Trouble in Rooster Paradise

by T. W. Emory

  “It got the police curious. They asked me if I knew who this old buddy Blanche referred to might be,” I said.

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “That they might find the answer in the blackmail photos or in Christine Johanson’s diary.”

  “And will they?” His voice had dropped an octave.

  “No. Guy de Carter had yet to take photos of you and Christine, and she didn’t name you in her diary.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “About your budding affair with Christine?”

  He gave a nod.

  “I had a few inklings along the way. Her diary refers to you as Slick, as in slicked-back hair,” I said, pointing to his head. “You’re not listed as a repeat customer at Fasciné Expressions, but then I remembered you telling me that you stopped by the place from time to time to take its pulse. But it really wasn’t until Blanche Arnot made her ‘old buddy’ comment that I made a solid connection. You live just down the road from Darcy. You were going to be her next stop.”

  “I see.”

  “It made me rethink a few conversations. You told me that you and Darcy made trips together and raised hell when you were younger. Darcy told me that he practically lived in New York City due to business, and that he liked to take in the shows. As you must know by now, Blanche Arnot had been a Ziegfeld Girl.”

  That news didn’t surprise him.

  “At the Moonglow Eats the other day, you told me that the golddigger I’d helped you with previously had gotten off easy because you’d mellowed with age. I understand better now what you meant by that comment. You have mellowed.

  “Blanche Arnot told me a pitiful tale about her good friend Sally Miller, a fellow chorine who’d been betrayed, framed, and sent to prison by her lover and his friend. Both were businessmen. Out-of-towners with local pull. The Miller girl died in prison. Addison Darcy had been her lover. And you, Mr. Lundeen, were his old buddy. You helped him to get rid of the girl once she’d become a liability.”

  He closed his eyes for a second, opened them and looked at me speculatively.

  I continued, “Blanche Arnot never forgot you two. When she married and came to Seattle, she recognized both of you. She was an unstable woman, kept reasonably stable by a man who loved her—her physician husband. But then he died. If that didn’t push her over the edge, I think it at least allowed her to jump. She hatched an elaborate revenge for you and your old pal. She chose a trap that fit your crime and that she was sure would snare you both. And whaddaya know? She almost pulled it off.”

  Lundeen’s breathing was shallow and his rugged cheeks had reddened. He regained possession of himself with no little effort, deliberately taking slow deep breaths. I stood up to leave. He stayed seated, watching me.

  “Blackmail was to be only stage one. But the murder of Christine Johanson set everything and everyone connected to her reeling. Including you. I believed your spiel about concern for family. But you weren’t really too interested in clearing Dirk. Mind you, I don’t think you have anything against the boy, but it probably would have suited your purposes just as well had Dirk quickly been found guilty. You hired me for insurance. What you really wanted was a plausible explanation to spoon-feed the police and any of the press you don’t already have in your pocket. How was it you put it again? You wanted me to ‘contain anything disturbing.’ Wasn’t that it?”

  He stood and gave me a level stare with his slate blue eyes. I kept thinking about all his sanctimonious talk of family, when but a day or two before he’d been making moves on his godson’s girlfriend, getting set to jump her bones.

  “So, what do you propose to do now?” he asked flatly.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “That chorus girl’s been dead for over thirty years. Anything resembling a case against you died with a madwoman. And the last time I checked there’s no law on the books against being a jerk or a conniving old roué. Not on man’s books anyway.”

  Then I gave him a glassy-eyed smile and got the hell out of there. I found my hat in the anteroom before the smarmy manservant made his showing.

  Outside, heavy drizzle doused the grounds and shrubbery. Everything had a dismal, disenchanting look, like a fairy kingdom gone sour. I got in my Chevy and edged down the driveway until the windshield wipers started to make a difference. I stopped at the border of Lundeen’s property and let the engine noise compete with the sound of rain battering the car body.

  “Like a tiger getting beat out of the brush.” Lundeen had said that right after de Carter had tried to kill Darcy and me. But Lundeen knew better. It wasn’t just scandal he worried about. His instincts for self-preservation were strong. He sensed a personal danger from the very start. I was the baby goat. The bleating kid. I was hired to be the tiger bait.

  Lundeen hadn’t mellowed with age at all. I was wrong about that. He’d merely slowed.

  I rolled down the window. As my sleeve and shoulder got wet I took from my wallet the card with Rikard Lundeen’s private number scrawled on it. I tore it into little pieces and tossed them in a nearby Thuja hedge. Or was it Viburnum? They all look the same in the rain.

  “Good for you, Gunnar,” Kirsti said sweetly, her eyes shiny. She suddenly looked extraordinarily lovely and alive to a guy who’d already reached for more than his share of brass rings. “That was awesome. I’m proud of you for tearing up his phone number like that. That Lundeen was pond scum. Lower than the low.”

  Kirsti was beaming at me. I liked being beamed at. So, I fudged a little. She probably would have too, if she were in my shoes. I much preferred Gunnar the Noble to Gunnar the Abject. Besides, she was recording things for posterity.

  “Tell me again, Blue Eyes, what kind of paper did you say you might parlay these memories of mine into?” I asked.

  Kirsti switched her recorder off and pulled in her lower lip with her teeth and then slowly let it go. “Well, actually, Gunnar, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said in a sweet melodic purr.

  It was a classic female purr with which I was long familiar. It was harbinger to a request.

  Kirsti went on, “At first, I thought of simply writing a human interest paper. That sort of thing.”

  “But now?” I said warily.

  She was beaming again. “Well, you have to admit, that was quite a week you’ve told me about. So now I’m thinking that I might like to type up what I’ve recorded as is. You know, a transcript. With your permission, of course. In fact, I’d love to record and transcribe any other cases of yours that you’d care to tell me about. For instance, last week you mentioned some guy who had been killed ‘out of character.’ Maybe you could tell me all about that one, and what exactly you meant. I think making written records of your private eye days would be cool, and that others would like to read them. What do you think, Gunnar?”

  “Hmm …. You want to play Watson to my Holmes?”

  Her smooth forehead creased as she thought about that. “No … more like I’d be Boswell to your Dr. Johnson,” she said in a satisfied tone. “But you don’t need to decide right now. Just promise me you’ll think about it, okay?”

  I promised I’d think about it.

  “So, getting back to what happened,” she said forming a cheery smile as she switched on the recorder. “You’d just finished talking with Rikard Lundeen, and when you got back to your car you tore up his card with his private phone number on it. So let me guess what happened next. You hooked up with Cissy Paget like you told her you would, and probably sooner than you planned to, I bet. You made up for being rude and missing your date. Right?”

  “Yeah … something like that. Sure.”

  “I knew it. I just knew that’s what you’d do.”

  The recorder was clicked off and put away, and Kirsti started to roll me back to my room.

  Mind you, I was tempted, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t have the heart to tell Kirsti the whole story, including how after I tore up Lundeen’s card, I waited a minute before I go
t out of my Chevy and picked up all the pieces; and how later I taped them together with Mrs. Berger’s help. That woman just loved jigsaw puzzles.

  However, I did follow through on my promised amends-making to Cissy Paget, but as I’d told Cissy, not till the next evening. So, Kirsti’s guess was correct, even though she was a little bit far afield of what really happened that day I gave Lundeen my bill.

  I’m pretty sure Dr. Johnson didn’t tell Boswell every little thing. Besides, sometimes you want to keep people from getting the right impression.

  The snoring woke me. But it was the rhythm of her hoarse sputter that kept me awake. I knew after five minutes there was no point in trying to get back to sleep. I just stared across the room at the wallpaper and fought an urge to count faded daisies.

  The bed was small and I was about to be pushed off my side of it. Verna Vordahl’s shapely rump was pressed in the small of my back like warm lead in a plaster mold. She was every bit the hot and spry Amazon of her customers’ fantasies. Her Tuesday shift didn’t start till 10:00 a.m. At the moment she needed her sleep. So I carefully pried free of her clinging silkiness and our short-lived closeness.

  I got up, quietly pulled my pants on, and tucked in my shirt. Verna rolled over and nuzzled the corner of the mattress where I’d been. Her snoring halted. A disheveled cluster of reddish brown hair hid her face. Only her mouth showed, her lipstick worn colorless from a necking session the night before that left both of us eager and gasping. My head ached from our little charade at dinner and the stiff drinks we used to make it credible.

  From the roadhouse, we came to her place for another drink and more alchemy that temporarily transformed our grief-affirming bedpost rattling into something honest. For a few hours we lost ourselves in sensation, lessened our loneliness, and became oblivious to the events of the past week. In our grip of mutual affection we each forgot about Hank Vordahl for our own reasons. Verna briefly forgot how much she still loved him, and I was able to put from my mind the enemy I’d make when the two of them got back together.

  But I also managed to forget all about Britt Anderson.

  Well, almost, anyway.

  Gunnar the Self-Deluded.

  * * *

  Born into a blue collar family in Seattle, Washington, and raised in the suburbs of the greater Seattle area, T.W. Emory has been an avid reader since his early teens. In addition to fiction, he likes biographies, autobiographies, and the writings of certain essayists. He also enjoys reading secular and religious history, and is a dabbler in philosophy and sociology. Moreover, he likes reading reprinted collections of old comic strips such as Thimble Theatre (aka Popeye), Moon Mullins, Captain Easy, and Li’l Abner.

  After taking on various odd jobs that included brief stints assisting a grounds-keeper, working in a laundry, washing dishes, waiting on tables, and doing inside and outside painting, he got into drywall finishing and eventually became a small-time drywall contractor.

  In addition to writing, T.W. enjoys cartooning as a hobby. He is second-generation Swede on his mother’s side and third-generation Norwegian on his father’s, which helps explain the Scandinavian flavoring in his first novel, Trouble in Rooster Paradise.

  He currently lives north of Seattle with his wife, two sons, one cat that is companionable and another that is aloof and rather ditsy.

  For more information, go to www.twemoryauthor.com.