Tales for a Stormy Night (17 page)

“Aren’t you going yourself?”

Mrs. Norris gave it a second’s thought. “I might,” she said.

The detective took a card from his pocket and wrote down a telephone number. “You can reach me through this at all hours,” he said. “That’s in case your cogitating gets you into any more trouble.”

When he had taken her to the office door, Mrs. Norris looked up to his melancholy face. “Who was Cathleen Ni Houlihan?”

Tully rubbed his chin. “She wasn’t a saint exactly, but I think she was a living person…How the hell would I know? I was born in the Bronx!” A second later he added, “There was a play about her, wasn’t there?”

“There was,” said Mrs. Norris. “I’m glad to see you’re not as ignorant as you make yourself out to be.”

“Just be sure you’re as smart as you think you are,” Tully said, “if you’re off to tackle a policeman’s job again.”

He had no faith in her, Mrs. Norris thought, or he wouldn’t let her do it.

All afternoon she went over the morning’s incidents in her mind. As soon as Mr. Jarvis left the apartment for dinner and the theater, she went downtown herself. The evening papers were full of the bombing, calling it the work of a madman. The mechanism had been made up of clock parts, and the detonating device was something as simple as a pin. It was thought possibly to have been a hatpin.

Well!

And there was not a mention of her in any account. The police were obviously ashamed of themselves.

Mrs. Norris took as her place of departure Forty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue. Turning her back on the waterfall atop the Broadway building, she walked toward Shubert Alley. Anyone who could even guess at the number of times the same water went over the dam must have looked at it at least as often. And Cathleen Ni Houlihan—no stranger to the theater had plucked that name out of the air.

The beggars were out in droves: the blind, the lame, and the halt. And there were those with tin cups who could read the date in a dead man’s eye.

Mrs. Norris was early, and a good thing she was. Sightseers were already congesting the sidewalk in front of the theater. New York might be the biggest city in the world, but to lovers of the stage a few square feet of it was world enough on an opening night.

She watched from across the street for five minutes, then ten, with the crowd swelling and her own hopes dwindling. Then down the street from Eighth Avenue, with a sort of unperturbed haste, came the little beggar-woman. She wore the same hat, the same ragged coat and carried the same beaded purse.

And she also carried a box about six inches by six which she carefully set down on the steps of a fire exit.

Mrs. Norris plunged across the street and paused again, watching the beggar, fascinated in spite of herself. Round and round one woman she walked, looking her up and down, and then she scouted another. The women themselves were well-dressed out-of-towners by their looks, who had come to gape at the celebrated first-nighters now beginning to arrive. When the little panhandler had made her choice of victims, she said, and distinctly enough for Mrs. Norris to hear:

“That’s Mrs. Vanderhoff arriving now. Lovely isn’t she? Oh, dear, that’s not her husband with her. Why, that’s Johnson Tree—the oil man! You’re not from Texas, are you, dear?”

Mrs. Norris glanced at the arrivals. It was her own Mr. Jarvis and his friend. A Texas oil man indeed! The woman made up her stories to the fit of her victims! She was an artist at it.

Mrs. Norris edged close to the building and bent down to examine the box. She thought she could hear a rhythmic sound. She could, she realized—her own heartbeat.

“Leave that box alone!”

Mrs. Norris obeyed, but not before she had touched, had actually moved, the box. It was empty, or at least as light as a dream, and the woman had not recognized her. She was too busy spinning a tale. Mrs. Norris waited it out. The woman finally asked for money and got it. She actually got paper money! Then she came for the box.

“Remember me?” Mrs. Norris said.

The woman cocked her head and looked at her. “Should I?”

“This morning on the Public Library steps,” Mrs. Norris prompted.

The wizened face brightened. “But of course! Oh, and there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. I saw you speaking to my young gentleman friend—you know, in all that excitement?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Norris said, remembering the young man who had pointed her out to the police.

“Isn’t he a lovely young man? And to have had such misfortune.”

“Lovely,” Mrs. Norris agreed.

“You know, he had a scholarship to study atomic science and
those
people did him out of it.”

“
Those
people?”

“All day long you can see them going in and out, in and out, carting books by the armful. Some of them have beards. False, you know. And those thick glasses—I ask you, who would be fooled by them? Spies! Traitors! And
they
can get as many books as they want.”

“Oh,
those
people,” Mrs. Norris said understanding.

“And my poor young friend. They won’t even give him a library card, and after I wrote him such a nice reference.”

“Do you know where he lives?” Mrs. Norris said as casually as she could.

“No. But I know where he works. He fixes watches for a jeweler on Forty-seventh Street. I walked by there once and saw him working in the window. If you wait here for me, I’ll walk over and show you the place tonight. He’s not there now, of course, but I’m sure he’ll be there in the morning. I hope you can help him.”

“I’ll try,” Mrs. Norris said. A watchmaker.

The warning buzzer sounded within the theater. The lights flickered.

“Excuse me for a moment,” the woman said, and picked up the box. “I’ve brought some violets for the leading lady. I want to take them in before curtain. Wouldn’t it be nice if she invited us to see the play? I shan’t accept unless she invites both of us.”

Mrs. Norris followed the woman down the alleyway and then hung back as she handed the box in at the stage door. The woman waited and, observing Mrs. Norris, nodded to her confidently. Mrs. Norris was only reasonably sure the box was empty. She was beset by doubts and fears. Was there such a thing as a featherweight bomb? The doorman returned and put something in the woman’s hand. She bowed and scraped and came along, tucking whatever she’d got into her purse.

With Mr. Jarvis in the theater, Mrs. Norris was not going to take any chances. “Wait for me out front,” she said. “I want to have a look in there myself.”

“Too late, too late,” the woman crowed.

Mrs. Norris hurried.

“No one’s allowed backstage now, ma’am,” the doorman said.

“That box the old woman gave you…” It was sitting on a desk almost within her reach. “It could be dangerous.”

“Naw. She’s harmless, that old fraud. There’s nothing in it but tissue paper. She comes round every opening night. ‘Flowers for Miss Hayes,’ or Miss Tandy or whoever. The company manager gives her a dollar for luck. I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to go now.”

Mrs. Norris beat a dignified retreat. The old woman was nowhere to be seen. But a watchmaker on Forty-seventh Street…Forty-seventh Street was also the diamond center of New York. What a lovely place for a leisurely walk-through with Mr. Tully!

1959

I
T WAS A NIGHT
of fitful winds, so quiet at times the fall of an acorn might have startled a listener. Then the wind would commence again, whispering at first, trembling the dead leaves; then it would rise to a wanton shriek that rattled the very stars, it seemed. And that fury spent, silence hung once more upon the mountainside. It was the sort of night that a man abroad in it was not likely to forget. It could make strangers of friends, and perhaps friends of strangers.

Two men surprised each other, meeting on the Upper Road well after midnight. One was walking south from the direction of Rossi’s Tavern, although it was unlikely that he had come from there: Rossi was in the habit of closing at midnight sharp. The other man, Tom Sommers, was coming east, down Cemetery Road. They were only a few feet apart when both of them hesitated, and then, having recognized each other, came on to their inevitable meeting at the crossroad. There a great naked light bulb shone beneath a porcelain shield which resembled an upside-down spittoon.

Both men lived in the village below, Point True, and they rode the same commuters’ bus into New York every day. Outside of that, and this chance meeting, they had little in common. Yet, about to pass each other with the merest of greetings, both men paused, and on an impulse each felt had come from the other’s prompting, extended their hands.

The handshake was brief, but it was their only one in fifteen years of acquaintance.

“Going down?” Tom Sommers said.

“No, worse luck. Up again. My wife’s still at the Shanleys’.” Allan Ford jerked his head in the direction of Cemetery Road, the same road down which Sommers had just walked.

There were a few houses along the road—not many, because so few people could afford the search for water on the mountainside. Many a well-digging had had to be abandoned at that height, and with it the plans to build a house.

“Nice people though,” Ford added, as though to amend what might have been taken as criticism. The Shanley house was the only one alight now, except for what seemed to be a night lamp burning at the Rossi window.

“Are they?” Sommers said. It was not a question. It was an avowal of his skepticism of the Shanleys as nice people, and of Ford himself, perhaps. By reputation Sommers was a sour man.

“Once in a while anyway,” Ford said, rubbing the back of his neck. It was an old mannerism, always practised to the tune of a sly joke. “Here comes the wind again. Isn’t it something?”

“You should hear it at the top of the mountain,” Sommers said, and without so much as a gesture of farewell he strode off down the hill.

At the very end of Cemetery Road, in the long plateau atop the mountain, his wife was buried. She had died a good many years before, at the age of twenty-three…

Both men were on the eight o’clock bus in the morning. Sommers boarded it first because he lived farther north, and as was his habit, he sat beside the person least likely to attempt conversation. He was tight-lipped and somber-eyed, reportedly a fine engraver. He looked rather like an ascetic monk. But any comment about him among the commuters almost invariably centered about his daughter. Ellen was fifteen now, in her third year at the Township high school, an honor student, and a very sweet-dispositioned girl. She was quite popular despite her shyness. Nearly everyone considered it a miracle she had been so well brought-up without a woman’s help.

Ford was not his usual hearty self that morning, but his explanation was familiar: “I wish to God we could get to bed nights.” He and Sommers did not even greet each other, much less comment on their post-midnight encounter. There was nothing at all out of the way about the bus trip that morning.

By the time most of the same commuters met again on the 5:15 bus, northbound, an item in the afternoon newspapers—or in some cases, a call from home—provoked a fury of talk; Point True had been the scene of a brutal murder shortly after midnight the night before. Fred Rossi had been bludgeoned to death in the woods between his tavern on the Upper Road and his home on Cemetery Hill.

Tom Sommers looked up from his newspaper at precisely the moment Ford was moving past him. Their eyes met and held for an instant, and Ford thought about their handshake of the night before—after the murder had occurred. But not a word was exchanged between them.

Ford’s wife was on the telephone when he got home. It gave him a moment he very much needed—a chance to be alone on familiar ground. He was aware of something shaky inside him. God knows, the sensation was common enough to an advertising man, this inner quaking. In his case, he thought, it usually portended a responsibility he did not want, a decision he did not want to make.

He wandered through the house and lingered a moment at the playroom door. Jeff was fond of cowboys again, judging by the television program that was on. He waved absently in response to Allan’s “Hi, son.”

Martha, off the phone, called out, “Allan?”

He returned to the kitchen. “Hi, honey.”

“I suppose you’ve heard about Rossi?”

He nodded. “It’s in the afternoon papers.”

“Did you hear anything on the bus?”

“Gossip, you mean?”

“All right then—gossip.”

Martha had a way of coaxing almost everything he knew out of him, and he resented it even while surrendering. The worst of it was that once she got hold of it, what he had to tell always seemed unimportant. She was a frighteningly digestive woman.

“Doc Rathensberger calls it the violent demise of one more blackguardly scoundrel,” Allan said.

“It takes one to know one from what I’ve heard about Doc Rathensberger,” Martha commented.

Allan shrugged. Doc’s florid turn of phrase had rather appealed to him.

“Chief Kelley was here this afternoon, corroborating—is that the word?—Jack Shanley’s statement.”

“What did Jack say?”

“That we were guests there last night…who stayed until two thirty, and that we didn’t hear anything unusual.”

“I wish we hadn’t stayed so late. I’ll bet we wouldn’t be asked to either if Jack had to ride the damned bus in every day.” Shanley drove his own car into New York. “It’s enough to kill a man.” Allan was talking quickly. It had become a way of his—to cover with patter what he felt to be his slow process of reasoning. Apparently he had not been missed in the half hour or so he had been gone from the Shanley house.

“I don’t think either Jack or I mentioned your having fallen asleep in the kitchen.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. He could picture Martha lifting that proud chin of hers when Shanley observed: “Your husband’s off again.” He had tried not to fall asleep last night, though the practice was not uncommon to him. The Shanley’s had an open kitchen grate, and a cat that lazed in a chair before it. Allan often retreated to its company when he’d had too much to drink and the talk got up to his ears. After midnight, Martha always seemed at her best, sharp, her humor brittle as ice. Listening to her and Jack—he was a criminal lawyer, and a brilliant one—was like following a tennis match by ear. Along about then, Allan’s own humor had as much bounce as a wet rag.