I Am the Only Running Footman

by Martha Grimes

  “Five minutes. Long enough to put the Q.T. Club out of business.”

  “God! Leave off!” She picked up a pillow.

  Jury felt a soft thud on his forehead. “And what about the theater? You can’t work nights and keep your job.”

  She flounced back on the couch. “It’s not even West End. Camden-bloody-Town! You call that theater?”

  “Just call the club and tell them you regret you must leave town. Say your old mum is dying.”

  Now she was turned on her side doing quick scissor-cuts with her legs. “Is SB-stroke-H coming over, then?”

  “Susan is her name. Yes, for a bit.”

  Carole-anne sat up again and cut him dead with a look from eyes the color of the Aegean. At least Jury imagined that was what the Aegean must be like, deep shimmering blue blending into the purple horizon. “Tonight we was to go down the Angel.” She flopped back, dead.

  “I’m really sorry, Carole-anne. I was supposed to see Susan last night and I didn’t.”

  Points for him, having stood up Susan. Carole-anne relented and struck a languid pose, dangling her espadrille on her toes. “You want to go to bed with a frozen lolly, I don’t mind.”

  Jury shut his eyes, not so much to shut out Carole-anne’s nattering as to defrost the image of Susan she’d just conjured up. “Who I go to bed with is kind of my business, wouldn’t you say?”

  No, she wouldn’t. She started peeling the new polish from her thumbnail and said, “You gotta be careful of flopping in the sack with just anyone —”

  “Carole-anne.” It was the dangerous tone.

  Which bothered Carole-anne no more than the sandal she was fitting on her small white foot, Cinderella-wise. “What time is it?”

  Jury was suspicious. Carole-anne never cared about time when she was using his flat, for whatever purpose. He felt as if he were living on the time-share plan. “Half-past five. Why?”

  She rose and stretched, a sight not just for the sore-eyed but for the blind. “Oh, just thought I’d go for a walk.” Arms straight out, she turned from the waist. “What time’s SB-stroke-H coming?” Round to the right, round to the left . . .

  As if she didn’t know. “Eight. Why?”

  Her calisthenics continued. Deep kneebends now. She shrugged at the same time. “Nothing.” She ended with a split.

  “You can be the house cheerleader. Listen, while I’m gone, keep an eye on Mrs. Wassermann, will you? Take her to the Bingo in Upper Street, or something.”

  Carole-anne stopped halfway down to the floor. “Bingo?”

  He might as well have asked her to visit a nunnery. “Sure. She’s got chums that go there every week.”

  “Welllll . . .”

  “There’s a surprise in it for you.”

  Carole-anne loved surprises. “Sure, I’ll take her to Bingo. Don’t I always look out for Mrs. W?”

  She did, actually. Jury said, “I’ve found a job for you.”

  Still split, she took the card he held out. “That’s a surprise? What’s this?” She looked down at the card.

  “You’ll love it. You get to wear a costume, Carole-anne.”

  That got her attention. Carole-anne would have gone down the mines if a costume were part of the job. It was one of the reasons she loved acting and was good at it.

  “What sort?” Her eyes glittered as she scooped herself off the floor.

  “Oh, one part of it’s a sort of satin turban. With stars all over it. You get to tell fortunes.” He smiled at her own wide smile. Carole-anne was having a good enough time predicting Jury’s future. Imagine turning her loose on perfect strangers, knowledge of whose lives would be uncluttered by reality. She’d be moving the planets about to suit herself. In a walk to the Angel pub she’d tried to convince him that the twinkling light on top of the post office building was Haley’s Comet.

  “Is it a fair, like? Do I have a booth?”

  “It’s a shop, actually. I’m not sure about the booth.” He handed her the little card. “The proprietor wants you to come round right away. Madame Zostra, that’s who you’re to be,” he added. “Madame Zostra, famous clairvoyant” . . . where had he read that?

  “ ‘Starrdust,’ fancy that,” she said, studying the card. “Whatever do they sell?”

  Jury smiled. “Oh, different things. Dreams, maybe.”

  Carole-anne sighed and shoved the card into the band of her shorts. “If SB-stroke-H is coming, you’ll need one, Super.”

  Her espadrilles slapped out and up the stairs.

  • • •

  Susan Bredon-Hunt, who was walking about the room barefoot, in her silky teddies, was talking about a future she seemed to think was theirs. She talked a great deal, Susan did. Immediately she came into his flat, she would undress, but not, he had found, out of a desire to go straight to bed, or even to appear engagingly wanton. She seemed to need to undress to calculate. Prancing back and forth (there was something equine about Susan, who rode to hounds), she smoked and drank her wine. The bowl of the glass she held cupped in her hands like a little crystal ball in which she read their future.

  “. . . and it’s time you met Daddy, Richard. I just lunched with him today at Claridge’s and he wants you to come round for cocktails. . . .”

  And so forth. It depressed him to think of it, really. The manor house somewhere in Suffolk. A star-studded family of all sorts of variations of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Here a CBE, there a few OBEs, no lowly MBEs, of course. Daddy, he remembered, was a Knight of the Thistle. Jury imagined that he himself appealed to some sense of recklessness in Susan, the desire to do something shocking like marrying a civil servant, a policeman.

  He wished she would stop her pacing and planning and talking about the future they most certainly would never share. Even a fight about the other night when he had left so suddenly would have been a relief, would have made him feel closer to her. But when he had brought it up, she had simply brushed it aside and went on to talk about the future, their future, as if she were dressing a window in some fashionable matchings of escritoires and turkey carpets.

  As she paced by his chair, he reached out and pulled her down on his lap, spilling a little of the wine across the peach silk that covered her small breasts. He ran his hands down her sides, from the angles of the shoulders to the bony hips, as she scraped at the wine stain.

  “This is brand-new, Richard,” she said, pouting.

  “I’ll buy you another.” He buried his face in the curve of her neck —

  There was a knock at the door.

  He knew who it was.

  • • •

  “Oh, I hope I’m not interrupting —” said the tenant from upstairs. Carole-anne Nouveau was wearing a fire-brigade-red dress, down the front of which any man would have loved to dump a cask of wine. The neck was scooped out in a diamond shape, the mandarin collar tightened by some sparkly bit of fake-diamond costume jewelry. The tightness elsewhere didn’t need diamonds. He could not believe that she was carrying a casserole, whose steam emitted wonderful vapors. “Your favorite.” She smiled sweetly.

  He had no idea what his favorite was, but he was suddenly hungry as hell. For drink, food, sex. “Thank you,” he said, straight-faced.

  “And here’s that song . . .” Sweet smile. She sashayed over to the record player, put the casserole down, and took the record from its sleeve. She clicked the button, turned to Jury, and winked, if such a languorous movement of the eyelash could be called a wink. “You remember . . . well . . .”

  On an extended sigh she listened to a few bars. “Of all the girls I LOVED before . . .” Dreamily, she held Jury’s eye long enough for a countdown on a launch pad. “That’s Julio. You remember Spain.”

  The only Spain he’d ever shared with Carole-anne had lasted for twenty minutes in the lobby of the Regency Hotel. He glared at her as Julio remembered the girls he’d loved going in and out his door.

  Carole-anne pretended not to notice Jury’s black look as sh
e shoved the casserole up against Susan’s apricot bosom, and (in a totally different voice) said, “Ten minutes on top of the cooker, dear. Ta.”

  The steam coming off the casserole could not compete with the steam coming off Susan Bredon-Hunt.

  • • •

  Jury stowed his things in the car next morning and went down the steps to the basement flat. He was surprised to find the door slightly ajar and the heavy drapes open. Mrs. Wassermann had enough deadbolts for a locksmith’s display case, and it usually took five minutes just for her to open the door. Not today, though. Since Carole-anne had taken the upstairs flat a year ago, Mrs. Wassermann had lowered the drawbridge of her fortress flat and let in a little light.

  “I just dropped in to see if you’d like something from Brighton,” Jury said when she came in from the kitchen. Over her navy blue dress she was wearing an apron. Her hair was pulled back from her face and wound in a coil as neat and tight as a clockspring.

  “Ah! Mr. Jury, I’m glad you’re having a little holiday. Just wait, there is something I have for you.”

  “Not a holiday, Mrs. Wassermann,” he called after her. “I only wish it were.”

  While he waited, he looked around the flat; with the sun warming the windowpanes and tossing coins of light on the brightly patterned rug she’d brought from Poland, it looked much different from the dark room with the drawn drapes and armored door. But Jury could understand her fears; Mrs. Wassermann had reached her sixties by various escape routes — back alleys, tunnels, blockaded roads, barbed-wire fences. That was when she was young, in what she always called the Big War. It was something they shared, despite the difference in their ages — the loss of her family, the loss of his.

  She came in carrying a small parcel tied up with string. “For your trip, I made this. Sandwiches. Breast of turkey, the very best, and a cheese and pickle.”

  He thanked her and took the parcel. “Keep an eye on Carole-anne, will you? Maybe you could have her down for tea. Maybe you could take her to your Bingo night. She might not show it, but I think she gets lonely.”

  “Such a sweet child, Mr. Jury.” They were walking up the three steps to the pavement. “Isn’t it nice about her new job?”

  Jury was suspicious. He didn’t think Carole-anne could have told Mrs. Wassermann yet about Starrdust. And God knows she would never have mentioned the job she’d meant to take at the Q.T. Club. “New job?”

  “You know, in the all-night launderette. Carole-anne said she was to work the late shift and wouldn’t be home until the wee hours. Well, I told her she must be careful and to take a taxi.”

  “The launderette. Yes, I’d forgotten about that.”

  “So much better than her old job.”

  The old job was at King Arthur’s as a topless dancer. “Yes, much better.”

  “At the library.”

  Jury studied the pavement at his feet, then looked up when the front door opened and the Librarian came out in her skintight jeans and fake-fur jacket. “Much as she likes books, it just didn’t pay enough, I expect.”

  “Ah, so hard it is to find work these days. And at the launderette she gets to wash her clothes free.”

  “Hi, Mrs. W!” Carole-anne called gaily.

  “Hello, dear,” said Mrs. Wassermann. “Don’t you look lovely!”

  “Thanks, Mrs. W. On my way to see about a job.” She was looking everywhere but at Jury, up and down the street, at the sky, checking for snow, rain, sun — anything but Jury’s expression.

  “Hello, dear,” said Jury with a mock-sweetness he seldom indulged in. “When you get through with the turban and stars, you can do my laundry.”

  Carole-anne squinted up at him, slack-mouthed, as if she weren’t sure about this unclean stranger on their doorstep. Her creamy forehead puckered; her raindrop earrings stirred. “Huh? Well, I gotta go. Ta.” She blew a kiss and hitched her bag over her shoulder.

  They watched her go down the street. First one, then another of the male residents coming the other way did an about-face when she passed. Across the way, a small man in a bowler latched his gate and did a quick-step, following up the other two. The postman moved a little more spryly about his duties, stuffing letters any old way through the slots of doors along Carole-anne’s route.

  “Well, Mrs. Wassermann, there goes the neighborhood,” said Jury, with a smile.

  PART V

  The Old Penny Palace

  22

  “BRIGHTON is known for the brilliancy of its air,” said Jury, looking out over the gunmetal water toward a horizon lost in fog.

  Eyes squinted nearly shut in case of sea-spray, Wiggins gave his long scarf one more turn around his neck and looked as if he couldn’t care a pence for brilliancy.

  Jury flicked away his cigarette and took a deep breath.

  “It’s not healthy, sir.”

  “Breathing?”

  “The sea air,” said Wiggins, adding instructively, “no matter what people say, any doctor can tell you it’s not healthy.” He then brought out his Fisherman’s Friends, a staple in his portable pharmacy ever since the cold, damp days of Dorset. He pushed the packet at Jury. “These’ll help a bad throat.”

  “I haven’t got one, Wiggins.”

  “You will,” said the sergeant almost merrily. He put one in Jury’s hand.

  Wiggins, thought Jury, would have taken shock treatments to ward off flu. “Mind over matter” was not a phrase in the Wiggins lexicon. “There’s Paul Swann, or I think it must be.” Jury pointed over the railing, down the shingle beach. “Near the Palace Pier.”

  The char had told Jury that Mr. Swann was not in, that he’d gone down to the beach, to the Palace Pier. Yesterday, it’d been the Royal Pavilion, she said. “Did the east portico. Last week he did the main entrance. He’s doing it all, see, inside too,” she added, as if Swann did floors.

  • • •

  Paul Swann sat on a canvas stool, looking far down the strand toward the West Pier. Sketchbook and paints sat at his feet, a watercolor rested on the easel before him. He was a man of indeterminate age with a thin face and watery blue eyes.

  After Jury introduced himself, Swann suggested they sit on a nearby bench within sight of his painting. An interview in the open air, brilliant though it might be, only made Wiggins cough.

  Paul Swann said sympathetically, “Not sick are you, Mr. Wiggins?”

  “Not yet, thank you.” Wiggins shrugged down into his topcoat.

  As they sat down on the bench, Swann said, in answer to Jury’s question about David Marr, “I don’t really see David that often, so I’m afraid I can’t be of much help to you there, Superintendent. Very nice chap, though,” he said hurriedly and intently, as if he were concerned that his lack of intimacy with Marr might be construed as his handing him over to police.

  “You were in the Running Footman that night, Mr. Swann, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right, I was. Been thinking about it too, trying to remember exactly when he left, what Ivy did, those details.” He shook his head. “But I wasn’t absolutely sober and I wasn’t really paying attention. I think she collected her coat and left just as time was called.”

  “She said nothing to you?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Wiggins came up out of his shivery cocoon long enough to ask, “How well did you know this Ivy Childess, Mr. Swann?” Turtle-wise, his neck drew back inside his scarf to receive the answer.

  “There was a drinks party at the house in Knightsbridge. I went round with David, who had the Childess girl in tow.” He stopped and looked up at the sky. “Would you just pardon me a moment.” Swann walked across the shingle to collect his easel and palette. “Hope you don’t mind. There’s just a touch to put to this before the light fades.” He continued his assessment of Ivy Childess. “What on earth David saw in that little chit is beyond me. I know that he is not a stupid man, nor a lascivious one — oh, Ivy was quite plump and juicy — and that all of his wild drinking and so forth is merely f
linging grit in the eyes.” As if flicking a bit of that grit away, he touched the brush, dipped in pale, pale yellow, to the picture of the West Pier.

  “Why would he want to fling it, Mr. Swann?”

  “I don’t know. We all have things to hide, Superintendent. Including the sort of person we really are.”

  Jury smiled. “Difficult to do with you. I’ve seen your portraits of the Winslows.”

  Swann looked up from his painting, smiling. “I’d say that’s quite a compliment. Well, I am very good at portraiture, but I will only paint certain people. I’d be a rich man if I took on every commission I was offered; I turn most of them down. I find most people much too shallow or simpering or narcissistic to want to bother with.”

  “But not the Winslows?”

  He smiled. “No, most definitely not the Winslows.” Arms folded across his chest, he kept his eye on his watercolor, so intently that he might have been expecting the pier to move, the fog to shift. “That was the only time I’d seen Hugh Winslow, at that party in Knightsbridge. He’s the wild card, isn’t he?”

  Jury looked at him. “Wild card?”

  “Doesn’t carry the Winslow stamp. I wanted Hugh in that portrait; I thought it would round it out. But when I met him, or when I watched him with the others — especially Marion and Edward — I realized it wouldn’t have done. There’s this interesting chemistry amongst them, Mr. Jury. Perhaps you’ve noticed —?”

  “Definitely.”

  Swann, almost as if he were reworking the Winslow portrait, leaned forward, and applied a faint wash of the pale yellow. “That’s it, I think. Anyway, when the three of them are together, they become more than the sum of their parts. They are a painting, Mr. Jury. They absolutely are. I’m sorry I can’t help you out in a more practical way — time David went to the Running Footman, time he returned, et cetera, but I just don’t know. As for Ivy Childess, it was only on that one evening, and not much of that. I only stayed for half an hour or so. Hate cocktail parties. Much rather go down to the Shepherd Tavern for drinks. I do hope it’s not going to go badly for David; I honestly can’t see him killing that girl.” He shrugged and looked truly sad that he couldn’t help out either Jury or David Marr.