Trouble in Rooster Paradise (4 page)

We glided through the pantry and dining room
and hopped, stepped, and tiptoed past Mrs. Berger’s bedroom door.
We were lucky. It was shut and she didn’t stir—telltale signs she’d
dosed herself with sleeping powder.

Light broke through the window at the bottom of
the stairs, accenting my landlady’s shrine to her bump and grind
days. A display case of mahogany was mounted on the wall. It
contained her prized fans, manufactured by the famous theatrical
costumer Lawrence Sittenberg of New York City. They were made from
tail feathers wrenched from ostriches in Capetown, South Africa,
then tinted and attached to celluloid handles. Alongside the case
hung three framed photos linked like comic-strip panels. Each
showed a younger Mrs. Berger working her fans in different stages
of her act—billiard ball naked, save for rouge, high-heeled
slippers and a G-string that was more thread than string. If she
caught you looking at her pictures—which you couldn’t help but do
when mounting those stairs—she’d holler over something like, “Sally
Rand was a piker next to me, am I right? If my Otto hadn’t taken me
from the life, I’d have been the big name,” or, “I kept them
spellbound and comin’ back for more. Such verve and flourish I had.
Those were good times. Good times.”

We were still chewing our Nightmare Drops when
we reached the top of the stairs.

“
I’m afraid Nora’s cookies deserve
their sobriquet. I’ll make us some coffee to wash them down, old
top,” Walter said in a whisper. “We’ll chat. Plus, the first of the
Napoleonics arrived. You’ll have to see them.”

I was easily persuaded. I needed more than
burnt sweet bread to neutralize the images of a dead
Christine.

Along one wall of Walter’s room was his
workbench—a wooden table, bar-high, three feet deep and ten feet
wide. As a whole, the counter was unstained, but the area where he
worked was peppered with dry paint droppings of every color. In the
center crowding the wall were paint pots and worn brushes bunched
in jars like mutant nosegays in small vases. In the far right
corner sat a hot plate, an electric percolator, a can of Hills
Brothers Coffee, a receptacle of Lipton’s Tea bags, and a box of
Ry-Krisp.

“
Roughage is a must, Gunnar,” Walter
liked to say. “It’s the key to the body’s survival.”

The man didn’t know how right he was. His
Remington typewriter was next to the Ry-Krisp, nestled up against a
stack of paper anchored with an old railroad spike. That stack was
Walter’s labor of love. He was helping the unlearned Mrs. Berger
write a play she called
The Making of a Fan Dancer.
Walter
struggled mightily to give it a philosophic twist. He wanted to
rename it
The Gymnosophist
, but Mrs. Berger wasn’t buying
it.

Near his work stool, probably fifty lead
soldiers on horseback stood on the bench in military columns. Each
horseman’s torso had been painted crimson, and a few of the horses
were already white, black, or brown.

“
British Heavy Dragoons,” he said
happily, handing me one. “This allotment came special delivery this
afternoon.”

I hefted it and studied the detail of the
dragoon’s drawn saber, pointed forward as if in a charge. After
Walter got done with them you’d see the whites of their
eyes.

“
What’s their destination?” I
asked.

“
A wealthy collector in Rhode
Island. He’s putting together a Waterloo diorama. It’s the kind of
order Perry salivates over. He intends for me to paint the whole
lot for him. Consistency of style. That kind of thing.”

Raymond Perry headed a family-run
soldier-making business out of his home in Springfield,
Massachusetts. He home-cast with lead, pewter, and rubber. Walter
had worked on Civil War figurines the month previous, and had told
me he was looking forward to his next assignment—toy soldiers from
the Napoleonic era. I’d forgotten all about it.

“
But Gunnar, here you stand all weak
and weary, indulging an old friend’s passion. Let me get that
coffee going.” Only the left side of his mouth lifted when he
grinned. He pointed me to his channel-backed fireside chair, sans
fireplace. He pulled the stool up closer for himself.

As Walter busied himself, he explained more
about his latest assignment—the new paints he’d need, the research
on the uniforms he’d be doing, the completion date he’d be shooting
for.

“
It’s a classic testimony to vanity,
Gunnar, that the whims and idiosyncrasies of a regimental colonel
often dictated the colors and patterns worn by an entire
regiment—”

Walter had probably been quiet and reclusive
long before his disfigurement. He futilely insisted he was of the
bourgeoisie, but I pictured him in some upper-class Philadelphia
playground, contentedly playing chess with his governess but
graciously admitting anyone else who cared to play. The continuous
gleam in his eyes went with a gift of making you feel his serenity.
Likely it was due to the real interest he showed in people—their
loves, hates, wants, needs, fears, and bugaboos. He rarely ventured
out in daytime. But I joined him on nocturnal excursions and many
times saw him console a lovelorn waitress, buck up a burly barge
worker, and play shrink to a barkeep.

“… 
armies were costumed as if
for a play. The Peninsular Wars were really a lethal grand
pageantry ….”

As the third Pangborn to attend Princeton,
Walter absorbed its Gothic charms alongside a ripening F. Scott
Fitzgerald. In Walter’s junior year he infuriated his father, “The
Judge,” by rushing off to smash the Kaiser in World War One. He
became a private in a Pennsylvania company. He fought in the
Argonne and was badly burned when a fuel wagon he stood next to was
shelled. He learned later that that very day his estranged father
died of a heart attack.

“
What do you make of it, Walter?” I
asked as he got the percolator going. “What we saw tonight, I mean.
My story about the girl.”

Walter plopped gently on the work stool and
said, “You realize, old socks, it’s our respective perversities
that take us down these roads.”

“
Sure. But we don’t go screaming.
And we like the scenery.”

“
Addicted to it, I fear.”

After the war, Walter lived in a veterans’
hospital in the Bronx—abandoned by his sole sibling, a grasping
older sister who had power of attorney for their invalid mother.
Walter was shut away in the kind of convalescent ward the public
never sees, and he shared existence with men with no jaws, eyes, or
ears. As he put it, “Each of us is in a valiant struggle to keep
from going off his nut.” After the big wars, society only saw the
occasional man on crutches. Wouldn’t want them to get the right
idea, don’t you know.

Walter’s father had arranged a trust fund for
him in his will. When this finally went into effect on his
twenty-fifth birthday, it was the salvation of Walter’s independent
nature. Forsaking his blue-blood ties, he drifted out West and
lived off an allowance that more than met his needs. Painting lead
soldiers provided a supplemental income and occupied some of his
time during the day. This, and the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that
took up another wall of his room, played a big part in centering
him.

“
So what’s the Walter Pangborn
construct for what you saw and for the facts I fed to the
cops?”

Walter had the fingers of his right hand to his
chin, and cradled his elbow with his left hand. It was a definite
Walterism. When he did that he’d knead his chin and look up and off
to one side.

“
Miss Johanson knew her pursuer,”
Walter said. “He didn’t drive erratically, yet she suggested that
he was drunk. She didn’t want you to stop the car and confront
him.”

“
Yeah. I figured it was a
cock-and-bull story,” I said.

“
That phrase has a quaint origin,
Gunnar. It comes from the renowned Aesop’s stories of moralizing
cocks and disputatious bulls. For that reason ….”

I raised a goading eyebrow.

“
Yes … sorry.” He cleared his
throat. “Of course, it was no coincidence that Miss Johanson sat so
close to you in the movie house. She made you in the lobby as a man
she could use, possibly lean on if there was trouble.”

“
I thought the same thing. I was to
be her Galahad if her shadow-man entered the theater.”

“
Precisely, though not likely as
gallant a role as you imagine. More like scraps to be thrown to her
pursuing hound. Since the hound didn’t enter the movie house, she
could afford to be rude to you after the movie ended. But she
miscalculated. My guess is that she saw the hound again when she
stepped outside, and
that
is what accounts for her accosting
you with her coy amends.”

“
Aw, Walter, you mean it wasn’t my
boyish charm?”

He laughed quietly. “You’ve still got appeal,
old thing—so not to worry. No, the girl probably assumed you were
just another lascivious chump she could manipulate.”

“
I’ll take that as a backhanded
compliment, Walter.”

“
By all means, Gunnar, you do that.
Get them when you can. That’s the way.”

Walter could easily hide the hideous marks on
his chest and right arm, but the ugly scars on his right cheek and
throat, as well as his deformed right ear, gave him the profile of
a vermilion monster. But he was a gentle beast. I never saw his
injuries once I got to know him. In fact, I don’t think anyone
continued to see them once they truly began to experience his
caring genius. Over the years he civilized an after-dark world of
friends who wound up forgiving the repulsive, and seeing beauty in
the grotesque.

“
You say Miss Johanson was
noticeably relieved to find you weren’t a policeman?” Walter
asked.

“
Palpably relieved.”

He stood up to get our coffee then resumed his
perch. Walter reached under his workbench for a bottle of Black
& White. It was his Scotch of choice, the one that featured a
picture of black and white Scotty dogs on the back of each bottle.
He held it up and gave me an inquiring look. My grin gave approval
for him to dose my cup. He then gave his own coffee a healthy
glug.

“
Hmm, let’s think on this, Gunnar.
Miss Johanson spoke of costly dreams, had some money salted away,
and was not attired like the common shop girl. Yet she lived in a
working class neighborhood. In her case then, I’d say that her use
of distaff allurements—while not an evil thing in itself, you
understand—may suggest something shady, even sinister.”

I agreed.

“
She lived with her aunt, so she was
not a kept woman. However, with the kind of beauty that transcends
class distinction, she might well have had a wealthy
suitor.”

“
I’m thinking that too. Yet she led
me to believe she was leaving the Northwest soon.”

“
Ah, yes. Park Avenue.”

“
So what do you make of the Packard,
Walter?”

“
Well, given what has befallen Miss
Johanson, I’m inclined to share Detective Milland’s view that you’d
not successfully lost the pursuing hound after all.”

“
Maybe she was in an affair gone
bad. Her pursuer a spurned suitor.”

“
Perhaps. But if he were Miss
Johanson’s suitor, then he’d have known where she lived, and your
efforts at losing him would have been a meaningless gesture. If so,
she might simply have been trying to get rid of him for the
evening. Possibly they’d just had a bad break-up.”

“
Something doesn’t sound right,” I
said.

“
I agree. But one thing is certain,
whoever the hound is, tonight he turned vicious.”

“
And then he took her money and
identification to make it look like robbery.”

“
Precisely. An old ruse. But
shooting her near a dark alley sounds premeditated. Crimes of
passion are generally more
spontaneous—spur-of-the-moment.”

“
Yeah. More likely, a spurned lover
would have conked her on the head with a fire poker or strangled
her with his bare hands.”

Walter nodded and took a sip from his
cup.

We sat in silence a few seconds. I heard
raindrops hit the roof. A wry smile appeared on the left side of
Walter’s face.

“
What is it, Walter?”

“
Oh, it’s just that conceivably our
speculations merely show that we’re striking back at the
encroachments of a humdrum existence.”

“
Life at Mrs. Berger’s,
humdrum
? Walter, you shock me.”

The raindrops now sounded like thimbles hitting
the shingles. Walter got up to shut his window.

“
Still Gunnar, perhaps we’re making
an Oriental tapestry out of a warp and woof throw rug. After all,
there is the real possibility that Miss Johanson was simply robbed
and this exercise has been nothing more than a grisly parlor game
that hasn’t been worth the candle.”

Grisly? Yes.

Parlor game? Not hardly.

B
efore Pearl Harbor I worked
for a big detective agency in Seattle. After my discharge from the
army I spent over a year furthering my education by means of the
G.I. Bill. I toyed with becoming the teacher my grandfather had
hoped I’d become. However, the temperament to learn but not teach
led me back into detective work in the spring of ’48—this time as a
one-man show.