We’d been sitting in front of the gas log in one of those silences, with sandwiches. Pete could look like summer in organdie with that Leghorn hat across her knees, but the costume didn’t fool me. I knew she was working Saturday mornings in a cut-rate department store; and she had no business throwing in her lot with a hack who should have been exhibiting chalk-talks or grocery-calendar seascapes and couldn’t do her justice. I’d had an impulse to chuck the unfinished canvas out into Forty-Third Street. Lucky I didn’t. That portrait of Pete was to have an amazing destiny. But I didn’t, that evening, think it was going to have any destiny at all, and I couldn’t see why a wizened black lawyer who dubbed himself the Count of Lemonade should be puddling the doorway of my studio, telling Pete her uncle had been murdered.
“Listen,” I advised. “If this is a gag, go back to Harlem and tell the funny man who hired you to come up here in that costume that scaring ladies isn’t the laugh he thinks it is. And close the door.”
He closed the door, but continued on the inside.
Apparently Pete had missed my outburst. “Uncle Eli,” she was saying to herself. “Murdered. How dreadful. I suppose there were a lot of people who didn’t like him.”
The face under the stovepipe ignored me with a blink. The purple lower lip was active again. “Forgive me if I have startled you, but time is pressing. Four hours after your uncle’s regrettable death, ma’mselle, I took plane from Cap Haitien to Miami, onward to New York. Had I not been forced to occupy the evening seeking your address—”
“How,” Pete gasped, “did he know where I lived?”
“But your Uncle Eli came several times to the States on business. There were, I believe, agents in this city.”
“Agents?”
“You are unaware, I think, of the magnitude of your uncle’s interests. Morne Noir, ma’mselle, is one of the largest estates in our Haitian Republic. There are many acres in cane. There is a sugar refinery. Alors, there are the fishing interests at Port de Paix, the rum at St. Marc, some hundred thousand gourds on deposit in local banks and gold bonds in the Banque Nationale. Although sugar is down and Wall Street doing deplorably with many of his securities here, your Uncle Eli died a man of wealth, leaving a fortune the most noteworthy. His villa at Morne Noir and an estate of some hundred thousand dollars.”
“I’m not interested in Uncle Eli’s estate,” Pete said coldly. “If he was killed I’m sorry and hope justice is done. Thank you for bringing me the — the news.”
Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines bowed. “As your Uncle Eli’s lawyer and executor I was so commissioned. It was his instruction that I was to communicate with you immediately, if, when, and at such time as he should die. Yesterday afternoon it was, when your uncle was discovered seated in the library, dead with a book in his lap. There was also a bullet in his forehead. However, no one was in the house at the time, nor was a gun discovered on the premises. There were no foot-tracks. There was nothing.”
“Go on,” Pete told the little black man.
Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines swallowed. “It was your uncle’s habit to retire to his library during siesta hour. Thus he was found by his personal physician, who, coming from the hospital at Le Cap, stopped in to call. Your uncle’s face was smothered with blood.”
I didn’t like that word “smothered.” Our informant wrinkled his face. “Dieu! but I saw it, ma’mselle. It is a fact I followed the physician into the house, arriving on the scene as he was extracting the bullet. The body, it was stiff. Dr. Sevestre said it had been dead about one hour, and prepared it at once for the burial. The police? Poof! Those Gardes know nothing. Suicide, they report. Of that I shall speak later. I can only assure you, ma’mselle, that you should feel interest in the estate as you have been named a possible heir.”
Pete shook her head. “Not by Uncle Eli.”
“In writing, ma’mselle. Along with several others.”
“I’m not — ”
“Pardon me,” the lower lip insisted. The old man leaned the umbrella against the door; dug industriously in the bosom of his redingote to extricate an impressive envelope. A square white envelope sealed with a red rosette of sealing wax. “Voilà! Here is the money, ma’mselle. More than adequate to take you by express plane to Miami and Cap Haitien. My instructions were to deliver this if you will go. Bien.”
Pete regarded the envelope with an expression of unbelief. “For me? Uncle Eli left money for me? To go to Haiti?” All at once she threw back her head and laughed. “Pinch me, somebody! A hundred thousand estate! Uncle Eli’s money! Oh, my!” She waved her straw hat at the ceiling. “Whee!”
“You will go, then, to claim your legacy?”
“‘Will I go?”
“But then you must hurry, ma’mselle, for there is barely enough time. There is a plane for Miami early tomorrow morning which you must take. From Miami you will fly to Cap Haitien, and no time can be lost. Myself, I am leaving for Haiti tonight. I will be in Cap Haitien to meet you and will, myself, conduct you to Morne Noir. Attend! You cannot miss tomorrow’s plane.”
Pete stood very still. “Tomorrow’s plane?”
The little old Negro nodded. “For if you are not there to hear the reading of the will you forfeit any heritage. Such are the written instructions of the deceased.” Another paper came out of the redingote. The white eyes traveled down the document, reading.
“‘The will now on file with Maître Tousellines’ (at your service) ‘is to be opened and read by said Maître Tousellines just prior to the burial service which is to be held in the library at Morne Noir on the midnight of the third day after death of the testator. Said reading shall be made by Maître Tousellines to the heirs or devisees named and in the presence of my personal physician, Dr. Sevestre, as witness, and any other witnesses attendant to the burial service. An heir so named who fails to hear the reading and remain present throughout the funeral is automatically disinherited, with his or her share of the estate, as bequeathed in the will, reverting to the local government.’”
The old black man droned the paragraph; he yanked another leaf from his coat. “I have here the list of possible inheritors, the devisees, ma’mselle. Your name is included.”
“And to collect my share I’ve got to leave for Haiti tomorrow and be there at the funeral?”
“As stipulated, ma’mselle. I can only advise that the fortune is not small and it would be to your interest to go.” He handed Pete the envelope with the money, stowed the papers back into the redingote, adjusted the stovepipe, and clutched up the umbrella.
As for me, I was dizzy. Rain was still drumming on the skylight; that was real enough. But I would be disappointed if this darkey did not say “Abracadabra!” and vanish.
He opened the door to stand crowlike in the frame. “I will await you at the douane in Cap Haitien, ma’mselle. Permit me to remind you, if you do not go you forfeit your rights to a bequest. Bon soir, ma’mselle.”
Pete stood looking at the envelope in her hand. I jumped to the door. “Wait a minute,” I called. “Any objection to Miss Dale’s fiancé coming with her?”
Eyes looked up the stairs. “There are none so stipulated by the deceased, m’sieu. Bon soir.”
“Hold on!” Pete cried, as I closed the door. “Call that — that African lawyer back here. I’m not going to need this traveling fare because I can’t go.”
“Can’t go? With a crack at this uncle’s fortune of yours?” I pidginned the King’s English. “With this chance at a hundred thousand — ”
Pete made a face. “He wasn’t my uncle, Cart. Not really. Not even a close relative, thank God. I — I hated him.”
“Who was he?”
“Fifth cousin of Dad’s, perhaps. When father died he left me in the care of this hawk. Eli Proudfoot. Supposed to be my guardian. Ugh. Skinny. Big Adam’s apple. Must have been fifty, then. Little glassy eyes like camera lenses. Kind of sneaked when he walked.”
“But he’s leaving you t
his — ”
“I guess he had some money, even then. We lived in a moldering old Florida house. I can still remember how his lips would sort of purse when he’d kiss me. I was ten. When I was seventeen he tried to make love to me — asked me to marry him. One of those horrible, superannuated old Romeos. I couldn’t stand it. I slapped his face with a riding whip and ran away. He simply went haywire with rage, threatened to have me brought back. I hid. Then I heard he’d gone to this plantation in Haiti and become sort of a white Emperor Jones or something. I haven’t heard of him since. I don’t wonder, really, that somebody took a shot at him. Once I saw him jab a lighted cigar into the flank of his saddle horse.”
“Sounds lovely,” I said. “But just the same he’s relented and cut you in on his will. A hundred thou — ”
“I’m not — ”
“You bet your sweet life you’re not going down there alone. I’m going with you. You know where Haiti is?”
“Island in the Caribbean. I read Black Majesty.”
“I’ve got just time to borrow the fare, and I can pack in a —”
“I’m not going, Cart.”
“With that money just dropping in your lap?” I capered. “Don’t stand there — ” Then I saw where her eyes were. “Lord! Don’t tell me you’re thinking about that damned painting.”
“Cart,” she said firmly, “do you think I’d step out on you just when you’re nearly finished? You’ve got to work every minute of the next few days.”
In all those weeks I’d been struggling at her portrait (full length, life size, Pete in a summer frock with a creamy straw hat swinging in her hand — “Southern Hospitality, ” by E. E. Cartershall, ’35) and trying not to write valentines to her on the side, I had never hated that canvas as I despised it then. Away down under, I didn’t think it had a pater-noster at this Academy showing — one of those gallery free-for-alls that seduce a lot of hopefuls into quitting errand-boy jobs and wasting enough canvas to have rigged the Spanish Armada — and I was sick of it. My work wasn’t too sour; in that crisp organdie frock with her Leghorn hat and a suggestion of blue dusk behind her, Pete’s portrait might suggest Watteau. Although the tilt of the head gave it an air and the pose wasn’t entirely mannered, I’m not Watteau, and I was equally convinced that the money would go to some Greenwich Village realism about “Sunset on Garbage” or “Geisha Girl with Clubbed Foot.”
“Listen,” I said. “It’s not right around the eyes, and I’ll never get it right around the eyes. The showing’s ten days away, and I couldn’t make it if it were ten years. You’ve starved around this garret, when you could have been working for B.B.D. and O. or Jeff Galata, long enough. I’ll never finish it anyway. You think I’d see you lose a fortune so I could miss winning this fool prize?”
How could any man paint her eyes when they blazed like that and had a way of changing color? Sometimes they were purple, sometimes indigo; when she wrinkled her nose they were cobalt, when angered coral green. Right now they were coral green.
“You do the listening,” she blazed. “You told that black lawyer you were my fiancé. Well, my fine friend, you’re not my fiancé. You’ve asked me to marry you often enough, and I’ll tell you this much and it’s final. You’ll never get an answer from me, as the saying goes, until that painting is finished. Memorize that!”
I memorized it. It gave me an inspiration. “We can take it with us!” I hollered. “Look, I’ll whip it off the frame — it’s dry, won’t hurt it a bit. I’ll work on it while we’re down there, and no time lost or anything. I’ll work in Haiti, see? My God, you can’t toss any hundred grand for something as simple as this. I won’t let you. You’re going, Pete, and I’m going with you.”
“I won’t go,” Pete said.
She wouldn’t have, either. And to tell you the truth, I was a little engloomed about all that money, because I knew what it meant. This story-book business of the poor, promising artist and the rich — but I didn’t hint any of that in the argument. And not a long time after that we were buggy-driving through the dirtiest, blackest rain ever to quench a night, on the darkest road to any place but one.
Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, LL.B., Comte de Limonade, steered what we could see of a horse. Pete sat with her eyes glistening. The more I was seeing of Haiti the less I was liking it, and the gladder I was I’d insisted on coming with Pete, the brighter I felt for remembering to stick my war-relic Luger in my Gladstone.
Rain fell in ropes, and away off in the dark somewhere there was a sodden tumpy-bum-bum, tumpy-bum-bum, like the beating of a heart. Maître Tousellines was speaking of murder.
II.
Blessed Are They that Mourn —
When the wind blew the rain sheeting across the road the sound faded, and when the rain went limp in a drizzle the sound grew louder. You couldn’t see the thumb on your hand outside the buggy curtains, but you could almost see that sound. It had personality. It followed us like a presence, and it persevered. It had come with nightfall, along with us and the rain and the buggy-ride. Tumpy-bum-bum, tumpy-bum-bum. I didn’t like the sound and I didn’t like the buggy-ride. I hadn’t wanted to leave the seaplane out in the bay and come ashore in the rowboat to meet the little black lawyer.
Our plane had swept into the Cape at twilight, and there was Haiti with darkness already crowding over the town along the shore. Jungly headlands cradling a bay. A coast of palm-trees and vague white roofs. A breeze like warm custard and a smell they told us was Cap Haitien. Dark Hills flanked up behind the sprawled town, and a gathering of mountains scowled off in the distance with clouds mumbling among their foreheads. Pete was all needles to get ashore, and fascinated by a ruin we thought we could see at the top of a distant mountain.
“Yeah,” the pilot pointed it out. “That’s this Christophe’s Citadel. La Ferrière. This Christophe was a black king, emperor of Haiti around the time of Napoleon. Built that fort up there. Used to order his soldiers up there for discipline, an’ command them to march off the cliff.”
Pete was happy. “So that’s the place I’ve read about.
“Yeah. This Christophe’s supposed to’ve shot himself with a gold bullet, and they buried him in a lime pit up there,” the pilot said with a grin. “They say the hand didn’t sink. They say it stuck out and reached at the sky. It ain’t there now; I went up to see. The tomb looks like a chicken coop. You’ll find everything in Haiti kind of looks like a chicken coop. I always wondered about that hand, but you know these black Haitians. Believe anything. Voodoo, and all that. You’ll hear the drums if you get inland. Myself,” said the pilot, “I don’t like it here. Well — have a nice honeymoon.”
“You’re not even close,” Pete told him acidly. “We’re going to a funeral.”
“I feel a little as if I were going to my own,” I had to mutter later on when we were being sculled ashore in a red rowboat by a tan Negro in a pair of violet pants. The scene was done in shades of blue, blue-gray and smoky green. The headlands of the cape were shadows thrown by purple mountains which loomed taller and darker as we neared the foreshore. All along the beach little bonfires twinkled, sending up columns of blue smoke in the stillness. The boat burbled softly in a mirror of dark wine. In the mulberry gloaming I could make out a concrete jetty and a string of watchers, our Senegambian attorney in his stovepipe hat a silhouette at dock’s end. We were Charon’s customers going to the Land of Shades, and there was the mortician waiting for the tickets against a sky of crape.
“I don’t know about this,” I remarked to Pete.
“About what?” She sat with her feet on the luggage, my paintbox in her lap, the unfinished masterpiece hugged against her gabardine.
“About landing in a Negro republic after dark like this.”
“I thought you were all for coming. Not scared, are you?”
“My teeth,” I said haughtily, “are chattering. All the same, Pete, don’t forget I’m — ”
“Coo,” she gave me (how I hate that exp
ression!). “Stop the father act. You’re not responsible for me, Mr. Cartershall. I’ll take care of my department and you’ll take care of yours. All you’ve got to do on this cruise is keep your mind on your business and paint. This is my funeral.”
Life does have its occasions. One evening you’re under a skylight on Forty-Third Street east of the elevated; two evenings later you’re under a chain of mountains jungled with tropical palms. I congratulated myself on having had the wit to wireless ahead from Miami and ask the authorities, if there were any problems in this place, about Master Tousellines. I hadn’t told Pete, but the answer was in my pocket. Master Tousellines, as far as the consular service was aware, was a Haitian barrister in good standing.
He doffed the stovepipe to Pete, regarded me as if I weren’t there, and without further greeting hurried us to a waiting Buick. We drove past shabby walls down vague streets in a darkness that prevented sightseeing. Cap Haitien gave off a smell of melons and manure, not unpleasant. There were galleries over sidewalks and loose-lipped black people bartering in lamp-light. Pete exclaimed over an oxcart under a street lamp, and a Negress standing at superb attention with a rooster perched on her turban. Rumba music trailed us from the pale yellow arches of a café, clicking and snapping at the thighs, and I glimpsed a couple of doorways worth sketching. Then we were whizzing on open highway, the town and the landscape gone.
Master Tousellines sat in thought on the front seat beside the chauffeur; Pete and I were two cigarette-sparks in the back. The black boy at the wheel abandoned caution. He wore a sleeveless cotton jumper originally patched, the right half red, the left half blue, as if he had cut the garment from a Haitian flag. Thus clothed, he was proof against disaster. Three hours through the night at about sixty miles an hour, climbing most of the way. The car boiled and shook. Now and then the swaying headlamps picked out a white palm-tree, a half-crumbled chalky wall, a Negro at ease on a donkey, or a pig, not stopping for the pig. At last the chauffeur gave up. Brakes screamed to a halt in the middle of nowhere. There was an enormous gray tree bearded with Spanish moss; a pink and brown splotched horse tethered to a nether limb; a buggy in the advanced stages of rickets. Everybody out.
Murder On the Way! Page 2
