Tenth Commandment (49 page)

'I do believe,' she said. 'Come on in, lawyer-man.'

She led me into a neat entrance hall, hung my coat and hat on an oak hall rack exactly like the one in Miss Goldie Knurr's home.

'May I know your name, please, ma'am?' I asked her.

'Mrs Harriet Lee Livingston,' she said in a rich contralto voice. 'I makes do for Miz Sylvia.'

'How long have you been with her?'

'Longer than you been breathin',' she said.

The enormous bulk of the woman was awesome. That had to be the largest behind I had ever seen on a human being, and the other parts of her were in proportion: arms and legs like waists, and a neck that seemed as big around as her head.

But her features were surprisingly clear and delicate, with slanty eyes, a nice mouth, and a firm chin that had a deep cleft precisely in the centre. You could have inserted a dime in that cleft. Her hands and feet were unexpectedly dainty, and she moved lightly, with grace.

Her colour was a briar brown. She wore a voluminous shift, a shapeless tent with pockets. It was a kaleidoscope of hues: splashes of red, yellow, purple, blue, green — all in a jangling pattern that dazzled the eye.

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'You stand right here,' she said sternly. 'Right on this spot. I'll tell Miz Sylvia she's got a visitor. I takes you in without warning, she's liable to get upset.'

'I won't move,' I promised.

She opened sliding wooden doors, squeezed through, closed the two doors behind her. I hadn't seen doors like that since I left my uncle's home in Iowa. They were panelled, waxed to a high gloss, fitted with brass hardware: amenities of a bygone era.

The doors slid open again and Mrs Livingston beckoned me forward.

'Speak nice,' she whispered.

'I will,' I vowed.

'I be right here to make sure you do,' she said grimly.

The woman facing me from across the living room was small, slight, with long silvered blonde hair giving her a girlish appearance, although I knew she had to be at least forty. I could not see a leg brace; she wore a collarless gown of bottle-green velvet, a lounging or hostess gown, that fell to her ankles.

She was a thin little thing, still with that look of tremulous vulnerability that had caught my eye in the photos in the Knurr family album and Jesse Karp's yearbook. She seemed physically frail, or at least fragile, with narrow wrists, a white stalk of a neck, a head that appeared to be pulled backward, chin uptilted, by the weight of her hair.

She had a luminous quality: pale complexion, big eyes of bluish-green (they looked like agates), and lips sweetly bowed. I saw no wrinkles, no crow's feet, no furrows — nothing in her face to mark the passage of years. If she had been wounded, it did not show. The smooth brow was serene, the dim smile placed.

But there was a dissonance about her that disturbed. She seemed removed. The lovely eyes were vacant, or focused on something no one else could see. That half-smile was, I soon realized, her normal expression; it meant nothing.

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I recognized Ophelia, looking for her stream.

'Mr Bigg?' she said. Her voice was young, utterly without timbre. A child's voice.

'Miss Wiesenfeld,' I said, bowing, 'I know this is an intrusion, and I appreciate your willingness to grant me a few moments of your time.'

'Oh la!' she said with a giggling laugh. 'How pretty you do talk. Doesn't he talk pretty, Harriet?'

'Yeah,' Mrs Livingston said heavily. 'Pretty. Mr Bigg, you sit in that armchair there. I sits on the couch here.

Honey, you want to rest yourself?'

'No,' the lady said, 'I prefer to remain standing.'

I seated myself nervously. My armchair was close to the corner of the big davenport where Mrs Livingston perched, not leaning back but balancing her bulk on the edge. She was ready, I was certain, to lunge for my throat if I dared upset her honey.

'Miss Wiesenfeld,' I started, 'I have no desire to rake up old memories that may cause you pain. If I pose a question you don't wish to answer, please tell me so, and I will not persist. But this is a matter of some importance. It concerns the Reverend Godfrey Knurr. I represent a legal firm in New York City. One of our clients, a young woman, wishes to bring serious charges against Reverend Knurr. I am making a preliminary investigation in an attempt to discover if Knurr has a past history of the type of, ah, activities of which he is accused.'

'Pretty,' she murmured. 'So pretty. It's nice to meet someone who speaks in complete sentences. Subject, verb, object. Do all your sentences parse, Mr Bigg?'

She said that quite seriously. I laughed.

'I would like to think so,' I said. 'But I'm afraid I can't make that claim.'

She began moving across the room in front of me. I saw then that she limped badly, dragging her left leg.

Below the hostess gown I could see the foot bound in the 406

stirrup of a metal brace.

She went close to a bird cage suspended from a brass stand. Within the cage, a yellow canary hopped from perch to perch as she approached.

'Chickie,' she said softly. 'Dear, sweet Chickie. How are you today, Chickie? Will you chirp for our guest? Will you sing a lovely song? How did you find me, Mr Bigg?'

The abrupt question startled me.

'I saw your photograph in the Knurr family album, ma'am. With Godfrey. Mr Jesse Karp supplied your name.

The Reverend Ludwig Stokes provided more information.'

'You have been busy, Mr Bigg.'

'Yes, ma'am,' I said humbly.

'The busy Mr Bigg,' she said with her giggling laugh.

'Busy Bigg.' She poked a pale finger through the bars of the cage. 'Sing for Busy Bigg, Chickie. What is Godfrey accused of?'

I had determined to use Percy Stilton's scam. The one that had worked with Bishop Oxman.

'He is accused of allegedly defrauding a young woman of her life's savings by promising to double her money.'

'And promising to marry her?' Sylvia Wiesenfeld asked.

'Yes,' I said.

'He is guilty,' she said calmly. 'He did exactly that.'

A low growl came from Mrs Livingston.

'I'd like to have him right here,' she said in her furred contralto. 'In my hands.'

'Miss Wiesenfeld,' I said, 'may I ask you this: were you married to Godfrey Knurr?'

'Chickie,' she said to the bird, 'why aren't you chirping?

Aren't you feeling well, Chickie?'

She left the cage, came back to the long davenport. The housekeeper heaved her bulk and assisted Sylvia to sit in the corner, the left leg extended, covered with the skirt of her long gown. Mrs Livingston reached out, tenderly smoothed back strands of blonde hair that had fallen 407

about her mistress' pale face.

'Oh la!' Miss Wiesenfeld said. 'A long time ago. Where are the snows of yesteryear? Reverend Stokes told you that?'

'Yes, ma'am.'

'It happened in another world,' she said. 'In another time.'

Her beautiful eyes looked at me, but she was detached, off somewhere.

'But you were married?' I persisted. 'Legally?'

'Legally,' she said. 'A piece of paper. I have it.'

'How long were you married, Miss Wiesenfeld?'

She turned those vacant eyes on the enormous black woman.

'Harriet?' she said.

'Fourteen months,' Mrs Livingston said. 'Give or take.'

'And then?' I asked.

'And then?' she repeated my question, perplexed.

'Did you separate? Divorce?'

'Harriet?' she asked again.

'He cleared out,' Mrs Livingston told me furiously.

'Just took off. With everything of my honey's he could get his hands on. But her daddy was too smart for him. He left my honey some kind of fund that cur couldn't touch.'

I tried to remember when I had last heard a man called a

'cur.' I could not recall ever hearing it.

'So you are still married to Godfrey Knurr?' I asked softly.

'Oh no,' Sylvia Wiesenfeld said with her disturbingly childish laugh. 'No, no, no. I have a paper. Don't I, Harriet? So much paper. Paper, paper, paper.'

I looked beseechingly at Mrs Livingston.

'We got us a letter from a lawyer-man in Mexico,' she said disgustedly. 'It said Godfrey Knurr had been granted a divorce from his wife Sylvia.'

I turned to Miss Wiesenfeld in outrage.

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'Surely you went to an attorney, ma'am?' I said. 'I don't know divorce law all that well, but the letter may have been fraudulent. Or Mexican divorces without the consent of both parties might not have been recognized in the state in which you were married. I hope you sought legal advice?'

She looked at me, eyes rounding.

'Whatever for?' she asked in astonishment. 'I wanted him gone. I wanted him dead. He hurt me.'

I swallowed.

'Physically, ma'am?' I said gently.

'Once,' Mrs Livingston said in a deadly voice. 'I told him he puts hands to her again, I kill him. I told him that.

But that's not what she means when she says he hurt her.

He broke my honey's heart.'

She was speaking of her mistress as if she was not present. But Miss Wiesenfeld did not object. She just kept smiling emptily, face untroubled, eyes staring into the middle distance.

'Oh la!' she said. 'Broke poor Sylvia's heart.'

I was not certain of the depth of her dementia. She seemed to flick in and out, sometimes in the same sentence.

She was lucid in speech and controlled in manner, and then suddenly she was gone, flying.

'Ma'am,' I said, hating myself, 'what did Godfrey Knurr do with your money? When you were married?'

'Ohh,' she said, 'bought things. Pretty things.'

Mrs Livingston leaned towards me.

'Women,' she said throatily. 'High living. He just pissed it away.'

That 'pissed' shocked me. It was hissed with such venom that I thought Godfrey Knurr fortunate to have escaped the vengeance of Mrs Harriet Lee Livingston. She would have massacred him.

'Harriet,' Sylvia said in a petulant, spoiled child's voice,

'I want to get up again.'

'Sure, honey,' the housekeeper said equably, lurching to 409

her feet. She helped her mistress stand. Miss Wiesenfeld dragged her leg back to the bird cage.

'Chickie?' she said. 'Chirp for me?'

There were other questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to probe deeper, explore the relationship between Sylvia and Knurr, discover how the marriage had come about, when, and why it had dissolved. But I simply didn't have the stomach for it.

It seemed to me that all day I had been poking through the human detritus Godfrey Knurr had left in his wake. I was certain Roscoe Dollworth would have persevered in this investigation, but I lacked the ruthlessness. He had told me never to let my personal feelings interfere with the job, but I couldn't help it. I liked all these victims, shared their misery, their sad memories, and I had heard just about all I could endure. Probing old wounds was not, really, a noble calling.

When I departed from the living room, Sylvia Wiesenfeld was still at the bird cage. Her forefinger was reaching through the bars. 'Chickie?' she was saying.

'Dear, sweet Chickie, sing me a song.'

I didn't even thank her or say goodbye.

Out in the hallway, Mrs Livingston helped me on with my coat.

'You going to mash him?' she demanded.

I stared at her a moment.

'Will you help?' I asked.

'Any way I can.'

'I need that marriage licence,' I said. 'And the letter from the Mexican lawyer, if you can find it. But the marriage licence is most important. I'll try to get copies made this afternoon and bring the originals back to you. If I can't get copies made, I want to take the originals to New York with me. I'll return them; I swear it.'

'How do I know?' she said mistrustfully.

'I'll give you money,' I said. 'I'll leave fifty dollars with 410

you. When I return the licence, you return the money.'

'Money don't mean nothing,' she said. 'You got a pawn that means something to you?'

I looked down at myself.

'My wristwatch!' I said. 'My aunt and uncle gave it to me when I was graduated from school. It means a lot to me. But it's a cheap watch. Not worth even fifty dollars.'

'I'll take it,' she said. 'You bring the marriage licence back, or mail it back, and you gets your watch back.'

I agreed eagerly and slipped the expansion band off my wrist. She dropped the watch into one of her capacious pockets.

'You wait right here,' she commanded. 'Don't move a step.'

'I won't,' I said, and I didn't as I watched her climb the carpeted steps to the second floor. That was really a leviathan behind.

She came stepping down in a few minutes, carrying two folded documents. I took a quick look at them. A marriage licence issued to Sylvia Wiesenfeld and Godfrey Knurr by the State of Indiana, dated February 6th, 1959, and a letter from a Mexican attorney dated fourteen months later, informing Sylvia that a divorce had been granted to Knurr.

I refolded both documents, slid them into my inside jacket pocket.

'You'll get them back,' I promised once more.

'I got your watch,' she said, and then grinned again at me: that marvellous, warm, human smile of complicity.

'Thank you for all your help,' I said.

'I don't know why,' she said, 'but I trusts you. You play me false, don't never come back here again — I tear you apart.'

On the early evening New York-bound airliner, a Scotch-and-water in my hand, I relaxed gratefully. The seats on both sides of me were empty, and I could sprawl in 411

comfort. I emulated the passenger across the aisle and removed my shoes. I wiggled my stockinged toes, a pleasurable sensation at 33,000 feet, and planned the defeat of Godfrey Knurr.

It seemed to me that our original assessment of the situation had been correct; in the absence of adequate physical evidence the only hope of bringing the Kipper and Stonehouse cases to satisfactory solutions was to take advantage of the individual weaknesses of the guilty participants. If we had failed so far in trying to 'run a game' on them, it was because we did not have sufficient leverage to stir them, set one against the other, find the weakest link and twist that until it snapped.