Obit Delayed (17 page)

And that was the way it ended—that delayed obituary for a battered blonde. The casual murder that didn’t matter because it happened somewhere every night. Mitch remembered that first brief item he’d tapped out five dawns ago and grinned. There was no telling where this thing would lead to when the federals got busy tracing that loaded doll, and one thing was a certainty—a bullet-riddled man in the general hospital would recover a lot sooner with that guard away from his door. Norma Wales could get some rest now. Her man was safe.

Mitch looked up, sensing curious eyes. “I think he’s meditating,” The Duchess said. “Maybe we should just leave on tiptoe.”

“Did somebody say something?” Mitch asked.

“Oh, nothing important,” Ernie said. “I just thought you might like to know that Dave Singer’s suddenly remembered where he dumped Rita’s body. His tongue slipped when we found a few blond hairs and a scrap of red cloth under the seat cushions of his car.”

“Cerise,” The Duchess corrected.

“Dave swears she was dead when he found her. He moved the body because he thought Hoyt was trying to frame him.”

“Dave thinks everybody’s trying to frame him,” Mitch observed. “It’s an occupational disease. But let him sweat for a while; he may remember a lot of other things.”

Ernie’s tired eyes brightened and the corners of his mouth rolled up into a smile. “Still after Costro, aren’t you?” he murmured. “‘A cancerous sore on the body of society, corrupting the weak, destroying the young—’ Honestly, Mitch, I never knew you had so much hair to let down!”

The letter! Ernie was quoting from that letter, and no man should have to listen to the reading of his own will. Mitch was on his feet in an instant, bellowing like a stuck bull.

“Lois!”

Ordinarily he’d have waited ten or fifteen minutes for a response, but nothing was normal today. Lois appeared in the doorway before he could get his mouth shut. “Don’t you ever follow instructions?” he roared. “Look at me! Am I dead or alive?”

“Refuse to answer on the grounds that it might intimidate you,” prompted The Duchess, but Lois had learned long ago to ignore the antics of outraged employers. “Mr. Parsons is on the phone,” she announced.

Parsons. One word and Mitch deflated like a tired balloon. All week he’d been expecting the ax, but not today. Not when he finally had a story. “Tell him I’m busy. Tell him to talk to Delafield—”

“I did tell him and he swore at me. Mr. Parsons says he doesn’t want to talk to the office boy; he wants to talk to the boss.”

Her message delivered, Lois flounced out of the office; and Mitch was still trying to believe his own ears when The Duchess winked at him.

“Congratulations,” she said. “It sounds like you’ve just been promoted.”

If you liked Obit Delayed check out:

False Witness

My name is Markham Grant. I am thirty-nine years old, five foot-eleven, 180 pounds, brown hair turning to gray at the temples, grayish-brown eyes, and not really as haggard as that face on my passport photo. I am married and have three children: Mark Jr., 12; Laurel, 10; and Peter, 7. My wife, Nancy, is a very pretty woman, a good wife and a dutiful mother. We have a three-bedroom home in the suburbs, a two-year-old station wagon, and no major domestic problems. Neither of us, Nancy or myself, is an alcoholic or a tramp, and we get along. She has her world—the house, the kids, the P-TA and the antique auctions, and I have my life at the office in New York—Harrison House Publications.

I’ve been with Harrison House for a long time. I was with them before the war, and when I got back my job was waiting for me with a promotion. There was a time, just after the war, when I toyed with the idea of breaking loose and trying something on my own; but then the first baby came along and a salary check looked pretty good. Respectability isn’t so bad when you get used to it, and I’ve done pretty well. I don’t own a gray flannel suit, but only because I prefer brown. I live quietly—as quietly as a man can live with three offspring in the house. Occasionally Nancy will cook up a little Saturday night party, and once in a while I have to dine and wine a client—but nothing riotous. My youth is definitely waning. Anything over four Martinis, and I fall asleep. Last winter I started taking vitamin pills.

But it was the last week of July when Ferguson walked into my office with the sailing schedule. A hot, muggy July; and I hadn’t been home for three nights. There was this big epic we were setting up for a fall printing, for one thing, but that wasn’t the real reason. For months I’d been manufacturing excuses. Life was getting dull. Nancy and I didn’t have much to say to one another any more, and the kids were getting old enough not to miss me if I didn’t come home. I had things on my mind—problems. Nothing definitive, just a gnawing uneasiness that might have been shrugged off as spring fever, except that it wasn’t spring any more. I’d taken to remembering things—unimportant things from my childhood, and there was one thing in particular: my father’s singing the morning he died. It was a long time ago—back in the days of dust and depression, and the man so poor they had to take up a collection in the family to buy a decent suit of clothes for his burial; but he died singing. I kept remembering that, possibly because I was alive and hadn’t even tried to sing for years.

And so I began to take every opportunity to stay in the city at night—not to do anything riotous, but to go off alone to some small, dark bar where a three-piece band beat out a rhythm I could feel in my stomach, and I could nurse along that third Martini—eyeing the women at the bar and remembering the war, and college, and how my father died singing. I knew what I was doing—I was trying to hang onto something I couldn’t have anymore. I was making a fool of myself, and if I didn’t stop I’d get beyond the dreaming stage and do a real good job of it. That’s the trouble with a methodical mind. Even when it tries to be reckless, it’s taking inventory. I could sit there half-hidden in the darkness, sipping my elixir of youth and planning conquests that weren’t ever going to come off; but all of the time I’d be standing outside of myself looking on with a mixture of amusement and sadness.

Ferguson was no dreamer. Sandy-haired, beetle-browed, and old enough to be my father, he could probably pin my shoulders to a mat any day of the week. He never came into my office unless there was a reason, and he never wasted any words getting to that reason. And this day the reason gave me more of a lift that all of the vitamin pills, Martinis and bar-flies combined: Tor Holberg was writing his memoirs. I’d heard rumbles of it through the trade, but nothing definite until Ferguson spelled it out for me. The gallant old rebel was holed up somewhere in the mountains of his native Norway, writing a book that could well turn out to be pure dynamite.

“—Or akvavit,” Ferguson added. “There’s not much difference.”

Or Holberg. There wasn’t much difference between Tor Holberg and dynamite, as I recalled. As Ferguson talked, the image of him had come to mind: a huge, barrel-chested, firm-voiced man who looked more like a gladiator than a diplomat. Soldier, statesman and rebel—he’d been in the fore of his country’s struggle for independence, the backbone of its resistance in the Second World War, and a leading figure in world affairs during all the years between until his retirement nearly a decade ago. I knew his story and remembered his personality. I’d seen him several times during the early days of the UN. Now the giant was stirring again, and I was quick to catch Ferguson’s enthusiasm.

“Socialist, communist, democrat—he’s run the gamut of them all, and knows all of the skeletons in all of the closets,” Ferguson said. “If he lays it on the line, and I can’t conceive of Holberg’s doing anything else, this will be the literary purchase of the generation. And I’ve got it all but sewed up, Mark. Do you, by any chance, remember a broken-down excuse for a newspaperman by the name of Nate Talmadge?”

Nate Talmadge! I was beginning to feel young again, and I hadn’t even had my daily vitamins.

“The lousiest war correspondent who ever filched a case of VIP’s cognac,” I said.

Ferguson grinned. “I thought you two knew each other. Talmadge is living in Oslo now, and it seems he’s an old buddy-buddy of Holberg’s. He knows where this mountain hideout is located, visits the old boy regularly, and has him convinced that Harrison House is the only publisher that will do him justice. All I need now is for someone to go over there with the contracts and sew up the deal.”

Ferguson paused. His eyes were already enjoying my anticipation.

“I hate to drive you away from the cool comfort of New York in summer,” he added, “but you’ve been looking a little peaked lately, anyway. An ocean voyage might do you good. A casual one, of course. No use stirring up any possible competition. Just a little summer voyage. They tell me the fishing is wonderful in Norway.”

If I ever have anything left after taxes, I’ll remember Ferguson in my will. I was reaching for my hat before he’d finished pulling the sailing schedule out of his pocket …

… It was raining when the
Oslofjord
docked at Bergen—a soft, slow drizzle that dropped like a gauze curtain from the low-hanging clouds. It was gray and damp, and yet it was festive. The Norwegians love their ships as they love their children, and a favorite child had come home. The dock was crowded, and somewhere a band was playing. Except for a brief glimpse of the Shetland Islands, this was the first land in nine days, and the light rain didn’t keep anyone below decks. A good many of the passengers were disembarking. Bergen, Stavanger, Copenhagen and then the home port—Oslo, that was the schedule. I was taking the full tour. Talmadge had a finger on Holberg, and if there had been any great hurry I would have been shipped off by air. But I was supposed to be on a vacation, and I liked the idea. I wanted to visit all the ports and see as much as I could, because this was my first trip abroad since the war and a kind of last chance at something my mind had yet to identify.

I might as well be honest—I wasn’t having too good a time. I was trying too hard. I was laughing too loud at the lounge jokes, making too-obvious a play for the cute, redheaded schoolteacher from Ottumwa, Iowa, and manufacturing a zest that hadn’t quite come off. But there was a reason. I was still too keyed-up, and this had had a peculiar effect on my whole system. Three nights straight I’d been stricken with headaches—sudden, intense and blinding. I hadn’t been seasick—the crossing was like a pond of glass—but land looked good to me. I stood at the prow of the ship as we nosed up to the quay, vaguely aware that I shouldn’t have left without a camera. The kids would have enjoyed a few shots of the picturesque, Hanseatic harbor. Vaguely aware … only vaguely.

“Good morning, Mr. Grant. You’re feeling better this morning?”

I turned around, pulling the collar of my raincoat up about my ears. We’d crossed over into August along the way, and the memory of summer was getting cool in these northern waters. I turned around knowing who would be facing me—Sundequist. Otto Sundequist, Stockholm, industrialist—retired. He was tall and bronzed, with a fringe of gray showing beneath his jaunty beret, and I had good reason to marvel at his confessed sixty-seven years. As tablemates in the dining room, (along with the attractive schoolteacher, Ruth Atkins, and a haughty
grande dame
of a school that should have been extinct, Mrs. Perriman) I’d made Sundequist’s acquaintance early in the voyage. He was a handsome man with indefatigable vitality. A fast mile around the deck that left me ready to collapse in the nearest deck chair was just a warm-up to a fast game of shuffleboard for Sundequist. I suppose I was a little envious, or it may have been embarrassment that made me resent his question now. Three nights the headaches had come—once at dinner, once during a film in the lounge, last night at bridge.

And standing at Sundequist’s elbow was an eager Ruth Atkins, who had probably never had a headache in her life.

“Yes,” I said. “I feel fine this morning. Fine.”

“You slept well?”

I hesitated. Had I slept well? There was something—something I didn’t quite remember. Some kind of a dream.

Ruth Atkins had probably never had a bad night’s sleep, either.

“Wonderful!” I answered. “Like a top! There must have been something in that nightcap we had together.”

Sundequist smiled. It was the easy, assured smile of a man who knows his place in life and enjoys it.

“Not at all, Grant,” he insisted. “You were tired, that’s all. Tired of relaxing. Oh, I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before. You American businessmen live at such a tremendous pace all year, and then try to squeeze in all of your relaxation in a few weeks time. The nervous system just can’t handle it—the sudden change is too much. A perfectly normal reaction. Nothing to fear.”

Sundequist liked to talk. He had a deep but soothing voice and spoke a beautiful Oxonian English. I hadn’t told him the truth. My headache was gone and I had slept, but I didn’t feel the way I wanted—and expected—to feel. I certainly didn’t feel fine. I had—and there was no other word for it—a kind of dread. I looked off toward the city again. A dread of what? Not of that beautiful harbor, surely. Not of anything beyond those mountains. I tried to shrug off the thought. It was easier to accept Sundequist’s explanation.

And Ruth Atkins, whose normally good-natured face had been appropriately grave during Sundequist’s questions, was now beginning to show all the symptoms of the typical American tourist at the edge of foreign soil. The small camera that dangled from her neck was being adjusted. She raised one arm and squinted at a light-meter, trying to locate a thoroughly hidden sun.

“Oh, to heck with it,” she exclaimed. “I never can read this gadget. I get better pictures when I just go ahead and shoot blind.”

And then she grinned at me—that was the only adequate word for it. She was charming. A row of freckles marched across her nose, and a short bang of reddish pair peeked from beneath the hood of her bright plaid raincoat. I’d had seven days to puzzle about her age—and settled on something between twenty-two and twenty-five—and seven nights to wonder if she was really as uninhibited as she seemed, or just amazingly wholesome. I’d never quite got around to finding out.

“You’re going ashore with me, aren’t you, Mark?” she asked brightly. “The deck steward tells me there’s a perfectly wonderful flower and fish market right down in the center of the city.” And then she paused, wrinkling her nose. “I do hope the flowers outnumber the fish—or perhaps they won’t have any on a rainy day.”

The note of dismay in her voice was met by Sundequist’s laughter.

“My dear Miss Atkins,” he exclaimed, “in Bergen there is no such thing as a day that is not rainy! I assure you that the flowers will be in the marketplace—and a lovely sight, too. But if it’s a really spectacular sight that you wish for your picture taking, then, by all means, you must take the funicular to the top of Fløyen. You will be over a thousand feet above sea-level at the top with a magnificent view of the city. You might even have time for a cup of coffee in the restaurant—but don’t spoil your lunch. The dining room steward has promised us a treat.”

Ruth Atkins had been hanging on every word. We’d both heard of the funicular, and her face was now as bright as the sun she’d been searching for.

“Do you suppose we’d really have time?” she asked.

“I’m sure you would,” Sundequist said. “It’s a short ride—no more than twelve or fifteen minutes each way. And you pass the outdoor market on the way to the station. Of course, there is a walk up the mountain as well, but it takes much longer and you miss the novelty of riding on the Fløybanen. But then—” Sundequist had been addressing his words to Ruth all this time. Now he paused and looked at me with grave and calculating eyes. “—perhaps it is not such a good idea after all. Mr. Grant may not feel up to such a trip after last night.”

I’d already told him I was feeling wonderful, even if it was a lie. Perhaps I looked less than enthusiastic. I squared my shoulders and tried to stare down those discerning eyes.

“Race you to the top,” I said.

Sundequist laughed. “Not today, Mr. Grant. I have done that very thing in years past, but not today. No, my friends, I am going back into the warm, dry lounge and await the lunch call. I love this beautiful city far too much to attempt to pay my respects in so brief a call. But I’ll be waiting to hear your adventures when you return.”

We had walked toward the gangplank as we talked, Ruth already impatient for her sightseeing. By this time most of those who were going ashore had already gone. The gangplank was clear as we started down.

“Just follow the quay all the way down to the fishmarket,” Sundequist called after us, “and you’ll have no trouble. But remember now, don’t be late. I’ll be expecting to see you both at lunch.”