I thought, “They’re going to knock off everyone else who made honorable mention in that will.”
I thought, “But Dr. Sevestre wasn’t on the waiting list — why was he killed?”
I thought, “Pete and me! They’ll get to our numbers after a while. What’s Tousellines squeaking about? Lord, what a face that Negress has! Why in God’s name doesn’t somebody stop this thing? Do something, you fool! Do something!”
Try doing something yourself in the face of chaos. That will of Uncle Eli’s was a chain letter; murder the award. Pete’s name was on that list, and fatalities were mounting. I had an arm about her shoulder, and the exodus from the storeroom had started. Lungs gathered breath around us. An outburst of cries exploded.
“By God an’ by Judas!” That was the scorched Ensign spitting oaths like hot-chewed nails. “Condemnation and lovable Christmas! If Ti Pedro ain’t plugged right in the bean. Right through the top of his bean!”
“Foah sake ob de Lawd Massy!” from Widow Gladys. “Yo’ sees dat dead one, Toadstool?” Smack! “Yo’ sees dat co’pse, Toadstool boy?”
“By the soul of Saint Bouleversé!”
“Through the noggin! Through the toppa his doggone bean!”
“Ja!” blurted Manfred. “Gruss Gott! if the killer has not set the room on fire to burn him.”
The En-sign’s tongue changed voice from harsh basso to shrill bewilderment. “Yah, and where’d th’ gunner get to? That window ain’t been up, and that door to starboard ain’t been opened. Cripes!” he blared at Narcisse. “This hall door was locked, too. How’d the sniper get clear of this room?”
My vision addled. The room and its faces went out of focus. Toadstool’s dummified leer, the black-lacquered globe of Maître Tousellines’ head, Manfred’s strawberried cheekbone, distorted faces rubbernecking, swimming on my eyeballs. Pete clung to me, and I wondered if I was going to be sick. Greenish smoke fumigated sweaty air. Harelip Louis was stamping out the fired matting, scuffling his shoes in a limber cakewalk along the charred fringe. Lieutenant Narcisse and his troopers oggled down at Ti Pedro’s punctured cranium. Then, the smoldering rug-fire extinguished, the officer drew his sabre and drove us into the hall.
Closing the door, he stood patting his throat with his handkerchief, eyes screwed to slits, glaring. We could still smell burnt grass. The hall was airless with a damp that seemed to come through its walls. Drum-sound pulsed through the waterfall pour of the rain. Narcisse’s eyes, hunting through shadows for something they couldn’t find, were coated glassy with rage and fear.
“Open that front door!”
A gendarme scuttled to obey. That house needed air. It didn’t get it. The forlorn gray light of drowned day washed into the hall on a gust of mist; we stood like specters at the last round-up, corralled by a fence of bayonets.
“You, you and you!” Narcisse spat like a cat at his squad. “Did I not order you to stand guard over these blancs and not move if the devil himself summoned you? Bones and blood, oui! Louis, you rabbit-mouthed black buffoon! You left your post when the lights went out, permitting one of these little prisoners to escape and shoot down Ti Pedro in the dark!”
Lanterns shrugged in chocolate hands. Butter-plate eyes swerved uneasily under broad-brim hats. Corporal Louis spoke in that impossible, honking nasal achieved only by a split lip, a creole accent and darkey fright — a tonal quality beyond description.
“Moi — heard light go out — then hear m’sieu lieutenant run f’om office, calm’ foah lights, oui!” The corporal waved a khaki arm. “Gendarmes, we leave our lanterns out back. We run fetch’m quick.”
“Bah! And while you were gone these — these — came out of their rooms and shot that Dominican in the dark!”
“Gott in Himmel!” Manfred spoke out. “Do you think we stay in our rooms all day to be shot like rats in the trap? Do you think we sit quiet when the storm blows out the electricity? Nein! I am no target. I, myself, run first thing into the hall.”
“Bully for you, and I’m right behind you,” the En-sign seconded his comrade. “I seen them glims was doused. Then I heard that guy scream. Right after there was that shot. Huh,” he grunted at Narcisse, “I tell you, Chief, we’ll all get shot if you don’t snap into it. We’ll all get shot before twenty-four hours — like Ti Pedro in there — ”
Narcisse swore, “But some one of you has a gun.” He pantomimed the maneuver. “Some one of you slipped out in the dark, broke into that room and jumped out again before I reached the door.”
“And stopped to lock it after him?” The sailor’s query was a vocal sneer.
Narcisse scowled. “You, Maître Tousellines. You delivered to me last night the key to that storeroom. Where is there another?”
The old black lawyer patted at his temples with his handkerchief. “M’sieu the lieutenant, there is not another. There is only that solitary key which I gave you.”
“There must be another key!”
“There is but one,” the lawyer stammered. “M’sieu Proudfoot was most cautious about the storeroom. It was there he cherished his rosewood coffin for safekeeping.”
“How long did he cherish a coffin in there?” Pete wanted to know in a faint voice.
“Perhaps a year or so, ma’mselle.”
“What’s that got to do with Ti Pedro gettin’ sniped in the masthead?” the En-sign growled, waving a fist like a meat ball. “By Gee an’ by God, Narcisse, are you gonna stand there askin’ riddles instead of — ”
Pete rebuffed the sailor. “I only wondered how long the room has been closed.”
“Ten thousand pardons,” Narcisse bit through his teeth. “But I happen to be conducting this investigation for the Garde d’Haiti, and I desire only to know how the room was opened when Louis had the single key in his pocket. I insist, Maître Tousellines, there is another key to this door!”
“There was but the one key, and that M’sieu Proudfoot carried on his watch chain. At his death I was to take it from him and open the room to produce the casket. Which I hastened to do. Then, m’sieu the lieutenant, last night I delivered the key to you. There is no other.”
Narcisse swallowed lantern light. His fingernails clawed through his buttered curls. He looked up and down that pariah-crowded lobby of a hall, and clawed at the hooks of his tunic collar. “How then does the murderer make this entry and exit from that room? How does Ti Pedro catch the bullet in the top of the skull?” He snarled with himself, “I was at that doorknob in two jumps after the shot. And he is shot in the top of — ”
“In the top of his nut,” interrupted the ineffable sailor with a sort of laugh. “Say, Narcisse, why don’t you look for an aviator?”
The Haitian officer razored the En-sign with a stare.
“An aviator?”
“Well, they’re the kind of guys usually shoot a fella through the top of his head.” His mouth went up. He gave a down-scale roar of laughter. Narcisse crashed the hilt of his sabre on the floor. The En-sign stood to attention, sober as the hypothetical judge. I drew Pete three inches away from the man. He wasn’t normal; the sort of animal who’d eat its young.
Manfred had something to say. He stepped toward Narcisse with a grimace; made a salute; clicked a right-about-face; leveled a finger at the Widow Gladys.
“You waste your time, Herr Lieutenant, until you fire one quick round of shots at this female witch. She was in the dark hall ahead of me, so. How did I know? Toadstool is with her, ja, and I hear the practiced slap. So!”
Widow Gladys stood offside in a nest of bayonets like something in a zoo. At Manfred’s pointed accusation, she made a half waddle forward, her arm uplifted for the assault; then she thought better of it, and relaxed, ivories grinning broad as the keyboard of a baby grand.
“Lawd, how dat Nazzy man he do lie. Ah sho’ nuff comes outen my room in de dahk, Toadstool he’m along by. But we bof’ behind dis yer’ German Nazzy, dat’s so. He out in de dahk first. An’ I don’t hit Toadstool, did I, Toadstool?”
She hit Toadstool before the guards could stop her. Toadstool spun like a toy wound up by the blow; came around in an imbecilic twirl; and ended up by saying “no,” the Widow Gladys hadn’t hit him and never did.
Manfred grunted, “Just the same, she is a witch. Does she not call herself the sorceress? Look at that boy of hers. A cacodemon, five parts Fledermaus!’ The German draped his jaw on his chest, pulled his ears down to his shoulders, contracted his eyes on the Negress, and succeeded in impersonating Lucifer rising out of the fumes.
The widow giggled. “Lawd, lookit dat Nazzy man!”
“So!” Having pumped up the bellows in his militant chest, Manfred deflated with a shout. “Listen, Narcisse. Here is a room locked up like the military fortress in Salzburg! The window, it is not opened. The doors, they are sealed. A man sees something, cries out and is shot into the top of the brain. It is then set on fire, the rug! You call that human? Nein! I say it is the work of that bocor witch woman!”
“Where is your room?” Narcisse flicked his sabre at the widow.
She nodded her chins, indicating the back hall.
“Toadstool, he was with you?”
The Widow Gladys nodded. She elevated her hand over Toadstool’s cringing head in the lazy way of someone swearing an oath. Toadstool made a quick affirmative head-bob. The widow lowered her palm.
“If she moves,” Narcisse snarled at his guards, “stab her. Bien! You, Toadstool, come with me. Let us talk in your room where your mother cannot reach you. As for the rest of you, wait where you stand!”
Toadstool sidled out of line and followed the officer down the hall, through the darkness of the dining room into further darkness somewhere in back. As for the rest of us, we waited where we stood, a row of guarded blanks confronted by a closed door. I didn’t dare look at Pete. I could see her hands in front of her, clasped together on a bit of handkerchief. She was staring at the closed storeroom door as if it wasn’t there. The black police with their bayonets and white eyes looked like dressed up Zulus from a So-This-Is-Africa movie; the hall smelled dark green in the wiggling oil lights; and the whole scene was taking on that spurious cast that anything as real as death always takes. There were the library doors closed on the cadavers of a doctor and an Englishman. Here was this storeroom door shut on the body of a third victim. Fifty hours ago I’d been an artist in New York. Last night I had sat through a wake in Haiti. Ten minutes ago I’d been sitting in an office under suspicion of murder. Now the lights had blown out and murder was done. It wasn’t convincing.
Wanting conviction, I found myself eying Maître Tousellines. He chose the moment to clap on his 1861 hat and extract and consult his grandfather watch. His judicial lower lip mumbled French at the time, as if he were fussing in a hurry to meet an appointment. He couldn’t be the murderer. He looked a page out of Mother Goose, and I’d seen him with her umbrella. Then the corner of my eye picked up the En-sign’s beefsteak face — he’d been calling me with his eye. Now he caught my glance; signaled me with an oblique wink. Manfred was studying me, too. I was convinced.
The navy man jerked his head. I took a backward step, and the pair leaned toward me in a friendly way, both smiling on the side of the face that was toward me.
I heard the En-sign breathe. “Nice work, kid.”
Manfred winked the eye on my side of his face. “Schön!”
I gave them a vacant stare. Nobody home. The En-sign swerved a side glance at the nearest gendarme, then scratched his upper lip with a finger and whispered under his hand. “You double-crossin’ son of a pig, I ought to crack your head for burnin’ my guts with that coffee this morning, but you’re actin’ so clever, me an’ Manfred’s gonna give you a las’ chance — ”
“A last chance,” the German echoed softly.
Mice feet ran over my scalp. Pete was only a step away. If she overheard this —
I gestured pianissimo. The En-sign let his voice barely float. “Her an’ you are gonna split with us, get that straight. We gets half or you don’t get nothing but what we give you.”
“What we give you,” Manfred exhaled on a zephyr of alcohol.
“We know how you pulled this last job,” the En-sign breathed with a wink.
“We try to cover you by putting the blame on the black witch. We help you,” the German confided.
“And if you don’t give us a break I’m gonna spill the beans and me an’ Manfred’ll cook your goose,” the En-sign menaced with his lips.
“Goose,” Manfred muttered with a somber wag of his head. He was opening and shutting his big hands at his sides; his eyes were amber with malevolence; his smeared cheekbone had shaded lavender. I suppose my own cheekbones were shaded with frost. Looking at Manfred, then, I could believe those stories about Socialists beheaded by executioners in tuxedoes. A swift glance at the En-sign would ratify anything discreditable on the part of his associates.
“Go to hell,” I consigned them with a secreted shiver; and I stepped up to Pete’s arm, steering her closer to the nearest bayonet. I’d rather have stood with my back toward a team of Bengal tigers, and it took all my concentration to stay me from turning around.
Pete whispered up at me, “What did they want?” rigidly.
Before I could lie to her, Narcisse and the Toadstool were focused in the picture. The Haitian officer’s features were out of place with rage, and he gave the black boy a shove that threw him against his mother, a haven from which he was promptly slapped.
“The boy can tell me nothing,” Narcisse fulminated at us. “He and his infernal mother were shut in a room behind the pantry. It would have been impossible for them to race this far down the hall at the moment of darkness, to shoot Ti Pedro and fire that grass carpet and retreat before I, myself, pounded at the locked door.”
Tousellines offered, “It was an execution the most swift.”
“It must be the devil, himself! Mon Dieu! I say it must. Observe, Tousellines. I leave m’sieu the American and ma’mselle in the office under the stairway. I rush into the darkness of the hall. I call for lanterns. There was a scream. Then a shot. In two jumps I am at this door and it is locked. Volià! It is Ti Pedro.”
“Waydda minute, skipper. Waydda minute.” The En-sign butted in hoarsely. “Didn’t I tell you to look for an aviator?”
“Sacré! Any more of this jesting and I will sabre you to a —”
“I’m only tryin’ to prove Ti Pedro was shot from aloft somehow. Stow your temper for a minute an’ listen.” Shouldering off the wail, the En-sign swaggered up to the officer, mouth cracked in a grin that bunched his red cheeks up over his eyes. He put his hand on the face of the corporal and pushed the darkey to one side. He let his triumphant grin go from face to face; then squared off in front of Narcisse.
“Sherlock,” he chuckled, “did I hear you say you was in that office under the stairs with the artist an’ the Judy, here?”
“You did, swine!”
“The lights blows out an’ you rushes into the ball, leavin’ them two behind?”
“Oui, and they were unarmed.”
“Whaddle you give me,” he pointed a thumb at the door behind Narcisse, “if I tell you how that Pedro was bumped off?”
“If you know something and do not tell the police, mon voyou, I will most certainly give you a reminder on your ugly head!”
“Save it for a snappier dome than mine,” the mariner advised venomously. “The trouble with you is, you don’t use yours.”
“Non?”
“Nah!” He tapped a green-edged fingernail on a bronze medal pinned to the lieutenant’s bosom. “You disarmed this bunch, didn’t you? Then what? You locked th’ gats in that safe in the office. Then what? You leave this artist mug and his dame back there with the safe. Then what? You run out into the hall and stand around in the dark — ”
It penetrated my numbed brain that this talk had something to do with me. I took my hand from Pete’s shoulder and pushed the En-sign’s shoulder. “What the devi
l are you trying to tell these cops?”
He ignored me completely, except in what he said to Narcisse. “Don’t you get it, Chief? Didn’t Ambrose tell you this guy’s a safe-crackin’ expert? Godamighty, it’s plain as a boil on your nose. This artist fella opens that box, grabs himself a cannon, beats it into the hall — ”
“That’s a black lie!” Pete cried out. “I suppose — I suppose, Cart — if he did have a gun — could climb up through that little transom and out again — ”
The En-sign put his tongue in his cheek like a cud of tobacco, and rubbed the swelling with the back of a hair-matted hand. He blinked one eye at the transom, then rolled it blue and wide at Pete. “That’s an idea, kid! Say! Say! D’you get it, Narcisse? Sure! The wise artist shot Ti Pedro through the transom. Yep! Say, maybe I missed my berth. Maybe I shoulda been a dick! He shot Ti Pedro through the transom an’ that’s why the Dominican gets a bullet in th’ top of his nut!”
“So I think you hit the nail on the head,” Manfred spat out.
Narcisse was now looking at me, eyes yellowed.
The En-sign went on harshly. “That’s the answer to this job. That’s how th’ killer gets outa th’ room. He wasn’t in the room to begin with. Yah! He shot through the transom, downward into Pedro’s noggin! Sure you did.” He chuckled at me. “Sure, an’ what an ace of a sniper you are! Why,” he roared, “I’ll bet you wasn’t near th’ door here, neither. Where was you, bright boy, when th’ lights come on? Where was you when they brung th’ hurricane lamps?”
“He was standing across the ball at the foot of the stairs,” Pete defended fiercely.
“I was standing by that newel post and you saw me there!” I croaked at the sailor.
Murder On the Way! Page 10
