Long Live the Dead (31 page)

My second was a loud-mouthed egg peddling something. He stayed twelve seconds.

My third, fourth, fifth and sixth were the same.

My seventh—a client.

He was a good-looking chap, well-dressed, perfectly at ease. I thought he was a college boy until he sat down and gave me a chance to look at his face—then I saw that he was older. Not much older, but older. His name, he said matterof-factly, was Standish. Edgar Standish. “I’ve not stolen anything or murdered anyone,” he said with a pleasant smile, “so I don’t suppose you’ve heard of me, Lieutenant.”

I said darkly: “Why the ‘Lieutenant’?”

“You are, aren’t you?”

“I was.”

“I don’t believe all I read in the papers,” he shrugged. “If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

I sort of liked him.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “if I believed that hokum about your lecherous nature, I’d be the last man in the world to come here. Because, you see, I want you to take care of a young lady for me. At least, to keep an eye on her.”

So it was one of those things. But it wasn’t.

“I live out of town a little distance,” he said, “in Green Hill. I’m married—have a youngster, in fact—and the young lady in question, Miss Grace Marvin, is a guest of ours. Not a very willing guest, I’m afraid,” he added, shaking his head.

I paid attention.

“She has been ill, Lieutenant, and is mentally not just right. Encephalitis sometimes does that, you know—leaves the patient somewhat unbalanced. Miss Marvin isn’t at all dangerous, you understand. In fact, most of the time she is quite normal. But at times she suffers from the delusion that she’s being held prisoner.”

“Is she?” I asked.

“Frankly, yes, until her doctor feels safe in giving her free rein. The situation is somewhat peculiar, in that the girl’s folks are in Europe somewhere, and she must either stay with us or go to a nursing-home. Doctor Truett is convinced that the atmosphere of a nursing-home would do her more harm than good. We like her and want to do all we can to help her, but frankly, Lieutenant, she’s quite a problem.”

“And you want me to play watchdog?”

“That’s right.”

“For how long?”

“As long as necessary. When the girl’s parents return, she can go to them, of course. But so far we’ve had no luck in trying to make contact with them. This war, you know.”

“Well,” I said, matching his frankness with some of my own, “I could use the job.”

H
e seemed pleased and grateful, gave me a check for one hundred dollars and said he would stop at my apartment, on his way home from work, to pick me up. When he’d gone, I went down to the third floor, to the office of the building-superintendent, and paid my rent.

I had plenty of time that afternoon to look up the past and present of my client, but the job was not an easy one The Green Hill directory, or rather the directory of the town of Greenwood, of which Green Hill is a handsome suburb, listed him as a home-owner, all right, and from the same source I learned that his wife’s name was Caroline.

The telephone book listed both a home and office phone, the former in Green Hill, which checked, and the latter at 32 Waverley Building, downtown. He was an architect.

If you know a man’s profession and are trained in the business of snooping, you can generally get a pretty good line on him. The line on Edgar Standish made him thirty-four years old, a graduate of M. I. T. and the son of a former Tech professor. It’s nice to know these things.

I was ready at five fifteen and he was there on the dot. We drove out to Green Hill.

He had quite a place, even for Green Hill. The road climbed a bluff and Standish’s house was at the top of it, overlooking the colony of expensive residences on one side, the bay on the other. The air was different out here. There was a stiff, clean breeze that appeared to be permanently a part of the location. The sea looked cold and gray, and the cliff fell into it with an abruptness calculated to make timid men steer clear of the brink. The house itself was a modern affair surrounded by lawn and gardens.

He introduced me to his wife, and I was impressed. My opinion of the other sex had been lower than the commissioner’s conscience since my set-to with Miss Mary Anderson, but now it took an upward turn. Caroline Standish gave me an honest hand and hoped I would make myself quite at home. “I’m afraid,” she said with a smile, “you’ll just have to make yourself one of the family. We have no servants except Mrs. Meade, the housekeeper, and it’s every man for himself down here.”

She was slim and pretty, with honest blue eyes. I liked her.

Standish himself toted my bag upstairs and showed me my room, and while I was wrestling into a clean shirt a little while later, I heard the youngster cutting up. He came tearing up the stairs, charged into my room, stared at me and said: “Hi!” A cute little guy about four years old, with his mother’s blond hair.

“Hi, yourself,” I said.

He said: “You’re an old friend of Daddy’s, aren’t you? You’re going to live with us for a while?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll have lots of fun,” he declared.

He was right—but not the way he meant.

A
t dinner I met Mrs. Meade, a comfortably plump woman on the verge of fifty, and was introduced to the strange cause of my being there—Grace Marvin.

She surprised me. Friends of genteel people are usually genteel themselves, and this girl wasn’t, or at least didn’t give that impression. She wore bright yellow slacks and a form-fitting sweater. Her mouth was reddened to look larger and more sensual than it was, her thick black hair was rakishly drawn back and bound with a red handkerchief, and the shadows that made her eyes so dark and wistful were as phoney as bootleg bond.

Standish introduced me as a very old friend of his, and the girl cooed: “How very nice!” That kind of goo, from her, was like
Traumerei
from a danceband fiddle.

I pigeonholed these first impressions, though, for future study and alterations. First impressions can be treacherous.

We spent a quiet evening, played bridge for a while and quit to listen to a symphony concert on the radio. I like that sort of thing myself. Maybe it’s old age creeping in, but my fondness for jazz went winging when the boogie-woogie boys began to slug out the sub-dominants. Miss Marvin, however, was plainly bored.

“Give me,” she said, “Benny Goodman any time.”

She excused herself with a yawn and went up to bed, giving the Standishes a chance to talk to me.

“Well,” Edgar said, “what do you think of her?”

“Seems perfectly normal to me,” I declared.

“She is, tonight. That doesn’t mean she will be an hour from now.” He gave me a peculiar stare. “I’m afraid you won’t get much sleep around here, Lieutenant.”

“You mean she prowls at night?”

“We never know when she’ll act up. That’s what makes it so difficult.”

I shrugged. “It won’t be the first time I’ve survived on catnaps. Ten years of being a cop, and you’re—” I didn’t finish it. It wasn’t important anyway. What was important was a furtive footfall over my head.

I looked up. The room above that end of the living-room was the bedchamber assigned to me. I got out of my chair and toed into the hall, stopped with one hand on the stair-rail.

It was dark up there. I shed my shoes and went up as quietly as was humanly possible. They were good stairs and they didn’t creak, which is something when a man weighs close to two hundred pounds.

The door of my room was closed. I’d closed it myself, before going down to dinner. I steadied myself outside it, listening for more of those furtive footfalls. I put a hand on the knob, turned it slowly and straight-armed the door open.

A voice in the darkness of the corridor, not ten feet from me, lifted me out of my socks by saying sweetly: “You don’t have to be
that
quiet, Lieutenant. He’s awake anyway.”

There she was, just her face and hands visible in the dark. I blinked at her, feeling like a ten-year-old caught in the act of swiping cookies. I fumbled the light on and she came toward me from the door of the youngster’s room, those too-red lips mocking me with a smile.

She was quite a girl in that snaky black negligee. Quite a girl.

“I thought he was crying,” she said, “but he isn’t. Just gurgling to himself.” The odor of her perfume hung like a mist in the hall as she glided by me. “Good night, Lieutenant.”

I closed my door. Maybe she had come down the hall to investigate sounds from the youngster’s room. The youngster’s room was not over the living-room though. I looked around.

There was nothing much she could have snooped through, except my suitcase. I’d unpacked a toothbrush, a few odds and ends and a clean shirt, nothing else. But the perfume gave her away.

Dumb of her, I thought. Even if I’d stayed downstairs until midnight, that heady smell would have-tipped me off. It was strongest near the bureau, but I hadn’t stored anything in the bureau yet. I pulled the drawers out. They were empty.

Just snooping, I figured. Just trying to get a line on me. I went downstairs again, put my shoes back on and walked into the living-room. Standish gave me a questioning stare.

“She was in my room,” I said, “prowling.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “I hope this isn’t going to be one of her nights, Lieutenant.”

“You think I ought to be up there, keeping a weather-eye open?”

“I don’t like the signs,” he said.

I said good-night to both of them and went upstairs. This time I left my door open, figuring that if Grace the Goofy took a notion to do any more prowling, she might hesitate before passing my doorway on her way to the stairs. That, at least, would restrict her range to the corridor.

I went to bed.

It was about one thirty by my watch when I heard the door open at her end of the hall. I had been dozing but not sleeping and with the house quiet as a tomb, the click of the door sounded like a pistol-shot. Then I heard footsteps.

S
he must be partially deaf, I told myself, or she would know that she was making a lot of noise. Her idea of stealth was to scuff along, stirring up little whispers with her feet. I slipped out of bed, toed over to the door and looked through the crack.

She stopped when she saw my door was open. Stopped and stared straight at me, and I wondered if she could see the whites of my eyes. Then she began to back up.

The footsteps receded. I heard the door of her room click shut. For about five minutes the house was a tomb again.

Then I heard a window open.

I crossed the room and opened my own window, making a lot less noise than she had—but then, windows are temperamental things, no two alike. A cold, steady breeze swept in off the Atlantic, toying with the curtains. A cloud thinned to let the moon through, and for a moment the house and grounds were touched with silver.

She threw a rope out of her window first. As it fell, it uncoiled like one of those rolls of colored paper you throw at New Year’s Eve parties. I heard it smack the ground. Then I saw a shapely leg emerge, and another. She slid down that rope like a born athlete, pedaling the wall with her feet.

At the bottom she hesitated, furtively looked around her but did not look up. Her hair streamed out in the wind and with a quick flip of her hand she snapped it out of her eyes.

Then she prowled across the lawn.

There was a bird-house over near the high stone wall that bordered Standish’s property—a cute little replica of the house itself, set on a pyramid of metal balls. That was her destination. From the folds of her negligee, she whipped out an envelope, or something that looked like an envelope, and jabbed it into the birdies’ doorway. Then she ran back to the rope and went up it like a deepwater man climbing the shrouds of a windjammer.

Quite an athlete, that young lady! But not smart enough to glance even once at the window of my room and realize she was being watched.

The rope snaked up and out of sight, slap-slapping the side of the house as the wind played with it. She closed her window. The silence came back. I closed my window, drew on a pair of trousers over my pajamas and slipped into the hall.

I went downstairs and out, but the expanse of lawn between the house and the birdies’ domicile was too open for comfort. In a crouch I followed the outer face of the stone wall—then I waited a full ten minutes, plagued by the wind, for a cloud to smudge the moon.

When that happened, I went over the wall, snatched the envelope out of the bird-house and ducked back again.

That was quite a letter. With my door closed and the dim light over the bed turned on, I studied it and wondered which of us was crazy:

He is here, and there are three moons tonight. I sing your hated song in my sleep and the beat is one-two-one-two-four-two. Never mind Hamlet. Three mornings from tomorrow the crow will croak again, despite him and his soliloquy. Nothing happens till then. Be careful, all of you. He is no fool.

I ask you. I ask you twice—how could there be any sense to prattle like that?

I read the thing through at least a dozen times. I applied to it all I know about ciphers, trick codes and hieroglyphic acrobatics, which is considerable. I even culled from my memory the major portion of Hamlet’s soliloquy. And got nowhere.

There was one thing I could do, though, and I did it. With a clean sheet of paper and a fountain-pen I sat down and wrote a letter of my own, aping the girl’s hand to the best of my ability. It read:

Meet me at the foot of the cliff, tomorrow midnight. Important.

This I sealed in the envelope—then I made another trip to the manor of our feathered friends and left it there for collection.

Someone
was supposed to call around for that letter, I figured. You don’t write mysterious missives and sneak them into bird-houses just for exercise, or to annoy the birdies.

So when I got back to my room I pulled a chair close to the window, parked myself and prepared to wait for development number two.