At the jungle, I showed R.R., Pinks, and Mr. Smith the article and explained my bleedin’ predicament. Mr. Smith was anxious for me, and Pinks, who’d never learned to read, spat his disgust.
“He ratted you out,” R.R. said, mournful and quiet. He squeezed my shoulder.
I shifted and he dropped his hand. “Mr. Carst—George? No, it wasn’t him, but I need to find him.”
Like good trench mates, they didn’t waste time asking unnecessary questions, they just put their shoulders to the task and went off to search.
Pinks knew most about Mr. Carston’s habits, but even he didn’t know where the guv’nor obtained his bootleg. Pinks himself often resorted to a twenty-five-cent bottle of smoke—poisonous wood alcohol sold at local dime stores for medicinal use, but the guv hadn’t sunk that low yet. His bottles held genuine moonshine whiskey which he must have obtained from a blind pig—an illegal pub.
Blind pigs and speakeasies survived because they paid off the local police and kept a low profile as private clubs, with unmarked doors, passwords, and secret knocks. Finding them, the right one, might not be easy.
Pinks guided me to the ones in the Bowery. The bouncers wouldn’t let us so much as step inside. “Get outta here, you stinking bums!” But they were willing to answer a question or two outside if we kept our distance. They knew George all right, but none of them had seen him that day.
I resumed my pacing and Pinks returned to the jungle. The guv must have another source, outside of the Bowery. Someone or some place from his life before Black Tuesday? I thought hard, sifting my memory for snatches of conversation I’d tried not to overhear. Names, dozens and dozens of names—bankers, college chums, brokers, politicians, scions of old New York families, and bootleggers that I wasn’t conscious of remembering. It took me all afternoon to sort through them. Absently, I stepped in a pothole full of rainwater and soaked my foot, and then it came to me. Gilderman the bootlegger. Mr. Carston, I realized for the first time, had financed the man’s business.
I returned to the blind pig near the Bowery armory and asked the bouncer, “Ever heard of a joint run by Gilderman?”
He was a man of few words, his head oversize like an ox, with large eyes and thick lips.
“Just tell me where to find it and I’ll be on my way,” I pleaded. “I won’t tell anyone. Who’d listen to me anyway?”
He thought about it, slow as treacle, then relented. “He’s got a place in Harlem at 135th and Seventh in the basement.”
By the time I arrived it was dark. There was nothing secret about the joint. The entrance was marked with its name in neon, THE PARLOR, an awning, and a doorman as elegant as any on Park Avenue. A chauffeured car pulled up and two flappers climbed out and sashayed inside. I waited for a pause in the arrivals, then approached. The uniformed doorman, with enough gold on his shoulders to be a general, took one look at me and guffawed. “You have got to be kidding.”
“Please. I’m looking for someone. George Carston.”
“Never heard of him. Now get lost.” He pantomimed a good-natured kick.
“You haven’t seen a bum who’s friendly with Gilderman?”
“That sorry boozer’s your pal? No offense. Didn’t know that was his name. Around back.” He hiked a thumb toward an alley alongside the building, then shoved me aside to get the door for a woman in a swishing satin gown.
The alley was dark and stank like a latrine. After a few steps the light from the streetlamp ran out, and I couldn’t see anything. “Mr. Carston?” I called.
A side door banged open, and someone propped it. Out of the kitchen poured light, steam, and the salivating smell of seafood.
I spotted the guv’nor sitting on a wooden packing crate.
“Good evening, Will,” he said, and took a pull from a bottle. Several more bottles, unopened and full, huddled around his feet.
I seemed to have caught him between binges. He was fairly sober, more like his old self before the crash. The shock knocked me off balance, and I reverted to our former roles. “There you are, sir. I’ve been looking for you. Let me help you up, sir.”
“I’m quite comfortable here. Care to join me?” He extended the bottle, in one of his characteristic generous and democratic gestures.
It disarmed me, always had, the way he could so easily and casually treat me like an equal. I’d only known British aristocrats and officers who’d been bred to think they were better than everyone else. A rush of renewed affection for him warmed me. “Thank you, sir, but I’ll pass on the drink.”
He retracted his hand quickly like he regretted the offer and was relieved I refused. He gulped more booze, watching me over the bottle.
Should I let him drink himself into oblivion, then ring the peelers, anonymously giving them the real story and his whereabouts? That was the irresponsible way out, wasn’t it? I couldn’t. I pulled up another crate across from him and sat, so I could speak man to man. “The fire and Mrs. Carston. You’ve got to tell the police what happened, sir.”
His eyes grew moist and he blinked. “You know I never fought in the Great War. I was too young to be called up.”
Not knowing what to make of the abrupt change of subject, I found myself falling back on my domestic service training, which wasn’t much different than the soldier’s drill, and answered noncommittally, “Sir.”
His hands showed the tremors, and the bottle shook. “You were at the Somme?”
“Yes.”
He regarded me and I regarded him. He seemed to want me to say something, so I said, “It was no picnic.”
“But you managed.”
“Had to. Wasn’t much choice, was there?”
“You must have killed a lot of Germans. How many, would you say?”
Ah, now I understood his train of thinking. “Not something I care to think about. The Jerries were just blokes like us, following cock-and-bull orders from their own brass. I’m not proud of any of it.” The memories made me furious. The bleedin’ waste of it all, and my own part in it. Being such a bleedin’ loyal soldier.
I gently tugged the bottle from his grasp before he had a chance to drink more. “The police, sir.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“No, sir, of course not,” I said soothingly, “but they’d like to talk to you.”
“Can’t we just forget about it?”
So he did remember. “I know it must be painful, sir,” I said cautiously, “but you see, I’m being blamed for it.” I handed him the newspaper.
He glanced over the article. “Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?”
“No, sir,” I said, surprised and heartened.
The peeler on duty came around the police station counter. “Get along with you now. The drunk tank’s full. Try the Salvation Army.”
I explained.
He looked us up and down skeptically. “That’s quite a tale you’re spinning just for a hot meal and a night on a jail cot.”
I showed him the newspaper.
Still skeptical, he stepped to a phone mounted on the wall, cranked it, and asked an operator to be connected with a Long Island precinct. An abrupt, muffled conversation ensued. He rang off and turned to us.
“Care to take a seat, Mr. Carston? The lads from the Seventh are on their way.”
We didn’t wait long. Four men in uniforms and a pair of detectives in bowlers arrived breathless. They must have hung up, jumped in a car, and, sirens blaring, raced into Manhattan. The detectives resembled each other so much they could have been brothers, both short and stout with tired, doughlike faces.
They introduced themselves as Detectives Farrel and Leon and shook George’s hand.
“We assumed you were dead, Mr. Carston,” Farrel said. “We didn’t find a corpse, but no one’s seen you since the fire. It’s good to be wrong for once.” He turned to me. “You’re the butler?”
“Yes, sir.”
He didn’t offer to shake hands with me. “Thought so. Recognized you from the photo.�
��
They led us to a windowless room filled by a wooden table and chairs bolted to the floor that reminded me uncomfortably of an officer’s trench dugout. The two detectives sat on one side of the table, leaving us no choice but to sit opposite them.
Leon said to me, “Now, son, tell us about that night.”
I was hardly Leon’s son, but I obliged.
Farrel scribbled while I talked. I tried to read upside down, but he shielded the page with his pudgy hand like a schoolboy hiding his exam answers. When I finished, he looked at his partner and lifted an eyebrow. Something passed between them before they turned unflinching gazes back on me. “Why didn’t you come forward at the time?”
“It was none of my affair. That was for Mr. Carston to do,” I said.
George began to cry, silently, pressing his fingers over his eyes, and the room filled with the stench of boozy tears.
Detective Leon dug out a wadded-up handkerchief from his breast pocket and pushed it into George’s hand.
George pressed it against his mouth, trying to stifle his sobs.
The two detectives leaned back, got out packs of coffin-nails, and lit up. They sat silently smoking, eyeing him and me, patiently waiting for George to get hold of himself.
Embarrassed for George, my face reddened. “I wonder if I might be excused now that I’ve told you what I know?” I asked, getting to my feet.
Farrel motioned me back down.
Coughing in the fug of smoke, I sat.
Detective Leon stepped out and returned with two cups of water and placed them in front of George and me.
After a time, George quieted and he said, his voice hoarse, “It was an accident. She didn’t mean to.”
“She?” Farrel asked.
“My-my-my wife Judy. It’s all my fault.”
In bits and pieces his story came out. They’d spent that last day arguing and drinking. Mrs. Carston was beside herself over their financial losses and threatened to divorce George if he didn’t go along with her plan. She wanted him to set fire to the house and use the insurance money to rebuild their fortune. He fled to the deserted servant’s quarters below stairs. She got a revolver from the gun room. Later, when he came upstairs for more liquor, the house was in flames. He picked up the phone to dial the fire department. She fired. He ran. She pursued him, emptying the chamber of bullets, but missed. Furious, she charged him, and beat him with the revolver. He wrestled it away from her. They fell and she hit her head on the corner of a table. “She didn’t mean it. She wasn’t herself.” George inhaled trying to control fresh sobs.
Relief washed over me. I don’t know how I could have imagined he killed her.
“What made you think she was dead when you left her?” Farrel asked, deadpan, impossible to read.
“There was blood everywhere. You mean she wasn’t . . . ?” A trembling hand went to George’s forehead.
“Then she’s alive?” I asked hopefully.
Farrel squinted at me. “No.”
George howled and began pulling at his hair, trying to tear it out.
The two detectives observed George, their faces expressionless.
Before George harmed himself, I grabbed his hands and pried them loose. “Then how did she die?” I asked.
George buried his face in his hands, and rocked himself soundlessly.
Instead of answering, Detective Leon asked me, “What can you tell me about this gun room?”
“It was used for weekend fox hunts like those hosted by the English aristocracy,” I said. “Mrs. Carston was a great Anglophile.”
Leon nodded slightly as if I’d confirmed what he knew. “And what kinds of weapons were kept there?”
I took a moment to inventory it in my memory, then told them.
“You’re familiar with guns yourself? From your military training in the war?” Farrel asked.
A chill of foreboding went down my back, and I nodded slowly.
Things weren’t so different in America after all. The peelers just wanted to nail someone for the crime, and they didn’t much care who the poor bloke was, as long as it wasn’t someone like George Carston who, even broke, had powerful connections. So they pinned it on me, their only other suspect.
George sent one of his lawyer associates to represent me pro bono. The bespectacled chap was none too happy about it. He was always hurried and fidgety with me, and avoided meeting my eyes.
At our first meeting, he set me straight. Judy Carston had regained consciousness and escaped through the flames to the back terrace. There, she’d been shot in the face. The weapon used, a rifle from the gun room, had later been found in the ashes, any fingerprints burned away.
“Obviously someone else was in the house,” I argued.
With a curt shake of his head, the lawyer said, “Not a chance. It was just you and him.”
No matter how hard I tried, and I tried very hard, I couldn’t see Mr. Carston pulling the trigger. He never fancied guns, and he’d been completely besotted with his wife. The gun room, the stable, the fox hunts, and me, the English butler, had all been for her.
I don’t know whether the guv’nor stuck up for me or not. I’d like to think he did after all I’d done for him. I never saw him after that day in the interrogation room. He didn’t attend my trial. Every time I requested he be called to testify in my defense, my lawyer, eyes shifty, brushed me off. “Not a good idea.”
The lawyer saved me from the electric chair. After the sentencing—twenty to life—I asked him for the thousandth time, “But how did the horses get loose?”
With a long-suffering sigh, he repeated, “Mrs. Carston freed them.”
“No, if she had, everyone would’ve known it was arson,” I argued, “and she never really cared about horses anyway. Had to be someone else, someone who loved horses. One of the stable hands must have secretly stayed behind to tend them. He released them so they wouldn’t burn to death, then punished her for her cruelty. He’s the killer, whoever he is.”
“No proof,” the lawyer said.
“The personnel records burned, yes, but there’s got to be a witness or other evidence.”
Apparently deciding his debt was satisfied and my free services had come to an end, he refused to appeal.
The Big House isn’t so bad—regular meals, a clean bed, a steady job in the prison laundry. A far sight better than the trenches, and I haven’t given up on my appeal. To pass the bleedin’ time, I think about horses.
The thing is I never knew any of the stable hands. Not really, not by name. The stable was outside of my bailiwick, and its staff didn’t take their meals with the upstairs household servants. Occasionally I’d glimpse them out in the paddocks, stroking and whispering to the horses. Now I lie awake in my bunk and dredge my memory for names I might have overheard and forgotten. But that’s only half the battle, because names or not, it’ll be nigh on impossible to find them, won’t it? Those blokes are jobless now, riding the rails and drifting around the country looking for work. But find them I will. Somehow. Maybe the bleedin’ guv’nor will help.
Copyright © 2011 Gigi Vernon
Next Article
Previous Article Next Article
FICTION
SHOOTER
JOHN R. CORRIGAN
“I’m still a shooter,” Pete Peters said to me. “They made me into one when I was eighteen.”
It was fifteen degrees outside in early December. We were drinking Jack and Cokes in Jumpers Bar on Main Street in Darlington, Connecticut, which is just east—but a full tax bracket—from Hartford and its insurance money.
I’d seen Pete only sporadically for fifteen years, whenever he was home on leave. Now he was out of the Marines and had called me at work to say he wanted to get a drink. I’d told Annie I’d be home late and to kiss Maggie goodnight for me.
“You’re not a sniper anymore,” I said. “You’re out.”
He took a drink, then twirled the glass in his hands, watching the ice cubes spin as i
f they were days gone by.
“You don’t stop being a shooter, Timmy. Doesn’t work that way. Either you can do it or you can’t. And if you can and do, after a while it consumes you.”
“Sort of, you are what you do?” I said.
“Everything you say is a question,” he said.
I pointed to the day’s Hartford Courant. “It’s what I do.”
“I know. But being a sniper is more than just what you do. It gets in your blood. You wake up thinking about it.”
“Wishing for it?” I said.
“No. Thinking about it. There’s a difference. You can taste it, and it’s a bad taste.”
We’d only been in Jumpers twenty minutes. I was realizing Pete had called because he needed someone to talk to. He knew I was editor of the Courant’s Sunday edition. Usually, a newspaperman is the last person people want to talk to.
“What else did you learn in fifteen years as a Marine?”
“You asking about job skills?” He shrugged, stared at the TV above the bar. The Celtics were up ten against the Jazz. “You know what it takes to be able to lay in wait for a guy to walk out of a building, and then . . .” He extended his thumb and forefinger, pointed his finger at me, and let his thumb fall. “I got hurt and took the Medal of Honor and a one-way ticket the hell out of Iraq. Me, with a Medal of Honor? After what I did over there? Doesn’t take a hero, just takes a certain . . .” He didn’t finish.
I didn’t push it. We had time, and the Medal of Honor might make a nice Sunday feature.
I tried to infuse a little optimism into the conversation. “You served your country.”
“There was a white-haired sergeant named McIllroy. The guy said he was from Connecticut too. Was impressed by my shooting scores. Took me aside, asked if I wanted to be a sniper. I was eighteen. It had to be better than the crap they had me doing. I said, sure. Then he says, ‘I bet you’re from a small town, bet you hunted a lot.’ I say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘dropping an enemy of the United States be the same as dropping a deer. No different. Both give you a rush,’ he says.”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Page 2
