The Sunlight Dialogues (8 page)

Miss Octave Woodworth, however, had not forgotten. She was morally outraged. They hadn’t so much as taken fingerprints, had even refused to take along the hammer which Miss Woodworth had left all this time on the enormous, carved walnut table and would not touch even now except with the handkerchief that had come down to her from her Great-Great-Aunt May, a Judd. She wanted an investigation.

Four o’clock. He stood gazing sullenly at the great stack of papers, sucking at the cigar with short quick puffs, hungrily, trying to get it going better than it could. He had time yet to get over to Stroh’s Flower Shop, for the Paxton flowers, and then to the Woodworth sisters’. Yet he hesitated. It irritated him that there was nothing he could tell them, no way he could honestly satisfy their demand for action, and it was only partly that they were the Woodworth sisters. No matter who it was that made the complaint, Clumly would have felt the same irritation at the box he was in.

We’d have gotten that burglar twenty years ago, he was saying to himself. It’s the times. What’s the world coming to? They had never considered, twenty years ago, the cost of catching a criminal—the man-hours involved in the investigation. A crime was committed, you went after the man. Just like that. Not now. “As near as we can estimate,” Mayor Mullen said, “every cop on your Force costs us nine dollars an hour. Nine dollars, Clumly. Think of it. That’s taking account of the overhead—buildings, cars, gadgets, the whole gambit—including salaries. So I put it to you: I want time-sheets, Clumly. And I don’t want you hiring a lot of office help to figure them. No sirree. I want a paying operation, and I want it now. Here. Put it this way. Say a merchant gets robbed at his store and he loses nine dollars. You know what that’s worth in Police Department time? One man for one hour. Period. Or two men for a half an hour. Case closed.” Mayor Mullen patted his stomach. It made sense, of course, like everything Clumly found disagreeable in the times. You couldn’t catch all of them anyway, might as well put your time where it meant good business. Nevertheless, it grated on him. He’d run a tight ship, in the old days. No figuring the odds, no punching a clock each time you started and stopped an investigation. A man could build up pride in his work. It was a service. Do ministers keep time-sheets, Mr. Mayor? Or schoolteachers? And doctors? But he hadn’t asked it. He had a suspicion they did.

And so (he brooded) he would visit the Woodworth sisters, soothe them with lies, invite them to visit the jail sometime and look at the thief they had locked up in another connection—Walter Boyle, if that was really his name—knowing all the time that it wasn’t Walter Boyle, he was no “wildman,” a smart old pro—and knowing too that the Woodworths couldn’t come down to the jail anyway, they never got out of the house any more: if the sun hit the Woodworth sisters they would shrivel up and disintegrate like corpses in a vacuum casket when you cracked the pane of glass.

The shiver of a hare-brained idea ran up Clumly’s back. Why not? he thought. The idea startled him, and he crossed quickly to the window and bent toward it to peer out, as if seeing if anyone had observed him thinking it. But the more he thought about it the clearer and simpler the plan seemed, however irregular. He’d have done it without a moment’s thought in the old days. He was Chief of Police, wasn’t he? Why not? It was four-fifteen.

Salvador handed the keys to him without even looking up from his paperwork. Miller was nowhere in sight. Clumly hurried down the hallway, glancing over his shoulder once or twice, to the cellblock. “You,” he said. “Up on your feet.” He unlocked the cell. The thief, Boyle, looked up at him over the top of the
Daily News
he was reading and, after a moment, stood up. He was short and fat, slightly humpbacked, still wearing the suit they’d arrested him in—brown trousers, black and gray suspenders, a dark tie of uncertain color. His suitcoat was neatly folded on his pallet.

“Get your coat,” Clumly said.

Boyle turned slowly, blinking his heavy-lidded eyes, and ran one hand over his thin, graying hair. He got into the coat, glanced furtively over at the others, and came out of the cell.

The bearded one grinned like a mule and closed his eyes. “God be with you.”

The thief, Walter Boyle, ignored him. He held out his hands for the handcuffs automatically, and Clumly snapped them on.

On the way to the street they passed no one but Salvador, still working on his papers, the radio chattering and spitting behind him. “I’ve got the prisoner with me,” Clumly said. “Checking an identification.”

Salvador glanced up, slightly surprised, then nodded. It was a new one, no doubt, but everything was new to Salvador and would be for a long time. He was slow.

But there was another complication, it came to Clumly as he was getting into the car. He looked up at the toy-castle towers of the police station, the gaping stone archway over the porch, the barred windows to the rear. He groped with the problem, scowling fiercely as he started up the engine, and at last he saw that he’d left himself no choice. He’d have to take Walter Boyle in with him when he stopped at Stroh’s for the flowers. Well, all right. He drove to Pearl Street and pulled up in front of the hydrant in front of the store.

It went off smoothly, as he’d known it would. Boyle was no troublemaker. Too slick for that. He got out docilely, walked docilely to the counter with Clumly, waited docilely while the flowers—white roses—were wrapped and boxed. They cost seven dollars, and Boyle held the box while Clumly got out his billfold. The lady behind the counter worked hastily for once, almost gave him an extra two dollars change. Through all this, Boyle said nothing, showed no surprise. Clumly felt grateful. Good man, he thought. What turned a man like Boyle to a life of crime?

At last Boyle said, speaking for the first time, “Where we going?”

“You’ll find out,” Clumly said. He was always stern, on principle, with prisoners. Let them learn you were human and you could end up dead in some ditch.

He turned off Washington Avenue onto Ross.

“Old Dr. Adams’ place,” Clumly said crisply, pointing to the right. It was a high brick house set back off the street, with round-arched windows, great heavy dentils along the roof overhang, latticework arbors on either side. A house of the type that was common once in Western New York and can still be seen here and there in the country—the Hodge place, for instance, out on Putnam Settlement Road—solid, unspeakably dignified with its great blunt planes of chalky orange brick, its Victorian porches, its cupola: the most beautiful architecture in the world, symbolic of virtues no longer to be found. On the wide, unmowed lawns there were tamaracks over a hundred years old, and at the end of the driveway a morose brick garage. The thief bent forward, looking back at it as they passed.

“Right there’s the Richmond Library,” Clumly said. He pointed, then clutched the wheel again, slowing and turning into Woodworks’.

“Ugly,” Boyle observed. “The library.”

Clumly scowled on principle, though it was true.

They waited on the porch for a full twenty minutes, Clumly fanning himself with his hat, Boyle standing meekly with his shackled hands folded. Maybe they’re dead, Clumly thought. But they weren’t, he knew. He could see nothing through the stained-glass strips at the sides of the door. The porch sloped badly, but someone had recently been working on it There were new balusters on the railing, and one end of the porch had been jacked up and leveled. The house next door had a black and white sign standing out from the porch roof:
SHADY REST.
There was no more hint of life over there than here. He mopped his forehead and thought again of the flowers lying in the front seat. They’d be even hotter in the car than here. Should he bring them in with him? But he should have thought of it sooner. Octave Woodworth might appear at the door any minute now, and if she found only Boyle there, standing alone, in handcuffs, who knew? It might give her a heart attack.

“I should have brought in those flowers,” Clumly said. “They’ll wilt out there.”

Boyle nodded.

He tried again to see through the stained glass, but it was useless. “Should have had them delivered,” he said.

Again Boyle nodded. He indicated with both shackled hands the heavy bronze knocker on the Woodworths’ door, a lion’s head holding a serpent in its teeth.

“They’ve heard us all right,” Clumly said. Abruptly, before he knew he would do it, he said, “Wait here, Boyle,” and hurried back to the car. He unlocked it as quickly as possible, snatched up the flowers, locked the door again, and hurried back onto the porch. “There now,” he said. He was out of breath. Boyle nodded. They went on waiting. Clumly holding the flower box under his arm.

At last they heard the raiding of the chains as someone unfastened the safety latches. The main lock clicked, and the big door opened inward. “Who is it?” Octave Woodworth whispered. Her face showed the ravages of time, he saw. She looked like an old, old potato from under a sink.

“I’m Chief of Police Clumly,” Clumly said. “I’ve brought along someone we thought you might be able to identify.”

“Come right in,” she whispered. “Come in.”

It was the darkest entryway in the world. The walls were nearly black with age, and the full-length mirrors on each side of the door, set in oak-leaved frames that four strong men could not have carried, reflected only the dull gleams, here and there, of darkly stained wood. Clumly’s figure and Boyle’s, in those antique mirrors, were like two barn owls with glittering eyes. The old woman was like a raven returned from the dead. The old woman backed away from them slowly, no more than a faint silhouette in that smoky darkness. “Come with me,” she whispered. She maneuvered a turn, joints creaking and clicking, and, moving tortuously on her two heavy canes, led them toward a gloomy ten-foot-high oak door that opened off the hallway to the left. “We expected you sooner,” she whispered. The house smelled abandoned, full of the vague scents in an old empty cupboard.

“I’m sorry,” Clumly said craftily. “It’s been a difficult case.”

In the parlor there was more light. They hadn’t yet turned the lamps on, if they still worked, but the arched window facing to the east drew enough sun from the mostly shaded lawn to raise a glitter on the silver vases that once had held flowers, and to glint on the dim prisms of the lamps, the highly polished walnut of the mantelpiece, the ornate legs of tables and chairs. There was no hint of color anywhere. The gilt framework and the ruby glass on the lamps, the yellow-brown of the oval family portraits, the once blue or red of the velvet cushions on the rickety chairs had all sunk to black or dark gray. While Clumly introduced his prisoner to Miss Octave, the prisoner stood meekly squinting at the clutter of old china and silver on the piano table.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Miss Octave whispered.

From the darkest corner of the room came a harsher whisper. “He’s not the one.”

Clumly steered his prisoner toward the voice. Miss Editha Woodworth sat propped up, motionless, under a huge lugubrious oil painting of—if Clumly’s eyes did not deceive him—broken columns on a hillside, or possibly horses. She sat wrapped in black blankets, among black pillows. On her head, slightly askew, sat an old black wig. Her face shone out of the darkness like a moon.

“Miss Editha,” he said. “I’m glad to see you well.”

“I’m not well,” she whispered. “That man is not the one.”

Clumly pursed his lips. The parlor was as cool as a valley between rocks, and after all his sweating he was chilly. “That’s too bad,” he said. “We were
afraid
we might have gotten the wrong man.”

“Nincompoops,” she whispered. “If Agnes were here—” (That was the oldest of the sisters, dead now for years, reduced to legend. She’d committed suicide, people said.)

“We do our best, Miss Woodworth,” Clumly said.

“What?” she asked.

He realized he had fallen into whispering like one of themselves. “We do our best,” he said.

She said nothing more, utterly spent, it seemed. Perhaps she had fallen asleep. He couldn’t tell.

To everyone’s surprise, Boyle spoke. “You’re Miss Editha Woodworth?” he asked. “You write poems?”

“Why glory be!” Miss Octave whispered. “You’re acquainted with Editha’s verse?”

Boyle glanced uneasily at Clumly. “I’ve heard it mentioned,” he said. Then his face became blank. “That is,” he said, “no.”

“How interesting!” Miss Octave whispered.

“She’s a poet, all right,” Clumly said, bothered by the way Boyle seemed now to have withdrawn, aloof from their awkward little ring of conversation.

“A legislator for humanity,” Miss Octave said happily, a little like a tyrant. She tried to pursue the matter with Boyle, but it was useless. At last she said, “Well do sit down. It’s so seldom we get visitors here.” She inched over to a chair herself and lowered herself cautiously, then laid the two canes in her lap. Clumly nodded toward the settee and handed Boyle the flower box, to be rid of the embarrassment of carrying it himself. Boyle went over to the settee while Clumly seated himself tentatively on a high-backed rocker. It must be after five, he thought, but he could not risk the rudeness of a glance at his watch. The rocker was leather, as cold and smooth as the dirt inside a cave.

“We used to have visitors,” Miss Octave said. “But the new Baptist minister doesn’t make calls, you know. Isn’t it criminal?” She dabbed at the side of her mouth with a Kleenex.

“What’s this country coming to?” Clumly said.

“That’s just what I tell Editha,” she said. “Poor old Mrs. Maxwell has arthritis so bad she can never leave her bed. Mine’s only in my fingers, you know, though it’s torment enough.” She held out her hands to him. The index fingers were like knotty pieces of wood, and the hands shook. She pressed on, though the hoarse croaking was such an effort it made her eyes bulge. “Well someone said to the minister he ought to go see her, and he went over and she said, ‘Pastor, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.’ ‘Well don’t expect to see me again,’ he says, ‘I don’t make calls.’ Now what do you think of that! He’s on the City Planning Commission or whatever they call it. That’s all he cares about, don’t you know. He’s got them to put up one of those highrise apartments—horrible!—and all that urban renewal, tearing down beautiful old buildings like the Jefferson Hotel, where President Cleveland stayed, and making everything into parking lots and I don’t know what. Now he’s got the congregation to agree to tearing down half of that beautiful old church of ours, going to put up an education building with a cloistered walk leading out from the church—we saw the pictures, didn’t we Editha?—flimsy little thing, it makes you sick at heart! Three hundred and seventy thousand dollars it will cost, a thousand dollars from every member of the congregation! Well they won’t be getting any thousand dollars from the Woodworths, we told them—I’ve got cataracts, don’t you know, and I don’t need to tell you how expensive that is.”