Murder and Blueberry Pie

by Frances

  “I did that,” Graham said. “Drew it up and took it around, and took the liberty of suggesting that the grandson might make a fuss. Only left him a thousand and I figured he might be annoyed-annoyed enough to contest. I know I would.”

  “And me,” Shapiro said. “I sure would. She—?”

  “Pretty well snapped my head off,” Graham said. “Told me it was none of my business. Which it wasn’t, of course. Said all she wanted of me was for me to make it legal. I said that, barring allegations of undue influence, it was legal. She said, ‘Fiddlesticks, young man,’ and that she would go over it to make sure I had it right, and sign it if it was. I told her she’d have to have witnesses and—”

  “This was Sunday?” Shapiro said. “Morning?”

  “Afternoon,” Graham said. “After she woke up from her nap and—” He stopped. “This hasn’t anything to do with this girl in New York,” he said. “Couldn’t have.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “Trouble with me is, I keep wandering up side-alleys. They keep telling me, ‘Trouble with you, Shapiro, you don’t stick to the point.’ And they’re right.” He looked very sad indeed. He said, a little vaguely, “She did sign the will, I suppose? With witnesses.”

  “Monday evening,” Graham said. “Half an hour or so before she died.”

  “You were there?”

  “I don’t see—but what difference does it make?” He was tolerant of this aimless man and tolerance was in his voice. “Sure I was there,” he said. “Saw her sign, blotted her signature. Showed a Mrs. Williams—there about a house tour—and a kid named Bourgelotti where to sign as witnesses.”

  “Well—” Shapiro said, and again moved to get out of the chair, and this time did. “Thanks for giving me all this time,” he said.

  “And,” Graham said, “not much help, I’m afraid. I warned you, though.”

  “You did at that.”

  “You want to see Ned Teller,” Graham told him, and stood up too. “Right across the hall. Anybody knows anything about this woman’s—well, last hours, I guess you’d call it—anybody up here, that is—Ned’s your man.”

  “Probably is,” Shapiro agreed, and thanked the pleasant brown-haired man again, and went out. And went across the hall and into the office of Edwin Teller: Real Estate and Insurance. Mr. Teller had a secretary. Mr. Teller was not, however, in. If Mr. Shapiro wanted to have a glance at their listings—

  Mr. Shapiro might, another time. He went down the stairs, into the sun of Main Street.

  He had got what he was after from the agreeable—if rather naïve—lawyer. What he was after, but not what he wanted. Mr. Graham had, unfortunately, strangled an incipient theory, more or less in its cradle.

  I’m no good at having theories, Shapiro thought, gloomily. They’re always dead on arrival.

  He looked, absently, up and down Main Street in search of a taxicab. At once, he thought, How stupid can a man get? Even me? This isn’t Brooklyn. He sighed deeply, and walked back to the Inn, and enquired. Ezra Teller had a car he rented, sometimes. You went north on Main Street for two blocks and there was Armistice Street, and Teller’s repair shop was half a block up on the right. You couldn’t miss it.

  You couldn’t. Teller had a car. Did he want a deposit?

  “What for?” Ezra Teller said. “Reckon I can trust you, mister.”

  “Use your telephone?” Shapiro said, and was told “Sure” and looked up two numbers and made two calls. The Glenville Advertiser answered its telephone promptly, but could not provide its editor. Mrs. Kenneth Williams did not answer her telephone.

  Shapiro looked up a third number, but did not dial it. Instead, he asked how to get to Battle Street and was told, and drove the car out of the lot.

  There would be no point in telephoning in advance to the residence of the late Mrs. Abigail Montfort. So far, he had moved among friends, or at any rate among neutrals. Or, he supposed he had. One never knew. The house of the late Mrs. Montfort would be enemy country. If, of course, there was an enemy.

  Talk about sending a boy to do a man’s work, Howard Graham thought, listening to Detective Nathan Shapiro’s feet going down the wooden stairs. Ned hadn’t been in, apparently. Not that there was anything to be got out of Ned, that he could see. Or that poor Shapiro would have got anything if there had been.

  The New York Police Department must, certainly, be scraping the bottom of the barrel. It was also evident that the New York Police Department did not, really, expect to find out in Glenville anything about the death of a Mrs. Banks, or a Miss Farthing, in Manhattan. If it had—if it had thought there was really anything to find—they would not have sent anyone so bumbling as Shapiro.

  A name written on a scrap of paper—or a sheet of paper, or whatever it had been—was, apparently, all they had to go on. He supposed that, after that, they did have to go through the motions. Well—he’d done what he could. Answered Shapiro’s obviously aimless questions as best he could. He couldn’t see that he had helped Shapiro any, but, probably, Shapiro was beyond help.

  It would, he thought, be pleasant if he could get hold of Lois Williams and get her to have a drink with him. A nice girl—he couldn’t remember when he’d met one nicer, or prettier. He dialed her number. She did not answer. He dialed the Advertiser. It would be interesting to find out whether Shapiro had been asking aimless questions of Bob Oliver. Mr. Oliver was not in.

  Howard Graham lighted a fresh cigar, drew on it and regarded the glowing end. Burning nicely. He wondered if Shapiro had been bothering poor old Ella Harbrook, and used the telephone again. Keating answered. Keating would do; Keating did do. No long sad detective from New York had been around. He couldn’t see, any more than Graham could, what he would come around for.

  “Checking up on the last hours of this Mrs. Banks,” Graham explained. “Last hours up here, that is.”

  “Oh,” Keating said. “She was up here, they think?”

  “Seems they do,” Graham said. “Give my best to your aunt.”

  He hung up, with that. He left his office, locked the door behind him and went across the street and down a block or so to the Inn. He’d run into somebody there—good old Ned or good old Somebody. The longer he lived in Glenville the more he felt himself fitting into it. He was getting more clients, too. Poor old Snoddy’s death had been a godsend. That had to be admitted. He didn’t like to think of it that way, but that was the way it was.

  Detective Nathan Shapiro parked against the curb on Battle Street and got out of Ezra Teller’s car. There was an historical marker across from the low, small-windowed house. The Second Battle of Glenville had been fought there on April 10, 1777. Shapiro turned his back on the marker and walked up to the house and rang the bell. After a brief wait, a youngish, plumpish man with receding hair opened the door for him. He did not, however, invite him in. He merely waited—an affable man waiting to say they didn’t want any. Meanwhile, he smoked a cigar.

  Shapiro, in a sad voice, explained his mission, such as it was. A tenuous mission, certainly. But—if he might see Mrs. Ella Harbrook?

  The affable plumpish man was sorry about that.

  “My aunt—my name’s Keating, by the way—is resting. Poor old thing. Pretty much broken up by all this. A Mrs. Banks, you say?”

  Shapiro did. The point being, did Mrs. Harbrook know whether Mrs. Montfort had known a Mrs. Banks? Seems Mrs. Banks, who was dead now by violence, had been in Glenville and had written Mrs. Montfort’s name down for some reason and—

  “They make a great point of filling up the record,” Shapiro explained, gloomily.

  “I can ask her,” Keating said, his voice doubtful. “Doesn’t seem likely—but—”

  “She was an actress,” Shapiro said, morosely. “Stage name of Farthing. Grace Farthing.”

  He was asked to wait a minute. Keating shut the door when he went back into the house. He was gone not much longer than he had promised.

  “She doesn’t feel up to seeing anybody,” he said, standing a
gain in the doorway. He took a final drag from his cigar and tossed the butt away. “But she says she’s sure Mrs. Montfort never knew a Mrs. Banks. Or a Miss Farthing. She’d have known if she had, I’m pretty sure. Lived in each other’s pockets for years, you know.”

  “Funny about Mrs. Banks having written Mrs. Montfort’s name down,” Shapiro said.

  “Very,” Keating said, without inflection of any kind.

  “Probably we’ll never know,” Shapiro said.

  “Probably not,” Keating said, still with no special emphasis.

  Shapiro said, “Well—” somewhat vaguely, and went back to the car.

  An incurious man, Keating, he thought, getting into the car. But some people were like that, about things which didn’t touch them personally. No abstract curiosity, curiosity about things in general. Like why a young woman would write an old woman’s name on a piece of paper, if the old woman didn’t know her and she, resultingly, didn’t know the old woman. It was hardly, Shapiro thought, worth the trouble of making up such untruths if they did not stimulate suspects. But, again, suspects of what?

  A good detective, Shapiro thought, driving back toward Main Street, probably would have thought of some way of retrieving a discarded cigar butt, for comparison with the one they had. But even a man as incurious as Keating might be surprised to see a police detective scrounging cigar butts.

  There was, of course, the chance that Keating knew a lie when he heard one. In which case, Shapiro thought, disconsolately, I might as well have picked the butt up, for all the harm it would have done.

  XI

  She had thought it would be difficult to go back to the inn called Fox Hill, where one sits on a terrace for cocktails and looks away at the soft, tender rolling of green hills which reach for miles. They had not gone there often—it costs to go there, and they had made some effort to live on a pilot’s salary—but they had gone there, and had watched shadows grow in valleys as the sun sank. Today, as she went out onto the terrace, she had taken a quick, involuntary breath, and the rhythm of her movement had been momentarily checked.

  Bob Oliver had said nothing, nor touched her. He had only, for that instant, checked his movement to match hers. And then, she had thought—with a tiny bell tinkling somewhere in her, yet with sorrow, with the pain of an ending—thought, I’m free. Not free to forget, not ever to forget. And wherever Ken and I went, and I go again—with this man or another man, or alone—there will always be that quick catching of memory. But it will not ache inside me. I am done with that pain.

  “It’s quite a view,” Bob Oliver had said, as if they had checked their movement only to look at rolling hills. Then, to the maître d’, advancing with enormous menus and a welcoming smile, “Two, please,” which was unnecessary, and which gave her time. If she needed time.

  Bob pulled a chair back from one of the little tables on the terrace, which was unnecessary, too, and she said, “Thank you, Bob,” without any special emphasis, but with more in mind than the moving of a chair.

  It had been very relaxed, almost desultory. They idled with their drinks and the sun idled down behind the inn itself. All the violence seemed to have gone out of Bob Oliver, all the urgency. He was a long, angular man with his legs stretched out in front of him, talking of nothing in particular—of working on newspapers, of the people of Glenville, now and then (still without violence) of what he thought about newspapers and what was in them, and of people, in or out of Glenville.

  Without insistence, she thought without any conscious plan, he showed her his mind, said, “This is me. This is Robert Oliver. If you are interested in any way.” And, as time idled, she, with no more intention, picking up a word, turning an idea between mental fingers, showed him her mind, said, “This is Lois Williams. What part we have time for, and there is no hurry.”

  There was still no committal; no undertaking that after this time—after this second or this minute—there would be any going on with anything. Bodies may leap together, and that is fine—or not fine always, but fine this time—and that is part of it, but only part. Minds meet more slowly, edge together. This was only the beginning of a beginning, perhaps not that. There was no hurry about anything.

  “The days are drawing in,” he said, and made no effort to avoid the obvious phrasing, which for an instant surprised her and then did not. “Do you like autumn?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so. The colors—” She hesitated, turned to him. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Nor I,” he said. “Things ending. Spring is better. Wet and cold and full of snow. And better. We can look ahead, not backward over our shoulders.”

  “And afterwhile,” she said, “the kind of pinkish haze. Over the hills. The haze of color—”

  Nothing of importance. I prefer spring, when the world is born to autumn, when it dies, although in these hills it dies in splendor. Would you rather it were spring?

  They ate with little further talk, which is the proper way to eat, but talked again afterward, over coffee in what had been a mansion’s drawing room—or, Lois suspected, one of them—and still talked of nothing of importance and sometimes not at all, because the music of a piano rippled in the room. It was rather late when they drove back to Glenville, and then they hardly talked at all. There was no hurry. Nothing had to be decided. Perhaps nothing would ever have to be decided.

  It was not, indeed, “decided” that when they reached her small house (with one light left discreetly burning) he should go with her into the house and then, when the lights were on (and nothing untoward) out onto the terrace. This went without saying; went as if it were a familiar thing.

  “Good evening,” Nathan Shapiro said, in a tone of depression, and rose, long and sad, out of a chair. “I hope you don’t mind my sitting here until you came back?”

  Bob Oliver had stiffened when the long man rose, and his hand had gone, suddenly, to her arm and the fingers tightened there, as if to draw her back to safety. But in almost the same moment the hand relaxed.

  “Oh,” Bob Oliver said. “You.”

  Shapiro sighed. “Me,” he said.

  “The detective I told you about,” Bob said. “Detective Shapiro. This is Mrs. Williams.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “The lady who heard voices. ’Evening, Mrs. Williams.”

  “So,” Bob said, “you decided it was worth looking into.”

  “The captain did,” Shapiro said. “Muggings—just muggings —bore him a bit. Professionally, that is. There’s nothing much to work on, you know. Unless you’re lucky and pretty much catch them at it. We’re not lucky, usually.”

  He sighed deeply.

  “What kind of a man is Mr. Graham?” he said, then. “Upstanding citizen, he seems to be. Is he?”

  “What he seems to be? I gather you’ve talked to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d say so,” Bob Oliver said. “Bet on it.”

  “Heavily, Mr. Oliver?”

  “I’ve no reason not to,” Bob said. “He’s—he’s a bit the puppy type, from all I’ve seen. Turn your back on him and get it slapped.”

  “A good lawyer?”

  “Hell,” Oliver said. “Do you analyze all the people you meet? Decide how good they are? Whether you’d bet on them? Graham’s just—” He paused. “Just anybody,” he said. “Doctor, lawyer, merchant—” He stopped again.

  “Chief? Thief?”

  “Neither, I’d think. Look—some people you wonder about, guess about. Say to yourself, what do you suppose makes him tick? Or her tick. Howdy Graham—no. Just good old Howdy. Active in civic affairs, insofar as a relative newcomer can be around here. Draw up a deed with anybody, at a guess. But— I’ve really never thought about it, one way or another. Just took him for granted. The kind of man you do. Or, don’t you?”

  Shapiro nodded, which was not an answer. He said, “Newcomer?”

  “About three years.”

  “Many clients?”

  “I don’t know. Seems
to get along. He— Why all this?”

  “Oh,” Shapiro said, “I merely wondered if he could be relied on.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It might be.”

  “Well—you talked to him yourself, you say.”

  Shapiro sighed.

  “I’m afraid I’m not too good at that sort of thing,” he said. “Easily taken in. Yes, I talked to him. Seems much as you say. A little innocent for his profession, if anything. Well—you’re still sure about the voice, Mrs. Williams?”

  “As I ever was,” she said. “But—things like that tend to fade, somehow. What I mean is—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I know what you mean. Has anything else come up?”

  “Mrs. Montfort’s coffin has been kept closed,” Lois said. “We—went to look.”

  “To see if it was really she you’d seen at the house? When she signed the will.”

  “Yes. It was closed.”

  “I don’t know the customs around here,” Shapiro said, with regret—with apology. “That’s unusual?”

  “A little,” Bob said. “When the body is, as they say, ‘resting’ in the—well, they tend to say the ‘funeral home.’ Or, ‘lying in state.’”

  Shapiro’s face, with half light on it from the lighted living room, was doleful. He said that that didn’t seem to get them much of anywhere. He said, “Nothing does, I’m afraid. Nothing else?”

  “No,” she said, and Bob Oliver said, “What it comes to, you don’t think there’s really anything to—all this? Isn’t that it?”

  And at that, Nathan Shapiro looked somewhat surprised.

  “Yes,” he said. “I think there may be. Mrs. Harbrook and Mr. Keating, perhaps with assistance from person or persons unknown, may be making themselves a million dollars or more, or whatever it comes to. But—I haven’t much idea how they’ve gone about it—or, only one small notion.”