by Frances
There had been several more letters after that—the meeting had, as such meetings sometimes do, revived a relationship which had all but petered out. But then—this was a couple of years ago, when Kingsley had just about decided he could do nothing more with Look Away, Stranger, except to start sending it around—a letter he had written had come back with a penciled notation which read, informally—“It wasn’t what you’d call a regular post office—‘Not here any more.’”
“So,” Kingsley said, and had apparently finished, “that’s about it. Until—well, unless it was really Carl I saw yesterday. More I think about it, the more I think maybe it wasn’t. Because—well, where would he have got the money?”
“You didn’t try to find him in Arkansas? After the letter came back?”
“I should have, shouldn’t I?” Kingsley said. “I kept thinking I would, but—well, I didn’t. It’s quite a drive up there—I was living in Little Rock by then and—” He shook his head. “I should have,” he said. “I sure should. Maybe I could have—maybe he needed some kind of help. But—I just didn’t.”
He shook his head, as one may with regret, may self-chidingly.
“He never,” Bill said, “talked about his days in Chicago? When he was on the paper there?”
“I knew he had been,” Kingsley said. “I suppose he must have mentioned it. But he didn’t talk about it, in the way I guess you mean.”
“And never,” Bill said, “mentioned that he knew Amanda Towne in the old days? Not even after she had become rather famous? Never said, ‘I used to know her when’?”
Cunningham never had. Kingsley was sure of that.
Kingsley finished his drink. He waited, looking from one to the other. But, also, he looked at his watch. He said he guessed that was about all he knew about Mr. Cunningham, and—
“We’re all going out to dinner pretty soon,” Pam North said. “When we finish these.” She indicated “these” by wiggling, slightly, her partly filled glass. “If you haven’t anything else to do—?”
“Now,” Kingsley said, “that’s mighty nice of you, Mrs. North. Of all of you. But—fact is, ma’am, I’ve sort of got a date. With a lady. Supposed to pick her up about—” he looked at his watch again—“about ten minutes from now,” he said. “So—”
“Of course,” Pam said.
Kingsley stood up. He said he was sorry about the date. He said if he had known but—but there it was. And—
“Run along to your girl, Mr. Kingsley,” Dorian said, and he smiled wide and warmly at that and said, “Guess I’d better, ma’am.” And, finally, did.
“He’s sweet,” Pam said. “And doesn’t know how to get away once he’s somewhere. How old is he, Jerry?”
Somewhere, Jerry thought, in his early or middle thirties. He looked younger; he acted younger. But—
“He does,” Dorian said, “bring out the maternal, doesn’t he?” She looked at Bill, looked at Jerry. “I can’t,” Dorian said, “say that ours do, particularly.”
“We must,” Pam told her, “be thankful for small things. Who wants them boyish? Except in passing, like Mr. Kingsley?”
The men were tolerant; they looked at each other and expressed tolerance. They sipped.
“Why Mr. Cunningham?” Pam asked, of anybody with an answer. “Anyway, I don’t quite believe in him.”
“I don’t—” Jerry said.
“Why pick on him, I mean,” Pam said. “You, Bill.”
He hadn’t, Bill said, picked on him. He hadn’t picked on anybody and couldn’t argue that he was close to it. But—he did know what Pam meant. And—he did not know why.
“A hunch?” Dorian said.
It was not even that. It was—He paused and sipped reflectively. He didn’t, he said, know quite what it was. Unless—you call it a fix. They looked at him with some surprise.
“Not the kind of fix you’re thinking of,” Bill said.
“For my part,” Pam said, “I’m not thinking of any kind. I do wish, Bill, you wouldn’t be so—elliptic. What’s a fix? Your kind?”
His kind, Bill said, was the “fix” of navigation. From a ship, a bearing taken on, say, one light of known position; simultaneously (or with allowance) a bearing on another. Possibly, even a bearing on a third. Lines drawn on a chart at the bearings indicated. Where the lines crossed on the chart, there was the ship, there were you. There was your “fix.”
“I don’t think,” Dorian said, “that you have made it any clearer, my friend.”
It was, Bill admitted readily, not at all clear. You took a bearing on a certain incident in the past—on a certain relationship in the past. Then on another—perhaps one much closer. One point of reference might be a happening; another a thing no more concrete than a facet of character. You drew bearing lines on the chart of your mind. Where they crossed, there—well, there you might be. A line on the mind’s chart from Chicago, and a girl’s influence on three diverse men; a line from a shack in the hills—the “highlands” of Arkansas; a line from a classroom in Fayetteville, and from a table in a restaurant off Madison Avenue. Where they intersected—
“I can’t,” Dorian said, “see that they do. Are my wits dull? Or yours fanciful?”
Bill smiled and shook his head, which said he had no answer ready; which, at the same time, denied the possibility that Dorian’s wits were dull.
“Also,” Pam said, “there is this judge. There is Mr. Gray’s going to Indonesia. There is—”
“Singapore,” Jerry said.
“It’s the same thing,” Pam said, generously. “You’ve thrown me off. There is Mr. Fergus’s maybe getting fired and Miss Towne’s brother maybe inheriting a lot of money, if Mrs. Fleming hasn’t stolen it and—where do those lines cross?”
They didn’t. At least Bill could not, at the moment, see that they crossed. Which was more or less what he was getting at. One could not, obviously, ignore any of these—points of reference. They were not being ignored. Mullins, for example, was hunting for Judge Parkman. Miss Towne’s brother was being looked into. Perhaps, from these enquiries—and those into Miss Towne’s financial affairs, and even from the papers in her desk—a new pattern might emerge. But, so far he did not see the pattern—did not see bearing lines crossing at a point of space or time or human motivation. Whereas, if one considered Chicago, and Fergus and Cunningham, Barnes and a girl from Arkansas in Chicago; and Arkansas and Byron Kingsley coming out of it—to say nothing of his book—and two people dead in New York—
Well, observations were yet incomplete; bearings needed checking; the mind is more fallible than a pelorus. But he thought the lines showed signs of crossing. At, or near, a man named Cunningham. Who probably—first certainty may be better than second doubt—had been in New York at the proper time.
“I think,” Dorian said, “that we had better go and get some dinner.”
Bill grinned at her and stood up. As soon as he made a telephone call, he told them and added, as he reached for the telephone, that they were probably quite right. But he called in, all the same and, being in, directed that the proper people in Arkansas—whoever they might be—be got in touch with and asked for co-operation in re one Carl Cunningham, erstwhile college instructor, erstwhile Chicago newspaperman, sometime hermit.
This done, they went to dinner at the Algonquin. Jerry was about to eat an oyster when he remembered something. He put his fork down, with an oyster on it, and said, speaking rather carefully, “Pam. Why don’t you believe in Mr. Cunningham?”
She said, naturally, “What?”
“You said,” Jerry began and she said, “Oh. That. Everybody drops names.”
The three of them looked at Pam North then, in puzzled, but rather pleased, anticipation.
“It’s only human,” Pam said. “If you’ve got names to drop, you drop them. I don’t care who you are, or how good your intentions. Sooner or later, you drop them.”
They continued to wait.
“Miss Towne,” Pam said, “was a very
good name. I’m not sure she wouldn’t be better back there than in New York. Because there aren’t so many other things in Arkansas, see?” She stopped and blinked slightly. “It comes out oddly that way,” she said. “Anyway—if I’d gone to school with—oh, Elvis Presley—”
“God forbid,” Jerry said.
“All right,” Pam said. “I agree. I’d drop him, all the same. It would be a—a reflex. But, Mr. Cunningham worked with Miss Towne, and was a friend of hers—and maybe even wanted her to marry him—and she’s become famous. And—he doesn’t drop her. Not once. So, naturally, I don’t believe in him.”
“Oh,” Jerry said and retrieved his oyster.
Bill Weigand looked at Pam for some seconds. Then he speared an oyster of his own and looked at it. It was, however, a moment or two before he put it in his mouth.
They were at coffee when Raul, shining as a maitre d’ should, and regretful as was appropriate, came to report that Captain Weigand was wanted on the telephone. Dorian moaned resignedly in her throat. Bill went to the telephone and returned to report that he would have to drop by the office for an hour or so. “Always,” Dorian said. “It never fails.”
“You would marry a policeman,” Bill told her.
“Nothing else would do,” Dorian agreed. Which, come to think back on it, was true.…
“This,” Sergeant Stein—repatriated from Washington—told Bill Weigand and held this out. “In her desk.”
This was a letter, addressed to Amanda Towne, on the letterhead of a television station—“CBC Affiliate”—in Little Rock. It read:
“I’m afraid we haven’t been able to dig up much about Kingsley you haven’t got. We’d already checked on him, for the local-boy-makes-good angle, and come up with nothing spectacular. He doesn’t seem to have known a great many people; those who did know him liked him all right, and didn’t see much of him because he was working most of the time—making a living, evidently in any way that came handy, daytimes and writing nights. All his ways of making a living seem to have been drearily legal. He was born in Mississippi, and his family moved to Arkansas when he was about fifteen—hence, I suppose, the Deep South stuff in the book. We’re not that deep here, for the most part. I wish we had something juicy to send along for the show. It appears there just isn’t anything.
“About Cunningham—and if there’s a local angle will you pass it along?—we haven’t been able to find out much, either. He did teach a while at the U of A—not actually on the faculty; just a part-time instructor. They don’t keep permanent records of those who attend extension classes, so there’s nothing to show that Kingsley knew him then. Kingsley was graduated from the university, if that’s of value. Cunningham taught there several years later, but Kingsley may have gone to his classes, which were open to anybody who wanted to pay the fees. Apparently, not too many did.
“After he left the university, which would have been about eight years ago, Cunningham moved up into the hills—his mail address was a place called Top Town which isn’t a town, actually—a general store and a post office, the hell and gone from anywhere. We sent one of the research boys up there, and he had quite a trip—right out of the twentieth century, I gather, and certainly right off paved roads. (Turned in a special expense account for wear and tear on his car.) The man, who runs the store, and reads the postcards, says, Yes, a man who called himself Cunningham lived around there for a while; lived in the old Nelson place, and he reckons he rented it. Didn’t have much to do with the rest of them—city feller, seems like. Came to the store once a week and bought canned goods and coffee, and not very much of either. Figured he was pretty well broke, they did, like you’d figure if he was living in the old Nelson shack.
“I’m trying to paraphrase what the research boy told us—a great guy for dialogue, the boy is. Writes scripts in his spare time, all full of local color.
“Cunningham didn’t get much mail, as the storekeeper remembers it. Once a month or so he got a letter from New York, registered. He never happened to notice who the letter came from. None of his business, or anybody else’s except Cunningham. The people up there aren’t very forthcoming with city people. They probably weren’t with Cunningham.
“About three years ago, Cunningham quit coming down to the store. They figured he’d left. Nobody had seen him go, and he didn’t have a car, so far as anybody knows. On the other hand, the railroad’s only about ten miles away, and anybody could walk it who wanted to. They figured he just walked it.
“I realize we didn’t get much, but you weren’t very clear what you wanted. I don’t know whether we could have got much more if you had been. Nobody seems to remember reading anything Cunningham had written and we haven’t found anything in the library. But I suppose you’ve had that checked in New York.”
(“Send somebody up to the public library,” Bill told Stein, interrupting his reading. “See if a Carl Cunningham shows up in the catalogue index. Oh—the periodical indexes too. Right?”)
“Our boy,” the letter continued, “got directions and went up to the cabin Cunningham had been living in. It’s about a mile, mile and a half, from the nearest road, mostly straight up, on a path which is pretty hard to follow. Our boy says he was all the time meeting snakes coming down the path. The cabin, which apparently isn’t much, is on top of a hill, in a clearing that is growing over. There’s not much to indicate that anybody has lived in it for years—or, our boy says, ever. He checked with the State police, who’d never heard of anybody named Cunningham and, apparently, had just barely heard of Top Town. And that, I’m afraid is all we’ve dug up.
“If you hear of an opening for a bright young man in the big town, will you pass it along? And I don’t mean to our research genius.”
The letter was signed, cordially, “Ned.”
Stein had waited for Weigand to finish. Then he said there was a good deal more stuff from Amanda Towne’s desk, if Bill wanted to go over it. Bill raised enquiring eyebrows. “Nothing I saw,” Stein said. “Then,” Bill Weigand said, “why me, sergeant?” This pleased Stein, as it was intended to.
“That help?” Stein said, and indicated the letter.
Bill said he didn’t know, and spoke slowly.
“There’s nothing in it we didn’t know about,” he said, and told Stein what they did know, and where it had come from. It accorded with what Kingsley had told, or near enough. It had been “a couple of years ago,” Kingsley said, when a letter was returned to him from, it now appeared, Top Town, with the annotation that Cunningham was no longer there. The postmaster said that Cunningham had disappeared three years ago. But the discrepancy was minor; “a couple” is imprecise on the lips of many.
But, all the same, the letter helped. It was an answer to a letter Amanda Towne had written, apparently only a short time before. She had wanted to know about Kingsley, which was understandable; research for interviews, Bill gathered, was thorough. But—she had also wanted to know about Cunningham and had, apparently, been urgent enough in her request to cause the local station to go to considerable trouble. It was to be presumed that the station carried “People Next Door,” and that co-operation was in order. Still—Amanda Towne must have been very urgent. Why?
Bill wished he knew the answer. Sergeant Stein, “filled in,” wished he could provide it. Meanwhile, did Weigand want the city combed out for Cunningham?
A little reluctantly, since such combing out requires many men, working methodically—and is very likely to be a protracted business, and to end inconclusively—Bill Weigand agreed that he did. Stein made a telephone call to get it started.
“If anything comes in,” Bill said, and got up and started toward the door, “I’ll be—”
The telephone rang. Stein took it, listened, beckoned Bill Weigand back with a movement of his head.
Sergeant Mullins was calling. He had found Judge Roger Parkman. He had found him very easily—Judge Parkman had come home.
Judge Parkman had nothing to tell them about anything.
And he would tell the nothing he had to tell only to the officer in charge. So?
“Right,” Bill said, and went back to his desk and said, “What have we got on—” and did not need to finish, because Stein handed him a précis of what they had on Judge Roger Parkman, late of the Court of General Sessions, County of New York.
X
Driving uptown to ask Judge Roger Parkman where he had been, and why he had chosen this particular time to go there, Bill Weigand carried in his mind certain odds and ends of information, none of which appeared to have any special significance.
Judge Parkman, a few years before, had been appointed to fill out the unexpired term of the General Sessions bench of one Antonio Consenti, deceased. Judge Parkman had, as a jurist, expired with the term. (Since he was a Republican, the New York Times had regarded his appointment as a commendable example of bi-partisanship, and of getting the best man for the job regardless of political affiliations. The New York Post, on the other hand, had darkly regarded the appointment as a “deal” and had wondered, gloomily, what lay behind it. There had, so far as Bill could see, been little in Judge Parkman’s conduct on the bench to substantiate either view. His ability had not been flagrantly outstanding; on the other hand, little had occurred to justify the Post forebodings.)
Only one controversy, and it minor, had arisen during Parkman’s two years and three months as a judge. A certain Marvin Bronsky had been arrested, after patient police work, and had cheerfully admitted that he was indeed the long-sought person who had been building bonfires in churches. He had done it, he explained in magistrate’s court, to prove he was right. Bronsky’s next stop was, expectedly enough, the psychiatric ward at Bellevue.
He had emerged from Bellevue after some weeks and been brought before Judge Parkman, psychiatrists buzzing about him to explain that his mental condition was such as to leave him unaware that there is anything wrong in building bonfires in churches—that, specifically, he was incompetent to enter a plea to the indictment. Judge Parkman had then, rather unexpectedly, proved himself to be made of sterner stuff. He had expressed himself firmly against coddling and directed that a plea be entered. He happened to be looking at Bronsky when he made this demand and Bronsky, before his court-appointed lawyer could intervene, smiled happily and said that he had started bonfires because bonfires were pretty. The judge, spluttering somewhat, ordered him held for trial, and said that there was a great deal too much of this sort of thing going on and that it was time examples were made.
