Odor of Violets

by Baynard Kendrick

  “Right! Go on.”

  “Well, the metal bars on each of those blue shoulder straps just read Canada in raised letters so the infantry was your original unit. Now, take your greatcoat. It has just the regular khaki shoulder straps but the bars on each shoulder are cut out CAMC, running from back to front, and easy to feel. Over them you have ‘four’ with a small bar over a ‘G’ in brass. That shows you were overseas with the Fourth General Hospital. It came from Toronto and was the only unit from the Canadian Army which was out in Salonica. I’m no wizard but I happened to have had a cousin who was with the same outfit, the Fourth General Hospital, and most of the men from Salonica were invalided back with fever through Egypt. So I took a guess that the same thing happened to you. All the men invalided back to England from anywhere with fevers end up in Netley and then at the C.C.A.C. at Shorncliffe. But the badge on the front of your cap is Canadian Army Service Corps, indicating that was the last unit you were transferred to here in England. My cousin went through that light duty routine, only they sent him out to France again driving a lorry. Now, I know you’re stationed up here in London with a permanent pass since you are up here nearly every Saturday afternoon, playing the piano. You have sergeant’s stripes on your greatcoat so I imagine you’re working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office. They have no emblem of their own.”

  Just then, an orderly stopped in from somewhere to collect him for tea, leaving me too dumbfounded even to inquire his name. He left me with a happy smile and a wave of his hand saying, “I’ll be seeing you.” He never did, of course, and I never saw him again. It was after New Year’s of 1918 the next time I went up to St. Dunstan’s and my blind detective had gone.

  It was ten years later (1927) before I came in contact with Paul Henderson again.

  My father died in Philadelphia in January 1927. Banks had already closed in Florida and our family savings were going fast while I fiddled around without much success at writing. But I had tasted blood because Field and Stream had bought my first short story, “The Captain’s Lost Lake,” in 1926 for $60. I hastened up to Philadelphia from Florida to see what could be salvaged from my father’s business and the day after his funeral, Mrs. Henderson, Paul’s mother, phoned me to say that she had seen the notice of my father’s death in the newspapers. She told me her own husband had died five years before. She and Paul were still living in the old family house on Queen Lane in Germantown, and could I come to dinner. I sensed desperation in her voice and went out to see them the following evening—a filthy snowy night.

  The house was a mausoleum, housing a frail invalid already feeling the effects of a cancer which killed her in 1930, and her blind, thirty-one-year-old son, who hadn’t been out of the house since his father’s death, five years before. The dinner was meager but by the time it was served none of us much cared—the bootlegger had made a delivery earlier and the orange blossom cocktails had flowed freely.

  Paul’s mother, through ignorance, fear, and too much love, did practically everything for him except take him to the toilet. It helped turn Paul into an alcohol-soaked cabbage with nothing to do but sit and look at the back of his eyes and curse at the fictional Max Carrados and his fictional supernatural powers. Paul was too frightened to move from the house that had become the only world he knew—and his mother, through misdirected love, encouraged his indolence.

  I sold out the Trades Publish Company that belonged to my father and went to New York, where I obtained a job as general manager of Bing & Bing Hotels. Within three months after his mother died in 1930, Paul Henderson sold the heavily mortgaged house in Germantown and sobered up long enough to catch a train to New York—purely because I was there. He hoped that I could get him a job—at anything, even making brooms. God knows I tried! But I soon realized that Paul had lost all interest in life, and I dreaded the tenth of every month when his small pension check would arrive. He’d disappear from the room I had gotten for him on Bank Street in Greenwich Village and make the rounds of speakeasies where kindly but misguided customers would buy him drinks when his money ran out. I started to think it might be better for him if he were a troublemaker and created a disturbance so the police could pick him up and tuck him safely away long enough to get off the booze. It took me more than a year to enlist the aid of enough friendly bartenders who would call me as soon as he came in.

  The Depression caught me full in 1932 and I was laid off with twenty other administrative office workers a week before Christmas—facing a world that seemed utterly jobless. I determined at that moment that I’d never work for a corporation again and I’d succeed at writing or starve to death trying. I rented an apartment for $25 a month in a basement in Astoria and started my first full-length book—a Florida mystery called Blood on Lake Louisa. Paul moved in with me two months later and on and off for a year we existed on what short unsigned pieces I could sell to The New Yorker and Liberty. I established a moderate credit rating at a nearby friendly Italian grocery and ate so much spaghetti that I finally broke out with a wheat rash. During this time, I sought out a great deal of material regarding famous blind people and read about them to Paul. I hoped that some of their accomplishments would inspire him, but I eventually realized that Paul had slipped into his own private paranoiac world—identifying with Max Carrados, using liquor to bolster confidence that he could duplicate the impossible feats of Ernest Bramah’s overdrawn character. Paul would also challenge the accomplishments of blind persons with a negative approach that defied argument, such as claiming that John Milton “was educated at Cambridge, besides being an established poet before he went blind at forty-four.”

  By 1932 I had reached the point of utter desperation with Paul and made an attempt to convince him that someone with even more severe handicaps than his could do something productive. I finally succeeded, through my agent, in getting in touch with Mr. John A. Macy, whose wife was the famous Anne Mansfield Sullivan who had trained Helen Keller. Mr. Macy was quite ill and died several months later, in August 1932, but the lengthy letter I wrote his wife interested her enough to furnish me with a list of famous blind people—and in reply to my complaints about Max Carrados, she wrote me: “You’re a mystery writer . . . so why not draw on the knowledge that you’ve accumulated and create a blind detective of your own—one who would be the antithesis of Max Carrados, who would never perform any feat in his detection or deduction that couldn’t be duplicated by someone totally blind—presuming they had the necessary brains and willpower to train themselves to try it.”

  Thus the idea of Captain Duncan Maclain was born. It was in 1937 that the Crime Club published the first of the books about him, The Last Express. For forty years he has served me well—in serialization, syndication, movies, and foreign editions. He’s responsible for the organization of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc., and for the Blinded Veterans Association—formed at Avon Old Farms Army Schools of the Blind at Avon, Connecticut, in 1945, in which I hold honorary life membership Card No. 1. Even today, if you sit up late enough and watch the third repeat of Longstreet on ABC, you can see that the series is based on “Characters Created by Baynard Kendrick.”

  Speaking to the B.V.A. on the occasion of their twenty-first annual convention at the Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, on August 20, 1966, I was asked by one of the members if I happened to remember the name of that young blind soldier in St. Dunstan’s Home in London who through his perspicacity had quite unwittingly been the progenitor of the B.V.A. I was forced to say no—I hadn’t forgotten his name for I never knew it; he was merely one of a number of blinded British Tommies ensconced for the time being in St. Dunstan’s.

  I intended to call this piece “The Birth of a Blind Detective” because, to me, Captain Duncan Maclain was really born—and I hope will live forever—showing to sighted people that although the blind of the world may have lost their eyes, their brains and their work live on.

  —BAYNARD KENDRICK

  THE ODOR

  OF VIOLETS />
  CHAPTER I

  THE CRAGS was built high up on an eminence above the little town of Tredwill Village, west of Hartford, in the Connecticut hills. Ordinarily, the tall buildings of the city could be seen from the Tredwill home. Now, even the few scattered houses in the village below were hidden from view.

  Norma Tredwill (Mrs. Thaddeus Tredwill, number four) sat down at the top of the stairs on a broad window seat and looked out through the mullioned panes. Her warm red lips, always ready to part in humor or sympathy, were pensively set. She stared through the frost-marked glass at the swirling snow, oblivious of the storm.

  She was thinking of Paul Gerente. Ten years before, she had put him out of her life completely, determined to forget a year of marriage to him which had been nothing more than a short, unhappy episode in her career.

  A step sounded down the hall. Norma stood up just as her stepdaughter, Barbara, came out of her room. Babs was wearing a trim tailor-made suit and carrying a mink coat over her arm. She was the only one of the Tredwill family who had never quite accepted Norma into the Tredwill home. For three years, Norma had vainly tried to break down the barrier between them, a barrier which was never apparent on the surface, but which Babs, in a thousand small ways, managed to make smartingly real.

  “You’re up early, darling,” Babs said with a smile.

  The politeness was always there, deference even, but it came through too readily to be genuine. Babs’s tenderness was as apt as some adroit line of an author’s spotted in a play.

  Norma said: —

  “You’re up early yourself, Babs.”

  “The weather, probably. Are you coming down? It’s a filthy day.”

  “I certainly agree.” Norma looked at the coat on Babs’s arm. “Don’t tell me you’re planning on going out! The wind will blow you away.”

  “New York,” said Babs. “It’s Stacy’s idea. Christmas is on Monday. If we don’t get in today, there’ll be no presents for our darling father and you.”

  Norma refused to be piqued by Babs’s tone. “Why not Hartford, if you simply must? It’s not so far away.”

  “Stacy has something special picked out for Thad—and Cheli Scott too, I suppose. Leave it to my fifteen-year-old brother.” Babs spoke with all the languid disparagement of an eighteen-year-old for one three years her junior. “It’s New York, I’m afraid.” She started down the stairs.

  Inwardly, Norma sighed. Another conversation with Babs was ending in the usual way, bright and friendly up to a point. Beyond that they never seemed to go.

  “Run along if you’ve a train to catch,” said Norma. “Are you taking the coupé?”

  Babs turned on the stairs and nodded absently. “Stacy’s driving us into Hartford. We’ll leave it at a garage near the station. We’re going to spend the night in New York with the Ritters and be back tomorrow. I don’t think this snow can last another day.”

  Norma watched Babs descend the stairs. The girl’s youthful beauty was almost too perfect, like a picture done in tints too bright,—gold and white, rose and blue,—which time might fade. Such coloring needed vivacity behind it, but Babs smoldered almost sulkily.

  “The Tredwill men have all the temperament,” Norma thought. Thad’s two sons, Gilbert, twenty-eight, and Stacy, fifteen, though separated widely in years, were much alike. They were quick to laugh, constantly enthusiastic about something, although their cause might change in a day. Thaddeus himself had all the ingrained egoism of a genius. He ruled his house and his family capriciously, and sometimes noisily, but back of his heated displays of temper he looked at life with a humorous glint in his eye.

  Norma heard Cheli Scott greet Babs downstairs. Cheli was a playwright, and Thad’s protégée. She was working on a new play which Thad wanted to try out in his own small theater, an integral part of The Crags. The house always seemed more pleasant and alive when Cheli was a visitor. Norma liked gaiety and laughter, and Cheli was friendly and amusing—a delightful, considerate girl.

  For a moment Norma listened, then she left her post at the head of the stairs and started slowly toward her own apartment at the end of the hall. In front of Babs’s open door, she paused and stood indecisively looking in upon the disordered scene.

  Babs depended on servants to keep the material articles of living in their proper places. Fastidious about her own appearance, she left behind her a limp trail of dresses, underwear, and stockings. The three-mirror dressing table was a jumble of make-up jars and glittering crystal bottles. Norma stepped inside and closed the door with a feeling of guilty intrusion.

  At the back of the dressing table was a crystal bottle of unusual design. It was larger than the rest, and obviously new. The stopper of black, cunningly wrought glass was so skillfully made that it gave an illusion of an exotic black flower, slightly evil, thrust into the bottle by its stem. Colored cellophane had been rolled down to encircle the base of the bottle. The slim flacon rose out of it with an appearance of naked beauty, as though it were some tiny woman of glass who had dropped her dress to the floor.

  Norma felt a slight touch of faintness, and sat down on the rose-cushioned bench in front of the dressing table. The triple mirror showed her piquant face pale above the blue satin of her house coat. The tiny freckle over the dimple in her left cheek glowed brightly, as it always did when she was perturbed.

  Automatically she took her vanity case from the pocket of her house coat and touched her cheeks with rouge. She snapped the jeweled case shut and returned it to her pocket. The perfume bottle was possessed with magnetism of memories. Twice she reached out to touch it, but forced herself to keep her hands away.

  She suddenly knew what had brought Paul Gerente back to mind. Ten minutes earlier, on her interrupted trip to breakfast, she had glimpsed that seventy-five-dollar bottle of Black Orchid through Babs’s partly opened door.

  That single glimpse had swept ten years away. The gift of a similar bottle had begun Paul’s courtship. Norma smiled a trifle bitterly. A bottle of the same Black Orchid had ended her marriage to Paul. She had seen it in the bedroom of another woman, and there had been others, too. Paul Gerente had distributed his Black Orchid tokens of affection as liberally as his charm.

  Norma made a slight moue of distaste at her reflection in the mirror, then stood up and left the room. She did not intend to allow a fantastically incredible idea to run away with her natural good judgment. Paul Gerente, once a famous stage name, had dropped out of sight after she divorced him. There had been various unsubstantiated rumors that he had lost his money in the market and taken to drink. Past association was flimsy evidence on which to base an assumption; just because Babs had an unusual bottle of expensive perfume was no indication that she was seeing Paul.

  The house was very silent. Norma stopped again at the top of the stairway. From below she heard Cheli Scott say good-bye. Cheli’s words were followed by the opening and closing of the front door and the whine of the starter as Stacy started the coupé. Norma waited until the clank of chains in gravel and snow told her that the car was gone before she went downstairs.

  Cheli, brilliant in a suit of red velvet pajamas, was curled up in the depths of a great armchair in front of the blazing log fire in the living room. She looked up from the pages of a manuscript, brushed back thick brown curls to disclose a smile in her blue-gray eyes, and said, “Cheerio, sleepy-head! How do you like the snow?”

  “I think it makes me hungry,” Norma told her. “Have you and the rest raided the larder completely, or is there anything left for me?”

  “Sausage and scrambled eggs in the hot plate,” said Cheli. “Coffee in the Silex, and cornbread and rolls in the warmer.”

  “It’s probably far too much.” Norma walked in toward the silver-laden sideboard visible through the open folding doors and added from the adjoining room, “At my age, I have to keep a checkrein on my waistline. Thad has a producer’s eye for bulges in the wrong place. I want to keep that ‘You ought to be on the stage, my dear!’ expression o
n his face when he looks at me.”

  “At your age!” Cheli laughed softly and rustled a page of her manuscript. “The sight of that skin of yours and your figure simply infuriates me. You’re the irritating type that makes aging debutantes sore. You’ll never look more than twenty-two.”

  Norma served herself, poured a cup of coffee, and carried her breakfast into the living room, where she settled herself at Cheli’s feet on a bearskin rug. “Christmas compliments!” she told Cheli. “They always crop up around the theater about the twentieth of December, but they’re still good, I suppose. You make me feel ready to buy you a new fur coat or a Buick sedan.”

  She sipped her coffee. “Have you seen Gil this morning?”

  The blazing fire touched spots of color on the cheeks of the girl in the chair. “He had to go into New York,” said Cheli, reading intently. “He took an early train. Helena and Thaddeus went with him. How come they didn’t take you?”

  Norma placed her cup and saucer and plate on the hearth. “Maybe my ears are deceiving me,” she exclaimed lightly. “I knew Gil and Helena were going—but Thad! Big things must be brewing when my late-sleeping husband hauls himself out into the early morning snow.” She tried the sausage and eggs and found them good. “I’m glad he didn’t want me to go. He’s a bear before eleven. I’m afraid the combination of an early train trip with Thad and Helena—” She ended on a vague note, feeling that she might have said too much already.

  Pierce, the butler, gray in Thaddeus’s service, came in and said apologetically, “Good morning, madam. I didn’t know you had come down. Mr. Tredwill left a note for you.”

  He stepped soft-footed into the hall and returned with the note on a silver tray. Norma smiled. Under Thaddeus’s training, Pierce could have fitted unchanged into any butler’s role in movie or play.

  “I’m a bad hostess, Pierce.” She opened the note and read it as the butler cleared her breakfast things away.