Turn on the Heat

Chapter Fifteen

It was all more or less routine to the coroner. He had some witnesses who identified the body as that of Flo Danzer, the night-club hostess, but I explained to him that that was a name taken by Aunt Amelia after she’d left John Wilmen. I put the whole history together for him. She’d left Oakview as Mrs. Lintig, had taken her maiden name of Amelia Sellar, had secured a Mexican divorce, had married John Wilmen, had left John Wilmen, taken the name of Flo Danzer, and more recently had gone back to using the name, Amelia Lintig. I told him about her trip to Oakview, and the clerk and the porter at the hotel, whose expenses to the city had been donated by the agency, identified the body absolutely.

After the autopsy, they turned the body over to me. I went with it to Oakview for interment. Quite a few people turned out for the funeral. That wasn’t so good. I explained that I thought the mourners were sincere, but there were a lot of curiosity-seekers and morbid persons who had attended the funeral, so I was going to keep the coffin lid closed. I thought Aunt Amelia would want it that way.

It was a nice funeral. The preacher said what things he could, and stressed the fact that at the last Amelia had repented of the crime and had made the supreme atonement, that justice was divine, and that who was there among us to condemn.

Bertha Cool sent a nice floral wreath, and there was a huge pillow of flowers marked: From an old friend.

I didn’t try to trace the pillow. If I had, I felt quite certain that Marian’s Uncle Stephen would have been found at the paying end of the bill, but Uncle Steve wasn’t at the funeral.

Afterwards, when I dropped in at the office to say good-bye to Marian, I could hear the typewriter laboriously clacking away behind the partition. I wondered who it was.

“A new reporter?” I asked.

She said, “That’s Uncle Steve. He wanted to write the obituary himself. It seems that he used to know her.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Marian looked at me steadily. “Donald,” she said, “was she really your aunt?”

“My favourite aunt,” I said.

She came closer to the counter, so that her uncle couldn’t hear me, and pushed her hands out across the partition. Her eyes were wistful. “When,” she asked, “am I ever going to get to see you?”

“Almost any time,” I said. “Bertha’s landed a job in the city for you.”

“Donald!”

“It’s a fact,” I said.

She came around the counter.

From the back room came the laboured clack-clack-clack of the typewriter as Stephen Dunton wrote out the obituary of the woman with whom gossip had connected his name twenty-one years ago.

In an envelope in my inside coat pocket was a certified copy of the death certificate. The envelope was addressed to Charles Loring Alftmont, Mayor of Santa Carlotta, and, right at present, that envelope was being badly wrinkled by the pressure of Marian Dunton’s body as she hugged me to her, but I thought it would be a touching gesture to hold up mailing the envelope until I could include a clipping from the Oakview Blade.

“Oh, Donald, you darling!”

“Bertha did it,” I said. “The newspaper picture helped — the one with the legs. What’ll Charlie say?”

“Charlie?”

“Charlie, the boy friend.”

“Oh,” She looked up at me and laughed. “I tied a can to him. He was too much of a stick. He liked it here.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked.

Her face was tilted up to mine. “The day after you took me to dinner in the hotel. He was there in the dining-room, seated right behind you — I thought perhaps he’d given you the black eye.”

“That was Sergeant Harbet. Say, did your Uncle Steve deliberately run away from my aunt?”

“Yes. He’s sensitive about his weight, his baldness, and his rural background. He figured she’d been living in cities, was sophisticated and smart, that she’d look on him as a country boy—”

She broke off abruptly as the typewriter behind the partition quit clacking.

Steve Dunton had finished writing the obituary.