Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  “Blow me down!” the En-sign spoke out from the doorway, rubbing his hands, his copper face creased with amusement. “This is gettin’ good!”

  Pete started to say something; but Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse interrupted her intent by turning his back on her, stepping gingerly over the corpse and into the wardrobe, where he let fly an explosion of staccato French oaths. Next minute his hands, pressing a panel at the back of the cabinet, had opened a door in the wall — a shadowy parallelogram about the size of the door to a broom-closet — and once more Uncle Eli’s bedchamber was alive with that clammy, green wind.

  The Haitian went through with a stifled shout; the panel closed behind him; the wardrobe was as empty as the feeling under my ribs. We could hear footsteps tapping behind the plaster walls; footsteps that died away, then came back rapidly like the fade and recurrence of volume in a radio. The panel reopened, exhaling stale breath and the perspiring person of the Garde lieutenant. Dusting cobwebs from his medals, he stepped with drama from the wardrobe and walked straight to Maître Tousellines.

  “M’sieu the avocat, when you left the office under the stairs tonight, did you lock the door?”

  Tousellines, licorice and lilac, bit his sausage lip. “The door to M’sieu Proudfoot’s office? I — I did not think to lock it.”

  “That is how Sir Duffin gained access to the wardrobe in this room. A passage in the wall, descending to the office below. He stole from his appointed quarters without being seen by my gendarme on the landing; crept into the office and came up by way of the wall passage. But Louis heard him creeping up the inner steps. Volià!”

  Pete could hold quiet no longer. Fixed on mine, her eyes were shiny, rounded, gray with wonder. “Cart!” she cried. “Didn’t you shoot him?”

  I looked at her dizzily. “Me? But I thought you — ”

  “I couldn’t shoot him,” she whispered. “And if you didn’t—”

  Who did? Who shot Sir Duffin Wilburforce if Pete hadn’t shot him and I hadn’t? I stared at the body on the floor, my ears still ringing from that dynamite-clap in the dark. I listened to Lieutenant Narcisse telling me how neatly he had disarmed the rest of the household and locked their hardware in the office safe. I listened to Maître Tousellines babbling how he alone knew the combination, and the safe in the office below was securely locked. I listened to the harelipped gendarme corporal, Louis, go down the stairs and come up the stairs with the information that the safe had not been opened.

  “But someone,” I heard myself saying jitteringly, “must have come up that passage behind the English freak and fired from his rear — ”

  The lieutenant promptly launched a cross-word puzzle. The room filled with the barks, bleats, whines and growls of the Inquisition and the sound of wind-thrown rain pounding the shutters. The lizard, reckless from curiosity, fell to the carpet, broke off its tail and fled under the Houdini wardrobe. Drums beat a throbbing undertone to the game of question and answer, eyes went haggard and voices hoarse, but the answer, like the atmosphere in Uncle Eli’s room, remained at zero.

  Tousellines had been asleep in an alcove bedroom.

  Manfred, Ambrose, Ti Pedro, Toadstool, the En-sign and the Widow Gladys, so help them God, had slept in their respective rooms, dreamed like babes until the moment of the gunshot. That was their story and they stuck to it. Furthermore, the lot of them were unarmed, were they not? Furthermore, a count of the guns stowed by the police in the office safe showed them all there. As Narcisse pointed out, Voilà!

  “Ja!” Manfred concluded his personal confession of innocence, “but we agree on one thing, Herr Lieutenant. Somebody killed the British swine and it was done with a gun!”

  “Miss Dale and I didn’t shoot him!” I lashed back at the hint. I frowned at Narcisse and Narcisse frowned at me. “Look here,” I hazarded, “if these — these sleeping beauties didn’t kill Sir Duffin, and we didn’t, how about somebody from the outside?”

  “Quite impossible,” the officer sneered. “Since midnight the château has been completely surrounded by guards. A rat could not get by my sentinels. On my faith, it does not seem necessary. The rats are already in the house.” His black eyes blurred with anger. “Attend, criminals! All of you! I am going to put a guard over every cursed one of you; from now on it will be like the siamese Twins, each one of you with a gendarme, oui! Two murders this night! Two under the eye of Lieutenant Nemo Narcisse, of the Garde d’Haiti! Do you think you can play with me like that? One of you shall pay! The one who shot down this Englishman, who killed Dr. Sevestre — when we find that one, on my word! I think we find the killer who put M’sieu Proudfoot, also, in his grave — ”

  Lighting his pipe, the En-sign gave a hoarse snicker. “You better stop your bluffin’, Sherlock, an’ find him damn quick,” he said to Narcisse in a furry tone. “Take a hint from this limejuicer, here. My bet is he was shavin’ an’ swabbin’ paint on his pilot-house to put on a spook act an’ scare the rest of us outa here. Why? Because he stood first to rake in on the will, that’s why, an’ he wanted to chase off the competition. But the competition don’t chase, an’ Sir Duff gets kissed good-by with a bullet. Ti Pedro’s in the hot spot, now. Myself,” the sailor turned on heel and gave me a venomous, blue wink, “myself, I’m glad I ain’t first in the will. I’ve a hunch it’s like a football game I once played the Quantico Marines. One down an’ six to go — ”

  The old clock on the stairs bonged six. Thunder tumbled wooden blocks around in the sky, and the windows rattled under cloudbursting rain. Storm sounds echoed through the nooks and halls of Château Morne Noir; and a voice called up the stairway from below.

  “Breakfast am served — ”

  VI.

  Next!

  I sing the restaurant business. It is here to stay. War and dictators, death and taxes — we eat in spite of them. The ship sinks, but cookey brings hot Java from the galley, let the stove be six feet under brine. Napoleon marches an army on its stomach, pampering the commissariat. Henry the Eighth beheads his latest wife and goes out to consult with his chef. Murder makes its abode in an old chateau in dark Haiti; the library is a morgue, but the pantry carries on.

  “Breakfast am served.”

  Louis of the harelip watched from my doorway. I found a cracked pitcher, lukewarm water with a little green frog in it for good measure, and I shaved. I cut myself four times. Then Louis wagged his finger, and I was escorted down to breakfast.

  There was a sober darkey posted at Pete’s door; a sound of water splashing in her room. I called to her as I went by, and she said she was all right.

  The Morne Noir dining room, that breakfast, was a combination Sing Sing, dime museum, and Paradise Lost. A soggy, high-ceilinged room at the back of the house, the plaster fractured on its walls, one side opening on a dripping courtyard where a marble cupid with a cracked head stood coyly in a broken fountain and didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Weeds and tropical vines overran the courtyard wall in sinuous profusion. Daylight was absent; the court curtained with an oyster-colored mist through which rain pelted in large drops, wept and twinkled on the stones and pooled in puddles where mosquitoes bred.

  Much of the rain ventured into the dining room, glossing a varnished stuffed alligator over a smudged fireplace, clinging in beady drops on the ceiling plaster. There were four aquamarine lizards and a brown lizard on the ceiling. On the floor someone had stepped on the biggest cockroach I had ever seen.

  A meal in that breakfast nook would be like feeding on the bottom of an aquarium, but what with the Scotch dying in my stomach and my nerves already unglued by the damp, I wanted coffee. A steaming cup, black, might scatter the dreads of last night, and I’d wake up on East Forty-Third Street, after all.

  Nothing of the sort. The party was still going on, and the guests continued in their costumes. Lieutenant Narcisse had marshaled the entire company in the lower hall, the black guards of Haiti made a cordon with their rifles. We were marched without grace to table. Narcisse i
ndicated chairs. Cornelius came web-footed from a pantry and swam around in the mist sadly distributing bitter coffee, bacon and grits. Grits! And there was raisin bread. I cherish an antipathy for raisin bread that persists as a fixation to this day.

  I took my chair, conscious of clattering crockery and a battery of side-glances. One long table and the boarding-house reach. Ambrose, who had been whispering to Lieutenant Narcisse, slunk down glumly between Ti Pedro and the Widow Gladys. Narcisse planted Toadstool across the board, and I could hear him grilling the moose-faced Negro in creole, a grilling that must have been warm for the Jamaican boy, judging by the way his dark forehead bubbled. His mother, unable to slap the width of the table, sat smiling a carnivorous smile and eating things with gusto and audibility. Maître Tousellines, gray-faced in his stovepipe hat, rolled bread into little pills which he popped into his maw; and I remember Ti Pedro swigging coffee through a tremendous, freckled grin, swallowing like a hydrant, and beaming at his muted thoughts. I wondered at the Dominican’s secret festivity until I remembered the will. And I wondered at it, then.

  I was sitting between the En-sign and Manfred.

  The En-sign’s shoe moved under the table and stepped on mine. His copper face was low over his plate, and he regarded me from the squinted corner of an eye, talking softly while a strip of bacon dangled from the side of his mouth like a thin, limber brown tongue. The voice was so low it seemed to issue from the tongue of bacon. Lines tracked across his forehead, seriously.

  “Lissen, bright boy, Manfred and me got something to say to you and pipe it low.”

  “Ja!” came the furtive whisper on the left. The German was gazing straight ahead, face a blank, coffee mug masking his mouth. The birthmark brightened angrily as the hidden lips moved. “We would like a few private words.”

  “Before the girl gets here,” said the bacon-tongue.

  Manfred’s blunt yellow head nodded furtively, and I had an acute feeling that a knife might catch me under the table from two directions, so I lit a cigarette and asked behind my hand, “What’s wanted?”

  Manfred whispered, “The En-sign and me, we know you shot the Englishman.”

  “And the doctor,” the corner of the sailor’s mouth said. “You was on the upper verandah when the doc was plugged; an’ Sir Duff was a cinch. The girl couldn’t of made such a hole with that twenty-two.”

  Manfred’s shoulder was friendly against mine. “We don’t blame you,” he muttered into the coffee mug.

  “Not a bit,” the En-sign muttered between chews, “and,” rubbing the question off his lips with the back of a tattooed hand, “all we ask is, how far are you going?”

  I said, with a mouthful of raisin bread: “You tell me.”

  “That was my idea,” the corner of his mouth agreed. He leaned across me to stab a fork at the bacon plate, lips moving around in his face for me to hear. “We’re on to the game, swab. You, her, the estate. All we want is our share, see?”

  “Our share,” echoed the German accent in the coffee.

  “And we don’t blame the skirt for bein’ sore, left last like she was,” the En-sign breathed, “but it wasn’t fair to us, neither.” His voice broke out loud, “Yeah, mister, it rains all the time, now. It’s what they call the rainy season in Haiti.” Softly: “It was a lousy will, an’ me and Manfred got stung on it, too. The old man must of gone nuts. He was queer ever since that mug Browninshields was muffed, and then all those crazy schemes he wanted to pull with the Cacos.” The blue eye winked chummily.

  “We play fair with you, my friend,” came the German echo. “You tell the girl.”

  “What?” I inquired through a funnel of cigarette smoke.

  The En-sign smeared butter on bread, flip-flopping the knife as if he meant to sharpen the blade. He folded the buttered slice; tucked it into a cheek. He chewed. “You’re a wise swab. I don’t know why you smacked the doc, but I suppose you got reasons. Narcisse ain’t a dumb boob, though.” His voice was barely, audible through the masticating. “He may get you for the English job. An’ you couldn’t get away with the rest of ’em, see, not alone. Widow Gladys an’ the Toad is tough stuff. Ambrose is worse. Ti Pedro’s hell.”

  Manfred muttered into his coffee. “We take care of those.”

  “Easy,” the En-sign mumbled, two tongues of bacon awag in his teeth. He looked at me as if he were thinking about his mother. “You an’ the girl friend won’t do another thing,” he purled sotto voce. “Your guns is frisked, anyhow. Leave ’em to me an’ the Nazi. We got our ways, hear?”

  I nodded at ashes drooping off the end of my cigarette.

  He purred, “Then it’s a three-way split an’ the rest is up to us. Tell the babe it’s no more’n our share an’ that Manfred an’ me bossed the deck before, run the whole job. Tell her why can’+t we keep goin’ like it was, even if the New York office is out. Tell her we can still make dough, an’ plenty of it. Just because Prohibition’s repealed — ”

  He blinked eloquently, leaned away from me and grinned at the table, reaching into a pocket for his pipe. I counted the four lizards on the ceiling; and on my left Manfred poured rum into his coffee mug and was sloshing the liquor around, staring at the miniature whirlpool with fascinated intensity. I tried to look as if I hadn’t heard them, as if the roots of my scalp weren’t throbbing. I grinned blandly at Ambrose down the table, and poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, leaning across the Ensign’s unbuttoned chest for the pot.

  “Prohibition,” I questioned sidewise. “I don’t get you.”

  The En-sign’s Alice-blue eyes twinkled cheer at nothingnesss in front of his nose. He twisted to face me. “Got a match, mate?”

  I held the small fire over his pipe. His month didn’t move; the words seemed to come through the stem and out of the bowl in tiny puffs of smoke. “Cut the bluff, wise guy. You and her will play ball or else — Manfred and me are in, or you two go out. I told you we had ways.”

  Manfred said something that sounded like: “And means.”

  “That’s that,” the En-sign said, leaning back in his chair as if his comment referred to his breakfast. Concealed from the others in the dining room, he let his hand move like a predatory crab up my back. The fingers came creeping up my spine, closed like steel pliers on my neck-nape, dug in. For a blinding half second I could hear the vertebræ crack in that osteopathic and subtle pinch. I grinned at him politely, moved my elbow and poured a cup of hot coffee across his exposed stomach. He drove his chair backwards with a shout, jumped up, hands pressed to his scalded breadbasket. Everybody jumped up. Narcisse came stumbling around the table, trying to draw his sabre, and that was the moment Pete chose to walk in, looking as dewy in white linen with a starched sailor collar as if she’d just spent a night with friends at a country club.

  The En-sign unbent with a howl to look at her, and the breakfast party turned to stare.

  “Sorry,” I apologized to my table partner. “Something stung me on the neck and I guess I jumped.”

  But I was by no means as cool as my speech when I crossed the room to sit beside Pete and pretend everything was under control. My little heart-to-heart talk with the navy man and his Prussian pal had spoiled my day. Manfred and the En-sign telegraphed little eye-messages up the table that came in black-rimmed envelopes, collect, and I had a feeling the next time I was stung it would be for keeps.

  “Thank God,” I thanked God, “these black cops have cornered all the guns in the place.”

  Only my thanks were unheard because there wasn’t any heaven to hear them. Not that morning. The sun had been drowned. The sky over Haiti wept, and the day wore weeds. And just when the morning should have been brightest, the château was going to be darker than midnight, lighted by gunfire where there shouldn’t have been any guns.

  Lieutenant Narcisse, who didn’t guess it either, consumed another banana, finished off his breakfast with a grunt, pushed back his chair with a nod at his gendarmes, and skirted the table once more to stand behind me. H
e picked his teeth dreamily, his eyes moving from me to the En-sign. He put the toothpick in his pocket, and touched my sleeve.

  “A word with you, m’sieu. As soon as ma’mselle has finished her coffee, will you both come to the office under the stairs?”

  Uncle Eli’s office under the stairs was as stuffy as a dog kennel under a stove. Once it had been a chapel, as evidenced by a stained-glass window which cast a dim, shrinelike rainbow pattern on a floor which hadn’t been swept for a hundred years. The ceiling at a slant, like a stairway upside down. Wall panels of scabbed mahogany. The sort of roll-top desk President Chester A. Arthur might have used. Several rheumatic cane-bottom chairs. A squatty black iron safe in a corner. A smell of cigars smoked in 1910.

  Lieutenant Narcisse snapped on an anemic electric bulb, and slammed the door on the blackamoor guardsman posted outside. He sighed into a chair, giving a hand wave that invited us to sit down. Pete sat down, trying to cheer me up with a smile. I faked one back at her, wondering which of those panels opened into the wall passage and the death-room upstairs.

  The Haitian officer crossed his boots, squeaked back in his chair and looked at us with shiny black eyes. Some of the official bombast seemed to have been let out of his doublet. His curls, this morning, were untended, and his plump brown face had sobered. He made a business of arranging the handkerchief in his cuff. I could see him pumping himself up with authority. I wondered if he was as scared of this house-party as I was, and I began to feel a little sorry for the man.

  He opened in a conciliatory tone, “I do not wonder at your resentment, m’sieu. Americans from the United States are often resentful of foreign environment, forgetting they are the foreigners. The situation — Haiti — a republic of color” — he spread his hands, studying pale moons on his fingernails — “naturally complicates this matter for you. But why,” he looked up imploringly, “do you not admit to shooting the Englishman in that cupboard?”