Tales for a Stormy Night (8 page)

Before the clerk took the money from his hand, Denny felt a hard clap on his shoulder.

“Come into the manager’s office, buddy.”

He stuck the money in his pocket and swung around on the man who had spoken.

“Come quiet unless you want to be carted,” he added flatly.

Looking up at him, Denny realized his muscles were as thick as his brogue and he had never heard one thicker in Ireland. He did as he was told. In that small office, he was almost in a chair when the big man yanked him up again.

“Let’s have your identification.”

“Let’s have yours,” Denny said, trying for boldness.

“I’m the house detective,” the big one roared glaring at him angrily.

Denny shook himself free. “What the hell is this all about? I’m with the Irish Players here on a visit.”

“Isn’t that lovely. You’re an actor, are you?”

“I am.”

“Then let’s see you act. Gimme your wallet.”

“It’s upstairs with my wife. Keep your fist out of my pocket.”

“I’ll put it down your throat in a minute. You’re a fine credit to Ireland.” He pulled the bill from Denny’s pocket.

“That’s mine,” Denny cried.

“Is it now? All that money on an actor.” He picked up the phone on the desk. “Gimme the woman who put in the complaint.” He looked Denny over with contempt. “They’re raising the fine ones over there now, for all they’re learning them Gaelic.”

Denny stared at the $20 as the detective pressed it smooth on the desk. “Madame,” he said into the phone, “I’ve got him and your $20.”

Denny’s heart leaped at the sound of her voice. Even from where he sat he could hear the fine, crooning lilt of it: “That was wonderful quick, officer. Just take the twenty off him for me and let him go.”

Peg called into the phone as though she were trying for an echo across the hills. The detective had to hold the instrument at near arm’s length. But he brought it up quick to say: “It isn’t that easy, ma’am. You’ll have to identify him. Come down now to the office.”

“Will it take long?” Peg crooned. “My husband’ll soon be home, and I’d as soon he didn’t know. It’s his family, you know.”

So, Denny thought, Richard had more with Peg than palaver.

The detective was as soft as butter with her. “There’s a rogue in my wife’s family, too,” he purred, “but I never cast it up to her though it was me turned him in.” He hung up the phone and glowered at Denny. “A nice little girl like that. You’re the fine bucko.”

Denny sat very still and thought about it all until Peg arrived. She looked from one to the other of the men, speechless.

“Well?” the detective demanded.

“That’s my husband,” she burst out.

For only a second did the detective waver. He fitted the tips of his fingers together as he added one thing to another. His face lengthened in sympathy. “You can thank your stars you found him out before you had a string of childer’ to worry about.”

“You don’t understand,” Peg said.

The detective threw his arms in the air. “Didn’t you tell me he threatened you? Didn’t you say he promised to stand up in the Crown Theatre and proclaim you a wanton woman if you didn’t cough up?”

“Yes, but…”

“And didn’t you say he was mad to match a twenty he’d lost on a horse?”

“That was his cousin Richard said that,” Peg cried.

Denny grinned, having the gist of it. Sweet William had run and lost early, but whoever was collecting from Richard was late on his rounds.

The detective smashed his fist down on the desk. “But this is the one I caught placing the bet! Right out there.” He waved his hand toward the lobby. ‘Sweet William,’ he says, holding out the twenty and I nabbed him.”

“Hold on a minute,” Denny shouted. “Sweet William ran in the second race. What would I be doing betting on a horse already in the pasture?”

“There! That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” the detective triumphantly cried. “They were in it together!”

“Oh,” Peg said, after a second, a look of great understanding lighting her face. “They were in it together, were they? What mischief, the two of them.”

What mischief indeed, Denny thought. “I was not placing a bet,” he said with great deliberateness. “I wouldn’t know a bookmaker from a cobbler in this country. I was getting change of the twenty.”

“And where, love, did you get the twenty?” said Peg.

As though she could be persuaded now. “I shook it out of Richard.”

“After he shook down your wife for it,” the detective put in harshly.

“She was a hell of a lot more shakeable for him than ever she was for me then,” Denny shouted. He turned on the big man and faced up to him. “Since you’re so set on patching us up, let me ask you a question: who carries the purse in your house?”

The detective’s mouth fell open. “My wife Norah does,” he said in no more than a whisper.

“And I suppose your pockets are bulging?”

The detective smiled wanly. “The sad truth is, she’s so tight she could squeeze a ha’penny out of a mouse.”

Peg reached for the money, but Denny clamped his hand over it first. “I’ve earned this twice,” he said. “I want to spend it before I’ve got to go out and earn it over again.”

Peg threw her head back. “I suppose we’re treating Richard on it, too, since he was such a help to you getting it out of me?”

“No,” Denny said, “but you might say we’re treating each other.”

“That was a mean prank,” Peg said. “I’d never’ve suspected you of conspiring like that, Denny.”

“Nor did I think you’d tell me the story you did, love, of paying the rent with it.”

“’Twas just for today, dear, to save the money. Tomorrow I’d have told you the truth.”

“Then tomorrow I’ll tell it to you,” said Denny. “Tonight we’ll celebrate the conspiracy.”

1953

S
HERIFF ANDREW WILLETS STOOD
at the living-room window and watched his deputies herd back from the lawn another surge of the curious, restive people of Pottersville. Some had started out from their houses, shops, or gardens at the first sound of his siren, and throughout the long morning the crowd had swelled, winnowed out, and then swelled again.

Behind him in the kitchen, from which the body of Matt Thompson had been recently removed, the technical crew of the state police were at work with microscope and camera, ultraviolet lamp and vacuum cleaner. He had full confidence in them but grave doubts that their findings would add much weight to, or counterbalance by much, the spoken testimony against Phil Canby. They had not waited, some of those outside, to give it to police or state’s attorney; they passed it to one another, neighbor to stranger, stranger sometimes back again to neighbor.

It was possible to disperse them, the sheriff thought, just as a swarm of flies might be waved from carrion; but they would as quickly collect again, unless it were possible to undo murder—unless it were possible to go out and say to them: “It’s all a mistake. Matt Thompson fell and hit his head. His daughter Sue got hysterical when she found him…” Idle conjecture. Even had he been able to say that to the crowd they would not have dispersed. They would not have believed it. Too many of them were now convinced that they had been expecting something like this to happen.

There was one person in their midst responsible in large measure for this consensus, a lifetime neighbor of both families, Mrs. Mary Lyons, and she was prepared also to give evidence that Phil Canby was not at home with his grandson the night before, at the hour he swore he was at home and asleep.

Sheriff Willets went outdoors, collected Mrs. Lyons, and led her across the yard between the Thompson house and the house where Phil Canby lived with his daughter and son-in-law, and up her own back steps. From the flounce of her skirts and the clack of her heels he could tell she didn’t want to come. She smiled when she looked up at him, a quick smile in which her eyes had no part.

“I hope this won’t take long, Andy,” she said when he deliberately sat down, forcing her hospitality. “I should give the poor girl a hand.”

“In what way, Mrs. Lyons?”

“With the house,” she said, as though there would be nothing unusual in her helping Sue Thompson with the house. “It must be a terrible mess.”

“You’ve got lots of time,” he said. “There’s nobody going to be in that house for quite a while except the police.”

Mrs. Lyons made a noise in her throat, a sort of moan, to indicate how pained she was at what had happened across her back yard.

“You were saying over there,” Willets went on, “that you knew something terrible was going to happen.”

“Something terrible did happen, even before this,” she said, “Phil Canby taking after that girl. Sue Thompson’s younger than his own daughter.”

“Just what do you mean, taking after her?”

“I saw him kiss her,” she said. Then, as though it had hurt her to say it in the first place, she forced herself to be explicit. “A week ago last night I saw Phil Canby take Sue in his arms and kiss her. He’s over sixty, Andy.”

“He’s fifty-nine,” the sheriff said, wondering immediately what difference a year or two made, and why he felt it necessary to defend the man in the presence of this woman. It was not that he was defending Canby, he realized; he was defending himself against the influence of a prejudiced witness. “And he gave it out the next day that he was going to marry her, and she gave it out she was going to marry him. At least, that’s the way I heard it.”

“Oh, you heard it right,” Mrs. Lyons said airily, folding her hands in her lap.

If it had been of her doing, he should not have heard it right, the sheriff thought. But Phil Canby had passed the age in life, and had lived too much of that life across the hedge from Mary Lyons, to be either preprecipitated into something or forestalled from it by her opinions. Had he looked up on the night he proposed to Sue Thompson and seen her staring in the window at them, likely the most he would have done would be to pull the windowshade in her face.

“Would you like your daughter to marry a man of fifty-nine, Andy?”

“My daughter’s only fifteen,” the sheriff said, knowing the answer to be stupid as soon as he had made it. He was no match for her, and what he feared was that he would be no match for the town, with her sentiments carrying through it as they now were carrying through the crowd across the way. They would want Phil Canby punished for courting a young girl, whatever Canby’s involvement in her father’s murder. “How old is Sue Thompson, Mrs. Lyons?”

“Nineteen, she must be. Her mother died giving birth to her the year after I lost Jimmie.”

“I remember about Jimmie,” the sheriff said, with relief. Remembering that Mary Lyons had lost a boy of four made her more tolerable. He wondered now how close she had got to Matt Thompson when his wife died. Nobody had been close to him from then on that Willets could remember. He had been as sour a man as ever gave the devil credence. A gardener by trade, Thompson had worked for the town of Pottersville, tending its landscape. A lot of people said that whatever tenderness he had went into the care of his flowers. One thing was agreed upon by all of them, it didn’t go into the care of his daughter. As he thought about it now, Willets caught a forlorn picture from memory: Sue as a child of five or six trotting to church at her father’s side, stopping when he stopped, going on when he went on, catching at his coattail when she needed balance but never at his hand, because it was not offered to her. Would no one but himself remember these things now?

“How long has it been since you were in the Thompson house, Mrs. Lyons?”

Her eyes narrowed while she weighed his purpose in asking it. “I haven’t been in the house in fifteen years,” she said finally.

He believed her. It accounted in part for her eagerness to get into it now. “She isn’t much of a housekeeper, Sue,” he said, to whet her curiosity further and to satisfy his own on what she knew of her neighbors. “Or maybe that’s the way Matt Thompson wanted it.”

She leaned forward. “What way?”

“It has a funny dead look about it,” he said. “It’s not dirty, but it just looks like nothing has been put in or taken out in fifteen years.”

“He never got over his wife’s death,” Mrs. Lyons said, “and he never looked at another woman.”

Her kind had no higher praise for any man, he thought. “Who took care of Sue when she was a baby?”

“Her father.”

“And when he was working?”

“I don’t know.”

“From what I’ve heard,” he lied, for he had not yet had the opportunity to inquire elsewhere, “you were very good to them, and so was Phil Canby’s wife in those days.”

“Mrs. Canby was already ailing then,” she snapped. “I was good to both families, if I say it myself.”

“And if you don’t,” the sheriff murmured, “nobody else will.”

“What?”

“People have a way of being ungrateful,” he explained.

“Indeed they do.”

“You know, Mrs. Lyons, thinking about it now, I wonder why Matt Thompson didn’t offer Sue for adoption.”

“You might say he did to me once.” A bit of color tinged her bleached face after the quick, proud answer. She had probably been at the Thompson house night and day then with solicitudes and soups, when Matt was home and when he wasn’t home.

Assuming Thompson to have been sarcastic with her—and he had had a reputation for sarcasm even that far back—the sheriff said: “Would you have taken the child? You must’ve been lonesome…after Jimmie.”

For once she was candid with him, and soft as he had not known her to be since her youth. “I’d have thought a good deal about it. I had a feeling there was something wrong with her. She was like a little old maid, all to herself. She’s been like that all her life—even in school, they say.”

“It makes you understand why she was willing to marry Phil Canby,” the sheriff said quietly. “Don’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t blame her,” Mrs. Lyons said. “This is one case where I don’t blame the woman.”

Willets sighed. Nothing would shake her belief that there was something immoral in Phil Canby’s having proposed marriage to a girl younger than his own daughter. “Last night,” he said, “your husband was away from home?”