Half a worm, actually.
“What nobody did know, though, is that the Judge knew about it,” Angela continued unabated. “You see what that means?”
Albert knew it meant something. A loose synapse was writhing about on the floor of his brain, trailing sparks and looking for something to plug into. The letter had no ‘Sincerely’ or ‘With Regards.’ This was significant. “He didn’t finish the letter.”
“No. Perhaps he was interrupted. Maybe by Pike!” The afflatus of suspicion rampant in her eyes.
“Twice?”
“Twice? What do you mean?”
“He didn’t finish the codicil, either,” Albert thought out loud. “He was writing it when he was killed.”
“Oh,” said Angela.
“You said the Judge was a neat person.”
“To a fault.”
Albert thought a neat person wouldn’t leave one thing unfinished, especially something so important, and start on another. He said so.
“Now that you mention it, no,” said Angela. “Certainly the Judge never would.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
The sweepers reached the end of the street and swept themselves around the corner and out of sight.
Sweeping. Sweeping paint chips and ashes and dirt by the road. Everything was being reduced to dust. Existence was a process of disintegration. One day, only the sweepers would remain. Then they’d have to begin on each other.
“You should tell them,” said Albert.
“I know.”
“No need,” said Matt Harvey through the screen door behind them. He pushed it open and crossed the porch. “May I see that?”
Albert handed him the letter. He read it. “You got this last night, Miss?”
Angela nodded.
“Where was it?”
She explained.
Perplexity sewed Harvey’s face into a thoughtful purse. “Strange,” he said.
“How do you mean?” Angela asked.
“It wasn’t there the day after the Judge was murdered.”
“I know,” said Angela. Harvey studied her closely. “You’re not suggesting that I put it there!” she protested.
That hadn’t occurred to Harvey. “No, ma’am,” he said reflexively. It was something to think about, though. “No. But somebody did, and I wonder who and why, is all.”
“Maybe it blew off the desk,” Angela suggested.
“No, ma’am. There were no letters on the Judge’s desk but that note to his lawyer about the codicil. Judge kept things orderly.”
“I just picked it up and stuffed it in with everything else,” said Heather. “I didn’t even read it ‘til this morning.
“I’m so tired,” she said, and leaned toward Albert.
“Isn’t it strange, the letter was in an envelope . . . even though it wasn’t finished?” said Albert.
“Sure is, Professor,” Harvey concurred. He tapped the letter against his open palm. “I’m going to hold onto this. Where are the rest of the papers?”
Heather rose. “Up in my room. I’ll show you.”
“I’d appreciate that,” said Matt. “Angela.”
They went inside.
“I’m sorry,” said Sarah as she bustled onto the porch, herding Alice before her. “He got away.”
“That’s alright,” said Albert. It was probably for the best. He wondered how much they’d heard.
The ladies alighted like pigeons on either side of him. “I’ve never heard such a thing in all my life,” said Sarah without preface. “All that about the accident and her taking Heather’s place. Funny how I feel sad to think Heather’s dead when Angela’s the only Heather I ever knew. It’s like a story in a book.”
They’d heard everything.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” said Alice.
“Well, if I read it, I wouldn’t believe it,” said Sarah. “Do you think she’s alright now, Professor. You know – in the head?”
Albert didn’t know if anyone was right in the head. Compared to whom? Him? Sarah? Maylene? “She seems okay,” he equivocated.
“Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when she went off like that,” said Sarah.
“Not so surprising once you know the story, though,” Alice allowed.
“No,” Sarah agreed. “Just imagine the burden the poor girl’s been carrying. The guilt. I’d’ve snapped, too.”
The air was rife with rumination.
“She’ll have to answer to authorities back in England, I suppose,” Alice conjectured at last.
“But, the case is closed, isn’t it?” Sarah rationalized. “I mean, as far as the police are concerned. Nobody even knows.”
“She does,” said Alice.
Albert agreed.
“That’s mighty interesting, what she says about Asherton Pike,” said Standish. His face was suddenly illuminated by the glow of a match. Albert accepted the light. Turkish cigarettes had taken some getting used to, especially since they smelled like a short circuit and tasted like dog’s breath, but he liked them; they were strong and went straight to his need. He’d also come to enjoy his lofty hideaway more than ever.
Standish appreciated the fact that Albert was comfortable there. They watched the lights come on in the neighborhood below.
“People have killed for less,” Standish continued.
Much less, Albert thought. They even kill over Etruscans. But that was another story.
“Couple the fact that the Judge knew about the embezzlement with the fact that Pike went missing, he sure looks like the one. I’m sure the FBI will double their efforts to track him down.”
“But, how did he know?”
“Who?”
“Asherton Pike,” said Albert. “How did he know the Judge knew about . . . what he stole?”
“The letter,” said Standish without thinking.
“The letter was never mailed,” said Albert. “It wasn’t even finished.”
Standish stopped not thinking. He loosed his eyes to graze in their orbits, while his brain scrambled to catch the thread of logic that had just been wrenched from his grasp and was rapidly disappearing over a cliff. He leapt at it.
“He must have dropped by that night.”
“Dropped by? To see the Judge?”
“Sure. They were partners, weren’t they? Why not? The Judge is all wound up anyway, confronts Pike, shows him the letter he’d been writing, then Pike picks up the knife . . . ”
“Marchant DuShane’s knife,” Albert interjected. It was important to mention that.
Standish’s mental juggernaut had hit a land mine, but damage was minimal. It collected its wits and lurched forward. “Never mind that,” he said. “If we work out the rest, we’ll see how that fits in.”
“Okay,” said Albert. The detective with his Great Discerning Brain probably knew something he didn’t.
“Anyway. He picks up the knife and stabs the Professor . . . ” Standish continued.
“The Judge,” Albert corrected.
“What? Oh, yes. Stabs the Judge,” said Standish.
“But, the Judge was writing his codicil,” Albert reminded. If he was a detective he’d want to take that into account.
Once again the juggernaut staggered to a standstill. For a minute or so it just sat there, idling roughly, with far fewer spark plugs firing than a juggernaut required to gain traction. “Okay,” Standish said at last. “Okay,” he repeated, lubricating the machinery of his mouth in anticipation of the upcoming brain-dump. “He looks through the Judge’s papers to find something to replace the incriminating letter. He finds a half-finished codicil, one that would incriminate DuShane.”
“Especially since it was DuShane’s knife that killed him,” Albert added.
“That’s right,” said Standish. Things were coming together.
“The one that was stolen four days earlier.”
A silence of Benedictine proportions ens
ued.
“Then,” Albert continued. “He folded the letter, put it in an envelope and hid it under the bookcase.” He thought a moment. “I’d have taken it with me,” he confided. “And burned it.”
Standish smoked the remaining half of his cigarette and ground it out on the branch over which he had draped his arms.
“ . . . and stabbed the Professor,” he said under his breath. “I was right the first time.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Albert had lain awake nearly an hour and-a-half staring at Kathleen and the closet, thinking of cats and garlic and Maylene and, all the while, in a sort of waking dream, a regiment of sweepers were sweeping. Sweeping in bright red uniforms with little brass brooms to the tune ofDouble Jeopardy! repeated in exact thirty-second intervals.
He shut off the light.
Hard labor began when he was sound asleep. The uncomfortable, indefinable blob at the back of his brain swelled until his subconscious could no longer contain it and surged through the cervix of his disquiet dreams.
Gestation was complete. A theory was born with all the arms and legs in place and the writhing, sparking synapse on the floor of his consciousness plugged into it and gave it life.
He awoke with a start.
“Double Jeopardy!” he said.
He listened aloud as the words were absorbed up by the silence. Albert’s musical mechanism whirred to life and scored the vexatious little theme song of the same name, full orchestra with an eighty voice choir whose members had been bouncing around like eighth graders on a school bus. Suddenly they were fused to their seats as if by some cosmic seatbelt and made to sing one long, loud, beautifully clear chord of reason in five parts.
It was the sweepers.
Unwittingly, as they had tidied up one side of the street and down the other while he’d talked with Angela, they had been sweeping up the debris that was clogging Albert’s thinking apparatus. They swept up paper and dirt and the dust of decaying concrete. The same way the young man at theGrand Reunion Hotel had swept up the ashes that had fallen at Bob’s feet. The same way the Judge would have swept up those strange bits of paint that kept appearing on the floor behind his chair – and nowhere else.
“I know!” Albert shouted in a whisper, as he sat bolt upright.
He threw off the covers, turned on the light, pulled on his pants, and ran to the closet.
The meowing began in response to the squeak of the door as he opened it. But there was no cat in the closet. Nor did he expect there to be. The sound was coming from behind the outside wall.
Almost deliriously, he began knocking and tapping. The meowing stopped. The wall was solid. Nothing gave. He pulled at built-in hooks and anything else that might trip a lever. He’d seen enough old movies to know that much. Nothing budged. The house had been well built.
He pressed on the walls. He pushed up. He pushed down. He pushed on the left sides. He pushed on the right sides.
Slowly the theory began to lose its shape. It didn’t seem as sensible with the light on as it had in the dark when he was half asleep. Union members among the orchestra had ceased playing. Some had gone home. Only a Dixieland Band remained, and they were beginning to play the blues.
The meowing started again.
“Kitty?” said Albert. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
“Meow?” the cat replied interrogatively.
“Jebby?” said another voice. Maylene arrived unannounced and squeezed between Albert and the doorpost, rubbing her sleepy eyes with the heel of her hand. “Kitty there?” she said, as if finding Albert talking to his closet walls in the middle of the night was not worthy of comment.
“I don’t know where he is,” Albert confessed.
Maylene bent down, grabbed the molding in the base of the exterior wall under the shelf that held Albert’s bags of tobacco products, and pulled. The wall swung noiselessly up between them, pushing them back against the interior walls, and Jebby, who had been occupying the top step of a built-in ladder that descended down a narrow cavity between the inner and outer walls, strode regally forth, pursued by the faintest perfume of garlic, and leapt into Maylene’s arms.
“You go on back to bed,” Albert said gently, patting Maylene on the shoulder.
“Jebby?”
“Take him with you,” Albert said. They could worry about what to do with him later.
“‘kay,” Maylene agreed. The bargain was sealed.
“And a child shall lead them,” said Albert to himself when she had gone. The quote had dropped from some musty chink in his brain at that particular moment.
He peered into the hole. There was only one thing to do, of course. He took some matches from his pocket and did it.
As he began the descent, his nervous system served up three fingers of adrenaline, neat, and Albert, an emotional teetotaler, was giddy. While his right brain exulted in the heady rush of understanding, his left brain sulked and scolded him for not having seen all sooner.
It had been right there all along. Right under his nose; inbroad daylight, just like Kathleen’s young lover, the one who never came back to find the picture and the letter she’d left under the stairs in that place only the two of them knew about. It hadn’t even been a closet then, just a hiding place under the stairs. A place for runaway slaves.
The opening was just big enough to accommodate Albert, his match, and the counterweights that made it so easy for Maylene to open the wall. You had to pull it. Only someone with no common sense could ever have found it. Why hadn’t he?
The shaft descended through the first floor and opened in the ceiling of an underground chamber.
The match threw irregular blotches of light around the room and in them Albert could see that the walls and floor were dirt, as was the ceiling which was held in place by a network of beams and rafters. These were thickly engraved with names, initials, designs and dates. ‘Naomi cum dis way wi chil, 18 an 59.’, ‘X’, ‘Jesus make the promis lan’, ‘As of this date, eighty four souls have found sanctuary here. Pageant Bigelow, 1862’, ‘Robert loves Kathleen, forever’ said the last. It was carved over a heart with an arrow through it. No date.
Only lovers ever come to the end of eternity.
To either side, the frail light cast by the matches was absorbed by dark rectangles.
“Tunnels,” said Albert. The one to his right, he knew, ended at the rear wall of DuShane’s wine closet. The one to the left, probably up a ladder and through the walls, like this one, to the little niche behind the Judge’s desk. Another moving wall, one that seemed so much a part of the woodwork that it had been painted over many times through the years so that now, on those rare occasions when it was opened, a dusting of paint rained on the floor behind the Judge’s chair.
Behind the Judge.
Albert shook out the match and lit another. The cavern was dry, roughly dug from rich, red earth. For a place so hidden, it had seen its share of traffic over the years. Slaves. Young lovers. People with darker motives, and a particularly persistent cat. Their footprints could still be seen in the earth. Bare feet. Leather soled shoes. Sneakers. And, now, Hush Puppies and paw prints.
There was no railroad track, but it was underground. What would Rupert Runyan make of that?
Bending low to keep from scraping his head, he took the tunnel most traveled, toward DuShane’s.
The surfaces all around him were irregular; sometimes so close together that he had to proceed sideways or so low he almost had to crawl. At one point it took a jagged detour around a huge boulder or ledge.
It was a three-match trip to DuShane’s cellar. A door, probably the back of the closet, was set in the wall of another chamber, somewhat smaller than the first. A bucket in the corner was stuffed with scraps of paper, most had been burned, at least partially, but all were covered with handwriting, either Judge Antrim’s signature or the words ‘Dear Quimby, I wish to make the following amendment to my will. ’
Someone had been practicing the Judge’s handwriting
.
The match burned his fingers. He shook it out, dropped it, and tore another from the book. In the single strobe of the first unsuccessful strike, he imagined he saw his reflection immediately in front of him. However, as he replayed the image in the seven or eight milliseconds before the next strike, he remembered he had a beard. The image was clean-shaven.
“So, it’s you,” said a voice in the dark. Simultaneously the match struck and lit. Not two feet away from Albert, whose heart had started so violently at the sound of the voice that his first instinct was to search for it, throbbing silently somewhere on the dirt in the dark, was Marchant DuShane. “The piano teacher,” he said.
At least there was one person in the world who didn’t know who he was.
“I figured if I waited long enough, you’d turn up sooner or later,” he said calmly. Much too calmly, Albert thought, since he himself was incapable of speech at all. It was much easier being the surpriser than the surprisee. “I rigged this up,” he continued, tugging at a wire embedded in the tunnel wall. “A trip wire.”
Even Albert wouldn’t trip over it that far off the floor.
“What were you looking for in my cellar?”
Interpreting Albert’s inability to speak as reticence, he grabbed him firmly by the shoulder. “How did you find this place?” he said, not allowing Albert time to answer the first question, even if he could have. “What are you looking for?”
Albert stammered something unintelligible, in the hope DuShane, seeing he was making an effort, would grade on the curve and refrain from physical violence.
The plan didn’t work. DuShane struck the cheek which Albert, on sound Scriptural advice, had turned to him. Albert dropped the match and it went out.
“This is private property,” said DuShane in the dark. He now had Albert by the collar of his T-shirt. “You’d be in big trouble if I turned you in.” He didn’t say ‘pismire’, but Albert heard it.
Dead in D Minor Page 25
