The Dirty Duck

by Martha Grimes

  The doctor looked both surprised and mildly amused. “I must say you fellows are certainly up on weaponry.” He lapped the handkerchief over the dagger. “He’s been dead under two hours. No sign of rigor at all.” The doctor was putting on his raincoat. “Hope you’ll forgive me; I’ve done all I can here, and I just missed the second act of a very good Webster. The White Devil.”

  The yellow, metal-shaded light overhead cast gloomy shadows across the table. “Those revenge tragedies are all alike.”

  Surprised, the doctor said, “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “It’s something he said.”

  The doctor turned to look again at the body of Harvey Schoenberg. “You knew him, then? Well, I suppose that makes your job much easier.”

  “Much.” Jury wasn’t smiling.

  • • •

  No one in the pub, according to DI Hatch, had seen the murdered man come in.

  “He must have come in by way of the alley and the garden. The owner remembers seeing him in here yesterday with another man. Says he was asking questions about some old tavern, the Rose. Said it used to be around here. He”—Hatch gestured toward the chair that had lately held the body of Harvey Schoenberg—“must have come in after the eleven o’clock opening, given what the doc said. We need to find that other man, the one he was with—”

  “I know the other man.”

  Hatch looked at Jury as if the superintendent had second sight. “So. Last of all,” said DI Hatch, handing over the scrap of paper, “this.”

  Even as his hand reached out for it, Jury knew what it was:

  I am sick, I must die.

  Lord, have mercy upon us.

  “Reads like a damned suicide note. Obviously not suicide though. What’s it mean? Any idea?”

  “It’s the end of a poem.”

  At least Jury hoped it was the end.

  “Because I wanted to see Southwark Cathedral,” said Penny Farraday, who appeared to be having no trouble facing down an extremely irritated CID superintendent.

  After Jury had told her about Harvey Schoenberg, she had gone into her room and slammed the door, stayed for a few minutes, and then returned, her face slightly mottled, all trace of tears scrubbed away.

  Still, she said nothing about Harvey Schoenberg. The argument was over her own wanderings over London. “I mean—shiiiiit!—we ain’t prisoners . . . we ain’t been arrested—”

  “Southwark Cathedral,” said Jury. “When did you suddenly develop this religious streak?”

  Penny slumped on the sofa beside Melrose Plant, whose refusal to glitter when they had finally met had not helped her attitude. “Since old Harvey—well, look, I’m sorry he’s—anyway, since he told me the story about it.” She grabbed up a pillow and punched it a few times and then stuffed it behind her back, as if her fury were aimed at the furniture itself.

  “A story. If you want to hear a story, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll toss you in the nick and tell you a very long story about why I don’t want you walking round London on your own. There’s plenty of blokes up alleyways with plenty of fascinating stories for little girls—”

  “I ain’t no little girl—”

  Jury merely overrode her objection by raising his voice: “And most especially, I don’t want you going anywhere with anyone connected with this tour! Is that clear?”

  She lowered her eyes and lapsed into grim silence.

  Jury repeated his question: “Is that clear, Penny?”

  Sharply her head came up as she yelled at him, “You ain’t my daddy!”

  The face seemed blistered with anger. But the tone was not truly heartfelt.

  • • •

  “What story?” asked Melrose, after Jury had left the room to go to Scotland Yard.

  Peevishly, she said, “It don’t matter. God, that’s four of us been killed now. And then there’s Jimmy! Whatever did happen to Jimmy?” Again she picked up the down pillow and held it against herself like soft armor. “I try and tell myself, it ain’t nothing but he just run off. But you know it’s got to be more’n that.”

  To keep her from dwelling on this morbid possibility, and also because he was curious, Melrose insisted she tell him Harvey’s story.

  “Oh, it was just about this girl, Mary Overs. She had this daddy named John Overs who ran the ferry over the River Thames and got rich because he was the only one with a ferryboat. But he was real cheap and mean.” Biting round her thumbnail, Penny scrunched down farther into her corner of the sofa, as if sinking into the very depths of meanness herself. She kicked off her loafers. “This John, he was so cheap he kept Mary hid away because he didn’t want no boys seeing her. She was so beautiful, see, any boy saw her’d fall in love with her like that.” Penny snapped her fingers. “If they fell in love, that’d mean they’d want to get married and old John, he’d have to pay a dowry.”

  Melrose felt the way she squinted at him was to see if he fully understood how heartless this exacting of dowries was.

  She continued. “Her daddy, John, decided to pretend he was dead for a day just so he could save the cost of feeding her servants. That’s how cheap he was. But what happened was, they were so happy he was dead, they broke into the food and liquor and had a swell time, right there around his corpse. Or what they thought was his corpse. Then John rose up in his shroud to stop them, and, of course, they thought it must be the devil doing it and they run John straight through with a sword.” Penny made a sudden thrusting motion. “Then Mary was free and when her lover was galloping to see her, his horse turned over and he broke his neck. Poor Mary was so heartbroken she turned a nun and started this priory, St. Mary Overies—”

  “Which later became Southwark Cathedral.”

  Penny looked up at him, surprised. “How’d you know that?”

  Melrose shrugged. “I’m a schoolteacher.”

  Her surprise turned to something resembling disgust, as she said, “Schoolteacher! How can you be an earl and be a schoolteacher?”

  “I’m not an earl,” said Melrose, absently. He was turning over the details of the account Jury had given him of the murder of Harvey Schoenberg, and thinking that it was more than strange; it didn’t add up.

  “Not an earl?” Penny was indignant. “But he told me—” She pointed toward the door through which Jury (that liar) had recently walked.

  “Sorry. I gave up my title under an act of Parliament passed in 1963. The Impoverished Earls Act, we could call it.”

  His smile was directed at a (for a change) nearly speechless Penny. She could but get out the single word: “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “ ‘Because’—that ain’t no answer. You don’t just give up being a—” But Melrose was thinking of his earlier conversation with Harvey. “ ‘When surgeons were barbers,’ ” he said, reflectively. “Southwark . . .”

  Penny had apparently grown as sick of Southwark Cathedral as had Melrose of his earldom. “Then that means your wife can’t be—what? An earless?”

  “Countess.”

  Disgust was written all over her face now. “You mean to tell me—Godamighty!—that you gave up your wife being a countess, too?” Penny toed her loafer and punched at the silken pillow. “How selfish can you get?”

  Melrose picked up his walking stick, preparatory to leaving, and sighted down it. “Well, since I have no wife, it makes no odds, does it?”

  At this, she bit her lip, and finally said, “Well, I can damn well tell you this: if somebody I was in love with was to die, I sure wouldn’t be a nun over him!”

  Thus they sat there for another moment or two in semi-companionable silence, reflecting on the loss of Harvey Schoenberg, the peerage, and the possible repercussions in the state of West Virginia.

  31

  It was not so much the brown eyes, untidy mustache, and weariness of posture that distinguished Jonathan Schoenberg from his brother—for the resemblance between them was clear—as it was the coldness of manner. Harvey’s effervescence was comple
tely lacking in the elder brother, like champagne gone flat.

  They found him in the British Museum, where Jonathan Schoenberg’s shoulders seemed weighed down with the dust of the antiquities around him.

  “Dead.” It might have been their surroundings—sarcophagi, Egyptian busts—that gave the word such a hollow sound when Schoenberg said it. The man seemed at a loss for some appropriate response. The stoop of the shoulders deepened, but neither the eyes nor the voice betrayed any particular emotion. “I can’t believe it. I just saw him this morning—” He shook his head.

  “You left Brown’s Hotel together?”

  Jonathan Schoenberg nodded. “He was going to Southwark, no, Deptford. He had this obsession about Christopher Marlowe.”

  “Yes. We know. Look, perhaps we could go down to the Museum café and talk.” The coldness of his surroundings was beginning to bear down on Jury. He could almost see his breath.

  • • •

  Schoenberg sat with his cup of coffee and loosened the knitted tie he was wearing. It looked expensive, as did the suit, though Jonathan Schoenberg did nothing to show them off. It was as if the weight of the man’s mind, which Jury judged to be formidable, bore down on the body, like a weight on shoulders, tie, cuffs of trousers. Beside him, poor Harvey would have looked almost spiffy.

  “You’re a scholar, Mr. Schoenberg. Was there anything at all in your brother’s research that someone might have been interested in?”

  “Interested—?” Schoenberg laughed briefly. “My God, Superintendent, it was a perfectly absurd theory. What are you suggesting? That someone killed him for it?” Schoenberg studied his hands, laced across his knees. His tone was so dismissive of the notion, that the man did not appear to feel it needed the reinforcement of a look at either Jury or Wiggins.

  “Your brother had no enemies, insofar as you know?”

  “Certainly not enough for that. But it’s hard to imagine Harvey’s really incurring anyone’s rancor.” He smiled slightly.

  It was a smile, nonetheless. “Any hard feelings between the two of you?”

  Schoenberg seemed amazed. He almost laughed. “Why would I harbor hard feelings about Harvey?”

  Apparently, Schoenberg’s coldness was grating on Wiggins, too, who pushed the cough drop on which he was sucking to the rear of his mouth and said, “We don’t know, do we? That’s why we’re asking.”

  Jonathan Schoenberg seemed disinclined even to acknowledge Wiggins’s existence, probably in the same way he would have ignored the presence of a younger, less perceptive colleague. Thus, he still addressed Jury. “Very well. Yes, Harvey appeared to be jealous. I was the one with the brains; I was the one favored by our parents; I was the one who got most of whatever was handed around. Harvey expended a great deal of energy in trying to prove himself, and I’m quite sure this whole idée fixe about Marlowe and Shakespeare was part of that.” This was announced without much interest in Harvey’s theory or in Harvey himself. Schoenberg spoke tonelessly as he examined the dun-colored walls, the lackluster fittings.

  Perhaps that’s what academic life did to one, thought Jury.

  “Did you see your brother often, Mr. Schoenberg?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Seldom.”

  “But you don’t live that far apart.”

  “True.”

  “Still, you met in London.”

  Schoenberg’s head came up sharply. “So? I come here at least once a year, usually in the summer.” He tossed his passport on the table, then went on in his passionless voice. “Probably he wanted to show me all of this evidence he’d collected.” His smile was cold. “Or show me up. But given what’s been going on—Harvey’s theories about Marlowe and Shakespeare rather had to take a back seat, didn’t they? I’m talking about the murders of the people on this tour he was on.” Schoenberg looked at Jury as if he might have better ways of spending his time.

  Since Jury had been about to ask to see the passport, he imagined that Schoenberg felt he was one up. Jury flicked through the pages. The visas had been stamped at nearly the same time every year for the last five years. Despite what Jury had said to Lasko, the passport looked authentic enough. Jury returned it to him.

  “I imagine Harvey told you about the methods of this murderer.” Jury took his copy of the poem from his pocket, the one stanza circled, and handed it to Schoenberg. “Sergeant Wiggins says you recognized the poem.”

  “ ‘Brightness falls from the air’ . . . of course. It’s one of Nashe’s. That line alone is famous.”

  “He wrote the poem during the plague years.”

  Jonathan once more gave his small, superior smile. “Yes, I know.”

  Jury waited for Schoenberg to go on, but he didn’t. Jury reclaimed and repocketed the poem.

  Schoenberg, thought Jury, was about the coldest fish he’d ever landed. Or, more to the point, not landed. He couldn’t make the man out at all.

  32

  “Poor Harvey,” said Melrose Plant. “The silly ass was beginning to grow on me.” With a feeling akin to nostalgia, he had been telling Jury and Wiggins about their travels round Deptford. He put aside the stapled pages he had been reading. “And doesn’t this rather shoot holes in the Beautiful Women theory?”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” said Jury, rubbing his eyes and leaning back in his chair in Plant’s sitting room at Brown’s. The three of them—Jury, Plant, and Wiggins—had a printout from Harvey Schoenberg’s computer, pried from the unwilling Ishi by a very frustrated computer expert at New Scotland Yard. Schoenberg had recorded over sixty pages on his trip and had, presumably, left even more at home.

  Jury tossed his own set of stapled pages aside and said, “I’ve gone through this three times now and I can’t find a bloody clue.”

  “I didn’t know this,” said Wiggins.

  “Didn’t know what?” asked Jury.

  “How disgusting these public executions were. He’s talking here about how people reveled in the twitchings of the body. They’d actually scream to the hangman to cut out the heart.” Wiggins looked a bit ill. “And the hangman would leave them semiconscious and then cut them up and take out their—I mean, sir, how could anyone still be alive if—”

  “Try not to think about it, Wiggins,” said Jury, gloomily.

  Melrose had finished reading the last sheet of his copy and said, “Anyway, the world has got more civilized, Sergeant Wiggins. Now all we do is hover over traffic accidents and ambulances.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t call what happened to Schoenberg or any of the others in this case ‘civilized,’ ” said Wiggins, testily. Illness, sickness, disease—Wiggins could not give it such short shrift. “And back then, in Marlowe’s time, the plague. God, can you imagine anything more horrible . . . ?” Wiggins shuddered.

  Jury raised his head slowly from a hand that wasn’t doing much toward curing his headache and said, “ ‘The plague full swift goes by.’ Read that stanza, will you?” he asked Melrose.

  Plant put on his spectacles and read:

  “Rich men, trust not in wealth,

  Gold cannot buy you health;

  Physic himself must fade;

  All things to end are made;

  The plague full swift goes by;

  I am sick, I must die.”

  Jury looked at Melrose and said, “In all of that talk with Harvey—you said there was a woman—”

  “Ah, yes. ‘But that was in another country./And besides the wench is dead.’ ”

  Following his own train of thought, to Wiggins Jury said, “You might just have something there, Wiggins.”

  Wiggins looked around the room as if he might discover where the Something was. “Sir?”

  “The public executions. The disemboweling. And how what happened to these victims was hardly any more civilized.”

  Jury got up. That elusive thought which had nearly come to him in Racer’s office surfaced now. “We’ve been concentrating on that other stanza—the one the murderer left, and ignoring w
hat the whole poem’s about.” Jury made a movement toward the door.

  “Where are you going, sir?”

  “To see James Farraday. I must be blind. I forgot the one person who’s really important.”

  Melrose removed his glasses. “I must be dim. What ‘one person’?”

  “Their mother,” said Jury.

  • • •

  “Nell?” said James Farraday. “What about her?” He was drinking what was obviously not his first whiskey in the elegant dining room of Brown’s Hotel. “I don’t understand.”

  “Just tell me what you know about her, Mr. Farraday,” said Jury.

  “But—she’s dead.” Farraday stuffed a black cigar in his mouth, which he then forgot to light.

  “I know that. Penny said her mother died of what Penny called ‘a wasting disease.’ She was vague about what the disease actually was. I don’t think she knew. So what was it?”

  There was a long silence, and then Farraday said, “VD.” He paused. “Syphilis.” He seemed to be looking everywhere—out the window, at his glass of whiskey—“It’s not exactly something you want to tell kids, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Nell was just an ignorant little farm girl, was all. It went on too long, you know? By the time the doctor told me, it was too goddamn late.” The cigar he’d been holding he finally lit. “She had to go to a hospital. More like a sanatorium, it was. Nothing they could do except make her comfortable as they could. Comfortable. Hell. You ever seen anyone with syphilis?”

  “What did you tell Penny and Jimmy?”

  “Told them she died, that’s all.”

  That’s all. Jury found it strange that the mother’s death could merit that sort of dismissal. “And how did she get it, Mr. Farraday?”

  “You’re thinking me, right? Well, it wasn’t me, Superintendent. She slept around, I guess. Listen. When I found Nell Altman she was near to walking the streets looking for work, and her with them two kids. And a lot of thanks I ever got from them, I can tell you—”

  It did not seem so much self-pity as delay, Jury thought. “When you found out she was syphilitic, there must have been questions—”