by FRANCES
“I,” Reg said, “er—that is, you know. What?”
She chuckled, this time. She said she would be perfectly all right.
“It’s still all very—” Reg said, and heard puzzlement in his voice.
“It certainly is,” Peggy Larkin said, and did not laugh again, but smiled—no, call it grinned. She looked, suddenly, like a red-haired gamin. And like a very sleepy one. “Very. Tomorrow?”
And now it was tomorrow. Five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. And explanation, it was to be hoped, coming to tea.
It had been his suggestion; it had even been his insistence. The police had not got in touch with him. Nor had they, it appeared, got in touch with the newspapers. In the morning papers, and in the early editions of the afternoon papers, “poet” was still being “sought,” although no longer on the first page. Nothing headlined, say, “Poet’s Cousin Jailed.” Or even, “Cop Shoots Ex-Private Eye.”
Reg had begun to telephone before noon. It had been after one in the afternoon when, finally, he had heard, “Homicide. Detective Shapiro,” and had said, “Grant here,” and continued.
Shapiro had agreed that it was very natural that Mr. Grant would like a further fill-in, although of course the major outlines were obvious enough. Merely a matter of identification to be avoided. “Couldn’t let you identify him. Say, ‘That’s my cousin Benjamin Cutler, whatever he’s calling himself here.’ Unpleasant repercussions, that would have had—will have, of course. As for the details—”
“Really,” Reg said then, and was stiff and knew himself a bit British.
“I’ve been busy,” Shapiro said. The thought seemed, from his voice, to depress him. “I’m still busy.”
“This afternoon,” Reg said, firmly.
“Well, Mr. Grant, I—”
“About five,” Grant said. “I’ll give you tea.”
And, this time, Nathan Shapiro chuckled. This was a phenomenon. (A detective at the next desk heard the sound, and looked at Shapiro with wide, unbelieving eyes, and thought he must have mis-heard; that the sound must have come from elsewhere.)
“Try to make it,” Shapiro said. “Probably can.”
“Five-ish,” Grant said. He was firm. “Five-ish,” he said, half an hour later, and tried to be firm again, but managed, he thought, only to sound anxious. “Or, can’t I pick you up?”
“I will say,” said Peggy Larkin, who had taken some little time to come to the telephone, “you’re good at that. But—no. I’ll limp around.”
It was ten minutes after five when the buzzer sounded, and he pressed the button and hoped that it would be Peggy Larkin. This somewhat surprised him since she was not the one to satisfy the exasperated curiosity which had been growing for some hours.
It was Peggy Larkin. She wore a beige topcoat and a soft green dress. Her right ankle was bandaged under a stocking, but she moved well enough. There wasn’t any good reason, now, to steady her. Bit of a pity, Reg thought, and then, Am I turning into what they call a wolf?
She stood in the doorway and looked down the hall toward the bedroom. She said, “Quieter, isn’t it?”
“Much,” he said, and took her into the living room. “There’s a hole in the bedroom ceiling,” he said. “Tea? Or?”
“Or, if it’s all the same to you,” she said. “A very little or, on the rocks.”
“It runs,” he said, “to a martini.”
She shook her head; shook it quickly.
“I’m not,” he said, “really that bad at it, y’know.”
She laughed again, gently. She finds much in me to laugh at, Reg thought, and wondered, briefly, why this pleased him. He gave her scotch on ice; himself somewhat more scotch, with water and—when in Rome—a cube of ice. She drank from her glass, looked up at him.
“I was—done in, last night,” she said. Suddenly there was sorrow, a kind of stillness, in her blue eyes. “It’s been—since it happened to my sister and—did I say thank you? For carrying me from—from harm.”
“Dear girl,” he said. “I got you into it. And, somehow—I don’t still know quite how—your sister. Brought harm, really. Not meaning—”
“I know,” she said. “And, if I didn’t, thank you, Mr. Grant.”
He said, “Is your name Margaret?” It was not in the least what he had expected to say.
“No. Just Peggy. I—”
The buzzer sounded. Reginald Grant went into the hall to press the release button.
Offered “tea, or” Shapiro, gloomily, expressing fear that he was being a nuisance, chose tea. He said, “Afternoon, Miss Larkin,” and hoped the ankle was coming along. Reg brought him tea. He sipped. He said it was very good tea. He sipped again. He looked tired, Reg thought—a sad, tired man.
“He insists he’s Pepperill,” Shapiro said, speaking to the teacup. “Knows it’s no good, but doesn’t know what else to say. Your cousin, that is, Mr. Grant. Can’t very well admit he killed Pepperill and took his place. Can’t very well admit anything. But, can’t very well deny anything either. Eyeglasses are plain glass. Pepperill had a whopping correction for myopia, right eye particularly, and astigmatism. Complete dentures. Pepperill had most of his teeth. Had them, anyway, until your cousin pulled them out after he shot him.”
“I know he’s my cousin,” Reg said. “But aren’t you rubbing it in a bit? And—would you mind starting a little further back? Ben Cutler took a job which had been offered to Pepperill.”
“Herbert Pepperill, Doctor of Philosophy.”
“Dr. Pepperill. Who was supposed to have a virus.”
“Couldn’t very well show up with you coming over,” Shapiro said. “Something of a shock when he heard you were, I imagine. Very reviving, tea. I wonder whether—”
Reg brought more tea. He sat down opposite Shapiro and looked at him fixedly.
“You understand,” Shapiro said, “that I can’t dot every i and cross every t. We may not be able to ever unless your cou—Dr. Cutler decides to talk. And I don’t think he will. And your people are a bit stuffy about part of it, Mr. Grant. The English police, I mean. The Special Branch. You knew Cutler was pretty far to the left?”
“Everybody knew that,” Reg said. “We don’t make quite as much of it as you do here in the States, y’know.”
“I know,” Shapiro said. “But a few years ago seems they started to. Special Branch. That’s where the stuffiness comes in. They admit they had Cutler under surveillance and, I gather, not because of what he thought. I suppose he was up to something. Could be he was in a spot to pass along word about agents. Could be they thought he was doing that, or something like that. Anyway—”
Anyway, Benjamin Cutler had decided he would be better off somewhere else. Why he hadn’t gone across borders to the ideology of his choice, Shapiro didn’t know. Possibly he had tried it and been stopped. That had been some three years ago. Shapiro paused at this point and sighed. He said that, along here, he had to guess—that they all had to guess. He guessed that Cutler heard that Herbert Pepperill, a man in the same line of scholarship, had an offer to lecture at Dyckman University, City of New York. He guessed that Cutler knew Pepperill, at least slightly—and knew that, because Pepperill was so much a recluse, so notable a curmudgeon, very few people knew him better. He knew that Pepperill was about his age, and about his weight and height. He knew that he could lecture as adequately as Herbert Pepperill on their common subject. He found out—Shapiro shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know how—that arrangements for Pepperill to come to the United States had been made by letter, not face to face.
“A longish chance, I’d think,” Reg said. “He couldn’t know that, when he got here, he wouldn’t run into somebody who’d say, ‘You’re not Pepperill. I know Pepperill.’”
A man takes a long chance when he can’t find a shorter one, Shapiro pointed out, and repeated that he didn’t know all of it, was guessing. It was possible that Cutler was in trouble with more than the Special Branch; was threatened by less temperate men, and so
felt he had to take any chance that offered.
“Anyway,” Shapiro said, “we think he killed Pepperill, and so do your people. Shot him and buried him. Pulled out his teeth first, of course.”
Peggy Larkin made a shivering sound. Reg wanted to pat her shoulder, but found it out of reach.
“Not a pretty idea,” Shapiro said. “Not a pretty man your cou—Dr. Cutler. But, if the body were ever found, it wouldn’t do to have the mouth full of teeth, of course. Not if it was to be tagged as Cutler’s, who hadn’t any. Cutler didn’t suppose the body would be found, but he’s the farsighted sort. Hence—pull the teeth and leave the ring and watch, just in case. So—”
Cutler had worn a beard, Pepperill had not. A shave took care of that. Pepperill had been nearsighted, and had worn glasses. Lenses of plain glass took care of that. Pepperill had been irascible, a “curmudgeon,” a shunner of his fellows. Cutler was none of these things. But a man can act.
For three years, Cutler had got away with it. Whether he had engaged in other activities in the States than lecturing on Slavonic literature, Shapiro didn’t know. He rather suspected he had, and the FBI now was looking into that. Certainly, he had at some time, and probably not at the last minute, got in touch with Donald Hunter, one-time private detective, a man for hire for one task and another, murders included. And, a man with a stable—a stable of hoods. Possibly, Hunter had worked in the past for people in the line of business the Special Branch suspected Cutler of having been in.
“You’re cagey,” Reg said. “More tea?”
“I’m guessing,” Shapiro said. “No, thanks.”
It had, no doubt, been something of a jolt to Cutler-Pepperill to learn that his cousin was coming to the States, and to lecture at the same university. Cutler had pleaded illness and made plans. He—
“Why,” Reg said, “not just have Hunter’s boys—er—knock me off?”
The question seemed to surprise Shapiro slightly. He said, mildly, that that would have been rather silly of Cutler.
“You get killed,” he said, “we dig for motive. We dig a long time, and in a lot of places. Particularly when the victim is somebody with no apparent associations in a city, not here long enough to make enemies. And, in this case, the deeper we dug the closer we might have come to Cutler. You’ve got to remember, Mr. Grant, that an impersonation is a pretty fragile thing. It works only so long as it isn’t doubted. The first doubt and—pouf—it goes like a bubble. We’d have concentrated on Cutler, thinking him Pepperill, because he was a fellow countryman of yours and—one thing might have led to another. At any rate, that’s obviously how your cousin figured things.”
“An accident. A—what you call a mugging?”
“The same risk. You’re a—well, a reasonably prominent man, Mr. Grant. I don’t say that that fact would have made us more—thorough. But—” He shrugged. He sighed.
What Cutler had decided on was murder at one remove—murder by the state. In other words, a frame-up. Make Grant a murderer, not a victim. No reason, then—or not the same reason—to dig deeply into his background. No reason to bother Herbert Pepperill, visiting lecturer on Slavonic culture. What could he tell them about a countryman who had got mixed up with a student and killed her in passion?
Peggy Larkin made a little sound—a little sobbing sound. She covered her face with her hands. Reg went over and sat beside her on the sofa, and put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But—poor little Jenny. Just to be—killed like that. So—it’s so without meaning. It’s—” She paused for some seconds. “As if she hadn’t been real at all.” She put her face, for an instant, against Reg Grant’s convenient shoulder. Then, again, she said she was sorry, and sat straight.
It was not quite that, Shapiro told her, his voice gentle. To a degree, obviously, Jeanette had been involved—had, to a degree, helped. She had spread the news that she and Grant had been dating. Probably—this again was guessing, but he thought safe guessing—she had been told that the purpose was to discredit Grant. Why she had joined in that—He looked at Peggy Larkin and raised his shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “She was—was an emotional child. Full of—of dreams. Of ideals. Shrewd people could prey on her—did, I suppose. Make her believe almost anything. That Reg—that Mr. Grant—was—oh, an enemy of peace. An agent of reaction. I don’t know what words they used. She—she thought with her feelings. She was a child.”
Reg still had his arm around Peggy Larkin. He pressed with the arm and she looked up at him. Her eyes were wet. She smiled up at him. It wasn’t much of a smile.
Had the child, in a strange fashion, died for a dream, Reg wondered? Well, people had before—for good dreams and bad dreams. They’d never know.
“We’ll never know, probably,” Shapiro said. “It must have been something like that. Well—you know the rest of it. Better than I do, actually. You’ll have to tell about it in court, you know. When Cutler and the rest of them come up. For murder one, it’ll be.”
“But Ben—my cousin—you’re not saying he actually killed Jeanette?”
“Oh no. Hunter. A knife man. But—hiring murder is the same as doing it, Mr. Grant. Same guilt and—same penalty. Well—”
He stood up and looked at his watch. He had to get back to Brooklyn. He’d still be in time to walk the dog.
“You knew he’d be here last night? I don’t see—”
“No,” Shapiro said. “How could I have known that? I just came by—I don’t know why, exactly. To have another look at your windows. On my way home. Cutler was standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the windows. Got impatient, probably. So I asked him why.”
He said, again, “Well—” and then, “Thanks for the tea, Mr. Grant. And I hope the ankle—”
“Wait,” Reg Grant said. “When you saw him looking at the windows. You brought him up. Made him come up. So you must—must already have suspected him.”
Shapiro stopped and turned. He seemed a little surprised. He said, “Why—yes, of course, Mr. Grant.”
Reg Grant shook his head.
“I got to thinking about teeth,” Shapiro said. “Because there weren’t any false teeth in the grave that was supposed to be Cutler’s. And none in the—er, skull. And then I remembered that, when I’d talked to Professor Pepperill in his office I’d noticed what very white teeth he had—shining white teeth. Not at all natural looking. Had a bad dentist, I suppose. Well—”
He went, this time. Reg went to the door with him and came back and found that Peggy Larkin was making the small, stirring motions which precede getting up from a sofa. Reg sat down beside her. He said, “Do you have to, at once?” and she said, “Well—” All Americans said “Well.” A bit odd of them.
“Because,” Reg said, “it would easily run to another drink.”
“Well—”
“I suppose, after, you’d not be free for dinner?”
Her lips twitched slightly. Going to laugh at him again. Well—
“Do you, Mr. Grant?” Peggy Larkin said. “I wonder why?”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Nathan Shapiro Mysteries
I
She paid the cabdriver. She stood on the sidewalk and watched the cab roll slowly down the street to the next corner. It hesitated there and then made a right turn. That was the way she had told the driver would be the simplest out of the jigsaw of streets she had guided him into. After the cab was out of sight she stood for some seconds in front of the tottering old building and knew she was postponing, and that it was useless to postpone.
The three flights of stairs would not grow less steep because of her delay. The treads would remain as narrow. She took a deep breath in preparation and went into the building. She hesitated again at the foot of the first flight, but this time only for a moment. She climbed it, holding onto the handrail and feeling the same sense of insecurity she always felt. The stairs canted away from the wall and she thought, as she had so often thought, that one day
the whole building would tumble down. She had said that often enough, and had been snorted at for saying it.
She went along the corridor of the second floor to the foot of the next flight. Her heels clattered on the worn bare boards of the corridor. She climbed again, and at the top of the flight she paused to catch her breath, holding to the handrail.
She walked the third-floor corridor and climbed the final flight and stood in front of the familiar door. She groped the key out of her handbag and put it in the keyhole and tried to turn it to the right.
It would not turn.
For an instant, then, she thought that he might have had the lock changed. It didn’t seem likely. Then she realized that she had, once more, made a mistake. If the key was pushed too far into the keyhole, even by the smallest fraction of an inch too far, it would not turn. She eased it out that smallest fraction of an inch, and turned it and the lock clicked. She pushed the door open and, as she stepped into the big cluttered room, she called, “Shack? You here, Shack?”
She called loudly and was not answered. She called again, the door still open behind her, and then, leaving the door partly open, went on into the room—into the unpartitioned area which was the whole of the fourth floor of the loft building. She went only a little way and stopped, and put both hands up to her mouth for an instant.
He had bled a good deal there on the floor in front of the small easel. The blood had spread out from his body. He lay face down and there was a hole in the back of his head, behind the right ear. The revolver was on the floor near his outstretched right hand.
Her screams slashed through the emptiness of the great room. Now she had started to scream she could not stop. She turned away and went back toward the door, her steps uncertain, almost stumbling. She heard the screaming continue, but it was as if somebody else were screaming.
She pulled the door open and held to the knob and then there were words in the scream. “Help!” she cried. “Help!”
She groped her way to the head of the stairs and screamed down them.
