“This is simply outrageous,” Nora said. “How dare they come to my home? Really, how dare these ruffians approach my home?” There was a silence filled by the sound of the three windshield wipers. “How dare they do any of these things …” She spoke with a dying fall.
“You’d better stay with us,” Polly said. “We’ll go down to Nat’s office.”
The police had finished with it. But the chill of the tragedy was not so easily whisked away. He felt it as they entered the darkened storefront, the almost palpable aftermath of violence. Nora turned on the lamps, hesitated, then pulled up her socks and led the way into Nat’s private office. Chandler knew it couldn’t have been easy for her. To his considerable surprise, he realized that Polly had at some point taken his hand: he caught her eye, she smiled faintly.
With Nora doing most of the work they found enough correspondence to build a picture of the men the old man had been looking forward to seeing. A Belgian, two Frenchmen, a German, two Englishmen—they were all written to, urged to set aside the final evening of the conference for an old-times dinner. He promised them a surprise, something well worth the journey to Bucharest even if nothing else developed.
There was no doubt about it: these six men would surely know the contents of the document …
“Let’s leave this end of it up to you, Miss Thompson,” Chandler said. The list of six names lay on the polished antique desk behind which Nat Underhill had been murdered.
“I’ll use the telephone,” she said. “I’ll work right here, at Nat’s desk. There’s a poetic justice in that, don’t you think?”
“Indeed, there is,” he said, smiling down at her. “Miss Thompson, may I say that you have been a wonderful surprise? Because you have been—”
“Times of crisis have a tendency,” she said, “to bring out the best in one. We’re going to find out what’s going on here … and why.”
They were putting their coats back on when Polly stopped: “One thing, Nora. You cannot go home tonight, not with the red Pinto on the loose. They were looking for you then, they’ll be looking for you now, and until they find you … We know how they treated Colin. I see no reason to think they’ll be any gentler with you—”
“Hear, hear,” Colin echoed. “It’s the dear old Parker House for you … and since Channel Three is obviously benefiting from your researches I think I speak for Miss Bishop when I say they’ll be glad to pick up your expenses.” He beamed at Polly.
“It goes without saying,” Polly beamed back.
“I won’t hear of it,” Nora began.
“Let’s not argue,” Polly interrupted. “We’re getting along so well. I insist and I’ll hear no more of it. You just attend to your trans-Atlantic calls. Do whatever shopping you need to do for the weekend and hold onto the receipts.” She smiled fondly at gray-haired Nora, suddenly looking properly sixtyish and spinsterish behind her spectacles. Sixtyish, but full of determination and ready to raise some discreet hell.
It was past three o’clock when they left Nora to pursue her inquiries and returned to Polly’s apartment in Chestnut Street. The rain had finally slackened to a bitter cold mist with heavy dark clouds blotting the light out early. She turned on the lights in the kitchen and living room and knelt before the fireplace, threw a couple of logs onto last night’s ashes. Chandler felt tired and comfortable as he dropped into the deep sofa. He watched her, the Levis tight across her thighs.
“This feels like home,” he said as the crumpled newspapers caught fire, flickered up through the logs. “I feel like I’ve been dropping in for years.”
“Well, you may as well get settled, relaxed.” She stood up. “I’ve got to go to work, I’m co-anchoring tonight on the first shift … just a talking head, not a reporter, not today. If they need me for the late show I’ll probably just stay on at the station, grab a bite—”
“Give me a call if you’re staying,” he said, surprised by a reflexive pang of concern. “I mean …”
“Yes?” She smiled sideways at him.
“Well, with that damned red Pinto on the loose, I just don’t want to sit here worrying about your getting kidnaped and beaten up, while you’re gorging yourself and cutting capers at the station …”
“Cutting capers?”
“Someone who cries ‘Crikey!’ in times of stress shouldn’t mind anything—”
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said laughing, leaving the room, “and get into some TV clothes. Take a nap …”
He knew he had to call Brennan but before he got to the telephone he was asleep. When he came to it was five o’clock and dark and she was gone. He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, pondered who might be the user, or users, of the shaving lotion, and went to the telephone in the kitchen. Brennan was out of breath.
“Where the hell have you been?” Brennan panted. “I’ve been looking all over Cambridge for you—I even walked over to your house expecting to find you dead of a heart attack in the tub—”
“Hugh, wait a minute—”
“And what the hell happened to your house? George is broken, the TV set blew up, probably from old age, your Chemex is broken, there’s coffee stains all over everything … Jesus, I didn’t know what the hell to do—”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing. I thought I’d give you twenty-four hours. I mean, what the hell should I do?” He sighed heavily, put upon. “There were reporters poking around the office today looking for you … and, get this, somebody stole the bug from the window box! Yeah, stole it. I wanted to look at it again and damned if it wasn’t gone! Now what the hell’s going on?”
Chandler took the better part of fifteen minutes telling him what had been happening, each new adventure eliciting a satisfying gasp.
“Now,” Chandler said at the end of it all, “answer me one question: did I get a package in the mail today, at the office or at home, since you were there?”
He could almost hear Brennan’s shrug: “I don’t know, Colin. Hell, I wasn’t looking for anything in your mail … I don’t remember anything on your desk and if it had come through the department they’d have, you know—”
“You were at the house—”
“It would have been left on the porch, right? Since you weren’t there? Well, it wasn’t, I’d have noticed it, I waited on the porch until it was obvious the rain wasn’t going to stop.”
“It was a long shot. So we still don’t know what Nat did with it—the package is the key, Hugh.”
“What are you going to do? You know what I think—”
“What?”
“Get Prosser in on this. I don’t mean to harp, but this has gone too far. Prosser should be told, as department head he’s your boss, and he’s also a representative of the college—honest to God, Colin, you ought to get his thinking on this whole thing.” Everybody at Harvard knows he was into the rough stuff, the OSS, spies, cloak-and-dagger crap during the war …” Brennan sneezed after his day in the rain.
“I know, I know—I’ll think about it. But Prosser’s not the type to leap in with both hands and start bailing, if you see what I mean. It’d just make him think I was somehow untrustworthy … he doesn’t particularly fancy coddling his staff.”
“Well, keep it in mind, damnit. He knows about crazy stuff … Now what?”
“I honestly don’t know … wait for Nora Thompson to turn up something. It looks like the only way we’re going to find out what the hell Nat and Bill Davis were onto … wait until I work up the guts to go home.”
“So you’re shacked up with Polly Bishop,” Brennan said wonderingly.
“Hardly—”
“If you ask me, that’s worth an evening with the pliers man and Rasputin the Mad Monk working in shifts. Polly Bishop … what’s she really like?”
“Don’t be disgusting, Hugh. She’s just a charming young woman.”
Brennan cackled wildly: “Charming! Yesterday she was a monster, Eva Braun of the lampshades or some damned thing
—oh, Colin, base fellow! Feet of clay …. a smile, a tender ministering to your wounds …”
“Shut up, Hugh.”
“How can I get hold of you?”
Chandler gave him the telephone number and Polly’s address.
“Hugh,” he said. “Just a word—keep a lookout for a red Pinto, okay?”
He watched Polly’s news show which informed the populace that there were no new developments in the murders of Bill Davis and Nat Underhill. For once the name of Colin Chandler was left out of the story. Realizing he’d had no lunch he foraged in her refrigerator, found a frozen pizza, several frozen steaks, a bowl of chicken stock, a six-pack of Carlsberg beer, about ten varieties of cheese, and some liverwurst. He ate a little of almost everything. Damn it, he’d forgotten to press Hugh about the reporters poking around his office … What next?
The telephone rang
“Did you watch me? Or sleep through me?”
“My dear woman, I would never sleep through one of your performances.” It surprised him, how glad he was to hear her voice.
“If I didn’t know you hated me, I’d say that was a cheap, leering double-entendre—”
“Harvard men never leer. They do occasionally need refueling, however, and I unfortunately experienced just such a moment while in your kitchen—”
“Oh-oh,” she said. “I am sorry. All frozen, I suppose.”
“Not the liverwurst,” he said bleakly.
“Poor thing.”
“I made do. Barely.”
“Well, look at it this way. The price was right.”
“A wonderful consolation. My empty, growling stomach and I await your return.”
“They need me for the late show.” She waited. “I am sorry, really. And I hate going on with apologies—why don’t you go to bed on your little couch. You’ve got to be exhausted.”
“I may. By way of business, Brennan tells me I didn’t get a package at home or at the office. We draw a blank.”
“Have you heard from Nora?”
“No,” he said, having let her completely slip his mind.
“You might give her a buzz.”
“Right. When will you be back here?”
“Midnight. Really, Colin, get some sleep, there’s no need to wait up.”
“Polly, old chum, old pal, I hate to say this … I miss you.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.
Chandler was musing on that, not quite sure why he’d told her he missed her, when the telephone rang again and scared him half to death. It was Brennan.
“Colin,” he said soberly, “you have gotten yourself into the goddamnedest thing. I’m not kidding. The weirdest …”
Chandler offered a hollow laugh: “You have further developments, I take it?”
“Damn right.” He took a deep breath that shuddered along the telephone lines. “I got to thinking about the package thing, thought it might have been delivered to the office after I left. So I went back up to the Yard and checked the office—spooky place, dark on a Friday night, rain, wind, perfect place for a murder. While I’m poking around and not finding anything the phone rings—it could be important, says I to myself, so I answer it. Naturally it’s for you … it’s this old guy calling from Maine, from Kennebunkport, says his name is Percy Davis and he sounds like he should be doing Pepperidge Farm commercials. Well, the name Davis rings a bell, but the old guy is canny as hell, he won’t respond to the pump. All he’ll say is that it’s urgent that you call him as soon as possible at a hotel, the Seafoam Inn—he gave me the number. I asked him if I could give you a message and it’s no dice. The only message is to call him … What do you make of that?” He was puffing again now, excited, nose stopped up with his cold.
“I’d better call him. Must be something to Bill Davis, some kind of relative, if there’s any logic to this thing. And I’m convinced there is—some kind of logic. But I can’t quite see it and that scares me.” He felt a tingling on his neck as he spoke: everything scared him these days. “Look, Hugh, you said something about reporters—what were they doing?”
“It was this morning and then again in the afternoon. Newspaper guys. They were looking for you this morning at the office, then they went away to check your house, came back in the afternoon and by then they’d decided there was something really funny going on. They didn’t say but I’d bet they’d gone inside the house and seen the mess and started figuring you just might be dead or on the lam.”
“So what did they do?”
“Well, they pressed me pretty hard, said they’d been told you and I hang around together and where the hell were you—what could I say? I told them I didn’t know. I didn’t! They persisted until I picked up that blackthorn walking stick and started tapping it on the desk and eyeing their pitiful wee skulls and giving them my blood-on-the moon Irishman look … So, they got the hell out but I damn well didn’t fool them. They’re onto something. One guy from the Globe said that as far as he was concerned you were a missing person. He also pointed out that they couldn’t find Nora Thompson either and if that didn’t look like a conspiracy then he wasn’t sure what did—”
“Did they act like real reporters?”
“They acted like assholes. Which qualifies—”
“As opposed to Fennerty and McGonigle who seemed phony to begin with?”
“Well, they didn’t have press cards and funny feathers in their hatbands and they didn’t have a lot of wisecracks and they weren’t doing Lee Tracy impressions, if that’s what you need as proof. They were young and bearded and were acting like Woodward and Bernstein. I’d say they were definitely reporters.”
“Okay, okay.” He heard Brennan sneezing. “You haven’t got a joke, I suppose—”
“You’re that desperate?”
“I guess.”
“You remember my continuing character, Sir Redvers Redvers, of course?”
“Of course.”
“Well, one evening at his country place, Sir Redvers was reclining in a pleasantly tepid tub being attended by his faithful valet and gentleman’s gentleman, Hotchkiss. After the old gaffer had finished playing with his boats and his duck, remnants of a childhood to which he kept threatening to return straightaway, both he and Hotchkiss noticed with considerable excitement that Sir Redvers’s male member was protruding with a fine determination, like a ship’s mast, from amid the soapsuds. ‘I say, sir,’ Hotchkiss ventured, ‘shall I summon her ladyship?’ ‘I think not, Hotchkiss,’ the old fellow explained, continuing, ‘in fact, fetch me my baggy tweeds … we’ll smuggle this one into the village!”
Thank God for Brennan.
“One last thing,” Hugh said after repeating the Kennebunkport number. “A red Pinto followed me home, just kept on going when I got to my place. Then I looked out the front window—it was cruising by again, going in the other direction. Bright red Pinto. Thought you’d like to know. May be just a coincidence …”
Chandler felt the chill: it was no coincidence.
“Be careful, for God’s sake.”
“They’ll be bloody sorry if they mess with me. I’m carrying me stick now. It’s a patented Irish skull buster, m’boy. Don’t you worry about Brennan. Remember the song Brennan on the Moor? We’re a tough bunch. I’ll put some blood on the moon, you can count on it …” He meant it: Chandler had seen him in a barroom altercation once, a long time ago, when there had been a place called Scollay Square.
Chandler went to the bay window and surveyed the visible length of Chestnut Street, deserted in the damp darkness, each parked automobile taking on an unrealistic coloration beneath the streetlamps. A Pinto thirty yards down the slope caught his eye but it was, he believed, yellow, a light color anyway. He let the drapery fall back and went to the telephone, dialed the Kennebunkport number. He let it ring twenty times: nobody home. Any inn on the Kennebunkport coastline with its freezing winds and Atlantic storms wouldn’t be open for business at this time of year. Consequently
, Percy Davis must be the proprietor.
He was watching the old Dana Andrews–Gene Tierney film Laura when he heard Polly on the stairs. She called his name as she opened the kitchen door: “Don’t shoot, Colin, it’s me!” He was irrationally glad to see her standing there in her pants suit and sheepskin coat. She smiled and winked: “It’s rotten out there.” She stripped off her gloves and coat and put a pot of coffee on. “So what’s new?”
Telling her, he felt the foreboding return: the reporters after Brennan, the Pinto following him, the message from Percy Davis … She rolled her eyes and made a face. The coffee was ready when he’d finished and she brought it in by the fire, along with a clunky bottle of Boggs cranberry liqueur. “Maybe I should heat the pizza—fear makes me hungry.” She laughed and went back to the kitchen. He lit a fire, poking at the log and the banked heap of ashes.
Plopping down on the couch, she warmed her hands on the cup and sighed: “Well, you’re a part of history now, Professor. This, whatever it is we’re stuck in, is history … it comes down to that. An old piece of something, an item in your line, floats to the surface and suddenly people are getting killed—who knows how many years later?”
“Listen,” he said, “history is my thing, not yours. You come riding out of a journalism school, you’re in the business of making snap judgments. Every little detail you people treat as history … hell, they’re not even footnotes. History has dignity, depth, meaning.” Dana Andrews was alone in Laura Hunt’s apartment late at night, the rain coursing down the windowpane, and he was falling in love with her portrait. “What we’ve got here is random violence, not history. Don’t dignify it.” But the inner, thus far undiscovered, logic nagged at him.
She gave him a look of incredulity across the vase of dried flowers: “You seriously call this nightmare random violence? There’s a point to it, Colin, a pattern, and you know it—and whatever it is, it’s linked to that document which you, the famous historian, were supposed to pedigree.”
She was right, of course, so far as that went: he heard all the echoes from his conversation with Brennan.
The Glendower Legacy Page 12
