Alone again, sniffling, Chandler dropped to one knee on the sidewalk and blindly began feeling about at the base of the shrubbery, plunging his fingers in among the roots and the mud and the wet, decomposing leaves of the previous autumn. It had to be here, it had to be … but, of course, it didn’t have to be, it could have been kicked God knows where, or he could be digging around a foot away, or he might even touch it and fail to recognize it for what it was. It would, in fact, be a miracle if he found it. But he did find it, held it up between filthy, mucky fingers.
Wet, crumpled, cruddy. The business card she’d given him and which he’d disgustedly thrown away. He smoothed it out, hands shaking, the night’s cold covering him like a shroud.
Polly Bishop.
Her telephone numbers, business and home, and her home address. Beacon Hill, of course, where else?
He nipped back across Mass Avenue and sneaked up on a taxi in front of the bank He leaped into the back seat before the unsuspecting driver could glimpse his peculiar costume and refuse the fare. What a man could be driven to! In this case, he asked to be driven to Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill.
Chestnut Street. He’d walked it again and again, one of Boston’s most historic areas … Bullfinch, Jim Curley, John Marquand’s country. He huddled in the back seat, wishing more of the heat were working its way toward him. It was two o’clock, he had no money, and he couldn’t stop shaking. Too old, absolutely too old for this sort of thing. As if he’d ever been the right age. Streetlamps glistened, reflected in the slick streets. Just like a movie which was of only passing consolation. Turning off Beacon Street the taxi groped its way through fog onto Chestnut, the driver peering at house numbers, finally stopping.
Chandler left the vehicle as nimbly as possible, revealing himself in bathrobe and pajamas.
“Oh, shit,” the driver said, doing a nice double take.
“Now, now, no need to be alarmed. Though I myself am temporarily without funds, be of good cheer. Bear with me for just a moment—” He gestured toward the narrow, recessed doorway and above it the glow of a lamp behind draperies in a second-floor bay window.
“Why me?” the driver remarked bitterly. He had a bushy natural and droopy moustache, reminded Chandler of a television comedian. “Shit …”
Chandler stumbled on the curb and fetched up in the dark fumbling for the doorbell. Come on, Polly, baby … He found it, gave it one prolonged stab. He could smell the wet earth of flower boxes, heard a steady drip from an eave somewhere nearby. Something brushed against his ankles and he let out a stifled cry. He heard a cat meow. He kept his finger pressed on the button.
“Hey, man, come on, I can’t wait all night—”
“It’s your money, you imbecile,” Chandler flared angrily, “so leave if you want … Christ, no wonder you drive a cab!”
“No point in getting personal, asshole!” He opened the car door: “What are ya, anyway? Wearing a dress? Some kind of faggot? Hunh?”
“Miss Bishop!” Chandler bellowed, “Look, down here, it’s me …” He stepped back onto the sidewalk where he hoped she would see him. “Down here, it’s me, Colin Chandler—from Harvard!”
“I shoulda known,” the cabdriver said disconsolately, “Hahvud. Crap.”
“Miss Bishop,” he screamed, “open the goddamn door!”
As if by magic the narrow door swung open and she stood in the light of the hallway. He assumed it was she, but the light was behind her. She was wearing a robe. Inexplicably she knelt down and seemed to be speaking in some sort of code.
“Ezzard,” she cooed, “Ezzard, you poor rapacious little darling … Such an undisciplined little devil …” The cat hurtled into her arms.
“Ah, Miss Bishop—”
“Yes, Professor Chandler,” she said calmly, stroking the cat’s thick damp fur. “I’ve heard your cries … why don’t you pay this young man and let him go about his business? I can’t tell you how glad I am to see Ezzard, he’s been missing for almost a week—did you find him?”
“Lady,” the cabdriver said, joining Chandler on the sidewalk, “look at this man. He’s wearing some kind of housecoat—”
“It’s called a bathrobe, soldier,” Chandler said.
“This fruit ain’t got no bread, lady,” the cabdriver said patiently. “I think he’s gonna stiff you with the tab, see? Six-eighty. Six-eighty and I’m gone, you can get it on with the guy in the housecoat—”
“I see,” she said, straightening up, cradling Ezzard. “I’ll be just a moment.” She disappeared inside, closed the door, reappeared in less than a minute which time the driver passed whistling “Hello, Dolly” between tight teeth. “Eight dollars,” she said, “and you be careful, driving around Boston in the middle of the night picking up men in housecoats … Goodnight.”
“Hey, you’re the TV broad—”
“Goodnight.” She smiled, large white teeth flashing. “And thank you.”
As the cab pulled away, she beckoned to Chandler with her forefinger.
“Come on, Professor. You obviously need something—”
“Help, Miss Bishop. It’s called help.”
“Ezzard is named for a former heavyweight champion and I’m a pretty tough customer myself.” She steered him toward the doorway. Ezzard yawned from the warm stairway inside, baring small gleaming fangs. “You’ve come to the right place.”
In the light at the foot of the stairs Polly did a gratifying double take, said: “You do need help, don’t you?” She stood on tiptoes and inspected his nose. “You’re leaking blood … you’re all muddy, what a mess.” She smiled on the verge of a giggle. “But you are alive—”
“Don’t laugh,” he muttered. “You should see the other guys.” His ear was throbbing and felt as if it had a cork in it. His legs were shaking and he felt old and exhausted. He was having trouble feeling the proper anger toward Polly Bishop.
“What machismo!” But she took his arm and guided him slowly up the stairs. “But I can see you’ve had a tough night—it’s like Starsky and Hutch. Come on upstairs and we’ll see if we can get you back together.” The cat dashed to the top, stood waiting, curious, as he felt his way up the banister.
“I’m a wee bit wobbly and cold as hell …”
She sat him down at the kitchen table and turned on the faucet in the sink. He watched her moving calmly, decisively about the kitchen. She put a soft dish towel, a box of tissues, a metal mixing bowl of water, and a bottle of Courvoisier out on the table.
“Lean your head back, close your eyes, let’s find out just what’s coming loose here.”
He felt her smooth fingertips on the bridge of his nose: “Hurt?”
“No,” he croaked. “But my nose feels clogged.”
“Blood.” He closed his eyes, heard the sound of water being wrung out. “But I don’t think your nose is broken, which, believe me, is a godsend. I had my nose broken once at school, girls field hockey team. You get awfully tired of breathing through your mouth, makes it hard to eat, too. I remember that because I’d had my first pizza about a week before and then, with the bashed-in nose, whenever I ate I felt like I was going to suffocate. I wanted pizza so badly …” He felt lukewarm water, soft strokes under his nose wiping the blood away. He heard her talking, her voice soft and low and soothing. Jesus, he was going to be all right. He felt the dried blood come away from the corners of his mouth, from the split lip, from his chin. It didn’t hurt: she was very gentle.
“Look at my ear,” he said. He opened his eyes: her face was very close, he could see the pores of her face, the ridges at the corners of her mouth, the thin line of her lips. She was squinting at him through circular wire-rimmed glasses, intent on drying the water from his chin. There were several tissues on the table, the paper soggy and pink-stained.
“Can you hear me?” she whispered on his bad side.
He nodded.
“That’s good. The ear’s probably okay. I’ll wipe the blood away.” She probed tentatively with a finger
. “Ouch,” she sympathized, “your earlobe’s got a little tear in it.” She went on dabbing.
“You’re disturbingly calm,” he said. “If most women were confronted with a bloody hulk in the middle of the night—”
“Say no more. You don’t know any more about most women than the tedious stereotypes we’re supposed to have outgrown. I’ll thank you to remember that in future—”
“No lectures, please,” he muttered, feeling her fingertip swabbing out the shell of his ear. Painless. But, God, spare the lectures.
“You’re risking a punch in the nose,” she went on quietly, “another punch in the nose. I hope your dedication to male sexist bullshit is very deep. Otherwise it’s not worth the pain. Can you blow your nose?”
“Are you kidding? I’d blow my eyeballs out.”
“I’m not a lunatic feminist, I don’t read the trashy novels by bad lady poets or the sexual guerrilla tactic junk and I’ve known how to masturbate since I was about fourteen.” She stood back, tightened the belt of her Halston robe, surveyed the repaired wreckage before her, and clucked her tongue. “But I don’t like men who say generally insulting things about women. Specifically insulting things about specific women, I can handle that. Got it? We want to be friends, so let’s give ourselves a chance. Now wash your hands in this bowl, get the mud off …” The cat crouched on the corner of the butcherblock table, behind the bowl and the tissue box, watching him.
“Tell Ezzard it’s not polite to stare.”
While he washed his hands she put coffee on, got snifters for the brandy and poured out generous shots. The cat strained forward, nose crinkling at the Courvoisier.
“How do you feel? Drink up.” She brushed her hair back, heaved a trembling sigh, and lit a Pall Mall.
“I’m okay.” He downed a slug of brandy, quaked inwardly at the heat of it in his chest. “You are a field medic when it comes to this patchwork. Really, I don’t know what to say …”
“Legacy of the sixties. Civil rights marches, peace marches, I did all that stuff, I marched in the first wave of them, covered the next wave as a reporter. People were always getting knocked on the head and maced and we all learned how to, you know, repair the damage …” She looked him in the eye: “Are you really so unpopular?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Most people—get that, people—get beaten up, they stagger off to their best friend … a girl friend, a pal, a chum … You take a cab you can’t pay for to the home of somebody you don’t know.” She raised a hand. “I’m not complaining—just curious. I love excitement. But it makes my ulcer flare up.” She went to the cupboard and took out an economy-size bottle of Maalox and filled a third brandy snifter. She took a sip, watching him over the rim. She had the biggest, brownest eyes he’d ever seen. “Who’s staring now?” she said.
“Sorry, I’m a little slow.” He shook his head. “You’ve got Maalox in your moustache.”
“See, that’s a nice specific insult. I can handle it.” She took another drink, made a face. “So, why me?”
“Because, Miss Bishop, all these comforting ministrations aside, you deserve me and all my troubles. It’s all a result of your dragging me into Boston’s hottest new murder spree. It seemed fitting, somehow.” He took another sip of brandy, winced this time as it burned its way into the cut lip.
“Well, well.” The thick, rich eyebrows raised, made an arch over the vast eyes.
“Half the studs in Boston,” he said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Forgive me, my mind is wandering. Addled.”
She crooked a finger at him: “Let’s go sit by the fire. Come on, Ezzard.”
The cat and the professor followed her.
A green glass-shaded antique student’s lamp glowed quietly on a heavy old desk stacked high with books. Another lamp, brown ginger jar, sat on a table by the bay window where she’d arranged a wingback reading chair. The curtains were long, cream-colored, nubby. Flanking the fireplace were two couches in a blue and brown floral print, above the mantel a round mirror in a deep gilt frame, green ferns and vines in the corners, hanging from hooks by the windows. The fire had burned low and an all-night FM station was blowing soft jazz from speakers hidden in the corners. Chandler felt that dying in such a room would not be an altogether unpleasant fate.
She sat down on one couch, curled her feet under her, received a hurtling Ezzard, and pretty well finished the Maalox. She set it down and sucked on the Pall Mall, then flipped it into the fireplace.
“The whole story,” she said. “I’ve got a feeling it’s a beaut.”
“As I said, it’s entirely your fault, Miss Bishop.” He sat as close to the fire as possible, across from her. “It was incredible … The man in the porkpie hat told the big guy with the deep voice to beat me up, he hit me in the face and ear, and he’d already smashed my George Washington—”
“Your George Washington. I see.”
“Then he took a pliers and tried to pull my fingernails out …”
“And why didn’t he?”
“Well, I was pretty pissed off by then, and scared shitless, of course—”
“Of course. It hardly needs saying.”
“—and mad about George … then I felt the cold metal of the pliers on my fingers …” As he spoke he felt it again, the tug at his fingernails: “So I poured the hot coffee in his face and hit the little one with the George Washington pedestal and ran away—”
“Where? When?”
“Cambridge. My house.” He swallowed hard. “Just now, before I came here.”
“Who were they? Did you know them? What did they want? Were they burglars?”
“Burglars! Burglars don’t do that fingernail thing! Of course they weren’t burglars … What a reporter!”
“Now run through the part about it all being my fault, Professor. I want to get it all straight.” She stroked Ezzard who made cat sounds, presumably exhausted from his recent amours.
“Let me tell you, Miss Bishop, I was a completely innocent college professor as recently as last Wednesday—insulated from all of life’s nasty realities—sure, I was sorry about Bill Davis, but I wasn’t really involved, I didn’t know him—and then you arrive in my classroom and set upon me like the furies and with your white teeth flashing … an ambush! You were full of tricks and implications and armed with television cameras, all of which you used to connect me to Bill Davis’s murder … utterly spurious, of course. Lots of people saw that broadcast, including the killer. What was so important about his seeing Professor Chandler? Those, I believe, were your words … In a matter of a couple of minutes you’d transported me from the safety of Harvard Yard into the middle of a murder case.”
“You were the boy’s adviser.” Ezzard smiled with his eyes as she ran a finger under his collar. “He had come to see you just before he was killed—anyway, I’m not going to argue with you.” She bit her free thumbnail, stared pensively into the fire, shadows playing on her face. “I wonder what he did from the time he left your office until he died? Did he actually go to Underbill’s shop? His name was on Underbill’s notepad—Bill could have been there … but why?” She glanced up sharply: “Anyway, the point is, you were—are—part of the case.”
Chandler sighed: “My God, there’s no reasoning with you—”
“Just tell me what’s been happening to you, minus all the editorializing. Remember, you came here—”
“Because you earned me and my problems.”
“Go on,” she said patiently. Good-humored. Obviously she was more accustomed to violence and danger than he.
“All right, from the beginning. First I remembered something Bill Davis had said to me. He told me that he had something I wouldn’t believe but that I had to authenticate for him—but he didn’t tell me what the item was. A document? Some kind of artifact? There’s nothing else I’m qualified to authenticate. But that would explain why he might have gone to poor old Underhill.” He could hear his
breath whistling through his blocked nasal passages: it was a nasty sound. His eyes burned from lack of sleep.
“Must be the revolutionary period,” she said. “If not, why you?”
“The same night I was watching you on television, interviewing me, Polly Bishop the old crimefighter—God, I’ve seen those ads, stoop to anything to snare the last bleary-eyed and undecided viewer—anyway, I’ve watched the blasted interview and I’m fuming to myself—”
“You’ll get an ulcer,” she interrupted, “worrying about things you cannot control. I did.”
“And I went out on my porch to breathe deeply and calm myself. It was raining and I saw these two guys across the street, standing around in the rain—my street, Acacia, is not exactly a thoroughfare, you know, but I didn’t attribute any malevolent motive to them. I just thought it was funny, seeing these two characters—one in his silly porkpie hat, the other a great hulking bozo in a little tan rain hat—seeing them twice in one day—”
“Twice?”
“Twice … they were in the Yard watching me when you did the TV interview, they were standing in the rain watching me, getting all wet. Those silly hats … And here they were again, back out in the rain outside my house—”
“My, but they’d spent an inclement day! And it didn’t strike you as ominous? I’d think anyone would find it strange—”
“Nonsense! I’ve got a normal life. I don’t suspect everything of being part of a plot, for God’s sake.”
She nodded grudgingly, frowning. Ezzard got up, stretched and yawned.
“Which brings us to Thursday morning, Miss Bishop, and things get stranger still.” He took a deep breath, leaned forward, rubbed his hands in the glow of the fire. “Two third-rate comics called Fennerty and McGonigle show up at my office claiming to be from Boston Homicide, Brennan is with me in the office, I’ve got a solid witness to what I’m about to tell you … Fennerty and McGonigle question me, all the while doing this tiresome leprechaun routine, and I tell them about the business of the authentication, and they began to piss me off, see? So I told them I’d seen them the day before, in the Yard—yes, these guys had been standing in the doorway of Matthews Hall while you interviewed me—”
The Glendower Legacy Page 9
