Murder Comes to Eden

by Zenith Brown

  He started towards the terrace, deciding against a private drink, and stopped as he heard Mag Cameron’s husky, downright voice raised a little from the entrance hall just behind the big fireplace.

  “. . . be a very good painter, Art, but you’re the son of a female mongrel hound along with it,” she was saying, clearly meaning it. “If you don’t like the O’Learys’ rum, don’t come here. The O’Learys have a liquor budget—with four kids and this place to support they don’t have the money for Scotch to pour down your gullet, or ours, either. They’re sweet and we all love them . . . and nobody’d miss you if you left right now and stayed a thousand years. And one thing more—you’d better damn’ well quit all those psychological passes you’re making at Molly O’Leary. They’ll get you no place, and they’re very apt to get you a lot of bones broken too small to put together again.”

  “By whom, love?” Art Dunning’s voice, amused and mocking, answered hers.

  “I could name a dozen. Three ought to be enough. Joe Cameron’s one. Hal Potter’s another. And then there’s Spig. You’ve heard of him, I expect. He’s the big red-headed guy that’s married to the girl.”

  “And hasn’t brains enough to see the kind of girl he’s married to,” Dunning added easily. “He treats her like a plough horse. He hasn’t the slightest conception of what she really is. He married her before she was old enough to have any idea of it herself, and kept her producing these brats . . . buried out here, cooking, and cleaning and making beds, without the faintest idea of what life really is.”

  “And you’re planning to show her?”

  “I’m not discussing my plans with you, Maggie. And I’d think you’d quit being the earth-mother and worry a little about yourself, sweetie. Or did you know Joe Cameron simply slathers every time he looks at the gal?”

  “Joe Cameron and every other male on Eden’s Neck,” Mag Cameron said calmly. “That’s why I’m warning you. It’s all open and above board. The idea of termites would offend them horribly.”

  “Mag, you’re divine, you really are. It’s you I’m in love with. You must let me paint you.” Dunning laughed, the malice crackling underneath. “Such swivets you go into about nothing, honey. Like yesterday at the Potters’. Poor Anita.”

  “All I told Anita Ashton was to shut up. If she and Stan don’t want Stan’s child, that’s all right. But it’s not all right to tell the simple old rector that the poor O’Learys need the money Stan pays for Molly A.’s board and keep—especially when it’s a damned lie. Stan doesn’t pay them a bean, and never has. Molly A.’s a lucky child—nobody knew how lucky till Anita’s own brat came to live here when she got kicked out of that last school of hers. If any sixteen-year-old ever needed the hind end of a hairbrush it’s Anita’s child, Lucy Bronson. Telling me she’s been drinking martinis since she’s six years old.”

  “Five as I recall it. She was very precocious . . .”

  “I’m sure of it. But she’s not drinking them at my house and not snitching nary another one when my back’s turned. Our kids aren’t precocious, thank God. They’re just ordinary oafs that stay home nights, and that’s the way I’d like to keep them. And I don’t want to hear any more about Lucy’s tricks or Anita’s marriages, past or present. Not from you. You’re such a malicious little toad you’d knife the only friends you’ve got without greying a hair of your black, old goat’s beard. And where are they, by the way, your friends the Town Planner and his bride? Molly said——”

  “Oh, Molly invited them,” Dunning said. “But they’re busy, packing. To go abroad. Or didn’t you know?”

  “I didn’t,” Mag Cameron said. “When?”

  “Oh, pretty soon. Old Stan’s been invited to lecture in London. They say.”

  “You mean he hasn’t. Come on. I’ll listen to this one. I know you’re dying to tell it. What’s the catch?”

  Dunning laughed. “Maggie mine, I wouldn’t tell you for all the yellow bees in the ivy bloom. You’ll find out. I won’t spoil the show. As a matter of fact, Stan is giving one lecture. His publishers arranged it, by request. Anita’s.

  “You mean they’re getting out. Is that it? What for?”

  “To avoid the stink, I presume, love. For old Stan, I mean. Anita would adore it. But you don’t have to worry. It won’t hurt you people way over your side of Eden’s Neck.”

  “It’s this side it’s going to hurt?” Mag asked sharply. “Spig and Molly? And you think you’re in love with Molly? And this is the way you show it?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, Maggie. I’ll be right here to pick up the pieces. I’m keeping the studio till fall. Or till I finish my gallery of you rural types. That you’re going to love, Mag. My New York show. We’ll send you a card.”

  “Look, Art Dunning,” Mag Cameron said. “White things squash. Excuse me now, will you? I’d like a drink. Some nice, clean, antiseptic rum.”

  “I’ll come with you, honey. That’s henna you use, isn’t it? Not meant to deceive. So different from poor Anita’s peroxide. It’s very hard to stay twenty-nine with a sixteen-year-old around and not admit you were a child delinquent. But don’t be alarmed. I’m just fixing you in my camera mind. You and Miss Crazy Fairlie—then my gallery’s almost complete. There’s still Molly, but . . .”

  Spig O’Leary’s knuckles were white where he gripped the hand-hewed chestnut mantel as Dunning’s mocking voice lost itself against the backdrop of laughter from the terrace. There were white ridges along his jaw and a cold nausea in the pit of his stomach. It was a good thing he’d mastered his first impulse to go out and throttle the bearded little bastard when he started talking about Molly. Dunning could wait. He dropped his hands and stood a moment longer then turned and went very quietly back through the children’s hyphen and out the kitchen door, keeping in front of the native cedars so that neither the people on the terrace nor the children up in the garden would see him, until he reached the woods and made his way along the trail to the Ashton’s garden. He went around it on the grass to the front door.

  CHAPTER V

  THE NEW, bright blue convertible was standing there in the drive. The door was open but the screen hooked. He raised his hand to press the bell when he heard the phone ringing, and stopped when he heard the maid’s voice that did not sound like a maid’s voice.

  “Baltimore calling Mr. Charles Sudley. Is Mr. Charles Sudley there? Baltimore calling.”

  He heard her then in an apparent aside, “Who’s calling, please?” Then she said, “Lorton’s Used Car Sales calling Mr. Charles Sudley.”

  Spig understood then. It was a country line shared by the Ashtons and the Sudleys. To get the other party on the line you had to dial a code number and hang up for the ring. The O’Learys did that when they called Miss Fairlie.

  The maid, still in the character of a long distance operator, said, “Mr. Charles Sudley?” Then she giggled and said, “Okay Charlie,” in the character of herself. But the girl had been born and raised on the Sudley place, and anyway it was no business of Spig’s. He put his hand up to press the bell, and stopped again at the sudden urgency in her voice.

  “Listen quick, Charlie. She had to go to Washington with her mother. She said to tell you the same time, same place. And lookie, Charlie—you kids got to be careful, hear? You know what your father’ll say if he catches you. It’ll be me that . . .”

  Spig moved back and scraped his feet on the flagstones, reached out and pressed the bell. The girl’s voice changed instantly. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell Mr. Ashton you called. She expects to be home around nine o’clock. Good-bye, ma’am.”

  She came to the door, a very neat, competent, serenely composed, coloured girl. “Oh, Mr. O’Leary. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”

  “I heard you talking to Charlie Sudley, if that’s what you mean.”

  The girl swallowed, the bloom on her glossy cheek bleaching a dull liverish grey.

  “It’s okay with me,” Spig said. “It’s Charlie and Lucy’s business, not mine.
You’d keep out of it yourself, if you were smart.”

  “It’s Mr. Sudley—he’d be blood-mad. But Lucy’s just crazy after Charlie, Mr. O’Leary. He’s got a right to have a little fun. You won’t tell his father, will you?”

  “I said it was no business of mine. It’s Mr. Ashton I want to see.”

  The colour seeped back into her eyes and skin. “I’m sorry, sir. He’s busy writing. He’s not seeing anybody else, to-day.”

  “He’s seeing me.”

  She hesitated, glancing sideways down the hall to the living-room.

  “All right.” She unhooked the screen. “But don’t say it was me let you in, will you? I don’t want any trouble from him, either. The long distance wasn’t my idea. It was Lucy’s. That’s——”

  “You’d be in trouble just the same.”

  “That’s what I keep trying to tell them.” She pushed the door open. “Mr. Ashton’s back there in the living-room.” Her eyes met his directly. “He’s not busy. He’s not writing.”

  Spig went deliberately down the jade-green carpeted hall.

  And he’s not seeing anybody else to-day—or next week. Not when I get through with him. Stan Ashton’s treachery was beyond any further doubt. He wasn’t going to kill him . . . half-way through the woods a sudden return of sanity showed how senseless that would be. But Ashton was going to stay here. He wasn’t going sneaking off to Europe to avoid the stink of his own making. It was the first time in Spig O’Leary’s life he’d come in cold blood to beat the living hell out of any man, least of all a man he’d called his friend and brother.

  The double doors in front of him opened on to a small landing. He put his hand out, turned the heavy, brass knob, pushed one wing of the door open, stepped in, pushed it shut behind him, moved forward to the three broad steps going down into the panelled room spread out handsomely, and stopped.

  Mr. Ashton was there. He was not busy. He was not writing. He was not seeing anybody else that day. Or if he was, he was seeing them in triplicate, with wavering and densely foggy edges. Mr. Ashton was drunk as a skunk.

  He was sprawled out in a deep chintz chair in front of the marble fireplace, his feet up on a Chinese mirrored coffee table. On another table by the arm of his chair was an almost empty whisky bottle, a tipped-up glass beside it. A yellow rubber ice tub was knocked over on the floor, quietly adding to the pool of liquid spreading out into the jade-green carpet. It was the first time Spig had seen him near a whisky bottle. One martini was the most he ever took, or one bottle of beer, leaving half of it.

  Spig came down the steps and across the room. Liquor was slopped all over the front of the yellow, raw silk sports jacket and the yellow tie Ashton had yanked to one side to loosen the collar of his moss-green shirt. His face was flaccid, mottled a sickly grey, saliva oozing out of his weak mouth under the small, delicate moustache he’d recently grown. The whole face that had once seemed so boyish and clean-cut was the sodden portrait of a weakling, mask off, naked to the pitiless impassivity that observed him.

  A stertorous snore punctuated his spasmodic breathing, and Spig bent over quickly and picked up the arm dangling limply, his fingers searching for the pulse. There was a book sprawled open, face down, on the floor where Ashton had dropped it. On the glossy red and white jacket cover the title was brave and blue. Town Planning: An Ethical Approach to an American Problem. It was Stan’s new book, just out. On the glossy white of the jacket back was a picture of the author. Spig already knew what it said in the fine print below it.

  “No abstruse visionary is author S. Seton Ashton. Known to his friends as ‘Stan,’ he has taken an active and effective part in preserving the natural beauty of the highway in his own lovely County Devon bordering the Chesapeake. Town Planner Ashton is shown here on his own estate, instructing the neighbouring farm children in the difficult art of netting soft crabs from the Devon River.”

  Except that one of the children was his own and the other two were Tip and Kitsy, the last statement was essentially correct—except that it was Tip and Kitsy who were instructing the Town Planner in an art he alone was finding difficult. If you called the six acres he had left an estate. But Stan Ashton at least looked a whole lot better in the picture than he did right now.

  His wrist was clammy cold under Spig’s fingertips. His eyes opened slowly, in a glazed stare, and he gave a sudden lurch, kicking one leg off the coffee table, knocking a jade cigarette box shattering on to the hearth. He shook his head, blinking, trying to focus.

  “Spig . . . tha’ you, Spig?” he mumbled. He began to sob. “Fin’ her, Spig. Fin’ Kathy. She’s awrigh’. Kathy’s awrigh’ isn’ she, Spig?” The tears were pouring down his mottled cheeks.

  “She’s dead. Kathy’s dead.”

  Spig’s voice was harsh. The brutal impulse to kick him was almost too strong to resist. The swine. The rotten, little swine.

  “I wan’ Kathy. Nobody cares . . . nobody unnerstan’s. I won’ do it, Spig. I won’. I’m too fine. I’m too ’mportan’. I won’. They can’ make me, Spig! I won’ do it!”

  He waved his hands, fighting off an unseen enemy. “Keep away from me! Kathy! Kathy!”

  Spig started. The door had opened, almost as if Kathy had heard and come. Spig turned. Joe Cameron was on the steps, his big, red face showing mild surprise but nothing more.

  “What gives?”

  “He’s drunk.”

  Cameron came down the steps. Ashton lurched to his feet, swayed a moment and pitched forward, smashing the mirrored table into shivering rainbows as he crashed on down to the floor, out cold.

  Cameron crossed the room. “What were you going to do? Kill him?” he asked dispassionately.

  “Not quite.”

  “Good thing he was drunk. We saw your car. Mag figured you might have heard Dunning. What’s the deal?”

  “He’s selling this place to a gambling outfit. Sudley told me. He thought I was in on it. He’s got a sign up to-night next to the Three D. Six hundred acres for sale. For industrial development. Two thousand feet on the river.”

  Cameron was silent for a long moment. “I saw him in the bank Friday . . . knew he was sore about something out here. If Stan doesn’t sell, will Sudley change his mind? He’s a fanatic about gambling.”

  “I don’t know. But Stan’s not going to sell. Not to a gambling outfit. Not if——”

  “All right, take it easy.”

  Cameron stood looking around the room until his eyes came to rest on a portrait of Stanley S. Ashton, over the marble mantelpiece. Old Stan was sitting in the foreground at one side of the wide canvas, his book in his hand. It was curiously thin and spidery—like his hands but not like them. The background was a slum street in long perspective, painted in minute, painstaking, brilliant detail. It was not a drab slum but gaily, gaudily alive, flaunting its colourful lack of virtue and orderliness, revelling lustily in it. Ashton looked like a bloodless self-satisfied prig set to destroy it. Two half-naked sailors were lolling in the doorway of one of the shops. On the window was stencilled: “Tattoo Artist—Arthur A. Dunning.”

  “If that was me, I’d hang it in the attic,” Joe Cameron remarked. “Facing the rafters.” He turned away. “You’d think Stan could see Dunning’s crucified him. I’d kill him, if he did it to me. Ever see him over in a corner grinning when Ashton stands under it when people are here?”

  He looked down at old Stan. “What do we do with him?”

  “Leave him lay.”

  Cameron’s eyes moved to the book face down on the floor.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s take an Ethical Approach to an American Problem. You take the Town Planner’s feet. I’ll take this end. His room’s through there. We’ll dump the little bastard, and you go home. I’ll stick around till the maid sees he’s alive. If he wakes up and hits the bottle again, he might not be.”

  “You better get a doctor, then. I want him alive, not dead.”

  “Good idea. Hang on to it.”

  They carrie
d him through the door by the fireplace, across the hall into his bedroom, and laid him on the ice-blue, satin cover.

  “I was afraid of this when Anita came, but I thought she’d got used to it down here,” Cameron said. “Or something. Come around to the office to-morrow. I’ll get my lawyer in. See what we can do.”

  Spig shook his head. “I’m taking a week off. To stick around. I should have done it a lot sooner.”

  “Okay. Remember this—he didn’t get stone blind for nothing. It sort of backs up an idea Mag’s got. She doesn’t think it’s him, or Anita either. She thinks Dunning’s the snake in the Gardens of Eden. She’s pretty good at calling the shots on people. Except little Lucy—she’s dead wrong about her. But you go on. And watch it, boy. He’s not worth hanging for.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And Spig . . .” Cameron stopped him as he started through the door. “I wouldn’t get up a tree about anything else Dunning may have said.”

  “I’m not going to,” Spig said shortly.

  “You got enough trouble, without making up any extra in your own head. Get yourself a stiff drink, why don’t you?”

  Spig stood on the terrace for a moment, breathing in the decent air. Two hundred yards off, beyond the chestnut oaks, the bridge rose, delicate and lovely in in the glow of the setting sun. The corner of his mouth moved as he recalled a line from the book face down in there on the floor. “Man’s mind creates beauty from concrete and steel: man’s cupidity, crouching in the jungle of ignorance, waits only to leap and destroy it.” Man, reading his own prophetic words, well might weep and reach for the bottle. Whoever was pushing Ashton, cupidity was in there greasing the skids. Spig was wrong. He’d been counting on vanity as Ashton’s compelling force. It had run a bad second if all it could do was get polluted and weep for itself. But the fact that it could still weep meant it wasn’t entirely dead.