Trouble in Rooster Paradise

by T. W. Emory

  As I got under the wheel of my Chevy, I applauded myself for my restraint. Another guy would have gone after Verna like a gin-fiend cut loose in a distillery. Still, my self-congratulations didn’t stop a few erotic flights of fancy about what might have been. I even started to kick myself a little. But these thoughts were quickly swept away by something I remembered Verna had said. It gave me the idea I needed as to where to go next.

  I got there at about 5:15. It proved to be a windfall.

  Christine had been the navigator the night I drove her home. When you consider that my attention had been divided between the road and Christine’s figure, eyes, and pouting lips, it was surprising I still remembered the street. Luckily Aunt Emelia’s was the only two-story Victorian in sight.

  The sky had cleared and it was a perfect day for combat. At least the local kids thought so. Boys wearing oversized sailor caps and army helmets had turned Aunt Emelia’s street into a battleground while a cluster of noncombatant young girls hopscotched on a neutral sidewalk. I drove slowly to allow the pretend soldiers to fan out as they machine-gunned me and my make-believe Chevy-tank. Conveniently, Aunt Emelia lived a ways from the carnage.

  The lines of the structure were familiar. Its daylight look was that of a smart gray house with a neatly manicured lawn. I turned into the driveway and parked. An elderly woman with carefully plaited gray hair sat on the verandah. She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of her niece. But she was old and no longer beautiful. She knew it and she didn’t like it. She was knitting, her hands moving violently. As I stepped out of the car our eyes locked, and to my amusement, neither one of us broke off our gazes as I made my approach. Hers was a withering look that made me feel like idiot du jour.

  As she and I continued our stare-down, Aunt Emelia feverishly worked her needles. She picked up her rhythm as I came in her direction and made me feel more and more like a scab crossing a picket line. I made out the closing refrains of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” as I reached the bottom stair of her porch.

  I wanted to search Christine’s room. How to get past Aunt Emelia’s formidable-looking defenses was the question.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, hat in hand. I was striving for a boyish grin to meet her stern expression, but a grimace was about all my sore face and aching head could muster.

  She abruptly stopped her knitting and turned off her portable radio. She said, “Good afternoon,” in a way that seemed anything but. Hers was the strong Scandinavian accent of my grandparents.

  “Ja, ja, but I already talk to the police.”

  “I’m not the police,” I said. I told her that I’d been hired by one of Christine’s employers to look into her murder.

  “Ja, I know nothing more to tell.” A Scandinavian’s “ja” can mean yes or no depending on the tone. Her “ja” was drawn out to two syllables. It was definitely a negative.

  She looked down at the knitting she quickly resumed. I started climbing the porch steps. Nearby, three cats circled like buzzards the soured residue of a toppled milk bottle.

  Aunt Emelia sat in a high-backed wicker chair, its white sheen worn away from use where her head and hands rested. “Do you mind if I sit with you as we talk?” I asked and pointed to the chair beside her—the twin of hers except its finish was still glossy. Visitors weren’t exactly lining up for porch visits with Emelia—not human visitors anyway. I brushed a few hair balls off the chair’s cushion and plopped down. She put her needles and yarn in a straw-colored basket at her feet.

  I took it as a good sign.

  Emelia Larson was a widow of ten years. She told me she had lived in Ballard for twenty-five years. Meanwhile the tabby cat crept closer to us.

  “Christine should never have come to live with me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She crinkled up her nose and eyes at me. “She was to go to school and work a little. Instead she work a lot and do no schooling.” She shook her head. The basket at her feet was loaded with balls of yarn. The tabby made its way to it.

  “What happened to school?” I asked.

  “Fool business is what. Ja, that’s what happened.”

  Aunt Emelia’s right foot shot out as swiftly as a placekicker’s. A blur of fur and a feline screech signaled the failure of the tabby’s invasion of the yarn basket. It landed in a bush alongside the steps and scurried off as the old woman mumbled something in Swedish that I couldn’t make out. The other cats were gone.

  Aunt Emelia was definitely a rugged old bird. I saw no need to tread lightly. “I’ve seen photos of Christine. A pretty girl like her probably had a lot of suitors,” I prompted.

  “Ja,” she said sighing. “Christine don’t think I know what she be doing. I tell her more than once to stop acting like some flyg skökan.”

  It wasn’t standard Swedish, but I knew enough Svensk jargon to recognize “flying whore” when I heard it.

  “The night before she was killed, she come home late again. We have a fight. I tell her quit her fool business or she have to leave.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She laugh and tell me she be leaving soon anyway. She expect big money,” Aunt Emelia said as she slapped her left palm with the back of her right hand for emphasis. “She say she plan to move to New York City, and so there. Ja, that’s what she say.” Aunt Emelia’s face showed the angry disgust that masks hurt.

  “The police say robbery. But I think Christine come to no good. I think she be killed for something bad she done.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Worn shoulders heaved. “A feeling. Just a feeling.”

  “Did you tell the police about this feeling?”

  “Ja, but why should I? They can’t bring her back. Who knows what skräp the police dig up?”

  I got the drift.

  “Why break my brother’s heart? He think his Christine was robbed. Let him think that. That’s sorrow enough. Ja, let him be at peace with little sorrow.”

  I told her she was wise. I asked if the police had gone through Christine’s things.

  She shook her head. “What for? They were going to. But then one of them get a call that say they get the fella what killed her.”

  “Mrs. Larson, I believe the man they’re holding is innocent. I think Christine was killed by someone else.”

  She considered that a moment. “Ja, and so what do you want?”

  “I’d like to look through Christine’s things. Maybe I’ll find something that will help me find her murderer.”

  She gave me what my grandpa Sven used to call a scrootinizing skvint. “You won’t make Christine look bad? You won’t hurt her folks?” They were more commands than questions.

  I told her I wouldn’t. I said I just wanted to bring the murderer to justice.

  “Ja, dynga justice,” she said, spitting the words out through her once soft lips. She got up and indicated for me to follow her into the house. She was agile for her years but thumped when she walked. She led me upstairs and pointed to a closed door.

  “That was her room. Do what you do,” she said as she turned and thumped back downstairs.

  Christine had adopted her aunt’s sewing room. It had become the room of a girl in the intense wrench and stretch of life’s sinews and muscles. A fluffy, stuffed kitten rested on her pillow. The pillowcase and bedspread were speckled with prints of Raggedy Ann. Had she brought these from home or had Aunt Emelia furnished them? Whatever the case, these were tokens of residual girlhood that had given way to another world and its symbols: the glut of lotions, rouge, jars, and perfumes piled in heaps on her dresser top, and the provocative finery in the closet. It was the burgeoning and prevailing domain of the demimonde.

  It took me two minutes to find what I was looking for. It was in her dresser drawer, carefully wrapped in a pair of scented underwear in the middle of a stack of others.

  I stuffed the item in my coat pocket. I rummaged around awhile longer for show. Then I bounced downstairs to where Aunt Emeli
a sat in her front room. She showed no signs of curiosity. She merely nodded as I bid her a solemn farväl and a sincere tack sä mycket.

  After driving two blocks, I parked and started thumbing through Christine’s diary.

  It was more a daily log than a personal memoir. Any hints of self-analysis were absent. Lacking too were any Aesopian morals to her boring little stories. Most of it was tidbits of tedium: the stockings she’d purchased, the meals she’d eaten, the friends she’d met and what they wore.

  But it wasn’t all dull reading. She’d spelled my name as “Guner” and wrote only that I’d helped her out of a “tight spot.” She described me as “a nice enough guy who was a little on the make.”

  But what really caught my eye were the periodic marginal entries. These were terse and written in a very small hand. She used no names—just nicknames and initials.

  Armed with one of the names I’d learned from Walter, I studied a few of Christine’s glosses until I thought I’d made sense of a couple from some months back.

  G. called. H.R. in can. I interpreted this to mean that Guy had called to tell her his photos of Hugh Rundquist were good to go. Or maybe that he’d succeeded in shaking him down. Two weeks later I found an entry that read: First payment from H.R.: $500. De Carter was probably paymaster, but she had her own silly brand of bookkeeping.

  I noted subsequent payments from H.R. in the months that followed. It was similar, with a few other initialed entries. For a little seductive flirting and a fervent one-nighter, Christine’s cut was none too shabby. Not bad if you could still stand yourself afterward. I could only imagine what Guy de Carter’s take was. I didn’t find Christine’s bankbook when I searched her room. My guess was de Carter stole it off her the night he’d killed her.

  There were only a few such assignation entries over a stretch of several months, which told me that the girls had been selective and had apparently cultivated their prey slowly and carefully. In the entries for the last couple of weeks, Christine had written of a “special” project.

  A few diary entries sandwiched in between shakedowns puzzled me. Then they started to trouble me. Finally they just made me ill.

  B. sensed trouble with Tubby. We backed off.

  B. wants M. to continue after Eyebrows and wants me on Slick.

  B. promises more $ for Slick. I think he’s special somehow.

  The note about Eyebrows was fairly recent and had to refer to Addison Darcy’s bristly brows. Maybe both girls had been assigned to try and seduce Darcy, but for some reason Meredith had apparently seemed more suited to the task. Or perhaps Christine was a better choice for the man she called Slick. But why no initials for Eyebrows and Slick? And who was B?

  I went back and studied the previous entries until something stood out. I looked for a peculiar quirk in her bookkeeping and found it. For some reason Christine didn’t use the victims’ initials until after a triumphal tryst and payment had been made. Prior to that she used pet names like Jowls, Bugeyes and Tubby—tags obviously drawn from the physical characteristics of the marks.

  Her handlers were another matter. They were known simply as B and G throughout. I’d met only two people in Christine’s circle these past few days whose first initial was B. Blanche Arnot and Britt Anderson.

  I drove to the nearest payphone.

  I didn’t reach Milland, but got his partner Bernie Hanson.

  “Do us both a favor, would you Bern?” I said.

  “Oh yeah? And what favor might that be?” he asked in monotonic solemnity.

  “It has to do with those registration records for late model Packards. Could you check on a name for me?”

  “Well ….” he said, drawing out the word to two slow syllables. “I suppose I could do that.”

  Don’t beat yourself up over it, Bern, I thought but didn’t say. Self-control is the better part of favor-begging.

  After five minutes that seemed like fifteen, Hanson returned to the phone and confirmed what I suspected.

  I’d worked with Lou Boyd for almost a month, when in an outpouring of youthful idealism I’d told him that our job was to pursue the truth.

  “Nah, Gunnar lad, it ain’t as noble as all that,” Lou had said with a wry smile. “We dismantle lies. If we’re lucky, the truth—or a pretty close second—comes crawlin’ out of the rubble.”

  In homage to Lou, I had my pile of rubble. And in a nod to Mrs. Berger’s hootchie-cootchie days, my close second was slithering out from the debris on its belly like a reptile.

  Chapter 15

  Hardy Lindholm was chapfallen.

  “Just in the nick of time, old thing,” Walter said as we drove off. “It’s my own fault. I know better. I should always let him win more than I do.”

  Walter was happy to take a ride. Relieved was more like it. He and Hardy had played a fatiguing thirty games of checkers. Walter had won most of them, but defeat didn’t sit well with Hardy. The old Swede’s identity and self-worth came from winning parlor games. Walter had agreed to a colossal rematch. A frazzle-haired Hardy had just put on a fresh pot of coffee when I showed up.

  I updated Walter as we rode along.

  “You said you wanted to meet her,” I said, heading us to Laurelhurst.

  “Yes,” he said gravely, “but I had a different idea as to when and why. A very different idea.”

  I parked in her driveway. Her garage was a separate building outside her fence. The door had a series of small windows at the top. Before we passed through the wrought-iron gate, I peeked inside and saw the dark and unmistakable outline of a Packard.

  I rang the buzzer.

  Walter presented the left side of his face to the speakeasy peephole as its grated window rasped opened.

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Nilson,” Blanche Arnot said in a cheerful voice.

  “Yes. I’ve brought a friend. May we come in?”

  “By all means.”

  She winced on seeing Walter’s scars, but quickly reshaped her welcoming countenance. She didn’t seem to need an explanation of my friend, and I didn’t feel like offering one. She had a coat on and looked all dolled up and ready to leave.

  “Are we keeping you from something?” I asked.

  “No. Nothing that can’t keep a little while longer.”

  She seated us in the living room.

  “Now, to what do I owe this second visit—and so deliciously soon at that?” she asked.

  “You drive a Packard.”

  “No … no, I don’t.”

  “There’s a Packard in your garage.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “You’re saying you don’t drive. Is that the case, Mrs. Arnot?” said Walter.

  She looked at Walter like an approving school marm. “That’s correct. I regret I never bothered to learn. The car in the garage was my husband’s. Henry bought it the fall before last, just before the heart attack took him.”

  “Has someone used your car recently, Mrs. Arnot?” Walter asked.

  “Why yes. It was just returned today. It’s been loaned out this past week.”

  “Who borrowed it?” I asked.

  She noticed the edge in my voice and looked at me curiously. “I didn’t meet the young man. He’s one of Britt Anderson’s friends. She told me his car is at the mechanic’s. I loaned it out as a favor to her. I trust her completely.”

  I’d been pretty certain that my rough draft was ready to be inked in. When you’ve convinced yourself that all the evidence fits the way you want to look at something, you really hate anything that detracts.

  “So, Britt dropped the car off?” I asked as my throat reached for my heart.

  Mrs. Arnot shook her head. “I’d given her the keys. She passed them on. That way her friend could take the car and bring it back at his leisure. I saw it in the garage just a little while ago when I went to get my garden hose. It wasn’t in there this morning, so I imagine the young man dropped it off this afternoon sometime. You see, I don’t lock my garage. A thief is
welcome to whatever he finds in there. Locks only dissuade the honest and the maladroit.”

  I was watching her closely. She was serene. Her equanimity was alarming. She might just as well have been talking about her grocery list. Her blithe comments came across with a convincing guilelessness. Another hypothesis began to bud that upset both my theories and my stomach.

  My skin had those frosty quivers you get that start at the base of your spine and run to the back of your head. My neat little picture of things slipped right off its drawing board and went gliding to the floor, destined for the ash heap.

  “But why all this interest in my Packard, Mr. Nilson?”

  Walter Pangborn to the rescue.

  “Because I might be interested in buying it,” he said. “I’m afraid my DeSoto is on its last set of whitewalls.”

  She was deliciously amused.

  Walter asked Mrs. Arnot a few more questions about her car, which gave me time to digest what I’d learned.

  Sick. Disgusted. Those words work. Add a healthy dose of angry. That probably covers it.

  It’s the kind of thing that happens when you bring your glans in as a consultant. And I’d known better. A passionate bond and a protective male urge clouds the wits and any pretense to professional judgment.

  I kept thinking how I’d screwed up and then some.

  My mind was elsewhere, but I vaguely made out that Walter had shifted from automobiles to questions about Mrs. Arnot’s days in the Ziegfeld Follies.

  I forced myself to swap my prejudices for a stab at objectivity. My brain started sketching away at a new picture. It was impressionistic and it wasn’t the least bit pretty. Revolting was more like it.

  I struggled with the idea that Britt had used and manipulated me from the start. I rethought all my encounters with her. Innocent actions now seemed malevolent. That first day—those times she’d buttonholed Meredith. I had to figure that they had nothing to do with consoling or bucking up a friend. It now seemed clear that Britt had been cautioning Meredith—warning her. I envisioned Britt carefully choosing her girls—making sure they were the type who weren’t likely to crack from the strains of the racket she was running, yet at the same time could be easily controlled by her and Guy de Carter.