Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "Oh, stop it," shouted Racer. "He's about as sick as that pint-sized panther that's lurking in here." He raised his head slightly, as if he were sniffing the air. Then his head popped below the surface of his desk, his voice coming back to them hollow and brandy-soaked. "Where is he?" His head came up again. "Stop fooling with that damned rose and find him, Miss Clingmore. As for you—" Racer pointed his finger, thumb turned in gun-wise, at Jury's chest. " You are finished. That's the ugliest bunch of flowers I've ever seen. Who sent it? Keighley police?"

  The flowers were, indeed, a strangely unintegrated mess of tiger lilies, white roses, rubbery green leaves, and brown thistlelike things. Jury had no idea what they were. He said nothing, hoping that a Racer-monologue could be hurried along if he didn't respond unless it were absolutely necessary.

  "Another call from Sanderson just this afternoon. Again he told me you'd been mucking about—"

  In someone else's manor, thought Jury wearily.

  "—in their manor." Racer's head swiveled left to right and back again as he yelled to Fiona that the ball of mange was in here. Fiona was pretentiously looking behind pillows, peering under the couch. Wiggins removed a packet of Fisherman's Friends with stealth. "You hear it? The bells?" Racer's tone was frantic.

  Jury pulled at his earlobe, wondering when Racer would at last slither into a Poe-esque black tarn. "The bells" referred to the four aluminum ones sewn to Cyril's new collar, a collar that the chief superintendent demanded he wear. Fiona had insisted the collar have elastic in it in case Cyril got caught in a tree limb and hanged himself. Do you see any trees in this office. Miss Clingmore? Wait, that's an idea. Have one planted somewhere and let the beast claw his way up it. I'll see to it he never gets down.

  What Racer was hearing was not bell-music, but tinkling bottles. Agile as Cyril was, there was no way to work his way through the glass forest of the drinks cabinet without its producing some sound. The collar, of course, had been worked off in a trice every morning after Racer had had a chance to see it was on.

  "Just sign this, Jury. In triplicate." He tapped some of the Yard's business stationery with his Mont Blanc pen.

  "Sign what?" Jury asked with innocently raised eyebrows. What was his chief up to now? The paper was blank.

  "Your resignation." Racer showed rather yellowed, dog-like teeth when he smiled his sly smile. "It can be filled in later."

  Jury checked his watch beneath the flower-cover. Smart's offices closed at five, probably, and he wanted to pay a visit to the Starrdust before he went to the Ritz . . . after four now . . . He measured out times. Twenty minutes at least to get to Elizabeth Street (rush hour, too), leaving at best five minutes for one of Racer's Byzantine lectures on the reputation of the Yard and Jury's part in the ruining of it. The commissioner, of course, knew the opposite was true. No, no time.

  "All right." He pulled the blank sheets over, signed the three pages swiftly with a flourish he hoped befitted Mont Blanc. "Now may I go? The flowers are wilting." He had, at the same time, seen Fiona backing up to the drinks cabinet where he knew the high heel of her shoe could catch in the latch. Consequently, he kept Racer open-mouthed and blindfolded (so to speak) until he heard a click.

  Wiggins was in place at the door to Fiona's outer office and Racer quickly looked round Jury in order to salve his pride by finding some reason to yell at the sergeant. "And just where do you think you're going, dammit?"

  Jury looked just in time to see copper fur streaking out the door. Given the speed, he assumed Cyril wouldn't have to go to a detoxification center.

  "To the toilet. Sir."

  The two scooted out and Jury followed with his flowers, turning at the door to give his boss a salute. "I'm always available if you need any help writing that." He bestowed a blissful smile on Racer and closed the door.

  There was a thud, a splintering sound, and another paperweight hit the floor inside.

  30

  Flowers offered carte blanche. They could get you past nearly everyone but Racer, thought Jury, as the receptionist at Smart Publishing House sat with her hand vaguely reaching for the interoffice telephone, dazzled both by Jury and by Jury's huge bouquet of tiger lilies and roses.

  Jury just barely stopped at her desk to draw a white rose and put it on her blotter. He now had his foot on the stair. "I'll just go up, shall I?" This short-circuited the dainty hand and it drew back from the receiver where it cupped itself on her chin. She knew true love when she saw it.

  Mavis Crewes didn't. When Jury walked into her rain forest-jungle of an office with the flowers behind his back, she leapt from her chair. "How dare you—" and her hand reached for her own telephone either to chew out the receptionist or call New Scotland Yard.

  Until she saw the massive bouquet that he produced together with an apology she could have taken for anything or everything he'd said, since he didn't want to specify what it was. "I've also read ten issues of Travelure." He offered her a smile as blinding as one of Charlie Raine's riffs.

  Stopped her in her tracks, that did. "If you find me a vase, I'll fill it."

  "I, uh. Yes. There's one right here." She reached round an ivory bookcase and pulled out a tall crystal one etched with a jaguar in a tree. She motioned to a door. "Powder room," she said cutely.

  Such convenience in the jungle as one's private toilet. For the office, like her home, was done in dark olive-green, a muddy brown, ivory, and flashes of orange. It was painted in a confusing collision of these colors, ornamented with plants and jungle fakery, like the stuffed rabbit-monkey climbing a skinny tree. One wall was a trompe-l'oeil painting of what some artist conceived as a jungle interior. A huge cat was coming right at him.

  Another cat, her cat, apparently, merely spat at him. That was all it could raise its lazy head to do. It sat curled in the prime seat—a dark green velvet sofa, displaying itself before brown and ivory cushions laced with orange. Long-haired, probably Himalayan, or some other exotic breed.

  He was running water in the vase in her powder room thinking of a pub called the Blue Parrot outside of Long Piddleton where Trevor Sly, the publican, had done his desert-safari look with far less money and no experience. The old film posters of the journeys of Peter O'Toole and Peggy Ashcroft, ill-fated, had struck him as sadly convincing. Then he thought of Hannah Lean. . . .

  "What's taking so long?" Mavis called in a singsongish, fluting voice.

  Jury looked at himself in the Art Nouveau mirror above the sink and wondered who he was. Racer's offer in triplicate might not be a bad idea. A long-overdue vacation. Another place, another country. Somewhere stark, where the rations were slim and one had to live, like Cyril, by canni-ness.

  Unlike his cup, the vase was overflowing.

  As Mavis Crewes, a cigarette in an ivory holder (this ivory was real, he suspected), rabbited on about her travels, her safari adventures, he sat at the other end of the cat's sofa and loathed her. She was shallow, overly precious in her movements, self-absorbed. She was as transparent as Mary

  Lee's new shoes, made of smoke. And with her dress of the same swirling colors as her office, she could have vanished before his eyes and he'd never know it.

  ". . . absolutely four-star food. The chef was Hungarian. Would you believe it?"

  She had apparently been talking about one of her safari trips. "I assumed people drank from tin bottles and ate army rations."

  That made her whoop with delight, enough to make the insolent cat blink once. "Good Lord, no. One has one's entire entourage."

  Jury wondered why it was that the ones who were blessed with an "entourage" were the ones who deserved them least. He thought of Nell Healey in that medieval prison of her father's; he thought of Jenny Kennington, years ago, in a huge and empty dining room where the only color was the sunlight across the varnished floor. Women like this, the ones he would remember, had no entourage; they stood in his mind like statues in snow, yet with money to burn.

  "Do you take your cat with you?" He looked at the obv
iously indulged and spiteful cat. Cyril could stiff it with one flashing paw.

  Jury winced when he heard her talk about Taffy, but smiled when he thought about Cyril. Such people as Mavis Crewes had so indulged themselves—even the starvation diet that kept her cruelly thin was an indulgence of the ego —that they became insensate. Her plants, her cat, herself thriving in the even temperature of their surroundings, would never survive in the cold world beyond her solarium. Her thermostat did her breathing for her.

  ". . . could stand a vacation yourself." Her wide mouth smiled slyly, her eyelids drooped, her voice lowered, probably hoping to get at Lauren Bacall's real jungle-cat image.

  Jury returned the smile with one equally false. "Oh, I do. Are safaris particularly relaxing?" He eased himself down into the sofa, put his hands behind his neck, gave the impression he had all day, if she liked. He forced himself to smile a particularly seductive smile, to make it reach his eyes.

  Mavis apparently "liked," all right. His look pulled her out of her chair and around the desk as effectively as Charlie Raine's had drawn Mary Lee from behind Jury's back.

  Resting against the desk, both palms back on the polished surface as if for support, she said, "Well, that depends. How much relaxation were you looking for?"

  "Total. Something that would take my mind off everything—this rotten city" (he loved London), "my all-hours job" (he loved his job, too, he supposed), "my solitary life" (he did not love that). "What are the sleeping arrangements? Tents?"

  "Very nice ones, very cozy, really."

  "Any doubles?"

  Mavis Crewes was enjoying this game immensely. It was what she was good at, games. Jury hated them.

  "But of course."

  He did not rise to light her cigarette; it would have lost him an edge of advantage. Sleepily, he said, "I doubt I could stand up to the competition. Tigers, jaguars, you know."

  "You certainly don't sound like Roger. But you're probably not a shooter. Literally, I mean."

  "Oh, but I am. I've been through D-six training. I'm not a marksman, but I got a first-class rating. How good was Roger?"

  "Good, though not so good as I—in most departments." Pursing her lips, she exhaled a plume of smoke. Then her face changed.

  Now she realized it. Her body went slack, her expression hard, both showing her years. For a moment she stood there before she sent the vase smashing to the floor.

  Taffy reared back and spat and jumped off the sofa. Jury rose, stepped over water and shards of glass, and grabbed Mavis round the waist in a- gesture that in better circumstances could have been one of the furious lover.

  He cupped her chin in his hand, bringing her closer. "I'm sorry; I don't like tricks. You could easily have told me what sort of man Healey was, for God's sakes. I expect you'll be what is described as a hostile witness. I am sorry." He felt it, felt he had used her. But he tried to smile, to cool her rage, probably making it worse.

  As he had imagined Cyril doing, she flashed her nails across his face, fortunately not connecting except at the chin line. Jury let her go. .

  She was screaming at him, but choked with rage. "You're a superintendent of police. When I tell your superiors, whoever they are, you'll be out of a job."

  "Racer. Chief Superintendent Racer." Jury had drawn out his handkerchief, was wiping the blood from his chin. "But I don't think I'm the safari type, Mavis. I need a cold climate, someplace that lets you think. No abundance, just short rations, that forces you to use your wits to survive."

  it's so cold in Alaska

  That line from the song Melrose Plant liked so much sprang to his mind and he smiled. "Like Alaska."

  HEAVENLY SPECTACULAR

  COMING 15 JANUARY

  The usual mobile of planets turning on their invisible strings had been moved to one side, apparently in preparation for the "Heavenly Spectacular."

  But if this wasn't already it, Jury stood in wonder at what more could be added come fifteen January. Already the window was attracting passersby, and a line of children solemn as sparrows on a fence were at the forefront.

  The familiar figure of a tiny Merlin in his cape and starry coned hat had been replaced by a diminutive prince on a white horse, bearing a standard, moving slowly out on a little electrical track, stopping, then returning to the dark woodland setting from which he had emerged.

  A vast sigh rose from a band of urchins who had muscled in to the front, hair spiky with the wet. From a little crystal castle in the opposite corner came a spun-glass princess, her gown ballooning icily and covering the track on which she ran. Their meeting was more symbolic than actual. The two figures did not touch, but stopped instead a hair's breadth apart, as close as the wonders of the electrician or the track could manage. Each returned to seclusion.

  Then a drift of snow lifted, flew about and resettled in another part of the windowfront. There must have been a snow machine somewhere. What looked like laser lights, tiny beams in misty rainbow colors, circled the skies, beaming on Pluto and Venus, then back to cast a rainbow slick across the little snowdrifts.

  And this little world of its own was yet to receive further elaboration. It seemed spectacular enough to Jury right now.

  Wiggins whispered, "Will we be around the fifteenth, sir?"

  Jury said, "Couldn't miss it, could we?"

  As they went in the door, Wiggins stopped sneezing and put his handkerchief away. The Starrdust was the only place that Wiggins could go where things weren't catching.

  The Stardust twins, Meg and Joy, were the ones who were arranging something behind the velvet curtain, whispering and giggling.

  When they saw who it was, they got up quickly, brushed off their black cord jeans, straightened their silver and gold braces on their shoulders. Their shirts were white satin.

  "Hello."

  "Hello. Were you wanting Andrew? He's with a customer."

  As Wiggins looked up at the winking lights of the planetarium ceiling, Jury squinted back into the dark length of the shop. Most of the lighting was supplied by muted wall-sconces with quarter-moon shades or tall, thin, lumieres with tops like ringed planets.

  Andrew Starr, a dealer in antiquarian books leaning largely toward astrology, looked up from his desk and waved. His customer was a heavy woman draped in a cape of Russian mink and a necklace of Russian amber.

  "I was looking to have my fortune read," said Jury. "Who did the window?"

  "We did," said Meg, somewhat breathlessly. "Joy's quite mechanical-minded.''

  Jury looked at Joy, surprised. Between the two of them, he wouldn't have thought they could open a lock with a key.

  "But Meg thought it up," said Joy graciously. "And Andrew told us we could spend what we liked," she said proudly.

  Andrew Starr would be amply rewarded, Jury knew. Hiring Joy and Meg and, especially, Carole-anne had doubled his holiday trade as it was.

  As several of the urchins issued from the little hut called Horror-Scope, Jury said, "Well, Andrew'd better be good to you because if Selfridge's gets a look at that window, Goodbye, Meg and Joy."

  They looked pained at this implication of possible disloyalty on their part. The Starrdust was home, after all.

  The same could be said for Carole-anne Palutski now coming toward them with a plate of cake. Since Madame Zostra had got this plummy job, the universe was her home.

  "Tea's up, kids," she said.

  Carole-anne Palutski was dressed in her harem outfit: red pantaloons shot through with gold thread; a short, lapis-lazuli-blue blouse the color of her eyes and bound in gold; and a flowing, filmy sleeveless coat. Had she not been wearing the gold lame turban, Jury imagined the Princess would have put the pattern down to unrestrained Lacroix.

  "I have an acquaintance who'd love your color genre."

  Carole-anne's face came up from the heavy slice of Black Forest cake she was scooping into her mouth with far more enthusiasm than she put in the look she gave Jury. "You finally decided to come back. Well . . ." Her sigh was h
eavier than the cake, a scapegoat sigh. "So who's this woman?"

  "The Princess Rosetta Viacinni di Belamante." Jury shut his little notebook. "I didn't say it was a woman."

  "Is she on the phone?"

  "No idea."

  "I can hardly wait to see you trying to look it up." With the back of her fork she was pressing up chocolate crumbs.

  "The Princess is probably seventy."

  Carole-anne shrugged a filmy gold shoulder. "So when'd that ever stop you?" Implying Jury had his own private harem of elderly ladies. She'd put down her plate and was putting some more records on the old phonograph. "And I don't expect S-B-slash-H would much like that." Susan Bredon-Hunt was still making telephone contact with Jury; her unspeakable name was dropped in a litter of initials like the stars now falling on Alabama in the music coming from the phonograph.

  Only terrestrial music was permitted in the Starrdust. Pennies falling down from or stairways leading up to heavens, stars whole or trailing dust, moons of any color. Perry Como had got his foot in the door because if his true love had asked him for the moon he'd "go and get it." Suns, moons, stare—the cosmos. If it were unearthly, Andrew and his ensemble team were into it.

  Meg and Joy, Andrew's sales assistants, were naturals. They must have come from the Milky Way, W.17, with their pretty, star-crazed faces. Now they were giggling with Wiggins in the Horror-Scope.

  Jury took Carole-anne's arm and guided her to the tent where she played her Madame Zostra role. Starr himself was a serious astrologer with a shrewd eye for the commercial, and Carole-anne had caught the fever; her fever, however, was born not of real interest in the signs of the Zodiac or the rings of Saturn; it had more to do with running Jury's life, and the lives of those who crossed her own star-crossed path, such as Mrs. Wassermann. Fortunately, she eschewed Andrew's complicated horoscopes: why should she learn all that, when the Daily Mirror provided quite adequate ones? Vidal Sassoon had probably turned up in the column the past Tuesday.

  The tent was a drapery of gauzy stuff hung over several rods protruding from the wall, the material pulled back on the outside like a curtain. Carole-anne and Jury sat opposite one another on huge cushions. On a stool in one corner sat the big stuffed monster-thing Jury had brought back to her last year from Long Piddleton. The black coned hat with the gold quarter moon was not part of its original outfit; it seemed to suit him, though.