Richard Jury Mysteries 10: The Old Silent

by Martha Grimes

  "You been talking to Rubber Ducky?" His head was turned to watch the band and his eyes squeezed in pain at the high whine of the slide guitar. "Oh, we have certainly got a double platinum."

  The customers were beginning to wake up and inch nearer the stage. Stone was back with a bottle clamped in his jaws and Stan took it and snapped the cap off with an opener on his keychain. The dog lay back down again. Stan shoved the Abbott's toward Jury.

  "Again, why?"

  "Huh?"

  "Roger Healey. Why was he trying to get at you?"

  "I expect because he was coming on to my old lady."

  "Are you saying Healey was having an affair with your wife?"

  "Aren't you old-fashioned? I never said she was my wife." He was searching out a butt in the littered tin ashtray. Jury tossed his own packet on the table, but Stan said, "Thanks, but new ones don't taste as schmuzzy." He found half a cigarette and lit it. "Deli's not my wife, though I think she might be several other guys'. She said, no, she wasn't screwing Healey, but Deli couldn't open her mouth without lying. She even lied about the weather. Pathological, right?"

  "Deli who?"

  Stan's eyes were on the group bathed in blue light. He didn't answer.

  "Mr. Keeler?"

  His fingers were beating a rhythmic tattoo on the table.

  "Deli's last name?" asked Jury patiently.

  "I never asked. Dickie's getting better; he must've cleaned the moss off that slide."

  "Sounds great to me, but we won't stick around for it. Come on." Jury rose and the lady whom one of the customers had called Karla turned her head slowly to stare at him. People didn't order her boy around, it seemed.

  "Come where, for God's sake?"

  "New Scotland Yard. You can't seem to keep your mind on answers here."

  "You're a real happening guy."

  "That's me."

  "Look, I don't know if it's her real name." Stan motioned him to sit back down. Karla looked off into the unfiltered air again. "She said it was Magloire. Delia Magloire. No one knew how to say it right, so we just called her Deli MacGee."

  Jury had his notebook out. "Where was she from?"

  "Martinique. So she said. Well, she did look like she might of come from the islands. Honey-colored skin, hair as black as Stone here." He reached down to scratch the dog's head. "Don't ask me where she went to . . ." His voice trailed off as he concentrated on the inert dog. Stone was a good name.

  "Pretty?"

  "Oh, yes. Thick as two planks, but pretty, oh, yes."

  "How'd she meet Healey?"

  Stan mashed out the butt, searched for another. "She was on her way to the Hammersmith Odeon and stumbled into the Royal Albert Hall by mistake. You believe that, you believe anything. About two a.m. she weaves past Nose and up to the flat and says, 'Love, Eric's got this big new band . . .' " He raised his eyebrows above the tiny match-flame. "The London Symphony. She wanted me to think she was that dumb. Then she starts talking about this famous music critic and kind of oomphing round the old bed-sit, puts on Robert hootchi-koo Plant and wants to dance. I never could figure out what possible centrifugal force could blow Deli across the path of that pissant Healey."

  "When did Deli leave?"

  Stan shrugged. "Year ago." He glanced at the small stage where the blue lights made the group look cyanosed. Dickie's slide screamed in Jury's ears. He wondered how Wiggins could make it through a concert without a nosebleed. "If that slide's got moss on it, you couldn't prove it by me," he shouted across the table. "Did you believe her? About Healey?"

  Stan shrugged. "Why not? The guy was a lech."

  It was getting harder to talk and to hear. The riffs were ear-splitting and the drummer had gone into an epileptic frenzy. Jury's ears seemed to have closed up, as if he were in a plummeting airplane. Stan was pulling a black Stratocaster from the case on the floor.

  As he fastened the leather strap around his neck, the dog gave a terse bark. "Sounds like Dickie's picking with the top of a tin again. I think I'll join. Stick around.

  "Where's the picks, Stone?"

  The dog snuffled in the long arm of the case and brought out a tortoiseshell pick.

  "Not that, for chrissakes. Thinner."

  Stone spat out the one in his mouth, rooted again, brought out a black one nearly thin enough to see through.

  "Thanks." He stuck the pick beneath the strings.

  "Did Deli MacGee dump Healey?"

  "I'd say so. She made some comment about him 'trading licks' that wasn't—how'd she put it?—'within my venue.' " Stan smiled. "I kinda liked that."

  "What did she mean?"

  Stan brought his hand away from the tuning knobs, hit a chord. "Come on, man. What'd'ya think? Healey wasn't an axeman. At best a ladies' man, at second best a lech, at worst a sado. You look surprised. You're a cop; you've seen these squirrely types before."

  "And were those reviews written after Deli walked out?"

  "You got it."

  "Jealousy?"

  "Who knows?" Stan shrugged. "Who cares?"

  You do, thought Jury, sadly, looking at the smudges under Stan Keeler's eyes. "Martin Smart seems to think he was knowledgeable. How could the man you describe keep such a reputation as a critic?"

  Stan reached out his arms slightly, inviting Jury to survey the room. "You see any critics in here? They're sitting in Italian leather swivel chairs in their 'study' recycling shit in their PCs. The only one that comes to Nine-One-Nine is Duckworth. Listen, man, Healey didn't know sod-all about rock, jazz, nothing. What's all this about, anyway?"

  "Mrs. Healey. She shot him."

  "She deserves a medal, not a fucking police investigation."

  Jury rose. "Thanks for your help. But I'm wondering why you didn't tell all of this to my sergeant."

  "I had a chain-saw hangover, man. I didn't feel like jamming with a cop. Listen, stick around. We can go to that Brixton place I was saying."

  Jury shook his head, smiled, and extended his hand.

  The band had slipped into a blues number and the old man by the piano had opened his case and was fitting the mouthpiece to a sax. Several couples had wandered onto the dance floor and stood in dreamy proximity to one another.

  "Hey, Stone." The dog was up in a flash. Stan turned and said to Jury, "You going to look for Deli?"

  Jury smiled. "If I find her I'll let you know."

  "Hell, find me a landlady instead. Come on, Stone, let's lay some shit down."

  Stan pushed his way through a crowd that willingly parted for him, followed by the black dog. He leapt onto the raised platform beneath the blue lights, and nearly before his feet hit the floor he let go with a sizzling riff followed by some staccato picking that made Jury's skin prickle, it was that fast. Then he switched over to a murky ghost bend, picking up the blues line of the old man with the sax. Its languor made him feel the poisonous losses of the past were working their way through his bloodstream.

  He turned to go, throwing a look at Karla, who was still leaning against the wall, still looking wanton and sad as a long rainy Berlin night.

  34

  Only the Princess (and Ruby, who opened the door to him) appeared to be in attendance at Weavers Hall when Jury turned up early the next morning.

  Ruby said she imagined Mr. Plant was still asleep, as he always tended to be the last one down for breakfast: a look of disapproval accompanied this.

  Plant was not, however, in his room. On the way down the hall he saw the Princess, in hers. The door was open; she was packing an old steamer trunk full of her elegant garments. One of these she was holding against her, assessing the effect in a cheval mirror. The blue dress was of crepe and chiffon, loose and languid, something the pre-Raphaelites would have admired.

  Seeing Jury's reflection in her mirror, she turned, unsurprised, to ask: "What do you think?"

  "Beautiful. You're leaving?"

  "Oh, yes. The Major and I are going up to London for a month or two. Or three. I'm weary of death
. . ." She sighed.

  (As she might have sighed over the London season or the tag-end of summer in Cannes, thought Jury.)

  "It seems to be making the rounds like a virus." She flashed a smile at him in the mirror, then turned to toss the blue dress over the open trunk, and to pick another garment from the wardrobe. "And we see no one these days but police." The Princess held the printed velvet jacket, sleeves bound in dark green satin, to her shoulders. "That poor child," she went on, as she caught her reflection from different angles, "alone out there on the moors. I simply cannot believe anyone would want to do her mischief." She tossed the jacket across the trunk beside the dress. "The trouble is it's so difficult to know what to take. You've just been there. What are they showing? Givenchy? Lacroix? I heard Saint Laurent was changing his hemlines again. I hope not too short: he does such lovely long skirts." At the moment she was holding one of her own against her waist, black and falling in a thousand narrow pleats. "And you needn't look at me that way," she said to the reflection in the mirror.

  "What way?"

  "Patronizing. Disapproving. Because I'm not at the funeral."

  "Funeral? "

  She was turning this way and that, kicking the skirt about. "Some cat or other. You should have heard the screaming this morning." When Jury looked a question at her, she went on. "Ruby: she found the cat in the freezer. Mrs. Braithwaite gave Abby quite a tongue-lashing. Didn't make any impression."

  She gave Jury an impatient, yet pearly glance. "/ didn't know the cat, for heaven's sakes."

  Behind the barn, the service was in progress. The four people there were framed like a picture by the big open doors at that end of the threshing floor. Jury stood in the shadow it cast, hesitant to join them, somehow feeling he hadn't the right to participate. He hadn't, after all, been around when tragedy had struck.

  Melrose and Ellen stood solemnly on one side of the small grave, still open, into which the box containing Buster (under its black cloth) had been lowered. Six votive candles outlined the opening. On the other side sat Tim and Stranger, close together, with bandaged paws, both with the sort of blue and green ribbons presented at dog shows fastened to their collars. Tim kept trying to get at his blue one with his teeth. Stranger was looking up at Abby with sorrowful eyes, and then farther up at the sky as if, in her words, were some intimation of an animal heaven.

  A little girl in powder blue and with a fresh ribbon in her hair (whom Jury assumed to be the friend Ethel) stood there by the dogs. Her head was bowed, her small hands folded against her starched skirt. She looked far more angelic and heaven-bent than Abby, planted firmly at the head of the grave in a black slicker and Wellingtons with her Bible, looking dark and retributive and wild with the wind blowing her black hair. She had that controlled expression of one who accepts pain and death as if they were unbridled, poorly trained hounds that would follow her to the end, gouging her heels.

  Whether she was looking at him or through him, Jury couldn't tell. When she started reading again, he realized it wasn't a Bible, but a dark-covered, flimsy-paged book of poetry.

  No more I'll see your splendid outward sweep With ears erect and drooping head and tail Nor view your gliding turns in front of sheep.

  He saw the frown cross Ethel's face at the recitation of this verse. Then Abby snapped the book shut and the marker fluttered to the ground. It was his card, the one he had given her before he left. Surely, that had been longer than yesterday?

  Picking up a handful of dirt, she let it trickle on top of the black cloth.

  Ethel mewled: "Oh, Buster, I'll miss you soooo. . . ." That sentiment earned her a glare from Buster's mistress, and a warning-off of whatever specious words Melrose Plant was about to say. He shut his mouth.

  Abby turned her face to the grave and nodded slightly and said, as if some terrible accounting between Buster and the wretched forces of this earth had been settled, "Goodbye."

  And keep cold, thought Jury.

  Abby retrieved his card from the ground, stuck it in her pocket, and then handed Melrose the shovel.

  Ethel was playing hostess, handing out cups of tea and roughly cut slices of brown bread and butter. It was she (Ethel informed them) who had had to remind Abby that people had to be fed after funerals. It was the proper thing to do. And it took her all yesterday to make the cake.

  Abby sat in her rocking chair, white-knuckled hands round the ends of the arms, gazing at the floor. Ethel skipped lightly across the floor, wanting, apparently, to bounce the full skirt of her dress and show off her lace petticoat.

  As she put the piece of cake on the bookcase-crate she whispered, "That poem was about a dog; Buster never ran around sheep."

  Abby gave her a look that would have flattened an entire mob.

  Then Ethel twirled off, skipping back to Melrose, Ellen, and the dogs. She removed the ribbons from their collars and went over to the bulletin board to pin them up. They were old ribbons, weather-worn and faded. Tim, Jury noticed, had had the blue one. Stranger's was green. Second prize.

  Abby stared at her, one hand removed from the chair arm and curling in a fist in her lap. "That's Ethel," she said with a sigh, the first words she'd spoken to Jury. He was sitting on her bed deep in the comforters.

  "That's Ethel." He smiled.

  Her mouth hooked up at the corners, but she quickly stopped the grin that threatened. Grinning was not on, not at Buster's funeral. "The earl was there when I got Buster." When Jury looked puzzled, she said, "At Loving Kindness. The vet's. He had his cat but I don't know what he did with it."

  The notion of Melrose Plant wrestling a cat into the vet's made Jury smile. It had to have been a stray. The only animal that Plant had ever bothered to develop a rapport with was his old dog, Mindy.

  "I'm sure the cat wasn't his," said Jury. "He must have found it by the road, or somewhere."

  "Oh." Abby rocked a bit harder, absorbing this new information. The earl wasn't a heartless wretch who'd dump his cat and never go back. "Anyway, he's pretty smart." The corners of her mouth hooked up in a smug little grin. "He found Ethel's hiding place." She gave Jury a look. "And he's not a policeman, either."

  "Where was it?"

  "Over behind the medicine bottles. It was just another bottle that had a Present from Brighton written on it."

  "Incredible. How did he know?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know, except he told her he knew, and right away she looked over there."

  Holding back a smile, Jury studied the runners of the rocking chair, moving fast as a swing. After a few moments, he said, "I'm sorry you had to go out on the moor again this morning. It must have been hard."

  "Not as hard as the first time," she said with a wonderful note of ye ne sais quoi.

  "Do you mind talking about it?"

  With a pretense of world-weariness not even the Princess could have matched, Abby told him. About the phone call, the voice muffled, coughing, saying something about Stranger and Mr. Nelligan's sheep. She told Jury about the whole dreadful experience.

  He asked her nothing further; there was no sense in mak-ing her repeat answers she'd already had to give a dozen times over. Jury said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't here."

  He followed her gaze to the bulletin board, where Ethel was carefully pinning blue ribbons up. "It doesn't matter. I had Stranger and Tim. And sheep."

  In that, there wasn't a hint of accusation, not a shred of irony. It was a statement of fact: this is the way the world is.

  Jury sat there watching her eat her cake, feeling her disappointment.

  "Her daughter." Jury shook his head as he jammed in the Volvo's cigarette lighter.

  "Everyone who saw them did think Ann Denholme was Abby's mother. That's the irony." In the passenger seat, Melrose was fiddling with the radio. The doors on both sides were open, the car sitting in the drive where Jury had left it.

  "Finding Trevor Cable wasn't hard. Wiggins said he sounded like a nice fellow, said he was helpful, if 'a bit croupy,' to quote my
sergeant. It wasn't he who wanted to get rid of Abby. That row with Trevor Cable Mrs. Braith-waite overheard was Ann Denholme's demanding Abby come back here."

  "She wanted her back so Abby could live in a barn?" Melrose shook his head. "I feel as cold right now as I think I'll ever feel." He gazed through the thin, drifting rain toward the barn from which they had just come. "Medea would have won the Mum-of-the-Year award compared with Ann Denholme. Jocasta would be an absolute plum. And Clytemnestra, good grief, a veritable heroine. People seem to forget that Agamemnon did offer up their daughter on that dismal island to appease the gods. Wouldn't you think they'd have got tired of all that patricide, matricide, infanticide, and incest? And isn't anyone going to tell Abby? Wouldn't it be better if she were undeceived?"

  "Wouldn't it only mean her having to work through yet another deception?"

  "What about the uncle? Trevor Cable? Sounds as if he wants her back."

  "Would she go back? If you thought your real father had given you up, would you want him back?"

  Melrose replaced the car's radio handset, sat back, said nothing for a while. Then, "But she's only a little girl, Richard. She has to have someone."

  "By that you mean some blood relation. Since when was blood really thicker than water? I've yet to hear relations who really cared ever utter those words. Which is why it's a cliche, I expect."

  Melrose opened the glove box. "Superintendent Sanderson will think it provides Nell Healey with one hell of a motive for murdering Ann Denholme if Roger was the father."

  Jury slumped down in his seat. "I smell money in all of this."

  "I smell The Scarlet Letter."

  "Ann Denholme didn't strike me as a martyr. Far from it. She struck me much more as a blackmailer."

  "What I meant was, in this case it's little Pearl who suffers. I'm talking about Abby as a constant reminder to Healey. Ann was flaunting her would be my guess." Melrose closed the glove box. "Perhaps something happened with the 'arrangement.' Perhaps the original idea was that if Ann got rid of Abby, Healey would divorce his wife and marry her. Something like that. But she must have been a very foolish woman to let it go on for over ten years."