Ice in the Bedroom (15 page)

Dolly paused, panting a little, and Soapy's lower jaw fell slowly like a tired flower drooping on its stem. He was not as a rule an easy man to explain things to, but on this occasion his wife's reasoning had been too lucid to allow of any misunderstanding. He had got the message.

'I never thought of that,' he said.

'Give a mite of attention to it now.'

'Gee!'

'Gee is right.'

'What are we going to do if he hijacks the stuff?’

'Sue him,' said Dolly, and even Soapy could discern that she spoke satirically. He fell into what would have been a thoughtful silence, if he had been capable of thinking. The best he was able to suggest at the end of several minutes was that he should telephone Leila Yorke and warn her to have nothing to do with J. Sheringham Adair, whose private eye activities were a mere cloak or front for criminality of the lowest order.

'So then, if he comes trying to ooze into the house, she'll get action with that gun of hers.' Dolly was not impressed.

'You think she'll have a lot of confidence in what you tell her, after that session you had with her about Silver River Oil and Refinery?'

'I could say I was Inspector somebody speaking from Scotland Yard.'

'With a middle western American accent? Try again.'

Soapy had finished his martini, but though agreeable to the taste and imparting a gentle glow, it brought no inspiration. He chewed his lip, and said it was difficult, and Dolly said Yay, she had noticed that herself.

Soapy scratched his Shakespearian forehead.

‘I don't know what to suggest.'

'Make that double.'

'We might…No, that's no good. Or…No, that's no good, either.'

'Not so hot as your first idea. That first one seemed to me to have possibilities.'

'If only,' said Soapy wistfully, 'there was some way of getting that dame out of the house!'

Dolly, who like a good wife had been refilling his glass, paused with the shaker in mid-air, spellbound. She had not expected to hear so keen a summing-up of the situation from such a source. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, she seemed to be saying to herself.

'Get her out of the house? Soapy, I believe you've got something. When I was down there yesterday, she sort of gave me the impression that it wouldn't take a lot to make her pack up and leave. I got the idea she's kind of pining for that stately home of hers, where there's cooks and butlers and all like that. Nothing she actually said, but that's the way it struck me. Look, finish that up and go take a walk around the block.'

'What, with this blister of mine?’

'Well, keep quiet, then. I want to think,' said Dolly, and walked to the window and stood looking out on London, while Soapy, scarcely daring to breathe lest he stifle thought at its source, lay back in his chair and gently massaged the sole of his left foot, his gaze fixed on her occipital bone as intently as if he could see the brain working behind it. The light of hope in his eyes was only faint, but it was there. Not once but many times in the past had his wife's little grey cells brought triumph out of disaster, and it might be that even the current problem, which, he freely admitted, was a lalla-paloosa, would not prove too much for her.

At length, Dolly spoke.

'Soapy, come here. Want to show you something.’

Soapy came as directed, and he too looked out on London. The portion of it that he saw was the back premises of Barribault's Hotel, for it was in that direction that the window faced. It was not a very exhilarating spectacle, mostly empty boxes and ashcans, and it did little to lighten the gloom in which he was plunged. Not that he would have derived any greater spiritual refreshment from it if the boxes had been the Champs-Elysees in springtime and the ash-cans the Taj Mahal by moonlight.

'See that cat?' said Dolly.

The cat to which she alluded was an animal of raffish and bohemian aspect, the sort of cat that hangs around street corners and makes low jokes to other cats as antisocial as itself. It was nosing about in the ash-cans below, and Soapy regarded it without enthusiasm. He was not, he said, fond of cats.

'Nor's the Yorke dame,' said Dolly. 'One came into the garden while I was there and started stalking a bird, and she eased it out.'

'With her shot-gun?'

'No, she just hollered, and the cat streaked off, and then she told me she didn't like cats.'

'And so?'

'Seeing that one down there gave me the idea.'

Soapy was stirred to his depths. '

You haven't got an idea?'

'I have, too. Wait. Don't talk,' said Dolly. She went to the ornate writing-table with which all suites at Barribault's Hotel are provided, and took pen and paper, frowning meditatively.

'How do you spell "descriptions"?' she asked. 'No, it's okay. I know.' 'D. as in "doughnut"…'

'All right, all right I tell you I know. Is Castlewood t-l-e or t-e-l?'

T-l-e. Why, honey? What is all this?'

Dolly waved him down impatiently, as authors will when interrupted with questions in the middle of an important work, and for some moments concentrated tensely on whatever this literary composition of hers was, her forehead wrinkled and the tip of her tongue protruding a little. After what seemed an hour she rose and handed him a sheet of notepaper.

'How's this?' she said.

It was not a lengthy document. It read:

WANTED

CATS OF ALL DESCRIPTIONS

GOOD PRICES PAID

APPLY

CASTLEWOOD

MULBERRY GROVE

VALLEY FIELDS

'It'll cost money,' said Dolly, 'on account of it's got to go in all the papers including the local ones down Valley Fields way, I know there's one called the South London Argus and there may be half a dozen more. That's up to you to find out. I want them in tomorrow morning, so you'll have to do some getting around, even if you do have a blister. But it'll bring home the bacon, believe me.'

Soapy was examining the script with the puzzled eye of one who is not abreast.

'How do you mean, bring home the bacon, baby?'

'That's the way I figure it. I told you the Yorke dame wasn't any too strong for Valley Fields anyway, so what happens when hundreds of people come horning in on her with cats of all descriptions and prob'ly letting half of them loose in the garden? And if the cats don't do the trick, we can switch to something else. There's plenty of other things. I say she'll pack up and leave pronto. Am I right, or am I right?'

Soapy drew a long breath. Even to him all things had been made clear, and he was telling himself that he had known all along that the light of his life would find a way.

'Honey,' he said, when emotion allowed him to speak,
'there's no one---'

'Say, tell you something,' said Dolly happily. 'I'm beginning to think that myself.'

17

TUCKED away in odd corners of the aristocratic Mayfair section of London there exist, like poor relations of the rich, certain alleys and byways which would be far more at home in the humbler surroundings of Whitechapel or Shoreditch. Halsey Court was one of these. Leila Yorke, on her way to the offices of the J. Sheringham Adair investigation agency two mornings after Dolly had put her plan of campaign into action, found it dark, dirty, dismal and depressing and far too full of prowling cats. Circumstances had so arranged themselves on the previous day as to make her reluctant, if she lived to be a hundred, ever to see another cat again.

She mounted the three flights of stone stairs that led to the dingy room where Chimp Twist passed his days and with a brief nod dusted a chair and sat down, eyeing him with the intentness of a woman who had come for professional advice and meant to get it.

He was not a very exhilarating spectacle. Sally, drawing a word-picture of him for her benefit, had called him a frightful little man with a face like a monkey and a waxed moustache, and when he had come to Castlewood to obtain a photograph of her husband, Leila Yorke had been struck by the accuracy of the description. But one does not engage an investigator for his looks. What counts is brain, and she had been favourably impressed by his obvious sagacity. Like Dolly, she would not have trusted him to tell her the right time, but she was not proposing to trust him. All she wanted from him was his trained assistance in tracking down the unknown hellhound responsible for the quite untrue statement that she was in need of cats of all descriptions.

 'Hope I’m not interrupting you when you're busy on the mysterious affair of the Maharajah's Ruby,' she said, 'but I'd like a conference.'

Chimp leaned back and put the tips of his fingers together.

'With reference to the matter we were discussing when I
visited your residence, madam?' he said, assuming the manner and diction he always employed with clients. In private
life he spoke in the vernacular and generally out of the side
of his mouth, but in his official capacity he modelled his style
on the more gentlemanly detectives in the books he read. 'I
can assure you that everything is being done to bring that
to a successful conclusion. My whole organization is working
on it. Half a dozen of my best men are busy on the investigation at this moment. Let me see, who did I put on the case? Wilbraham, Jones, Evans, Meredith, Schwed…yes, fully half a dozen. They are scouring London from end to end. It is as if you had pressed a button and set in motion some vast machine. The Adair agency is like a kind of octopus, stretching its tentacles hither and thither and---'

Leila Yorke was not a patient woman. She banged the desk, causing a cloud of dust to rise, and Chimp's voice trailed away. Better men than he had fallen silent when Leila Yorke banged desks - Aubrey Popgood of her firm of publishers for one and Cyril Grooly, his partner, for another, and similar effects had been produced on head waiters in restaurants when she banged tables. As she sometimes explained to intimate friends, it was all in the follow-through.

In short,' she said, 'you're telling me you're good.'

Chimp admitted that this was what he had intended to convey.

'Right,' said Leila Yorke briskly. 'So now we've settled that, perhaps you will let me mention what I've come about.'

‘Not the matter we were discussing when I visited your residence?'

'No. Cats.'

Chimp blinked.

'Did you say cats?'

'And dogs.'

'I don't think I quite follow you, madam.'

'You will,' said Leila Yorke, and opening her bag she produced a wad of newspaper clippings. 'Read those.'

Chimp put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Seeing him in his normal state, one would have said that nothing could make him look more repulsive, but these glasses went far to performing that miracle. Even Leila Yorke, though a strong woman, winced at the sight. He read the clippings and raised a surprised and enquiring eye.

'You are fond of cats, madam?'

'I like them in moderation, always provided they don't go for the birds, but you don't suppose I put those advertisements in the papers, do you? Somebody's playing a practical joke on me, and I want you to find out who it is, so that I can strangle him with my bare hands. Cats of all descriptions! I'll say they were. I don't know how many people there are living in South London, but they all called at Castlewood yesterday, and every one of them was carrying a cat and wanted me either to buy it or pay him for the time I'd wasted telling him to bring it. I never saw so many cats in my life. I was up to my waist in them. Black cats, tabby cats, striped cats, cats with bits chewed out of their ears…it was like a mouse's nightmare. And more coming every minute. If it hadn't been for Widgeon's cousin George, they'd have been there still.'

She paused, her eyes gleaming as she relived those testing moments, and Chimp asked who Widgeon's cousin George was.

'He's a policeman. He and Widgeon have got the house next door. He suddenly appeared and told the multitude to pass along, which they did, and I don't blame them. I'd have passed along myself if a man that size had told me to. Thank heaven for policemen, I say. Salt of the earth, those boys.'

Chimp preserved a rather prim silence. He did not share her enthusiasm for the constabulary, with whom his relations both in his native country and in England had been far from cordial. Fewer and less vigilant officers were what both the United States and Great Britain needed, in his opinion, if they were to have any chance of becoming earthly paradises.

'Very efficient, that Cousin George. Got lots of weight, and threw it about like a hero. I suppose he was grateful to me because I'd taken two of the five-shilling tickets for the concert in aid of the Policemen's Orphanage. Just shows it was right what the fellow said about casting your bread on the waters. He couldn't have been more zealous if I'd bought up the entire front row of orchestra stalls. Well, that ended the episode of the cats.'

Chimp said that was satisfactory, and Leila Yorke corrected him.

'Not so darned satisfactory, because this morning there were the dogs, and he wasn't around to cope with them.'

'Dogs, madam?'

'How many breeds of dogs are there?'

Chimp was unable to supply the information, but said he thought there were a good many.

'Well, representatives of every known breed were there this morning with the exception of Mexican chihuahuas. I don't think I noticed any of them among those present, though I may be wrong. I'm fond of dogs, mind you, I've got six of them at home in the country, but---'

'Castlewood is not your home?'

'No, I only took the place because I was planning to write a book about the suburbs. I live at Loose Chippings in Sussex, and I'm beginning to wish I was back there. A little more of this, and Valley Fields will have seen the last of me. What's the matter?'

What had prompted the question had been a sudden aguelike quiver which had run through her companion's weedy frame, causing his waxed moustache to behave like a tuning-fork. Chimp Twist was, as has been indicated, astute, and a blinding light had flashed upon him. As clearly as if she had appeared before him and given him the low-down herself, he saw behind these unusual occurrences the shapely hand of Mrs. Thomas G. Molloy. His client had spoken of practical jokers. There was nothing of the practical joker about Dolly Molloy. She was strictly a business woman, actuated always by business motives. And Soapy, the dumb brick, had told him all about that ice, even to the very spot where it was hidden. It figured, he was saying to himself, yes it certainly figured.