Something blue (14 page)

She had the robe oflE. She stepped, then, from Nan's bed

to the edge of her own. She put her knee on the bed. She said, "Good night."

"And Johnny's jealous, too!" Nan raged. "Both of you want to spoil things! Well, you won't—!"

Nan flew into the bathroom, sobbing.

Dorothy lay in the cold sheets' embrace.

In a Httle while, Nan came out of the bathroom, switched oflF the hght, got into her bed.

Dorothy said into the dark, "You can have my white dress, hon. Or anything else of mine. Except a He."

CHAPTER 15

Johnny Sims, unable to sleep, ordered himself to think.

Very well. Two jeweled pins. Call one Nathaniel's, because it had been given to Nathaniel's wife and he had it after her death. CaU the other one Christy's.

Take Nathaniel's first. Nathaniel gave it to Kate.

Did Johnny beheve this? Kate said so. Now, after seventeen years, old Mrs. Bartee also said so. And Dick said so. Blanche said so. Yes, Johnny believed it and had beHeved it when Kate Callahan first told him. He thought she was too soft, too tolerant and yielding to have told a hard He and stuck to it for seventeen years.

So Kate had Nathaniel's pin. But this was just exactly what the jury had not beHeved, seventeen years ago.

Did it make any difference to McCauley?

That depended. There were two alternative careers for Nathaniel's pin, after Kate got it. First, it had been loaned to McCauley and was innocently in McCauley's pocket, the night of the murder. If this were the truth, a big hunk of evidence against McCauley disappeajed. A difFerence was made. Who said this? Kate said it. McCauley said it.

But, second, Nathaniel's pin had been in Kate's drawer that night, (or, at least, two nights later.) Who said this? Dick said it. Blanche said it. If true, McCauley was guilty.

What began to worry Johnny was the thought that Kate could not be sure that it wasn't in her drawer. Even McCauley might not be sure. Suppose McCauley, in his cups that night, having the pin in his pocket, intending to return it, had actually slipped it into Kate's drawer. Suppose he had wiped out the memory, an impression already fogged by alcohol, and built up his martyr role on this forgetting? (He must also have forgotten that he opened the safe, took Christy's pin, quarreled with her, hit her. But all this was psychologically possible.)

So, which alternative career of Nathaniel's pin did Johnny believe?

His mind veered. He tried to imagine the scene between a weak frightened man and his bold rough-and-tough fifteen-year-old son. The man begged the boy to save him from banishment? Or did the bold son offer to go steal back a pin, partly for the hell of it? Whose idea was this housebreaking? Nathaniel was dead and could not say, and was a liar, anyhow.

Johnny could not help wondering whether the bold son was craftier than Nathaniel could have known. To take with him a scared young girl, and involve her in doing what was forbidden, doing what was illegal, and fearfully exciting, and done in the^ght and in the dark.

Why did Dick take Blanche at all? Johnny started up from tie mattress. Unless it were for the purpose of fooling her in the dark! So easy to do!

Again, there was a choice of what to believe about this Dick Bartee. Believe a tangle of craft and deceit, deep plotting, improvisation at that, a quick snatching at opportunity. Or, beheve something much simpler—just a wild kid who didn't see why a spot of burglary wouldn't be fun, in a good cause.

(Take care, J. Sims, which way your own prejudice and your desire is going to point you.)

He tossed. Try the other pin, then. Christy's pin. It had been in the safe. Agreed. Taken out at the time of the killing. Agreed. By whom?

If by McCauley, then McCauley put it in his pocket where the police found it. Simple. Believable. And believed for seventeen years.

But if by Dick, then Dick not only took it away with him

but had had the incredible nerve to keep it handy. Then, in a day or so, Dick had seen the wonderful opportunity to get rid of it and in so doing, 'prove' his own innocence, with Blanche for witness, and also frame McCauley—in depth and in secret. For protection. The protection of whom? Of Dick Bartee.

Doubt. Johnny could not help doubt. On both sides. What nerveless crust to keep that pin handy I

Johnny didn't know who had killed Christy.

In their big front bedroom, Blanche and Bart were not asleep, either. They faced each other in anger.

''You are a grown man," she said, "and honest. Maybe you can't miderstand a child who was afraid and wasn't altogether honest. Although it made no difference!"

"If he fooled you—"

''How could he fool me? You are the one he fools," Blanche said, "right now. How is it that you permit your mother to give Dick her bit of stock in the vineyard? How is it you permit Dick to put up Nan's capital and come out with half of your rightful business? Where you've put your life. That's just your pridel" she cried furiously. "Your mother would Like it."

Bart tightened his lips.

"And you fooled me," she cried with no restraint. "I thought I was going to be your partner. I thought this was going to be my house. I am not your partner but your servant. And this is your mother's house. All right, I understand. I know she is old and it was her house and you didn't want to dethrone her. Because of your pride, Bait. She never preferred you. So you proudly will defer to her. It's coals of fire."

"Be quiet," he ordered.

"I could have waited," Blanche sobbed, beyond obedience. "I was waiting. I thought it was generous of me. But now, you've given my share, here, to your mother all these years. If you now give your share to Dick Bartee, Bart, I won't stay—"

"Be quiet," Bart said and it was not a command. "Please, Blanche," he begged her. "I am committed. I can't help it, nowl If Sims can ever prove—" Bart said. "I must be careful. It's too easy to believe what you'd hke to believe."

106

She was quiet and in a moment he said painfully, "My mother hasn't been generous towaid you."

"No," Blanche said.

"Nor have I," he said. "But I want you to stay. This is your house."

Johnny woke late to the ringing of his phone.

Bart Bartee was calling him. He was taking the girls on a tour of the winery this morning. Would Johimy like to join them? For color? For atmosphere?

Johnny sensed something changed in Bart. He accepted.

It was nearly eleven o'clock, before the tour shook itself together and began. Johnny, the two girls and Dick, Bart led to the spot where the wine-making process normally began. (All of them were passive under Bart's guidance as if, by sheer fatigue, hostilities were in abeyance.) The grapes were harvested, Bart explained, in the fall. Trucks brought them in and dumped them upon a water-washed sunken platform, from which they were sluiced into a slot and conveyed to the crushing machine.

The machines were silent now. Bart did not linger here. Johnny received the impression that here was one place where money was needed.

They followed the pipes through which the juice of the grapes would nm and came into the building where, in huge imcovered vats, it was left to ferment. They were shown the sumps in the floor, filled with cooling apparatus, used Bart said, to control the fermentation, especially in the making of sweet wines. Johnny 'learned about the natural yeast on the grape, the killing of it, the substitution of the vintner's own strain.

Bart knew what he was talking about.

Nan was being brightly attentive. This was her future. Dorothy was relishing the sights and smells. It was Dorothy who perceived the nature of this business. "The grapes do it by themselves," she exclaimed.

Bart smiled. "Nature, given conditions that are just so, makes a fine wine," he told them. "If the conditions are not just so, nature makes a fine vinegar. We watch. We test. We try to control. Sometimes we alter the timing. But you are right. Miss Dorothy. The grapes really do it themselves. Now, here is one of our storage or aging cellars."

He led them into a building, not a cellar in any sense of being below the surface of the ground. It was a room filled, packed, with huge redwood tanks that were nothing in the world but mammoth barrels.

Sudden pygmies, Johnny and the girls looked about them. Each tank held something hke 20,000 gallons. A tank was made of staves—staves that were almost 3 inches thick. It was hooped with metal hoops. These monsters stood in the dimness they created, haunch to haunch, and all around them rose the acid-tinged smell of the wine.

Bart began to point out the two valves at the bottom of each tank, to explain how the wine was pumped in, pumped out. Portable pumps were used, he said.

In each huge curving side, low down, there was an oval—marked by a seam, a possible crack—to the center of which oval a handle seemed attached. The oval looked to be no more than 14 or 15 inches at its widest. When Bart explained that after a tank had been emptied, and its inside needed cleaning, this oval piece could be removed to admit a hving man, the girls murmured astonishment.

Bart found one of the big buxom barrels even then being pumped out. He promised them that, in a few minutes, they would see for themselves how the oval was tapped with a rubber mallet, pushed inward, and then removed.

At the other end of the place, a steep flight of wooden steps went up to a catwalk. Bart said there were bungs above, which must be removed when tlie wine was being drawn out at the bottom, lest the top of the tank be sucked inward. The girls followed him up the steps. Dick and Johnny climbed behind.

From above the sight was very strange. The walks had handrails, but one could see straight down into the dizzy depths of the narrow spaces, between the barrels, to the distant floor. Bart leaned upon the rail, talking, talking.

Johnny found it all mildly interesting. But not especially colorful. The old romantic image of laughing peasants with their bare empurpled feet faded reluctantly from the furniture of his mind.

Johnny began to think about other things. Bart had the girls' attention. Johnny said to Dick, "Did Nathaniel Baitee have much to do with the business?"

"My father?" Dick looked sideways. "He painted."

"Did he sell his paintings?''

Dick said amiably, "Not many. Why?"

Johnny answered only with a shrug. He walked away from the group, along the narrow boards, gazing absent-mindedly downward. He saw a man come into the building. He recognized Blanche's father, the lawyer, Marshall.

Marshall spoke to the worker at the tank. Bart saw him and called down.

"No hurry, Bart," Marshall called back. "I'll wait."

Bart turned back to his audience. "A European,'' he was saying, "doesn't miud lees in the bottle. He knows they signify age, which is good. But Americans want a wine that is perfectly clear. So we have what we call a polishing filter."

Johnny, hands in his pockets, strolled farther, gazing down. The workman was moving away. He had, indeed, opened that oval place. Marshall stood waiting, looking cmiously about him. Johnny could see, on the top of his head, where the hair thinned.

Dick Bartee came up behind Johnny. "What was in your mind," Dick asked softly, "about my father?"

Johnny didn't look at him. "Oh, that safe. The money. I understand you knew how to open the safe?"

"The combiotttion wasn't much of a secret within the family," Dick answered, rather casually.

"I understand your grandfather didn't always count his money?"

"He had a kind of petty cash. Where do you pick up this stuff?" Dick was friendly, easy.

Johnny was straining to see back seventeen years. He could see Dick, in the school, getting out for no better reason than that his rooDimate had gone out. Dick, needing cash. Could enter the house. Could open the safe. Christy, awake, perhaps on accoimt of her baby, hearing something. Christy downstairs, to protest. To threaten to call the old man. Dick angry. And one blow vdth a candlestick. Then, what?

What about the pin? Had it fallen, having been somehow on top of things? Had Dick put it in his pocket? Then, fading silently away from crime and punishment, forgotten he had it?

Then, when Nathaniel's pin had miraculously put Mc-

Cauley on the spot, Dick keeping thankfully still. And using Christy's pin . . .

Johnny said aloud, "You stole from Kate, you admit. It came natural, did it? I have one question. Why the devil did you keep Christy's pin? How could you have known you could use it later?"

Dick didn't reply. His face looked hard.

Johnny paid vague attention to Marshall below, who now crouched to peer curiously into the egg-shaped hole in the side of the great cask. It would be black dark inside. Mr. Marshall took a packet of matches from his pocket. Johnny, his mind misty with imagining the past, yet knew that Dick Bartee stiffened, and did so too late for this to have been a reaction to Johnny's question. Dick Bartee had both hands on tlie rail and they tightened.

It was Bart who shouted from the far end of the walk. "Drop it! Marshall! Don't light that match!"

"What?" Marshall looked up.

"Drop it!" Bart shouted.

"O.K., O.K." the lawyer said in the huff of the startled who had meant no harm.

Johnny watched Dick Bartee's hands relax.

Bart raced towards them, leaned and spoke down. "Why do you think we put up No Smoking signs?" he barked. "That tank has just been emptied. It's full of fumes. You could blow the top off!"

"Say, I . . ."

Johrmy turned his head slowly and looked at Dick.

"Close," said Dick sighing.

"Blow the top off?" said Johnny in a sUghtly high voice.

"You'd have had it, Sims," said Bart. "You see that, Dick?"

Dick said, "We'd both have had.it! Whew!"

"Come along," barked Bart, "and get on wdth this tour. 'Whew' is right!"

"I'm sorry," Marshall said below. "I didn't know . . ."

"No harm," said Bart. "Just close."

Johnny looked at Dick Bartee. "Wasn't it?" he said, with satisfaction. Because he knew! %.

Marshall sitting in Bart's office a little later said, "Say, I nearly goofed with that match, eh? I guess it would have been serious?"