The Narrow Cell. Ronal Kayser
You can’t deny you are.”
“But I do deny it,” said the dark sister. “You may be tickled pink, but that’s because you’re so deliciously primitive, darling. When actually it won’t make the least difference. You’ll go on just as before, boozing and sleep-ing-around, until one fine day Al Dearborn slits your pretty throat.”
Jessie Axiter broke in, fluttering: “Corinne! Girls! What will the lieutenant think of us?”
“Mother,” said Corinne, “her habits aren’t any secret from the police. They call her by her first name at the sub-station—if they are charitable. Otherwise, God-knows-what.”
“Are you a cop?” Lally murmured to Kenmore. “You don’t look like one. I think you look like a football coach. College, not high school.”
“That,” said Corinne, “is what she tells all the boys who are too old to look like football heroes.”
Kenmore ignored the bitter brat. He stared down at the younger girl. “Yes, I am . . . Why should you be glad? Any of you?”
Under his searching scrutiny, Lally gave a little blurred giggle.
“I bet you think I haven’t any brassiere on.” In fact, the white gown was almost shamelessly low-cut. “Well, I have so. A very special one, from New York, and it cost—you guess.”
The settee caught Jessie Axiter’s collapsing, spent weight. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and burst into tears. “Corinne, take your sister upstairs.”
“No,” Kenmore insisted. “I want her to answer that.”
Lally’s entrance had obviously been fortified by a very stiff drink, the effects of which were rising in her clouding blue eyes.
“Twen’y-fi’ dollars,” she mumbled.
“I mean why you should be glad.”
“Because Uncle Henry saw through us,” Corinne told him, “is why. When you perform your autopsy, take a good look at his tongue. He had a blunt one.”
She stood.
“Come along, darling, before you’re sick on the nice parquetry, and you know Ella hates that.”
“No,” said Kenmore, “she isn’t that drunk . . . Look here. Don’t touch this. But have you ever seen it before?”
Lally’s blue eyes focused with some difficulty on the envelope.
“No,” she denied.
“Miss Corinne?”
The dark sister shook her head. “I’ve no idea—what is it, anyway?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I am trying to find out,” said Kenmore. “What it was doing in the guesthouse.”
“It probably fell out of the carpenter’s pocket,” Corinne thought. “We don’t know anyone named Bur-rett, and I never heard of New Gilead, Michigan.”
“Mrs. Axiter?”
Tears trickled down Jessie Axiter’s too-powdered cheeks. She looked up at Kenmore, and for the first time he saw the faint and ancient scar on her throat under the thick powder.
“That isn’t Henry’s handwriting,” said she. “Mr. Kenmore. Lally does have headaches. I’m sure that is why . . . She is simply not responsible when she has these spells.”
And so wonderfully made is the human mind, Kenmore thought it even possible she believed what she said.
“Yes,” said the lieutenant. “But have you any reason to think what she told us might be true? If your brother had an enemy—?”
“Oh, no!”
“I don’t necessarily mean a blood feud, Mrs. Axiter. But if he was involved, let’s say, in a lawsuit? If he had been annoyed by a crank in some way recently?”
And he ran down the list of commonest motives for murder.
“No,” Jessie Axiter repeated, “no, no.”
“Did you notice,” persisted Lieutenant Kenmore, “anything unusual in his manner? He was worried . . . or wrapped up in something he mightn’t have talked about?”
“Not at all,” said Corinne. “We had dinner at the Loquat House tonight. Uncle Henry left early, before the dessert, because of the Commando raid drill. That was the last we saw of him, and he was certainly in the best of spirits then.”
Lieutenant Kenmore went outside and, pausing on the verandah, tamped tobacco into his pipe. There was a great deal wrong in the house of death, but what was significantly wrong? He couldn’t tell . . . The scene was too like one of those pictures in which the artist deliberately includes several score errors, and challenges you to count them accurately.
He was not to smoke the pipe of contemplation as yet.
A light showed now above the garage’s triple doors. The lieutenant found a flight of outside stairs. He climbed, and knocked.
Stifled tones told him, “Yup, come in.” Kenmore en-tered a small, slope-ceilinged room that had an ill-kept, masculine, bachelor appearance. A box couch fitting against the lower wall, between bookshelves, wore a rumpled blanket cover. Copies of Time, Sunset, and Popular Machanics lay strewn over a table in the middle of the room. The pine floor lacked any covering.
“Hello, where are you?”
Kenmore heard footsteps, and then a small, bald, moustached man came around a partition at the room’s end. He appeared in an undershirt and trousers, with his suspenders falling to his knees.
“Fred Crush?” the lieutenant asked, and showed his badge.
Crush nodded; then held the nozzle of a medicinal-looking tube to his nostril; flattened the companion nostril under his thumb, and sniffed noisily.
“Yup,” said he in a congested tone. “What you want?” And as an afterthought: “ ’Scuse me. Lots of pneumonitis around. A working man can’t take chances with his health, it’s all he’s got.”
Kenmore replied: Fred Crush had been a witness tonight, had he not?
“Uh-huh. Pull yourself up a chair.” The gardener seated himself on the box couch. He squeezed out a thumbnail’s length of the nasal jelly, tossed that into his mouth, and swallowed, grimacing. “I guess I can’t tell you much. They had him outside on the grass by the time I got down there.”
“They called you?”
“Nuh, I heard her carrying-on, crying. Miz Axiter.”
“And then?”
“Well, sir,” said Crush, “that’s just about all there was to it.”
Kenmore looked at him. “Nobody told you to do anything about it?”
“Oh. Yup. She said to call a doctor, so I went in the house.”
“Ran across the tennis court?”
Crush nodded.
Kenmore said, “All the way to the house, when there was a phone right there?”
“Well, I went in there first. There was a phone, all right, but I didn’t see any book. I had to look up the number before I called. That’s why I went to the house, mister.”
“And which doctor did you call?”
The gardener gave a headshake. “I didn’t, I told Corinne about it.”
“And then,” said Kenmore, “you weren’t interested enough to go back to the guesthouse and see what was happening?”
Crush’s eyes refused to meet his inquisitor’s. “I dunno what good I could ’a done.”
“Where