The Recycled Citizen

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I’m going with you,” said Sarah.

  The upshot, of course, was that everybody went except Mary.

  “You won’t mind going with Max, will you, Dolph? I really ought to stay and help Genevieve clean up the kitchen. She must be tired.”

  Sarah doubted that. Genevieve had put in a good many years under Great-aunt Matilda’s iron heel; working for Mary must be her idea of heaven. The truth of the matter was that Dolph was all geared up to spare the little woman and do his duty like a soldier, and Mary was too good a wife to crab his act.

  As they sorted themselves out for the ride, Sarah couldn’t help thinking they were an unusual group to be so closely allied. Theonia, the raven-haired, sloe-eyed, almost alarmingly well-mannered offspring of a Gypsy mother and an Ivy League anthropology student who’d got more closely involved with his subject than he’d meant to, was perhaps the most exotic.

  Certainly she was the most striking to look at, and showed every intention of remaining so. Theonia still carried her height proudly, although she’d given up wearing high heels when she married Brooks. She walked every day to maintain a reasonable balance between her excellent appetite and her Rubenesque figure. During the daytime she dressed in simple black or dark red with a modest string of pearls. At night she burgeoned forth in wondrous creations of her own.

  This being a brisk September evening, Theonia had put on a sumptuous wine-colored velvet dinner gown she’d first espied as a marked-down negligee in Filene’s Basement. She’d remodeled the velvet to follow the lines of her expensive foundation garment and trimmed it with creamy lace taken from what would have been called a teddy by Sarah’s late mother-in-law, to whom the teddy had once belonged.

  Such a gown really called for a sable cloak, Sarah thought. In deference to Brooks’s views on the wanton slaughter of fur-bearing mammals for human adornment, however, Theonia had bought three yards of black woolen coating material and made herself a stole. With this draped carefully over her high-piled hair and flung around all that lace and velvet, she rather suggested a middle-aged Tosca on her way to stab Baron Scarpia.

  Brooks Kelling, standing five feet six inches tall and weighing perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, might have been considered a laughable consort to so queenly a spouse, but nobody laughed at Brooks. Something about him put one in mind of those unassuming chaps John Buchan used to write about: the ones who could speak fluently any obscure foreign dialect that happened to serve the immediate purpose, could contrive an impenetrable disguise with a handful of dust and a trick of the mind, could construct any required device from whatever bits and pieces might lie at hand, could endure any hardship or face any peril with a hymn on their lips and a Sunday School text in their hearts, could effect the downfall of the Schwarzestein at the precise moment when it appeared to be inevitably in der Siegeskrohe, then go back to scratching the backs of their pedigreed pigs and taking twenty-mile strolls across the moors with Carlyle’s “Essay on Burns” for company.

  Brooks was a photographer of ospreys’ nests and a former entertainer at children’s birthday parties. He could build almost anything but was inclined to be fussy about his materials. He spoke only Andover-Harvard and had no trouble making himself perfectly understood in it anywhere, under any circumstances. He altered his appearance by wearing a straw boater with a feather of the crested grebe tucked into the hatband during the summer, and a greenish-gray felt hat with a feather of the ruddy turnstone in the winter. The only perils he’d ever quailed at were bossy widows who wanted to marry him, but Theonia had relieved him of those. The Schwarzestein wouldn’t have got to first base with Brooks Kelling and had never been known to try.

  Jeremy Kelling was about Brooks’s height and roughly twice his girth. There was a cousinly resemblance between them, but Sarah could never have pictured Uncle Jem photographing an osprey’s nest or thwarting the Schwarzestein or anybody else by agility or guile. He might, she supposed, succeed in paralyzing a foe with a jug of his special-formula martinis. More likely he’d yell for his man Egbert to handle the matter. Lately, to Sarah’s annoyance, he’d taken to yelling for Max.

  In Sarah’s personal opinion Max Bittersohn was far and away the most distinguished member of the group. She could well believe his ancestors had been priests in the temple of Solomon while the Kellings were still painting themselves blue and being nasty to the Picts. Max was just about six feet tall and looked less than the forty years he’d soon have attained. His dark brown hair had a marvelous wave to it; his gray-blue eyes saw a great deal more than most people realized they did.

  Lately the expression on Max’s handsome though by no means pretty face had been often anxious. That was due to impending fatherhood; normally Max was a cheerful man, though never boisterous like Jem. By profession Max was a private detective specializing in the recovery of precious art objects. Recently he’d developed a sideline: fishing members of the enormous Kelling tribe out of hot water.

  Sarah herself had been Max’s first Kelling catch, and the only one he’d never felt any urge to throw back. She was small and slight like Brooks, had a modified version of the square Kelling jaw, but had mercifully escaped the Kelling nose. Her hair was brown, much lighter than Max’s, and was showing a tendency to curl now that she’d had it cut short. Her skin was delicate and inclined to be pale except when she blushed. She was still under thirty and as happy as an expectant mother could be, considering how many relatives’ good advice she had to endure.

  The luxurious car Max drove was his only step in the direction of ostentation, and not much of one at that since he used it often on business, needed plenty of trunk space to bring back the rescued Rembrandts and dealt mostly with rich clients who expected him to look successful. Dolph plunked himself down in the front passenger seat without waiting to be asked. Sarah shrugged, slid under the steering wheel and put her feet up on the hump in the middle. Max checked to make sure his impending offspring was in no danger of being squashed, then took his place behind the wheel. Theonia sat in back with Brooks on her right and Jem on her left, like a hybrid tea rose between two Boston baked beans.

  All but Dolph lived on Beacon Hill. Jem shared a memento-filled flat on Pinckney Street with his long-suffering henchman, Egbert. Brooks and Theonia were at present managing the historic brownstone on Tulip Street that Sarah had inherited from her first husband, Alexander Kelling, and then had turned into a remarkably high-toned boardinghouse. Sarah herself had retreated with Max to a small apartment next door while waiting for their new house at Ireson’s Landing to be finished.

  At this time of night it was about a twenty-minute run from Chestnut Hill. Max made it in fifteen. “I’ll drop the rest of you at the boardinghouse and get Sarah up to bed before Dolph and I go on to the morgue, if that’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed,” Sarah protested.

  “Then stay with us till Max gets back. Mothers-to-be must be humored,” said Theonia.

  Theonia herself had never been a mother, but she had a way of investing her pronouncements with an authority it would have seemed folly to question. She might have acquired the knack during her earlier career as a tea-leaf reader, but anyway, Max yielded. Sarah went into the house with the rest and accepted a glass of hot milk in deference to her delicate condition. Jem asked for black coffee. Brooks and Theonia drank something called Snoozybye Tea, and thus it was that Max found them when he got back from his direful errand.

  “It was Arthur, all right,” he told them. “Dolph’s pretty cut up. This is the first violent death they’ve had among the SCRC members, and he’s blaming himself. He thinks it wouldn’t have happened if he’d got that warehouse remodeled sooner.”

  “Poor Dolph,” said Sarah. “Mary’s right about him, you know. Where is he now?”

  “I ran him back to Chestnut Hill. We weren’t long at the morgue. There was nothing to stay for. Dolph promised to send an undertaker around in the morning, and they presented us with Arthur’s personal effects.”
/>
  He held up a worn and ripped brown paper shopping bag with SCRC stamped in big green letters on one side. “This is it, except for the membership card in his pocket and the clothes on his back. He’d been bit over the head from behind with a tire iron, which was left at the scene. Dolph thinks he might have had a little money on him. Arthur was a conscientious collector and came in with a bunch of bottles and cans to be redeemed every day. The cops who picked him up said there were maybe a dozen empty soft-drink cans scattered around the body, presumably from the torn bag.”

  “Died with his boots on, eh?” said Brooks. “I suppose there might be worse ways for a person in his situation to go. Will there be a funeral?”

  “Oh yes, it’s a perquisite of membership. The members are all elderly, you know, so they lose one to Father Time every so often, and they always make a point of giving them a decent send-off. Dolph says it was Mary’s idea. Maybe it doesn’t help the dead person much, but it makes the rest feel better. They go to a community church nearby, one of their members who used to be janitor in a church or something conducts a nonsectarian service, then they troop back to the center for coffee and cake.”

  “How perceptive of dear Mary,” said Theonia softly, “letting those dear people know they’ll be decently cared for even after they’re gone. Brooks darling, do you think I ought to bake something?”

  “Why don’t you check with Mary in the morning, my dear? She’ll know better than I. Max, can I offer you something? Tea? Brandy?”

  “Brandy, if you don’t mind. I could use it.” Max was fiddling with the tattered shopping bag. “Poor bugger. Hadn’t a damn thing but this, and some son of a bitch wouldn’t even let him keep it. I suppose these printed bags were Mary’s idea too?”

  “No, I think they were Dolph’s,” said Sarah. “Look out, Max, there’s sugar or something dribbling out on the rug.”

  “Sugar?”

  “One takes it, you know,” said Theonia, “those little packets they put out at lunch counters. The extra carbohydrates help get one through the night if one has to sleep in a cold doorway.”

  Max nodded, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He’d spread a newspaper over the library table and laid the bag on top. Now he was ripping the folds apart, finding a few grains still caught inside.

  “Got something we can examine it with, Brooks?”

  “Just a second.” Brooks ran lightly up the elegantly proportioned but rather steep and narrow staircase. In a moment he was back with an old-fashioned brass microscope in his hand.

  “Picked it up years ago at the Morgan Memorial thrift shop,” he explained, fiddling with the adjustments. “Now let’s have a speck or two of that stuff on a slide.”

  He produced a pair of needlepointed tweezers and a slim oblong of glass, selected a few grains and arranged the slide under the lens.

  “Ah yes, very interesting. Not salt, surely. Rather like sugar in its crystalline structure, and you know, Max, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “I think it mightn’t be a bad idea to get this over to the police laboratory.”

  Max shook his head. “I’d rather get my own chemist to run the analysis if you don’t want to take the responsibility, for which I wouldn’t blame you. Only I’d rather not go to the police unless I’m sure there’s something to go for. And then I’ll want to even less,” he added soberly. “You know, Brooks, we could put Dolph and Mary out of business if we let it be even suspected somebody’s running drugs through the SCRC.”

  “Then what would happen to all those waifs and strays who are looking to them for a nice, cozy funeral?” grunted Jem. “Far be it from me to indulge in an excess of sweetness and light, but I have to admit it would disturb me to see some poor bum lying around unplanted because my Cousin Adolphus was in the jug for peddling dope. Gad, can’t you see the old blowhard sitting in a concrete cell with a honey bucket beside him, bellowing for the warden to bring him the Wall Street Journal?”

  “Uncle Jem, that’s not a bit funny,” Sarah protested. “Don’t you realize Dolph actually could wind up getting arrested?”

  “But surely not convicted?”

  “No, of course not. Merely detained long enough to ruin his fund drive and break Mary’s heart.”

  She hadn’t realized how close she was to crying until Max did something he normally wouldn’t have dreamed of, to distract her. He picked up one of the cups that had held the Snoozybye Tea, a piece of blue and white export china that had come back in one of the Kelling clippers from Hangkow sometime during the, late 1800s, and handed it to Theonia.

  “Okay, you’re the expert. What’s your prognostication?”

  Theonia inclined her head, took the cup in her fingers, tilted it upside down and let a few dregs run out into the saucer. For some little time she gazed at the flecks adhering to the inside. Then, without saying anything, she hurled the precious bit of porcelain straight at the back of the fireplace, smashing it to slivers against the soot-blackened bricks. She stood up, smoothed down her velvet skirt, said in her usual dovelike coo, “If you people will excuse me, there are some things I have to attend to upstairs,” and went.

  “We now assume,” said Jem, “that the party is over. Call a cab, will you, Brooks?”

  Chapter

  3

  MAX WAS ON THE phone to Marseilles when Sarah got up, giving somebody named Pepe urgent instructions about two Paul Klee paintings and a Winslow Homer.

  “What an unusual combination,” she remarked when he at last hung up. “That would have been Pepe le Moko at the other end, I suppose. I thought you’d intended to go to Marseilles yourself.”

  “I had, until this business of Dolph’s came up. Pepe can handle the French end without me, I hope. It’s high time I began delegating more responsibility. Actually his last name’s Ginsberg, pronounced GeensBAIR. You met him when we were in Paris, remember? The guy who looks like a mink wearing a purple T-shirt. How’s the kid this morning?”

  “I haven’t asked. I don’t think he’s awake yet. Would you like a glass of milk?”

  “God, no.”

  “Neither would I.” Nevertheless Sarah went to the refrigerator. “It’s always the woman who pays,” she complained, licking a narrow white, mustache off her upper lip. “Do you actually mean to say you’re staying home because of what happened last night?”

  “Why not? I’m practicing to be a family man. Dolph and Mary are family, aren’t they? Frankly, kätzele, I’ve been holding my breath for fear something like this would come up. Those printed scavenging bags were a serious mistake, in my opinion.”

  “But they’re meant to give the SCRC members a feeling they’re doing a real job instead of just pawing around in trash bins,” Sarah protested. “It’s part of the self-esteem thing. Besides, Dolph got them for nothing from that old crony of his who owns a printing company.”

  “I know.” Max poured juice for himself and Sarah. “The only trouble with building up an identity is that it makes you too damned easy to identify.”

  He drank some of his juice. “Suppose I’m out on the corner dealing and I see somebody who looks as if he might be a narc bearing down on me. Naturally I don’t care to get caught with a pocketful of drugs. I see this nice old guy shuffling through the garbage, and I see he’s carrying a nice, convenient shopping bag that says SCRC on it in nice, conspicuous letters. I figure he’s not going to be too far away after the narcotics agent frisks me and finds me clean, and that bag will be easy to spot. I drop my merchandise in among his junk, let him wander off on his appointed rounds, follow him as soon as the coast is clear, and engage him in light conversation while I rip his bag open and get my goods back.”

  He drank the rest of his juice. “Or else I join a respectable organization, get myself an official SCRC membership card and a bag that will make it easy for my customers to spot me. I run my business right out of that shopping bag until some dissatisfied customer hits me over the head and r
obs my store.”

  “Which do you think happened to Chet Arthur?”

  “I’m trying not to think anything about Chet Arthur until we’ve got a chemist’s report. That powder might have been something he used to cure his athlete’s foot, for all I know.”

  “Yes dear. I’m sure you’d cancel your trip to Marseilles for a case of athlete’s foot. How about scrambled eggs and a toasted bagel?”

  “How about a toasted bagel and a little kootchy-koo?”

  “That’s what you said to me eight months ago, and look what happened.” Sarah gave her husband a chaste kiss on the brow and went to toast the bagels, which she still tended to regard as glamorous and exotic gourmet fare. “When do you plan to see the chemist?”

  “As soon as I can get away. I’m expecting a call from Ghent.”

  “Good news, I hope.”

  “So do I. Ah, that must be it now.”

  But it wasn’t Ghent, it was Mary Kelling. “Max, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Would you care to share your thoughts?” he prompted when she seemed reluctant to go on.

  “Well, I don’t want to make a bad matter worse, but after you folks left last night, I got to wondering what Chet Arthur had been doing over in the Back Bay. The thing of it is, Chet had his little quirks, as most of us old fogies do, and one of them was that he was scared stiff of going anywhere beyond Arlington Street. That’s all made land, you know: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford, and clear down to Kenmore Square, if my memory serves me.”

  “I know,” said Max. “They leveled off Fort Hill and part of Beacon and chucked them into the Charles River Basin back around 1800, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” said Mary. “Anyway, Chet got it into his head that some day that whole area was going to turn back into one big mud puddle, which isn’t so crazy as it might sound, in my opinion, the way they’re putting up those big skyscrapers as if there was something to anchor them into; But that’s not what I called about. What I’m getting at is, Chet wouldn’t have gone down Marlborough Street if you paid him a hundred dollars a step, so how did he get way over near Mass Ave?” She used the abbreviation as a born Bostonian naturally would. “I haven’t brought this up with Dolph and I’d just as soon not, until after the funeral’s out of the way, but I didn’t think it would be right not to tell you.”