Plum Pie (31 page)

"Well, don't point it at me."

"I'll put it down on this chair here while we talk."

The last three words struck Mr. Pinkney as sinister.

"Are you intending to make a long stay?"

"No, no, I shan't keep you a minute. I just came to give you something Julie asked me to slip to you. But first I would like to tell you that in my opinion you're doing the big, generous thing in giving Cardinal that money. I had the story from Freddie Threepwood and was greatly impressed. Many men in your position would have been sore at him for throwing up his job at the bank and dashing off after a girl just because he couldn't bear being parted from her. But you took the romantic view. Love's love, you said to yourself, and in my opinion it was the right spirit."

Judson paused. He was interested to see that the recipient of these stately compliments was turning purple. Not so purple as he was going to turn later when the subject of the necklace was broached, but purple enough to cause concern.

"Do you mean---" said Mr. Pinkney, and he too paused. "Do you mean to tell me---" He paused again. "Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, at last becoming coherent, "that my nephew Joseph has given up the post I got for him at the New Asiatic Bank and has come on this ship because he is infatuated with some girl?"

"That's it. I thought you knew."

"Guk! " said Mr. Pinkney, or something that sounded like 'Guk!' and made for the door. "I am going to find that young idiot and tell him what I think of him," said Mr. Pinkney, and was gone with an agility remarkable in so stout a man.

Left alone, Judson removed his spectacles and polished them with a thoughtful handkerchief, his habit when life was not running smoothly. He found the sudden purpling of Mr. Pinkney's face and the abruptness of his departure disturbing, and the conviction had begun to steal over him that he had said the wrong thing. Even to him, though he was not a quick thinker, it had become plain that in supposing that Mr. Pinkney had been touched by Joe Cardinal's romantic story he had erred. So far from touching him, It seemed to have aroused his worst passions and there could be little doubt that if and when he found Joe Cardinal, their encounter would for the latter not be an agreeable one.

Heavy breathing sounded outside the open door, and Mr. Pinkney reappeared. Judson regarded him anxiously.

"Did you find him?"

"I did, and I told him that if he thinks he is going to get any money from me, he is very much mistaken.”

"You aren't going to give him his money?"

"I am not."

"Then," said Judson severely, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself, and I hope those Customs guys catch you with your pants down and you get sent up the river for ten years."

"What are you talking about?"

"This."

"What's that?"

"A necklace Julie bought in Paris. She gave it to me to give to you to smuggle through the Customs."

"What! "

"And here's a letter she wrote that goes with it."

If Judson had been offering him a cobra di capello, or some other poisonous serpent, Mr. Pinkney might have looked more perturbed, but not much. In predicting that his face would take on an even deeper tinge of mauve than it had worn as he listened to the Cardinal Story, Judson had made no miscalculation.

"She disapproves of paying duty," he explained, "and I don't have to tell you what the duty on a chunk of ice like this would tot up to. As I see it," said Judson, feeling that Mr. Pinkney would like to know where he stood, "three courses are open to you. You can disregard Julie's wishes, which I wouldn't advise because you know what Julie's like when her wishes are disregarded, or you can have a shot at smuggling the thing in, which, as I say, will probably lead to your being jugged for several years, or you can pick up the tab yourself, paying the duty out of your own---"

"Get out!" said Mr. Pinkney, and Judson did so. He had plenty more to say, but this did not seem to him the moment. It was probably the relief of being freed from his future brother-in-law's company that after a short while enabled Mr. Pinkney to start thinking with a certain measure of coherence.

Judson, goggling at him through his spectacles like some rare fish in an aquarium, had precluded thought. He was able now to examine the problem confronting him with something of the efficiency which he brought to those which were always cropping up during business hours. It was, he could not but see, a problem that called for the exercise of his fullest powers. His opinion of Judson's intelligence was low, but he was unable to deny that in his parting speech that not very gifted young man had spoken sound sense, outlining the position of affairs with a lucidity which would have done credit to someone with a far higher I.Q.

There were, he had said, three courses which he, Pinkney, could pursue, and he, Pinkney, found it difficult to decide which of them he liked least. At the thought of what his betrothed would have to say if he refused to carry out her instructions his flesh crept; but so it did at the thought of being arrested for smuggling. And as for paying the duty out of his own pocket, it became positively agile at the prospect. He had always been a careful man with his money.

What he wanted was a fourth alternative, and there did not appear to be one.

It was as he reached this depressing conclusion that his eye was caught by the letter from his betrothed which Judson had laid on the bed table, and he picked it up and opened it. He was not expecting to derive any solace from it, but reading it was something to do.

It was a short letter, written by a practical woman who believed in keeping to the point. Smuggling, she said, was pie. All he had to do was go to the ship's shop and buy a Mickey Mouse—or, if he preferred it, a Felix the Cat—and go ashore with the necklace in its interior. She could testify to the efficiency of this routine, for she had tried it with gratifying success. The only reason she was not handling the thing herself, she explained, was that her purchases in Paris would have made her a marked woman, for these darned shops always notified the Customs people who had bought what and they went through your belongings with a fine tooth comb. He, of course, would have none of this inconvenience. She concluded with a cheery 'Best of luck' and said that she was looking forward to seeing him again.

"Guk!" said Mr. Pinkney, and flung himself into a chair. And as he did so he became conscious of an odd feeling that he was not alone. He seemed to sense an unseen presence. It was as if he were being watched by ghostly eyes, which was curious when you came to think of it because it was unlikely that a stateroom on the C deck of a reputable ocean liner would be haunted. Then, scanning his surroundings more closely, he saw that his room mate was not a spectre but the woolly cinnamon bear which Judson, when getting out as requested, had omitted to take with him.

Most of Mr. Pinkney's business successes had been the outcome of flashes of inspiration, and it was a flash of inspiration that lightened his darkness now, though he would have been the first to admit that he owed much to his Julia and her letter. He had remembered something Judson had said on entering the stateroom.

It was not often that Judson's remarks lingered in people's minds, but his words on this occasion came back to Mr. Pinkney as if played on a record. Its head screws off and you put candy inside, he had said, speaking of this cinnamon bear, and he had mentioned that he was giving it to Mr. Pinkney's secretary Dinah Biddle as a token of his esteem.

What Customs official, Mr. Pinkney reasoned, was going to enquire too closely into the cinnamon bear of a charming young girl whose honest face and modest secretarial position obviously placed her above suspicion. The fellow would probably not even know that the heads of ship's shop cinnamon bears do screw off. Mr. Pinkney was a man of wide experience and knowledge of the world, and this was the first time he had learned of it.

To remove the creature's head, insert the necklace and screw the head on again was with him the work of an instant—which was fortunate, for he had scarcely completed the operation when there was a knock on the door and Judson entered.

"I forgot my bear," said Judson, speaking haughtily, for they had parted on bad terms. He was surprised to find Mr. Pinkney quite genial.

"Ah, yes, there it is. You are giving it to Miss Biddle?"

"That's right."

"I am sure she will be pleased."

"She ought to be. Have you decided what to do about Julie's necklace?"

"I'm thinking it over," said Mr. Pinkney.

"He told me he was thinking it over," said Judson.

"Well, he seems to have thought to some purpose," said Freddie. "He's as calm as a halibut on ice.''

The S.S.
Atlantic
had come to journey's end, and they were standing in the P-T section of the New York Customs sheds, watching Mr. Pinkney as a stern-faced man in uniform examined his baggage. And, indeed, there was nothing in Mr. Pinkney's aspect to suggest that that baggage harboured a guilty secret which might at any moment be exposed to the pitiless light of day by a flick of the inspector's fingers. Despite the fact that the latter, as deficient in simple faith as he was in Norman blood, was being very thorough in his researches, his face was untroubled and his whole demeanour, as Freddie had said, as nonchalant as that of a fish on a fishmonger's slab.

His placidity smote Freddie like a blow.

"There's no justice in the world," he complained. "There stands a man who thinks Peterson's Pup Food superior to Donaldson's Dog Joy and on top of that refuses to give Joe Cardinal the money he is morally entitled to. and does the wrath of heaven strike him? Not by a jugful. With a light laugh he flouts the most sacred laws of the United States of America and gets away with it. See! The bloodhound has let him through. We know that necklace must be concealed somewhere in his effects, but he's managed to tuck it away so shrewdly that even an experienced Customs inspector failed to find it. It's uncanny. Well, I'm getting out of this," said Freddie, surveying his surroundings with an unappreciative eye. "I always say these Customs sheds are all right for a visit, but I wouldn't live here if you gave me the place. I'm going to take a taxi to Great Neck and drop my lighter things and get my car and drive back and have lunch at the Plaza. Perhaps you will join me?"

Judson was obliged to refuse the invitation. He had, he said, a date.

"But you only landed about twenty minutes ago."

"I fixed it up just now on the phone."

"A girl?"

'Yes."

"Well, God bless you. Then I'll be pushing along. Hullo," said Freddie, his attention drawn for the first time to a cinnamon bear of repellent aspect which sat on the top of Judson's steamer trunk.

"I thought you were giving that thing to Dinah Biddle."

"She didn't want it."

"I'm not surprised. Ashamed to be seen in public with it, eh? What are your plans for its future?"

"I was thinking of dropping it in a litter basket."

"You can do better than that. Give it to me."

"You don't mean you want the beastly thing?"

"Not for myself," Freddie hastened to assure him. "But I've a friend named Bream Rockmeteller who recently added a Junior to the strength...well, of course, actually Mrs. Bream did most of the heavy work, but Bream gets his name on the bills...and an object like that will be just the infant's cup of tea. I don't know if you've noticed it, but all babies are practically dotty. Where you and I shrink from this cinnamon bear, the young Rockmeteller will be all over it. No accounting for tastes. Right, then, let me have it."

Freddie's bijou residence in Great Neck was near what had been the Soundview golf course till the developers took it over, and a swift taxi brought him there in a short space of time. His return to the metropolis was delayed for some twenty minutes by Lana Tuttle, the cook whom Mrs. Freddie had left in charge. Lana was an immigrant from the Bottleton East section of London and was anxious for information as to how the old town had been getting on since she left it. She also had interesting local news to impart—items of public interest such as that there had been a burglary at the Witherspoons down the road and others of a more private nature such as that she was going to wash her hair that afternoon. It was a little past one o'clock when Freddie entered the Plaza's dining room and began his lunch. And he had just finished it when, like Mr. Pinkney in his stateroom, he became aware of a presence. Looking up, he saw that he had been joined by Judson Phipps. He greeted him cordially.

"Welcome to the Empire City, Juddy. Have you been lunching here? I didn't see you."

"We were over in a corner."

"Where's the girl?"

"She left. She had to go to a rehearsal," said Judson.

He took a chair. His manner was grave. "Do you know what?"

"What?"

"We're engaged."

"You are? When did this happen?"

"Over the coffee."

"You work quick, don't you? Well, heartiest congratulations and all that."

"Thanks. But I'm beginning to wonder if I've done the smart thing."

"Already?"

"It came over me as I was putting her in her taxi. I'm not sure she's my type."

"Still, she isn't Arlene Pinkney."

"No, there's that," said Judson, cheering up a little. "But I think I could use a drink. One for you as well?"

"No, thanks. I've got to phone Aggie. I tried to get her before lunch, but she was out."

Freddie's route to the telephone booths lay through the lobby, and as he approached the newstand his eye fell on a man buying a paper there, and he was struck by his extraordinary likeness to Mr. Bunting of the legal firm of Bunting and Satterthwaite. Looking more closely, he saw that the resemblance was due to the fact that the other was Mr. Bunting, the last person he would have expected to see in mid-town Manhattan.

"You?" he said, astounded.

"Ah, Freddie. I thought we might run into one another before long."

"But what are you doing over here?" Mr. Bunting had a ready explanation.

"if you remember, when we parted I was about to get your father-in-law on the transatlantic telephone to discuss with him the idea of settling that law suit of his. Being a man whose slogan is 'Do it now', he asked me to fly over and confer with him, which I was very happy to do. They tell me at the office that he's out of town."