Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

  Miss Lizzie said, “You say that Mrs. Burton was blackmailing Mr. Chatsworth?”

  “His wife’s a cripple. Keeled over one day, ten years ago, bang, and that was that. Stroke, they said. Legs gone, been in bed ever since. She’s a Cooper, of course. Bad stock. The grandmother was loony, the aunt ran off with a blacksmith. Can you imagine?” She cackled. “A blacksmith? No wonder Bessie turned out the way she did. In bed all day with her morphine and her ghosts.”

  Miss Lizzie said, “And Mrs. Burton learned about the morphine and used that knowledge to blackmail Mr. Chatsworth?”

  Scornfully: “Don’t be dense. Whole town knows about the morphine.”

  “Then why—”

  “You answer me a question,” said Mrs. Marlowe, and smiled.

  “What question?” asked Miss Lizzie guardedly.

  “Amy Stockwell said you tried to buy poison for two whole weeks before the murders. Prussic acid. Couldn’t find anyone to sell it to you. That true?”

  “Surely if it had been,” said Miss Lizzie, “it would have been revealed at the trial.”

  “Bilge. You had the best lawyer in the state. Ex-governor. Same man who gave the judge his job. Your judge. They worked a deal at the trial, Amy said.”

  “No deal was worked.”

  “So you deny it? The Prussic acid?”

  “I don’t see that I have to.”

  Mrs. Marlowe displayed her yellow teeth. “Cool as a cucumber, eh? Good, good. But you should’ve waited, woman.”

  “About Mr. Chatsworth,” said Miss Lizzie.

  Mrs. Marlowe cackled. “Cool as a cucumber. You want to know about Sidney? All right. Sidney’s been”—Mrs.Marlowe glanced at me, looked back at Miss Lizzie—“carrying on with that table-rapper. That Madame Whosis.”

  “Mrs. Archer?” said Miss Lizzie, surprised. “The spiritualist?”

  “Can’t imagine what he sees in her. Face like a bucket of worms. Course, Bessie’s no prize herself, and never was. Always looked like she was standing around waiting for someone to slap a saddle on her back.” Another cackle. “No accounting for tastes, eh?”

  “They were … involved?”

  Mrs. Marlowe frowned. “Didn’t I just say that? And Audrey found out about it. And she told Sidney she knew. Said she wanted a little money to keep her mouth shut.”

  “And Mr. Chatsworth paid her?”

  She grinned. “Didn’t have any choice, did he? Crippled or not, addled or not, Bessie’s the one with the money. She finds out Sidney’s having at it with her pet table-rapper, she’ll drop him like a hot potato. Write him clean out of the will. And her brother, he’d make it stick. He’s their attorney, and he never did like Sidney. No one did.” Another cackle.

  “You know that for a fact?” asked Miss Lizzie.

  “Course I do. He’s a blockhead.”

  Miss Lizzy smiled wearily. “Do you know for a fact that Mrs. Burton threatened to inform Mrs. Chatsworth, and that Mr. Chatsworth bought her off?”

  “For an absolute fact. Told you, I know everything. People tell me things.” She pointed to the telephone on her nightstand. “Greatest invention of all time.”

  “And someone must’ve told things to Audrey Burton.”

  Mrs. Marlowe blinked. “What d’you mean?”

  Miss Lizzie sipped from her cup. “Mrs. Burton was a stranger here in town. How could she possibly have learned about an affair between two local people, a relationship that both of them, presumably, were keeping secret, unless someone had told her?”

  Smiling comfortably, Mrs. Marlowe said, “Someone did, I expect. Town is crawling with busybodies and snoops. Makes a body sick to think about it.”

  “And which one of them, do you suppose, would be spiteful enough, poisonous enough, evil enough, to provide that piece of information to Mrs. Burton?”

  Mrs. Marlowe’s smile had faded and she was glaring through her wire-rims. “Why ask me? How would I know? What Audrey did was her own damn business. Not my fault she was a bitch. Evil? If anyone was evil, it was Audrey. Isn’t that right, Amanda? You know that. Tell her.”

  Miss Lizzie set down her tea cup and saucer. “Come along, Amanda. Time for us to leave.”

  As we stood, Mrs. Marlowe said, “But one thing I’ll say for Audrey.” Her face was red. Her thin arms were at her sides, her tiny fists clenched. “She never killed her parents. She never picked up an axe and hacked her mother’s head off.”

  “Thank you for the tea,” said Miss Lizzie.

  We were moving out the room, down the hall, but Mrs. Marlowe was shouting after us: “She never killed anyone! She never spilled blood! Spill it? She never splashed it all over the house! She never wallowed in it! She never chopped anybody up and got away with it!” She started to cackle then, and we could still hear it from far off, the wild brittle rattle of her laughter, when we let ourselves out the front door.

  I could hear Miss Lizzie breathing heavily beside me, but neither of us spoke as we walked down the walkway. When we reached the sidewalk she put her hand on my shoulder, stopped moving, and said, “Are you all right?” Concern furrowed her brow, narrowed her eyes.

  “I’m okay, Miss Lizzie. Are you?”

  “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “Yes.” Suddenly she smiled. “But rather glad to be out of there.”

  “She’s not a very nice lady, is she?”

  “No. Not very nice at all.”

  We moved off down Main Street.

  After a while I asked her, “I guess Audrey really was a blackmailer.”

  She looked at me and nodded, her lips compressed. “If Mrs. Marlowe is telling the truth.”

  “Maybe she isn’t, you mean?”

  “We’ll find out, Amanda.”

  “Are we going to ask Mr. Chatsworth?”

  She smiled. “I think we’ll leave that to Mr. Boyle. I’ve had quite enough of the local gentry for a while.”

  “If she was blackmailing him, he could’ve been the one who did it. To get rid of her.”

  She nodded. “Possibly.”

  Two cars passed us, both heading into town.

  I said, “So you think it was Mrs. Marlowe who told Audrey about Mr. Chatsworth?”

  “Assuming that anything she said is true, yes. And, again on that assumption, it must have been Audrey who told her about the blackmail.”

  “Why?”

  “From what she said, she and Mr. Chatsworth aren’t on the best of terms. He wouldn’t have told her, certainly. And who else is there?”

  “Mrs. Archer?”

  “I rather doubt that.”

  “But how do you think Mrs. Marlowe knew in the first place? About Mr. Chatsworth and Mrs. Archer?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Chatsworth has servants, and one of them talked to someone else’s servant. And someone overheard and told someone else, and sooner or later it reached Mrs. Marlowe.”

  “Why do people gossip so much?”

  “Gossip is like glue. It holds people together.”

  “How?”

  “Well,” she said, “when two people gossip about someone else, they’re proving to each other, and to themselves, that they’re alike. That they have the same terribly weighty concerns, and the same terribly impeccable standards.”

  “But sometimes gossip isn’t very nice.”

  Miss Lizzie smiled. “If it were nice, it wouldn’t be gossip.”

  We were coming into the business section once again.

  I looked at her. “So I guess Mrs. Archer was Mr. Chatsworth’s girlfriend?”

  She looked at me. “I suppose so. But let’s not worry about it any more, shall we? What would you like for dinner tonight? Shall we stop at Hanrahan’s and pick up a nice bit of steak?”

  “Sure. Can we have baked potatoes too?”

  She nodded. “I think we deserve them, don’t you?”

  I laughed. “Yes.”

  A Ford Model T stopped across the street. Its horn honked and the driver waved. “Miz Borden!”

  It wa
s Boyle. He opened the door, stepped out, and crossed the street, hands in his pants pockets. He still wore the rumpled brown suit he had worn when we first met him.

  He told Miss Lizzie that Mr. Foley, the second Pink-erton man, was talking to all the shopkeepers in town, trying to identify the man William had described. Miss Lizzie told him what the two of us had learned from Mrs. Marlowe.

  When she finished, Boyle smiled. “You don’t need me, Miz Borden. You’re gonna put a lid on this thing all by yourself.”

  Miss Lizzie smiled back. “I think you should be the one to speak to Mr. Chatsworth.”

  “Soon’s I get done with Charlie. On my way to his place now.”

  “Can I go with you?” I asked him. I am not really sure why I asked. Perhaps I merely wanted to see again a face that had, before Audrey’s death, been friendly.

  He shrugged. “Okay with me.” He looked at Miss Lizzie.

  She frowned. “It’s getting near to dinnertime, Amanda.”

  “It won’t take long. Will it, Mr. Boyle?”

  Boyle shrugged again. “Shouldn’t.”

  “Dinner will be at eight,” she told him.

  Boyle took a watch from his pocket, glanced at it. “Over two hours. No problem.”

  “You’ll keep a close eye on her?” she asked him.

  “Sure.”

  To me: “All right, dear.” To Boyle: “Before eight o’clock, then.”

  Boyle’s car smelled like Boyle, which is to say, like cigarette smoke. He sat back comfortably on the seat as he drove, his left elbow hooked out the window, his right hand at the top of the steering wheel, Fatima notched between first and second fingers.

  I asked him, “Do you think Mr. Chatsworth could’ve killed Audrey?”

  “Coulda, yeah.” He shrugged. “Coulda been Mrs. Archer. Coulda been anyone, at this point.”

  “Mrs. Archer? But she’s tiny. She’s smaller than me.”

  “Big enough to hold a hatchet.”

  “But then why would she come to Miss Lizzie’s like that? If mean, if she was the one who did it.”

  Boyle took a drag from the cigarette. “Two ways to find out what someone knows. One, you ask him questions. Two, you let him ask you questions. If we’d of asked Mrs. Archer about the murder, she would of known, maybe, that we thought she did it.”

  “But nobody asked her anything.”

  He nodded. “And now she knows we don’t think she did it Damn.” He jerked the steering wheel, but too late: We hit a rock and the Ford jumped. It landed with a thump, its body rattling, and skittered to the left.

  “Not much of a road,” said Boyle, easing up on the gas pedal, slowing down the car. He brushed cigarette ashes from his pants.

  The road was dirt, potholed and badly rutted. Along its sides sat small clapboard houses, most of them painted white, each surrounded by a small plot of lawn. Some of the houses were ramshackle, their dingy paint flaked and blistered, their roofs sagging; the sunburned yellow grasses in front were as high as my waist. The windows of these were open, and the front doors too, all leading into an interior darkness that seemed to be not so much the absence of light as the presence of something else, something palpable and oppressive. As though to escape this, the people sat out on the porch steps under the lengthening late-afternoon shadows, black men and women and children.

  When we drove by in the Ford, they suddenly stopped whatever it was they were doing. Husbands stopped talking to their wives; old men stopped laughing with each other; a young girl, my age, brown legs lean and strong below a frilled pink skirt, stopped skipping rope in the dusty footpath that led down to the road. They stopped and they looked at us, not with hatred or fear or resentment, not even with curiosity, but with a kind of blank watchfulness: as though they were waiting, all of them, to learn what this intrusion signified before they would commit themselves to any particular emotion.

  We passed other houses as well, these set on small, neatly trimmed lawns bordered with whitewashed picket fences and carefully tended flower gardens, chrysanthemums and carnations gay against the green of grass. But the people on those steps watched us in the same way; and the houses themselves, neat and trim and brightly painted as they were, still seemed guarded, suspicious, still seemed to be marking time until we left.

  It was in front of one such house that Boyle brought the car to a stop. Flowers grew in a rectangular plot on the left of the lawn, tomatoes and lettuce and runner beans in a plot on the right. Behind the building was a small patch of corn, slender pale-green stalks leaning at an angle from last night’s storm.

  “Here we are,” said Boyle.

  “Charlie lives here?” I asked him. I had begun to picture Charlie living, squalid and sad, in a rundown sullen shack like one of those we had passed.

  “Yep. C’mon.”

  I did not really want to come. For the first time, as we drove down that road, I had understood that black people might lead lives in their own right, and not serve merely as adjuncts and background to the lives of white people. Not an especially brilliant insight, granted, but rather a disconcerting one at the time. I did not know what I ought to do with it, did not know where thought and feeling, armed (and alarmed) by this new truth, might lead me. I told myself that by being here we were imposing ourselves upon people who wanted nothing to do with us. But the truth is, their sudden reality was imposing itself upon me; and I had, or so I thought, experienced quite enough of new realities over the past week.

  But even if I could have verbalized all this to Boyle, it was too late now to tell him.

  We got out of the car and followed the flagstones up to the porch. Pale-blue curtains hung in the windows. To our left, a white wooden swing hung above the floor. They were simple, everyday objects; and yet, just then, invincibly alien to me.

  I asked Boyle, “What’s that smell?”

  “Chickens. Pretty ripe, huh? Coop must be out back.”

  He knocked on the door. After a moment, Charlie opened it.

  He wore polished black shoes, pressed black woolen pants, an opened black vest, a white shirt without its collar. I had never seen him dressed in anything but blue denim coveralls, and those usually stained and smeared.

  “Mr. Peterson?” said Boyle.

  Charlie looked from Boyle to me.

  “Hi, Charlie.” I smiled, pleased to see him even if he chose to masquerade as someone else.

  He looked down at me, and his face was far from friendly. The black skin tightened around his eyes and curled downward at the corners of his mouth.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE EXPRESSION DISAPPEARED from Charlie’s face so quickly I was unable to determine what it was, beyond a kind of general unhappiness. He looked back at Boyle and said, “You not the poh-lice.”

  “Uh-uh. Pinkerton. Harry Boyle. We need to ask you a couple questions about last Tuesday. Won’t take long.”

  Charlie’s mouth moved as he sucked at a tooth. He said, “I already talk to the poh-lice.”

  Boyle smiled pleasantly. “Good. Then this’ll just be more of the same. Easy stuff. Could we come in?”

  Frowning, Charlie reached up and scratched for a moment at the back of his white-haired head. Then he said, “We talk out here. Don’t want to disturb Mrs. Peterson. She ailin’ some right now.” He waved a hand—reluctantly, I thought—toward the swing.

  Boyle and I sat down on the swing. Charlie leaned back against the low wall of the porch. He did not seem to know what to do with his knobby hands. For a moment he put them, large and gnarled, one atop the other on his lap, and then he crossed his arms and held them underneath, long fingertips flat against the curve of his ribs.

  “We interrupting something?” Boyle asked him.

  “Gettin’ ready for services. Over to the church.”

  This was a very different Charlie from the man who had joked and laughed with me. He lived within a quiet self-possession at which I would never have guessed. And yet behind it, so it seemed to me, lay the same guarded watc
hful quality, the same wariness, I had sensed since we arrived in his neighborhood.

  “This won’t take long,” Boyle assured him.

  Charlie nodded. “Yessuh.” He had not looked at me since that first glance in the doorway. Now he did. “Sorry about your momma, Miss Amanda.”

  I said, “Thank you, Charlie.”

  “The good Lord give and he take away. He give you comfort now, you axe for it.”

  I nodded.

  “Mr. Peterson,” said Boyle.

  “Yessuh?” Blinking, he shifted his position slightly on the wall.

  “You were on Water Street last Tuesday? Near Mrs. Burton’s house?”

  “Poh-lice already axe me that.”

  Boyle nodded. “And what’d you tell them?”

  “I tole ’em the truth. Yessuh, I on Water Street Tuesday.”

  “Did you go to the Burton house?”

  “Yessuh. Goes up and knocks on the door like I do. See if Miz Burton, she wants to order her a chicken. Usually she do. Once a week, leastways. But nobody show up, so I leaves. This just like I tole the poh-lice.”

  “You see anybody else around?”

  “I sees that Mr. Hornsby. Big gennleman works on Captain Hardee’s boat. The police, they already know he be there. He the one say I be there.”

  “You talked to the police yesterday?”

  “Yessuh. Chief Da Silva come here. And another one. That Mistuh Medley. ’Bout this time of day.”

  “Where was Hornsby when you saw him?”

  “He comin’ down Water Street. I goin’ up.”

  “After you left the Burtons’ house.”

  “Yessuh.”

  “And you were going north on Water?”

  “Yessuh. North.”

  “Away from downtown.”