never. Without my icons I starve in the gutter,” said the countess cheerfully. “Look what I do.”

  She led her guest through the maze of furniture to a table on which sat one of the icons. Beside it, in a litter of twisted paint tubes, whiskered brushes, and wads of filthy cotton, lay an absolute duplicate, complete except for the gold leaf on the Infant’s halo.

  “I finish tomorrow. Is most careful work to make identical in every detail. I sell, then I eat. If I could paint faster I could eat more. Is always market for beautiful fake icons and nobody can fake as good as me. I am unique.”

  “I’m sure you are,” said Sarah, and hoped it was true. “Where do you sell them?”

  “Ah, that is my secret.” Never with ten thousand tortures will I tell. Is no good for business, see?”

  “Of course, I should have known better than to ask. I beg your pardon.”

  “I am wonderful businesswoman,” said the countess with a complacency that her circumstances would not appear to justify. “Is necessary now that I am old and ugly.”

  “Oh, you’re not!”

  “Pretty words from a pretty woman is nice but I say the hell with women’s lib give me every time a man to pay the bills. For you the wonderful Max coughs up, eh?”

  “He pays his rent like the rest of my boarders,” Sarah replied primly. “I was left badly off when my husband was killed. It was a case of either losing my house or finding a way to make it produce some income, so I started to rent rooms. As to the murders, Mr. Bittersohn was very helpful with the investigation.”

  “And now he investigates you, eh? Ah, if I were twenty years younger maybe I could have been investigated by the gorgeous Max instead of that old turkey who sits and gobbles with Dolores.”

  “But surely you don’t mean—he couldn’t possibly—”

  “Mr. Watch-and-Ward Palmerston? Not any more he couldn’t I think but he would no doubt still wish to. I knew him long ago, when he was somewhat less unattractive than now. He was, I will say for him, a man who always got his money’s worth. So I have heard from a number of sources. I meet ladies in all walks of life, some of whom are in fact not what you would call ladies and do more walking than others, if you follow me as he does not nowadays. He is a philosopher. He took them where he found them and he paid them what they asked. About the price he never quibbled, only about what a big financier calls the return on the dollar.”

  “If my Great-aunt Matilda had ever known that! She was always holding him up to my Cousin Dolph as a model.”

  “Palmerston was never that good,” said Countess Ouspenska. “Now, if it would be the handsome and agile Max, tell me—

  Anticipating what the countess was hoping to hear, Sarah jumped up. “I’m afraid all I can tell you is that if I’m not home in time to prepare Mr. Bittersohn’s dinner he might employ his agility in moving elsewhere. Thank you so much for showing me your studio.”

  “Come again after I sell my icon and I give you tea Russian style. Bring your marvelous Max.” The countess kissed her repeatedly on both cheeks.

  “I’m sure he’d love to come.” Sarah decided it was no use trying again to explain that the marvelous Max wasn’t hers to bring. She had periodic fits of the giggles all the way back to Tulip Street. En route she stopped at one of the more chichi grocery stores and ordered a basket of exotic delicacies to be sent to the Countess Ouspenska at the Fenway Studios, charging it to Mrs. Adolphus Kelling because she couldn’t possibly pay for the basket herself and she knew Cousin Mary would understand.

  “We’ll send it around first thing in the morning, Mrs. Kelling,” the clerk promised. “Did you wish to enclose a card?”

  “Why not?” Sarah picked up the pen he offered, thought a moment, then printed, “In fond remembrance,” on the little white square and sealed it inside the envelope. At least the countess would eat this week.

  Chapter 7

  THE MAGNIFICENT MAX DID not appear for the dinner Sarah cooked. He finally showed up about half-past nine while she was in the library exchanging recipes with Mrs. Sorpende. She could see that he looked frazzled around the edges.

  “Mr. Bittersohn, did you have any dinner? Shall I fix you a snack?”

  “That would be great. I’m starved.” He followed Sarah out to the kitchen. Mrs. Sorpende, being an oracle by trade and perhaps divining that her persona might be non grata there, did not.

  Mariposa and Charles were in their basement lair broadening their cultural horizons by listening to some old Cab Calloway records. Sarah shut the basement door on Minnie the Moocher and sat Bittersohn down at the table with a cup of soup for starters. “Now tell me what’s happened.”

  “Brown, that guard who staged the robbery in the chapel—”

  “I know. Drink your soup while it’s hot.”

  “Brooks found him dead in the locker room this afternoon full of paint remover. He had a note in his pocket saying, ‘I’m sorry about Joe.’”

  “Oh no!”

  “Lieutenant Davies can’t decide whether Brown killed Witherspoon and then committed suicide in a fit of remorse or got thirsty while he was trying to write somebody a sympathy letter.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think the note was a plant. I think Brown kept a bottle in his locker and somebody loaded it. After he passed out they took away the liquor bottle and substituted one half full of paint remover with the label nice and prominent and his fingerprints artistically arranged on the glass. Very efficient job. Also a very painful way to go, one might think. It must have taken him a while to die, unless the paint remover was gingered up with a pinch of strychnine or something.”

  “Are they going to do an autopsy?”

  “Have to, I suppose. How did your visit with Mrs. Tawne go?”

  Sarah could readily understand why he’d want to change the subject. “It was interesting, in a way,” she told him. “C. Edwald Palmerston dropped in unexpectedly. Mrs. Tawne seemed ever so glad to see him. And I met an admirer of yours.”

  “Do tell. Which one?”

  “Countess Ouspenska, no less.”

  “Ouspenska?” He took another spoonful of soup. “What does she look like?”

  “In a word, hell. Slavic and suffering. I’d say, though, that she must have been absolutely stunning when she was a good deal younger and in better repair.”

  “Oh, I know who you mean now. Good old Lydia. She used to be Nick Fieringer’s girl.”

  “She was C. Edwald Palmerston’s girl, too.”

  “Small world. Does Mrs. Tawne know that?”

  “I couldn’t say. The countess greeted him like an old acquaintance against whom she held a grudge, but she didn’t unburden her soul, as it were, until she and I had gone to her studio. And then she talked mostly about you.”

  “What’s to unburden about me? My God, Mrs. Kelling, you don’t imagine Lydia and I were ever—”

  “No, I don’t. That was the burden of her plaint. That you hadn’t, I mean. She”—Sarah blushed—“appeared to be under some misapprehension as to—”

  Luckily Charles poked his head into the kitchen just then. “Oh, Mr. Bittersohn. I heard movement overhead and thought that might be you fixing yourself a snack since you weren’t in to dinner. I was about to offer my assistance but I see you are capably provided for. May I fetch you a glass of sherry, perhaps? Or a cold beer? Mariposa and I keep a six-pack or two on hand for our personal use.”

  “No, thanks, Charlie. I’m sort of off liquor
tonight. Just tell me if you happen to know a former actress named Lydia Ouspenska.”

  Charles carefully shut the basement door, cocked an ear to make sure Mariposa wasn’t on her way upstairs, then murmured, “I have met Countess Ouspenska, sir.”

  “She’s madly in love with Mr. Bittersohn,” Sarah couldn’t resist putting in.

  “I have always found her to be a person of unexceptionable taste and discrimination, madam. She comes from a noble Russian family.”

  “She’s a Polish sign painter’s daughter from Chelsea,” said Bittersohn. “The way I heard it, the Countess Ouspenska act came from a play she was in, back during World War II when all the real actresses were doing their bit for the lads at the front. Lydia never got far in the theater. Her real forte was seeing what the boys in the back room would have. How’s she doing these days, Mrs. Kelling?”

  “Not too well. All her former sources of income have walked out on her. Charles, how could you be such a cad?”

  “Madam, I must beg leave to protest. My connection with Countess Ouspenska has been confined to a short run at the Charles Street Playhouse, where we both had walk-ons, and since then to an occasional exchange of pleasantries over a libation or two at Irving’s.”

  “I didn’t know you hung out in Coolidge Corner, Charlie,” said Bittersohn.

  “Officially, sir, I do not. However, all Mariposa’s relatives live over the other way in Jamaica Plain and environs, and there are times when we theatricals require our freedom of expression. If I can render no further service here, may I return to my quarters?”

  “You have our gracious permission to retire. On your way downstairs, you might try to recall whether Lydia’s ever said anything to you about Madam Wilkins’s palazzo.”

  “I shall endeavor to do so. Hasta la vista, señor, señora.”