The Book of the Dead (13 page)

“You'll collect; Crenshaw seems to have had plenty of money.”

“But wouldn't you think the widow would put her hand in her pocket?”

“That's not the automatic gesture nowadays.”

“How right you are; but Crenshaw was a gentleman.”

Gamadge joined Miss Daker, with apologies for keeping her, and asked Mulqueen to call a cab. It was—rather to Gamadge's disgust—a Skyview; he objected to glare. But Lucette Daker liked it; she sat up alertly, gazing from right to left, heedless of the fact that the breeze was lifting the dark curls on her neck. They would fall into place again; they were natural curls, and she didn't have to think of them.

“How about taking your bag down to the station now and checking it?” suggested Gamadge. “Then you won't have to bother with it again until you're ready to take your train.”

Miss Daker approved.

“And I can telephone. I ought to telephone home and tell my man where to find me. I'm rather expecting an out-of-town call.”

“Why didn't you telephone from the apartment, Mr. Gamadge? Or didn't you think of it then? It would have been so much more convenient for you.”

“Well, I hardly liked to use your telephone on my private business.”

They checked the bag, and Gamadge telephoned from the nearest booth. When he came out she asked: “Where did you say they
could
find you?”

“That's a secret.” He smiled at her. “I thought that we might begin our travels by walking up to Rockefeller Center.”

“I'd love to walk.” But as they left the station and dodged their way across Vanderbilt Avenue she seemed doubtful and a little worried. They went on to Fifth Avenue in silence, Gamadge taking profile views of her quaintly tilted nose and the curve of her round chin.

When they turned up the Avenue, she said in the soft voice that was sweetly lingering, but not quite a drawl: “You're awfully kind to do all this for me, Mr. Gamadge.”

“I like doing it.” He wondered what she would say if he confessed how highly gratified he was to have a key witness all to himself.

She went on: “I ought to tell you a lot of things. I ought to explain about my not going back to California, and then you won't think I'm so selfish. I couldn't stay in Sundown without Uncle Howard.”

“So I gathered.”

“Perhaps it's mean of me not to be more grateful to my aunt; she did take me in, and she kept me all those years; but she only does things like that because she thinks she ought to.”

“Or because other people may think she ought to?”

She looked up at him. “Those people in Sundown! There's just one way of doing things in Sundown.”

“I bet.”

“If anybody visits there from somewhere else they can't bear it if she's different. My mother used to laugh about it. I never thought I'd have to live all my life in that place. I can't. Not with
her
.”

“It must be very humiliating for her now to go back there and explain.”

“That's all Uncle Howard's death is to her—humiliating. She doesn't think of
him
. She didn't understand him at all.”

“What he did takes a dickens of a lot of understanding, Miss Daker.”

“I know why he did it; he couldn't face the fuss, and the telegrams, and the tickets and planes and specialists. The hypocrisy! All just for appearances.”

Gamadge asked after a moment: “Didn't they get on?”

“Oh, yes! They got on! You couldn't quarrel with Uncle Howard, and she doesn't quarrel either; she's above it!”

“Oh dear.”

“It was just deadening to live with.”

“Well, you've made your strike for liberty.”

“Uncle Howard wouldn't blame me if he knew. He liked fun. He liked queer characters. I suppose that's why he liked that man—that Pike; and Miss Fisher. Was she a character?”

“Decidedly a character.”

“I could see that you felt badly when you heard she'd been killed in that horrible way; but Aunt Genevieve never noticed how you felt. She never notices how anybody feels. Mr. Gamadge…'

“Yes?”

“It was queer—her being killed that very same night; the night of the day Uncle Howard died. Wasn't it?”

“Very.”

“But there
are
a good many hold-ups?”

“Unfortunately.”

They walked on. Suddenly she said: “Mr. Gamadge, I don't know what you'll think of me. I've been very deceitful.”

“How so?”

“I don't believe you'll be shocked at me. I don't believe you'll tell.”

“Try me.”

“The reason I came East was because I have a friend here.”

“Have you? Good.”

“In the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

“Better and better.”

“He's only a sailor, but he's going to be a radio officer soon. He was only a radio man in Sundown, and Aunt Genevieve didn't know I even knew him; she wouldn't have let me have him in the house. I met him at a movie,” said Miss Daker rapidly, “and we used to sit in drugstores; different drugstores. His name's Judd Binney.”

“No bars in Sundown?”

“He wouldn't have taken me into a bar. He's an awfully nice boy, and so clever. He's had a very good education.”

“High school?”

“He started to work his way through college, but he couldn't manage it—he had family dependent on him. So he started out in the radio business for himself, and then the war came.”

“And you telegraphed him that you were coming to New York?”

“You think I'm awful, Mr. Gamadge, but it was our only chance. He's going off somewhere with his ship next week. When he gets back we'll be married; I'll just fade out.”

“But not too suddenly, or Mrs. Crenshaw will put the police on you.”

“Oh, she won't care; she'll never bother about me again if I write that I'm married.”

“How will you be off for money until your friend gets back? Or will he share his pay with you?”

“I don't need it. I have six hundred dollars.”

“Too bad you have to sacrifice your expectations from your aunt.”

“I can't help it.”

“How much has she, if I may ask? Do you know?”

“Uncle Howard told me once that after he sold the business he settled a hundred and fifty thousand on her, and kept the same for himself.”

“And now she gets the other half too?”

“I suppose so.”

“Why did he make the settlement on her, I wonder?”

“Because he wanted to feel free to do what he liked with his own money and spend it any way he wanted, and not have her nagging at him and asking him questions.”

“Too bad you're giving up your share of the money; I suppose you are.”

“She'll never give me anything now, or leave me anything; but I don't
care
, Mr. Gamadge. Mr. Gamadge, you don't think I'm doing the right thing.”

Gamadge, feeling somewhat trammeled and bogged down by so much virtue, said that he couldn't criticize Mr. Binney or herself for unworldliness. “But you're rather young to plunge into this marriage, you know. Are you sure you're not doing it just to get away from Sundown, California?”

“I'm sure!”

“You'll have lots of other chances if you wait, you know. You'll meet lots of other men.”

“I know I'll never meet anybody like him.”

“You've planned to meet him at Radio City?” Gamadge smiled at her.

“On Sixth Avenue. There's a cafeteria there he likes to have dinner in.”

“What time?”

“Half past six.”

Gamadge, having repressed a slight moan, asked her if she wished him to disappear before Mr. Binney arrived. “Oh, no; I'd like you to meet him.”

“Well, we have lots of time for a cocktail first. It's only a quarter to six.”

“Where?”

“I'll show you.”

They had reached 49th Street, and Gamadge took her along the Avenue to the middle of the next block, and asked her to look across the way. He himself stood with his head back, gazing at the great shafts that drove up into the sky. He said: “Isn't it lovely?”

“Lovely?” she looked up too. “It's so plain!”

“Very plain.”

They crossed the street, and she looked down the long vista of flowers and fountains. “Is that statue down there the one they make all the jokes about?”

“Yes. Don't you care for our gold man, Miss Daker?”

“I thought everybody made fun of it.”

“It certainly wouldn't do to be too solemn about him. We'll have our cocktails down there under the awning.”

“Right out doors? How wonderful!”

“Only it isn't as gay this summer as it was last summer.”

“I think it's lovely. Did you tell them to call you on the telephone
there
?”

“If my call came. Now I won't have to tell them to call me somewhere else later, shall I?”

“Oh dear, I haven't treated you very politely! But I don't think,” said Lucette, smiling up at him, “that it will be much of a hardship for you to miss spending the whole evening till twelve o'clock with me!”

They descended the slope. At approximately that moment Mrs. Howard Crenshaw should have been descending another slope—the ramp at the Grand Central Station which led passengers to the Century Limited. But she was doing no such thing. She had been put into her cab at five thirty by Mr. Humbert and Mulqueen, her bag, duly labelled, had been put in beside her, and she had been driven down to the station. But when the Century rolled out at six o'clock she was not on it; she was not in the terminus at all.

G
AMADGE AND LUCETTE DAKER
found a table under the awning of the Grill Bordeaux. Gamadge, laughing, put her with her back to Prometheus, since she didn't care for him, and faced the west himself. Lucette had a splendid view of all the other people at the tables, a view she appreciated vocally.

“I have too many flowers in my hat!”

“Is three too many?” Gamadge looked at the “hat,” which consisted of the three flowers, and—so far as he could judge—nothing else.

“They only have one.”

“Why any?”

“Just to show they're not at home!”

“That's putting the finger on it.”

He had ordered an oldfashioned for Lucette, since she said she was used to them, and a Martini for himself.

When the drinks and the canapes came, Lucette remarked that Uncle Howard always said good Bourbon couldn't hurt you.

“Did Mrs. Crenshaw always say so too?”

“She doesn't drink.”

“What a woman.”

“Mr. Gamadge, you think I'm awful about her; but it's just that I can't bear people who never say or do anything they mean. For instance she puts brown rinse on her hair.”

“Without meaning to?”

“Of course she means to. They do it at the hairdressers' whenever she has a shampoo. At first she said she didn't know they were doing it, and then—when her hair got too gray for her to pretend any longer—she said it wasn't a dye because it washes off!”

“Disingenuous of her, very.”

“
She
doesn't need oldfashioneds; she's oldfashioned enough herself.”

“That is unworthy of you; and I don't mean morally.”

Miss Daker laughed.

“But to be oldfashioned, in your sense,” continued Gamadge, “doesn't mean to be without emotion, you know. Far from it. People may have lots of emotions, repress them rigorously, and call it self-control—a quality once highly thought of.”

“I don't think Aunt Genevieve has any emotions.”

“You mustn't be too sure.”

Lucette Daker took a sip of her oldfashioned. Then she said in a thoughtful tone: “I know her pretty well.”

“Do you? So her friends in Sundown would say; but their judgment of her wouldn't be yours.”

“
They
don't know her!”

Lucette Daker had emotions, and just now they were getting a little the better of her; Gamadge, seeing that she was trembling slightly, called for the check. “Mustn't keep Binney waiting.”

They went through 49th Street to Sixth Avenue. A young, stockily built man in white, with his sailor's cap on the side of his cropped head, started eagerly forward as they turned the corner. Ignoring Gamadge, he advanced to seize Lucette by the arm, just above her elbow. “You got here, kid!”

“Yes, Judd, here I am.” She gently freed herself from what Gamadge thought of as the grip populi. “I want to introduce you to Mr. Gamadge. He's been awfully kind, and I told him all about us and everything.”

Binney looked up, nodded, and said: “Thanks.” Gamadge's presence evidently did no worse than bore him; this thirty-seven-year-old civilian could be no more to his loved one than a mentor, and not a permanent one at that. But Binney's expression was not hospitable.

“Very glad to make your acquaintance, sir,” said Gamadge. “I'll have to be running along, now; I see I'm leaving Miss Daker in good hands.”

He looked back once; Lucette was being firmly propelled into the cafeteria.

When he reached home he had his bath and shower, and then—observing from the library window that Theodore had just watered down the yard, and that a pleasant smell of wet leaves and grass arose from it—he rounded up Martin for what he persisted in calling a stroll in the shrubbery.

For him this meant adjusting Martin's harness, snapping on the leash, putting his hand through its loop, and sinking the hand in his pocket. He would then wander thoughtfully along the paths and around the tree, pausing to inspect the privet and forsythia, the niche and fountain built into the brick wall, the condition of the turf, and the paint-work on the white iron garden-furniture. Meanwhile, forgetting Martin entirely, he would pay not the slightest attention to him.