Beacham stared at the road ahead.
“And even you’ve been uncommunicative,” Mark went on. “You and your friends. I’ve had to dig for the little bit I’ve got and I’ve even been reduced to hunches. Will you answer some questions now?”
“Sorry. I’ve trained myself to keep my mouth shut. Go ahead.”
“How much did you know about the Suttons before you came up here?”
“I didn’t know them at all, except by name.”
“Have you ever heard Nick’s mother mentioned, by anyone? Did you ever hear her maiden name?”
Beacham gave him a sharp look. “No to both.”
“Do you know how Nick’s father and mother died?”
Beacham rumbled an oath, threw back his head, and roared with laughter. “Are you crazy?” he demanded. “What the hell has that got to do with this?”
“That’s a fine, hearty laugh. Don’t you want to answer?”
“I can’t! I don’t know! Ask old Sutton or Nick himself.”
Mark watched the road for a full minute before he went on. “Your own wife died in a hospital, didn’t she?”
Beacham took a long time to reply. “Yes. The Reid Memorial. You’ve been building up to that one, haven’t you?”
“I have,” Mark admitted. “And now that you’re on, I’ll ask them straight. Did you ever consider marrying Miss Cassidy, or propose it to her?” He waited for an explosion that didn’t come.
“No,” Beacham answered calmly. “Never. And she didn’t expect it, either. But I meant to keep her with us as long as she lived, or wanted to stay. She’s in my will.” He gave Mark a shrewd look. “I’m telling you this because you’ll probably find it out for yourself and decide it means something. It doesn’t. Franny Peck is in my will too, for no reason except that she was kind to me when Arch and I were getting started. . . . You’re curious about Arch, aren’t you?”
“Mildly.”
“He’s invaluable to me. He handles his end of the business and gets results. I don’t ask him what he does or how he does it. He doesn’t ask me what I do. We run with a different crowd socially, but we always get together for a few months each year, usually in the summer. If I were you I’d cross him off.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.” Mark knew from Beacham’s tone and the set of his jaw that further talk would be useless. Beacham accelerated the speed and they entered Bear River in a cloud of dust. The traffic cop at Mountain and Main waved his arms with frantic delight and blew his whistle. When he saw Mark he shrugged and went back to the shade of his umbrella.
Beacham dropped Mark at Perley’s. He shook hands cordially and drove away, but not, Mark noted, back to the hotel. He turned off into Main Street.
Pansy provided lunch and tactfully withdrew. Mark talked and Perley listened. He listened unhappily, with a beaten look; he didn’t want to be left alone, not on this case, he didn’t. And he preferred to sleep in his own bed.
“Why do I have to stay up there?” he complained. “Why can’t Beacham take care of his own family? What’s the point? You say yourself that you don’t think this one’s a double header.”
“I want you there for the looks of it, Perley. That’s all. While I’m in New York I want to think of you, rocking on the front porch and fondling your gun. You’ll be a sensation. And—this part’s on the level—you’ll probably make somebody very uneasy.”
“How will I know if I’m making somebody uneasy? It don’t always show.”
“Keep your eye on the person who makes the most fuss over you. That’ll be the one to watch. And tell Beacham I want you to sleep in Roberta’s room.”
“No!”
“She isn’t in it. She bunks with Joey now. If Beacham objects, or takes it with bad grace, you’ll have to put up with the front porch. But stick to that cottage.”
“Suppose somebody breaks in the hotel?”
“You stay where you are whatever happens. Don’t leave the cottage. Even if the hotel burns to the ground, you stay where you are. We’re not falling for any booby traps. And besides, you’ll have Amos in the hotel.”
Perley rested his chin in his hands. “Will I?” he asked with what he hoped was sarcasm. “Are you arranging that too?”
“No. You are. Tell him to go up there around midnight and sit in the lobby. You can fix it with the night clerk. He needn’t stay on after dawn. The staff is up and around then.”
“Is that all?” Perley snarled softly.
“I think that’s all, except for my New York phone number.” He crossed to the blackboard and wrote it down. Then he returned. “There’s always somebody at the switchboard. Call me up if you feel like it. But I’ll be back on the early train Friday.”
“And I’ll be there to meet you! You want to know something? You’ve been making plans for me and Amos ever since you came in here but you haven’t said a word about what you’re going to do yourself. Is it” —he looked wistful—“is it too big for me to know?”
“Certainly not!” Mark hesitated. “You know that sign in Buster Spangler’s window?”
“Know it! I laugh myself sick every time I go by. ‘Guess who’! He’s a card.”
“So am I. I’m going to dig up the background of everybody whose picture is on that screen.”
Perley gave a low moan. “Why don’t you try a little gypsy tearoom?”
Mark got up. “That’ll do. Come on, I want you to drive me over to Crestwood. I don’t want to see Bittner, but I must. Also Beulah.”
Perley led the way out of the garage. “You’re not going to turn Beulah loose in the Mountain House, are you?” He sounded anxious. “I got trouble enough.”
“No.” Mark produced the little bundle of half-burned rags. “Some of Joey’s. I want Beulah to keep them for me.”
“Going to braid yourself a nice rug this winter?”
“No, I’m going to weave a nice rope for somebody’s neck, and soon. Sutton gives me seven days. Get the car out.”
Perley complied. He also put a new dent in the fender. “You make me nervous. It’s the way you talk. Get in. . . . What do you want with Bittner?”
“I’m going to give him the new rules in the cops and robbers derby. He was supposed to call me if he saw an unusual traveler on the road to Baldwin. I’m going to tell him to call you. If he does, use your own good judgment. Ignore the lovers in the bushes and unfrock all masked riders.”
“Or, in plain English, stop anybody whose picture is in Buster’s window.” Perley was momentarily delighted with his riposte and then he wilted. “Now you listen to me. I can’t arrest people for traveling to Baldwin. I’ll get in trouble.”
“Who said anything about arrest? Simply get up there as fast as you can and attach yourself to the doubtful party. Buy him or her a beer, stick like a brother, be a nuisance. If he tries to take a train, tell him he can’t. Be very sorry and very firm. Coax him back and call me. I wish you wouldn’t look as if I’d asked you for money. These are only precautions. I don’t expect anything to happen.”
“Then why—”
“I want to keep Bittner on our side, that’s all.”
The car turned into Main Street and headed out of town.
“I don’t see Floyd these days,” Mark went on. “What’s up?”
“You know Floyd. He’s got a theory. He says Miss Cassidy had long hair and that something demonstrandum there ought to be hairpins lying around. So he took Pansy’s special little rake and started to comb out the church grass. Walters said that seeing as he was on his knees anyway he might as well dig out the burdock too. He’s digging out the burdock.”
Mark left Perley in the car when he went into Beulah’s. He handed her the small bundle of rags and told her where they had come from.
“Hide them for me,” he said.
She gave him a long look, full of solicitude. “Are you working too hard, Mark?”
“Do as I say,” he said sharply. “Hide them and forget where they are. Until I ask for them later.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me why?”
“No.” His voice was undecided. “No,” he said again, firmly. “One dead woman is enough.”
She didn’t follow him to the door when he left, and Perley saw that his contentment had vanished when he climbed into the car.
“Where now?” Perley asked.
“Bittner’s,” Mark said, “and then Baldwin.”
“You got a couple of hours before the train leaves.”
“I need a couple.”
He refused Bittner’s smiling invitation to enter and talked to him through the window instead. All I need is a guitar, he said to himself, and all he needs is a rose.
Bittner accepted the change in plan with a pout, but he agreed to it. “You’ll come to see me when you get back, won’t you?” He hung over the sill. “There may be some little thing that I’d rather not tell Wilcox. He’s so narrow.”
“Sure. Sure I’ll come.” He got away with difficulty. Bittner had long arms. We also need an iron grille, he amended silently.
On the way to Baldwin he told Perley what he had promised Beacham. “He’ll be after you. Tell him he can have the body on Friday. That’s on the level. You make the arrangements with Cummings and the undertaker, and take Beacham along with you. Be sure he sees that you’re cooperating. I’ll take over when I get in Friday morning.”
“Tell me what you know,” Perley begged. “I don’t care how wild it sounds. I’ll feel better if I know what to expect.”
Mark laid an arm across Perley’s shoulder. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I do.”
He left the car at Baldwin, and Perley drove away alone, looking back over his shoulder like an old dog excluded from the day’s hunt. He felt that way, too. Go on home, Rover, he said to himself. Go on home, sir! But in a way he was glad to have it so. Maybe these rabbits were too fast. Maybe—he shivered when he remembered how Mark had protected him once before—maybe he was being protected again. After all, he had Pansy and Floyd and the old people to look after. Go on home, he said again, but with a grin. He told himself that if he had a tail he’d wag it.
Mark walked the sun-baked, treeless streets of Baldwin until train time. It was an ugly, sprawling town, surrounded by lumber mills and shoe factories. The army camp was two miles out. He looked in vain for familiar faces, for anything that even remotely touched the residents of the Mountain House.
The business district was two blocks long and it accommodated two old-fashioned saloons and five self-styled Clubs. The latter were garish, noisy, and new, and they looked as if they could and would comply with any unreasonable request. The food stores featured flies, sleeping cats, and wilting vegetables. The Emporium, Ladies’ Wear, offered a window filled with shoddy finery, and Sam’s Gents’ Furnishings did the same. Even the drug store had a spurious look, not unusual in a mill town.
He looked at the depressing rows of small brown and gray frame houses, each with a grassless patch of littered yard. He wondered about Mabel’s tuberculars, hoarding their hours into days and nights on the outskirts of this dismal stretch of earth. He also wondered whether Mary Cassidy had gone to see the place and, if so, why she had bothered.
A few minutes before his train left, he bought an evening paper and crossed the dingy platform to get his ticket. A girl was coming out of the express office, followed by crowing laughter. She looked familiar and he stopped, although he was short on time and the train was pulling in. It was Mabel.
“Hello,” he said, slapping his money on the counter. “New York.”
Her face flushed. “Why, hello,” she said. “Who’d ever expect to see you here.” She was plainly embarrassed and tried to ignore the two pimpled youths who trailed her out of the drab little building with audible comments on her weight.
So they still do that, Mark said to himself with faint distaste, recalling other freight sheds, dim and dusty, other girls in thin, tight dresses and boys with fumbling hands and furtive eyes. He could remember other scales, always in the darkest corner, and the slow, deliberate gestures as the weights were pushed along the rod, back and forth, back and forth. He scooped up his change and crossed to the train.
Mabel followed him, nervously. “I went in there for a package,” she said, “but it didn’t come. . . . Are you going away for good?”
“No,” he smiled. “I’ll see you in a few days.” He swung aboard, and because he was ashamed of his reaction to her cheap little maneuvers he turned back and waved. That soothed his conscience. He told himself he had no right to condemn Mabel, or to compare her with the carefully sheltered Roberta. Mabel and Roberta had learned their lessons in different books. But just the same, he’d tell George to beat her, regularly.
The ugly town slipped away, and gave place to fields and farms and pine-covered hills. Beyond that far line of trees was Crestwood, with its fragrant gardens. More farms, watered by lazy brooks, more hills and fields, then Bear River. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there, shrouded in green. The mountain was tipped with gold from the mellowing sun. He went into the club car and drank Martinis, still thinking of Mabel.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT was one o’clock in the morning when Mark took a cab to his apartment. The streets were noisy and crowded and the air was exactly as he knew it would be, stifling, odorous, and unquestionably poisonous. He filled his lungs happily and felt suddenly fit. At two o’clock he was in his own bed, lulled to sleep by the benevolent murmur of an electric fan.
Up at the Mountain House Perley Wilcox was wide awake. He had started the evening at ten o’clock, on the Beachams’ front porch; at eleven he had made a faltering entrance into Roberta’s room. They had made things very easy for him. No questions and many expressions of gratitude. He had met gratitude on all sides; he’d been feted like a visiting angel sent to save all skins and souls. At first he’d tried to keep a list of those who offered the most insistent courtesies, but he’d had to give that up. He didn’t even know who some of the people were.
The Pecks he knew; they were the gin, with an invitation to poker. And the Suttons had sent George over to ask if he wanted some light reading. Miss Cora Sheffield had appropriated the top step, when he was on the bottom, and hitched her chiffons to her knees because it was hot and he was an old married man who didn’t count; she sang “My Old Kentucky Home.” Mr. Kirby had offered to lend a sword stick which he said was Sicilian. He flashed it in the moonlight.
By this time an uneasy suspicion had entered Perley’s mind. He began to be afraid that they were glad to be rid of Mark and were secretly delighted with the substitute. Then he began to worry about the hours ahead.
This impression grew when Amos arrived, deliberately dressed in his most disreputable clothes, and was welcomed like an ambassador by the night clerk. A comfortable chair was set aside in the lobby for Mr. Partridge, with a reading lamp and the latest magazines. Cigars were brought out. Extra cushions were heaped in a veranda swing in case Mr. Partridge wanted the air. Perley, momentarily strayed from his own beat, watched all this and felt his heart sink. When Miss Rayner laid a delicate hand on Amos’s oil-stained sleeve and offered to sit up with him, and two perfect strangers tried to give him a flask, Perley went back to the Beacham cottage and locked himself in the bathroom. The flask from the strangers was too much. He didn’t know it then, but they were more frightened than he was. They were people calling themselves Foote on the third, not married.
He brushed his teeth for the second time that night and in a voice calculated to reach beyond closed doors announced that he was going to bed. The girls had already gone; it was eleven-thirty and Beacham was at the Peck cottage. He locked the door to his room, was immediately ashamed of himself, and unlocked it. Then he selected the chair most likely to keep him awake and sat by the window overlooking the porch.
The night was serene and cloudless. Once every half hour Amos walked by on his perarranged rounds. They reported to each other in low voices; Perley fe
lt silly and childish, as if he were playing Home Sheep Run with the kids in the next block. It wouldn’t have surprised him to hear Pansy’s voice, indulgent and chiding, calling from an inner room, “Perley! Stop that nonsense and come to bed!”
To remind himself that this was no game, he laid his revolver on the window sill and kept his eye on it. He wondered what Mark was doing.
Beacham came home at one, just as Amos stopped to make his self-conscious report that all was well. He heard Beacham lock himself in his room.
“I don’t think you ought to leave that there,” Amos said, indicating the revolver. “It’s a temptation.”
“I’ve got my eye on it,” Perley said. “Everybody accounted for at your end?”
Miss Sheffield had gone out, Amos said, but according to the clerk she always did. She was a night walker. Everybody else was in bed or said that was where they were going. The clerk had given him a nice lunch, chicken sandwiches and iced coffee.
“Get along!” Perley dismissed him with a low growl. “Want to wake everybody up?”
He leaned back in his stiff chair and tried to stretch his legs, but it couldn’t be done. Roberta’s four-poster was a pale, inviting oasis in the dark room. He turned firmly away from it and changed to a wicker chair, padded with cushions. It was safe, he thought; the way he felt he wouldn’t sleep for a year. He relaxed with a sigh and stretched with pleasure. One-fifteen. Time was moving right along. Wouldn’t be long until dawn.
For a while he listened to the night wind in the trees, to the soft, light patter of new green needles dropping to the thick brown carpet of other years. Like rain, he thought; like little April rain. His head lowered until it reached his chest.
Amos scratched urgently on the window screen. Perley woke with a start. Somewhere close by an owl hooted with faint derision.
“Did you hear that?” Amos whispered.
“Owl.” Perley raised the screen and looked out. “What’s the matter with you?”
Time to Die Page 16
