Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (16 page)

 
          
 
"Ah!" he said, suddenly jolly again.
''No.
Just got on.
If you'd
of come day before yesterday you wouldn't have found me.
Old
man who ran the place up and died, though.
Pitched over like he was
poisoned, right there where you're a-standing now, up and pitched over, and
there I was an hour later, looking in at the door with my hat in my hands. I
knew a little about it, being mechanical and having lived by the sea, so I was
a natural. They took me right on. What's all that to you?"

 
          
 
"Nothing.
Nothing at all," I said, realizing right off that I shouldn't have said it
twice; there was no room here to sound jumpy. But he had caught me by surprise
with the question, and all I could think to say next, rather stupidly, was, ''
Up and died?" thinking that the phrase was a curious one, as if he had
done it on purpose, maybe got up out of a chair to do it.

 
          
 
You can see that I had got muddled up. This
wasn't going well. Somehow I had excited his suspicions by saying the most
arbitrary and commonplace things. Captain Bowker was another lunatic, I
remember thinking—the sort who, if you passed him on the street and said
good-morning, would squint at you and ask what you meant by saying such a
thing.

 
          
 
"Dropped right over dead on his
face," said Captain Bowker, looking at me just as seriously as a stone
head.

 
          
 
Then he grinned and broke into laughter,
slapping me on the back again. "Cigar?" he asked.

 
          
 
I waved it away. "Don't smoke. You have
one. I like the smell of tobacco, actually.
Very
comfortable."

 
          
 
He nodded and said, "Drives off the
'monia fumes," and then he gnawed off the end of a fat cigar, spitting out
the debris with about twice the required force.

 
          
 
"So," I said. "Mind if I look
around?"

 
          
 
"Yep," he said.

 
          
 
I started forward, but he stepped in front of
me. "Yep," he said again, talking past his cigar. "I do mind if
you look around." Then he burst into laughter again so that there was no
way on earth that I could tell what he minded and what he didn't mind.

 
          
 
He plucked the unlit cigar out of his mouth
and said, "Maybe tomorrow, Jim.
Little too much going on
today.
Too busy for it.
I'm new and all, and
can't be showing in every Dick and Harry." He managed, somehow, to get me
turned around and propelled toward the door. ''You understand. You're a businessman.
Tomorrow afternoon, maybe, or the next day.
That's
soon enough, ain't it? You ain't going
nowhere
.

 
          
 
Come on back around, and you can have the run
of the place. Bring a spyglass and a measure stick."

 
          
 
And with that I was out in the fog again,
wondering exactly how things had gone so bad. In the space of ten minutes I'd
been Abner and Jim and Dick and Harry, but none of us had seen a thing. At
least I hadn't given myself away, though. Captain Bowker couldn't have guessed
who I really was. I could relate the incident to St. Ives and Hasbro without
any shame. There was enough in the captain's manner to underscore any
suspicions that we might already have had of the man, and there was the
business of his not wanting me to see the workings of the icehouse, innocent as
such workings ought to be. '

 
          
 
I lounged along toward the Apple—it wasn't the
weather for hurrying—and had got down past the market, maybe a hundred yards
beyond The Hoisted Pint, when I heard the crack of what sounded like a
firecracker from somewhere above and behind me. Immediately an old beggar with
his shoes wound in rags, standing just in front of me, stiffened up straight,
as if he'd been poked in the small of the back, and a wash of red blood spread
out across his shirtfront where you could see it through his open coat.

 
          
 
Before I could twitch, he sat down in the
weeds and then slumped over backward and stared at the sky, his mouth working
as if he were trying to pray, but had forgot the words. He had been shot, of
course—in the heart—by someone with a dead-on aim.

 
          
 
A woman screamed. There was the sound of a
blowing whistle. And without half knowing what I was about, I had the man's
wrist in my hand and was feeling for a pulse. It was worthless. Where the hell
do you find a man's pulse? I can't even find my own half the time. I slammed my
hand over the hole in his chest and leaned into it, trying to shut off the rush
of blood and feeling absolutely futile and stupid until a doctor strode up
carrying his black bag. He crouched beside me, squinted at the corpse, and
shook his head softly to tell me that I was wasting my time.

 
          
 
Reeling just a little from the smell of
already-drying blood, I stood up and stumbled over to sit on a bench, where I
hunched forward and pretended for a bit to be searching for a lucky clover
until my head cleared. I sat up straight, and there was a constable looming
over me with the look in his eye of a man with a few pressing questions to ask.
If I was a rotten actor in front of Captain Bowker, I had improved a bit in the
score of minutes since, and it was a simple thing to convince the constable
that I knew nothing of the dead man.

 
          
 
I avoided one issue, though: I seemed to be
collecting dead men all of a sudden. First there was the tragedy up in Holborn,
now a man drops dead at my feet, shot through the heart. Most of us go through
our lives avoiding that sort of thing. Now I was getting more than my share of
it. It was evidence of something, but not the sort of evidence that would do
the constable any good, not yet anyway.

 
          
 
It wasn't quite noon when I got back to the
Crown and Apple and cleaned myself up, and when St. Ives and Hasbro found me I
was putting away my second pint and not feeling any better at all. This last
adventure had taken the sand out of me, and I couldn't think in a straight
enough line to put the pieces of the morning together in such a way that they
would signify.

 
          
 
"You're looking rotten," said St.
Ives with his customary honesty. He ordered a pint of bitter, and so did
Hasbro, although St. Ives had lately been under a new regime and had taken to
drinking nothing but cider during the day. They were following my lead in order
to make it seem perfectly natural that I was swilling beer before lunch. St.
Ives winked at Hasbro. "It's the clean sea air. You're missing the
London
fogs. Your lungs can't stand the change.
Send for Dorothy." He said this last to Hasbro, who pretended to get up,
but then sat back down when the two fresh pints hove into view.

 
          
 
They were joking, of course—being jolly after
their morning visit. And I was happy for it, not for myself, but for St. Ives.
I hated to tell them the truth, but I told them anyway.
'
'There's
been a man shot," I said.

 
          
 
St. Ives scowled. "The news is up and
down the bay by now. We heard a lad shouting it outside the window of Aunt
Edie's cottage.
Sterne
Bay
doesn't get many shootings."

 
          
 
"I saw the whole thing.
Witnessed it."

 
          
 
St. Ives looked up from his pint glass and
raised his eyebrows.

 
          
 
"He wasn't a half step in front of me. A
tramp from the look of him, just about to touch me for a shilling, I suppose,
and then, crack!
just
like that, and he's on his back
like a bug, dead.
Shattered his heart."

 
          
 
"He was a half step in front of you?
That's hyperbole, of course. What you meant to say is that he was nearby."

 
          
 
"As close to me as I am to you," I
said, thinking what he was thinking.

 
          
 
St. Ives was silent for a moment, studying
things. It had taken me a while to see it too, what with all the complications
of the morning. Clearly the bullet hadn't been meant for the beggar. There's no
profit in shooting a beggar, unless you're a madman. And I had been running
into too many madmen lately. The odds against there being another one lurking
about were too high. Picture it: there's the beggar turning toward me. From
back toward The Hoisted Pint, I must have half hidden him. The bullet that
struck him had missed me by a fraction.

 
          
 
So who had taken a shot at me from The Hoisted
Pint, from a second-story window, maybe? Or from the roof of the icehouse; that
would have served equally well. I thought about the disappeared elephant and
about the captain and his "Out West" mannerisms.
But
why on earth . . .?

 
          
 
I ordered a third pint, swearing to myself to
drink it slowly and then go up to take a nap. I'd done my work for the day; I
could leave the rest to Hasbro and St. Ives.

 
          
 
"I saw Parsons on the pier," I said.
"And I talked to Captain Bowker. And I think your woman with the letters
is skulking around, probably staying at The Hoisted Pint, down toward the
pier." That started it. I told them the whole story, just as it
happened—the toy on the table. Parsons in his fishing regalia, the captain
jollying me around—and they sat silent throughout, thinking, perhaps, that I'd
made a very pretty morning of it while they were off drinking tea and listening
to rumors through the window.

 
          
 
"He thought you were an agent," said
St. Ives, referring to Captain Bowker.
"Insurance
detective.
What's he hiding, though, that he wouldn't let you look
around the icehouse?
This log of his, maybe?
Not
likely. And why would he try to shoot you? That's not an act calculated to
cement the idea of his being innocent. And Parsons here too . . ."St. Ives
fell into a study, then thumped his fist on the table, standing up and
motioning to Hasbro, who stood up too, and the both of them went out leaving
their glasses two-thirds full on the table. Mine was empty again, and I was
tempted to pour theirs into mine in order to secure a more profound nap and to
avoid waste. But there was the landlady, grinning toward me and the clock just
then striking noon.

 
          
 
She whisked the glasses away with what struck
me as a sense of purpose, looking across her spectacles at me. I lurched up the
stairs and collapsed into bed, making up for our early rising with a nap that
stretched into the late afternoon.

 
          
 
I WAS UP and pulling on my shoes when there
was a knock on the door. It's St. Ives, I thought, while I was stepping across
to throw it open. It might as easily have been the man with the gun—something
that occurred to me when the door was halfway open. And for a moment I was
tempted to slam it shut, cursing
myself
for a fool and
thinking at the same time that half opening the door and then slamming it in
the visitor's face would paint a fairly silly picture of me, unless, of course,
it was the man with the gun . . .

 
          
 
It wasn't. It was a man I had never seen
before. He was tall, gaunt, and stooped, almost cadaverous. He wore a hat, but
it was apparent that he was bald on top and didn't much bother to cut the tufts
of hair above his ears. He would have made a pretty scarecrow. There were deep
furrows around his lips, the result of a lifetime of pursing them, I suppose,
which is just what he was doing now, glaring down his hooked nose at me as if
he didn't quite approve of the look on my face.

 
          
 
Afternoon naps always put me in a wretched
mood, and the sight of him doubled it. "You've apparently got the wrong
room," I said, and started to shut the door. He put his foot in the way.