Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (20 page)

The coffee began to boil. I poured some of the black liquid into a cup and carried it to the window behind my desk. The city of San Francisco looked cold and lonely and hoary-old through the ebbing steel-wool banks of fog. I glanced down at Taylor Street three floors below; rush hour was fast approaching, and there were a lot of cars jammed up down there. A small flatbed truck was blocking two lanes of traffic, trying to back into a narrow alley across the way. It was carrying a wide load of plywood sheeting, and the driver was having difficulty jockeying the truck into the mall's slender mouth.

I watched him for a time, listening to the angry horn blasts of the blocked cars drift up from the street, and then the answer came drifting up, too, and hit me square in the face. I spilled some of the coffee getting the cup down on the desk. I picked up the San Francisco telephone directory and got it open to the Yellow Pages. Half a minute later, my finger came to rest on a boxed, single-column advertisement at the bottom of one of the pages under
Lumber—Retail
. Freddy the Dreamer had been right; Chaucer, the former teacher of English literature, had been a great kidder.

I caught up the telephone and dialed the Hall of Justice. It was four-thirty now, and maybe Eberhardt had come back. He had.

“Sherwood,” I said when they got him on the line. “Sherwood Forest Products.”

“I
T WAS THE
owner's son, Ted Sherwood,” Eberhardt said. “We saw the car—one of those pickups, actually a jazzed-up 1968 model with mag wheels and chrome exhausts and the like—parked in the company lot in Daly City when we drove up. I checked the registration and found out it belonged to the Sherwood kid. He was still there, he and his old man, supervising the unloading of a shipment of pine boards. We put it to him the first thing, and he lost his head and tried to run for it. He should have known better.”

I nodded and drank a little of my beer. We were sitting in a small tavern near the Hall of Justice. It was after eight o'clock, and Eberhardt had just come off duty.

I said, “Did he confess?”

“Not right away,” Eberhardt said. “The old man insisted he have his lawyer present, so we took him down to the Hall. When the lawyer showed, he and the old man went into a huddle. When they came out, the lawyer advised the kid to tell it straight.”

“Did he?”

“He did,” Eberhardt said. “He'd been out joyriding with his girlfriend and a case of beer that night three weeks ago. He'd just taken the girl home, out on Potrero Hill. I guess he must have been pretty tanked up, though he won't admit it; he says he thought the light was green at the intersection. Anyway, when he hit the old lady, he panicked and kept right on going.”

“The impact must have jarred those particles of sawdust loose from the bed of the pickup,” I said.

“Apparently,” Eberhardt agreed. “The kid told us he made small deliveries—plywood sections, mostly—from time to time.”

“How did he get the dents ironed out?”

“Some friend of his works in a body shop, and the two of them did the job at night; that's why hit-and-run didn't get a report from any of the garages. With the new paint job, and the fact that nothing had happened for three weeks, he figured he was home free.”

“And then Chaucer showed up,” I said.

Eberhardt inclined his head. “He wanted five hundred dollars to keep what he'd seen quiet, the crazy fool. The Sherwood kid put him off with fifty, and arranged to meet him down on the Embarcadero last night with the rest. He picked Chaucer up there and took him out to that alley on Hubbell Street. Sherwood swears he didn't mean to kill him, though; all he was going to do, he said, was rough Chaucer up a little to get him to lay off. But he's a pretty big kid, and he waded in a little too heavily. Chaucer hit his head on the building wall, and when Sherwood saw that he was dead, he panicked and beat it out of there.”

“Which explains why Chaucer still had the rest of the fifty dollars on him when he was discovered.”

“Yeah.”

I finished the last of my beer. Eberhardt said, “One thing. How did you finally make the connection?”

“I'd seen this Sherwood Forest Products place once, when I was in Daly City on a skip-trace,” I said. “Watching that truck, loaded with plywood, maneuver on Taylor Street brought it back to mind.”

We sat there for a time, and then Eberhardt said, “Listen, I called my wife before I left the Hall and told her to put on some steaks. You want to come out for supper?”

“Rain check,” I said. “I've got something to do.”

“What's that?”

“Look up Nello. I promised him I'd let him know if anything turned up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe it'll restore some of his faith in humanity. Or at least in the minions of the law.”

“After fifteen years on the Row?” Eberhardt said. “I doubt it.”

“So do I. But there's always the chance.”

Eberhardt nodded, staring into his beer glass. “So long, social worker,” he said.

“So long, cop.”

I went out into the cold, damp night.

The first inkling
André DuBois had that his niece and her husband intended to rob him was when he found his file box of recipe cards missing from his kitchen shelf.

Before, he had vaguely suspected that they might try to borrow money from him to help finance a gourmet restaurant in Paris. However, when he returned from his expedition to the village grocer and saw that his recipe file was gone—that's when he first seriously entertained the idea that they meant to steal his greatest treasure—and even, if it should prove necessary in the end, to kill him.

André DuBois was a slender, shaggy-browed man of middle height but well past middle age, and now almost bald. His baldness, he often explained jokingly, was the result of wearing his hat indoors for so many years. His chef's cap, he meant. For he had been a world-famous chef before he withdrew from Paris to spend his declining years growing flowers and garden vegetables on the outskirts of the Italian village of Lucignano.

As he stared at the empty place on the kitchen shelf where his box of recipe cards had been, his emotions were varied, to say the least. Surprise was his first reaction. Surprise was rapidly followed by disbelief, which, in turn, gave way to incipient anger. Finally, with greater impact than any of these, he was struck by pity and shame for his niece, Yvonne, the only relative he had left in the world, the daughter of his dead brother, and now married to the man Gustav. Or
was
she married to him? Perhaps not, in these days of the sexual revolution; but here she was, at all events, in Lucignano with Gustav.

They had arrived from Arezzo driving a rented car in which they had been taking, they said, a leisurely trip about Italy, visiting Venice, Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Rome. Since Arezzo was so very close to Lucignano, Yvonne explained, they had decided on impulse to seek out her Uncle André, whom she had not seen for thirteen years, introduce him to her husband, Gustav, and thus strengthen, she hoped, the fragile thread of family relationship that had, alas, worn thin over the years for both of them.

André DuBois had made them welcome, of course. He was delighted to see his niece again, glad to meet her husband, especially pleased to have their company for a time in his retirement retreat, since he was a lonely man at best.

Yvonne had grown into a vivacious, voluptuous woman from the leggy youngster he remembered. Her hazel eyes and blonde hair (if it were genuinely blonde, which he doubted) gave her the patrician look of a northern Italian—a far cry indeed from the dark Latin mien of a Frenchwoman from Provence, which she really was. When she spoke, André noted with approval, her voice was soft and provocative, as a woman's voice should be.

As for the husband, Gustav, he was another kettle of fish entirely. A great lout of a man, bearlike and shambling, speaking with a rough Scandinavian accent that went with his name, Gustav would never win any prizes either for good looks or good manners, André decided indulgently. He felt inclined to indulgence as he looked at his handsome niece with avuncular understanding. If Gustav were Yvonne's choice, Gustav was good enough for André, too. Although—and André noticed this the moment they met—Gustav's small unblinking eyes, the color of muddy water, were set rather too close together, and the man carried with him a strong odor of perspiration.

André insisted that they stay with him for a while, eagerly offering them his own bedroom, the only one the ancient farmhouse contained. He would sleep on the sofa on the small porch where he usually ate his meals in nice weather.

Yvonne and Gustav accepted his invitation with alacrity, transferred their cheap suitcases from the rented car to André's bedroom at once, and proceeded to make themselves at home.

“Uncle André,” said Yvonne, “it is so nice to see you again after all these years. And in Italy, of all places! It is so quiet here, so unspoiled and fresh, so different from smelly old France!”

“And I'm glad to see you, Yvonne,” André responded warmly, “and to meet your husband, too.” He was somewhat at a loss as to what to say to Gustav. “I find this place very relaxing indeed after so many years in your ‘smelly old France,' as you call it.” He smiled at her, his bushy eyebrows tilting upward at their outer edges in a very droll manner.

Gustav was looking about him. The room in which they sat was untidy and cluttered, a typical farmer's retreat. Its most remarkable feature was a source of metal plaques, framed certificates, and engraved medallions that almost entirely covered the wall space of the cramped room. Gustav waved a hand at them and asked, “What are all those things?”

Before André could reply, Yvonne said with a hint of laughter in her soft voice, “Gustav! Read them! They are awards for cooking, won by Uncle André from all the gourmet societies of the world!”

Gustav jumped up from his chair for a closer look at the awards. “You were a chef?” he rumbled at André. “A chef?” He paused deliberately, then said, “Not
Le Grand
André? Of
Chez Marie Antoinette
in Paris?
That
André?”

Somehow Gustav didn't sound as surprised as his words suggested. Nevertheless, André nodded and replied modestly, “That André, yes. But no longer. Now I am only a farmer, Gustav, as you see. A decrepit raiser of flowers and bland vegetables.”

Yvonne laughed aloud. “You see, Gustav,” she crowed, “I've been saving Uncle André as a surprise for you! The greatest chef of the century is also our own dear Uncle André!”

Gustav gave a grimace that might have been meant for a smile. “Surprise, indeed!” he said, shaking his massive head. “
Le Grand
André! In my own family!”

Yvonne jumped up, seized Gustav's hand, and danced around in a circle. To André, Gustav's heavy, awkward movements seemed more than ever like those of an ill-trained bear.

After a few turns, Yvonne dropped her husband's hand, turned to André, and cried, “You see, Uncle, the great joke is that Gustav is a chef, also! Can you believe it? Two chefs in the same family!” In her ebullience, she took hold of André's arms and would have danced him around, too, except that he protested, with a laugh, “Yvonne, no. I am too old for these childish tricks.”

He glanced at Gustav's face, again expressionless around his close-set eyes, and said, “Where do you work, Gustav? Is your restaurant in Paris? Do I know it?”

“At present,” Gustav said, “I am unemployed.”

“Oh, bad luck. Where was your last job?”

“
Le Logis du Loup Sauvage
. In Aix.”

“A fine restaurant. Famous in my own youth, if memory serves, for its
soufflé d'escargots
. And they let you go?” Small wonder, André mused. How could they expect food prepared by this great clod to be anything but unsavory, heavy, indigestible; as totally lacking in subtlety and balance as the chef himself? Aloud, he said, “Such are the hazards of our profession, Gustav. But not fatal, thankfully. Let us hope your unemployment will be only temporary, eh? Have you anything in view?”

Yvonne answered with a rush. “Oh, yes, Uncle! We have applied at all the good restaurants along the Côte d'Azur. And now in Italy, too. That is the true purpose of our trip, you see. Gustav has had interviews at
La Taverna Fenice, Martini, Savini, Pappagallo, Oliviero, Sabatini, Alfredo
, and
Hostaria dell'Orso
.”