Chapter 9
The Iron Curtain would be fluttering in as many shreds as a grass skirt if the news of the world spread as fast and as pervasively as local gossip in Smithville. It dripped from the sable wings of night and sped forth refreshed on the golden wings of the morn. On Saturday morning everybody in Smithville was feeling exceedingly sorry for Janey Blake. Her overdraft varied from one hundred to one thousand dollars, but there was no variation in the reason for it-the slot machines, the way Gus Blake was carrying on, tearing around the country with John Maynard's divorced daughter. Even after Janey had driven a burglar out of the house single-handedly, Gus Blake had come home and brought the Maynard girl with him and gone off with her again, not getting back till five o'clock in the morning, leaving little Mrs. Blake and the kid alone there in the house all night. It made the patrolman watching the house sore as a pup. It was a dirty trick, with Mrs. Blake scared as she was and pretending she wasn't. The milkman who saw Miss Maynard kissing Gus Blake at two o'clock in the morning on Fetter Street didn't care what they did if she hadn't nearly run into his truck just as he was starting out. They could kiss each other all they pleased-what worried him was five hundred bottles of milk and cream and an undetermined amount of cottage cheese. And everybody felt exceedingly sorry for Janey. Everybody, with two exceptions. One was Lois Maynard, who still, however, in a way and when she didn't stop to think, felt a little sorry for Janey, in the slightly contemptuous and offhand way a beautiful sleek panther might feel about a young sheep she was trailing across an open field of daisies.
The second exception was the murderer of Paul M. Wernitz.
There was nothing in all this that made Smithville very different from any other town. Gus Blake was finding that out daily as he tried to make it sound unique and interesting for the centennial edition of the Gazette. Nor was domestic conversation very different, even in the homes of the people who had been to the Maynards' party the night before and had to be at the office the same time Saturday morning as they were the other five working days of the week.
Martha Ferguson, the red-haired wife of the president of Smithville's leading bank, pulled the plug out of the coffeepot and glanced up, past her red-haired freckle-faced thirteen-year-old daughter, earnestly frying bacon and eggs, at the clock on the back of the electric range. It was ten minutes past eight, and Jim was still not down. Fortunately her son did not have to shave yet, and a bath, so far as she knew, had never taken him more than three minutes except under compulsion since he'd graduated from outside assistance. He was over at the sink, in as much of his football gear as was permitted by the house rules, diluting the frozen orange juice. Martha Ferguson put two more slices of bread in the toaster.
"I don't know what on earth's keeping your dad this morning," she said. "The Maynards' hoedown certainly doesn't account for it. We were home by twelve." She waited for the toast to pop up, took it out, and buttered it. "Do you people realize," she said, "that all over the United States there are people just like us, waiting for the man of the house to get out of the bathroom and come down and eat? Millions and millions of them. Anybody that thinks the bathroom in the American home is a sanitary device is nuts. It's nothing but a throwback to the prehistoric cave where the male could hide in comfort in his fur skins while the female and the young were outside in the cold hunting sticks to rub together. And if you spill much more of that orange juice, sweetie, there won't be any left."
She laughed at her son and went out into the hall.
"Jim, are you ever coming down? What on earth are you doing? If you're eating soap, there's bacon and eggs down here. You've got to get to the bank. You're only president of it-you don't own it."
"Coming, darling." Jim Ferguson, hurrying down from the landing, stopped to check his pockets for handkerchief, billfold, change, and fountain pen. She waited for him at the foot of the stairs.
"Do something about those checks of poor little Janey today, Jim." She spoke earnestly, lowering her voice so the children could not hear her. "I simply can't bear to think of her going around with all this hanging over her. Can't we lend her the money to cover the things, Jim? I could get it from Dad. He might just as well loosen up a bit before he dies. I'll write to him today. But for heaven's sake, come and eat."
At the Nelson Cadwallader Symses' house in Batmen Street, Lois Maynard's Aunt Mamie Syms towered like the chairman of the Committee of the Whole at the head of the heavy Empire table in the old-fashioned dining room, where militant pieces of family furniture stood about against the brown-papered walls as if they had waited too long to march out and at last had given up hope. The dust of Aunt Mamie's tenure had faded off their spit and polish into an adamantine gray except on the surface portions that even Aunt Mamie's down at-the-heel maid couldn't overlook. As the long narrow windows were seldom washed and were hung with sun-faded brown rep curtains, it was hardly noticeable, and Aunt Mamie's vigorous attention was fixed on civic, not domestic, problems. Except at the moment. She took off her reading glasses and put down her paper. "Dorsey," she said.
Aunt Mamie's son was older than Martha Ferguson's, and instead of a football jersey and simulated Notre Dame pants he wore a chalkstripe blue suit, a blue shirt, and blue striped tie. He was already through his breakfast, waiting for another cup of coffee, the only product of the Syms kitchen that could be called even average.
"Dorsey." Aunt Mamie tapped the table with a wing of her horn-rimmed glasses that were as near a gavel as anything at hand. "Where is your father?"
Dorsey Syms turned the Maynard brown eyes and the Maynard smile toward his mother as he put down the sporting and financial section and pushed his plate back. He didn't answer. Aunt Mamie's questions were mostly rhetorical, or if not rhetorical, fully capable of being, and intended to be, answered from the chair.
"I hope," Aunt Mamie said, glancing toward the clock on the big Empire sideboard, "that he hasn't forgotten he's supposed to look over the letter I've written. Gus Blake tampered with the last one I wrote. I can spell quite as well as anyone else. I was deeply mortified, the way it came out in the paper. Your father's just dawdling this morning-dawdle, dawdle."
Dorsey smiled at her. She'd forgotten she was late for breakfast herself. No one, however, could ever accuse her of dawdling.
"And just when I've got to see Doctor Mason," his mother added. "I have a very severe headache. It must be my eyes."
Only a stout effort on the part of a stout woman kept Aunt Mamie from putting her head on her hands and all three on the breakfast table. Dorsey smiled again and looked at his watch.
"Why don't you just wait, Mother?" he said "Maybe it'll wear off. I mean, you don't have to use your eyes much today or tomorrow. Maybe they'll clear up if you rest them a little. You do too much."
"Well, perhaps, Dorsey."
He heard his father coming slowly down the stairs. He pushed his chair back. It was a dirty trick, going off, leaving his father to cope with one of his mother's champagne eyestrains. But there'd be a lot to do at the bank this morning There were at least ten people in town who'd hot-foot it there as soon as they opened their morning mail. Which meant work for him in the savings department. The ones who had savings would have to take them out. The others-Dorsey Syms shrugged mentally. That was their problem. Old Doc Wernitz must have had some wry sense of humor, he thought. Maybe he got a kick out of hanging on to a lot of checks people wrote after their sixth high ball and forgot about. Maybe he'd really enjoyed bringing them all in one batch, just toward the holidays and at the end of the month, when most Smithville bank accounts were on their last legs anyway. Notices had gone out to ten depositors, six with savings. An eleventh should have gone, to Janey Blake. But it hadn't. And there was no telling how many the other two banks across Courthouse Square had sent out.
He listened to his father coming along the hall. His father banked over at the Merchants National. It was the one determined stand Dorsey had ever known Nelson Cadwallader Syms to make. He'd refused, even in face of the plea of family solidarity, to bank where his wife's brother John Maynard was on the board of directors. Poor old Nelly, Dorsey thought. He was probably expecting a notice himself that morning, and was in no hurry of any kind to get to the office to get it.
Dorsey went around the table and dropped a kiss on his mother's feverish cheek. "I've got to rush," he said. He raised his voice to carry to the hall. "So long, Dad. I've got to shove. See you later." He went out the other way, through the kitchen. He always hated to see his father beaten down.
The butler at the Rogerses' country house out on the Bay glanced apprehensively at the paper propped up in front of the master of the ; house at the foot of the dining table. Mr. Rogers had cleared his throat twice already. The third time was the boiling point, in caloric inverse to the bacon and eggs under the plastic lid covering Mr. Orval's plate at the other end of the table. The butler's palms were discreetly moist as he listened intently for Mr. Orval to bust out of his room upstairs. He could hear him then, running halfway down the stairs and slowing up to come the rest of the way quietly and soberly. Mr. Orval's father did not like people being late to meals and having to race into the dining room, no matter how many parties they'd been to the night before. The butler cleared his own throat noiselessly and breathed more freely as he poured a cup of coffee from the silver pot and put it at Mr. Orval's place.
"Good morning, sir," he said.
Mr. Rogers's gray brows beetled over the edge of his paper, but not before Orvie Rogers had had time to give his tie a yank into proper place.
"Good morning, son."
"Good morning, Dad."
Mr. Rogers went back to his paper, Orvie took the lid off his bacon and eggs.
The butler glided across the thick Chinese rug through the swinging door into the pantry as Mr. Rogers cleared his throat the third time. Behind the door he paused, listening discreetly. He wondered just how rough a session it was going to be. Mr. Orval was not any too fit. The expression on his face as he'd lifted the plastic lid had nothing to do with the bacon and eggs being cold. It had to do merely with their being. He heard Mr. Rogers clear his throat again.
"About those checks we were talking about, son."
The butler glided swiftly away toward the kitchen. He had heard Mr. Rogers discuss checks with his son before at breakfast, and it was nothing he cared to listen to again.
"You'll find a check on my desk, Orvie," Mr. Rogers said. "I want you to take it by and give it to Janey. Tell her it's a personal loan from me to her, and she can pay it back when and as she can."
Orvie Rogers looked up quickly and opened his mouth. He closed it again as his father cleared his throat for the fifth time. "I understand this fellow Wernitz was murdered last night."
"So I heard," Orvie said. Even coffee tasted foul this morning.
"Good riddance. I wish we could get those machines out of Smith County. Nobody would think of cutting a hole in his pants pocket to let his money dribble out, and nobody with any gumption would put a nickel in a coin machine."
His brows beetled over at Orvie again. He knew Orvie played the slot machines, and Orvie knew he knew it.
"In any case," he said, "Janey's a fine girl. I don't want her mixed up with this filth. I'm very fond of Janey." He said it very much as if it were a personal I accusation. Orvie waiting, half expecting, from I long experience, that his father would go on and say, "If you'd had the gumption of a wet muskrat you'd have married her before Blake did." He didn't mind it anymore. Things would have been different if he had married her-or if she would have married him.
"And I suggest you let Blake get out of the way before you go there," his father said. "I've got some idea that what Gus doesn't know about this won't hurt him. I daresay most of us are fools when we get out of our own field. I learned that when we had to convert the plant at the beginning of the war."
At John Maynard's house in town his daughter, in a tailored suit and white blouse tied in a flat bow at the neck, ready for a day's work at the Smithville Gazette, jabbed viciously into the grapefruit in front of her as she waited for her father's footsteps on the stairs. At last she put her spoon down impatiently and pressed the bell under the table. When the butler came she said, "Lawrence-go upstairs and find out what in God's name is keeping my father. Bang on the door. Maybe he's slipped in the shower."
She picked up her spoon again. "Never mind. Here he comes."
She raised her voice. "Daddy, if you don't hurry you're not going downtown with me."
Then she realized that he was not coming. He was going into the library first. She looked at her watch. She was in a hurry. Gus always got to the office earlier than anybody else, and she had some unfinished business with Gus that she wanted to get on with. Her father was coming now. She looked up expectantly at him. Then she frowned. He wasn't smiling his slow, easy smile, as he usually did.
"What's the matter, Daddy?"
"Nothin', honey."
John Maynard came around the table and kissed her on the top of her head. He went to his place at the end of the table, waiting until Lawrence had gone out of the room.
"Lois, you haven't done anythin' foolish, have you, honey?" he asked gently.
"Lots of things, I guess, Dad. Why? What particular one do you want to know about now?"
"I'm not jokin', honey. I'm talkin' about those checks I showed you last night. Did you take 'em out of the drawer in there?"
Lois Maynard stared at him. "Good heavens, no. Why should I do that? They're no-Do you mean they're gone?"
"That's what I mean, Lois. They're gone. The whole lot of 'em. I was goin' to take 'em around after Gus left home this mornin' and have a little talk with Janey." He looked past her out of the window for a few moments. "I'm tryin' to think who was in there last night. Who'd want to take 'em, I mean, Lois."
He shrugged and picked up his napkin, the old smile coming back on his handsome, rugged face. "It was mighty nice little Janey won the jackpot last night."
Lois was watching him intently across the table.
"Daddy," she said sharply. She put down her coffee cup. "Just how well did you know this Doc Wernitz who was killed last night?"
John Maynard smiled at her. "Now, honey." He wiped his broad mouth with corner of his napkin. "Now, honey, if I was you, I'd keep my little nose out of things that don't concern me. It's always best. Usually I've always found it was safest, in the long run, too."
Lois wanted to say something but no words formed in her mouth. Her father was telling her to shut up, in no uncertain terms. He knew something-Lois could sense it. She had seen that same look on his face once before, recently-when he was paying off Janey's jackpot!
She managed to supress her interest. Lois stood and left the room. John Maynard watched her go, then turned his face toward the window that overlooked the grounds.
It was a messy business, all right. And John Maynard was only going to wait a short time before he moved into action.
John Maynard smiled. It was a shame that it took something like this to get the juices flowing. But that was part of growing older. You needed new experiences in order to feel anything. Not like when he was young, John Maynard thought. It was different then, and he had been a different man, always eager to experience life in its most vivid terms.
He remembered his first visit to Chicago. He'd been a wild man then, young and strong and filled with the grit and stamina of a young bull. John Maynard had five thousand dollars in his pockets on that first trip, and when he left Chicago four days later he was broke.
It was the last time in his life that he had been down to the wire, but he never once regretted the mad, exciting, totally wanton scene that he had purchased.
Memories live forever, John Maynard thought.
He chuckled. It had been a wintery night, cold and blowing, and he'd arrived at Jeanine's House of Pleasure half-drunk and frozen through to the bone.
The girls had helped him off with his coat, then led him into the sitting room where he poured down at least half a bottle of the finest whiskey he'd ever tasted. All the girls were curious about what John Maynard had in the packages he'd brought under his arm, but it wasn't until he was thoroughly warmed up that he handed them out.
The packages went to Sissy and Claire, the two lovely blondes who'd been in his service since he arrived. The girls eagerly and happily tore open the wrappings, then tossed aside the box tops-and there, for each of them, was a fur coat!
John chuckled again. Those damned coats more than paid for themselves in sheer, sensual, sexual pleasure. There wasn't enough Sissy and Clare could do for him-and he let them do as they pleased about ten minutes later, after they led him stumbling up the stairs to the bedroom that they all shared.
They undressed him and then gave him a quick sponge bath, using warm, sudsy water, rinsing him clean with fresh warm water. Then they led him to the bed, and if he remembered correctly, John Maynard was singing at the top of his voice all the time.
Claire and Sissy didn't care-they even told him that they enjoyed his loud, boisterous singing. Sissy laid him down on his back, flat on the bed, then quickly and nimbly jumped atop him, planting her sweet, perfumed center right on his mouth.
John loved it. He could feel Claire tugging at him, making his cock hard and thick, and then the warm wet smoothness of her lips encircled him and he felt her tongue swirling around his shaft.
But that was nothing compared to the way Sissy moved atop him. John Maynard held her by the flesh of her hips as she swiveled and rolled, giving his tongue and lips tempting targets which he probed eagerly and, for Sissy, pleasurably.
He was more than half-drunk, John Maynard was, but his stamina and raw male vitality was not diminished in the slightest. Both Sissy and Claire had been overjoyed to find themselves his sexual slaves the past few days, delighted to have-for once-a young bull to play with instead of the tired, aging businessmen who were their usual companions.
The girls exchanged positions and John Maynard laughed uproariously. He'd never had an experience like this in his life-no one back home would believe it!
The girls knew exactly how to please him in every way. Later, when he lay top Sissy, her small, perfect form clinging to him, he leaned to his right and kissed Claire full on the mouth, for she was there too, stretched out, available for his hands and mouth.
They had carried on for days in like fashion, and John's mind came up with many different games for them to play. He was totally uninhibited, ready for anything, willing to do it again if he liked it.
When it was over and Sissy and Claire stood by the door, shivering in their light wraps, it was Sissy who pressed the gold-washed quarter into his hand. "For luck," she said.
It was the same golden quarter he'd given to his old friend.