Читать книгу Murder Without Tears - Leonard Lupton - Страница 4

I KEPT watching the door. Yesterday she had come through that door. I had the feeling that she would come through that door again today in spite of the heat.

It was cool in the barroom. These old Hudson River houses, built by the brickyard owners, had a depth and dimension that offset humidity and June sunlight. I sat there in the caned chair at the round table with the checkered cloth and wondered what old Jason Prescott would have thought of my turning his mansion into a fashionable ginmill. I wondered what my old man would have thought of it, also. He had been straw boss at the Prescott brickyard. He had given them a service, a loyalty, a real humility that has gone out of date today. And a good thing it has.

I got a lot of satisfaction out of seeing the Prescott mansion turned into a roadhouse.

Of course it isn’t any waterfront dive. It’s five miles north of Newburyport on the Hudson River; up where the big estates still keep two or three gardeners each to tend the rolling, shaded lawns that always were and still are Off Limits to the likes of us Broomes.

Broome. When I was a kid I used to ask myself how anyone with a name like that could get to be President. My old man used to have a wry way of looking at life and he didn’t take my complaint very seriously. “Sure you could be President some day,” he used to tell me. “Think of the campaign slogan—‘Let a new Broome sweep clean!’ ”

He never took himself or his family name or his position in life very seriously. I don’t suppose he ever looked up from the job in the brickyard and wondered what it would be like to live in the big, square, brick house on the hill.

But I did. And now I knew. It took a war and a government loan and a muddle-witted ex-bootlegger to make it possible. But here I was, sitting in the big house. And that wasn’t all.

I was waiting and watching for a woman to come through that door again. To see me. One of the women who belonged up here on the hill.

I could hear pans and kettles clattering in the kitchen. I pay my chef one-fifty and keep, and the pastry chef almost as much. That’s good money up here. In the summer, for the lunch hour, my waiters wear white; but for the dinner hour they dress the part. I’ve tried to serve the best filet mignon in this part of the Valley and I’ve done something else—I’ve reversed the usual trend. I’ve tried to make my place hard to get into. It works.

Of course downstairs in the barroom it’s different. The barroom is a replica of the saloon my old man used to go to down on the flats. Everybody invited, though mostly only the right people come.

There are brass spittoons, and sawdust on the floor, and a white marble rail in front of the mahogany at just the right height to balance a tray of beer. There are mirrors all around the walls and one day a magazine illustrator, up here in the valley to release his blood pressure over a week-end, piled the rye too high on the rocks and paid off by soaping the mirrors with the kind of art that fits in well with the phony kerosene lights that have been set up in wall brackets all around the place.

The place looks like it used to look when it was down on the flats, except that the sheriff and the ambulance never come out here on a Saturday night; for the trade I get even here is the silk lapel trade and there are as many feminine shoulders, bare to cleavage as the British say, as there are dinner jackets.

It’s quite a way of life and most of the time I’m feeling a little smug and satisfied about it. My accountant says I’m making money and I’m having a subtle kind of revenge on the Prescott memory, just to pay them back for what they did to my old man. But every now and again I could still get the feeling that something was wrong.

You grow up like I did, all full of steam and ambition, and spend thirty years trying to climb maybe three or four hundred feet up a hill, and when you get there maybe you too would find that the view was wonderful and the air different—but the people merely the way you’d figured they would be.

I thought about all this while I kept watching the door. I don’t often worry about myself, or waste time looking in mirrors. But now I took a look at the wall mirror and worried a little. What would she see when she came in? I’m not tall like a knight on a white charger. My shoulders are too heavy and my jaw is too broad—and now I was fretting about the mustache that I had grown in the army to make me look older. It was no hair-line thing, but one of these Robert Preston type mustaches. I had wondered if I’d better shave it off. But that seemed a silly thing to do, now. She had seemed to like me with the mustache—after all, she was coming back.

I sat there and thought about her. It had happened last night. She had come in with another girl. They had both been in evening dress. She was just back from the Coast. I hadn’t found out yet what she’d been doing out there. I didn’t think it could have been the studios. She didn’t seem that type. Pretty enough? Sure—well, maybe not exactly pretty. What do you mean by pretty?

The feeling I got from her was not of prettiness, but of impact. Something hit me. For the first time since the war something hit me where it matters.

I remember what I thought. I thought, there’s a good-sized doll . . . and let it go at that for a minute. It shook me up a little, later, to realize that if I’d employed a floorman or a bouncer I might never have got to talk to her.

They had taken a table, just the two of them. They didn’t seem to notice that they were the only unescorted women in the place. I stopped at the table and they looked up from whatever they’d been saying. I’ve seen the time when it might have thrown me to come face to face with so much poise and assurance. But I’d picked up a little poise along the way, too. I think maybe the army helped. That’s no wisecrack. I mean it. Going through O.C.S., even infantry, and getting the gold bar—I know. There’s a gag about it. Gentleman, by act of congress.

Skip the gag. I thought I was going to lead a platoon into battle. I could field-strip an MI, a carbine, a .30 water-cooled, and a .50 air-cooled and jumble them together blindfolded and then reassemble the parts. That was considered pretty damned important. I knew how to level a mortar baseplate, make out a morning report, and what to do until the medic got there. Maybe even more important, I knew the first thing the medic would do when he did get there. Oh, I was a well-instructed 2nd Lt. of Inf.

So I became a maintenance officer in the headquarters company of a supply battalion in an armored division—me, who didn’t know a spanner wrench from a socket. A maintenance officer and, automatically, a gentleman.

Maybe it should have happened to somebody else. Maybe I would have been better off if I had never found out about being a gentleman. It caused me some misery along the way because some of the men I had to deal with were gentlemen, and not by any act of congress. But I had the great advantage of being treated like a gentleman and after a while I began to act like a gentleman, and sometimes even to think like one. And so I stood at the round table and looked down at these two girls, all of whose male ancestors had been gentlemen for generations back, and I was neither embarrassed nor distressed.

I didn’t want to make any particular fuss about it, but I wanted them to understand clearly and at once just what sort of a position they had put me in. I smiled and said, “If I may?” and sat down before they said I couldn’t. I said, “We’re always most happy to welcome new guests, and since it’s the first rule of the house that there shall be no unescorted ladies present, I’m going to take advantage of the situation and pretend that I’m escorting both of you tonight. Fair enough?”

I remember that the brunette smiled, but for the first time in my life I didn’t pay much attention to a brunette. I was looking at the blonde. She was neither a bright and glittering blonde nor a grubby imitation one. She was a girl with fluffy, curly, very attractive gold-colored hair. I mean that literally. If you’re not too young, you’ve got a token gold piece around the house somewhere and remembering it, you will know at once the color of Anne Cramer’s hair.

She told me her name almost at once. I suspect that she wanted to impress me at the very start—make sure that I wouldn’t for a minute misconstrue her purpose in being here. Everyone in the township knew the name of Cramer. It might ring a bell with you, too, if you heard the full title that her father wore with distinction. Brigadier-General Gunther Cramer.

To a former second lieutenant of infantry it was pretty impressive.

I got my breath back and said, “I’ll bet you played in this house as a kid. I mean—the Prescotts and the Cramers and the—” for a minute I couldn’t think of any of the other old and impressive family names. In my boyhood there had been room only for a villain and a hero. Prescott had been the villain, but time and the clay pits had taken care of him. Now here was the hero’s daughter.

She laughed and said, “Yes,” and gave me an odd, straightforward look. “I played here as a child with Sue Prescott and when I came home yesterday and heard that the old mansion was now a—”

“Ginmill?” I said softly.

“Exactly,” she said in her soft, grave voice. She looked at me very steadily and I thought that she was going to ask me how I could have done such a thing, as though it were some kind of desecration. But she didn’t ask anything. She sat looking at me as though an explanation from me would be her natural right.

I didn’t hurry to answer. I saw her jaw was broad and firm. Her skin was very good, creamy and tight-textured. Her clear, appraising eyes hinted at a secret boldness. I thought the traditional thing—spoiled, rich brat. But then I knew that I was using the worn-out thoughts of other people, not my own, and tried to reassess her and fit a new thought to that face.

Before I could get anywhere with the idea she was after me with words.

“How did you happen to do this?” she said. “This isn’t a cocktail lounge, this is a replica of the old barroom down on the flats. I remember my father telling about it. It was a grim and terrible place.”

I looked around the room. I inhaled my cigar slowly and came back to her. “It isn’t grim or terrible here, is it? The same bar, the same fixtures, the same sort of tables and caned chairs. Even the kerosene lamps along the wall came from down on the flats. But the sheriff has never been here, the ambulance has never backed up outside that door. It must be true that God made two kinds of people—the rich are better-mannered. When we get the others, they behave.”

There was amusement away back in her eyes.

“When I heard that a man named Jason Broome was running River House, I tried to place the name. The last name. I could understand about the Jason. For generations, the oldest male Prescott was always named Jason. That suggested that your father might have worked for Jason Prescott.”

“He was a straw boss in the brickyards when I was a kid. He died the week after the yards closed down.”

“And in your mind,” she said, “that took on some twisted significance. You blamed Jason Prescott for your father’s death. And turning the Prescott mansion into a roadhouse was your idea of a subtle revenge.”

I could look at her and not mind. I could laugh at her. I had her then, caught and trapped by her own words.

I said, “Prescott didn’t close the yards down for the sake of a whim. He ran out of clay. No clay, no brick. And my father died of pneumonia, caught duck-hunting out of season. It had nothing to do with a broken heart and the loss of a job after a lifetime given to it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then why this hatred? Why this flaunting in the face? Why bring a fine old house and fine old memories to such an end?”

I let the laughter in me show, and if she wished to read the mockery also, why, that was there too.

“An ex-bootlegger by name of Gallagher bought the place at a tax sale, fixed it up and got a license. I was in the army at the time and the last thought I had in mind was running a roadhouse in the Hudson Valley. Now, may I bring you something from the bar?”

She said, “Scotch and soda. Eloise, too.” I remembered that she had not presented me to the brunette. She thought of it at the same time and said, “I’m sorry. I was too taken up with history. Eloise, this is Jason Broome, our host. Eloise Ruysdale, Mr. Broome.”

I said, “How do you do?” I thought that if I had any sense I would pay some attention to Eloise Ruysdale. She was a brunette and I had always liked the dark ones. But I found it difficult in the presence of Anne Cramer—only she came through at the moment.

I came back from the bar with the three glasses. I know that it is poor practice to drink with the customer—I haven’t the paunch for it and I don’t really like the stuff. But I knew an occasion, and this was one.

Anne Cramer said, “It was nice of you not to have us thrown out. I’ve only just come in from the Coast. They aren’t so particular in some of the cocktail lounges out there.”

I smiled and said, “There are places along the side streets down in Newburyport where they aren’t so particular, either. Every so often someone writes a piece about it for a newspaper or magazine and a license gets revoked. I try to be a practical businessman.”

“You seem to have been very practical, Mr. Broome. But I have the feeling that Eloise and I are keeping you from your work.” Anne Cramer stood up and, of course, I stood up too. I had a really good look at her then, full length. She was as tall as I—it was difficult to tell much else about her except that she was not obviously misshapen. There are so many ways to improve on nature today that a man is a fool to take all he sees as evidence of perfection.

But she was wearing a summer evening gown and a summer fur and the rest seemed to be all her own. I liked what I saw and was trying to think how I could prolong this meeting or at least get some assurance that there would be another, when she spoke.

She said, “It has been an interesting evening—I’m really sorry about an engagement made earlier. I’d like to know more about how you have changed the Prescott mansion into River House.”

I said, “Tomorrow?”

She said, “Tomorrow, then.”

There was a considerable crowd in the room. We worked our way to the door. I was wondering whether to go as far as her car with them, across the blue gravel. But she gave me her hand, briefly, and with no hidden pressure that I could detect.

There had to be the rest of the evening, but I moved through it without conscious reflexes. There were suddenly things that needed thinking about.

It is easy, now, with hindsight, to know what I should have done. But at the moment no one on earth could have persuaded me to go down and jump in the river and not hold my breath. No one told me about the clay pit, for of course no one had thought of the clay pit in years. And even if they had, they would not have associated it with me or with Anne Cramer.

Or with murder.