Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

“Yes, sir,” Liles agreed reluctantly, and excused himself. “Well?” Practice demanded, after Liles had left.

  Guthrie smiled wryly. “Well, what?”

  “Did you see A.B. Sharp?”

  “He came in ten minutes before the dessert was served, wearing a moldy old tuxedo with lapels that pointed up past his shoulders, and took his seat. He sat there smiling all through the speeches with his hearing aid turned down, and afterward there was a great milling around, with Sharp in the middle. He put one hand on me and a hand on the Major, and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, don’t you think it’s time you started considering the party instead of yourselves?’ Then he invited myself, the Major, our immediate families, and any friends whom we considered indispensable to his farm next weekend. And there the Major and I are going to cut for high card.”

  “That’s all Sharp had to say?”

  Guthrie nodded. “Word for word. The next instant, so help me, he vanished. The whole evening reminded me of the tea party in Alice in Wonderland. The Major, the white rabbit, who looked just like A.B. Sharp, and little old Alice, that’s me.”

  Guthrie’s glass slipped from his hand and smashed on the floor. He looked at it wearily.

  “It’s all over, Jim. If the Major were going to win, there wouldn’t be any conference at Whitestone Farm next weekend. The Major knew. I watched his eyes while Sharp tendered his invitation. Terrible eyes, aren’t they? I never realized it before. The old, yellow eyes of a proud and brutal man, whom I happened to love once. He forced the knife into my hands and now he’s too proud to ask me to pull it out from between his ribs. My God, if I were half of that man! You don’t see it, I suppose; you never knew him. Should have seen him, Jim, after the war, in his full-dress uniform. Tall and straight, by God, not a line of that uniform wrong, brass and gold and gleaming boots. He carried a sword that Marshal Pétain himself gave him, beautiful damned thing, Swedish steel and razor sharp, with a hilt of gold that flashed in the sun. I suppose I had the Major in my mind’s eye the day I headed for Canada to join the Air Force ...”

  “Where did you know Billie Charmian, John?” Practice nuked casually.

  “Billie?” He frowned. “Where did you hear that name? She called herself that. She was Wilma, Wilma Croft ...”

  “Ted Croft’s sister?”

  “Yes. She joined the band the winter of ’38 in Chicago. Sang with us for a while.” Guthrie swallowed, rubbing his forehead. “I’m having a letdown here. Suppose I ought to get to bed. Billie—she was only seventeen, but she had the voice. Could have been one of the great ones. Ted never encouraged her, though. He was far gone, that winter. T.B. Died late in the spring. I couldn’t get to his funeral.” He lifted his head abruptly. “What about her, Jim?”

  “Bill Dylan called a few minutes ago. Those were her fingerprints on the crank letter.”

  Guthrie stared at him.

  “Billie? She sent that thing?”

  “I only know that her fingerprints were on the drawing. What can you tell me about Billie, John?”

  He was still staring at Practice blankly. Then he closed his eyes and put his hands over his face.

  “Tell? I haven’t seen her, or heard from her, in almost twenty-five years. I haven’t heard anything about her.”

  “Her last known address was Fort Frontenac. She’s been licensed to sing in nightclubs in this state since 1945.”

  “Fort Frontenac? That’s where Ted lived. I was part of a combo playing in a dive down on the riverfront when he was putting his last band together. Nineteen thirty-seven or thereabouts.”

  “How well did you know Billie?”

  There was an irritable edge to his voice. “We played together, lived apart. The original group had Ted on clarinet, Darby Post on drums, and Liberty Leeds playing bass. Later on Ted added Phil Petigo, a tenor sax, and somebody named Kelvin on trombone—he never amounted to much. Darby and I were white, the others black. Billie probably hadn’t been with us more than three months before I quit to join the RCAF. I didn’t know her well”—he lifted his head and stared at Practice—“but I knew her well enough. She would never send anything like that damned picture. Billie was a shy, quiet girl, and she read a lot. Ted took care of her, good care. He wouldn’t have let her travel with the group, but there was no one in Fort Frontenac whom he trusted to look after her. Even knowing how good Billie was, Ted didn’t want her to sing, but she begged him for months until he gave in. She was only seventeen, as I said.”

  “What happened to her after her brother died?”

  “I don’t know, Jim. Went back to Fort Frontenac, I suppose. I don’t know why she didn’t become a star. Everybody who heard her sing loved her. She sounded like the original Billie to begin with, but she was developing a style of her own in those three months. Nobody singing today sounds anything like her. Maybe Dinah Washington did.”

  Guthrie fell silent and looked uneasily at the floor.

  “I think I’ll move in with Dore tonight,” he said. “Too much trouble to put the spare bedroom in order.”

  “What do you want me to do, John?”

  “Do?”

  “About Billie Charmian?”

  Guthrie stood up, avoiding the glass on the floor.

  “What does she want?” he asked vaguely. “Why would she do it?”

  “I’d have to ask her.”

  “No. No, don’t. Don’t stir up—” He hesitated.

  “Don’t stir up what?”

  “Maybe,” Guthrie said, “she needs help. Who knows? Maybe there’s something I can give her.”

  “According to the drawing, she wants your head.”

  “There is no reason for that, Jim!” Guthrie shouted. More quietly he added, “Believe me. No, I’m positive Billie isn’t responsible, even if those are her fingerprints. All right, then. Find her if you can.”

  “If she’s still in Fort Frontenac, it shouldn’t be hard. If she’s been moving around, it’ll take more time. The envelope was postmarked here in the city, but that may not be significant.”

  “Don’t take much time, Jim. I need you here. Give it tomorrow, and if you don’t find Billie, come on home. If she wants something from me, she can ask, instead of playing games. And now I’m going to bed.”

  Practice walked with the Governor into the sitting room and stood a few moments by himself after Guthrie, with an irritable “good night,” had entered Dore’s bedroom. His thoughts returned to Billie Charmian and the grotesque image of knight and dragon which had come to John Guthrie stained with her blood. Practice had no answers, but, thinking about the puzzle, he felt challenged and absorbed for the first time in months—almost his own man.

  • 8 •

  Gene Ogden had been one of the better first basemen in the National League until aging legs retired him at thirty-three; now he had law offices with two other men in a prosperous black settlement of Fort Frontenac. Practice looked about wistfully as he waited for the girl to announce him. There were several good paintings on the walls and just enough Swedish modern furniture, with neutral shades of upholstering, and from somewhere the homely smell of brewing coffee subtly softened the effect of uncompromised efficiency.

  The girl came back with a tapping of heels. She smiled at him.

  “Won’t you come in, Mr. Practice?”

  Gene Ogden rose up hugely from behind his desk and reached over it to shake hands; for any other man it would have been a strain, but Ogden’s reach reduced the desk to child’s size.

  “Good to see you again.”

  He had added a mustache and horn-rims since Practice had last seen him, but the athlete’s body looked as solid as ever. Ogden’s skin was caramel-colored and his thinning hair reddish brown. There were a few trophies around the room, and several photographs, including one showing Ogden with the President of the United States and Governor Guthrie.

  “I came in about four to get some book work out of the way,” Ogden explained. “Have you met my partners? I’ll see if they’ve come in ...”


  “You don’t need to bother, Gene. I only have a few hours, and I may have some trouble locating the person I came to see. I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Do my best.”

  “Her name is Charmian. Billie Charmian. Does that ring a bell?”

  Ogden frowned. “Just barely.”

  “She’d be forty-two, almost forty-three years old now. Charmian’s a stage name, by the way.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She was a singer, at least she was during the thirties. Sang with her brother’s band, just before he died. I suppose you remember Ted Croft.”

  Ogden nodded.

  “I’ll call my wife. She’s the authority on jazz singers.” He reached for the telephone and dialed. The receptionist came in with a tray and coffee service and poured two cups.

  Ogden listened intently, then wrote on his pad, then listened again, frowning. Presently he hung up and swiveled around to face Practice, his big hands lightly grasping the edge of his desk.

  “She told me to look up a man named Skandy. I’ve had some dealings with him. I hope this Billie Charmian isn’t in his company much.”

  As he was putting on his topcoat, Ogden glanced casually at Practice and said, “The Governor used to play with Croft’s group, didn’t he? Way back when.”

  Practice nodded.

  “Could you give me some idea why he’s looking for Millie?”

  “The Governor has a trunkful of relics from those days—pictures, arrangements, old recordings. Since Billie is Croft’s only surviving relative, as far as he knows, he thought she might like to have them.”

  “Skandy is going to say, ‘You give me the trunk, I’ll see she gets it.’ ”

  “I want to talk to Billie myself. Alone.”

  Ogden shrugged. “All we can do is try.”

  —

  The lawyer did the driving, and soon they were in an industrial valley webbed with railroad tracks and crowded with brick factories and stacks. Not a blade of grass was visible anywhere. The narrow business streets contained one- and two-story buildings, housing taverns and chili parlors. There were few white faces visible on the streets or in the asphalt play yard of an elementary school. Ogden’s eyes were impassive as he wheeled his big car through the heavy traffic, but he missed nothing.

  “Look at their faces,” he said. “Look at their poor bodies. Place like this, it’s the big reason I’ve got to get myself into politics.”

  He stopped once to ask directions, then swung into an alley that ran beneath a steep ashen bluff, and parked at the rear of a ramshackle factory building. The air outside the car was faintly acid, despite the sun and blue sky overhead.

  They entered a dim hallway by way of a loading platform and turned up a flight of iron stairs worn to a glitter in the center. Some pallid light came through windows at each of the landings. Ogden paused once to catch his breath and grinned, then patted his middle significantly. They went on.

  On the fourth floor Ogden indicated high metal doors with a tilt of his head and punched the buzzer mounted on the pocked and crumbling wall. From behind the doors Practice could hear the racket of hammering: mallet and metal.

  A smaller door cut into the left-hand door opened and an old man with rough gray hair that matched his paint-flecked gray topcoat looked out at them. The din from within was louder, and Practice couldn’t hear the conversation between the old man and Ogden. The old man apparently spoke in monosyllables and continued barring the way, until Ogden put a hand against the man’s chest and gently pushed him back.

  The man yielded without further argument. Ogden stooped and entered, then beckoned to Practice.

  He found himself in a high-roofed loft that obviously occupied nearly all the space on the top floor. There were two grimy skylights and a bank of floor-to-ceiling north windows, somewhat cleaner, through which sunlight poured. Against the west wall a complex of scaffolding surrounded some unidentifiable monolith that looked like the remains of a pile of partially melted scrap iron. Looms and shuttles stood in the south end of the loft, near the doorway. Glittering mobiles of all descriptions hung from the rafters. There were tarpaulins in spangled patchwork on the dirty floor.

  Two youths in blue jeans and sweaters out at the elbows were hammering away at workbenches, working over sheets of copper and aluminum. Far down the floor, near the windows, a man straddling a stone bench was working with a welder’s torch on a spindly framework dripping with excrescences. The old man who had opened the door for them pointed at the welder and shrugged, then went back to a stool nearby.

  “Skandy,” Ogden said loudly in Practice’s ear.

  “What’s all this?”.

  “His workshop. My wife tells me he’s good, but I wouldn’t know. I know one thing, she put me in hock for a month and a half to buy a small bronze bust of his. Last month he had a one-man show in Venice.”

  They walked slowly across the floor of the loft, past piles of scrap metal. The flavor of the torch was very much in the air, but otherwise the loft was cold and smelled stale. They paused before a huge mural, seeming to consist of numerous wires and gobs of metal strung together.

  “Supposed to be his most famous work, but he won’t show it,” Ogden explained. “Claims it’ll never be finished. It’s called ‘The Work of Mankind,’ which itself is never finished.”

  “Bravo,” Practice murmured. The whine of a drill set his teeth on edge. “Tell me about Skandy.”

  “Okay, we’ve got time. I wouldn’t want to interrupt him at his labors, he might turn that torch on us. He’s forty-five years old, was born a block and a half from here, has no home at the moment except for a spare room somewhere in the building. There’s a cot in it, for when he feels like sleeping, which he doesn’t very much. Usually a chick on the cot. He sends out the young bloods to comb the streets for him; can’t be bothered himself. He’s made a fortune and given most of it away to politically inspired causes, and once he set out to walk barefoot across Africa, some kind of protest. He did time when he was younger. Politically he’s either a Red or an anarchist. A lot of people love him. I don’t, because in his free time he’s also an unpredictable drunk. Fortunately he doesn’t have much free time. I did him a turn once, or he would have lost this studio, so he may return the favor—if he’s in the mood.”

  “If you knew where he was all the time, why the phone calls?”

  Ogden grunted. “To find out if he was in the mood.”

  Skandy had turned off his torch and pushed back the shield that covered his face. He sat slumped on his stone bench in an attitude of abject misery. Then he got up slowly, peeling off his gloves and flexing his fingers. He shot a glance at Ogden and Practice, then nodded his head slightly.

  The two men approached the artist.

  “Who’s he?” Skandy said, without preamble, to Ogden.

  “A friend.”

  Skandy looked at Practice with an expression of such unforgiving suspicion that it was almost amusing. He had long hair for a black man, which was going dead white in streaks. With his fingers he combed crisp particles of burned metal out of his hair and then rubbed his nose.

  “What do you want?” he said to the lawyer.

  “Man here wants to talk to Billie Charmian,” Ogden replied, slipping into street vernacular.

  “No.”

  “I hear you and Billie is real close,” Ogden went on, undisturbed. “She don’t have none of her own to look after her, so you see to what she needs.”

  Skandy sat staring at his creation, which looked like a series of elongated S’s with interlocking humanoid figures. He sat very still, his hands on his knees.

  Finally he said, “Nothing I can add to what you hear.”

  “This man,” said Ogden, “has got something of importance for Billie.”

  Skandy’s eyes shifted a little, and then closed. A brief smile touched his lips, bitter, ironic. He looked at Practice.

  “Are you death?” he said. “Did you bring her
death?”

  “No.”

  “There is nothing else she can use.”

  “Is she sick?”

  It seemed as if Skandy wouldn’t answer, and then he put out a hand and lightly touched the bronzework in front of him.

  “What do you think of this?” he said gently, as if he were speaking from a dream.

  “You’re asking me?” Practice said, and felt Ogden’s sidelong glance.

  “Yes,” Skandy breathed. “Judge it for me.”

  “I’m not a fit judge.”

  “Judge it,” Skandy commanded softly.

  “All right,” Practice said. “You’ve tried to create a clean, biting tension within a rigidly defined space, and that’s wrong, because you’ve defined space in terms of a preconceived torment—those figures. You’ve sacrificed line and freedom to a central idea of pain, sensed that it was wrong, and tried to correct with a melodramatic emphasis instead of a sweeping simplification. Because you’re a professional, this piece is technically exciting. And because you’re a professional, it has to be called by its rightful name: clumsy, aggravating claptrap.”

  Skandy had thrown back his head to stare at Practice, and halfway through the precis the man’s eyes narrowed in rage. Then he swung back to look reluctantly at his work.

  His lower lip trembled for a moment, as if a piece of the metal had pierced him. Suddenly he bellowed in satisfaction.

  “Conrad! You! Come here and get this thing out of my sight.”

  One of the boys dropped his mallet and scurried across I In- floor. Skandy was sitting with his head down on his chest.

  “How did you know?” he said to Practice.

  “I’m no artist. I like art. I read a lot of books.”

  Skandy sat still in contemplation before speaking again. “Billie Charmian is a very sick woman. Heartsick, crippled with arthritis, blinded by bad whiskey. She don’t have a voice to sing with no more. A week ago two men found where she was staying. They wanted to know something about her life. She wouldn’t tell them. They twisted her knotted and crooked hands until she screamed, and left her in agony on the floor of her room.”