Chapter 12
"Morning!" Lois Maynard's cheerful lilt gave his stomach another wrench. She made it sound as if they'd just had breakfast together but don't ever let anybody else know our beautiful, lovely secret. One colorless eye of Swede Carlson flickered. Gus felt the other cocked bleakly on him as he hung his overcoat on the hook by the washbowl in the corner and stuck his hat on top of it. The hell with both of them. He turned back. Swede Carlson looked at him disinterestedly.
"Thought you came back and did your story last night," he said.
"That's right," Gus answered curtly. "Got anything to add to it? I thought you were going home and go to bed."
Oh, oh, Lois Maynard thought. He's mad about something. I bet little sheep-eyes gave him one hell of a going-over this morning.
She had a bright picture of Janey trailing lugubriously around in her old yellow bathrobe and wool-lined slippers, no lipstick, tow hair unkempt, red-nosed, probably weeping into his coffee cup. She caught a quick glimpse of herself, crisply tailored and neat, in the cracked mirror over the washbowl, and smiled at it before she moved around and perched on the corner of his desk, looking casual but business-like, waiting for orders. Chief Carlson was cutting something off an oblong brown block. She shuddered inside a little. She hadn't known people still chewed tobacco.
"I did go home, just like I said," Carlson said placidly. He closed his knife and put it and the plug back in his pocket. "But I got up this morning. Still haven't got anythin' to add, not right now. The boy's still out, over at the hospital." He put on his hat. "I'm just makin' a few calls. Routine checkup, I guess you people call it."
His bleak gaze was still fixed on Gus. If it meant anything, Gus Blake, embroiled in his own special kettle of bitterly simmering oil, was missing it. He jerked his chair up to the desk.
"Then why don't you get on and make 'em?" he said offensively. "Tell me about it later. But just get the hell out of here, will you? You, too, Lois. Both of you. Clear out and shut the door. Cut out all the yakkety-yak, for just five minutes. I've got to work."
"Thought maybe I'd like to see that editorial I hear you wrote," Carlson said equably. "Understand you-"
"Okay, okay. I'm not pulling it, if that's what you want to know. I'm letting it ride just like it is. Lois'll get it for you. Now get out, will you? Get out before I throw you out."
He heard the door close as they went into Lois Maynard's small office next to his, and waited a moment before he stretched his head up and back as far as he could, gritting his teeth, staring up at the stains on the grimy ceiling. He was sick as a horse. If there was only someplace he could go and get the hell out of here. Get drunk, he thought; go out and get lousy stinking drunk and just forget about the whole business. He jerked his head forward again and pushed his chair violently back, got up, started toward his overcoat in the corner, stopped, and came slowly back. He was drunk already-or his stomach felt as if he had been drunk. It was churning now; it had the classic dimensions of a first-class hangover. Anyway, getting polluted and going through it all over again wasn't going to help. It never had and it never would.
He ripped his handkerchief out and blew his nose. In a minute or two he was going to bawl like the little Dane. It was going to be the second time in his life he'd wanted to cry, the first since he'd been in the hospital plane flying into Pearl from Iwo Jima. And bawling didn't help any more than getting boiled did. He blew his nose again, and sat down in his chair. For get it, Blake. Just take it-socko, wham-take it and shut up.
He stuck a sheet of paper in his typewriter and stared at it until it gradually came into focus and the room gathered itself together, everything coming back into solid form and settling itself firmly where he was used to seeing it. It settled back, but it was all changed. All small-time, all down at the heel. A rattling typewriter on a rattletrap desk in the back room of a run-down building that ought to have been condemned before the Civil War. What the hell was he doing there? What the hell was he doing sitting in a room with Managing Editor printed on the door-the G and E rubbed off so that it read Managin ditor? What was he doing there, anyway? Grubbing away at a hundred bucks a week on the understanding that if he pulled the paper out of the red four years he could buy a controlling interest in it over the next four years at the appraised value the day he came to it. It was all funny as hell, now he was seeing it with the fish scales off his eyes. Whatever-But that brought him to Janey again, and he wasn't going to think about Janey. That had been his first mistake. Blake. Blake the lion in the street, doing a favor because he had a little time to spare.
A copy boy kicking the door brought him to sharply. "Come in!" he bellowed. "And next time knock! Don't kick the damn door down, you little-" He swung around, hearing himself and seeing the astonished boy. "Sorry," he said quickly. "Sorry. I take it all back. Just put it in the basket, will you, Ty?"
"Here it is." Lois Maynard pulled the proof sheet of the day's editorial off the holder by her desk and glanced at it again. It was how she knew Gus must have come back to the office to work after he'd left her at her door a little before three o'clock. The first few lines under the head Suckers had been changed.
Slot machine operators come and go. They go quietly sometimes. Sometimes they're murdered before they get a chance to go quietly. Like Doc Wernitz out at Newton's Corner last night.
The suckers who play them go on forever. The rest of it was the same. She handed it over to Swede Carlson.
"You know, Chief," she said, sitting down at her desk, "I don't think Gus has the faintest idea that his wife is in such a mess over the slot machines."
She pulled her chair up abruptly to cover her own surprise. Was that why he was so all-fired mad? It hadn't occurred to her until that second. That was the trouble with the egotistic approach. She had simply taken for granted that the row between Gus and Janey must have been over her. And row there had been-she knew Gus too well to make any mistake about that-but what she'd just thought of was much more likely. She looked at Carlson. He had his horn-rimmed reading glasses on, concentrated on the editorial. She pulled forward a bunch of rewrite stuff the boy had put on her desk while she was talking to him in Gus's office, and glanced at the top sheet. It was the report from the blotter at the city police station for the twenty-four preceding hours, and never very interesting. Today there was a scribbled note clipped to it. She picked it up and read it.
"Lois-Guess Blake will want to write up his own four-alarm burglary." The reporter's initials were penciled at the bottom.
She read it again, and read the story as it had been written leaving the Blakes's four-alarm burglary out. Then she looked over at Chief Carlson to ask him, and changed her mind. He was county police, anyway, and this was something that needed a little time to think about. She put the story back on her desk face down and took a cigarette out of the box in front of her. Carlson was just about to the end of the editorial now, and he'd be gone in a minute.
He put the proof sheets down on the desk. "So Mrs. Blake is in a mess with the slot machines, is she?" he asked soberly. "Why do you say that, Miss Maynard?"
Lois was too surprised to think of anything at all to say for an instant. "Oh," she said. "Why, I-I supposed you knew it. Everybody in town seems to-except Gus. I'm really sorry. I wouldn't have peeped, but I thought that was the reason you were giving Gus such a fish-eyed stare in there. Let's just skip it, shall we? It would make it frightfully awkward for me."
A bleak smile lighted Carlson's heavy face a little. "You mean you think maybe, because Mrs. Blake's lost say a couple of hundred-"
He stopped. "More than a couple of hundred, is it?"
"I must be horribly transparent, Chief." Lois laughed. But you're right. It's rather more than that."
"A lot of people are more transparent than they think, Miss Maynard," Carlson said. "But say she was in the hole a couple of thousand, even, you won't think I think Gus Blake went out there and slugged Doc Wernitz on that account, now, will you, Miss Maynard? Maybe I'm dumber 'n I think I am, but I'm not that dumb. There's another thing maybe you could tell me. About this deal Gus has got with your father. About the paper, I mean."
Lois looked at him a moment. She said, "Thanks for telling me something. I supposed they had some kind of-deal. I don't know what it is. Perhaps you'd better ask my father. Or Gus. What's that got to do with Mr. Wernitz getting murdered?"
Swede Carlson shook his head. "Nothin', Miss Maynard. Nothin' in particular. I just wondered, that's all. I'm interested in a lot of things, right now. What Wernitz did with all the dough he made, for instance. Whether he left a will. What made him decide to get out of town. Who he talked to about it. Who'd profit by havin' him dead. A lot of things like that, Miss Maynard."
He took his hat off the corner of her desk. "I guess you're pretty new on this murder business," he said. "You were pretty upset, last night, it looked like to me."
He's watching me. I'm transparent. She kept her eyes wide and interested, not blank, fixed on his face.
"I'm very new to it. It did upset me."
"That's what I figured." Swede Carlson nodded his understanding. "Well, I'll tell you, Miss Maynard. I've been chief here in Smith County for fifteen years next April. I've seen a lot of people killed, one way and another. When men kill each other, it's when they get juiced up and blood-mad. It's quick, then-quick and easy for the cops, too. Or a little fella can get scared of a big fella and not see any other road out. Or jealousy. Sometimes one fella thinks another one's hangin' around his wife too much."
He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if that was just one of those things nobody could ever do anything about.
"But by and large, Miss Maynard, when one fella sets out and does a neat premeditated killin', it's because the other fella could put him in jail for swindlin' him out of somethin'-money, property, somethin' the fella stole from him-and the funny thing, it's not so much him keepin' the money, or the property, of the fella he stole it from as it is him keepin' his own reputation. You know, Miss Maynard, I figure most killin's that are premeditated, like the one we've got here, come because people are just plain cowards."
The bleak eyes rested steadily on her.
"If you're rich you're afraid to lose your money and your reputation. But if you had to take your choice, it's always your reputation. That's the most important, just the same as if you were poor. I guess reputation's mighty important, no matter how you look at it."
Chief Carlson went over to the door. "Well, I guess I got to go. I better be thinkin' about my own reputation. If I don't get this business cleared up, I'll be out on a rotten limb for fair. Ain't often I get a chance to talk to a real intelligent lady." He opened the door. "Tell Gus I'll be back. I'd give him time to cool down a little first, if I was you."
Lois Maynard sat motionless in her chair for several moments. Keeping her face rigid as it was she pulled open her desk drawer and reached for the mirror under the pile of papers in it. She held it up in front of her. Transparent. He'd said people were more transparent than they knew-but she'd known while he was still sitting there how transparent she'd become. The mirror only proved what her dry, slightly parted lips and the strained feeling along her eyelids had already told her. The rouge stood out in queer patches on her cheeks. She moistened her lips, blinked her eyes, and put the mirror in the drawer again.
He was talking about her father, of course. All the time he'd been pretending to talk about his experience with murder, he'd really been talking about John Maynard. She tried to think when it was she'd first become aware of it, but everything he'd said was so mixed up in her mind that she couldn't think back over it and say when it was she knew that was what he was telling her. She got up and paced back and forth in the little room. Her father-her father who'd told her at breakfast that it was best to keep her little nose out of things that were none of her business. She flung herself into the armchair again. But that was absurd. Her father had been at home. He was out in the pantry seeing about the liquor for the party when she got there at half past five. When was Wernitz killed? She caught the proof off the rack and ran her eye quickly down Gus's story. Between five forty-five and seven. The service mechanic had phoned the police at twelve minutes to ten. According to the story, he had told them when they got out there and found him down in the basement with Wernitz's body that he had come back from a call at 6:35 approximately, and found Wernitz dead, after he had tried to turn on the lights in the office and gone down to fix the fuse.
Five forty-five and seven. Lois put the proof sheet down. At a quarter to seven he was in the library, dressed for dinner, talking to her about Janey's checks. It was impossible for him to have got out to Newton's Corner, killed Wernitz and-she stopped and clenched her jaws, her cheeks flaming hot all of a sudden. How dared she even consider anything so stupid and revolting. It was like blasphemy even to think of it. Swede Carlson had better watch out who he was talking about.
She gave her head a violent shake and looked at her watch. As soon as she got through the stuff in front of her, she'd call her father up and ask him to meet her at the Sailing Club for lunch. Never. Never in all her life had she heard anything so foul and revolting, underhanded and positively rotten. She picked up the sheet with the police reports on it, and the note attached. The next thing, they'd be saying John Maynard had burgled the Blake house. She got up, went over to the door to Gus's office, and wrenched it open.
"Smitty says do you want to write the-"
She had got that much of it out before she saw Gus was not at his desk. A sheet of blank paper was sticking out of his typewriter-blank, but in too crooked for anybody to write on it. She glanced over at the corner by the washbasin. His hat and coat were gone.
"Where in the world-"
She turned quickly as the Gazette's crime reporter, who also covered the financial district, consisting of the three banks on Courthouse Square, and the industrial district, which was the Rogers plant across Carson Creek, came in the door.
"What do I do about the Blakes's burglar?" he inquired testily. "They're going over to fingerprint the joint. Do I cover it or does-"
T don't know. If he'd wanted it in, I guess he'd have said so. He didn't, so I guess he doesn't. Anyway, he's gone. I don't know where he is. Where's his secretary? Ask her, don't ask me."
"She's home sick with a cold in the head."
"Then skip it," Lois Maynard snapped. "He's probably gone home himself if the police are there."
"Keep your shirt on." He started to close the door. "It's okay with me. I don't know what's the matter with everybody this morning."
"Wait, Smitty." She came out of a red fog and started functioning again. "What is this four-alarm burglary? What happened?"
"Oh, nothing much," Smitty said indifferently. "Just a guy in the house and Mrs. Blake scared him out. I just figured maybe there was an angle. The guy switched the lights out in the basement, like the Wernitz deal. But I guess Blake got that as easy as I did. I thought of telling Swede Carlson, but he was in there, so I guess Gus already told him. I've got to do the market report now. You can get winter kale for fifteen cents a bunch at Tony Modesto's when you put your two bucks down on Carter's Fancy-he's a cinch for the three-o'clock at Bowie."