Never Walk Alone

by Rufus King

  He left Hopkins at the stables and then drove around the curve and parked at the front door. He rang the bell.

  He kept his fingers crossed while he asked Leila whether she would find out from Mrs. Giles if it were convenient to see him. Leila failed to evaporate. She said that she would and asked him very rationally to wait in the drawing room.

  He put his hat on a completely carved console table and walked into the drawing room. What these old houses didn’t know! Generations had made private worlds of them. You didn’t find it in the October-to-October apartment life that was lived today. Not this atmosphere which was sifted with a touch of arrogance and the sound assurance that if it wanted to it could tell plenty.

  “Back again, Stedman? Well, good afternoon.”

  Parling had walked into the room. He was dressed in a good gray business suit and looked very scrubbed and fresh.

  “I thought I might catch Mrs. Giles in here,” Parling said.

  “I think she’ll be down shortly.”

  “That’s good. Quite a fine old character, isn’t she? I know the type. You’d think a slight breeze would bend them over backward, but it doesn’t. Strong as oxen as a matter of fact.”

  “Anything new on the case?”

  “The boys are working.”

  Parling’s lips moved fractionally into a smile.

  “How familiar that sounds.”

  “Muggings are always a pain in the neck.”

  “Yes.” The smile perceptibly increased. It looked astonishingly derisive for such a little thing. “Muggings.”

  “You seem to have different ideas about it.”

  “No, not at all. It just occurred to me that you and the boys are handling the case with a trowelful of savoir-faire. That’s a French expression I picked up from a slummer across the old man’s bar.”

  Parling broke off as he saw Mrs. Giles coming down the long room toward them. Mrs. Giles said good afternoon and suggested chairs. She thought Mr. Parling greatly improved now that he was no longer in a dressing robe but properly clothed and wearing a very good suit. It destroyed a good deal the saboteur effect while replacing it with something just as adventurous but without any sinister implications. She could not put her finger on just what.

  “I wanted to see you about my car,” Parling said. “Do you mind if I keep it parked in the stables?”

  Mrs. Giles saw no reason why he shouldn’t. Her own cars had been kept there until the gasoline shortage had made her unshroud the victoria and brougham and buy the roached black mare. Years ago a cement flooring had replaced the original one which Papa had had put in of oak.

  “I will tell Hopkins that you wish to do so, Mr. Parling.”

  “Thank you.” Parling stood up. “You two will want to talk privately.”

  “No, nothing private,” Stedman said.

  Oddly, Mrs. Giles found herself hoping that Mr. Parling would stay. Now that she had removed, or at least partially shifted, him out of the role of Menace she drew a certain—well, it seemed silly to call it a sense of protection (but that was what it was) from the steely quality in him.

  “Do stay, Mr. Parling,” she said.

  Parling sat down again.

  “I had just asked Stedman whether there was anything new.”

  “There isn’t,” Stedman said. “Nothing of any value. I thought I’d just check with you about Hopkins, Mrs. Giles, while I was out here.”

  “Check? In what way?”

  “I’ll put it like this. Does he like to be important? I mean is he interested in shoving himself into the limelight?”

  “No, I should say the reverse. He is a very retiring man. A very good one. Why?”

  “So many people will say anything that comes into their heads if they feel it will draw attention to themselves. You run into it all the time handling criminal cases. It runs from stating they witnessed things which are entirely in their imagination to the whole hog of making a confession to the crime itself. Silly.”

  “Surely Hopkins—”

  “No. I felt instinctively about him what you tell me. That he’s quite reliable. He says he saw the man before.”

  Mrs. Giles breathed deeply. She saw a glint of interest break through the mask of Mr. Parling’s face.

  She said, “Who was the man, Mr. Stedman?”

  “That’s it. Hopkins doesn’t know. It’s just that he saw the face sometime recently and it impressed him because of its foreign look. He thinks it was at some time while he was sitting on the box waiting for you. Either at the bond sale yesterday or at the station this morning.” Stedman smiled. “Then he thinks it was at neither, but at some other moment during the past day or two. How old is he, by the way?”

  “Eighty.”

  “Well, he hopes it will come to him. He says such things sometimes do after he’s slept on it.”

  “What good will it do even if he should?”

  “Frankly I don’t know. The only value might lie in there being something indicative about the locality.”

  Stedman did not elaborate. He stood up and said good-by, but he did not leave at once.

  “I’ve persuaded the chief to put a patrol on this section,” he said casually. “Your grandson being home will attract people. Also the publicity about your taking roomers. There is plenty of monkey left in the average citizen. They read or hear about something and they’ve got to take a look, even if the only satisfaction they can get is in staring at the outside of a house.”

  Then he left.

  CHAPTER 19

  Parling took a cigar out of a vest pocket and began the leisurely process of preparing to light it.

  “Good man, Stedman,” he said.

  Mrs. Giles had momentarily forgotten that Parling was there. The continued casualness of Mr. Stedman’s manner increasingly perturbed her. In her opinion the patrol he had so thoughtfully arranged was not so much to protect the section as it was to keep a close official eye on River Rest and on the people in it.

  Specifically upon herself. How would this patrol affect her proposed nocturnal interment of the blue silk wrapper? It would not, if the man were to stay out on the public road, but the very fact of his official presence in the vicinity would place an added difficulty on the task.

  She wanted to be alone and think, but habit forced her to accept this social moment which Mr. Parling evidently intended to indulge in. He seemed completely settled in his chair. He was even striking a match to light his cigar.

  “Does cigar smoke bother you, Mrs. Giles?”

  “No, not at all. Papa always smoked them. He distrusted cigarettes.”

  “My old man did too. He smoked a pipe. He owned a bar in New York down on South Street. Called it the Seven Seas. He was quite a character. A romantic, in spite of his looks.”

  “He is dead, Mr. Parling?”

  “Yes, about ten years ago. They got him out back in the alley one night.”

  “How horrible! How terrible it must have been for your mother.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that. She was gone a couple of years before it happened.”

  “Dead too?”

  “No, Oregon.”

  Mrs. Giles observed Mr. Parling with a peculiar fascination. This was life in the raw. Literally her first firsthand view. What a life to have led. How splendid to have risen from it. For obviously he was risen. A solid worker in a splendid cause. Doing his share. She observed his competent artisan’s fingers as they prepared to relight the cigar which had gone out. Suddenly she knew.

  She was certain as to what Mr. Parling was: an undercover agent for the government, working in war plants to detect saboteurs.

  How clearly it explained the flexible steel quality in him, and how perfectly the dead-pan look. It also explained his casual, almost callous attitude when he had announced the finding of the stranger’s body when he had met them on the porch that morning. Habit would have inured him to such deaths by violence, almost the usual run of his daily tasks.

  And he would have
undertaken this riskiest of all jobs because of the death of his father whom he must have loved deeply or else he would never have been able to understand that he had been, beneath his bartender’s covering, a romantic. Yes, Mr. Parling had become an undercover agent to avenge him.

  “They,” the ones who had lurked in the alley and killed him, would surely have been gangsters of the most vicious type, and Mrs. Giles quite easily saw a youthful Mr. Parling dedicating himself to a life which would encompass such villains’ erasement.

  She said impulsively, “You are interested in criminals, Mr. Parling?”

  The faintest of starts convinced her that she was on the right track.

  “Me?”

  “In their apprehension and ultimate punishment?”

  Parling took time to think this over.

  “Well, just about as much as any ordinary citizen would be. Why?”

  “It occurred to me because of your father’s shocking death. That you might have cared to avenge it.”

  Parling studied her curiously. There was a bemused, almost a fond look in his eyes.

  “There are some things that people can’t talk about, you understand.”

  Mrs. Giles did understand. Perfectly. The very essence of his work was secrecy. How well she knew that once an undercover agent’s mask was torn off his life wasn’t worth a red cent. She felt confused and sorry at having asked such a leading question.

  “You must forgive me. My mind is so occupied with the murder of that stranger. I feel there may be something important in what Mr. Stedman said. Something most important, really.”

  “Said about what, Mrs. Giles?”

  “That business about Hopkins trying to remember just where he had seen the man before. About some value lying in there being something indicative about the locality. Do you have trouble about remembering things, Mr. Parling?”

  “Never.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But I do. I’m like Hopkins that way. I know we drove to the bond sale yesterday and to the station this morning. I can’t for the life of me think where else. And yet this is what annoys me. There was a somewhere else.”

  Parling stood up. He looked at his watch.

  “Time to be getting on,” he said. “Thanks for letting me use the stables for the car. Would you mind my advising you not to worry too much?”

  “Worry? But I’m not.”

  “I think that you are. I can tell when people are worrying no matter how they try to hide it.” Parling set his cigar down on cloisonné. “Don’t.”

  He took a wallet from his pocket and permitted one side of it to flap down while he idly inspected the papers which were in the other half. It was quickly done, really, but it gave Mrs. Giles the opportunity for catching a glimpse of the small plaque of metal pinned to the flap which hung down. Then he put the wallet back in his pocket and picked up the cigar.

  Parling said nothing further, but he looked into her eyes for a second before he turned and left the room. Mrs. Giles read the unspoken message easily which he had sent her: pity, and understanding, and perhaps a life preserver in the wind. Such things she read both in his look and in the glimpse he had so deliberately permitted her to have of the badge.

  A chill took hold of her as she realized that Parling would now have to be added to the list of Mr. Stedman and the police: the list with which she would have to battle in her fight for Kent’s defense.

  CHAPTER 20

  Mrs. Giles paused at Kent’s door on the way to her rooms. She opened it quietly and looked in. He still slept. It did not seem to her that he had even moved. She shut the door and went on to her living room.

  It was half-past four. She sat down in a chair at a window and tried to think of nothing at all. It was impossible. A barrage of involvements spattered her. She resigned herself to the one requiring the interment of the blue silk wrapper.

  A fork spade would be best, from the shed near the stable where Hopkins kept the garden tools. During some hour of the night when all would sleep. One hoped. Somewhere among the delphiniums. It would disturb the tulip bulbs—but then… Could the surface mat of weeds be replaced? It would have to be. Nothing must show.

  The telephone rang at five.

  “Russell Stedman, Mrs. Giles,” Stedman said when she answered it.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Stedman?”

  “I found several reports waiting for me at the office just now. Most of them deal with your roomers. I thought I’d relieve your mind. They’re all right. The police have finished checking their records out at the plant as well as doing some telephone verification on their own hook.”

  “That is most kind. I appreciate it very much.”

  “Smith, Wade, and Parling pass with flying colors. Miss Ashley introduces the only fly in the ointment, and it’s a very small one.”

  Mrs. Giles thought swiftly: If it were only to ease my mind about having these people in the house the police would have been satisfied by their check of the records at the plant. But the police went in for further telephonic verification of their own. It is more than my peace of mind they are interested in. It’s the murder. And Miss Ashley…

  “Would you explain about Miss Ashley, Mr. Stedman?”

  “As I say, it isn’t much. Her records at the Collins plant are perfectly straight. It is simply that she had been rooming with a Mrs. Aldershot before she moved to you. When she left there she gave Buffalo to Mrs. Aldershot as a forwarding address.”

  “How queer.”

  “Well, the police did think so for a while until they asked Miss Ashley about it. Her explanation was perfectly satisfactory. Some man had been annoying her, trying to date her up, and she decided to shake him off by giving Buffalo as a forwarding address to Mrs. Aldershot instead of your house. Her mother said Miss Ashley was frequently troubled like that.”

  “Mother?”

  Mrs. Giles had never envisioned Miss Ashley as having a mother. In the usual having-a-mother sense, that is. Nor any sort of family. Such spies and adventuresses were always without family ties: lone women cruising the globe in solitude while in lethal pursuit of their prey. Somehow this mother touch made her think almost kindly of Miss Ashley for a moment.

  “Yes,” Stedman was saying, “her mother is a widow. Lives out in Cleveland. She’s down on Miss Ashley’s dossier as the next of kin. When the boys phoned her, Mrs. Ashley satisfied them entirely about her daughter. Quite.”

  (Something cryptic, Mrs. Giles decided, in that. Especially Mr. Stedman’s emphasis on the quite.)

  “Incidentally,” Stedman was going on, “the central bureau in Washington has identified the corpse for us. His fingerprints are on record. Very much so. I won’t bother you with all of his aliases, but his favorite seems to have been Agualdo Russdorff. It has a global smack. He was quite a lad.”

  “In what way, Mr. Stedman?”

  “In many ways. I suppose you could list him as one of those nuggets labeled international crooks. He’s down on the books for almost every crime except murder. His specialty was blackmail.” Stedman paused. A deliberate pause. “That sort of changes the complexion of things, Mrs. Giles.”

  How well, how nerve-wrenchingly she knew it! No international crook with such a record would ever permit himself to become the victim of a mere mugging. He would be far too adroit from years of being constantly on the defensive for anything so naive as that. And so the police would reason. More pointedly than ever would their roads now converge on River Rest.

  “Yes, Mr. Stedman, I suppose that it does.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it. Good-by, Mrs. Giles.”

  Mrs. Giles, as she hung up, was getting thoroughly sick of having people tell her not to worry. Leila, Mr. Parling, and now Mr. Stedman. As if she could stop. As if, ever, she could feel serene again.

  There was something Mr. Stedman had said. Something in connection with Miss Ashley which should have registered. A definite discrepancy. Now it was gone. Mrs. Giles’s head was too steaming to attempt to recapture it.


  She went to the wardrobe and picked out a handsome Paris number of plum velvet and jet.

  Kent came in as Mrs. Giles was finishing the last hook. Sleep had made him a different person, a little maturer than the boy who had left her, but no longer the careworn, taut man he had seemed at the station. He carried several packages, and Mrs. Giles saw with gratitude that his eyes were smiling as well as his lips. He dumped the packages on the bed and kissed her soundly.

  “Loot,” he said. “The treasures of Egypt. For you.”

  She sat down on the bed beside the packages and busied herself with unknotting string until the tears which swam in her eyes had cleared. Not now, never during this happy moment, this true happiness which she felt so surely her grandson was sharing with her, could she bring herself to beg him to explain his part in murderous conspiracy and furtive flight.

  Later, yes, but not now.

  The presents warmed her heart with a warmth which she had believed it would never feel again. This sudden oasis of being happy went to her head almost like the time when Papa had given her by mistake a wineglassful of bourbon instead of port.

  The things he had brought her, had thought of to bring her while he must have been going through that daily hell over southern seas, were wonderful: a scarab brooch, the lovely garden of a hand-woven silk shawl, a vial of attar of roses, a necklace of garnet, carnelian, and jasper.

  “And what on earth, darling, is this?”

  “That is a nose ring, Grand’Mere, worn by the Fifis in Upper Egypt. A Fifi, as you don’t know, is the girl friend. Very fashionable. Wear it at your next committee meeting or while lolling in the victoria and you’ll knock them flat. I certainly wish you would wear it at that reception tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Oh, Kent!”

  “Well, it would help a lot.”

  They talked, but she did not know of what, and they went downstairs together, and she watched him glut himself with roast chicken and, after, with frosted devil’s-food cake which had taken practically every grain of sugar in the house.