Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (14 page)

I didn’t mind if she wanted the company of both men together. They were arguing who should go where, as I got into the cart and drove off.

It was the first time I had operated one of those things. On my salary you don’t hire them lightly. The brake was fiercer than I had expected, but the thing was stable enough, so long as one didn’t ask the impossible on a steep or an uneven gradient. I steered sedately over the road and along the seventeenth and eighteenth fairways, finding on my left one of the big rubber-lined reservoirs from which the underground pipes could be fed. An ingenious system.

I had had, as I reviewed it, an excellent morning of golf. A piquant round of great comfort. Not one for tricks or nasty surprises or any of the crude and unpleasant hazards which tax one to extremity, in sport as in life. But a good game of golf.

Sir Bartholomew was waiting, as predicted, on the patio of the clubhouse. He wouldn’t hear of my going back but pressed on me instead his beach towel and his chair, ordered me a fruit juice, and suggested that I should pass the time with a swim.

He didn’t need to explain his gratitude any more than I my commiseration. I changed, thankfully, into the new bathing suit and beach shirt I had left in my locker, picked up my bathing cap for dewigging with later, and made my way back to my tall, ice-filled drink by the pool.

It was too hot to talk. In the baby blue water a long-haired girl swam showily and then got languidly out. The palms in front of the clubhouse were motionless and the sea grape in the corner hung its leaves like unpolished green sequins. Around the pool, the slatted beach chairs lay straddled like spiders, each with its burden of naked bronze flesh. Someone said politely, “You need to be oiled, lady, or you’ll get awful sore.”

It was Paul, of the locket. I said, “Thanks, but I should be all right. I’ve been quite a lot in the sun.”

He flashed his snowy, capped teeth and waggled a finger. “Not there you haven’t. Call yourself a doctor, as well?”

He was correct, I was annoyed to discover. The shape of my present bathing suit produced problems which were undoubtedly novel. “Now just you lie there,” he said; and before I could stir, a large warm hand lapped in liquid spread itself over my central vertebrae and proceeded to massage, ably and hard. I gasped, and turned my head to one side in order to read his expression. He winked and continued unpausing. Feet had not even been mentioned. His impulses were entirely benign.

Someone, three chairs away, was grumbling softly about something; someone else somewhere was laughing. But quietly. Everything was quiet. In the pool, empty now, a string of colored floats moved with the air on its satiny surface, hand in hand like a dream line of children. A brush hissed. A black boy, in a black lace shirt with pearl cuff links, was spraying the bushes at the back of the open-air bar; his sneakers squeaked below bare brown ankles as he moved gently along. The sound mixed with the organ note of a plane coming in, the giant cricket hum of the generators. A whining buzz came from the cart room, where the sixty unused golf cars sat in canopied rows, feeding umbilically, each from its meter. Paul said, “You’ve got a cute little figure. Ain’t no one ever told you before, Doc?”

The girl from the reception counter, running out on the back steps with the radio transmitter box gripped in her hand, stood and screamed: “Doctor MacRannoch! Are you there! Doctor…”

I was up and running, the beach shirt whipped over my shoulders, before she got another word out. She stood and stared at me gasping, her face stiff and the color of yeast. I said, “Give me the transmitter. Take a deep breath. Now, what is it?”

But I knew. I could hear the hubbub behind: people wakened, talking, asking; even Paul’s naked feet padding along, a late starter behind me. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

The girl was still choking. I gave her a rap on the shoulder. “Come along. What is it?”

She said, “That was the car from the beach. To say they’ve gone for the nurse. And Mr. Brady said you’re to go, too. They were looking for something…”

“A brooch. I know. What happened?” I said.

“They didn’t find it. And Sir Bartholomew said to call off the search. And they called Lady Edgecombe, but she didn’t answer. And Mr. Brady went off to look. Then Mr. Brady called from the thirteenth that he’d found her.”

“Well?” I said. My voice was calm, I trust, but I couldn’t believe it yet, the thing she was going to say.

“Lady Edgecombe was dead,” said the girl. “They say her neck’s broken.”

Denise. Not Sir Bart but his wife.

SO SHE WAS GASSED,” said Johnson. “And deliberately, you fancy, Beltanno? Not a victim of environmental pollution?”

“It would be hard to prove it,” I said, “but I think a pad was pressed over her face.”

“And then she was flung into the empty reservoir,” Bart Edgecombe said. His two hands were still clenched in front of his face. “Instead of me.”

In forty minutes after it happened, Johnson had been there. It was the first thing I thought of, to summon him. He was known as a friend of the family; it seemed natural enough, I had hoped. I waited until the special constable came from the village and left him beside Bart, kneeling beside that sad, covered body; and then got a lift in the company car up to Hilltop, the little restaurant which was also the transmitting station to the outside world. Official messages had to be sent: to the hospital, to the Criminal Investigation Department at Nassau for a plane to come over.

Crab Island didn’t have radio transmission, but
Dolly
had. I pinned my hopes to the fact that Spry would have sailed her from Nassau, and that Spry would be on board. He was; and I spoke to him, while in the coffee bar next door, people who hadn’t heard the news laughed and chattered under the ceilings and walls covered with autographs from the Americas and all over Europe:
Surfside, Massachusetts; Sundsvall, Sweden; Provo, Utah; Brighton, England; Vreeland a/d Vecht, Holland; Caracas, Venezuela; Hollywood, California
.

Brady and I met Johnson by the workers’ camp on the pier which the cargo ships used. We heard the engine before
Dolly
’s launch came in sight, low and white and extraordinarily fast. Johnson was alone at the wheel. The boat cut an efficient arc through the water, reduced its power, and murmured up to a mooring. In a moment he was ashore, and we were moving off in Brady’s Javelin SST.

No one could have faulted my friend Johnson’s behavior. Consternation, and a mild stimulation—so characteristic of sudden death, so identical with the feverish atmosphere of the clubhouse I had just left that it deceived even me for a moment. Then Brady dropped us at Edgecombe’s house, and I realized as we walked up the path that all those questions had had a point; and that although his greeting of Sir Bartholomew, huddled inside, might hold genuine feeling, it was merely the preamble.

The chairman of the board had arrived, and whether we wanted it or not, we were about to hold a post-mortem in the fullest and ugliest sense of the word.

It helped Edgecombe to talk. I had heard it before: Mr. Tiko had gallantly tramped back to tee No. 7, where Denise had put the brooch in her pocket, and volunteered to search the next three holes. Brady had begun from No. 10, and Lady Edgecombe had begun walking backward from the sixteenth where she had discovered her loss. Sir Bartholomew, starting much later, had taken a golf cart from the clubhouse to No. 10, and had caught up with Brady at the twelfth. They walked on from there together. It was Brady who had noticed the footmarks at the edge of the great white excavation to the right of the green, and had called Sir Bartholomew over to look.

I had seen it as well. Unrolled like a ribbon over the crossed caterpillar tracks down the side of the chasm was the smooth undulating mark of a falling body, with the small rubble kicked up alongside. Lady Edgecombe lay at the bottom, where the harrow had been left with its sharp turning spikes. Luckily, most of what had happened to her was obliterated by the folds of a dusty tarpaulin.

I was the only person who had picked up the tarpaulin and sniffed it. The smell of gas was then perfectly clear: the exterminating gas, and something else so faint I was unable to name it.

“Chloropicrin. They use it to fumigate the ground, don’t they?” said Johnson. “If they’re replanting, or relaying turf on old ground. It kills the weeds and removes the bacteria. Were they planting there?”

“Yes,” said Sir Bartholomew. He removed his hands. Beneath his face had aged a great deal. “They were creating a border of plants between the tee and the new lake. The tarpaulin was there when we passed earlier on. We think she picked it up…” He stopped.

“It was wet,” I said. “We believe the sprinkler was on. In fact we know it was: the grass still had a big silver-blue patch where the spray had just fallen. We think the brooch must have lain in the path of the spray, and Lady Edgecombe picked up the tarpaulin and slung it over her head before running in and snatching it up. She got as far as that, anyway, before the gas overwhelmed her. We found the brooch where she dropped it again, probably when she started coughing and choking near the edge of the quarry.”

For a moment Johnson was silent, the bifocals in impersonal communion. Then, “If the victim was supposed to be you, Bart,” he said, “why should they trouble to do anything more to Denise? Or do you think she genuinely fell over the edge?”

“I think she saw whoever it was,” Sir Bartholomew said, his voice rough. “I think the killer was there, ready to finish the job. Beltanno says unless you were trapped under that tarpaulin for any length of time, the gas wouldn’t kill you. But it would choke you long enough for a determined man to do anything with you he wanted.”

“-— Such as press a pad of ether or chloroform or whatever you like over your face and suffocate you before you went over,” I said.

“In the open air? In daylight?” Johnson’s voice was merely clinical.

I said, “Go down and look at it. There’s palmetto scrub to the horizon on every side. You can just see the sea on the right, and if you look back, you can just see the triangle of the airport control tower. But it’s secluded as three quarters of the fairways on this course are secluded. The only possible interruption might have come from a service cart; there were plenty of them about. But if he used the tarpaulin as a shield, he might appear only to be sheltering Lady Edgecombe.”

“Or he might have been in a red service cart himself,” Johnson said. “ Or in a golf cart. What’s your view of Wallace Brady now, Bart?”

“Only that I don’t want to see him again,” Edgecombe said. He was beginning to lose his precarious poise. I caught Johnson’s eye, and he ignored me.

“Have you found out any more about him?” Johnson said mildly. Edgecombe put down his fists.

“Have
I
found out anything? I’ve told you what I know. He’s American; he comes from Virginia; his family seems authenticated; he is a genuine engineer, and good at his job; he’s been here six months and expects to spend another three on his part of the development. He’s going on after that, I believe, to Caracas. He works all over the world. He has never spoken out of turn or given the least cause for suspicion. In fact, he was good to—” He balked at the name.

He said, staring at Johnson, “What the hell more do you want from me? You’re the top man. You’re the big shot with the money and resources. All you have to do is radio around your pals and you can find out what toothpaste he uses. But you didn’t bother to do it, did you? You didn’t check; you didn’t call in protection; you didn’t even trouble to keep an eye on the matter yourself. You were too damned keen to get off to Crab Cay and your latest…”

“Actually, the Begum is James Ulric’s property,” Johnson said. “But I’ll admit to a crazed liaison with Sergeant Trotter, if it’ll make you feel any better.” He paused, and said quietly, “Brady has been checked out, of course. He’s clean, or appears to be. So are Krishtof Bey and Sergeant Trotter for that matter. All it means is that so far, no one has traced any misdemeanors they may have committed. Brady could have killed Denise. So could Mr. Tiko. So could any one of several hundred men of the island’s labor force, if suitably paid. Do you honestly think she would still be alive, Bart, if I had moved in beside you with a revolver?”

Edgecombe muttered something. I heard only “protection.”

Johnson looked up. He said, “But you don’t get a wet nurse with this job. You don’t even get good toilet and canteen facilities. You get permission to kill and be killed, with no questions asked. You’ve the training we all have, and the weapons we all have, and a fair number of your housestaff, I expect, are in the Spoonmakers’ Union as well. What the hell more do you want?” He got up and stood over Edgecombe, his hands in his pockets. “If someone’s killing you because he doesn’t like the shade of your socks, that’s too bad: that’s natural wastage. If someone’s killing you because you’re an agent, then he’s lying out there taking his time about it for a very good reason. He wants to see who else is going to drop off the rock face and sprint for the play area.”

Johnson moved across to the drinks table, and uncapping the whiskey bottle, began to pour three neat doubles into three heavy tumblers. “You may have blown your cover, Bart,” he said crisply, “but I’m damned if you’re going to blow mine.”

“You’ve made your point,” Edgecombe said. He paid no attention to the drink Johnson laid by his side. Edgecombe said, “I suppose I can’t expect you to come to Nassau for the funeral? There won’t be anyone else.” His eyes were bloodshot as if he had had a blow on the head, but I thought his training showed, if nowhere else, in the remarkable grip he had taken again on himself. Johnson offered me a whiskey and I snapped a refusal. I wasn’t in the bloody Spoonmakers’ Union.

Johnson sat down. “Doesn’t Denise have any relations?”

Edgecombe shook his head. “A few distant ones in the south of England. They couldn’t afford to come, and wouldn’t care anyway. She… she’d made her life with me.”

“But you left her alone a good bit, didn’t you? Didn’t she resent that?” Johnson said.

Edgecombe shut his lips and put the back of his hand to his mouth. I walked across and standing between Edgecombe and Johnson, put my hands on my hips. “What possible business is it of yours?” I said to Johnson. Pleasantly, I trust.

Edgecombe said, his hand still over his face, “He gets twenty-five thousand a year for asking that sort of question. At this sort of time.”

“Was she alone a lot?” Johnson repeated. He might not have heard me.

“Yes. But she had friends,” Edgecombe said.

“Did you know who they were?”

“Not all of them. I couldn’t,” said Edgecombe with sudden bitterness. “
Go here; do that; we want this code broken by Monday
… You know this business. I had a wife. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. But I’d had her a long time — long before I entered your stainless profession. I loved her…”

“Did she love you?” said Johnson. “Or was she bored and resentful, and open to suggestions by anyone with enough money? Suggestions which would make her a comfortable widow… except that she didn’t live to become a comfortable widow. Because Denise talked too much when she had had too much Planters’ Punch, didn’t she? Who made up the crab sandwiches you took to New York, Edgecombe?”

Edgecombe’s big, well-groomed face had gone white to the lips. I said sharply, “Drink this!” and gave him the whiskey Johnson had poured. He started to speak, and then as I looked at him, drank it off in one gulp. He put it down and got to his feet and stared at Johnson, until his breathing allowed him to speak.

Then he said, “All right. You said that, with Denise lying dead in that diabolical quarry out there. She fell on a harrow… can you imagine that? I expect you can; you’ve seen plenty of violent deaths in this job. Before that she was suffocated — by gas, by a cloth — it doesn’t matter. You can imagine that, too. I’d like you to. You can further imagine that we slept here last night, Denise and I, and had breakfast together this morning. I shaved, she dressed. We talked of the day, and our plans for tomorrow… She was looking forward to her golf…”

He stopped, still breathing hard. I made a little movement, but he waved me off. “Beltanno was too good a player. I realized what had happened. Denise wasn’t strong willed. She didn’t need to be. She had me… most of the time. She knew her own weaknesses, and we supported one another. She wasn’t spiteful, she wasn’t anything but a nice, pretty woman who was perhaps a bit vain…”

He looked straight at Johnson. “She doesn’t deserve on her deathbed to be accused of murder and treason. I don’t deserve that the first posthumous words I hear of my wife are the suggestion that she wanted to kill me.” He stumbled, and I put my hand on his elbow and kept it there. “You may withdraw your attention from Great Harbour Cay,” said Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe. “As from this moment, I have resigned from your service. Whatever interest you have kindly heretofore taken in me, I deserve none of it now.”

Through it all, Johnson had not even moved. His glasses, motionless, reflected the chair, the table, Edgecombe’s pale face and the blue of my beach shirt, as I stood and supported him. I had forgotten I was still in my swimsuit. The anger I was suppressing became a strengthening pain in my stomach. I controlled myself. Johnson said levelly: “As soon as you are exposed as an agent, your career as an agent is ended. Nothing has changed.”

“Something has,” I said with satisfaction. “I put a strong sedative in Sir Bartholomew’s whiskey, Mr. Johnson. If you want to distress him still further, I suggest you come back in two hours.”

Johnson said, “Is he distressed?”

I had Edgecombe’s pulse under my fingers. I said, “Would you like to come and feel this?”

Johnson shook his head. He was looking at Edgecombe. Sir Bartholomew stared back at him. I could feel his weight press on my arm as the drowsiness gathered. Edgecombe said, “I told you the truth.” The rancor had gone out of his voice.

“I know,” Johnson said. “But I had to be sure. We swear loyalty ten times over to our employer, and mean it. But we cover up for the person we love.”

Edgecombe said, his voice gentle, “She wasn’t mixed up in anything. Not Denise,” and Johnson, walking forward stopped, ignoring me, and took Edgecombe’s other arm, turning him toward the shut bedroom door. “You would know. I accept that,” he said. He walked Edgecombe to the door and opened it on the empty bedroom. “I never apologize for the inexcusable,” he added.

Sir Bartholomew put one hand on the doorpost and with the other patted my shoulder. “You see? Brains and tenacity,” he said. “Should I accept his apology?”

“He didn’t offer one,” I said grimly.