Working Murder

“CLARA? CLARA GAMADGE?”

The voice on the phone was high, Eleanor Roosevelty, unmistakable. I said: “Aunt May.”

“You angel—you knew my voice. It's been ages.”

“How are you?” I said. “
Where
are you?” Please God, not at the Sarasota airport

“In New York. Still at 740 Park. I'm miserable, Clara. Something horrid has happened.
Your husband would have known just what to do. How you must miss that dear man!”

I did indeed sorely miss that dear man and his penchant for involving himself in other
people's horrid happenings. But now I could only look longingly at my paintbox, which
I'd been in the act of packing, along with a sandwich and a paperback copy of
Middle-march
. May was going on about her own widowhood, which, as it
antedated mine by about twenty years, was not, I felt, a pressing matter for condolence.
She ended accusingly:

“And you never said good-bye when you moved to Florida.”

“I didn't move. I just leased my brownstone for a year. It was pretty empty after Henry
died.”

The Gulf of Mexico, fifty yards from where I stood, was a preposterous shade of
blue-green in the January sun. May said hastily:

“Oh, of course. But—a
year
? Isn't Florida sort of...” Her voice trailed.

I laughed. “Boring, banal, and bourgeois? The Three B's, Cousin Sadd calls them. What's
the horrid thing that's happened, May?”

“Oh, it's too nasty. Let me get a cigarette.”

Was this woman still smoking and alive? She'd been a daily two or three-packer in her
youth, and May Dawson had to be in her late eighties now, a good twenty years older than
I. Never intimate or even congenial, we'd always been friendly. I reached for a
hairbrush and tackled my long white hair, which my daughter won't allow me to cut. May's
phone clunked around on some surface, and she was back. She coughed rackingly for a
moment, made an attempt to speak, coughed again, and finally said:

“I'm still in bed. What time is it? I'm simply too depressed to drag my clothes on. You
remember Lloyd Cavanaugh, that cousin on the Saddlier side. Well, he died yesterday and
refuses to be buried.”

I took in this unlikely sequence as I tried to pin up my hair with one hand and watched
another cousin, Charles Saddlier by name, but “Sadd” for as long as I could remember,
walk up the path with the
Times
under his arm. I hoped this particular cousin
would be spared a while longer to make the world safe for curmudgeonry.

“What I mean is”—May coughed again and I shuddered—"there's that hideous mausoleum
sitting in Holy Martyrs Cemetery with all those empty crypts that none of us wants to be
buried in and you can't blame us but Lloyd is penniless and should be grateful and
instead he's left instructions that he be buried someplace in Ohio where he was born.”

I wondered what was so horrid about that, as May paused for breath.

“And here's the horrid part: I thought I'd persuaded his wife—what's her name—Helen—to
have Lloyd buried in Holy Martyrs, and last week when he was sinking I even made that
awful trip out to Queens to ask about opening the vault, and what did they tell me in
the office? Somebody has been snooping around asking questions about the
stories
.
That wretched place. We'll never live it down.”

The Dawson mausoleum. I'd seen pictures of it as a child and could perfectly envision the
enormous marble structure dwarfing everything around it in old Holy Martyrs Cemetery in
Queens, New York.

I said: “I remember there was supposed to be something scandalous about the place, but I
was never told what it was. Sounds rather fascinating.”

May's high voice went higher. “You're safely in Florida and your name is Gamadge now.
You
won't have to face some lurid piece in one of those loathsome tabloids.”

I felt sudden pity. A long-ago, high-profile tragedy in May's family had rendered her
pathologically sensitive to notoriety. This I understood and respected. But the Dawsons
in general have been a snobbish, ingrown group to whom a breath of scandal is to be
dreaded more than sin. My husband used to say that their motto was the same as the
Scarlet Pimpernel's in his effete disguise: What's worse than a crime?—a blunder! I am
the only Dawson who affectionately remembers an old family embarrassment involving a
senile uncle whom I adored, for in the course of it I met Henry Gamadge, and my days as
an inept, lonely little debutante were over. Happiness, a sage once said, is not
something you experience, it is something you remember....

“May,” I said, fighting memories and hoping I sounded ineffectual, “what can I do?”

“You can come.”

"Come?"

“Come help us persuade Helen Cavanaugh to have Lloyd buried in the mausoleum. We'll all
show up at Holy Martyrs, and the place will be opened—it hasn't been since that awful
creature was buried there—and maybe those
stories
”—May seemed to put the word in
italics each time she said it—"will evaporate. And aren't you staying with Sadd? Tell
him to come too.”

I said despairingly: “Will you hold on a minute, May? Sadd just came in.”

“Of course.” She coughed again. “I'll hold on.”

Not for long you won't, I thought grimly. Sadd had seated himself on the porch (I can't
bring myself to use the ersatz-elegant “Florida Room") and had folded the
Times
into quarters, a habit that dated back to his commuting days on the New York, New Haven
and Hartford. He pushed his glasses up to a nesting place in his thick white hair and
said:

“Lloyd Cavanaugh died in Hollis, New York.” He pulled the glasses down again and squinted
at the fine print of the obituary. “'Son of Kenneth and Rose.' Why can't they get these
things right? Her name was Rosamond. Anyway, it's nice to be so far away that you don't
have to even debate about going to the funeral. Who was on the phone?”

“
Is
on the phone. May Dawson. She wants us to come to New York for that funeral we
don't even have to debate about.”

He stared at me. “She's out of her mind.”

“It seems”—I don't know if I was angry or just bored—"that there's some problem about
getting Lloyd buried—or not buried—in that mausoleum, and somebody's dug up the rumors
about the place and May believes that if we just show up en masse...” I went on to
describe the salubrious effects of committing Lloyd's reluctant remains to Holy Martyrs
Cemetery.

Sadd said: “She's right.”

This family! “Then go, Sadd. But I have no intention of making a round trip to New York
City in the middle of January, especially since I'm going home in April anyway—”

“You are not.”

“—when the lease is up. So you tell May you'll be glad to come and you'll look forward to
that nice, leisurely layover in Atlanta and the balmy weather in New York, and you'll be
happy to browbeat Lloyd's widow, who has a perfect right to bury her husband wherever
she—”

“Hello, May, this is Sadd.” He had struggled to his short legs and reached the phone. “I
agree it would be unfortunate to revive that sordid mausoleum story, but isn't there
enough of the family up there for your purpose?” He was motioning to me to pick up on
the kitchen extension. “You don't want to drag two tired, elderly people...”

When Sadd didn't want to do something he was “tired and elderly.” At all other times he
was “spry as a cricket, thank you,” and he was. I walked reluctantly into the kitchen,
where a fiery hibiscus was brushing the screen, closed my eyes, and took the receiver
from the wall. May's voice was quavering on.

“—some person who was at a funeral near the mausoleum and saw the name DAWSON—you know
the size of those letters over the door—and remembered the
stories
(italics
again) and began to ask questions—”

“May,” I had a sudden inspiration. “Why can't young Henry represent Sadd and me? He lives
in Brooklyn Heights—I'll give you his phone number.” I warmed as I thought of my son. He
was the exact age, thirty-eight, that his father had been when I met him, and he was a
clone of his dad, same gray eyes, mousy hair, good mind, and bad posture. “I'm sure
he'll go, May, and he'll take his wife—you'll love Bettina—and anybody else he can
muster. He's a dear thing—”

“He is indeed!” May's voice was suddenly gentle. “And he's standing right here. I'll put
him on.”

Sadd and I stared at each other across the kitchen aperture. What
was
this?

“Hello, Mother! Sadd, you there? Now, listen, you guys, be good eggs and haul ass up
here.”

Sadd said: “Henry, don't be vulgar.” I was used to it.

“By the way, Mom, little Hen has been reading my old Oz books, and he needs you to
reassure him about the Yoop.”

I froze. Sadd was beginning to huff and puff, but I scarcely heard him. When Henry was a
child we had a code: If you are away from home and something happens to upset or
frighten you and you can't speak freely on the phone, refer to the Yoop, the man-eating
giant in his favorite Oz book. Once when he was in boarding school, the Yoop had saved
Henry from the torments of a bully; one summer when he was unhappy during a visit to
friends in Maine, the Yoop had effected a summons home.

I said, as quietly as I could: “Henry, are you telling us there's trouble and you can't
talk?”

“That's right, Mom. The good old Yoop.”

My heart was thumping. Sadd said: “Can you call us later?”

“Well, no. So hop a plane tomorrow. There's an Eastern flight gets into LaGuardia at
noon—I just checked. I can't meet you but I'll buy you a cab right here to May's. And
bring warm stuff—it's snowing.”

His receiver clicked. We stood still, ours in midair.

Sadd said, in an apocalyptic tone: “Snowing...”

He walked to the bookcase, which doubled as his wine chest, and took out a bottle of
sherry. “Our elevenses today are going to be tenses. I assume that ‘Yoop' business was a
code?”

I nodded and sat down in a chair that had stood by the window of our living room on East
Sixty-third Street. It was a straight-backed thing with carved arms, out of place in
these airy surroundings, but I had brought it with me to cherish the memory of Henry
Gamadge, so often stretched in it and puzzling over a horrid happening.

IT BEGAN, BEFORE I KNEW HIM, IN THE SUMmer of 1936.

Henry Gamadge, a modest, endearing man, scholar, bibliophile, expert (he hated the word)
discerner of forged manuscripts, found himself in the midst of murder in a Maine resort.
Almost apologetically he named the killer, then fled back to his bachelor quarters on
East Sixty-third Street. But the low-profile, moneyed, bookish society of New York now
had him in its genteel clutches, and Henry Gamadge became the man to consult about that
most delectable phenomenon—scandal and murder in “a good family.”

When he died, people said to me (knowing I had “helped")—"Clara, you will of course carry
on for Henry.”

At first the thought had distressed—even repelled me. I'd loved working with the
manuscripts, but “detecting” was another matter and without Henry, unthinkable. Would I
have the heart, the skill? The dangers in which he involved himself often filled me with
terror, but I had to confess that his absorption, when a puzzle presented itself, filled
me with admiration—almost envy. He once said that the first intimations of a mystery,
the first faint stirrings of a question, were almost as exciting as the answer.