Trouble in Rooster Paradise

by T. W. Emory

“Then Penny gives him a bugged look that as good as tells him, ‘What’s it to you, bub?’ But then the guy says next, ‘I know just the place to have that run fixed for free, darlin’.’ So now Penny’s sort of curious. Her face has gone from being bugged to a look that says maybe this man knows something about stockings that I don’t. Do you know what I mean, Walter?”

  Walter nodded and continued to write furiously.

  It sounded to me like they were revising the act about the white slavers. I went over to the stove and poured myself a cup of coffee just as Mrs. Berger said, “Well, look what the cat in her pity drug in.”

  When I realized she was talking to me I smiled and asked, “Was it a billiards or church Sunday for the young and perplexed?”

  “Sten decided on church, judging by his costume,” said Mrs. Berger.

  At least twice a month Sten attended a Lutheran church over on Twentieth. He was the only churchgoer in the house. But I don’t think it was because he was particularly devout. He told me once it just gave him a good feeling when he went. The only religion I ever heard Mrs. Berger spout was Fletcherism. Walter was a deist in the manner of Thomas Jefferson. As for me, I’d been a non-practicing Lutheran since my teens. Before the war, while holed up alone at a friend’s beach house in Nelscott, Oregon, I came across a stack of old newspapers dating back to the 1910s. To kill time I read some sermons by a popular syndicated preacher. He had a rational and lucid style that I liked and that forever spoiled me when it came to religious discourse.

  I sipped my coffee and tuned out the conversation between Walter and Mrs. Berger. It had something to do with Penny having trouble reading a street guide of San Francisco. Walter busily jotted down whatever was deemed pertinent for later use at his typewriter keys. I was just glad to see him happily back at it. I knew he’d spend part of the day in his room, going over his notes, writing, editing and rewriting—thoroughly engrossed in his labor of love. We all have our ways of offsetting hysteria and dulling pain.

  I washed and rinsed my cup and put it back in its spot on the drain board. Turning toward the pantry, I swear I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Berger kneading Walter’s instep with the toes of her right foot. But when I did a double take both of Mrs. Berger’s feet were sheathed in their pink fuzzy slippers and reposed under her chair.

  Footsie. On a Sunday no less. Mrs. Berger and Walter. I went upstairs wondering if I really knew these people. After a shave and a fresh change of clothes, I telephoned Rikard Lundeen.

  I apologized for not calling sooner, but he told me he’d already learned quite a few of the details. It was no surprise, what with his city hall connections and his tie to the Engstroms and their attorney.

  We talked for a few minutes, and I agreed to visit him the next day in the afternoon to submit my full report and my bill. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  After we hung up I went back to bed and slept till 3:00 p.m.

  When I entered the Hanstad Building Monday morning, I went straight to Olga Peterson’s shop.

  Miss Peterson gave me the curious and approving look all saleswomen give a man when he buys flowers. I think she was also tickled to finally know the exact nature of one of my purchases without having to ask. Still, there was a quiz.

  “Has a particular young woman caught your fancy, Mr. Vance?” she asked. Her eyes sparkled but she sounded like she was auditioning for a spot on a parole board.

  “My office needs a little cheering.”

  My answer disappointed, but it didn’t stop her from giving me an accompanying card or from wishing me good luck as I edged away from her.

  “I’m glad to see your jungle fever isn’t bothering you, Mr. Vance. Did you remember about the molasses?” she called after me.

  “Every night. Two tablespoons. Heaping,” I said over my shoulder.

  “And, by the way, did you happen to pass my greeting on to Mr. Pangborn?”

  “Western Union couldn’t have done better.”

  My Longines told me it was a little after 9:00, but the door to Dag’s suite was locked. I was more than happy to postpone my encounter with Cissy Paget. I opened the card Miss Peterson had given me, and wrote, “With apologies to Sweet Knees.” I tucked the card in the flowers and set them in front of the doorsill.

  The maintenance man must have made an emergency weekend stop because the frosted glass in my door had been replaced. Cissy’s thoughtfulness further indicted me.

  A solitary letter was nestled in my mail slot. The name of the sender gave it the dreadful attraction of a telegram in wartime. It was missing both stamp and postmark, which meant Britt probably delivered it herself when the building opened.

  The door to the inner pigeonhole was also repaired and I noticed fresh plaster on the back wall. I left the inner door open and sat down to open my letter.

  Britt’s handwriting was beautiful. The message was short but definitely not sweet.

  Dear Gunnar,

  Recent events have made me realize that I’m in need of a big change in my life. I’ve decided to move to New York City and see about finding that “throne” of my own that we talked about.

  If I don’t get a chance to see you before I leave, please know that I enjoyed our brief time together and hope to keep in touch.

  It was signed “Yours Always, Britt.”

  Yours, what? Always, how?

  “Ah, that’s sad, Gunnar,” Kirsti said in a feeble voice. Her eyes actually had tears in them, and she was gingerly dabbing at them with a Kleenex.

  “Yeah. A dimwitted lout just might fail to pick up on her unwritten ‘I’ll call you; don’t call me.’ ”

  After a few seconds of calf eyes and parted lips, Kirsti said, “I’m sure it was hard for her to do. It’s not easy for a girl to break things off, you know. It can be a … challenge.”

  “At the moment, Blue Eyes, I wasn’t exactly thinking of the challenge I posed. However, I did try and figure Britt out. On our drive over to Addison Darcy’s, I’d picked up a few pieces of the puzzle from her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that first day we’d met, when she’d buttonholed Meredith, it had been out of genuine concern.”

  “I thought so. Sure,” Kirsti said.

  “And Britt had honestly been interested in my investigation all along.”

  “She liked you, silly. Women get men to talk about what they do if they like them. You men fall for it every time.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, come to find out, Britt had been on the phone that night I was in her bed. Blanche Arnot had called her on some pretext, probably trying to find out my whereabouts from Britt, while de Carter paid his deadly visit to Meredith. According to Britt, she and Blanche talked on the phone all the time. Britt had unwittingly passed on my every move to de Carter through Blanche.”

  She nodded. “So, why did she go to New York?”

  “Times were different. Britt was a gifted businesswoman with a truckload of promise and the ambition for far more. Not to mention she was stellar in the looks department. But a talented and attractive woman still had it tough in those days. The achievements of the feminist movement were yet to come. She probably saw New York as a city where she stood a better chance of advancing herself.”

  “Is that the only reason she took off, do you think?”

  “Britt was only human. For a long time, Blanche Arnot had been part of her life—probably more a part than I realized. Blanche had nurtured both Britt and Alexis. And while their roles had reversed in many respects, I’m sure Blanche had been a kind of respected role model to Britt. But none of that mattered now. Not anymore. Not ever again.”

  Kirsti remained quiet.

  “You understand, Kirsti, I was mainly left with my guesses as to Britt’s feelings. Finding out she’d misjudged Blanche and misplaced her confidence in members of her sales staff had to have been a painful shock.”

  “It probably blew her away!”

  “Yeah. I could see when I took her home that night she was having a r
ough time of it. Some people are unable to love and trust in the same way after an experience like that. I hoped better for Britt. But I didn’t think I’d ever know. She didn’t want to talk about it. At least not with me.”

  I reread Britt’s note three times. I read between lines, stayed alert for loaded words, hunted for ambiguity, and tried to sniff out any hidden implications. It was pointless. Its plain message bit and twisted my heart in a way I couldn’t define.

  No matter how much I might have wanted to be Britt’s shoulder to cry on, or fix the hurt she felt, I wouldn’t be able to make it better overnight—if ever. Maybe that’s what she believed. That’s one of my guesses anyway.

  Everyone uses somebody. Sometimes several somebodies. The trouble is getting somebody to use you when you want to be used.

  I carefully put the note back in the envelope and sailed it into the spilth receptacle just as someone rapped on the outer door.

  The rap was too forceful to be Cissy Paget’s, no matter how mad at me she might be, and the cloudy figure through the frosted glass was definitely too large. I told my caller to enter.

  It was Dirk Engstrom.

  He shook my hand and I told him to take a seat. He wore a sheepish grin as he studied me and then my office.

  “I … I wanted to thank you for clearing me, Mr. Nilson,” he said. His crisp dark suit told me he was dressed to sell jewelry.

  “Glad I could help, Dirk.”

  “I … I want to pay you for your time.”

  “That’s not necessary. Rikard Lundeen’s footing the bill.”

  “Still—”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  I would have liked for him to insist one more time. If he had, I’d have let him pay me something. But he didn’t. He was of that budding post-war generation with its ever-diminishing list of ought-to-dos.

  He cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. His unruly lock was slicked in place, and all traces of belligerence seemed to have evaporated. I wondered if he’d been told about Christine’s part in the blackmail racket. He didn’t leave me hanging.

  “I feel … like such a … jackass,” he said looking at the floor.

  I didn’t disagree. I didn’t say anything.

  “I … I loved her. At least I thought I did. Now I … I don’t know what to think.”

  I still didn’t say anything. It’s easy to do when a person isn’t looking at you.

  Dirk raised his eyes from the linoleum to me. I saw tears. Now I had to say something.

  “It was what it was. It just wasn’t what you thought it was. There’s a lot of that in life, kid. The earlier you learn it the better.”

  “I … I suppose so. It’s just so hard to accept that she used me.”

  “We’re all users, kid. You both used each other. It’s a primordial instinct. That’s the way it is.”

  He gave me a grim smile and slowly nodded. Then he looked at the floor again so I gladly returned to being mute. But I couldn’t maintain it.

  “If it means anything to you, at least Christine tried in her way to warn you off.”

  “Wha … what do you mean?” he asked looking at me again.

  “You said she bawled her head off when you talked marriage. She did tell you she wasn’t good enough for you. A guy might take that to mean that at heart she really cared for him.”

  Dirk was dumbstruck. I actually believed what I’d just told him. But I didn’t believe what I said next.

  “It looked like she was being coerced somehow to do what she did.”

  “You mean like a white slavery racket?”

  “Something like that. Who knows? If she hadn’t gotten killed she might have worked up the courage to ask for your help.”

  He liked the sound of that. He thought in silence for a while, recharting his mental and emotional map. Suddenly he stood up and reached over to shake my hand once more. This time he did so more heartily.

  “If there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to call.”

  He needed to say it. I knew it just as sure as I knew I’d never call him.

  The back of my head still hurt when I put my hat on in the hallway. I noticed the bouquet of roses was gone as I walked away from my office. I slipped a clove in my mouth and opened Dag Erickson’s door to take a friendly reconnoitering peek.

  The flowers sat on Cissy’s desk. A good sign.

  She was at her typewriter. I studied her pondering profile, noted the brow knotted into a scowl, the lower lip pinned down by front teeth. She turned to me as I entered.

  It was probably my imagination, but I thought I saw a fleeting tenderness in her eyes before they turned stormy. She fixed me with a venomous stare and said in almost a whisper, “May I help you?”

  “Peace offering okay?” I asked, nodding to the roses.

  “Let me make something perfectly clear. It’s not like I own you or anything. You’re over twenty-one. It’s just that I expect a wee bit of consideration if you’re not going to show up when you say you are. I mean, what was I to think? Especially after what had happened the last time I saw you? For all I knew you’d been killed and were lying in some gutter. How do you think I felt?”

  She bit her lip petulantly. I said I was sorry.

  Knowing Cissy, she probably hadn’t seen the newspapers—generally too much lunacy and heartache for her taste. But, even if she had, thanks to Rikard Lundeen and Addison Darcy, certain details never saw ink. I apologized again and told her those details.

  She listened respectfully and I watched her thin-lipped pout give way to shock and sorrow.

  “Does it help at all to say again that I’m sorry?” I said.

  The first sign of absolution was a small and rather formal smile.

  I checked my watch and started for the door.

  “Listen, Sweet Knees, I really want to make amends. Let me buy you dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I’d take you out tonight, but I’ve got a feeling I’ll be grim company later. But how about a prime rib feast in the Georgian Room over at the Olympic? Cocktails and all the trimmings. What do you say?”

  That won her over.

  “Great. We’ll talk more then. Right now, I’ve got to go meet a man with a checkered past.”

  Even though my story was winding down to a close, I insisted on taking a short break. After chewing and swallowing the last of the hardtack with herring, I said to Kirsti, “It still dumbfounds me, Blue Eyes, how many irrational people make up the world. I’m convinced that most humans are lunatics to some degree.”

  Kirsti’s look was more sympathy than understanding. Like my grandmother used to say, you can’t put an old head on a young body.

  Still, I felt a need to explain.

  “I don’t mean it like it sounds, Kirsti. Most people aren’t crazy enough so as to spot it, or to where they’d get themselves locked away in a mental hospital. They’re just crazy when it comes to some important or critical issues.”

  She gave me a charitable smile.

  “I’m serious. How else do you account for the way people live their lives? How else can you explain the huge gap between the beliefs and opinions people mouth and their personal choices and behavior?”

  She stayed silent.

  “I rest my case.”

  The drive to Rikard Lundeen’s was disquieting. It meant a return to The Highlands and to thoughts of Blanche Arnot and Britt Anderson. Britt would be haunting me for quite a while. That I knew.

  Charlie was at the gatehouse again. He dutifully found me on his clipboard and sent me on through.

  I parked my Chevy in front of Rikard Lundeen’s stately New England-style manor house. It was way too big for a widower to rattle around in.

  Lundeen’s old manservant gave me a suit-off-the-rack look before he let me in. His quick appraisal told me that if I were a dinner guest I’d be seated way down table and out of reach of the salt. He left me waiting in a living room with
floor-to-ceiling draperies and furniture with sapphire-colored upholstery and blond woodwork. The décor was but one of many bothersome details Lundeen had turned over to hired help.

  I spent ten minutes studying the original works of art that adorned the white walls around me. Abstract expressionism. All I saw was a jumble of colored blotches, slashes, and twirls that some visionary had splashed on canvas, put into frames, and then taken money for his perversity. Had these somehow spoken to Rikard Lundeen? Or were they just high-priced window-dressing?

  I sat on a hybrid daveno that lengthwise could easily have slept two. Rikard Lundeen entered the room, followed by his manservant carrying a metal tray that held cups and a porcelain decanter.

  I stood to meet him. He clasped my hand in both of his and wagged it in the air a full ten seconds.

  “Masterfully done, son. Masterfully done,” he said.

  When he let go of me I handed him my bill with itemized expenses and made the obligatory by-all-means-check-it-over comment.

  “That won’t be necessary, son. Not at all.” He glanced at the total, shoved the paper into his pocket and took his checkbook from his coat and made me out a check.

  I thanked him and put the check in my wallet. I resumed my spot on the daveno and he sat in a chair across from me. The manservant left after pouring us coffee.

  We talked about some of the events of the past several days and how they’d unfolded. I was tempted to let it go at that. After all, I reasoned, what difference did it make? But then Lundeen went and gave me an opening I couldn’t ignore.

  “Addison Darcy, that randy old son of a bitch. It looks like his wicked ways almost caught up with him.”

  “Funny thing that,” I said, positioning a fresh clove with teeth and tongue to the left side of my mouth. “Just as Blanche Arnot was about to shoot your friend Addison, she said something about ridding the earth of him, and afterward it would be his old buddy’s turn. Any idea whom she meant by that?”

  Lundeen didn’t say anything.