Town of Masks

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Let’s go over this carefully,” he said. “She had them laid out on a cloth—”

  “A satin cloth,” Hannah prompted. “And as she was about to go to the door with me, she flung the surplus of it over them as if it were a dish cloth.”

  “You’re certain, Miss Blake, she didn’t put them away while you were waiting?”

  “Quite certain.”

  “Was the maid there?”

  Hannah remembered quite distinctly the woman Annie’s presence and titter over Maria’s debunking. But at the moment, she had no desire to involve poor Annie. “I don’t recall that she was.”

  The sheriff got up. “It’s damned queer if she was so easygoing about them, nobody ever saw her put ’em away or get ’em out. Nobody admits seeing that.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if she kept them in a buffet drawer,” Hannah said.

  The sheriff turned on her. “Can you show me the buffet drawer?”

  She did not answer.

  He was looking at her, but his mind was on something else. “I’d just like to be dead certain somebody didn’t walk out with them this morning—for a souvenir. Matheson might as well’ve sold tickets, he had such a crowd.”

  “Matheson is handicapped by a small force,” Hannah said.

  “That isn’t the smallest thing he’s handicapped by. My boys had to take over.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Hannah murmured. My boys, she thought, her contempt for him rising the more he concentrated on the jewels. She would not have put it past his boys to have gathered souvenirs.

  “Now it’s funny you should mention that silver, Miss Blake. There was a silverware chest on the buffet, and when we got to it, there was one tray empty. Interesting?”

  “Perhaps someone helped himself to a handful of silver, too,” she said.

  The corners of Walker’s mouth quivered with wry amusement. “Like Judas, huh?”

  Hannah held her eyes on his, but for an instant he seemed to shimmer before them.

  “Ever see a silk cord in her house—like a cord from a bathrobe, only longer, ten feet maybe, one tassel?”

  “No.”

  Walker straightened up. “Nobody saw a thing. A home for the blind, she kept!”

  What went ye out to see? Hannah thought, her mind spinning back with the phrase to another time when it had come to her, talking to Maria last night. No, not last night—long ago as a child home there for cookies and milk after Sunday school, white-frocked and white-minded.

  “Yes?” Walker said.

  He had been watching her. She relaxed her hands where they had grown taut on the arms of the chair.

  “I was remembering,” Hannah said. “Remembering my childhood with Maria.”

  “You were old friends,” the sheriff said. “Old friends aren’t always good ones. Tell me, did you like Mrs. Verlaine?”

  Hannah tried to think about it. “I loved her,” she said, and the words, prompted from beyond her expectancy, moved her first to surprise and then to a sense of pain which burst within her like a blister, starting tears.

  The sheriff touched her shoulder, passing. He walked to the window and back. “Understand, Miss Blake, this is my job. I’ve got to ask you all these questions.”

  “Of course.” Hannah went to her desk for tissue, and returned with the box of it.

  “When did you last see Mrs. Verlaine?”

  “I called on her a few days ago, Monday, I think. I only stayed a few minutes. It was a trivial matter.” On Monday she had met Maria on the post office steps, but the fear that she might have left some sign of her presence in the house last night prompted the lie.

  “What trivial matter?”

  “Church, which is not trivial, but Maria took it rather lightly.”

  “Who else was in the house, Miss Blake?”

  Why this, why this? she wondered. “No one that I noticed.”

  “No maid to let you in?”

  “I don’t remember Annie’s being about. I was there but a minute.” Dangerous, dangerous, she thought. Annie might swear she had not been there.

  “Where did you sit?”

  “I’m not even sure I sat down,” she said; “I don’t understand—”

  “Never mind. She was pretty thick with this Sykes fellow, wasn’t she?”

  “I believe they were intimate.”

  “Intimate?”

  “By which I mean they were friends. How should I know the extent of their intimacy?”

  “Your loyalty isn’t going to pin your friend’s murderer to the wall, Miss Blake. I know Sykes has a wife in the East. They’ve been in and out of the courts for years over his—indiscretions.”

  “Really,” Hannah murmured. “You’ve been marvelously quick in your work, sheriff.”

  “No, I’m slow, in fact. I had a summons to serve on him once. But he has a lot of friends. I didn’t serve it.”

  “So frank,” Hannah murmured.

  “Realistic, that’s all, Miss Blake. I’m a politician and I admit it.”

  “Don’t you think such information could be dangerous in the hands of your opponents?”

  He smiled and sat on the arm of a chair. “In the hands of my opponents—possibly.”

  I am naïve, Hannah thought. I’ve never known the extent of my naïveté. “Police officers shouldn’t be in politics,” she said.

  “On the contrary. In most instances, that’s how they get to be police officers. It’s the way of the world, inheritance or politics. Whatever name is put on them, they’re its twin rulers. Where did you go last night, Miss Blake?”

  What a delicate snare! “I was home last night,” she said evenly. “I was reading, and I went to bed early.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “I live alone, Mr. Walker.”

  “Excuse me,” he said with more than a little sarcasm. “But witnesses sometimes come in handy, even embarrassing ones.”

  “I have none—either to help or to embarrass me.”

  “Your girl lives out?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the kid over the garage?”

  “I should think he would be able to tell you whether or not I took the car out.”

  “Are you able to tell me that he didn’t go out?”

  “I’m not in the habit of checking up on the people who work for me. I noticed the light in his room. I presumed he was there.”

  “It’s too bad I can’t go on presumptions, too,” the sheriff said. “Did you know that he was at Verlaine’s three nights ago?”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  Walker grunted. “Democratic, wasn’t she?”

  Hannah did not answer. But safe from him, she would destroy him if she got the chance, she thought. He was corrupt and cynical, but her best friend of the moment.

  “Don’t you ever go out without the car?” he asked then.

  “Not often. It’s some distance to the Cove.” It occurred to her then that she might turn one of her worries to an advantage. “And last night especially I wasn’t likely to.” She extended her foot. “I sprained my ankle yesterday.”

  He made a noise of commiseration. “Did you see a doctor?”

  “No. It’s happened before. I have weak ankles.”

  His eyes took in the good one. “What were you reading?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said you were reading last night. What?”

  “Poetry,” she said, fearful that if she were asked the title of a book, none would come to mind.

  He showed his teeth in a smile, but there was little mirth in it. “It looks like the town is infested with it.”

  “We are having a contest for Campbell’s Cove Day.”

  “That’s nice. You’re entering it, too, are you?”

  She tried to think what might have prompted the question. “No. I decided against it.”

  Walker stood up. “Is that what you burned in the fireplace?”

  “I was cold,” she said. “It was a chilly ni
ght.”

  He moved quickly to her desk and opened the folder. Something had been left there, to surprise her should she have turned the cover. He picked up a piece of half-burned paper, and read aloud:

  “‘Love has unbound my limbs, and set me shaking. A monster bitter-sweet and my unmaking.’”

  He let the paper drop to the desk. “With that sort of stuff you had to light a fire to keep warm? Ha!”

  Hannah folded her hands very tightly. “I shall not answer another of your questions until I see the warrant whereby you searched my house.”

  “Searched is not the word, Miss Blake. I observed. If I’d searched you’d have known it. What have you got here you don’t want me to see?”

  “Not Maria’s jewels certainly.”

  “What?”

  “Some things are very private.”

  He jerked his head toward the desk. “That stuff I just read?”

  She lifted her chin. “That stuff.”

  “Autobiography?”

  She did not answer.

  He smiled broadly. “You wouldn’t be sweet on this Sykes fellow yourself?”

  “I haven’t now, I never had, and I never will have enough sweetness for that.”

  “Well, I had to ask. There’s no accounting for tastes.” The sheriff picked up his hat. “That’s all for now. I want you to go down to the station house tonight and let them fingerprint you.”

  “I expect to be very busy tonight,” Hannah said.

  “If I were you, I’d make time for that, Miss Blake.”

  22

  AS HE HAD NO doubt opened the door and walked in, so he let himself out, and Hannah saw him presently as he crossed the lawn to where his deputy still stood with Dennis. He went to work on the boy with a barrage of questions then. She could tell by the snapping of his head, quick-fire, before Dennis had a chance to dodge them. Sophie came to the study door.

  “Is he gone, Miss Blake?”

  “Temporarily at least,” she said without turning from the window. “Come in, Sophie. It must have been very difficult for you.”

  “He wanted to know all about Dennis.”

  Strange, Hannah thought. He had asked her nothing at all about the boy. She realized then that if the jewels were the issue on which the sheriff chose to concentrate, Dennis was a very likely suspect. He had been to Maria’s house three nights before, he might be presumed to have seen them and to have known her attitude toward them, and he was, in effect, a vagrant upon the town. Why then had the sheriff not asked her about him, where he had come from, why she hired him?

  “And did you tell him all about Dennis?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “I told him how I used to go out with him—I mean, how I used to sit in the boats, and how he used to recite to me.”

  “You didn’t tell me that he recited to you, Sophie.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Hannah looked around at the girl and smiled.

  “I thought you’d think it was silly,” Sophie added, her eyes on the floor.

  “I think it’s very touching,” Hannah murmured, returning to her vigil. “Did the sheriff want to know what he recited to you?”

  “Uh-huh. Like in school was all I could tell him, like in ‘this is the forest primeval—’”

  “What is primeval?” Hannah mused aloud, playing on the word.

  “I don’t know, Miss Blake.”

  “Of course you don’t. I wonder who in this world does.” She stretched the words tortuously, twisting the drapes in her fingers with the same deliberateness. She let them go. “What else did the officer ask?”

  Sophie hesitated. “He wanted to know if Dennis was ever in the house, this part of the house, and I said no. But I invited him in the kitchen sometimes and I told him. Not very often, Miss Blake, just a couple of times—”

  Hannah interrupted. “Why should you not invite him into the kitchen? Have I ever forbidden it?”

  “No, ma’am. And then he wanted to know if Dennis spent much money on me, and I said all he ever bought me was a Coke and once a bandanna for my hair.”

  “Was the officer upstairs?”

  “Here?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, but he was all over Dennis’s room.”

  “I see.” Hannah looked at her watch. “I shall want dinner at six-thirty. And, Sophie, don’t worry. I’m sure Dennis will be all right.”

  As soon as the sheriff and his deputy departed, their sirens screaming as they turned toward town, Hannah went to the porch. Dennis was closing the garage door, having put her car away. She called to him and waved him to the house. He followed her into the study without speaking.

  “Well, Dennis, we seem to have been involved in something.”

  He slumped into a chair. “It’s a mess,” he said.

  “I suppose they asked you all sorts of questions?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you tell the truth?”

  “Why not?” he said, which she assumed to be an evasion of her question.

  “I told them I believed you were in your room all last night,” she said. “I did see a light there.”

  “Thank you very much, Miss Blake.”

  “You were, weren’t you?” She turned the question on him as though he himself had cast a sudden doubt on the issue.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He was by no means calm, she realized, for all that he had seemed to relax into the chair. He was taut in the position he had taken there, and the muscles of his face were tight, even to making his skin pale in splotches beneath the sunburn.

  The lie might have been contrived to protect Elizabeth from something, to conceal their rendezvous of last night, for he and Elizabeth had been locked together in an—alibi. Why? And why did Mrs. Merritt apparently know nothing of their association, of the real issue between Elizabeth and her brother?

  “I doubt if they’ll do much of anything until they find the jewels,” Hannah said.

  “I never stole anything in my life, Miss Blake.”

  “I’m sure you haven’t,” she murmured. “And Mrs. Verlaine was very nice to you.”

  Dennis fumbled for a cigarette. “That’s an open question.”

  Hannah looked at him and repeated, “An open question?”

  He lit the cigarette and took a deep pull at it. “Damn my nerves. They go to pieces at a time like this,” he said, watching the tremble of his own hands.

  “In what way was Maria unkind?” Hannah persisted.

  “She wasn’t unkind. But she thinks I’m a phony, and she said so right out.”

  “Did she?” Hannah said. “That’s like Maria.” But there was something wrong, she thought, something completely out of joint. “And I’d say it was very unkind of her.”

  “She was entitled to her opinion,” Dennis said, almost roughly.

  “But Mr. Sykes didn’t share it,” Hannah prompted.

  “I don’t know if it affected him or not, and I don’t really give a damn.” He pulled himself up in the chair and sat with his hands between his knees, the smoke from the cigarette rising into his face and not seeming to bother him. “That’s a silly thing to say. I do care. A great deal. Not only for myself. Elizabeth Merritt asked him to read my things.”

  “And you’re fond of Elizabeth?”

  He was on guard for that, she thought. She should not have asked it. “She’s been very nice to me,” he said coldly.

  Hannah got up from the chair. She had to know, she thought. She had to know about this boy whom Maria called a phony. She stood above him looking down on the fair, ruffled hair. He always had the smell, the essence of the outdoors about him. For all that he was writhing now, he always seemed to ooze the fine, clean life virgin dreams thrived on, and he wrote with a wild and naked boldness which compelled unfortunates like herself to one of two alternatives: to strip before him and try to become his poem, or—to put more clothes on.

  She forced a smile and put her hand to his chin, lifting it. “What d
oes it matter now, what Maria thought?”

  He leaned back in the chair escaping her hand. And from the words he flung at her, his mouth half twisted in a smile, she took insult.

  “How do you know she wasn’t right?”

  She left him without a word and went upstairs.

  23

  THIS WAS TO BE no ordinary council meeting, Hannah realized as soon as she was within sight of the municipal building. The lawns and doorway were crowded with townspeople, most of whom she knew by sight at least. She spoke a word here and there, pushing through, but scarcely got a nod, so involved were they, each little group, in their exchange of hearsay.

  The stairs to the council chamber over the offices were lined with people demanding admission. They grumbled behind her as the great doors at the top were opened to her and closed against them. The chamber itself, a high-ceilinged room the length of the building, was filled with straining, restless people. There was nasty tempers among them, mostly in the Front Street crowd, headed by Dan O’Gorman. She greeted him and then moved quickly to where she was more at home.

  Ed Baker was propounding a theory. He was full of them, she thought. Maria’s maid, it seemed, was off for a couple of days, visiting her nephew in Jefferson City. “A convenience,” Baker said. “A real convenience.” He jerked his head toward the Front Streeters. “What do you think’s got them riled up?”

  Hannah began to sense something of the trouble. Annie Tullie herself came up from Front Street. She had a legion of friends and relatives there.

  “But I’ll tell you this,” Baker said to anyone who would listen, “from what I know of Maria, she wasn’t the kind to sit in the chair and wait for somebody to walk in and strangle her. Somebody held a gun on her.”

  “Then why the devil didn’t they use the gun?”

  A logical question, Hannah thought.

  “Too much noise. Besides, they can trace bullets to guns and guns to people,” Baker said profoundly.

  From the group behind her, Hannah learned that the coroner had ordered an autopsy, and that it was now in progress.

  “What’s that going to prove?” someone asked.

  “It’s going to prove the sheriffs right.”

  She turned to see who was speaking. The voice was familiar and bitter. It was Matheson, the police chief of Campbell’s Cove. He looked as though he were trying to find a place to spit. “No matter what comes out of it, that’s what it’s going to prove—that Walker was right. When the sheriff itches, the coroner scratches, and when the coroner scratches, the county prosecutor runs the bath. I ain’t saying he takes a bath, mind you. I’m just saying he lets the water run.”