Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 12

. . . a houseful of women. My grandmother said, no roof was ever built big enough for that.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

It being Thursday, and the maid’s night out, Kenmore’s ring at the front door was answered by Corinne Axiter. (The dark sister. Darwina’s glacial, bitter brat.)

“Yes. Please come in.” Corinne’s face was expressionless, as smooth as her straight-combed dark hair. Corinne missed prettiness by a little margin—a margin of reserve and sharp intelligence. She had what Kenmore considered bookish features, thin and cool and introspective.

From the front hallway, he followed the girl down three curved steps into what tried to be a baronial room. It only needed a suit of armor or so in its distant corners, the lieutenant felt. An enormous dragon-limbed table at the foot of the steps emphasized the expanse of glistening, parquetry floor; so did the succession of massive, blue velour-clad settees along the walls.

Window drapes of this same blue fell from ceiling-high valance boxes to spill yards of velvet upon the parquetry. A fireplace, unlit, was repellently large, austere, and cold. This last was flanked by somber oils, overwhelmed by their own great, gilt frames.

Jessie Axiter, a tiny figure on a blue settee, was now bearing up bravely with an obvious effort.

Kenmore said he regretted the necessity of questions. “For the coroner’s records, you know.

“Name of deceased, Henry R. Bowling,” murmured he, over an opened memo book. “What is the R for?” to Mrs. Axiter.

Jessie Axiter, seen now by light, was a fair-haired and ineffectual-seeming woman, amorphously flowing. Kenmore recognized at once that she hadn’t any force or thrust of personality; he imagined, though, she could cling to beat the very devil.

“Ross,” she told him. “It’s the family name on my mother’s side. She was Scottish. So were the Bowlings, only they were really English originally.”

“Mother,” said Corinne. “The officer only wants the name, he doesn’t care what it means.”

She misjudged Kenmore. He certainly had no objection to letting Jessie Axiter render an account in her own diffuse way.

“His age?”

“Sixty-two,” said Mrs. Axiter.

Kenmore continued in a disarmingly mechanical manner. Date and time of death, he had that. Reported by, place of death, character of premises, ditto. Last residence of deceased, 222 Laguna Terrace. Without the slightest change of tone, Kenmore asked: “How long had he lived here?”

“We came in ’39,” said Jessie Axiter. “That summer.”

That was to say, two years after the Catherine Hope Case. It was not quite what Kenmore had expected to hear. Henry Bowling might not even have heard of Catherine Hope.

Mrs. Axiter took advantage of the detective’s momentary preoccupation. “Though Henry always said he’d been a resident much longer than that—in spirit. He visited here the first time, I think in ’33. No, it must have been ’32. I remember he cast an absentee ballot, I had to get the papers and send them on, and after all the bother it didn’t make the least difference. Because Mr. Hoover wasn’t elected, anyway. Well, Henry simply fell in love with La Jolla, then. Of course, it’s changed since. It’s not at all the same place.”

“Last previous address?” said Kenmore.

“Mankato. We’re old Minnesota stock. Grandfather Bowling—my father, but I always called him that after my own children came—settled there at the time of the New Ulm Massacre.”

Lieutenant Kenmore had become almost resigned to it . . . Of every two persons you met on a San Diego street, one had lived here not more than a decade; of every three, one had come in the last year or so. Most people, like Henry Bowling, had their roots elsewhere.

It posed a peculiarly boom-town police problem, since so much a detective needed to uncover was somewhere else, maybe a thousand miles away.

The lieutenant asked, “Your brother’s birthplace was Minnesota, then?”

“Yes, in Mankato.”

“Occupation?”

“Why, retired. He was a newspaper man. A newspaper publisher.”

“Oh, mother.” Corinne was smoking a cigarette, or rather letting it smoke itself away in her slender, tapering fingers; with continual, small, birdlike pecks toward an ashtray. “He wasn’t really. What he did was sell the printed insides to little country papers. I don’t think you can call that being a newspaperman.”

Kenmore recognized ironic hostility in this comment, and reproach in Jessie Axiter’s answering glance. “Dear, I don’t think the police care exactly what he published. It was a newspaper supplement, at any rate. I’d call it being a newspaper publisher, and I’m sure he considered himself one.”

“Civil condition?” He interpreted. “Married? Widower?”

“Oh, no. Not Henry.”

“His father’s name?”

“David. David Bowling.”

“And his birthplace?”

“It was Linlithgow. That’s in Scotland.”

Kenmore scribbled. “And you say his mother’s maiden name was Ross.”

Mrs. Axiter smiled; said to Corinne, “You see, dear.” And to Kenmore: “Yes, Jessie Ross. She was a Linlithgow girl. They were childhood sweethearts. Grandfather Bowling came away to America to make his fortune, and then years later he went back and they were married, after they’d both waited for the other all that time. It was terribly romantic, wasn’t it? But he always said, she was worth crossing the ocean twice to win. She was a great beauty—you won’t see it in me, I take after him— but Lally’s the very image.”

Mrs. Axiter’s shoulder suddenly quivered, and she gave a little gasping sob.

“I’m sorry,” she said faintly, and touched a handkerchief to the corners of her wet eyes. “It’s just that a death in the family takes one back so.” She paused. “Do you think Saturday’s too soon for the funeral?”

“Well,” said Kenmore, “you’ve got to allow time for the coroner’s autopsy.”

He would sooner this question had not come up so abruptly.

“Oh.” The eyes widened above the handkerchief. Jessie Axiter looked to her daughter. “We hadn’t thought of that.”

“No,” said Corinne, and stared at Kenmore. “It didn’t occur to us. I should think Dr. Myatt’s signing the death certificate ought to satisfy the red tape. The other would be just a formality—and a pretty disagreeable formality.”

She bent forward.

“You saw off the top of their heads, don’t you, officer? And split them up the middle. I don’t think Uncle Henry would have cared for it a bit.”

Mrs. Axiter cried out painfully, “Oh, no!”

“Well, mother, that’s what an autopsy is,” observed the bitter brat.

She was certainly smart enough to know what she was up to; Lieutenant Kenmore didn’t yet know; but he felt completely certain she hadn’t objected to the sawing-and-splitting out of squeamishness. For what Corinne’s composed and unmoved face could not mask was a bland indifference to the effect of this lurid description upon her shocked and distressed mother.

“No,” Mrs. Axiter trembled indignantly, “we could never consent to anything of the kind. Never.”

It was not the first time Lieutenant Kenmore had encountered opposition to an autopsy.

He began reasonably and sympathetically. “But, after all, it’s only surgery. It’s performed by a physician for a necessary and legitimate reason, like any other surgical operation. And it’s quite often to the family’s advantage . . . Henry Bowling carried life insurance, I suppose?”

“I can’t see whatever his insurance has to do with this,” Jessie Axiter protested.

Kenmore replied, it might. “If there’s a double indemnity clause covering accidental death. The underwriters would have to be convinced it was accidental, that actually enough carbon monoxide had been inhaled to cause death.”

“Yes,” said Corinne, “only his wasn’t that kind of insurance.”

Kenmore glanced curiously at the girl.

She said, “Uncle Henry purchased insurance as an investment, not to buy protection he didn’t need. I don’t understand all the complexities of it, but I know it wasn’t the kind of insurance you’re thinking of.”

Jessie Axiter brightened. “Well, then, there’s no need for an autopsy,” she declared in relief. “So we won’t talk about it any more.”

“It’s not a question of insurance, Mrs. Axiter. I mentioned that as a possibility, as an example. I hoped you’d see it was reasonable—”

“No,” said Jessie Axiter, interrupting sharply. She got up from the settee, with little flags of color in her too-powdered cheeks. “I don’t see it, I don’t think it’s in the least necessary or reasonable. It’s absolutely horrible and barbaric! And,” her voice had grown shrill, “there’s no use trying to change my mind, because I shan’t even consider it.”

This was meant to be final.

But what else did it mean? Kenmore could not be sure whether Mrs. Axiter objected to the autopsy, or to what it might disclose. Or whether she had not been goaded into this stand by the sardonic Corinne.

At any rate, it demanded a final answer. He was not going to get anywhere with this investigation without determining the cause of death. The issue had to be faced—and forced.

Kenmore stood, too.

“You needn’t change your mind, of course,” said he. “Mr. Bowling’s body is in the custody of the State of California. It cannot be released until the authorities have investigated and certified their findings.”

Jessie Axiter gave him a rigid stare.

“You mean you think you can just go ahead and take him?” she asked incredulously.

“Technically, yes. But in practice, we don’t ‘take’ the body anywhere. It will remain at the local mortuary.”

“And that’s all we have to say about it?”

“Legally,” Kenmore dryly assured her, “you’ve no property right to the body of the deceased. But actually there won’t be any objection to a member of the family attending—or you may ask your family doctor to be present. I suggest you do so.”

There followed a pause; Mrs. Axiter used it to moisten her grey lips; the flags of color were hauled down, and left her face rice-white.

“Well!” she burst forth. “We’ll fight that! I never heard of such a law. If it is one. The idea a man’s own family can’t, his own sister can’t—just because he died accidentally!”

Behind her came a slightly blurred giggle. “Mother, that’s baloney. You know perfectly well Uncle Henry was murdered, and we’re all tickled pink.”

Jessie Axiter flung around: “Lally!”

Her mother hadn’t exaggerated; Lally Dearborn was certainly a beauty. The portiere drapes of a side doorway provided the suitably somber background for a hel-ment of dazzling, wheat-gold hair, and for a figure sheathed in clinging white. The gown left bare Lally’s arms and her shoulders, suntanned to the complexion of richly creamed coffee.

She’d made an indisputably effective entrance.

Unfortunately, the effect dissolved as Lally advanced into the room.

“She’s not herself,” Mrs. Axiter told Kenmore hurriedly; and she was not, at any rate, very sure of herself. He remembered seeing drunken drivers trying to walk chalklines, before breath and blood tests for intoxication came into police use. Lally walked like that, placing her feet upon the parquetry with painfully preserved steadiness. It wasn’t that she staggered; she only looked as if she would, the next step.

Corinne Axiter, her head tipped to one side appraisingly, studied her sister. “I don’t know, mother,” said she critically. “I should say she’s very much herself. Almost more so than usual.”

And Mrs. Axiter observed: “She’s been taking those headache drops again. They always make her dizzy. I think there’s sulfa or something dreadful in them.”

The curious thing to Kenmore was that Lally’s condition excited these comments; but what she’d said made no visible impression upon her mother and sister.

It was left for him to pick up that . . . “Here,” he directed. “Sit down. What do you mean, he was murdered?”

Lally, as he bent over her, was not quite so beautiful as she had seemed in the doorway. And yet her features were flawless. The tiny termites of dissipation hadn’t actually loosened a lineament; it was only that you could sense what she’d look like next year, and the year after.

“What a pity,” thought the lieutenant, who knew better than most how inexorable the change would be. “Why doesn’t she take the cure?” Or, if Darwina was right, put herself into the hands of a psychiatrist. But he knew she wouldn’t. Kenmore had observed before now, there is no one more recalcitrant than a young woman who is determined to go to hell.

But the thought was by-the-way.

“Well?” he demanded. “Why do you say he was murdered?”

In vino Veritas. But what degree of truth? Lally replied with childlike logic:

“That old heater’s been there for years. It never killed Mrs. Rhine. So you see.”

Kenmore drew back a discomfited step. It was only that?

Corinne was stabbing her cigarette to its death. “But,” the dark sister observed superiorly, “when Mrs. Rhine lived there she had the chimney.”

“Chimney?” said Kenmore.

“There used to be a fireplace. Uncle Henry tore it out. He thought if a bomb dropped anywhere near, the bricks would fall through the roof.”

Kenmore thought, that explained the new paneling.

Corinne continued briskly. “The north lots didn’t come with this house. He bought them two years ago, to have room for a tennis court partly, and partly because the old redwood cottage was an eyesore. It was built, oh, years before this section of town was restricted. And Mrs. Rhine never watered, never pulled a weed, and she hung out her washing practically under our noses, things like that. Of course, Uncle Henry intended to remodel the cottage inside and out and make it really a guesthouse. Only priorities came along and he couldn’t get the materials, and let it go until after the War. That’s how it became his air raid post, because he didn’t want to pile sandbags around this house.

“Anyway,” said Corinne conclusively, “it’s perfectly true the heater never poisoned Amy Rhine, but she hadn’t the place sealed up as it is now.”

Lally listened, or didn’t listen, petulantly. “Anyway, you’re glad it happened. You can’t deny you are.”

“But I do deny it,” said the dark sister. “You may be tickled pink, but that’s because you’re so deliciously primitive, darling. When actually it won’t make the least difference. You’ll go on just as before, boozing and sleep-ing-around, until one fine day Al Dearborn slits your pretty throat.”

Jessie Axiter broke in, fluttering: “Corinne! Girls! What will the lieutenant think of us?”

“Mother,” said Corinne, “her habits aren’t any secret from the police. They call her by her first name at the sub-station—if they are charitable. Otherwise, God-knows-what.”

“Are you a cop?” Lally murmured to Kenmore. “You don’t look like one. I think you look like a football coach. College, not high school.”

“That,” said Corinne, “is what she tells all the boys who are too old to look like football heroes.”

Kenmore ignored the bitter brat. He stared down at the younger girl. “Yes, I am . . . Why should you be glad? Any of you?”

Under his searching scrutiny, Lally gave a little blurred giggle.

“I bet you think I haven’t any brassiere on.” In fact, the white gown was almost shamelessly low-cut. “Well, I have so. A very special one, from New York, and it cost—you guess.”

The settee caught Jessie Axiter’s collapsing, spent weight. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and burst into tears. “Corinne, take your sister upstairs.”

“No,” Kenmore insisted. “I want her to answer that.”

Lally’s entrance had obviously been fortified by a very stiff drink, the effects of which were rising in her clouding blue eyes.

“Twen’y-fi’ dollars,” she mumbled.

“I mean why you should be glad.”

“Because Uncle Henry saw through us,” Corinne told him, “is why. When you perform your autopsy, take a good look at his tongue. He had a blunt one.”

She stood.

“Come along, darling, before you’re sick on the nice parquetry, and you know Ella hates that.”

“No,” said Kenmore, “she isn’t that drunk . . . Look here. Don’t touch this. But have you ever seen it before?”

Lally’s blue eyes focused with some difficulty on the envelope.

“No,” she denied.

“Miss Corinne?”

The dark sister shook her head. “I’ve no idea—what is it, anyway?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I am trying to find out,” said Kenmore. “What it was doing in the guesthouse.”

“It probably fell out of the carpenter’s pocket,” Corinne thought. “We don’t know anyone named Bur-rett, and I never heard of New Gilead, Michigan.”

“Mrs. Axiter?”

Tears trickled down Jessie Axiter’s too-powdered cheeks. She looked up at Kenmore, and for the first time he saw the faint and ancient scar on her throat under the thick powder.

“That isn’t Henry’s handwriting,” said she. “Mr. Kenmore. Lally does have headaches. I’m sure that is why . . . She is simply not responsible when she has these spells.”

And so wonderfully made is the human mind, Kenmore thought it even possible she believed what she said.

“Yes,” said the lieutenant. “But have you any reason to think what she told us might be true? If your brother had an enemy—?”

“Oh, no!”

“I don’t necessarily mean a blood feud, Mrs. Axiter. But if he was involved, let’s say, in a lawsuit? If he had been annoyed by a crank in some way recently?”

And he ran down the list of commonest motives for murder.

“No,” Jessie Axiter repeated, “no, no.”

“Did you notice,” persisted Lieutenant Kenmore, “anything unusual in his manner? He was worried . . . or wrapped up in something he mightn’t have talked about?”

“Not at all,” said Corinne. “We had dinner at the Loquat House tonight. Uncle Henry left early, before the dessert, because of the Commando raid drill. That was the last we saw of him, and he was certainly in the best of spirits then.”

Lieutenant Kenmore went outside and, pausing on the verandah, tamped tobacco into his pipe. There was a great deal wrong in the house of death, but what was significantly wrong? He couldn’t tell . . . The scene was too like one of those pictures in which the artist deliberately includes several score errors, and challenges you to count them accurately.

He was not to smoke the pipe of contemplation as yet.

A light showed now above the garage’s triple doors. The lieutenant found a flight of outside stairs. He climbed, and knocked.

Stifled tones told him, “Yup, come in.” Kenmore en-tered a small, slope-ceilinged room that had an ill-kept, masculine, bachelor appearance. A box couch fitting against the lower wall, between bookshelves, wore a rumpled blanket cover. Copies of Time, Sunset, and Popular Machanics lay strewn over a table in the middle of the room. The pine floor lacked any covering.

“Hello, where are you?”

Kenmore heard footsteps, and then a small, bald, moustached man came around a partition at the room’s end. He appeared in an undershirt and trousers, with his suspenders falling to his knees.

“Fred Crush?” the lieutenant asked, and showed his badge.

Crush nodded; then held the nozzle of a medicinal-looking tube to his nostril; flattened the companion nostril under his thumb, and sniffed noisily.

“Yup,” said he in a congested tone. “What you want?” And as an afterthought: “ ’Scuse me. Lots of pneumonitis around. A working man can’t take chances with his health, it’s all he’s got.”

Kenmore replied: Fred Crush had been a witness tonight, had he not?

“Uh-huh. Pull yourself up a chair.” The gardener seated himself on the box couch. He squeezed out a thumbnail’s length of the nasal jelly, tossed that into his mouth, and swallowed, grimacing. “I guess I can’t tell you much. They had him outside on the grass by the time I got down there.”

“They called you?”

“Nuh, I heard her carrying-on, crying. Miz Axiter.”

“And then?”

“Well, sir,” said Crush, “that’s just about all there was to it.”

Kenmore looked at him. “Nobody told you to do anything about it?”

“Oh. Yup. She said to call a doctor, so I went in the house.”

“Ran across the tennis court?”

Crush nodded.

Kenmore said, “All the way to the house, when there was a phone right there?”

“Well, I went in there first. There was a phone, all right, but I didn’t see any book. I had to look up the number before I called. That’s why I went to the house, mister.”

“And which doctor did you call?”

The gardener gave a headshake. “I didn’t, I told Corinne about it.”

“And then,” said Kenmore, “you weren’t interested enough to go back to the guesthouse and see what was happening?”

Crush’s eyes refused to meet his inquisitor’s. “I dunno what good I could ’a done.”

“Where did you go, then?” Kenmore asked.

When he didn’t get a reply to that, the lieutenant arose from his chair.

“Put on your shirt,” said he, “and a coat.”

The box spring cried out, the gardener jerked visibly as from a blow. His lips worked under their shelter of greying moustache. He whined: “If you got to know. I had to go look for Lally. I went down to the Shore Club, only she wasn’t there.”

“Lally! What is this? Why didn’t you say so?”

Fred Crush’s face got brick red. On his cheekbones traceries of hairline capillaries gorged into blue prominence.

He exploded: “Well, God A’mighty! Corinne told me not to mention it! Lally’s on a drunk-bat, I suppose. They’re trying to hide that, they expect me to lie and get myself in Dutch with the police . . . What does Corinne care about me? They’re all alike, that family!”

Lieutenant Kenmore could not imagine Corinne in the role of Lally’s defender. There was certainly more to it than that . . .

The gardener had jumped up excitedly.

“If you had to put up with them yourself!” Fred Crush exclaimed. “The way they impose on a man! Take just one thing—eating. Of course they’ve got my ration books, so’s to do all the shopping together. But you take meat . . . The government never intended a big roast should go on Henry Bowling’s table for him to carve off more than the family can eat, and then send the bone out to the kitchen for the hired help. I don’t care if you are a cop, you have to admit that’s not right.”

But he didn’t give Kenmore a moment to admit it, he plunged on:

“Oh, they’ll tell you what a fine fellow Henry Bowling is—was. How much he did for civilian defense. Well, maybe, but there’s more to it than that. You take those sandbags down there—” the gardener gave a short bark of laughter. “On account of the housing shortage, he was afraid the government’d step in and make him rent that little cottage to some War worker. But a family in it would mean kids. Not that there’s anything they could hurt. Only you know how it is. Kids holler and yell. They’d be a nuisance. He saw it coming, and he figured if he made the place into an air raid post, he wouldn’t be bothered.”

Fred Crush wiped a bent and nervous forefinger across his moustache, both ways. And went on, headlong:

“There’s your Henry Bowling. He knew which side to spread the butter on—his side. And when butter’s rationed, it makes a man stop and think . . . At that, he was the best of the lot. When I see those girls that never lifted a finger in their lives—one of them drinking herself to death—and Corinne just as bad, driving everybody else to drink—! What the hell have they got to kick about? I’d like to know. They’ve got every advantage and luxury money can buy. Everything in the world. And they’re bawling because the moon wasn’t thrown in. I tell you what it is—

“Selfishness! It’s spoiled selfishness. I’m not any crazy Red,” he shook his head at Kenmore, “but the whole family makes me good and swearing mad. Miz Axiter, too. Damned if she doesn’t think those girls ought to have the moon!”

“Yes,” said Kenmore, “if it’s true, I can see how you feel.”

But this lengthy outburst hadn’t distracted his attention from the original issue.

“You brought Lally home, then?”

“No,” said Crush, “she wasn’t at the Club.”

“One more thing. This.”

The gardener peered at the envelope, and shook his head.

Lieutenant Kenmore carried that object back to the guesthouse where Donald Heyes, police photographer and fingerprint technician, was now busy.

“You had better take a picture of this, and see if there are any prints on it.”

Donald Heyes took the picture.

He said there were only unidentifiable smudges on the envelope. “Plenty of other prints here, if you got any suspects to match ’em up with.”

Kenmore replied everyone involved might conceivably be suspected. “Only we can’t start fingerprinting them yet.”

He had to be content with bundling together the pink sheets along with the gas mask and helment; these last articles he could fairly claim, since they were property issued through the war duty office authority.

“Too bad he wasn’t wearing that,” said Heyes.

“You mean the mask? It wouldn’t have made any difference, this type isn’t designed to exclude carbon monoxide.”

Nevertheless, Lieutenant Kenmore examined the mask attentively; the white, very thin rubber inlet valve was lifelessly weak. “He couldn’t have worn it, anyway.” And the lieutenant transferred his attention to the heater. This had two valves; one upon the heater base, and the other at the wall tap, whence ran a reinforced tubing to the heater.

“Check these prints here,” said Kenmore, discovering the grilled top of the heater bore visible impressions.

He had next to pay a call at the mortuary and, according to regulation procedure, remove and list Henry Bowling’s clothing and personal effects to seal and deliver to the police department’s property clerk.

In this occupation, Kenmore generally found both food and opportunity for reflection. It followed the first interrogation of witnesses, and with the conflicting testimonies fresh in mind.

Though Kenmore knew he was not going to get any useful perspective of Henry Bowling by walking around and seeing him through a dozen pairs of eyes. (The armband and whistle he laid aside. Wallet, wristwatch, keys, spectacle case, tobacco pouch, stickpin and signet ring went into another heap.) For what any man sees in another is the reflection of the observer’s self-interest, attributes and attitudes. Kenmore thought, “A missionary doesn’t look the same to a bishop and a cannibal.”

(He tied the shoes together by their laces.)

And how the missionary would look to a homicide detail detective would be neither the sum of those observations, nor a balance struck between them. Henry Bowling as employer, as sector warden, and as family head didn’t engage John Kenmore’s professional attention. No matter what the man had really been like; only, how must he have seemed to the murderer he meant to denounce?

(The clothing, neatly folded, made another pile.)

And with the clothing went the individual; what remained was The Victim. Who had to be seen as such; and not in any perspective Kenmore could get by adding Wyeland’s estimate with the several contributions of Lauren Wallace, Mrs. Axiter, Corinne, Lally, and Fred Crush.

Leave the exact weighing of pros and cons to the Recording Angel; leave Kenmore’s own personal and human philosophy and feeling out of the matter; what he had to do now was see eye-to-eye with the killer . . . a nebulous figure concealed in an unexplored shadow Henry Bowling hadxast sometime and somewhere.

Eye-to-eye with the killer?

Lieutenant Kenmore had not reached that point. It was, he thought, “Like playing chess blindfolded,” against an adversary who operated at no such disadvantage and besides had every move plotted in advance.