Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (13 page)

"You're not going?"

"Sorry, but I must. Besides, Brewster must have gone to Edinburgh for that Scotch."

He tipped his hockey cap over an eyebrow, and clomped out.

Ed laughed when I told him about Fishbait's abrupt departure. "You know, Pointers are like that. When they want to drop in, they drop in. Mind to go, they go."

But the cautious curtain once more descended over Ed's expression when I briefed him on the Sophie St. Clair story.

"Fishbait," Ed said with a headshake, "is a champion drinker and a champion fabricator. You wouldn't know he was cooked to the gills tonight, now would you?"

"He didn't look cooked."

"It's the same with his stories. You never know whether they're on the level, or made up as he goes along. He's a character," Ed said. "Giving out that his father worked there at the Surf and Sand."

"Didn't he?"

"I've seen the stone up in the cemetery. Eli Fox—Fishbait's father. He died around the year Fishbait was born. So he couldn't have told Fishbait— Wait a minute!" Ed broke off. He snapped his fingers. "What do you know?"

"What?"

"Fishbait was nine or ten years old in Nineteen Four. He worked at the Surf and Sand. Bellhop. . . . Mackerel!" Ed glared around the parlor. "Maybe it did happen. I wouldn't put it past Fishbait to have been in on the thing with the photographer."

"So there was a Sophie Sowalski?" I asked, amused by Ed's reaction.

"Damn, yes. At least, there was this blonde peacherino ran a beauty parlor named Madame Sophie. Henna rinses and manicures for the hotel set and summer people. Her shop was smack in the middle of the Center. She drove a big red Winton. I remember hearing some of the villagers wonder where she got the dough."

"She must have had a carload of gall," I observed. "If she set up shop on the Bridewell money."

"Come to think of it, there was talk of some kind of rumpus between her and Old Abby. Leastwise, that Old Abby never went there for a hair-do. Love of mike! Being a kid, I never thought much of it."

I could follow Ed's thinking processes on his mobile face. Why had Old Abby put up with the woman? But what else could she have done? Either pay up, or Lionel went to jail and they closed the Surf and Sand.

Madame Sophie had the Bridewells hogtied.

Of course. And every adult native of Quahog Point was party to the affair. But the Pointer fathers were content to let the matter ride. Each would have asserted he was all for minding his own business. Smeizers handled their own affairs. Bryces handled theirs. Let the Bridewells take care of their'n.

Too, there must have been some lip-smacking, some amused satisfaction at the situation. Here was the Point's first family taken hook, line and sinker by this Jezebel. Pride goeth before a fall. Old Abby could run the town, but she couldn't run this female bandit out of town. What if the old lady did have to pay up a few thousand dollars? Bridewells could afford it. And hadn't they put the squeeze on other people? Now they were getting it from this blonde. Tit for tat, in a way.

"It's odd," Ed said, knocking out his pipe and sitting up. "A thing like that can make a ruction for a while in a place like this. And then it all dies down and it's—well, not forgotten, but sort of accepted. You know, like getting used to the smell of squid. First time I went on a fishing boat, the smell almost killed me. Now I don't even know it's there, and I expect I'd miss it if it wasn't. See what I mean? About someone like this Sophie?"

Ed was telling me that perverse men and nations at first endure what they think they cannot cure. In time the endurance becomes resignation; resignation becomes social acceptance (the abnormal becoming the norm); and in the reductio ad absurdum of human nature and rationale, acceptance generally leads to indulgence.

Sophie was like war. Everyone knows that war means killing, and killing is a crime. One of the basic Thou Shalt Nots. A cardinal sin. But man has learned to endure war; has become resigned to war; indeed, has rationalized it as a necessity to the point of glorifying its indulgence.

Similarly Sophie was eventually indulged. Once you begin to compromise—?

Well, Absalom Purdy took to dropping in, and nobody could believe he went there for a manicure. Neill Smeizer went there, too. Finally Horace Ross stood up in Town Council, one weathery night when Abby Bridewell wasn't there, and made a motion to permit the removal of a watering trough which blocked the curb in front of Madame Sophie's beauty parlor. Everyone knew who sponsored Horace's proposal. But Madame Sophie, by that time, was well to do. Like war, she made money, and money has a way of inviting tolerance. The watering trough was removed.

"Matter of fact," Ed said wryly, "this Sophie added tone to the Center. She was smart as new paint, and her shop smartened up the old Center a lot."

I could picture it. The red Winton at the curb and a boy in a monkey jacket to escort in the customers. I said, "I don't suppose there was a Mister St. Clair around."

"A good question," Ed nodded. "It seems, as I recall, she called herself a divorcee."

But naturally. The confederate invariably disappears. Sophie would have blamed the "divorce" on Lionel Bridewell.

"What finally became of Madame Sophie?"

"She left the Point, bag and baggage, directly after Abby Bridewell was murdered."

"I see. The blackmail payments were cut off."

Ed frowned reflectively. "Look. If there was any blackmail— and I don't say there was—I'd guess it was cut off before that. Maybe in the summer of 1910—the bad season after the P. and Q. crash. I remember some petermen visited the Point. They got into Sophie's beauty parlor and burgled her safe."

Petermen. Another expression as dated as the Police Gazette. The gaslight safe-blower with his sack of tools and his hotwater bottle loaded with nitroglycerine. They "milked" it out of stolen dynamite, and they carried the "soup" in a rubber bag because a jolt might smash a glass bottle or blow a metal container sky high.

I once interviewed a veteran peterman. A quaint little character with mild blue eyes and a gentle, apologetic smile. He had spent two-thirds of his adult life in prison—he was just out of Oklahoma State—and with great humility he admitted that he hadn't been

tops in his profession. The best, he said, were known as "Johnsons," after a wizard whose name was Johnson.

This master peterman, Johnson, was a wonderful operator—a former Army officer (West Point graduate) who had concluded that he could make more money blowing "cans" than he could blowing up Indians in Arizona or Spaniards in Cuba. A really good man could peter a safe so the explosion would scarcely be heard. You muffled the box with an old bedquilt, and applied just exactly the right amount of "soup." A bad job might blast the safe door clean into the street, and you with it, along with a tornado of coins and currency. You could always tell an inferior peterman when he showed up with a sackful of bent silver dollars. The old-timer of the interview ruefully showed me a bent silver dollar. Sad old fellow—his left wrist ended in a stump. He had not been an expert "Johnson."

Apparently the petermen who burgled Madame Sophie's safe were in the "Johnson" class. Nobody saw them come or go. Nobody heard the blast. Daylight revealed a jimmied window and the safe in the corner wide open with its laminated iron door hanging askew on one hinge. The miniature vault had been picked clean.

Ed recalled: "She—Sophie—raised all kinds of hullabaloo. Wanted the State Police. Vowed she would hire Pinkerton men to track down the criminals. Isn't it odd how a pirate will scream to high heaven when they themselves have been looted?"

I could not help remarking that the reaction was basic. The barracuda cries "Outrage!" when caught by the shark. The shark wails "Vandalism!" when chawed by the killer whale. What nation has not done the same thing—plundered some weaker nation or people and then bellowed for law and order when threatened, in turn. (What? We never plundered anybody? Ask the American Indians.)

"Funny thing," Ed said. "Right after that robbery, somebody stood up in Town Council and sponsored a motion to order Madame Sophie out of town. I remember hearing talk about it. They threatened to lock her up if she didn't go."

"On what charge?"

"Selling her favors," Ed said delicately, "without a license. My old man said Sophie was wild and called the charge a slander. But it seemed like somebody had procured a warrant."

I had been waiting for Abby Bridewell to strike some sort of retaliatory blow. But why, at that particular date, would the old lady have chosen to strike? What unleashed the counter-attack hitherto held in check by the Damoclean sword over Lionel?

Then I saw it. The robbers who had cleaned out Sophie's safe! Would talented petermen have bothered to burgle a beauty parlor? Not unless they were after something, and—

"Ed!" I exclaimed. "Do you suppose Abby Bridewell could have hired those burglars?"

"You couldn't prove it by me," he said. "Remember, all that was a long time ago. Coming from Fishbait Fred Fox, you got to take that badger-game story with a grain of salt."

There was a hole in the end of it, and I remarked it to Ed. If Abby did lay hands on the alleged blackmail photograph, she would hardly have delayed in abolishing Madame Sophie along with the picture. A legal ouster of Lionel's Nemesis seemed too mild. And Sophie, it seemed, had taken her time about going, if she did not leave Quahog Point until after Abby's demise.

"Of course," I noted, "Sophie may have threatened to kick up a scandal, anyway. Or something else may have held Old Abby's hand."

"I don't know," Ed said. "Tell you what. There's an old fella in town—Needles Thorn—once worked for the Bridewells. He might give you some dope." Ed consulted his watch. "Nine-twenty. Luke wanted me to pick him up at ten. I'll drop you at Needles' while I go pick up Luke."

It was Needles Thorn who told me of the episode which could have held Old Abby's hand. The story of Magdalena Gero.

CHAPTER 9

Needles Thorn sat on a barrel under a dim electric light. Behind him a decayed frame building leaned in gray dissolution against an equally shabby boathouse. The lighted scene included a glimpse of oily water, a tethered dory, and the squat bow of a trawler named Milly O. A faded sign on the building said: Thorns. A scrap of fishnet dangled from the sign.

Needles was reading a newspaper when I walked up. Holding the paper about two inches in front of his face. When he lowered the paper I saw he was as old and dilapidated as the building. A little man in dungarees. Wizened. He wore a countenance of brown clay which had shriveled and cracked into a million cracks while undergoing Time's ceramic process.

He spat brown juice. "So you're writin' something on Quahog Point? Local lore and such. Ed Brewster tell you about Ghostly Mary?"

He cupped hand to ear. Speaking up, I told him I was interested in Senator Bridewell.

"No," he shook his head. "She wasn't a bride. Little girl, she was. Got drownded by the ship-wreckers back in the old time. Come ashore with a May basket, and you see her out on the headland, moonless nights. Lots of folks has seen her. Ghostly Mary."

"The Bridewells," I said into his cupped hand. "Senator Bridewell."

"Oh, yes," he nodded. "So Ed told you about Sitting Bull."

I shouted into his ear that the only bull I had heard about was one named Sliding Billy Watson.

"Hee, hee," the old man giggled. "But this here Sitting Bull was a cigar-store Indian. A jumping cigar-store Indian. Sensation at

Quahog Point for years . . . Pull up a lobster pot. Pull up a lobster pot."

I found one of the wooden cages in the shadows, and I drew it forward and sat on it. Presuming I might as well let the old man on the barrel warm up.

He took his time about it. And the cigar-store Indian legend is worth briefing only as one which manifests the fireside credulity of the Gaslight Era. Today we phenomena-lovers have Flying Saucers and goblin crockery that soars around the house. Sixty years ago Quahog Point had this jumping cigar-store Indian.

It seemed that Chester Goodbody owned the cigar store. And early in the 80's, he acquired the phenomenal Indian. He purchased it out on the West Coast where he'd gone to visit his sister in San Francisco. The wooden Indian, man-size, proved a transport problem. To avoid the high cost of Wells Fargo Express, Mr. Goodbody boxed the Indian and brought it East by ship, keeping the big box in his stateroom as a piece of luggage.

The point is that the Indian traveled by ocean steamer. And going around the Horn, the steamer bucked through hell and high water. The entire voyage was stormy. Gale after gale. When at last he reached New England, Mr. Goodbody was groggy. So, it appeared, was the cigar-store Indian.

Proud as punch of the splendid figure—Sitting Bull standing on a pedestal with a fistful of stogies—Goodbody unveiled (or unboxed) it at Quahog Point with great ceremony. Well! If Tobac-canist Goodbody thought this Chief was going to stand in the doorway of his cigar store—or anywhere else—he was in for a surprise. First of all, the entry was too small to accommodate the Red Man on the pedestal. Nor could the Indian be gotten through the door. So Goodbody placed the figure in the side yard, facing Main Street.

Next morning the wooden Indian was not in the side yard, facing Main Street. During the night, it seemed, he had wobbled about-face. A prank, of course. Some of the villagers had turned him around.

But, no, the following night Sitting Bull had about-faced again. What's more, he had jumped into a bed of marigolds at the side

of the cigar store. Goodbody was furious. He put up a no trespassing sign, and warned the village boys to leave the wooden Indian alone. Three mornings later the Red Man was discovered half-way down the yard. Tracks? Yes, there were tracks. A series of blotches in the grass where the pedestal had jumped. But that was all.

From there on out, the legend follows the usual formula. Good-body sitting up all night. Installing a watchdog which hears nothing. The Indian settles down for a time. Then, sure enough, at dark of the moon (and of course when no one is looking) it goes jumping again.