City of Brass

by Edward D. Hoch

  “We have some leads,” Simon told him. “Despite our reluctance to act as detectives, we have uncovered a few interesting facts.”

  “Oh, have you?” He was interested now, and I couldn’t help feeling that this information had been the real purpose of his visit. I sat back and let Simon take it from there.

  “Yes,” he said, like a cautious hunter laying out the bait, “we’ve learned quite a bit concerning Professor Wilber, for instance. We followed him yesterday and saw him return to the funeral home during the supper hour. Amazing thing—he was in there all alone with the body.”

  “Alone?”

  Simon nodded. “He was running his fingers through her hair.”

  Mahon was in the act of lighting a cigarette when Simon spoke the words, and his fingers faltered. “What? Why would he do that?”

  “My friend here believes he might be planning to bring her back to life.”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. “You really think that?”

  “Well, not really. It was sort of a joke.”

  “Is this whole thing a joke? Do you know who killed her or don’t you?”

  “Sometimes life is a joke,” Simon answered, “but we know who killed her.”

  “Who?”

  Simon closed his eyes. “The murderer will be at the funeral tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s all you’ll say?”

  “That is all I’ll say.”

  Mahon sighed as if disappointed and got up to leave. It was obvious that he was unhappy with the state of the interview, but there was nothing much for him to do about it. After mumbled thanks and promises to see us later he departed.

  “There’s a guy who’s really changed,” I observed. “He’s certainly not the rich playboy type any more.”

  “Men change for a reason,” Simon said. “Find the reason and you learn much.”

  “I gather from your conversation with him that we’re staying for the funeral tomorrow. Right?”

  “Right. One extra day, might make a great difference. I want you to do certain things for me while I am busy elsewhere today.”

  “What kind of things?” I always hated chasing around on missions for him like some third-rate Doctor Watson, but I could see I had little choice.

  “You must contact Quinn, the detective. Tell him to be at the funeral tomorrow morning. Tell him he must have some of his men in the crowd.”

  “He’d probably be there anyway,” I said. “Why do I need to tell him?”

  “Just so he’ll be prepared. Do it, will you?”

  “OK. Where are you going to be?”

  “At the University, with Professor Wilber. I believe a conversation with him might clear up the last of the haziness.”

  We went downstairs for breakfast and then separated. I was sorry to see him go, especially since I had only a vague knowledge of my real mission. Was it possible that Simon somehow suspected Quinn of being mixed up in the affair and wanted to scare him into the open. I’d met the man only briefly, but now I remembered the conflicting stories about his acquaintance with Cathy Clark. Well, stranger things had happened. Maybe Quinn was involved in some way.

  Baine City Police Headquarters was an old sandstone building badly in need of a cleaning. Outside, flanking a short stretch of steps, stood two battered brass lamp posts surmounted by green glass globes. It was the police station of the twenties brought strangely back to life, and as I entered I half expected to see a chorus line of flappers being booked for indecent exposure, or a bootlegger paying his token fine. All was dusty with neglect, like a library in a country of the blind. Maybe that was it—maybe there just wasn’t any crime in Baine City. No crime but murder.

  “Is Captain Quinn around?” I asked the man behind the desk, taking a wild guess at his rank.

  “You mean Sergeant Quinn?” he asked with a slight smile. “Yeah, he’s around somewhere. Have a seat.”

  I lowered myself onto a long dusty bench to wait. Presently one of the distant doors opened and I saw Quinn approaching with a well-dressed woman. It was Mrs. Foster Baine.

  “Fellow’s waiting for you, Sarge,” the man at the desk said.

  If Quinn was surprised to see me he didn’t show it. He said goodbye to Mrs. Baine and came over to me with an outstretched hand. My eyes followed her out of the place but she purposely avoided glancing my way.

  “Well,” Quinn said, “good to see you again. Can I help you?”

  I was still puzzled by Mrs. Baine’s strange appearance, but I tried not to show it. Obviously Quinn wasn’t planning to discuss her visit with me. “Simon Ark asked me to talk with you,” I said. “He has a lead on the Clark killing.”

  “Ark? The man who was with you yesterday?”

  “That’s right. He said to tell you the killer will be at the funeral tomorrow morning. You should be there with some men.”

  Quinn made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a sigh. “Is your friend Ark going to unmask the killer at the funeral—pull him like a rabbit out of the hat? Maybe get the corpse to stand up and point an accusing finger like in Poe?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen Simon do stranger things.”

  “I’ll be there, don’t worry.”

  I started to turn away and then paused. “Say, didn’t you tell us you’d never met Cathy Clark?”

  Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “I just heard from somebody that you knew her.”

  I’d tried to make my tone casual, but he wasn’t having any. I was like a fisherman who finally gets a bite and finds it’s a whale. “Who?” he rasped, seeming to tower over me as he spoke. “Who told you that?”

  “A kid named Zenny.”

  He nodded. “Cathy’s friend. You know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “He’s a nut. Be in trouble someday. Know why they call him Zenny?” I shook my head. “He’s trying to be one of those beat characters like you have in New York. You know—Kerouac and all that. He reads books about Zen Buddhism and stuff, so his gang started calling him Zenny. He liked it and it stuck.”

  “He said you rescued Cathy from them one night. Took her home or something.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe I did. I usually try to get a girl out of their clutches, unless she’s asking for it. Cathy Clark might have been one of them.”

  It was hard to decide whether or not he was telling the truth. Certainly he was an honest, educated man—and probably a good cop as well. I was inclined to take his word for it. “Then you’ll be there tomorrow—at the funeral?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  With that he turned back toward his office and I left him, heading for the street. My mind was still on the conversation with Quinn when I saw Mrs. Foster Baine waiting for me outside. It startled me so that I couldn’t be certain she was really after me until she spoke, calling me by name.

  “Could I talk to you?” she asked.

  “Any time. This is a surprise, after last night.”

  “I’m sorry about last night. I can explain it.”

  She was edging me toward a cream-colored convertible I’d noticed on my way in. It was parked in a striped No Parking zone not twenty feet from Police Headquarters, but I suppose that didn’t bother people like Mrs. Foster Baine. “Your car?”

  She nodded. “Want a ride?”

  “Where to?”

  “Just around. While we talk.”

  “What will your husband think?”

  “There comes a time when it just doesn’t matter much any more,” she answered, opening the car door for me.

  “And this is the time?”

  “Maybe. I thought about it all night, I couldn’t sleep.” She went down the main street, in a direction I didn’t know, driving with a skill that surprised me.

  “It’s been a good many years,” I said. “What have you been doing?”

  She twisted her lips into a sort of smiling sneer. “I got married.”

  “And pretty well, too—Baine Brass isn’t jus
t the corner drugstore.”

  “She sighed a bit. “Ten years of it now. That’s a long time for anything. I’ll bet even Adam and Eve got tired after the first ten years. That’s probably why it was so easy for the serpent.”

  “I didn’t think anyone ever tired of money. Baine must be worth a cool hundred million, and it’s family owned—no stockholders to get in your hair.”

  The warm breeze caught at her hair and pulled it free behind her, billowing out in a beautiful way I remembered from the first time I’d seen her. She was still a pretty girl, though some others might have now considered her a beautiful woman. She was Mrs. Foster Baine … I searched my memory for her first name and finally came up with it.

  “Betty.”

  “What?”

  “Betty Baine. They go together.”

  “Yes,” she answered seriously, “I suppose they do.”

  “Tell me about it?”

  “What is there to tell? He was charming, rich, and in love with me. I was past twenty-five and beginning to look over my shoulder at my youth. One night I just sat alone in my room thinking about it, and I guess I decided to marry the first man who came along. Foster Baine was that man.”

  “Too bad I didn’t come back.” I didn’t really know if I meant it, but it was something to say.

  “You’re married now?”

  I nodded.

  “Children?”

  “No. Shelly—my wife—well …” I stumbled to a lame halt. There was no reason to discuss personal matters with Betty Baine. She’d only been the briefest of shadows in my past, a girl whose very name I’d had trouble remembering.

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “Out west. In a little town called Gidaz. It’s a long story. That’s where I met Simon Ark too.”

  “That strange man who was with you last night …Who is he?”

  “So many times people have asked me that question, and to tell you the truth I still haven’t got the answer. At least I haven’t got an answer that satisfies me. He’s a man, a wanderer, a searcher. Perhaps in a way he is all men, seeking the ultimate truth that can never be found.”

  “Only fools seek truth,” she said. “Others are content with appearances. Life is too short.”

  “It has been longer for Simon Ark,” I said. “He has the time to seek truth.”

  She turned down a narrow street that seemed to be leading out of the city. Gradually the houses grew further apart and soon here and there a farm appeared on the landscape. A cow grazing in a field of high grass, the stalks of corn just beginning their annual spurt of growth …

  “What’s your interest in Cathy Clark?” she asked suddenly.

  “No interest in the girl personally. I only met her once, very briefly. But I’ve known Mahon for several years.”

  “He’s got money,” she said. “So’s his wife. The Clarks were a wealthy family once, and Jean got it all.”

  “You know her?”

  “Not really. She’s a bit under my age group, you know. But of course I’ve heard of her. The whole city knows how she trapped Henry Mahon into marrying her.”

  “They seem happy.”

  “She is a beautiful, wealthy, intelligent girl. He has no complaint.”

  “What about Cathy? I understand she got shortchanged on the money end.”

  Betty Baine gave a slight shrug. “Her sister took good care of her. She always got everything she wanted.”

  It was all country now, with acres of rolling farmland in every direction. I’d always admired upstate New York for this virtue—it could be agricultural when it wanted without the intruding glare of wheat fields by the mile that were so typical of the midwest.

  I was beginning to get restless, though, riding like this toward nowhere with a woman I hardly knew any more. “Would you mind telling me where we are going?”

  She half turned her head toward me. “If it was anyone but you I couldn’t do this. But I feel you’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?” Was she about to seduce me?

  “Foster—my husband—has a great many problems, personal problems. I think it would kill him if they were made public.”

  “I’m not interested in making trouble for your husband, Betty.”

  “You’re interested in Cathy Clark, aren’t you? And in Professor Wilber?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “And don’t you realize that in a city like this all roads of scandal lead directly to our doorstep? Don’t you realize that if Cathy Clark’s killing involves Professor Wilber it also involves Foster Baine and me?”

  “You’re worried about the scandal? You’re apparently not worried about being seen driving around town with an old boy friend.”

  “That kind of talk never worried me,” she answered smugly, and turned the car onto a bumpy dirt road. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?”

  “To the Baine family secret. The skeleton in the closet.”

  “Does your husband know you’re taking me out here?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Some things have to be done. You want to know about Professor Wilber’s work and I’m going to tell you. Maybe then you’ll be convinced it doesn’t concern Cathy Clark’s killing.”

  I sat back in the seat, trying to relax, and presently we topped a ridge to look down on a rambling old house that might have been something out of Hawthorne or Dickens. Certainly it was a house from the past, a house that had seen a good century of life and death. Yet some small attempts had been made to modernize it—a bright brick chimney contrasted sharply with the drabness of the faded gray sideboards. We passed a single wooden name sign bearing the simple word Baine, and this too looked somehow old and faded.

  “The family homestead?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Foster was born in this house.”

  “But his parents are dead, aren’t they?”

  She pulled up and parked behind a black Ford, the only other car in sight. “Most people think so. You lose track so easily of widows after their famous husbands pass on.”

  “You mean Foster Baine’s mother is still living in there?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. She was already out of the car, heading up the front steps with quick, sure strides. I followed, a bit uncertainly.

  The door was opened to her ring by a dumpy, middle-aged woman who could only have been a cook. “Hello, Gerta,” Betty Baine said. “How is she today?”

  The woman shrugged. “The same. She’s always the same.”

  “Has Father Fox been here today?”

  “Sure. He comes every morning, sometimes before I’m up.”

  I’d figured Mrs. Baine for some rare illness, but this mention of a priest threw me for a loss. What type of illness required the daily ministrations of a priest?

  “We want to see her,” Betty said. “Just for a moment.”

  The woman called Gerta eyed me suspiciously. “Does the mister know about him?”

  “It’s all right. I’ll take full responsibility.” She turned to me. “Come on, this way.”

  I followed her toward the front of the house, until we reached a locked door. Betty motioned to the woman and she produced a key from somewhere, inserting it in the gleaming lock that was like a sleeping eye to the heavy wooden door. Inside, all was semi-darkness. Blinds were tight on the windows and there was only the dim glow of dying embers from the fireplace to cast a flickering fire over the room. But my eyes went first to the woman who sat upright on a straight-backed chair in the very center of the room. Her eyes had been closed, but now she opened them, gazing out at us from a wrinkled yet strangely peaceful face. She was not a young woman, and I would have guessed her age at near seventy-five. That was Foster Baine’s mother I had no doubt—the face bore the Baine look, as little of it as I’d seen.

  “Hello, mother,” Betty said. “I brought you a visitor.”

  The old woman focused her eyes on me. “Who?” she asked, nothing more.

  �
��Just a friend, Mrs. Baine,” I answered. “You don’t know me.”

  A shadow seemed to pass across the face and the old head nodded a bit. Then her eyes flickered shut. “She’s sleeping,” Betty Baine said.

  “What’s this all about, anyway?” I asked her.

  “Look.” Betty walked over and opened one of the blinds a bit, so that a ray of sunlight fell across the room and onto the woman’s sleeping figure. Then she came back and reached for the two wrinkled hands lightly clasped in Mrs. Baine’s lap. I bent over to see what she was trying to show me.

  In the palm of each hand was a dark area, like a wound yet somehow different. I’d never seen anything like it before. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Stigmata. The wounds of Christ.”

  “What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her clearly.

  “Mrs. Baine carries the wounds of the crucified Christ on her body. On her hands, her feet, and her side. In addition, she subsists solely on Communion given her each morning by Father Fox. She has eaten nothing in over five years.”

  I let out my breath in a low sigh. “That’s fantastic.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s true. Foster Baine’s mother is a living saint.”

  “And you keep her here like this, locked up in this room?”

  “There’s no room in Baine City for a saint, especially when she happens to be Foster Baine’s mother.”

  “You’re Catholics?”

  She shook her head. “No, but Mrs. Baine was—is.”

  “And this Father Fox—what does he say about all this?”

  “Nothing. He comes, every morning, to give her Holy Communion, but he never talks about it. I get the impression he doesn’t believe his own eyes.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Only her family doctor has seen her since it started. He’s at a loss for any normal explanation. And Professor Wilber, of course.”

  I’d forgotten about Wilber. “What’s his connection?”

  She closed the blinds again, leaving us with only the fireplace glow. “He’s investigating it. He has been out here and carried on several experiments.”

  I had to admit I could see no connection between this sainted woman and Cathy Clark. But why would Henry Mahon have thought this shocking? Odd, curious, fantastic—yes. But shocking? There was still something—many things—I didn’t understand.