Some Buried Caesar

Chapter 6

At eleven o’clock Tuesday morning I stood working on a bottle of milk which I had brought in from a dairy booth, one of hundreds lining the enormous rotunda of the main exhibits building at the Crowfield exposition grounds, and watching Nero Wolfe being gracious to an enemy. I was good and weary. On account of the arrival of the officers of the law at Pratt’s around midnight, and their subsequent antics, I hadn’t got to bed until after two. Wolfe had growled me out again before seven. Pratt and Caroline had been with us at breakfast, but not Lily Rowan or Jimmy. Pratt, looking as if he hadn’t slept at all, reported that McMillan had insisted on guarding the bull the remainder of the night and was now upstairs in bed. Jimmy had gone to Crowfield with a list of names which probably wasn’t complete, to send telegrams cancelling the invitations to the barbecue. It seemed likely that Hickory Caesar Grindon’s carcass would never inspire a rustic festivity, but his destiny was uncertain. All that had been decided about him was that he wouldn’t be eaten on Thursday. He had been convicted by the sheriff and the state police, who had found lying in the pasture, near the spot where Clyde Osgood had died, a tie-rope with a snap at one end, which had been identified as the one which had been left hanging on the fence. Even that had not satisfied Frederick Osgood, but it had satisfied the police, and they had dismissed Osgood’s suspicions as vague, unsupported, and imaginary. When, back upstairs packing, I had asked Wolfe if he was satisfied too, he had grunted and said, “I told you last night that Mr. Osgood was not killed by the bull. My infernal curiosity led me to discover that much, and the weapon that was used, but I refuse to let the minor details of the problem take possession of my mind, so we won’t discuss it.”

“You might just mention who did it -”

“Please, Archie.”

I put it away with moth balls and went on with the luggage. We were decamping for a Crowfield hotel. The contract for bull-nursing was cancelled, and though Pratt mumbled something about our staying on to be polite, the atmosphere of the house said go. So the packing, and lugging to the car, and spraying the orchids and getting them on board too, and the drive to Crowfield with Caroline as chauffeur, and the fight for a hotel room which was a pippin - I mean the fight, not the room - and getting both Wolfe and the crates out to the exposition grounds and finding our space and getting the plants from the crates without injury… It was in fact quite a morning.

Now, at eleven o’clock, I was providing for replacement of my incinerated tissue by filling up with milk. The orchids had been sprayed and straightened and manicured and were on the display benches in the space which had been allotted to us. The above-mentioned enemy that Wolfe was being gracious to was a short fat person in a dirty unpressed mohair suit with keen little black eyes and two chins, by name Charles E. Shanks. I watched them and listened to them as I sipped the milk, because it was instructive. Shanks knew that the reason Wolfe had busted precedent and come to Crowfield to exhibit albinos which he had got by three new crosses with Paphiopedilum lawrenceanum hyeanum was to get an award over one Shanks had produced by crossing P. callosum sanderae with a new species from Burma; that Wolfe desired and intended to make a monkey of Shanks because Shanks had fought shy of the metropolitan show and had also twice refused Wolfe’s offers to trade albinos; and that one good look at the entries in direct comparison made it practically certain that the judges’ decision would render Shanks not only a monkey but even a baboon. Furthermore, Wolfe knew that Shanks knew that they both knew; but hearing them gabbing away you might have thought that when a floriculturist wipes his brow it is to remove not sweat but his excess of brotherly love; which is why, knowing the stage of vindictiveness Wolfe had had to arrive at before he decided on that trip, I say it was instructive to listen to them.

I had been subjected to a few minor vexations in connection with the pasture affair. During the battle for a room at the hotel I had been approached by a bright-eyed boy with big ears and a notebook who grabbed me by the lapel and said he wanted, not only for the local Journal but also for the Associated Press, as lurid an account as possible of the carnage and gore. I traded him a few swift details for his help on the room problem. A couple of other news retrievers, in town to cover the exposition I suppose, also came sniffing around; and while I had been helping Wolfe get the orchids primped up I had been accosted by a tall skinny guy in a pin-check suit, as young as me or younger, wearing a smile that I would recognize if I saw it in Siam - the smile of an elected person who expects to run again, or a novice in training to join the elected person class at the first opportunity. He looked around to make sure no spies were sneaking up on us at the moment, introduced himself as Mr. Whosis, Assistant District Attorney of Crowfield County, and told me at the bottom of his voice, shifting from the smile to Expression 9B, which is used when speaking of the death of a voter, that he would like to have my version of the unfortunate occurrence at the estate of Mr. Pratt the preceding evening.

Feeling pestered, I raised my voice instead of lowering it. “District Attorney, huh? Working up a charge of murder against the bull?”

That confused him, because he had to show that he appreciated my wit without sacrificing Expression 9B; also I attracted the attention of passers-by and a few of them stopped in the aisle to look at us. He did it pretty well. No, he said, not a charge of murder, nothing like that, not even against the bull; but certain inquiries had been made and it was felt desirable to supplement the reports of the sheriff and police by firsthand information so there could be no complaint of laxity…

I drew the picture for him without any retouching or painting out, and he asked a few fairly intelligent questions. When he had gone I told Wolfe about him, but Wolfe had orchids and Charles E. Shanks on his mind and showed no sign of comprehension. A little later Shanks himself appeared on the scene and that was when I went for the bottle of milk.

There was an ethical question troubling me which couldn’t be definitely settled until one o’clock. In view of what had happened at Pratt’s place I had no idea that Lily Rowan would show up for the lunch date, and if she didn’t what was the status of the two dollars Caroline had paid me? Anyhow, I had decided that if the fee wasn’t earned it wouldn’t be my fault, and luckily my intentions fitted in with Wolfe’s plans which he presently arranged, namely to have lunch with Shanks. I wouldn’t have eaten with them anyway, since I had heard enough about stored pollen and nutritive solutions and fungus inoculation for a while, so a little before one I left the main exhibits building and headed down the avenue to the right in the direction of the tent which covered the eatery operated by the ladies of the First Methodist Church. That struck me as an incongruous spot to pick for being undone by a predatory blonde, but she had said the food there was the best available at the exposition grounds, and Caroline’s reply to an inquiry during the morning ride to Crowfield had verified it, so I smothered my conscience and went ahead.

It was another fine day and the crowd was kicking up quite a dust. Banners, balloons, booby booths and bingo games were all doing a rushing business, not to mention hot dogs, orange drinks, popcorn, snake charmers, lucky wheels, shooting galleries, take a slam and win a ham, two-bit fountain pens and Madam Shasta who reads the future and will let you in on it for one thin dime. I passed a platform whereon stood a girl wearing a grin and a pure gold brassiere and a Fuller brush skirt eleven inches long, and beside her a hoarse guy in a black derby yelling that the mystic secret Dingaroola Dance would start inside the tent in eight minutes. Fifty people stood gazing up at her and listening to him, the men looking as if they might be willing to take one more crack at the mystic, and the women looking cool and contemptuous. I moseyed along. The crowd got thicker, that being the main avenue leading to the grandstand entrance. I got tripped up by a kid diving between my legs in an effort to resume contact with mamma, was glared at by a hefty milkmaid, not bad-looking, who got her toe caught under my shoe, wriggled away from the tip of a toy parasol which a sweet little girl kept digging into my ribs with, and finally left the worst of the happy throng behind and made it to the Methodist grub-tent, having passed by the Baptists with the snooty feeling of a man-about-town who is in the know.

Believe it or not, she was there, at a table against the canvas wall toward the rear. I pranced across the sawdust, concealing my amazement. Dressed in a light tan jersey thing, with a blue scarf and a little blue hat, among those hearty country folk she looked like an antelope in a herd of Guernseys. I sat down across the table from her and told her so. She yawned and said that what she had seen of antelopes’ legs made it seem necessary to return the compliment for repairs, and before I could arrange a comeback we were interrupted by a Methodist lady in white apron who wanted to know what we would have.

Lily Rowan said, “Two chicken fricassee with dumplings.”

“Wait a minute,” I protested. “It says there they have beef pot roast and veal -”

“No.” Lily was firm. “The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking and is still there. So I was told yesterday by Jimmy Pratt.”

The Methodist bustled off. Lily looked at me with a corner of her mouth curled up and remarked as if it didn’t matter much, “The chief reason I came was to see how surprised you would look when you found me here, and you don’t look surprised at all and you begin by telling me I have legs like an antelope.”

I shrugged. “Go ahead and nag. I admit I’m glad you came, because if you hadn’t I wouldn’t have known about the fricassee. Your harping on legs is childish. Your legs are unusually good and you know it and so do I. Legs are made to be walked with or looked at, not talked about, especially not in a Methodist stronghold. Are you a Catholic? What’s the difference between a Catholic and a river that runs uphill?”

She didn’t know and I told her, and we babbled on. The fricassee came, and the first bite, together with dumpling and gravy, made me marvel at the hellishness of Mrs. Miller’s disposition, to drive a man away from that. It gave me an idea, and a few minutes later, when I saw Wolfe and Charles E. Shanks enter the tent and get settled at a table on the other side, I excused myself and went over and told him about the fricassee, and he nodded gravely.

I was corralling the last of my rice when Lily asked me when I was going back to New York. I told her it depended on what time the orchids were judged on Wednesday; we would leave either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning.

“Of course,” she said, “we’ll see each other in New York.”

“Yeah?” I swallowed the rice. “What for?”

“Nothing in particular. Only I’m sure we’ll see each other, because if you weren’t curious about me you wouldn’t be so rude, and I was curious about you before I ever saw your face, when I saw you walking across that pasture. You have a distinctive way of walking. You move very… I don’t know…”

“Distinctive will do. Maybe you noticed I have a distinctive way of getting over a fence too, in case of a bull. Speaking of bulls, I understand the barbecue is off.”

“Yes.” She shivered a little. “Naturally. I’m thinking of leaving this afternoon. When I came away at noon there was a string of people gawking along the fence, there where your car had been… where we were last night. They would have crossed the pasture and swarmed all over the place if there hadn’t been a state trooper there.”

“With the bull in it?”

“The bull was at the far end. That what’s-his-name - McMillan - took him there and tied him up again.” She shivered. “I never saw anything like last night… I had to sit on the ground to keep from fainting. What were they asking questions for? Why did they ask if I was with you all the time? What did that have to do with him getting killed by the bull?”

“Oh, they always do that in cases of accidental death. Eye-witnesses. By the way, you won’t be leaving for New York today if they hold an inquest, only I don’t suppose they will. Did they ask if you had seen Clyde Osgood around there after dinner, before you went for your walk and ran onto me?”

“Yes. Of course I hadn’t. Why did they ask?”

“Search me.” I put sugar in my coffee and stirred. “Maybe they thought you had deprived him of all hope or something and he climbed into the pasture to commit suicide. All kinds of romantic ideas, those birds get. Did they ask if Clyde had come to Pratt’s place to see you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes lifted up at me and then dropped back to her coffee cup. “I didn’t understand that either. Why should they think he had come to see me?”

“Oh, possibly Clyde’s father sicked them on. I know when I mentioned your name to him last night and said you were there, he nearly popped open. I got the impression he had seen you once in a nightmare. Not that I think you belong in a nightmare, with your complexion and so on, but that was the impression I got.”

“He’s just a pain.” She shrugged indifferently. “He has no right to be talking about me. Anyway, not to you.” Her eyes moved up me and over me, up from my chest over my face to the top of my head, and then slowly traveled down again. “Not to you, Escamillo,” she said. I wanted to slap her, because her tone, and the look in her eyes going over me, made me feel like a potato she was peeling. She asked, “What did he say?”

“Not much.” I controlled myself. “Only his expression was suggestive. He spoke of wringing your neck. I gathered that you and his son Clyde had once been friends. I suppose he told the police and sheriff that, or maybe they knew it already, and that’s why they asked if Clyde came to see you last night.”

“Well, he didn’t. He would have been more apt to come to see Caroline than me.”

That was turning a new page for me, but I covered my surprise and inquired idly, “You mean Miss Pratt? Why, did they have dealings?”

“They used to have.” She opened the mirror of her compact to study nature with an eye to improvement. “I guess they were engaged, or about to be. Of course you don’t know about the Osgood-Pratt situation. The Osgoods have been rich for generations, they go back to a revolutionary general I think it was - their relatives in New York think the Social Register is vulgar. To me that’s all a bore… my mother was a waitress and my father was an immigrant and made his money building sewers.”

“Yet look at you. I heard Pratt say yesterday that he was born in an old shack on the spot where his new house stands.”

“Yes. His father worked as a stable hand for Osgood’s father. Clyde told me about it. A farmer had a beautiful daughter named Marcia and young Pratt got himself engaged to her and Frederick Osgood came back from college and saw her and married her. So she became Clyde Osgood’s mother, and Nancy’s. Pratt went to New York and soon began to make money. He didn’t marry, and as soon as he had time to spare he started to find ways to annoy Osgood. When he bought land up here and started to build, it looked as if the annoyance might become really serious.”

“And Clyde read up on family feuds and found that the best way to cure it would be for him to marry Pratt’s niece. A daughter is better in such cases, but a niece will do.”

“No, it wasn’t Clyde’s idea, it was his sister’s. Nancy’s.” Lily closed her compact. “She was staying in New York for the winter, studying rhythm at the best night clubs, and met Jimmy and Caroline, and thought it might be helpful for the four of them to know each other, and when Clyde came down for a visit she arranged it. It made a sort of a situation, and she and Jimmy got really friendly, and so did Clyde and Caroline. Then Clyde happened to get interested in me, and I guess that reacted on Nancy and Jimmy.”

“Did you and Clyde get engaged?”

“No.” She looked at me, and the corner of her mouth turned up, and I saw her breasts gently putting the weave of the jersey to more strain as she breathed a deep one. “No, Escamillo.” She peeled her potato again. “I don’t suppose I’ll marry. Because marriage is really nothing but an economic arrangement, and I’m lucky because I don’t have to let the economic part enter into it. The man would be lucky too - I mean if a man attracted me and I attracted him.”

“He sure would.” I was wondering which would be more satisfactory, to slap her and then kiss her, or to kiss her and then slap her. “Did Clyde attract you much?”

“He did for a while.” She shivered delicately. “You know how tiresome it is when someone you found exciting gets to be nothing but a nuisance? He wanted me to marry him, too. You mustn’t think I’m heartless, because I’m not. Caroline would have been a swell wife for him, and I told him so. I rather thought they would make it up, and I hoped they would, and that’s why I said he would have been more apt to come to see Caroline than me last night.”

“Maybe he did. Have you asked her?”

“Good lord no. Me ask Caroline anything about Clyde? I wouldn’t dare mention his name to her. She hates me.”

“She invited you up for the barbecue, didn’t she?”

“Yes, but that was because she was being clever. Her brother Jimmy and I were beginning to be friendly, and she thought if he saw me out here in the country, a lot of me, he would realize how superficial and unhealthy I am.”

“Oh. So you’re unhealthy?”

“Terribly.” The corner of her mouth went up another sixteenth of an inch. “Because I’m frank and simple. Because I never offer anything I don’t give, and I never give anything and then expect to get paid for it. I’m frightfully unhealthy. But I guess I was wrong to say superficial. I doubt if Caroline thinks I’m superficial.”

“Excuse me a minute,” I said, and stood up.

Even in the midst of being ruined I had had Wolfe’s table across the tent in the corner of my eye, partly to note his reaction to the fricassee, which had appeared to be satisfactory since he had ordered a second portion, and my interrupting my despoiler was on account of a sign from him. A man was standing by Wolfe’s chair talking to him, and Wolfe had glanced in my direction with a lift to his brow which I considered significant. So I excused myself to Lily and got up and ambled over. As I arrived the man turned his head and I saw it was Lew Bennett, the secretary of the National Guernsey League.

“Archie, I must thank you.” Wolfe put his napkin down. “For suggesting the fricassee. It is superb. Only female Americans can make good dumplings, and not many of them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have met Mr. Bennett.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you conveniently extricate yourself from that…” He turned a thumb in the direction I had come from.

“You mean right now?”

“As soon as may be. Now if you are not too involved. Mr. Bennett has been looking for me at the request of Mr. Osgood, who is waiting in the exposition office and wishes to see me. Mr. Shanks and I shall have finished our lunch in ten minutes.”

“Okay. I’m badly involved but I’ll manage it.”

I went back to my table and told Lily we must part, and summoned the Methodist to give me a check. The damage proved to be $1.60, and, having relinquished a pair of dimes for the missionaries, I reflected with pride that the firm had cleaned up 20 cents net on the deal.

Lily said in a tone of real disappointment without any petulance that I could detect, “I had supposed we would spend the afternoon together, watching the races and riding on the merry-go-round and throwing balls at things…”

“Not ever,” I said firmly. “Not the afternoon. Whatever the future may have in store for us, whatever may betide, I work afternoons. Understand once and for all that I am a workingman and I only play with toys at odd moments. I am working when you would least expect it. Throughout this delightful lunch with you, I have been working and earning money.”

“I suppose while you were paying me all those charming compliments one part of your brain, the most important part, was busy on some difficult problem.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Dear Escamillo. Darling Escamillo. But the afternoon comes to an end, doesn’t it? What will you be doing this evening?”

“God knows. I work for Nero Wolfe.”