The Convivial Codfish (20 page)

Everything moved, it seemed. The chickens marched in and out of the restaurant, the junk in the dumps got picked up and swung around by cranes, a steam shovel at a building site snapped at piles of sand, then dumped its gritty mouthfuls on other piles. This must be great fun for people who liked to pull switches and watch so much energy being expended to so little effect.

Max could imagine Wouter standing there fiddling with the controls, admiring those insane chickens pecking their way in and out of the shop. He’d have been wearing those engineering clothes, no doubt, that he’d had on when Max and Tom found him lying dead in the engine cab. A duplicate suit was hanging on the back of the door. Maybe Wouter had owned separate sets for big and little trains. Or maybe this one was for visitors.

“Did many of the Tolbathys’ friends come to play trains with Wouter?” he asked Rollo.

“You betcha. They’d be lined up around the track sometimes three deep, singin’ ‘Casey Jones’ an’ ‘The Runaway Train,’ greasin’ up their tonsils with a jug o’ martinis an’ sendin’ me downstairs for another one. Cripes, we had some great ol’ times up here.”

Pensively, Rollo dropped off a refrigerator car alleged to belong to the C&O Line and had it picked up by a passing Bangor & Aroostook freight, all from his control panel on the far side of the room.

“How do you do that?” Max asked him.

“Like this,” Rollo began his switching routine again.

“I mean, how do the cars get hitched and unhitched? My cousin had an electric train when we were kids, but he had to hook the cars on and off by hand.”

Rollo gave Max a haughty glance. “Baby stuff. All right for you kids, maybe. These here’s an old set. They used to be handcouplin’, but Wouter put electromagnetic solenoids in ’em. Wait a second.”

He flipped a master switch. The trains, the cranes, even the marching chickens came to an abrupt halt. Then he left the room. Through the open doors, Max watched Rollo pick his way around the dragon and go to stand in the farthest doorway with his hands in his pockets, making a great show of doing nothing whatever. All at once, the trains started up again.

“Wouter used to do that,” he chortled. “Never showed nobody the trick, neither.”

He probably wouldn’t have had to. Max had already guessed it: simply a hand-held remote control switch such as any number of people use nowadays to open their garage doors or turn on their television sets.

“Wouter rigged it all,” Rollo boasted. “These here is mostly trains that belonged to their father, some of ’em, or to Tom an’ Wouter when they was kids. Wouter put in all the switches hisself. Put ’em in the cranes an’ such, too. Even put ’em in the chickens so’s they can pick up them little bitty bags an’ put ’em down again.”

“Good God! Wouter must have been a wizard.”

“Yup. Wasn’t much Mr. Wouter couldn’t do, once he put his mind to it. Wasn’t much he wouldn’t put his mind to, neither.”

“I can well believe that,” said Max with his eyes on the chickens. He’d just put his mind to something, also.

“Tell me, Rollo, did Wouter ever do odd jobs for his friends? Repairing their trains, anything like that?”

Rollo made a fair attempt at not understanding what Max was getting at. “What would he want to take in odd jobs for? Mr. Wouter had enough on ’is hands right here, didn’t he?”

“But didn’t they ever ask him? Look, let me put it this way. If you owned a train setup like this, say, and you wanted a crane rigged up so it would dump sand like his, would you have asked Wouter Tolbathy to wire it up for you?”

“H’nh.” Rollo made a choking noise that could have been a laugh going down the wrong way. “Not so’s you’d notice it.”

“But why not? You said yourself he could do any thing.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t ask ’im. See, Mr. Wouter was awful inventive. What I’m gettin’ at is, he’d be glad to do you a favor, but by the time he got through doin’ it, you wouldn’t know if your crane was goin’ to pick up dirt or play ‘The Wreck o’ the Old Ninety-Seven’ or fry you a mess o’ fresh-caught trout.”

“I get you.”

Then it would appear to be unanimous. Nobody would ever have trusted Wouter Tolbathy as far as they could have thrown him, not because he was disobliging or lacking in skill, but because he could never have resisted the urge to make the job more interesting.

On the other hand, his great-nephew Woottie was fixated on dragons, and for his namesake, Wouter had produced not a gryphon or a wyvern or a camelopard but a perfectly ordinary run-of-the-mill dragon. All one would have had to do would have been to give him an assignment that was totally mad to begin with, and he’d have been quite amenable to carrying it out as requested. And, Max suspected, Wouter had done exactly that. But for whom?

J
EM HAD TOLD MAX
that Dork, the man with the hangnail, was a close neighbor of Tolbathy—close in Bexhill terms, anyway. Since Dork had been released at the same time as Tom, the odds were he’d be at home in bed, too. Max decided not to risk phoning to find out whether Dork was in a mood for visitors. It would be harder to keep out a visitor who was already on the doorstep. He got directions from Mrs. Rollo and went.

Dork’s house presented an interesting contrast to the Tolbathys’ dignified, somewhat austere Federal mansion. This place must have been planned by a designer of cuckoo clocks back when the Victorians were in full cry after the gothic grotesque. There was a vast amount of dark wood siding, carved and fretted into crenelations, fenestrations, doodads, and whatnots. There were probably a quaint old man and his quaint old wife hired by the week to dress up in peasant costumes made of litmus paper and pop in and out of opposite doors when the weather was about to change.

There were far too many shrubs on the lawn, clipped into cones, spheres, obelisks, cubes, and dodecahedrons; many of them wearing burlap burnooses to protect them from winter’s freeze and windburn. In summer, no doubt, these would provide interesting backgrounds for hollyhocks, four o’clocks, and the other sorts of flowers that show up on greeting cards, in front of thatched cottages, with kitties and puppies and blue-eyed babes cavorting among them.

To complete the effect, a gaggle of gamins in long-tailed wool caps with bobbles on the ends ought to have rushed up caroling that here they came a-wassailing among the leaves so amply burlapped; but no gamins appeared. Nobody came at all, for quite a while. Max was wondering if perhaps he ought to direct his researches elsewhere when, sure enough, a rosy-cheeked moppet wearing a red velvet dress and pixyish red-and-white striped stockings came to open the door.

“Mewwy Chwiththmath,” she lisped.

“Mewwy Chriththmath to you,” Max replied. “Is your gwandpa at home? Or are you the butler?”

“Who is it, Imogene?”

A stoutish young woman also wearing a regrettably snug-waisted red velvet frock and a pair of red-and-white striped stockings that made her legs look like a pair of warped barber poles came after the tot. Seeing Max, she snatched Imogene into the protection of her skirt.

“If you’re from the press—”

“I’m Jeremy Kelling’s nephew.”

The little darling fought herself free of her mother’s skirt and shrilled, “He ith not! Thath the man who mawwied Couthin Tharah for her money.”

“Hush, Imogene,” chided the mother. “We don’t mention money in front of strangers. Anyway, you know perfectly well Cousin Sarah doesn’t have any.”

“Then what did he mawwy her for?”

“Dearest, I don’t know.”

“Doth he?”

“Yes, but I’m not going to tell you,” said Max.

He gave up on the moppet and turned to the mother. “Look, I know Dork’s out of the hospital and I want to see him. If you don’t let me in, I’ll get Jem to plant a rumor that you’re giving the kid a toy Donald Duck for Christmas.”

“You wouldn’t!” gasped the woman.

“Mama, he thaid a bad word,” squeaked her daughter.

“Yes, and I’ll thay it again if you don’t get this show on the road pretty damn fast,” snarled Max. “Furthermore, where do you get that Cousin Sarah stuff? You’re only her Cousin Lionel’s wife’s sister.”

He knew her now. It was the stockings that had temporarily distracted him. Her resemblance to Aunt Appie Kelling’s daughter-in-law Vare was enough to give Max what a Scottish museum curator of his acquaintance had once alluded to as a cauld grue. The curator had been talking about a pop-art painting of a soup can, but Vare’s sister looked enough like one in that outfit to justify the analogy. That meant the precocious pimple at her knee was a first cousin to Vare’s home-grown goon squad: Jesse, Woodson, James, and little Frank. Those five mothers’ darlings could well have got together last night to wreck the train and bump off its passengers as a way of beguiling a dull evening.

The theory was tempting but most likely not viable. Max gave Imogene his dirtiest look and addressed the mother in a Mike Hammer tone. “Are you going to let me in, or do I start quacking?”

“Ruffian!”

However, she got out of the way, dragging Imogene with her, and he entered without undue violence. The interior of Dork’s house was about what he’d expected. Except for a dearth of ticket windows, it suggested Penn Station in the good old days, though on a smaller scale.

The walls were loaded with framed photographs, some in color, some black-and-white, some inexpertly hand-tinted. All showed railroad stations with gardens around them.

The furniture was of the pseudo-Jacobean style, running to nailheads and cut plush upholstery in deep reds and olivey greens. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the younger Mrs. Dork, as Max assumed she must be, and her dimpled darling, he might have rather enjoyed the agreeably fusty waiting-room atmosphere. As it was, he simply wanted to do what he’d come for and get out as fast as he could.

“Come along, Imogene,” he snarled. “Take me to your grandfather. And no funny business.”

Automatically, the child tripped over to slip a tiny hand into his. Then she grabbed it back as if he’d been a hot stove. “Do I have to, Mommy?”

“Take him to Grandpa, Imogene. Please.”

Lorista, that was her name. Max remembered her all too well now from one of Aunt Appie’s dreadful tea parties, to which Kellings flocked in droves for some reason he still couldn’t understand. She’d been wearing a grass-green dirndl that day, he remembered, and heelless black slippers with a seemingly endless crisscross of lacing over her thick white stockings. Or perhaps those had been her thick white legs. He’d stuck it out until Lorista produced her dulcimer and began singing folk songs. Then he and Sarah had told Aunt Appie they had urgent business elsewhere.

They’d gone back to Jem’s, he remembered, and Jem had sung folk songs, too: “Lisa and her Londonderry Air” and “Never Go Walking Out Without Your Hatpin.” Then Egbert had trotted out a hot Welsh rabbit and some excellent chenin blanc and they’d all drunk a toast to the frog in Lorista’s throat. He smiled at the memory as he followed Imogene past another gross or so of railway stations.

“Where’s your grandfather?”

She shied nervously at the sound of his voice. “In the conthervatory. You’re not weally going to—do that, are you?”

“Not if you behave yourself. Your grandfather knows who I am, by the way, so you needn’t bother trying to rat on me. He and I met last night at the Tolbathys’.”

“Are you a Wussian?”

“You bet I am. Is this the place?”

“Yeth,” she whispered.

“Okay, don’t blow it.”

Max pushed open a heavy door and found himself at the flower show. In proportion to the rather small rooms he’d been walking through, the conservatory was immense. As another agreeable contrast, it was also warm. If there’d been any sunshine today, the glass roof and windows would no doubt have provided solar heat. Since there wasn’t, heavy insulating batts had been set in place to cover the glass, and some kind of central heating turned on.

This must be where the Dorks really lived. Max saw comfortable garden furniture set out on a flagstoned terrace in front of what was most likely a toolshed. The little wooden enclosure had been got up to look like, naturally, a railroad station. It had a sign across the front that said, “Dork’s Depot.” It had window boxes full now of holly and ivy, and a prissy little border abloom with some white flowers Max couldn’t recall ever having seen before.

“Hellebore,” said a somewhat hollow-sounding voice from a wheelchair that was drawn up beside a small ornamental pool complete with plashing fountain, live waterlilies, and goldfish. “Christmas rose, you know. Most people can’t get ’em to bloom till Easter,” the voice added smugly.

“Very lovely,” said Max, as in fact they were. “How are you feeling, Dork?”

“Rocky. You’re Jem Kelling’s nephew, aren’t you?”

Imogene started to contradict her grandfather, then shut her little pink mouth and went over to adopt a winsome pose among the Christmas roses.

“Nephew by marriage,” Max amended to spike her infant guns. “Jem sent me along to see how you’re doing.”

“That was kind of him. And of you, to come. How is the old scorpion? Raising hell all over Phillips House, no doubt.”

“No doubt whatsoever, I’m afraid. He was in fair condition and rotten temper when I saw him a while back. By the way, I hope that wheelchair doesn’t mean—”

“Doesn’t mean a thing,” said Dork. “I’m all right. A bit weak and dizzy, of course, from the indignities visited upon me at that butcher shop they call a hospital. Some nurse rolled me out in a wheelchair when they released me, so Lorista—my daughter-in-law—got the clever idea of putting me into this one when she and Immy brought me home.”

“When was that?”

“Around nine o’clock this morning.”

“And you’ve been here in the conservatory ever since?”

“Yes, and damned glad to be here, I can tell you. But come and sit down.”

Dork wheeled himself over to the terrace and motioned Max into one of the aluminum mesh chairs. “This thing does come in handy, I must say. We bought it for my wife’s father when he came to spend his last years with us, as we thought. But he died within a month, so we never felt we’d got our money’s worth out of it till we started using it around the conservatory. It’s a convenient way to go along the benches and attend to the plants without having to be constantly stooping over. See?”