Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 9

Men have more intuition than women any day, if they would stop and listen to it.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

Unnatural death affected John Kenmore to about the extent a physician is emotionally affected when confronted with a repulsive disease. It was shocking, but it was also his job.

He dropped to one knee and stared at Henry Bowling’s cherry-mottled face, and a change came over him. He ceased to be the John Kenmore who preferred tap beer to the bottled variety, considered Leon Errol funnier than Laurel and Hardy, and would rather spend his day off reeling in swordfish than spend it playing golf. As a normal human being, he felt all the complicated and instinctive emotions normal men do feel in the presence of death; but he put aside his personal feelings. They were not any more important than the color of the necktie he happened to be wearing.

“What happened here?” said the homicide detective.

“Gas heater.” The kneeling man bent forward on the pivot made by his cupped hands. A strand of dark hair fell, dangled before his lowered face. “Fumes—got him—I guess.”

“You’ve sent for a doctor?”

“Think so.” The other leaned back and rested with his hips on his heels, showing Kenmore a thin intent face from which the lock of dark hair had fallen away and down one flat cheek. “Can’t talk—doing this.”

The eyes burned with their own preoccupation, and it was possible this man did not really see Lieutenant Kenmore.

“One,” he said under his breath, and his body rocked forward, his cupped hands pressed against Henry Bowling’s ribs, and the strand of hair dropped from his forehead. “Two. Three. Four.”

Kenmore straightened.

“Mrs. Axiter would know about that,” suggested the warden at his side.

Kenmore’s grey glance made out the woman’s form. She leaned against the pyramid of sandbags. She was watching, and weeping as she watched.

Kenmore, as he came a step closer, saw that tears had washed paths down her faded, and he thought curiously heavily powdered face. Her hands hung lamely and limply at her sides.

She had to gather herself, and gather her breath, to answer him.

“I think,” Mrs. Axiter faltered, “the gardener went and phoned.”

Kenmore could not be sure, from the indecisive sound of this, that a doctor had been called at all.

(Not that he thought it would make any difference to Henry Bowling. However, that was the doctor’s province, and not a homicide detective’s.)

The lieutenant took two more steps to the guesthouse door. It was a redwood cottage, and its interior had the ripened and dark look common to very old redwood. The end wall had been freshly paneled, and the new wood made an odd, eye-catching contrast to the other three, seasoned walls and the floor.

The room was very hot; the heat came flooding up from a portable gas heater beyond the flat-top desk where the telephone stood.

Kenmore lifted the telephone from its base, and dialed Seaview 3-3000, the La Jolla control room number.

“Elliot?” said he. “You’d better rush your nearest casualty station physician to 222 Laguna Terrace—” and had to repeat the instruction to make the district warden understand he was not simply reporting a drill incident.

William Wyeland had come in, a step behind the lieutenant.

Very pale, he muttered: “I was in the A.E.F. last time, you know.”

Kenmore understood perfectly what the apparently uncalled-for remark meant.

“It gets you, anyway,” said he.

“I suppose it’s—we were just talking . . . It’d already happened then. Of course, Theodora never dreamed,” said the other confusedly. “He was a good sector warden. She often said, no one could have done more. This is a heavy blow for all of us.”

“Theodora?” Kenmore remembered, or half-remembered, the name.

“My wife.”

“You found him, did you?”

“No,” said Wyeland. “I was at home, that’s my post. My daughter—she’s in the messengers—was the one.”

“Your daughter . . . When was this?”

“Just now.”

“Five minutes ago? Ten?”

Wyeland said, “Let’s see . . . I opened the envelope at 7:47—that was the time marked on it. Then I had to make up my report in writing. Mr. Bowling insisted on that; he said it saved time on the phone. I suppose it was a couple of minutes later when I tried to phone him here.”

“He didn’t answer?”

“No, but I thought nothing of that. I supposed the wires were down as a result of some earlier incident in the sector, you know. That was all prearranged, that if he didn’t answer the phone we were to send a messenger. So I sent Dorothy. But she had to go upstairs and get her armband—it took a minute or so more.”

Wyeland colored faintly above his brown beard.

“That,” said he, “was what we were talking about. My wife didn’t see why Dorothy needed to bother about the armband. Since the child was wearing a white dress, anyway. But, as I said, it might be a dark dress next time, and that white armband’s a good thing to wear in a dim-out, running about the streets. And of course Mr. Bowling would notice if she neglected to wear it. He was very keen about details—old-maidish, as Mrs. Wyeland put it.

“But”—hastily—“we were lucky to have him in charge. I know, the wardens found him difficult at times. And the ladies didn’t appreciate having him come poking into their attics after fire hazards. Still, if we have a real raid instead of a practice one fine day they may be grateful to him after all.”

Kenmore nodded; he imagined it had been 7:55 or later when Dorothy Wyeland arrived and found Henry Bowling dead.

“Here,” said he, returning the flashlight. “You’d better be out front when the doctor gets here.”

And having dismissed Wyeland, Kenmore turned and stared at Henry Bowling’s desk.

On the desk lay two sheets of pink paper. The lieutenant glanced at these; at first casually.

Both were filled out in large, pencil-printed characters. At 7:03, there’d been an UXB reported from 30 Pheasant Lane; and at 7:17, an explosion and spreading fire at the Richfield filling station at Toyon and Balboa Streets.

Kenmore’s mustering frown owed to the fact that the pink sheets were mimeographed, and not the standard printed forms supplied by the War Duty Office.

There was nothing else on the desk except half a dozen pencils methodically arranged in a wire holder; an ashtray and a briar pipe; a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, an eraser, a flashlight, and an alarm clock.

Kenmore observed that the pencils were sharpened after the fashion of professional draughtsmen, being pared to a wedge point rather than a round one. The pipe had been tamped full, lighted, and then let go out with the tobacco scarcely blackened.

The lieutenant’s frown became an expression which pressed up pads of muscle under his grey eyes, and knotted other muscle pads at the corners of his wide mouth.

He stepped back, glanced around the room, and then walked behind the desk.

In the top, right-hand drawer lay two copies of the Handbook for Air Raid Wardens, a pamphlet on extinguishing incendiary bombs, and a booklet, What You Can Do.

The second drawer held only some loose sheets of typing bond paper. These were letter headed: The Valley Press, Mankato, Minnesota. H. R. Bowling, Publisher.

The third and lowermost drawer was larger. Its contents included a civilian’s white-painted steel helmet, a training gas mask in its canvas carrier, a fly-spray gun, and an 8-oz. bottle that bore the label Formaldehyde

The central shallow drawer had nothing in it except a miscellany of paper clips, penknife, pipe cleaners, and (curiously) a clip of ’06 cartridges.

On the left side of the desk was space for a typewriter, and a lower drawer in which were stacked some copies of the dim-out proclamation under a city telephone directory.

That was all for the desk. Placed against the wall behind it, stood a steel filing cabinet.

This, when Kenmore turned to it, disclosed an index of the homes in the sector, divided by posts; it cataloged the residents in detail: the children under six, and adults over sixty-five, and the infirm and otherwise handicapped, and the household pets . . . together with the location of each house’s water taps and garden hose, and electric switches, and gas cut-offs.

Then there was another section, given over to correspondence, mostly mimeographed, and much of it directives from the war duty office.

Lieutenant Kenmore looked into the other rooms—there were only three; a tiny kitchen, a tinier bath, and a bedchamber.

Henry Bowling had kept these rooms closed off; they were chillish and damp, and looked unused in a long time. Perhaps he had never put them to any use at all. The wicker furniture of the bedchamber, the flat-spring bed without a mattress, the picture of Yosemite that had come unglued from its frame—none of it suggested the accommodations the owner of the big house would offer a guest.

All the windows, like the one in front, were sand-bagged; the kitchen door, locked and made secure with a bolt besides. Kenmore looked attentively to this bolt, which wore an undisturbed film of dust.

He stood in the other, front room, staring at the desk; considering.

He had found absolutely nothing to explain Henry Bowling’s sardonically amused phone message.

But he had found enough to feel very sure Henry Bowling had not died by accident.