The Narrow Cell. Ronal Kayser
“The elder one. The dark one. She’s a glacial, bitter brat. I wouldn’t predict how she’ll respond.”
And for the first time, Darwina’s tone sounded perturbed.
“Corinne has intelligence! It takes brains to be that sarcastic. She could do something, she could be useful. I don’t understand people who have intelligence and simply won’t use it.”
There were three more names on the card. Mary Yellick, said Darwina, was the cook. Ella Marion, the maid. And Fred Crush, the gardener. “But I don’t suppose the servants count, do they? Or Lally, either. It’s what Jessie and Corinne will think, and I don’t imagine you’ll find them very cooperative.”
“No,” said Lieutenant Kenmore. “Well. I had better let on I think it was accidental death, for a while at least.”
VI
. . . a houseful of women. My grandmother said, no roof was ever built big enough for that.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.
It being Thursday, and the maid’s night out, Kenmore’s ring at the front door was answered by Corinne Axiter. (The dark sister. Darwina’s glacial, bitter brat.)
“Yes. Please come in.” Corinne’s face was expressionless, as smooth as her straight-combed dark hair. Corinne missed prettiness by a little margin—a margin of reserve and sharp intelligence. She had what Kenmore considered bookish features, thin and cool and introspective.
From the front hallway, he followed the girl down three curved steps into what tried to be a baronial room. It only needed a suit of armor or so in its distant corners, the lieutenant felt. An enormous dragon-limbed table at the foot of the steps emphasized the expanse of glistening, parquetry floor; so did the succession of massive, blue velour-clad settees along the walls.
Window drapes of this same blue fell from ceiling-high valance boxes to spill yards of velvet upon the parquetry. A fireplace, unlit, was repellently large, austere, and cold. This last was flanked by somber oils, overwhelmed by their own great, gilt frames.
Jessie Axiter, a tiny figure on a blue settee, was now bearing up bravely with an obvious effort.
Kenmore said he regretted the necessity of questions. “For the coroner’s records, you know.
“Name of deceased, Henry R. Bowling,” murmured he, over an opened memo book. “What is the R for?” to Mrs. Axiter.
Jessie Axiter, seen now by light, was a fair-haired and ineffectual-seeming woman, amorphously flowing. Kenmore recognized at once that she hadn’t any force or thrust of personality; he imagined, though, she could cling to beat the very devil.
“Ross,” she told him. “It’s the family name on my mother’s side. She was Scottish. So were the Bowlings, only they were really English originally.”
“Mother,” said Corinne. “The officer only wants the name, he doesn’t care what it means.”
She misjudged Kenmore. He certainly had no objection to letting Jessie Axiter render an account in her own diffuse way.
“His age?”
“Sixty-two,” said Mrs. Axiter.
Kenmore continued in a disarmingly mechanical manner. Date and time of death, he had that. Reported by, place of death, character of premises, ditto. Last residence of deceased, 222 Laguna Terrace. Without the slightest change of tone, Kenmore asked: “How long had he lived here?”
“We came in ’39,” said Jessie Axiter. “That summer.”
That was to say, two years after the Catherine Hope Case. It was not quite what Kenmore had expected to hear. Henry Bowling might not even have heard of Catherine Hope.
Mrs. Axiter took advantage of the detective’s momentary preoccupation. “Though Henry always said he’d been a resident much longer than that—in spirit. He visited here the first time, I think in ’33. No, it must have been ’32. I remember he cast an absentee ballot, I had to get the papers and send them on, and after all the bother it didn’t make the least difference. Because Mr. Hoover wasn’t elected, anyway. Well, Henry simply fell in love with La Jolla, then. Of course, it’s changed since. It’s not at all the same place.”
“Last previous address?” said Kenmore.
“Mankato. We’re old Minnesota stock. Grandfather Bowling—my father, but I always called him that after my own children came—settled there at the time of the New Ulm Massacre.”
Lieutenant Kenmore had become almost resigned to it . . . Of every two persons you met on a San Diego street, one had lived here not more than a decade; of every three, one had come in the last year or so. Most people, like Henry Bowling, had their roots elsewhere.
It posed a peculiarly boom-town police problem, since so much a detective needed to uncover was somewhere else, maybe a thousand miles away.
The lieutenant asked, “Your brother’s birthplace was Minnesota, then?”
“Yes, in Mankato.”
“Occupation?”
“Why, retired. He was a newspaper man. A newspaper publisher.”
“Oh, mother.” Corinne was smoking a cigarette, or rather letting it smoke itself away in her slender, tapering fingers; with continual, small, birdlike pecks toward an ashtray. “He wasn’t really. What he did was sell the printed insides to little country papers. I don’t think you can call that being a newspaperman.”
Kenmore recognized ironic hostility in this comment, and reproach in Jessie Axiter’s answering glance. “Dear, I don’t think the police care exactly what he published. It was a newspaper supplement, at any rate. I’d call it being a newspaper publisher, and I’m sure he considered himself one.”
“Civil condition?” He interpreted. “Married? Widower?”
“Oh, no. Not Henry.”
“His father’s name?”
“David. David Bowling.”
“And his birthplace?”
“It was Linlithgow. That’s in Scotland.”
Kenmore scribbled. “And you say his mother’s maiden name was Ross.”
Mrs. Axiter smiled; said to Corinne, “You see, dear.” And to Kenmore: “Yes, Jessie Ross. She was a Linlithgow girl. They were childhood sweethearts. Grandfather Bowling came away to America to make his fortune, and then years later he went back and they were married, after they’d both waited for the other all that time. It was terribly romantic, wasn’t it? But he always said, she was worth crossing the ocean twice to win. She was a great beauty—you won’t see it in me, I take after him— but Lally’s the very image.”
Mrs. Axiter’s shoulder suddenly quivered, and she gave a little gasping sob.
“I’m sorry,” she said faintly, and touched a handkerchief to the corners of her wet eyes. “It’s just that a death in the family takes one back so.” She paused. “Do you think Saturday’s too soon for the funeral?”
“Well,” said Kenmore, “you’ve got to allow time for the coroner’s autopsy.”
He would sooner this question had not come up so abruptly.
“Oh.” The eyes widened above the handkerchief. Jessie Axiter looked to her daughter. “We hadn’t thought of that.”
“No,” said Corinne, and stared at Kenmore. “It didn’t occur to us. I should think Dr. Myatt’s signing the death certificate ought to satisfy the red tape. The other would be just a formality—and a pretty disagreeable formality.”
She bent forward.
“You saw off the top of their