The Dirty Duck

by Martha Grimes

  “Are you sure your son mightn’t be with one of the others on the tour? Apparently, you’ve been together for some time—”

  Amelia Blue got all girlish and giggly: “Too long, you ask me.”

  “Was your son especially friendly with someone?”

  Honey Belle, who had done nothing all the while but fix Jury with her empty blue gaze and chew on a strand of yellow hair, finally decided to talk: “Jus’ that crazy Harvey Schoenberg’s all.”

  The voice utterly destroyed the illusion of wanton womanhood. The tone was flat, nasal.

  “What was it about this Schoenberg he liked?”

  “Harv’s into computers,” said Farraday. “And Jimmy’s a right smart little fella, got a mind like a computer, I think.”

  “Stupid stuff.” Honey Belle yawned, stretching her arms up elaborately and then clasping her hands behind her head, in case Jury’d missed anything.

  “Anyway,” Farraday went on, “he wasn’t with Harvey. We’ve checked. We’ve gone and checked with everyone on the tour. No one’s seen him.”

  Farraday coughed and got out his handkerchief. Jury realized, and with sympathy, that the cough merely disguised a threatening bout of unmanly tears. Farraday’s eyes were glazed over as he stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket, leaned across the table, and pointed his finger at Jury.

  “Now look, here. I can get the American embassy, you know. So, what’re you fellas going to do?” The man was used to doing business by means of hard-nosed threats, Jury imagined, but in this case, it was all facade: Farraday was really worried. Which was more than could be said for the others, except Penny. She hadn’t said much, but she was very tense.

  “Everything we can, Mr. Farraday. The Stratford police—Sergeant Lasko—are very capable—”

  Farraday banged his fist on the table. “I don’t want no piss-poor local po-lice on this job. I want the best, hear?”

  Jury smiled. “I only wish I were. But we’ll certainly do what we can. We’ll need your cooperation, all of you.”

  A handwritten invitation couldn’t have got a glossier smile out of Amelia Blue. “Well, now, you most certainly do have that, Inspector.”

  “He’s a superintendent, didn’t you hear him say?” said Penny, looking around the table as if they’d all got rocks in their heads.

  That didn’t put Amelia Blue off. “Well, whatever. I’m sure he’s just wonderful.”

  There was a sort of gagging sound from Penny Farraday.

  “Did your son have any money with him?”

  “Yes.” Farraday looked uncomfortable, as if he’d supplied the boy with the means of escape. “Oh, not all that much; just in case he’s out and needs a meal . . . ,” he ended, weakly. “He’s nine. Boys are very spirited at nine.”

  “And at three,” said Penny, counting her fingers, “and at four, five, six, sev——”

  “Now that’ll be enough from you, miss,” said Amelia.

  Penny melted back into silence and shadows.

  “What does your son look like, Mrs. Farraday?”

  “James Cahlton’s my stepson.” She seemed to have to sort through some file of faces to bring James Carlton’s to mind. “Well, he’s so high”—her hand went out to measure off a few feet of air—“dark brown eyes and brown hair. He wears glasses. Like Penny, here. They both got ’stigmatism.”

  Jury turned back to the father. “Any distinguishing marks at all?”

  Farraday shook his head.

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Blue shorts and his Pac-Man T-shirt and Adidas.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “Well, there’s the one on the passport. Snapshots we took, we don’t have developed yet.” Farraday drew the dark blue passport out of his pocket.

  Jury put it in his notebook and stood up. “Okay, Mr. Farraday. I don’t have any more questions at the moment. I think I’ll send someone along to have a look at his room. In the meantime, I wouldn’t worry too much. Kids have a way of going off. And after all, this is Stratford-upon-Avon, not Detroit.” Jury smiled. “Nothing ever happens in Stratford.”

  That, of course, was a lie.

  6

  Penny Farraday had, somehow, managed to cut through the lobby and make it to the front of the Hilton before Jury. She was waiting for him on the walk.

  “I come out here because there’s some stuff I want to tell you and I don’t want them listening, especially that Amelia Blue. Come on,” she was tugging at Jury’s sleeve, “across to the park.”

  She made a death-defying sprint across Bridge Street, where the traffic shot over the bridge in an endless wave, before separating at the crosswalk.

  “Let’s set,” she said, dragging Jury down on a bench positioned near the bronze figure of Shakespeare.

  The river was choked with swans and ducks, streaming up to the banks for their lunch. A knot of children, probably on one of the last school outings of the year, were feeding them from bags of breadcrumbs hawked precisely for that purpose, like peanuts at the zoo. In the middle distance was the Memorial Theatre. Whoever had designed the Stratford Hilton, which was placed across the street and in view of the theatre, had cleverly designed it to match the theatre’s modern lines, thereby binding them together in the tourist’s mind. The day was golden, the sky an enameled blue. Jury didn’t mind sitting here at all. He took out his packet of cigarettes.

  “Gimme me one of those.” Her words were a command, but her tone was uncertain. She expected to be refused. He gave her one.

  She looked at the cylinder with such surprise he wondered if she’d ever in her life smoked before; he couldn’t believe she hadn’t. He held the match for her and it took her several puffs to get the cigarette going. She held it between thumb and forefinger, puffing in that hectic way of the amateur.

  “He ain’t our daddy, you know. Jimmy’s and my, I mean. He kind of adopted us,” she added, grudgingly.

  Jury smiled at that “kind of.” Still, he was surprised. Certainly the woman hadn’t shown a mother’s concern, but he thought Farraday had shown a father’s. “No, I didn’t know. Only that his wife wasn’t your mother.”

  “Her? She sure ain’t. Mama’s dead, too.” From a rear pocket of cutoff jeans she pulled a worn leather wallet from which she took a snapshot, black-and-white and creased, as if it had been handled a lot. She passed it to Jury. “This is Mama.” The sorrow in her voice was weighted like lead. “Her name was Nell.”

  The young woman—she seemed very young—stood in the shadow of a tall tree, but even in the bad light of the setting, he could see the straight hair and the bones of the face were Penny’s. She stood there stiff and straight and not so much as the ghost of a smile on her face, a subject refusing to please the camera.

  “I’m sorry, Penny.” Jury handed the picture back. “What happened to her?”

  Carefully returning the snap to its plastic sleeve, Penny said, “She died six years ago. I remember the day she packed her bag and left. She said to me and Jimmy, ‘Honey, I got to go away for a while. Mr. Farraday, he’ll look after you.’ See, she worked for him; he liked her a lot and she him, I think. And she said, ‘Now don’t fret yourself; it may be a long while, but I’ll be back.’ Only that wasn’t true. She never did come back.” Penny lifted her head and looked out across the river, Jury thought past everything—the willows, the swans surfeited with crumbs and scudding against the bank, the brilliantly colored little pleasure boats moored at the edge. “She died of a wasting disease. That’s what they told us. But Jimmy and me never did find out what that wasting disease was. I guess it don’t make no difference. I guess you could say anything you die of’s a wasting disease.”

  Jury said nothing, only waited for her to go on. “Boy, was she pretty! You can’t tell it from that picture—”

  “Yes, you can. She looks exactly like you.”

  Astonishment was stamped on her face. Her light eyes seemed to refract some of the gold of the day. “Ah, go on. .
. . No one ever looks at me with them two around.”

  “Some people have no taste, then. What about your real father?”

  She dropped the butt of her cigarette on the ground. “I guess he died too. I don’t think him and our mama was married, if the truth be known. Maybe I knew him. I don’t remember. But Jimmy, he never . . .” This was brought out on a deep sigh, and in the words there was not a trace of reproach. People make mistakes, her tone seemed to imply.

  “So He ups and marries this Amelia Blue, and sure as God made little green apples, her and Honey Belle think we’re just bastards. Oh, they don’t say it out loud; they wouldn’t dare; their eyes say it. You just can see it in their eyes every time they look at us. That Honey Belle, there’s words for what she is where I come from. I was born in West-by-God-Virginia—you can tell, I don’t talk good—and what we call girls like that is just plain c-u-n-t—if you’ll excuse my language—I trust I ain’t shocking you. In West Virginia we got all kinds, so maybe we got c-u-n-t too, but I swear to almighty God with my hand on my heart”—and not to be thought a liar she placed it there—“that we ain’t got it with a capital C. That had to come slithering up from Georgia. Now we live in Maryland,” she added indifferently. “You can just see the boys around Honey Belle. They drop like flies everytime she twitches that ass of hers down the street. I used to have me a boy friend once.” She sighed. It was not hard to imagine what happened to the boy friend. “I know you think I’m jealous and I don’t deny it. My God, you seen them shorts she wears? Practically up to her armpits. Well, you got to allow as how you know what I mean about Honey Belle.”

  Jury had to allow as how he did.

  “And that Amelia Blue, she ain’t no better. Two peas in a pod. It makes me sick the way she messes with men. There’s this Englishman on our tour that I bet my life she’s been fooling with—”

  “Who’s that, Penny?”

  “Chum or Chomly. But it ain’t spelt that way. First name’s George. He’s good-looking all right. Nearly has Amelia and Honey Belle wetting their pants. What I wanted to tell you was—you’ll have to excuse me bending your ear this way—I think Jimmy might’ve run off.”

  “Run away, you mean? But surely not in a foreign country.”

  “You don’t know Jimmy. ‘James Cahlton,’ she calls him. I swear, all those people down South have these stupid double names, so Amelia Blue has to make them up for us too. She calls Him James Cecil as if one name’s not enough for anybody. I ain’t got a middle name, thank you, Lord.” She looked up at the sky. “We lived with James Farraday for four years before he married Amelia. He’s okay, I guess. . . . He’s in coal. Owns most of West Virginia and western Maryland. And hotels. Got a big summer hotel in Maryland. That’s where our mama worked. Waitressing and stuff. Jimmy was hardly a baby when we came there.”

  “I think Mr. Farraday’s really worried about your brother.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. If only He hadn’t gone and married her. Or I should say them. First time we seen her bouncing up the drive we wondered Miss Dolly Parton wasn’t honoring us with a visit, all that blond sheep’s hair and boobs out to here. She tries to make me not cuss and tries to make Him think she’s all la-di-da when you can just tell she’s trash. She’s always got someone over—some man—sitting on the front porch—veranda, she calls it—drinking beer and fanning herself like she was born on a plantation. You’d think she was Scarlett O’Hara. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her rip the curtains off the windows and yell, ‘Tomorrow is another day!’ That woman’s as phony as a three-dollar bill.” Here she looked at Jury from beneath the smooth curtain of her long hair, obviously hoping he’d agree.

  “Go on with what you think happened to Jimmy.” He offered her another cigarette. That seemed to please her immensely.

  As she puffed away again, she said. “You got to know Jimmy. He’s different.”

  Jury could well believe it.

  “Jimmy started working on this project of ways to get rid of Amelia Blue and Honey Belle. It wasn’t nothing simple, like putting frogs in their beds and short-sheeting them. Jimmy, he’s real smart. He talks good, too. He decided you don’t get nowhere in this world if you don’t talk good—you know—like politicals, that sort. What he did was, he got all of these books out of the public library on poltergeists—you know. Spirits that make noise and throw stuff around. Steven Spielberg made a movie of it. You seen it?”

  Jury shook his head.

  “Then he told Honey Belle the house was haunted. She’s the biggest coward God ever made. Then—I don’t know how he did it—he made chairs move and glasses walk all over the cupboards. He made drawers open and all sorts of stuff. Scared them both shitless but didn’t get rid of them.” She smoked her cigarette, looking hard at the riverscape. “Jimmy’s got you might say an elaborate mind—like him.”

  Incredibly, she seemed to be studying the bronze statue. “Shakespeare, you mean?”

  “Yeah. You ever read him? I just love that Shakespeare. I must of been to see As You Like It three times already. We had to read that in school and I learnt all the speeches.” She ground out her cigarette. “Listen, you just got to find Jimmy.”

  He doubted she was used to pleading. . . . Hell, another hour or two on this case wouldn’t kill him. The bell of Holy Trinity Church drenched the air with its tolling of noon. “Come on, Penny. Let’s go over to Shakespeare’s birthplace and ask a few questions.”

  “Me?” That she would be helping out in a police investigation changed the sad look utterly. Light seemed to gleam through the dust of the freckles as she walked beside him, across the brilliant green of the grass toward Henley Street. Still, she continued her odyssey of life with her stepmother and -sister. “It’s like a steambath around that house. Jimmy’s the only thing brightened my life. Well, I’ve decided in the last two days I ain’t going back there. I’m going to stay right here and try and marry up with a duke or earl or someone. I like Him okay, but I just can’t stand those two no longer. Not being around that house with all them tits and asses. You wouldn’t happen to know any, would you?”

  Jury was not sure whether she was referring to tits and asses or dukes and earls. “As a matter of fact I do know an earl.” He smiled.

  “No shit!” She stopped and looked up at him, her face all wonder.

  “No shit,” said Jury.

  • • •

  The birthplace was a pleasant, homey, half-timbered building of Warwickshire stone whose door was nearly flush with Henley Street. Outside that nearly sacred door, a double line of pilgrims waited, impatient parents and quarrelsome children licking iced lollies. Jury wondered how many of the people there actually read Shakespeare, but he had to admire them and their willingness to take genius on faith.

  “It looks like the lines to E.T.,” said Penny, morosely. “It must be a hundred people ahead of us.”

  “I think maybe we can navigate round the crowd. Come on.”

  The woman at the door, wearing the emblem of the Shakespeare Trust, observed Jury’s warrant card with a kind of horror, even after he had assured her that nothing was wrong. She still looked up at him uncertainly, as if afraid he might drag into the birthplace, not only the girl at his side, but also the effluvia of Criminal London, which would be left behind to cling like a patina of dust to the precious collection within.

  There was as much of a crowd inside as out. Jury showed the picture of James Carlton Farraday to the guardian of the rooms downstairs, but met with no response. They made their way upstairs, to other small and cheerful rooms—white-plastered and solid-timbered. The furnishings were Elizabethan and Jacobean, but none of them unfortunately, Shakespeare’s (so a guide upstairs was informing the pilgrims), except for the old desk from the Stratford Grammar School, where young Will had had to endure no end of terrors. The desk was marked and pitted.

  Jury approached an elderly gentleman, another guardian, who was dispensing information to a disheveled young woman in shorts and sandals, regard
ing the leaded glass window, where the names of the famous of other centuries had been cut with diamond rings. The woman in sandals slapped away.

  Jury produced his identification. “I wonder if you might have seen this boy in here on Monday morning.”

  The gentleman seemed astonished that someone would be inquiring into the whereabouts of anything except furniture and windowpanes. Especially that Scotland Yard would be the inquirer. When Jury showed him the picture in the passport, he shook his head.

  “We get so many schoolchildren on holiday and, especially now, with term nearly over. Well, you know, one schoolboy begins to look like another. There are so many of them and they ask so many questions . . .” He went on in this vein, prompted to overexplain out of some conviction that Scotland Yard might think he had this particular schoolboy locked up in the oak trunk beside him.

  Jury handed him a card, entering the number of the Stratford police station above the Scotland Yard number. “If you should remember anything, anything at all, give me a call.”

  The guide nodded.

  • • •

  The result was the same in the souvenir shop on the other side of the gardens, where the pilgrims were buying up all sorts of Elizabethan memorabilia: place mats, cut-outs of the Globe Theatre, postcards and pictures and pendants. None of the harassed salespeople recognized the picture of James Carlton Farraday.

  • • •

  Jury and an unhappy Penny were now standing looking down the central walk, bordered by flowers. There were quince and medlar trees and the summer air was pungent with the fragrance of flowers and herbs.

  “I read in this little book they got all the flowers here that Shakespeare talks about in his plays. I wonder if they got rosemary.” She pushed her long hair behind her ear. “That ain’t a flower, is it?” Her look at Jury was very nearly inconsolable. “That’s for remembrance.”

  7

  James Carlton Farraday was tired of being kidnapped.

  He did not know who he had been kidnapped by, or where he had been kidnapped to, or what he had been kidnapped for.