Farewell, My Lovely

30

Old Nosey poked her nose an inch outside the front door, sniffed carefully as if there might be an early violet blooming, looked up and down the street with a raking glance, and nodded her white head. Randall and I took our hats off. In that neighborhood that probably ranked you with Valentino. She seemed to remember me.

“Good morning, Mrs. Morrison,” I said. “Can we step inside a minute? This is Lieutenant Randall from Headquarters.”

“Land’s sakes, I’m all flustered. I got a big ironing to do,” she said.

“We won’t keep you a minute.”

She stood back from the door and we slipped past her into her hallway with the side piece from Mason City or wherever it was and from that into the neat living room with the lace curtains at the windows. A smell of ironing came from the back of the house. She shut the door between as carefully as if it was made of short pie crust.

She had a blue and white apron on this morning. Her eyes were just as sharp and her chin hadn’t grown any.

She parked herself about a foot from me and pushed her face forward and looked into my eyes.

“She didn’t get it.”

I looked wise. I nodded my head and looked at Randall and Randall nodded his head. He went to a window and looked at the side of Mrs. Florian’s house. He came back softly, holding his pork pie under his arm, debonair as a French count in a college play.

“She didn’t get it,” I said.

“Nope, she didn’t. Saturday was the first. April Fool’s Day. He! He!” She stopped and was about to wipe her eyes with her apron when she remembered it was a rubber apron. That soured her a little. Her mouth got the pruny look.

“When the mailman come by and he didn’t go up her walk she ran out and called to him. He shook his head and went on. She went back in. She slammed the door so hard I figured a window’d break. Like she was mad.”

“I swan,” I said.

Old Nosey said to Randall sharply: “Let me see your badge, young man. This young man had a whiskey breath on him t’other day. I ain’t never rightly trusted him.”

Randall took a gold and blue enamel badge out of his pocket and showed it to her.

“Looks like real police all right,” she admitted. “Well, ain’t nothing happened over Sunday. She went out for liquor. Come back with two square bottles.”

“Gin,” I said. “That just gives you an idea. Nice folks don’t drink gin.”

“Nice folks don’t drink no liquor at all,” Old Nosey said pointedly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Come Monday, that being today, and the mailman went by again. This time she was really sore.”

“Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us — “

“This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.”

“He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.”

Her face turned a shade of violet that reminded me, unpleasantly, of cyanosis. “Get out of my house afore I call the police!” she shouted.

“There is a police officer standing before you, madam,” Randall said shortly. “You are in no danger.”

“That’s right there is,” she admitted. The violet tint began to fade from her face. “I don’t take to this man.”

“You have company, madam. Mrs. Florian didn’t get her registered letter today either — is that it?”

“No.” Her voice was sharp and short. Her eyes were furtive. She began to talk rapidly, too rapidly. “People was there last night. I didn’t even see them. Folks took me to the picture show. Just as we got back — no, just after they driven off — a car went away from next door. Fast without any lights. I didn’t see the number.”

She gave me a sharp sidelong look from her furtive eyes. I wondered why they were furtive. I wandered to the window and lifted the lace curtain. An official blue-gray uniform was nearing the house. The man wearing it wore a heavy leather bag over his shoulder and had a vizored cap.

I turned away from the window, grinning.

“You’re slipping,” I told her rudely. “You’ll be playing shortstop in a Class C league next year.”

“That’s not smart,” Randall said coldly.

“Take a look out of the window.”

He did and his face hardened. He stood quite still looking at Mrs. Morrison. He was waiting for something, a sound like nothing else on earth. It came in a moment.

It was the sound of something being pushed into the front door mail slot. It might have been a handbill, but it wasn’t. There were steps going back down the walk, then along the street, and Randall went to the window again. The mailman didn’t stop at Mrs. Florian’s house. He went on, his blue-gray back even and calm under the heavy leather pouch.

Randall turned his head and asked with deadly politeness: “How many mail deliveries a morning are there in this district, Mrs. Morrison?”

She tried to face it out. “Just the one,” she said sharply — “one mornings and one afternoons.”

Her eyes darted this way and that. The rabbit chin was trembling on the edge of something. Her hands clutched at the rubber frill that bordered the blue and white apron.

“The morning delivery just went by,” Randall said dreamily. “Registered mail comes by the regular mailman?”

“She always got it Special Delivery,” the old voice cracked.

“Oh. But on Saturday she ran out and spoke to the mailman when he didn’t stop at her house. And you said nothing about Special Delivery.”

It was nice to watch him working — on somebody else.

Her mouth opened wide and her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution. Then suddenly she made a squawking noise and threw the apron over her head and ran out of the room.

He watched the door through which she had gone. It was beyond the arch. He smiled. It was a rather tired smile.

“Neat, and not a bit gaudy,” I said. “Next time you play the tough part. I don’t like being rough with old ladies — even if they are lying gossips.”

He went on smiling. “Same old story.” He shrugged. “Police work. Phooey. She started with facts, as she knew facts. But they didn’t come fast enough or seem exciting enough. So she tried a little lily-gilding.”

He turned and we went out into the hall. A faint noise of sobbing came from the back of the house. For some patient man, long dead, that had been the weapon of final defeat, probably. To me it was just an old woman sobbing, but nothing to be pleased about.

We went quietly out of the house, shut the front door quietly and made sure that the screen door didn’t bang. Randall put his hat on and sighed. Then he shrugged, spreading his cool well-kept hands out far from his body. There was a thin sound of sobbing still audible, back in the house.

The mailman’s back was two houses down the street.

“Police work,” Randall said quietly, under his breath, and twisted his mouth.

We walked across the space to the next house. Mrs. Florian hadn’t even taken the wash in. It still jittered, stiff and yellowish on the wire line in the side yard. We went up on the steps and rang the bell. No answer. We knocked. No answer.

“It was unlocked last time,” I said.

He tried the door, carefully screening the movement with his body. It was locked this time. We went down off the porch and walked around the house on the side away from Old Nosey. The back porch had a hooked screen. Randall knocked on that. Nothing happened. He came back off the two almost paintless wooden steps and went along the disused and overgrown driveway and opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. There were a few battered old-fashioned trunks not worth breaking up for firewood. Rusted gardening tools, old cans, plenty of those, in cartons. On each side of the doors, in the angle of the wall a nice fat black widow spider sat in its casual untidy web. Randall picked up a piece of wood and killed them absently. He shut the garage up again, walked back along the weedy drive to the front and up the steps of the house on the other side from Old Nosey. Nobody answered his ring or knock.

He came back slowly, looking across the street over his shoulder.

“Back door’s easiest,” he said. “The old hen next door won’t do anything about it now. She’s done too much lying.”

He went up the two back steps and slide a knife blade neatly into the crack of the door and lifted the hook. That put us in the screen porch. It was full of cans and some of the cans were full of flies.

“Jesus, what a way to live!” he said.

The back door was easy. A five-cent skeleton key turned the lock. But there was a bolt.

“This jars me,” I said. “I guess she’s beat it. She wouldn’t lock up like this. She’s too sloppy.”

“Your hat’s older than mine,” Randall said. He looked at the glass panel in the back door. “Lend it to me to push the glass in. Or shall we do a neat job?”

“Kick it in. Who cares around here?”

“Here goes.”

He stepped back and lunged at the lock with his leg parallel to the floor. Something cracked idly and the door gave a few inches. We heaved it open and picked a piece of jagged cast metal off the linoleum and laid it politely on the woodstone drainboard, beside about nine empty gin bottles.

Flies buzzed against the closed windows of the kitchen. The place reeked. Randall stood in the middle of the floor, giving it the careful eye.

Then he walked softly through the swing door without touching it except low down with his toe and using that to push it far enough back so that it stayed open. The living room was much as I had remembered it. The radio was off.

“That’s a nice radio,” Randall said. “Cost money. If it’s paid for. Here’s something.”

He went down on one knee and looked along the carpet. Then he went to the side of the radio and moved a loose cord with his foot. The plug came into view. He bent and studied the knobs on the radio front.

“Yeah,” he said. “Smooth and rather large. Pretty smart, that. You don’t get prints on a light cord, do you?”

“Shove it in and see if it’s turned on.”

He reached around and shoved it into the plug in the baseboard. The light went on at once. We waited. The thing hummed for a while and then suddenly a heavy volume of sound began to pour out of the speaker. Randall jumped at the cord and yanked it loose again. The sound was snapped off sharp.

When he straightened his eyes were full of light.

We went swiftly into the bedroom. Mrs. Jessie Pierce Florian lay diagonally across the bed, in a rumpled cotton house dress, with her head close to one end of the footboard. The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked.

She had been dead long enough.

Randall didn’t touch her. He stared down at her for a long time and then looked at me with a wolfish baring of his teeth.

“Brains on her face,” he said. “That seems to be the theme song of this case. Only this was done with just a pair of hands. But Jesus what a pair of hands. Look at the neck bruises, the spacing of the finger marks.”

“You look at them,” I said. I turned away. “Poor old Nulty. It’s not just a shine killing any more.”