The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  “I can remember—” Jerry began and Pam said, “Maybe you’d better not,” and flushed slightly, and to herself unexpectedly.

  Bill was provided for and the others refreshed. Bill sipped and looked pleased. Then he said he had been trying to get Jerry on the telephone. He was not at the office, not at home.

  “Giving an author lunch,” Jerry said. “And don’t tell anybody what time you tried. And Pam called from here and said the painters were impossible, and she had thrown us both on Dorian’s mercy. Why?”

  “To ask,” Bill said, “whether you’ve ever come across, or heard of, a man named Carl Cunningham.”

  Jerry repeated the name. He shook his head. He said, “Should I have?”

  Cunningham apparently was, or had been, or had hoped to be, a writer. Jerry was a publisher.

  “No,” Jerry said. “I can ask around, though. Tomorrow?”

  “He lives in Arkansas,” Bill said. “Or, did. Years ago. He may have been dead for years—for five years or so, anyway. Up to then he was being helped by Amanda Towne. He—”

  Bill told them what he knew about Cunningham.

  “Is that all?” Pam asked, when he had finished and, when he nodded his head, said, “It isn’t a lot, is it? Unless, when she stopped sending him money, he got mad and—” She shook her head. “It really isn’t much,” she said. “And Arkansas is so far off.” She paused. “Of course,” she said, “I do know some people in Hot Springs.”

  They awaited amplification.

  “That’s all,” Pam said. “I just know some people who live in Hot Springs.”

  “I do,” Jerry said, “hope they like it.”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “very much. Mr. Kingsley is an Arkansan, too.” She shook her head. “That can’t be right,” she said. “Because they don’t pronounce it that way. Arkansawer? Sawian? You’d thought of that?”

  “That Kingsley comes from Arkansas?” Bill said, circumventing the problem. “Yes. And that, as a writer, he might know other writers in the state. Even much older writers, as Cunningham obviously would be. Know of them, at least. And that Miss Towne also came from Arkansas.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Pam said, and Bill, answering, agreed more with her tone than with her words. He said, “Probably nothing.”

  “You must have more,” Dorian said. She sat, her right foot tucked under her left knee, in a deep chair. She sat relaxed as a cat, but with the same readiness.

  They had odds and ends, Bill said, and told of them—told of James Fergus and something of what Fergus had told him of the days in Chicago; told of Alice Fleming, and the arrangements she and a man named Bart had made to safeguard Amanda Towne’s money; of the continued absence of Judge Roger Parkman and of the interesting trip a man named Tony Gray was about to take, partly because he was unleashed by the death of Amanda Towne. He told of Amanda’s liking for a rich and highly flavored tea, and of the color of two of the sofa pillows in her suite.

  “Nothing,” Dorian said, “to build anything on.”

  “The red pillows,” Pam said. “Meaning she might have been smothered there, with one of them, and carried—or dragged, I suppose—to our room?”

  They checked things out, whatever their meaning, or lack of it. Detective Willings had done what was indicated in the checking out.

  “It would have been risky,” Jerry said. “Taking her along the corridor. Dead.”

  It would have been. But, murder is a risky business. Among risks it is sometimes necessary to choose the lesser. The premature discovery of a body might well be a greater risk. If, for example, the discovery came too soon after a known visit to a hotel suite. The trouble, however, was that no such visits were known about, independently.

  Few things are easier than to pay unnoticed visits to rooms in large hotels, assuming the visitor knows the room he wants. Even preliminary calls on house telephones would be unnoticed, since no records are made of such calls. Nobody, for example, had seen Byron Kingsley, or remembered having seen him. They had checked on that, as a matter of routine. And, of course, of timing.

  “He,” Pam said, “is much too sweet. Too—sort of loose and gentle. By loose, I don’t mean loose, exactly. Un-unknotted? Anyway.”

  “Also,” Jerry said, “he’s much too valuable, Bill. He might write another.”

  Bill was not, he assured them, after their pet author. Kingsley was, for the moment, merely an example of the easy accessibility of hotel rooms. Of course, he was the last known to have seen Amanda Towne alive.

  “Except the judge,” Pam said. “Or Judd somebody. Is smothering hard? I mean to give, not to receive?”

  It was not especially difficult to smother. Circumstances decided. With warning, an able-bodied person—and Amanda Towne had been that—could make it hard for anybody but a much more powerful assailant. Unprepared—perhaps lying back comfortably on a sofa or in a deep chair, or on a bed, there may be little chance for struggle, and almost none for a successful one. Death may come very quickly. And, if the body is not examined for some time, death may appear due to natural causes, and even an autopsy prove inconclusive.

  “There isn’t even a great deal to guess about, is there?” Dorian said. “Whyn’t we have one more round and then somewhere for dinner? Because, all I’ve got is four lamb chops. Jerry, why don’t you, while Bill catches up?”

  Jerry did not try to think of a reason. He got gin and vermouth from a refrigerator almost as familiar to him as his own, and a fresh lemon and a chilled mixing pitcher already filled with ice, and poured a few drops of water from the pitcher. He measured, in a two-ounce glass—

  “He’s the only man I know who can heap liquid,” Pam says now and then of Jerry, proudly.

  —eight ounces of cold gin and then, with that poured over ice, a very unheaped two ounces of vermouth. He stirred briskly for a moment, sliced strips of lemon, went to the refrigerator for four fresh glasses chilling in the freezing compartment and brought them back carefully, stems between fingers, bowls untouched. (The warmth of hands should not be transferred to frigid glasses.) He poured carefully, evenly, into glasses, twisted lemon peel over the first glass until tiny spatters of oil dimpled the surface, and rubbed the twisted peel around the glass’s rim.

  “And that,” Pam said, “is the way to make—”

  The telephone rang, with a telephone’s uncontrolled excitement. Jerry, too concentrated on perfection, jumped slightly—slightly, but enough. He said, “Oh damn!” and grabbed at a swaying glass, and knocked another over with the movement. He caught both glasses before they fell, but not before they had, largely, emptied themselves.

  Dorian Weigand uncoiled, reached the telephone, and said, “Yes?” to it. Then she said, “Just a moment,” and held the telephone toward Bill and said, “I thought it was too good to be true.”

  Bill crossed the room to her, and to the telephone and said, in turn, “Yes? Weigand speaking,” and then, “Yes, I did, Mr. Kingsley.” He listened a moment. “Oh,” he said, “there wasn’t any hurry. Good of you to call. Just one question—do you know a man named Cunningham? Carl Cunningham? He’s a writer too, I understand. Lives somewhere in Arkansas and—” He stopped and listened. He said, “That’s interesting, Mr. Kingsley. I wonder if I could drop around to your hotel and—”

  Dorian’s slim, long-fingered hands, together, made a beckoning gesture.

  “—or,” Bill said, “why don’t you come over here? The Norths are here and we can give you a drink. If you’re not—” Again, it appeared, he was interrupted. He said, after a second, “Right. Take you about ten minutes,” and gave the address.

  Bill put the telephone back.

  “He does know him,” he said. “Known him for years. And—saw him in New York yesterday. He’s coming over to tell us all about it.” He looked at Jerry, who was mopping up. “That,” he said gravely, “is not the way to make a martini.”

  Jerry remade. They sipped, and waited.

  IX

  It took Byron King
sley a little longer than ten minutes. He wore tweeds; he stooped a little as he came through the doorway, although that was not really necessary. He said hello to the Norths and that it was mighty nice to meet Dorian and Bill Weigand, and that it was mighty nice of them to have him come around. He said, being asked, that a little bourbon and tap water would be fine, if not too much trouble. He looked through windows toward the East River and said they certainly had a wonderful view.

  With these matters attended to, he said that he had indeed known Carl Cunningham, far away and rather long ago, and that Mr. Cunningham was a mighty fine man.

  “Did you,” Bill asked him, “know that Cunningham was an old friend of Miss Towne’s?”

  Kingsley’s wide eyes widened. He shook his tawny head slowly, thoughtfully.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t know that. Is that why—?”

  That, Bill Weigand agreed, was why. Which did not mean that Carl Cunningham was, in any way they now knew of, specifically involved. In the investigation of murder, much is explored that is entirely tangential. This is particularly true when the physical circumstances of the crime are not in themselves revealing, or sufficiently revealing. Then enquiry extended in many directions, in time and space—it was carried into the past and, in a sense, projected into the future—in the sense that murder is sometimes done to prevent an event of the future.

  “More simply,” Weigand said, “we’re trying to find out everything we can about Miss Towne, and about those who’ve been part of her life. Like Cunningham. You say you saw him in New York yesterday?”

  “Well,” Kingsley said, slowly, “I’m almost sure I did, captain. I could—then, anyway—have sworn it was Carl. I yelled at him—said, ‘Hey. Carl!’ He was getting into a cab. But, either it wasn’t Carl or he didn’t hear me or—” He paused. “I thought he did hear me. It was as if he started to turn when he heard his name, and then—didn’t. But—now I wouldn’t want to swear to that, sir. Could be it was just somebody who looked like him.”

  “Where was this?”

  It had been, Kingsley told them, outside the Algonquin. But he was not certain that Cunningham—if it had been Cunningham—had come out of the hotel. At least, he had not been staying at the hotel. Kingsley had asked about that. It had been in mid-afternoon. Kingsley had had lunch at the Algonquin—“with a lady”—after he had signed his statement at the West Twentieth Street station house. He had finished lunch, and got the lady into a cab and it was a few seconds after that that he had seen a familiar figure getting into another cab and called, “Carl! Carl Cunningham.” At a guess, it had been around three o’clock.

  “Of course,” Kingsley said, “I hadn’t laid eyes on Carl for years. All the same, I could have sworn—”

  But now, he could not swear. It might have merely been a tall man, a tall thin man, who looked like Carl Cunningham. Probably was, because—well, the last he had heard of him, Cunningham was living up in the Bostons.

  “The Bostons?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Kingsley said, like a man at fault. “The Boston Mountains. Part of the Ozarks you can call them. Pretty country, but you get out of towns, off main roads, some of it’s pretty wild. Somebody—some naturalist, I think it was—said that the whole Ozark country is one of the best places in the world for snakes. Some of the prettiest snakes you ever saw. Colors you wouldn’t think snakes could be. I remember one was the brightest green in the—”

  He stopped, evidently feeling that he was failing to hold his audience. Pam, particularly, looked to be an audience on the loose—an audience about to run. Kingsley said he was sorry; that he had got to remembering.

  “About Cunningham?” Bill said.

  Byron Kingsley, in his slow, soft voice, told them what he had to tell of Cunningham.

  He had, he said, encountered him first about ten years before, when Cunningham was giving a course at the state university—a course in fiction writing; one of the extension courses being given in Fayetteville. The classes met in the evenings, twice a week—“a lot of people, all kinds, who thought they wanted to write,” Kingsley said. “Kids and right old people, and most of them weren’t ever going to. You know how it is, sir.” The last was to Jerry North, who certainly knew how it was, and said so.

  Kingsley himself, he told them, had then been trying to write for several years—writing, and tearing up what he had written and not, so far as he could see, really getting any place. He hadn’t, he said, seen much of others who were trying the same thing. Maybe there weren’t many in Arkansas; maybe he just hadn’t happened to run into them. He had felt isolated; had felt a need for contact with others who practiced the craft he essayed to enter. The classes at Fayetteville had seemed to promise the fellowship he sought. And, if he was lucky, advice which might help.

  He thought, now, looking back, that he had been lucky in meeting Carl Cunningham—in listening to him talk about writing to the class; in talking with him, more specifically, about things he had himself written for the class.

  “He didn’t,” Kingsley said, “try to tell us how to write so much. I mean, he said everybody had to write the way it came to him, and that there weren’t really any rules. But there were certain things you tried to do in your own way, and sometimes a person looking at it from outside, understanding what you were trying to do, could tell you where you’d gone off.”

  They had tried to learn to write by writing. That was Cunningham’s way of teaching. “He said, ‘You just keep on doing it, whether you feel like it or not.’” Some of the stories—most of them—weren’t stories at all, weren’t written at all. Most of Kingsley’s own were like that, he realized now. But—well, apparently some of his weren’t.

  “Mr. Cunningham,” he said—and now, remembering a former mentor, he spoke of him formally—“seemed to think maybe I had something. Or would have something.”

  They had, despite their disparity in age—a disparity of some twenty-five years—struck up what amounted to a friendship. Kingsley had taken to going around to Cunningham’s room—it wasn’t much of a room; the only thing in it that was Cunningham’s own, Kingsley thought now, was a pretty “beat-up” typewriter. They talked about writing, and about writers. “I must have bored him, but he didn’t show it.”

  That lasted for two or three years. Kingsley was supporting himself—not too well—by selling brushes, and by whatever else came to hand—whatever else that did not tie him too closely to a fixed way of life, did not interfere too much with his attempt to find his own way.

  And then Cunningham had left the university. Kingsley didn’t know why—whether he had tired of teaching, on a part-time lecturer’s tiny wage, or for other reasons. He had said he was going off somewhere, by himself, and try to get on with his own writing. “Maybe,” Kingsley said, “little as I suppose he was getting, he’d saved up some kind of stake.” Cunningham had said he was going up in the hills, where living wouldn’t cost much, and get on with it.

  They had, Kingsley said, kept in touch, more in the first few years after Cunningham left the university than later. “It just sort of petered out, the way those things do.” Kingsley had kept on trying to write, without much luck. “What it came to,” he said, “I wasn’t any good with short stories and pretty soon I decided I wasn’t ever going to be. So then I started the novel.” He sipped his drink. “The one you saw,” he told Jerry North, “was the third shot at it, and part of it was the fourth. And still you and you and Mr. Barry had to pretty near rewrite it, sir.”

  “Not by miles,” Jerry said, although there was some truth in it.

  “To get back to Cunningham,” Bill said. “How did his own work go? Did he tell you? In letters, I suppose. Before it petered out, as you say?”

  Kingsley hesitated. He seemed reluctant. Then he said, “I don’t know, sir. I’m afraid—not too good. I kept reading magazines at the library, looking for something by him. And I had a friend in a bookshop and he’d let me go over publishers’ announcements. But—I guess it didn’t
go so good. Maybe he was a better teacher than he was a writer. He—”

  Kingsley stopped again.

  “Well,” he said, “I went up to this place of his once. About three-four years ago. Hell and gone—sorry, ma’am—way up in the hills. You had to park your car about a mile off and climb up a path that wasn’t much of a path. And the place he lived—well, you’d have to call it a shack. He—”

  Cunningham had looked a good deal older. He had been thin when he gave the course at the university—tall and thin, with thick black hair. He was thinner when Kingsley visited him in the shack. Kingsley had wondered if he was getting enough to eat. He had been thinner and his hair wasn’t black any more—what there was of it was gray and—“Well,” Kingsley said, “he looked awful.”

  They had talked, the big, tawny-haired man said, mostly about his own work, and he had admitted that it wasn’t coming any too well, and had said that maybe he wasn’t cut out for it after all, and had probably better get on with brush-selling.

  “He said, ‘Don’t do that, King.’ He called me that, most of the time. A lot of people did. Byron’s sort of—well, my dad admired Byron a lot. Used to read him a lot. Anyway, Carl said, ‘Just stick to it, King. It’s a long way, but you’ll make it.’ As if he really meant it. Maybe if he hadn’t said that, as if he meant it, I would have given the whole thing up—chucked it, as they say. I certainly appreciate what he did for me. What everybody’s done.”

  Kingsley had, of course, asked how Cunningham’s own work was going. “Although I guess I was pretty willing to talk about what I was doing most of the time.” Cunningham had said he was “getting by” and then turned the conversation back to Kingsley, as if what he himself was doing was of no importance.

  “Or, as if he didn’t want to talk about it,” Kingsley said.

  He had stayed a couple of days in the shack with Cunningham, and had driven into town—“if you could call it a town”—and bought a good deal more food than they would need while he was there, and left most of it when he left. Cunningham had smiled faintly at that, but not said anything about it; the acceptance had been tacit, and with it was the tacit admission that the food could be used. So, Kingsley had thought, his friend wasn’t “getting by,” whatever he said.