The Dirty Duck (23 page)

Schoenberg's head came up sharply. “So? I come here at least once a year, usually in the summer.” He tossed his passport on the table, then went on in his passionless voice. “Probably he wanted to show me all of this evidence he'd collected.” His smile was cold. “Or show me up. But given what's been going on—Harvey's theories about Marlowe and Shakespeare
rather had to take a back seat, didn't they? I'm talking about the murders of the people on this tour he was on.” Schoenberg looked at Jury as if he might have better ways of spending his time.

Since Jury had been about to ask to see the passport, he imagined that Schoenberg felt he was one up. Jury flicked through the pages. The visas had been stamped at nearly the same time every year for the last five years. Despite what Jury had said to Lasko, the passport looked authentic enough. Jury returned it to him.

“I imagine Harvey told you about the methods of this murderer.” Jury took his copy of the poem from his pocket, the one stanza circled, and handed it to Schoenberg. “Sergeant Wiggins says you recognized the poem.”

“ ‘Brightness falls from the air' . . . of course. It's one of Nashe's. That line alone is famous.”

“He wrote the poem during the plague years.”

Jonathan once more gave his small, superior smile. “Yes, I know.”

Jury waited for Schoenberg to go on, but he didn't. Jury reclaimed and repocketed the poem.

Schoenberg, thought Jury, was about the coldest fish he'd ever landed. Or, more to the point, not landed. He couldn't make the man out at all.

“P
oor Harvey,” said Melrose Plant. “The silly ass was beginning to grow on me.” With a feeling akin to nostalgia, he had been telling Jury and Wiggins about their travels round Deptford. He put aside the stapled pages he had been reading. “And doesn't this rather shoot holes in the Beautiful Women theory?”

“Thanks for reminding me,” said Jury, rubbing his eyes and leaning back in his chair in Plant's sitting room at Brown's. The three of them—Jury, Plant, and Wiggins—had a printout from Harvey Schoenberg's computer, pried from the unwilling Ishi by a very frustrated computer expert at New Scotland Yard. Schoenberg had recorded over sixty pages on his trip and had, presumably, left even more at home.

Jury tossed his own set of stapled pages aside and said, “I've gone through this three times now and I can't find a bloody clue.”

“I didn't know this,” said Wiggins.

“Didn't know what?” asked Jury.

“How disgusting these public executions were. He's talking here about how people reveled in the twitchings of the body. They'd actually scream to the hangman to cut out the heart.” Wiggins looked a bit ill. “And the hangman would leave them semiconscious and then cut them up and take out their—I mean,
sir,
how could anyone still be alive if—”

“Try not to think about it, Wiggins,” said Jury, gloomily.

Melrose had finished reading the last sheet of his copy and said, “Anyway, the world has got more civilized, Sergeant Wiggins. Now all we do is hover over traffic accidents and ambulances.”

“I certainly wouldn't call what happened to Schoenberg or any of the others in this case ‘civilized,' ” said Wiggins, testily. Illness, sickness, disease—Wiggins
could not give it such short shrift. “And back then, in Marlowe's time, the plague. God, can you imagine anything more horrible . . . ?” Wiggins shuddered.

Jury raised his head slowly from a hand that wasn't doing much toward curing his headache and said, “ ‘The plague full swift goes by.' Read that stanza, will you?” he asked Melrose.

Plant put on his spectacles and read:

“Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade;

All things to end are made;

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die.”

Jury looked at Melrose and said, “In all of that talk with Harvey—you said there was a woman—”

“Ah, yes. ‘But that was in another country./And besides the wench is dead.' ”

Following his own train of thought, to Wiggins Jury said, “You might just have something there, Wiggins.”

Wiggins looked around the room as if he might discover where the Something was. “Sir?”

“The public executions. The disemboweling. And how what happened to these victims was hardly any more civilized.”

Jury got up. That elusive thought which had nearly come to him in Racer's office surfaced now. “We've been concentrating on that other stanza—the one the murderer left, and ignoring what the whole poem's about.” Jury made a movement toward the door.

“Where are you going, sir?”

“To see James Farraday. I must be blind. I forgot the one person who's really important.”

Melrose removed his glasses. “I must be dim. What ‘one person'?”

“Their mother,” said Jury.

 • • • 

“Nell?” said James Farraday. “What about her?” He was drinking what was obviously not his first whiskey in the elegant dining room of Brown's Hotel. “I don't understand.”

“Just tell me what you know about her, Mr. Farraday,” said Jury.

“But—she's dead.” Farraday stuffed a black cigar in his mouth, which he then forgot to light.

“I know that. Penny said her mother died of what Penny called ‘a wasting disease.' She was vague about what the disease actually was. I don't think she knew. So what was it?”

There was a long silence, and then Farraday said, “VD.” He paused. “Syphilis.” He seemed to be looking everywhere—out the window, at his glass of whiskey—“It's not exactly something you want to tell kids, is it?”

“No.”

“Nell was just an ignorant little farm girl, was all. It went on too long, you know? By the time the doctor told me, it was too goddamn late.” The cigar he'd been holding he finally lit. “She had to go to a hospital. More like a sanatorium, it was. Nothing they could do except make her comfortable as they could. Comfortable. Hell. You ever seen anyone with syphilis?”

“What did you tell Penny and Jimmy?”

“Told them she died, that's all.”

That's all.
Jury found it strange that the mother's death could merit that sort of dismissal. “And how did she get it, Mr. Farraday?”

“You're thinking
me,
right? Well, it wasn't me, Superintendent. She slept around, I guess. Listen. When I found Nell Altman she was near to walking the streets looking for work, and her with them two kids. And a lot of thanks I ever got from
them,
I can tell you—”

It did not seem so much self-pity as delay, Jury thought. “When you found out she was syphilitic, there must have been questions—”

“ ‘Must have been—' That's real funny. You're goddamn
right
I asked questions. Which she wouldn't answer. You never knew Nell. Lord, but that was one stubborn woman.”

“If she told you nothing, why did you assume she ‘slept around'?” Jury felt an irrational impulse to defend this woman's character. “It could as easily have been her husband who—”

“Husband? Don't think there ever
was
one.”

“Okay. Then whatever label you want to give the gentleman—”

“I'll give the goddamn
gentleman
a label. Sonabitch is what I'll give him!” Farraday leaned across the table, allowing Jury the benefit of his whiskey-laden breath. “That bastard had VD and
never told her.”

“Maybe he didn't know, either.”

“And maybe he
did,
mister! Maybe he just didn't want to
trouble
her with that bit of information. Maybe he just didn't want the
bother.”

“So what did you assume happened to the father?”

Farraday shrugged. “Lord only knows. Guess he just took off from her or something. She never said. I never asked. And where she got that stinking disease, I don't know.” Farraday ran his hand over his face. “Poor bitch slept around because she was so stupid about men she couldn't tell—”

“She slept around, but not with you, is that it?”

Farraday was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I'd of married her. I mean, before I knew . . .” His voice trailed off.

White of you,
thought Jury, irritated by his unprofessional anger.

But it evaporated when Farraday said, sadly, “She wouldn't have me. Don't ask me about the father, or husband, or whatever. She was from some godforsaken place in West Virginia—you know the kind—blink and you miss it—someplace called Sand Flats, something like that. All I know about the girl's family is this dad of hers who come around to get money off her—” Farraday raised his glass, as if to toast Nell Altman's father, but actually to call the waiter, who appeared like swansdown at his side. “Ain't you got any good old Kentucky
bourbon
in this place?”

“Not Kentucky. Tennessee sour mash. Would that be acceptable, sir?”

Farraday nodded and the waiter withdrew. “Softhearted, Nell was. I shouldn't have said that before, about her being stupid. Nell wasn't stupid. Far from it. Gullible, that's the word. Anyone could of got anything out of her. Like that old grief of a dad of hers—”

“What was his name?”

Farraday looked up from the plate he was pushing food around on, confused. “His name?”

“I mean, was it Altman? Was Nell Altman using her maiden name?”

He thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah. I guess she was. You got to understand, Nell never talked much about herself—”

“Go on.”

“Penny's like her. Looks like her, acts like her. Oh, Penny tries to sound hard, but inside she's like mashed potatoes. And that Jimmy—wherever did he get his brains? It wasn't the schools. I tried sending him to private school—well, it was Amelia thought of that.” He wiped his napkin over his face, in what Jury thought was a surreptitious gesture to stop tears. Then he laughed artificially. “But Jimmy didn't take to private schools any more than public. We used to have this kind of joke, Jimmy and me: ‘There wasn't a school made yet could hold Jimmy Farraday.' But Amelia, of course, she wanted all of them in private schools. That Honey Belle—it surely didn't matter there; she could of turned any school into a row of cellblocks. Penny, now that's different. The girl likes to talk like she just
come up out of a mine. . . . But I think that's a kind of loyalty. . . . You know what I mean?” Farraday had received and downed most of his whiskey at this point.

“I know what you mean. Why wouldn't Nell Altman marry you?”

Farraday stared into his glass for a moment before answering. “She didn't love me, is why. Nell wouldn't've married anybody for money.” Here he looked quickly away as if to keep Jury from seeing an expression that would betray a thought,
not like some.
Then he looked back. “There's no good me pretending Amelia and me were a couple of lovebirds. We had problems. There was a divorce coming up, sure as God made little green apples.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Neither did she,” said Farraday, his voice low. “I guess it's not too smart, me telling you that after what's happened.”

Jury smiled slightly. “Mr. Farraday, the police would have one hell of a time if every man who wanted to divorce his wife decided to murder her instead. Anyway, that would hardly account for the others.”

“I'm not thinking too straight.”

“Straight enough. Go on.”

“Look. Don't think I wouldn't give
everything
I got to undo what's happened to Amelia and Honey Belle and the others. I guess I seem pretty coldblooded, but believe me, I'd give it all, and I got a lot. But to tell the truth—” He stopped and looked at Jury almost with entreaty. “—it sounds pretty hard . . .”

“The truth usually is.”

“It's really Jimmy I feel grief over. And Penny. Nothing's happened to her
yet
—”

The word hung in the air, cold and sharp as an icicle.

“We'll find Jimmy,” said Jury, with a conviction he didn't feel. But the man had been through a lot. “As for Penny, she's got orders not to leave the hotel, unless one of us is with her.”

Farraday managed a laugh. “Penny. Never knew her to pay attention to
anyone's
orders.”

“She will to mine,” said Jury, smiling.

In a very low voice, James Farraday said, “You fellows . . . I don't think you're any nearer to knowing what's going on than you ever were.” It was said not as an accusation, but rather as a gloomy foreboding.

Jury did not comment. Instead he asked another question. “Would you have said Nell was beautiful?”

Farraday seemed to be considering this carefully. “To me she was.” He
paused. “It was the way she was. I'd of thought she'd be beautiful to anyone, to tell the truth.”

Jury got up. “As to what you said before—yes, I think we're closer to finding a solution. At least I've found a motive. Nell—that's a nickname. Wasn't her name really Helen?”

“Helen. That's right.” But his look reflected only an increase of puzzlement. “Helen.”

H
e had walked through woods (probably in circles) and down a long avenue (seeing only a few cars at this early hour), determined to get to the other side of that river he had seen from the tower room. There was a distant sound of traffic.

James Carlton was keeping out of sight as much as possible, carrying the cat weak from a lack of Jell-O (probably). Off to his right was bright green grass. At first he thought it was a golf course.