Talmage Powell

Man Sinister

Chapter 1

I came out of the three-day spree in a flophouse on Diamond Street. After I decided where I was, I sat on the bed and held my head in my hands for a while. I found my coat crumpled on a chair. There was a nearly full pint of Old Seaman in the pocket. I gagged, looking at the whisky. It seemed that then as an alcoholic I was an also-ran.

I knew then that I was finished with this kind of drinking. It was not the inevitable belief born of hang-over and remorse. It was the simple recognition that whisky had not done for me what I had hoped. The wrong memories blacked out, leaving stark and clear the very memory I’d been wanting to escape for a long time. The memory of what I had done to my wife.

I slugged the Old Seaman once to still the shaking of my hands. I wanted a shave and a bath, after the drink slid down.

I put on the coat, and turned up the collar. Then I went out on Diamond Street, walked two blocks, and caught a taxi. I rode over to Papa Joe’s house.

A strange black car with New York plates was parked in the driveway. I went around to the rear entrance. Ellen was coming out of the pantry. She jumped like a frightened kitten. She and her brother, Wilfred, were the household servants. She was about seventeen, a peaked little thing with faded brown hair and startled brown eyes. She and Wilfred came of the poorest kind of mountain family.

“Oh, Mr. Martin!” She made it sound as if she had been scared by Old Nick himself.

“Who is the company from New York?”

“Your brother.” Then her mouth became petulant. Her voice was sullen as she added, “And with a new wife. A New York girl.”

I took the back stairs to the second floor. In my room I set the pint of Old Seaman on the bureau.

The door opened and Wilfred shuffled in. “I heard you come up, Mr. Martin. Anything I can fetch for you?”

He was a year or so older than his sister, an obese boy with a round, soft face thatched with limp, sandy hair. His face and his vacant, flat blue eyes suggested inbreeding. He was sly, evasive.

I shook my head. “How long has Harold been here?”

“Couple days.”

“Well, it’s a nice time of year to bring his new wife to Asheville. Plenty of summer color and cool nights in the mountains now.”

Wilfred grunted. “If there ain’t anything you need, I’ll be going on downstairs.”

After he went out, I picked up a razor, shaving cream, and a towel from the bureau. The door opened a second time. This time it was Papa Joe.

He slammed the door. He beat the tip of his cane against the floor. He carried the cane more like a weapon than an aid to his crippled right knee. He was a small man with pale blue-eyes, sparse gray hair always plastered to his narrow skull, and bitterness written all over him. He came from an old Southern family, the kind that used to have colonels.

“Steve, you stinker! You rotter!”

“I’ve been drunk before.”

“Not at a time like this. Look at you! Did you let Vera see you?”

“Vera?”

“Harold’s wife. A nice impression you’d have made. I hope you crawled in the back way.”

My face went hot. “I did. You make Vera sound pretty important.”

“Harold has done quite well for himself. But you wouldn’t understand much about a wife, would you?”

I had to sit down. “You’re hitting low.”

He laughed, a sound filled with sadistic pleasure. I looked at him. A sudden chill grabbed my spine.

“How long have you hated me this way?” I asked.

“Hated you? I don’t. I despise you, as I despise all weakness. Weakness in Government, in men, in theories. Unfortunately the weak number many, and are able to usurp power rightfully belonging to their protectors.”

“You’re telling me to get out?”

“Not at all. I rather enjoy the spectacle of you.”

He was not only my senior by twenty-eight years; he was the man who had raised me. I could not strike him. He had spoken his exit line. I kept my face turned until I heard him leave the room.

I got my shaving stuff together again. “Nuts to you,” I told the Old Seaman bottle. Like many women, the bottle would not keep its promises.

I shaved without my mind being on the task. I was stunned at the feelings I’d uncovered in Papa Joe. Something pretty excruciating must have happened to have shattered his control. I didn’t wonder much about it. There remained for me to leave as much like a gentleman as possible.

Now that I’d discovered his feelings, fragments of memories out of my youth came back — his treatment of me, little actions and words dropped here and there. I’d never thought too much of it before. I’d long been conditioned to accept the status of orphan in the household. Now I began to question Papa Joe’s purpose. Perhaps my status, my failures, had been food for years for his sadism.

I went downstairs. My head was pretty clear, though a dull ache was working on the base of my skull. I was beginning to get hungry.

The strange car was gone from the driveway. I threw my cigarette over the porch railing, went back in the house, and turned into the heavy, gloomy, overstuffed parlor. A woman was sitting in a mohair wing chair. She was thumbing through a magazine without seeing it.

When she looked up, I said, “How do you do? You must be Vera.”

“Why, yes, and I suppose you are Steven.”

She was beautiful. Her hair was a soft blonde mane. She had wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and good legs, and full breasts with a promise of lushness not hidden by her plunging neckline.

I offered her a cigarette. She took it, and as I held a light for her I had a close-up of her face. Natural, unplucked even brows, gray eyes, a mouth that was full without seeming large.

“Do you plan to be in Asheville long?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

I caught the cloud that shadowed her eyes for an instant. Maybe she had made the trip against her will. Or perhaps she just didn’t like it here.

“How do you like our natural wonders — Chimney Rock, the Smokies, the Vanderbilt house?”

“I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen any of them.”

Again that strain in her face. The room grew uncomfortable. She rose, walked to the window.

“How far is it to Pressley’s Drug Store?” she asked.

“About four blocks. Would you like something from there?”

“No. Harold went over there. He should have been back by now.” She stopped speaking. Her face was white. I went over beside her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No... no,” she said quickly. “I just haven’t been feeling up to par. The trip down and all, you know.”

Where the lace curtains parted, I glanced through the window. A man was standing in the shadows of a tree across the street. I couldn’t see details from here, but he was not Harold. Too short and blocky.

“It is a little close in here,” I said.

I raised the window, propped my palms on the dusty sill. The man across the street walked away. I turned from the window.

Vera said, “Would you mind terribly walking down toward the drug store? I’m worried about Harold. He’s a little upset. We had a bit of trouble with the car on the way down.”

“I’ll take a walk down there,” I said.

I went out into the hall. It was a long hall, with a high ceiling, gloomy as twilight. Portraits of Cranfords long dead reposed against the walls in oval frames.

As I reached the porch, Harold’s black car swung into the driveway. I waited for him. He smiled as he came up the porch steps carrying a small package he’d brought from the drug store.

We shook hands and said the usual. Long time no see. You’re looking well. All that.

He hadn’t changed much since the last time I’d seen him. Still the clear, fragile china skin, the light blond hair that waved a little, and with a few locks loose to the breeze. A few more lines were about his eyes, and his mouth was beginning to develop some of the steel-trap qualities of Papa Joe’s.

He was a magazine illustrator, a successful one. Periodically he would send little notices to the Asheville papers when his work was appearing in one of the big national magazines. Now and then nice old ladies and aspiring young artists from the local art club would drop around to ask for Harold’s address.

“It’s nice you could get away for a while,” I said to him.

Whatever was between Papa Joe and myself, I had lived a portion of my life with this man like a brother. We had never been close, though, and in school while I’d been getting a collar-bone broken playing football Harold had been on the debating team. Yet there was bound to be a sort of feeling between us in spite of the fact that we were only foster brothers, and nothing Papa Joe said or did would affect that.

“You should have written that you were married,” I said, “and were coming down. We’d have given you a reception.”

“The past three years haven’t given me much time to write,” he said. “I don’t care for parties, anyway.”

“Liar!” I laughed.

He turned on me suddenly. His eyes got hard. His voice was harsh. “I mean it, Steve! No parties. I didn’t come down here to fool around with a lot of people.”

“It’s your trip,” I said.

He hesitated. “Well, look, Steve. I didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded.”

“Forget it. I met your wife. Was she a model?”

“No. A secretary to a magazine editor.”

“She know how come I’m a Martin in a family of Cranfords?”

He nodded. “I sketched the details when I told her about you.”

I watched him go into the parlor. I’d been tense, talking to him. But he hadn’t asked about Bryanne, my own wife.

Chapter II

I walked upstairs. But I wasn’t in the house. I was back again in a USO club and it was the time of the big war. I was fresh out of OCS, a green as grass ninety-day wonder in the infantry. A crowd of brass was gathered near the punch bowl. As a rift appeared, I saw her. She was dark, smoothly tanned by the sun with black hair and eyes as merry as chinkapins. She was wearing white.

“North Carolina?” she said to me as we danced. “At last the Army is improving.”

“What part?” I asked.

“Greensboro,” she said.

I should have known then, but I just didn’t pause to think. Bryanne Quavely. North Carolina. Cigarette factories.

Later, it didn’t seem so important. There were too many other matters to be settled in the world at the moment to allow a little thing like a few million bucks to stand in the way of quick marriage when you know it’s your last leave, and she knows it too.

She lived all the way to the Rhine with me, in my heart. Mrs. Steve Martin. Who were the Quavelys?

A stealthy footfall behind a closed door in the upper hall brought me back to the present. I opened the door. It was obviously the room Harold and Vera were occupying.

Wilfred was standing near the closet, his fat shaking as if he were afraid to look over his shoulder. A pair of pliers showed its snout over the lip of the hip pocket of his jeans.

I walked across the room, spun him around. Then I made a quick grab and tore the revolver out of his hand.

He wiped his nose sullenly with his forefinger.

“Where’d you get this?” I balanced the gun.

“It’s his — Harold’s.”

“You found it in here?” I demanded.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t going to take it. I was just looking at it.”

“You know what Mr. Cranford told you the last time he caught you snooping.”

“I wasn’t snooping! I was just starting to straighten the room.”

“That’s Ellen’s job.”

“She’s busy with this cooking — for them, him!”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.” He was sullen.

“You’d be better off to talk to me,” I advised. “You’d get more understanding.”

He raised his eyes. Surprisingly they were swimming with hot tears. “I hate him! I hope he gets hurt. Ellen’s always trying to smooch him when she gets him in a corner.”

“Ellen wouldn’t do that. She knows Harold is married.”

“She wouldn’t care!” he said defiantly. “To her he’s a big New York artist. She’s always felt that way. A wife wouldn’t matter. She said once she wouldn’t mind having a baby, if it was Harold’s.”

I’d known for a long time that Ellen had carried a torrid crush on Harold. I’d expected her to outgrow it. Now, seemingly, his absence and success had made her heart grow fonder than ever. I would have to suggest to Harold that he have a talk with Ellen, convince her that if her love was strong enough she would carry it in noble silence to the end of her days. It probably would appeal to the martyr in her.

“What makes you think Harold will get hurt?” I asked Wilfred. “You’re not getting any foolish notions, are you?”

“Naw. But I know he’s scared, and running. And when a man’s like that he’s in danger of getting hurt. He’s got a gun, too. He wouldn’t if somebody hadn’t followed him down here.”

“I think you’re mistaken,” I said calmly. “A lot of people keep guns on their premises. Some even carry them when they’re taking a trip by car. Now put the pistol back where you found it and get downstairs about your business.”

I thought it over after Wilfred was gone. The big question in my mind was the man who’d been across the street watching the house from the shadows of the tree. I wondered who he was and why he was following Harold — if he was. It was possible that Wilfred’s imagination was exaggerating things. If something really serious was afoot, Harold should — and was able — to go to the police.

Mind your own knitting, Martin.

I went back downstairs.

Dinner was a quiet meal. I saw that Vera noticed the way Ellen hovered at Harold’s elbow to serve him. The beautiful blonde smiled quietly. She was pretty sure of her man.

Papa Joe related incidents out of Harold’s childhood in an attempt to bring humor to the dinner. Nobody laughed much. It was obvious that Papa Joe was pleased with his son’s marriage. Vera brought an air of sophistication, poise, charm, even into a dining room that seemed to have been designed for glum eating.

Papa Joe was no less expansive about his son. “He was touched with something different, perhaps near genius, from his boyhood,” Papa Joe told Vera. “Not much like Steve, who cut classes when he got the chance and seemed determined to get mixed up in one scrape after another.”

I met his eyes with a smile. I hadn’t eaten much of his bread since I’d been able to shift for myself. But less than a month ago, after grogging myself up and losing my job in Charleston, I’d returned to Asheville. I hadn’t figured I was sponging on him, for I believed myself just about even with Papa Joe. Money that I’d saved during the war had been partly responsible for keeping his business from going under, and I’d been paying my own way since I’d come back this time for a visit.

And this would be the final time. I knew I would never return. Already I felt that heavy sense of loss that comes with any final departure. I had spent a good part of my childhood in this house. I had shoveled snow from the front walks, and careened down the hill before the house on my first bicycle. From its rear upstairs windows I had potted at sparrows with a bean-shooter.

Papa Joe’s wife had been my mother’s dearest friend. She had taken me in after I had lost my mother, and she had loved me like her own son. I’d eaten cookies baked by her in the same range that Ellen used today. When she, my foster mother, had died the soul had gone from Papa Joe’s home.

After dinner Vera and I wandered toward the parlor, talking idly.

“I noticed you called Mr. Cranford ‘Papa Joe,’ ” she said. “Why is that?”

“With my own parents dead,” I explained, “I felt that I shouldn’t call him ‘Papa.’ childish notion. So I tacked the name ‘Papa Joe’ onto him, and soon everybody was using it, including grown-ups.”

“He doesn’t like the name, does he?”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I suppose he doesn’t.”

She laughed. “I’m glad I’m getting to know you, Steve. You’re refreshing. You accept things at face value, in perfectly good faith. You’re resilient. You keep right on acting in good faith even when life lets you down.”

“I really appear that way to you?” I was surprised.

“Of course. Did I say something wrong?”

I grinned wryly. “You might have done something easy, like swatting me with that vase over there. I’ve acted with less faith than anybody I ever had the displeasure to meet. Sometimes I think I’m the most decayed one of the whole tribe.”

“You mustn’t think such things about yourself!” she chided.

“It isn’t healthy, normal, is it?”

“No,” she said distantly.

I was sorry our talk had been routed into this channel. She was a nice kid. She loved Harold. If she would bear the selfishness I knew to run deep in him, she would enjoy a nice life as the wife of a successful artist.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know I have a wife, don’t you? Harold told you what I did to her?”

“No, I didn’t know. Now it’s my turn — I’m sorry.” She offered her hand and I shook it. We were friends again, and I was glad.

From upstairs, Harold called to her. After she had gone, I lighted a cigarette and went out on the porch to smoke it.

I was finishing the cigarette when the stranger came. I was instantly almost sure it was the same man I’d seen watching the house. Short, blocky, dressed in a baggy suit.

When he stepped on the front porch I got a look at his face in the light spilling from the hallway. A heavy Irish face. Eyes of cold slate. A red stubble of beard. A mouth that could be either generous or tough as they come.

I hadn’t moved out of the shadows. “Cranford,” he said, “I hope you didn’t think I would give up so easily.” His voice was deep, rumbling in his chest, his words spoken with a clipped Yankee accent.

His belligerence annoyed me. I said, “I’m not Cranford. I’m his foster brother. Would you like to give him a message?”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I could see if he’s in.”

“He’s in. He hasn’t left the house since he drove back an hour or more ago. His car is here, and he hasn’t left the house walking unless he went out the back way.”

“You’re saying you’ve been watching us?”

“I’m saying that I’ve been trying to see him. Now will you tell him I’m here?”

Harold himself stepped out on the porch. “I’ve nothing more to say to you, McGinty. Except that this has got to stop! You understand?”

Harold was deeply shaken, facing this man he called McGinty as if the act required every ounce of courage-he possessed. He was in a dangerous mood, his back to whatever wall McGinty had erected.

McGinty said, “We can’t talk here.”

“There’s no more talking to do!” Harold said flatly. “You’ve been wrong from the beginning, McGinty. You’d do well to make yourself scarce.”

McGinty stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, a thin smile on his face. “I’m getting you just about where I want you,” he said. “Just about to the breaking point.”

His words reacted on Harold like short, hard punches to the mid-section.

“We’ll talk,” McGinty said.

Harold dropped a glance at me. I interpreted it as resignation. He wished to speak to McGinty alone. I went in the house.

The door of Harold’s room was open when I passed down the upstairs hall. Vera was alone in the room, sitting rigid beside the bed, as if waiting for something to happen, something beyond her control.

“Hello,” she said, attempting a smile as she saw me stop in the doorway.

“Hello.”

“Harold is down there now talking with a strange man, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes.” I stepped inside the room. “What’s it all about?”

“It’s that damn painting.” Falling from her lips, the invective stunned me.

“One of Harold’s?”

“Yes. Now and then he decides to do a serious piece of work. Occasionally he even manages to get around to it.”

“This man — this McGinty — is after the painting?”

“No, nothing like that. McGinty cares nothing for the painting. The painting in itself is worth little. Two hundred dollars, I should say. Harold calls the painting The Wharf Girl. It’s supposed to express a mood of... well, a very dark, morbid mood. We saw the girl in a waterfront spaghetti joint one night. She had tried to jump off a dock. A big Irishman had seen her and had stopped her. He had brought her into the café and bought her coffee. She was still sobbing.”

“The man was McGinty?”

“You catch on quickly.”

“He’s Irish — at least he looks Irish. I was just guessing.”

“I wish we had never seen the girl,” Vera said, a note almost of desperation in her voice. “She was a tiny thing who looked as if she’d always been underfed. She had lovely white skin and her eyes were the largest and darkest I’ve ever seen. When they turned on you, their gaze seemed to jump at you. They were eyes so morbid and pathetic it was hard to look at them and not shudder. Harold wanted to paint her.”

She stopped speaking. I let the silence hang. She didn’t break it.

I said, after a moment, “You haven’t told me anything really.”

“I haven’t intended to. Why should I mix you up in our troubles?”

She was listening. For Harold’s footfall returning up the stairs. Then the footfall sounded and her shoulders sagged faintly in relief. She practically forgot I was there. I picked up the cue and crossed the hallway toward my own room. Harold brushed past me. His face was cotton-white; his eyes blazing.

He entered his room, and I heard his sharp, angry voice speaking to Vera, without being able to distinguish individual words.

Chapter III

A few moments after I closed my own door behind me I heard Papa Joe’s door slam, heard his footsteps resound in the hall. Then the slam of another door. Papa Joe had joined his son and daughter-in-law.

McGinty, I thought, whatever it is pushing you, you’d better have your game well-planned. You’re dealing with a high-strung man. Like TNT Harold might go off in your face if you shake him a little the wrong way.

The pint of Old Seaman was still on my bureau. I picked it up. The amber fluid brought back a quick memory. A party. Year 1945. Just the two of us having a party because war had ceased to be my mistress and I was home with my wife.

It was almost a solemn party. She had been unutterably dear and desirable sitting across the-table from me. The long agony of waiting was mirrored in her eyes, eyes that were dark pools of feeling that night. As we danced, her arm across my back clutched me. We didn’t talk as we danced. I think we were both afraid because of the dammed up feelings inside of us. Not afraid of the feelings themselves, understand, only afraid that an untoward gesture might spoil the mood.

We went back to our table and drank highballs. She looked at her drink and said, “You’ll never be sorry, Steve?”

“I? I could never be! I should be asking you that question myself.”

“Sorry that I’m not a Quavely any longer?” Her laugh was shaky, causing me to look at her quickly.

She must have had a pretty rugged time of it at home. They’d had months and months to take her away from me. They had failed. But I suspected how hard they must have tried. I had met her mother and sister on one furlough, not long before that last furlough before I shipped out. They’d known they were losing her. Lucy, the sister, in particular was infused with the importance of family prestige. One thing could be said for Lucy. She hadn’t kept her cards up her sleeve. She had drawn the line; she had spoken her on guard; then she had done battle.

But all of them had failed. I never could blame them too much. I had lost Bryanne finally through failure of my own.

I set the Old Seaman back on the bureau. If Lucy were on my team, if she were here now, what would she say? Something like, “Ever since Papa Joe’s flare-up late this afternoon you’ve been thinking, haven’t you? He bashed your eyes open, didn’t he? Just as soon as you can do so without any unpleasantness, making a scene, you’re leaving here. Then why not keep right on fighting? You won once. Then at the first failure you felt that Bryanna was lost to you forever. Forever is a long time, my friend. In this life you’re not privileged to back up and start over, to erase past mistakes, but you’re never denied a new beginning from the moment you decide to begin again.”

I knew then that I’d been toying with the idea for weeks. I hadn’t liked the taste of defeat from the beginning. Stuff like the Old Seaman hadn’t been able to wash it out-of my mouth.

I walked over to the window. I forgot Harold’s troubles, Papa Joe’s raw bitterness because he was forced to grub for a living in the construction business of grandeur — this in a land where his forbears had ruled.

I felt exhilarated. There would have to be a job, of course, a good one. A little egg in the bank. But it could be done.

From the window, I looked down on the front lawn. My thoughts broke off as I saw the shadowy figure of a man go down the walk, turn north on the sidewalk. He was about the size and build of Harold.

A knock sounded on my door. Still watching the quickly moving man, outside, I said, “Come in.”

The door opened, and I turned to find Vera moving across the room toward me. Her eyes were agitated. “I thought Harold might be in here.”

“No, I haven’t seen him since he came up after talking to McGinty.”

She sat weakly on the edge of the bed. “I’m scared,” she said frankly. “Harold said he wanted a big slug of straight whisky to settle his nerves. He said there was a bottle in the buffet. I went to the dining room and got the bottle and glasses. When I came back up just now he was gone.”

I turned back to the window. It was dark out there now, as dark as if a thunder squall were in the making. Then in the glow of the street light at the intersection of Hickory street and Northland avenue, I saw my man. He was turning west on Hickory.

“I’ll look around outside,” I said. “Likely he decided a short walk would relax him more than a drink.”

She looked up at me. “I hope you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “But Harold is armed.”

Papa Joe and I entered the hall at the same moment.

“What’s up?” he demanded. “Where are you going?”

I didn’t have time to answer his questions. I took the stairs down two at a time.

By the time I reached the intersection of Hickory and Northland, Harold had vanished. I stood in indecision. He hadn’t been heading uptown toward the business district. His turn west on Hickory, the last move I had seen him make, removed the possibility of that. Northland ran straight into the business section. He wasn’t going far, either, or he would have taken his car.

I started west on Hickory, walking rapidly under the dark canopy of the maples that lined the sidewalk. The terrain changed in a few blocks. Houses became fewer, weed-grown fields more prominent. And a few more blocks further on the street would begin twisting downhill toward a settlement of large old houses that had been converted into tenement dwellings for Negroes.

I could surmise only one destination for Harold. About midway between Northland and the Negro district stood an empty cottage on Hickory that Papa Joe owned. If I did not find Harold there, I had lost him completely.

The bungalow stood forbidding and dismal, its windows like black mirrors. I passed the weathered, lopsided “For Sale” sign at the corner of the yard. The unkempt grass chopped at my ankles.

Just as I was deciding that my hunch had been wrong, I saw a flash of light in the bungalow. I moved to the window that had reflected it.

Harold and McGinty were inside the bungalow, McGinty crouched in the beam of the flashlight in Harold’s hand. McGinty’s eyes were distended, his face mottled with fear. He was holding one hand out before him, saying hoarsely, “No!”

Then Harold began shooting. McGinty whirled, knowing in that final instant that death was coming. He plunged through a doorway behind him, into the yawning black emptiness of the room beyond. Harold fired five times, as rapidly as he could pull the trigger. At the distance, I knew it was impossible to miss. I knew the slugs were hammering squarely in the Irishman’s broad back between the shoulder-blades.

The impetus of his motion kept McGinty moving for a second or two. He crashed into something — a door or piece of discarded furniture — in the dark room beyond. And then stillness. Just as suddenly as the whole thing had started, it was over.

Still holding the light and gun, Harold raised his hands to his face. His features were contorted, white, ghastly. He pressed the backs of his hands against the sides of his face.

“McGinty?” he queried. And when no sound came from the adjoining room, a sob broke in his throat. He let the flashlight fall from his nerveless fingers, and bolted.

He chose the back way out of the cottage, a short-cut across weed-grown fields back to the house on Northland. He plunged into the brush and by the time I reached the edge of the yard he had crashed his way out of sight.

I returned to the cottage. A moment’s pause there. Then I went back out on Hickory street.

The nearest house was about a block’s distance away. It was dark, and remained so. Then I saw a lone man hurrying down the street. The shots, then, had been heard. For a moment I had entertained the hope that they had gone unnoticed. The gun was small; the shots had been muffled by the empty cottage.

I faded into the shadows of a tree; heard the quick snapping of the approaching man’s heels against the sidewalk. He paused at the edge of the walk leading to the cottage porch. The man was Papa Joe.

The scuff of my foot startled him, swung him about, swinging up his cane for a quick blow. He lowered the cane slowly.

“What are you doing here?” he asked shortly. “When you ran out of the house, I followed you. Was that shooting I heard?”

“I’m afraid it was.”

“Inside the cottage?”

“Yes.”

“Who was in there?”

“Harold and a man called McGinty. They were apparently keeping an appointment made earlier this evening.”

Papa Joe’s mouth was a tight, thin line, yet his voice quaked, “He — shot Harold?”

“No, it was the other way around.”

Some of the sudden, tortured agony was dissipated from Papa Joe’s bleak features. “He hurt McGinty badly?”

I hesitated. Yet to evade the question and have him learn the truth later would be more cruel than giving it to him now.

I said, “He shot McGinty until the gun was empty. He was hysterical. I don’t think he knew fully what he was doing. But it’s certain he killed a man in there.”

Papa Joe’s whole body shook as if with a chill. But his voice came flat, controlled. “What are you going to do now?”

“Get back to the house as fast as I can, knock my stomach in place with a stiff slug of Old Seaman, then call the police.” Instantly I wondered if I’d sounded flippant. I hadn’t wanted to.

“No,” Papa Joe said, “you’re not calling the police.” The shaking was gone now. As he faced me he was like a tight steel spring.

“What else can we do?” I demanded. “We can’t conceal the fact that the man followed Harold here to Asheville. If we try to hide this, it’s going to make matters worse. Let’s shoot it clean. That’s Harold’s only chance.”

“Steve, Harold is my own son, my only son. Do you think I’ll allow him to be sacrificed to a whim of yours?”

I experienced an upsurge of impatience. It was not a moment to be governed by whims, even his.

I took a step toward the cottage. Papa Joe’s cane moved with the speed of a’ striking snake. I managed to get my face out of the way, but the cane crashed on my shoulders. Before he could strike again, I tore it out of his grasp.

He stiffened, breathing thickly through his nostrils, the glitter in his eyes a challenge.

“Because of the years Harold and I spent together as children,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help him. Otherwise, the feelings you and I have for each other are such that we can’t stay under the same roof much longer. Now go back to the house. I think Harold went there. Try to get him calmed down. He’s going to need a sound, steady grip on himself. I’ll see if there’s anything at all that can be done for McGinty, then we’ll call the police.”

I handed the cane back to him. He strode stiffly away.

The back door of the cottage was still standing open, as Harold had left it in his headlong flight. I groped my way into a dark hall.

I could feel damp sweat on the palms of my hands. If McGinty was alive I didn’t want him thinking I was Harold, and start shooting.

I said, “McGinty, this is not Cranford. I’m Steve Martin. I’ve come to help you.”

There was no answer. The silence became stifling. A wan glow of light was just ahead — the flashlight that Harold had dropped.

I entered the room where the shooting had taken place. The smell of gunpowder was still strong. I picked up the flashlight and moved to the room where McGinty had crashed down.

The room was empty! McGinty had gone down in this room. I had heard him fall. But he was not there now!

Chapter IV

There were two or three pieces of junk furniture in the room, none of them large enough to conceal McGinty. I pushed a moth-eaten hassock to one side and opened the closet door. The closet yawned emptily.

I didn’t begin to get the shakes, though, until I had searched every room in the bungalow, without finding McGinty. Had he crawled outside? But it was incredible that a man carrying five bullets in his back could have crawled away in the short time between Harold’s departure and when I entered the place.

Nevertheless, I checked the doors and windows. All were locked except the door Harold had used. The back door, then, was the only possible exit from the cottage. Beyond it stretched the high grass of the back yard for about a hundred feet before it blended with the high weeds of a vacant lot. The grass was heavy with the moisture of a summer night in the mountains. A wounded man laboring across the yard would have left a trail a child could read. Yet for spots which Harold’s feet had mashed, the grass in that yard was untrampled. McGinty most definitely had not crawled out of the cottage and away. He must still be in there. But how could I have missed anything as large as McGinty’s bulk?

I went back inside, and this time I included the attic and the cellar in my search. A cold sweat was on my face.

Finally I went back to the room in which Harold had shot McGinty, leveled the light in my hand as if it were a gun. Could Harold possibly have missed at this point-blank range?

I searched the wall and door casing, but found no bullet marks. Those bullets had come to rest in McGinty’s broad back and chest. When I had searched for signs of blood leading to the back door, and found none, I knew nothing else to do.

Standing on the back steps, I felt the slow, hard beating of my heart against my ribs. McGinty was not human — able to take five bullets, lose no blood, and walk or run across the back yard without leaving any foot marks on the grass.

Such a creature did not exist, of course. Then what had happened? Had I witnesses a killing at all? But I knew I had.

Vera was waiting on the front porch when I got back to the house on Northland. When she saw me, she ran to meet me halfway down the walk. She caught my arm.

“Steve! What has happened? Harold came in babbling that McGinty wouldn’t hound him any longer. Right after that, Papa Joe showed up, practically writhing. He was seething with anger, and deeply frightened at the same time. He called Harold into the parlor and they talked for a minute. Then Papa Joe went upstairs, yelling for Wilfred. He hasn’t come down since, and I can’t get anything out of Harold. I’ve been waiting for you. What is it, Steve?”

“I’m not sure yet. Where is Harold?”

“Upstairs, in our room.”

She followed me up. I opened the door. Harold swiveled his body around from the bureau. He’d been pouring himself a drink from the bottle that Wilfred had brought up from downstairs.

I closed the door. Vera moved around beside me, watching both of us.

I said bluntly, “You’re in serious trouble, Harold. If you want help, you’d better level with me. Why has McGinty followed you all the way down here because of that wharf girl painting?”

“Who said anything about the painting?”

“I did,” Vera said quietly. “Don’t you think you’d better tell him the rest of it?” She curved her glance at me. She was badly frightened, but clinging to her remaining poise with sheer willpower.

Harold had had almost an hour to calm himself down. The flush in his cheeks revealed that he’d been hitting the bottle heavily, bolstering his courage.

“First, Steve,” he said cautiously, “what are you going to do? Have a big slug and call the cops, as you told Papa Joe?”

“No, not yet.”

Astonishment whitened his face. “You mean you’ll help me get McGinty out of there so no one will ever know?”

“Not hardly. McGinty vanished.”

“He what?”

“Just that. There’s no trace of him in the cottage. No bulletholes. No blood.”

Silence fell over the room. Vera’s mouth worked. She cried suddenly, “What is this about bullets and blood?”

Harold set the whisky on the bureau and moved quickly to take her in his arms. But she was almost herself. She backed away from him, hysterical tears spilling down her cheeks.

“No, don’t try to wheedle me into submission! Tell me what happened to McGinty!”

“Darling, please—” Harold slipped his arm about her. She shrugged it off quickly, turning to me.

“Then Steve will tell me!”

Over her shoulder I glimpsed Harold’s anxious face. The plea in his eyes was urgent, unmistakable. It might have influenced me more than I thought but at the moment I believed I was thinking only of the lovely, distraught girl who was his wife.

I gripped her shoulders, kept my voice even and gentle as possible. “Tonight Harold met McGinty and fired a gun at him. Fortunately, he did not shoot straight.”

She murmured a broken, thankful sounding word and sank in a chair. Harold poured a small drink of straight whisky for her. She took it.

I crossed the hall to my room. I pulled my scuffed gladstone out of the closet, opened it on the bed, and began tossing clothes into it. I had the bag half-filled when the door opened. I threw a glance over my shoulder. Harold closed the door, came across the room.

“What’s the idea of the bag, Steve?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

He lighted a cigarette. His fingers were still shaking. “I know you had a run-in with Papa Joe this afternoon. He told me. Now you’re peeved at me. I can’t say that I blame you.”

I said nothing, but went on packing.

“What you did tonight was decent, Steve. I appreciate it. I really do.”

“Why don’t you take this McGinty trouble to the police, whatever it is, and be done with it?”

His smile was sly. “There’s no need for that now, is there?”

Some inkling of what he was thinking slipped into my consciousness. I snapped the gladstone closed before lifting my gaze to meet his. I saw the expression in his eyes that I was afraid I would see.

“You’re thinking,” I said, “that I carried McGinty out of the cottage, that I’ll chuck him some place for you.”

“I could hardly ask you to take such a risk, could I?”

I was angered at his growing confidence. I swung the bag off of the bed. “I didn’t lie to Vera. McGinty really did vanish, even though he couldn’t have left the cottage. If you missed him, the walls of the cottage would have stopped the bullets. The walls showed not a single bullet mark. McGinty took all that lead, and still did not bleed.”

The sincerity of my tone caused a momentary shadow of doubt to cross Harold’s face. He was struggling to believe what he wanted to believe, and he won.

“I hope you don’t tell that tale to any police inspectors, Steve. I’ll side you in anything you say, provided you’ll keep it plausible.” He turned to leave, then paused. “If they find McGinty in a culvert it’s possible they’ll learn that he knew me. So it’s a regrettable coincidence that he ran into trouble from another source. I’ll see to it that the gun disappears — and I’ve not left the house all evening.”

The door closed behind him. I turned to pick up the bag. I felt exactly as if I had been talking to Papa Joe.

When I reached the hallway, Ellen was just topping the stairs. She said, “There’s a lady down in the parlor to see you, Mr. Martin.”

I deposited the bag outside the parlor door, entered the gloomy room, and drew up short. Lucy Quavely was standing near the center of the room, casually lighting a cigarette.

She looked at me over the tip of the flame dancing on the tiny gold lighter.

“Do you intend to come in, Steve?”

“Yes, of course.” I stepped forward. “Nice to see you, Lucy.”

“You’re a liar. Will you ask me to sit down?”

I motioned to a chair without speaking. She was taller than Bryanne, her body more the feminine athlete’s. The bones of her face were prominent, giving her almost a hungry look. She’d never worn much makeup, I remembered. Now she wore only a touch of lipstick. Her dark brown hair hung straight, almost lank. She disdained style. She was wearing a light polo coat, sweater, tweed skirt, flat-heeled shoes. Her very casualness was in itself utter pretentiousness.

The chill gaze of her slightly slanted eyes was designed to reduce her vis-a-vis to pure crudity. Often the gaze succeeded.

I voiced a question I couldn’t suppress. “How is Bryanne?”

“Much better. The last operation helped. She’s walking now. It was much easier for her to learn to walk the first time, when she was a baby.”

“Lucy,” I said thickly, “will you please say why you’re here, and get out?”

“Still the ruffian,” she drawled. “How dreadfully masculine you are! It was unthinkable for you to marry a Quavely in the first place. After you did that horrible thing to Bryanne I wondered sometimes if our hate wouldn’t reach out and smother you. The irresistible wall, Steve, just hoping you would try to prove yourself the irresistible force.”

I said nothing. Bryanne could not have survived amid turmoil. There had never been in my mind any thought of irresistible forces, only the belief that in my surrender had lain the only possible road back to life for Bryanne.

Chapter V

Lucy read in my silence my refusal to rehash the past. I was more interested by far in knowing what had brought her calling here at ten o’clock at night.

“Very well” — she shrugged — “we shan’t waste words. Bryanne has met someone else, a South Carolinian. His family is in textiles.”

“What will it be for you, Lucy?” I asked. “A cotton baron?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“In the existence of a scion of textiles, yes. In the fact that you’re arranging things your own way for Bryanne, yes. In your other implication, that she has fallen in love with this gentleman of the looms, no.”

“Would it be so strange for a girl to fall in love twice?”

I kept my hands jammed deep in my pockets to conceal their shaking. I hoped the edge of confidence was there that I tried to keep in my voice when I said, “You didn’t drive all the way up from Greensboro to tell me these things. You want something. What is it?”

“I really came at Father’s insistence,” she said arrogantly. “To bring you this.”

She opened her bag, handed me an envelope. It was heavy. I opened it. It was filled with crisp new money.

“There’s five thousand dollars of it,” Lucy said. “There will be five thousand more when you have gone to an easy divorce state and cut yourself loose from us for good. After all, it’s only the legal gesture. For practical purposes you haven’t been Bryanne’s husband for some time.”

I tossed the money back in her lap. Color leaped to her cheeks. “We shan’t be pushed too far, Steve! We shall bargain only a little. Don’t name too high a price!”

“Good night, Lucy.”

“Steve! Don’t you dare leave this room until you have given me an answer!” She leaped to her feet. “What is your price?”

“The Quavely money is the most important thing in the world to you. For that reason, you can’t understand how it could be otherwise with anybody else. You can’t pay my price, Lucy. That price would be the understanding on your part that I married Bryanne despite the fact that she was a Quavely, not because of it.”

Her face flamed. She controlled her temper with an effort.

“Why must you be so unreasonable?” she demanded. “Would twenty thousand add a grain to your common sense?”

“My common sense tells me that you’re doing this without Bryanne’s knowledge,” I accused flatly. “If she loved this guy with his spindles and shuttles she’d do her own divorcing. On the other hand, should I divorce her, the way would be clear for her to fall into your trap.”

“You—” Lucy muttered hoarsely. “You’re impossible! Thirty thousand, then, and that’s as high as we’ll go. I’m stopping at a local hotel, the Bradley. I’ll stop by tomorrow morning to take you to the airport.”

I watched her go. I felt tired and old, as if she had piled thirty years on my shoulders. My mind was shot through with memories of the way it had been.

Mr. and Mrs. Steve Martin. Residence, Atlanta, Ga. Occupations, heavy equipment salesman and housewife. Reason for big celebration, husband’s promotion to district manager. A few drinks, but not enough to back up the claim of the Quavelys. A spot of ice in the highway and the wheel of the car was suddenly lax and powerless in my hands. She’d been laughing at something I’d said when the skid started. Then she’d screamed and the sound had been muffled in the crash.

A long time later I’d clawed my way out of the wreckage. She was pinned beneath the car. She turned her head. I was filled with abject horror; she was still conscious.

“Steve,” she’d said, “there isn’t any feeling in my legs.”

The closing in of the irresistible wall as I exhausted one financial source after another until no more were left. She still needed specialists, care beyond my reach. The Quavely money was her only hope. I’d told myself I should feet grateful when Papa Quavely and Lucy had offered their bargain. I was, for Bryanne’s sake.

But making that bargain in no wise indicated that I was prepared to bargain again, on the terms Lucy had handed me tonight. I hoped she would enjoy the scenery during her stay here.

I allowed myself to feed on my anger as I walked up Northland into the business district. I found a cheap walk-up hotel. I had come out of my binge with nearly twenty dollars left, plus a watch I could pawn tomorrow morning. Any kind of job would do until I could manage the proper appearance for the right kind of employer. There was still the Atlanta sales office of the firm turning out big shovels, ditch diggers, and bulldozers. Perhaps it would be wise to return to the point where evil had begun and turn it into good.

Lucy, I accept the challenge.

After I had breakfast the next morning, I returned to the hotel. Two men in the dusty lobby left their lumpy chairs and started up the stairs behind me. I reached the third floor corridor, stopped at my room, slipped the key in the lock.

The two men came down the hallway and stopped, one on either side of me. The man on my left reached in his inner pocket, took out a small leather case, opened it, showing me a small, gold badge.

“I’m Captain Hagan,” he said. “This is Lieutenant Conroy. Police Headquarters. You’re Mr. Steven Martin?”

“Yes.”

“May we speak to you?”

“Of course.”

Opening the door, I motioned them into the room. Hagan was a large man, solidly built, with a wide, placid face. He looked as if he would enjoy quiet Sunday drives with his wife and kids. Conroy I judged to be ten years or so younger, about thirty-five. He was as big as Hagan, but on him it was stretched to a horizon six inches higher.

I thought, Watch it, Steve. They’ve found McGinty.

Hagan said, “You’re the foster son of Mr. Joseph Cranford, I believe.”

I waited.

He continued, “You’ve been staying with Mr. Cranford for a time?”

“The past week or so.”

“Before that?”

“I worked in Charleston. South Carolina.”

“What kind of work?”

“In Charleston I operated a bulldozer.”

“Make out pretty good?”

“You know the cost of bulldozing, grading work. I made enough to keep me for the time.”

“Prior to your return here, had you lived in your former home for some time?”

“No, it’s been several years since I lived in Asheville.” This, I thought, was a queer lead up to McGinty. Or maybe they always got some background information with their first questions.

Hagan spoke again in his molasses and corn pone accent. “You’ve been doing some drinking since your return?”

I gave him a quick glance. It seemed he already had tapped some source or other for background information.

“Yes,” I said

“Relations were of the best between Mr. Cranford and you?”

I hesitated. “Would you mind telling me if this line of questioning is relevant to whatever brought you here?”

“I assure you that it is. Will you answer my question?”

“I haven’t seen too much of Mr. Cranford since my return. Only at meal times, now and then in the evenings. And not at those times every day.”

“You’re evading what I asked you, Mr. Martin. Was there any ill feeling between you and Mr. Cranford?”

“A certain measure, I suppose.”

“You’ve argued with him?”

“To a certain degree.”

“And that’s why you left his home last night?”

“Partially. How do you know when I left, or where I came?”

“Your foster brother told us you had packed a bag and left. It doesn’t take long to check the hotels in a town of this size. Now, tell me, Mr. Martin, were you drinking when you returned home yesterday afternoon?”

“No.”

“But you do admit a heated argument with Mr. Joseph Cranford? And you were in a high state of nerves from previous drinking?”

“Both statements are partly correct. Will you tell me what this is all leading up to?”

Conroy spoke for the first time. “A servant girl — Ellen Holecomb — went to Mr. Cranford’s room this morning to call him to breakfast. She knocked on the door. It wasn’t securely latched, and swung open. She found Mr. Cranford on the floor of his room. Dead. Poisoned. Murdered.”

I rode with Conroy back to Northland Avenue. We entered a house heavy with the hush of death. Ellen, with eyes red and swollen from weeping, let us in and closed the front door behind us.

“Has your brother returned?” Hagan asked her gently.

“No, sir.”

Hagan motioned me into the parlor. I entered and saw Harold. He was slumped in a chair, an old, tired man of thirty. In his gaze, as it fell on me, was no warmth, no sign of recognition. But then his eyes spoke an agonized question: Why, Steve? Did you do it?

I put my hand on Harold’s shoulder. What could be said at a time like this? Harold nodded and left the room, in a daze.

“I wish you’d bring me up to date on the details,” I said to Conroy.

He sat down in an overstuffed chair. “Like the captain told you,” he said, “the girl found him. He must have been dead there in his room since before midnight. Unless the autopsy turns up something different, we’re betting that Mr. Cranford was killed with chloral hydrate administered in a drink of whisky. You know anything about poisons?”

“No.”

“Well, alcohol steps up the action of chloral-hydrate. Like hitting somebody over the head with a sledge-hammer. Mild doses of the stuff are used in sleeping capsules. That girl, Ellen, tells us that a doctor gave Mr. Cranford a prescription several weeks ago. Mr. Cranford had the girl get the prescription refilled day before yesterday. We found the bottle, empty, and called the druggist. Chloral hydrate.”

Conroy lit a cigarette and replaced the package in his pocket. He went on then, “Naturally we thought of suicide, but the captain won’t believe that Mr. Canford was the kind of man to take his own life.”

My mind was leap-frogging, trying to make a connection. Harold in flight. McGinty. The nearly worthless painting of a girl waif who’d tried to commit suicide off a New York City dock. The shooting of McGinty. The blank wall I’d encountered there in the bungalow. Now the murder of Papa Joe, the most unreasonable happening of all. I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly be tied in with the rest.

Chapter VI

My insides began a transmutation to cold jelly as I considered motives. Harold would not have killed his own father. It was just as unlikely that Vera would have. Ellen and Wilfred had just as little reason. Papa Joe had been their bread and butter, and they were accustomed to his tirades.

Even if McGinty could have slipped into the house here, for some reason wanting Papa Joe out of the way, he couldn’t have known where the poison was. To have him accidentally find it and prepare a drink, somehow knowing that Papa Joe would drink it, was stretching the wildest laws of chance and coincidence far beyond the breaking point. Anyway, McGinty was after Harold, not Papa Joe.

Lucy Quavely had been in the house the night before, but what possible reason could she have for murdering Papa Joe? Besides, she wouldn’t take a chance of blighting the Quavely name, no matter how much she might want to kill somebody.

And that extremely unpleasant process of elimination left only one person. My shoulder had been stiff this morning when I woke. If Hagan discovered my black and blue marks and in any way could learn that I’d received them last night when Papa Joe struck me with his cane, I could picture that police captain’s reaction.

Panic crawled into my throat. I lighted a cigarette when I caught Conroy watching me closely, walked over to a chair and sat down.

“You’re sure you’ve leveled with us, Martin?” he asked me shrewdly. “About the quarrel you had with the old man and all the other details?”

“I’m positive.”

Conroy settled back in his chair. “When we find Wilfred we might pick up a lead. When did you see him last?”

“Late yesterday.”

So Wilfred was gone and Hagan had been unable so far to find him. The jelly didn’t suddenly turn to flesh and blood again, but I had the thought that Wilfred’s disappearance might remove some of the pressure from me, give me a little time to do something. Just what, I didn’t know. All I knew that Hagan didn’t know was that business about McGinty and the empty bungalow. Harold wouldn’t let the police in on that, of course, and certainly Vera would accede to his wishes and remain silent. She would go a long way to protect him. She had already proved she would stick to her man when the going got rough.

Hagan came back downstairs. I outlined my movements of yesterday afternoon and evening for him, except that I skipped the episode of the cottage. Even if I had mentioned it, I knew well enough that Harold would deny the whole thing. Unless McGinty or his body turned up I would be made out a ridiculous and fantastic liar, putting new questions in Hagan’s mind. He might even conclude that I’d been drunk enough to poison the man who had reared me.

I knew he was waiting for me to make just one slip. If there had been so much as a single bullet mark in the empty cottage I might have told him the whole story, at that. But now the only one, besides Harold and me, who had heard the shots was in the morgue.

When Hagan departed, with a caution to stay within reach, I went to look for Ellen. I found her in the kitchen. She was spreading a napkin over a plate of food she was placing in the warmer of the range. She threw a startled glance over her shoulder at me as I entered.

“I ain’t myself, Mr. Martin,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “Not since the minute I found poor Mr. Cranford,”

“Now of course you’re worried about Wilfred.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know where he is, don’t you?”

Her gaze came quickly to my face. Her lips pursed. She was a pretty little creature with her wide eyes dewy with tears. “How would I know?” she wailed.

“Just a guess.” I shrugged. “Wilfred scares easily. He wouldn’t want to hide where he was completely alone. He’d want help, the assurance of somebody he loved and could trust. I thought he might have got in touch with you.”

“Oh, no sir!”

“Who saw him last?”

“I guess I did, Mr. Martin.”

“When?”

“Last night. Young Mr. Cranford rushed in the house, then his father came in a few minutes later. Old Mr. Cranford began yelling for Wilfred to come up to his room. Wilfred went, and nobody saw him any more.”

“He’s hiding because he’s afraid, Ellen,” I told her. “Mr. Cranford must have died just before Wilfred went into his room or while he was there. Wilfred was afraid someone might think he had something to do with it and ran. But his running makes it all the worse. You see that, don’t you?”

She lowered her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“If he gets in touch with you, you’ll let me know?”

She was silent.

I said, “I promise you that I’ll do everything I can for Wilfred.”

She nodded.

“Harold will help too. You know Harold would never let anything happen to Wilfred, feeling as he does about you.”

My stab found its mark. She was too simple to control her feelings, but not simple enough to miss the meaning of my statement. Her face went scarlet. She turned quickly and busied herself at the stove.

Harold, you stinking tramp.

Harold stayed in his room with Vera for the most part, leaving me to speak to sympathetic callers as news of Papa Joe’s death spread. I made the necessary arrangements for the time when the coroner should release Papa Joe’s body.

Lucy Quavely phoned me about eleven o’clock, a brittle quality in her voice.

“I have just suffered a frightful indignity,” she informed me.

“We all do, at times,” I murmured.

“You didn’t have to send that policeman to my hotel with his questions, Steve.”

“I didn’t.”

“You told him I was in the Cranford home last night.”

“I told him you talked to me a few minutes in the parlor. By the way, Lucy, how did you happen to locate me?”

“It took a week or two,” she said sharply, “tracing you from job to job. Your last employer in Charleston said you’d left for Asheville. I came up, since Mr. Cranford’s home seemed to be the logical place to start looking for you here.”

I drawled thoughtfully, “Did you ever consider that Papa Joe might be a powerful ally for you, Lucy — for a monetary consideration, of course?”

I expected a violent reaction. Instead, she said calmly, “Naturally I did. I knew his wife had insisted on adopting you, and that he considered you too unimportant even to be a necessary evil. I also knew that he was in constant financial difficulties. He was entirely too superior and insulting and short-tempered to be a business success.”

“So you made a deal with Papa Joe?”

“I did not! I thought him too unreliable.” She suddenly chuckled. “If I had made a deal with him Hagan would love that. It would just about fix things for you, Steve. Say you were determined to hang onto the Quavely money. Papa Joe was about to queer it. Such a grave obstacle had to be removed.”

“They call that perjury, Lucy.”

“Do you think the captain would believe you? Or believe me? I’m smart enough to make it good, Steve, to make it stick.” She laughed again. “So I don’t have to spend thirty thousand dollars on you at all, do I? You’ll be sensible and agree to Bryanne’s freedom now, I’m sure.”

She hung up. I stood with the dead phone in my hand. A ridge of sweat had formed across my forehead. Lucy had neatly turned my suspicions of her and Papa Joe into a trap. I told myself that she was bluffing. But my heart was beating hard, with fear — and hatred.

I slammed the phone into its cradle and turned to the window. A man was idling across the street. For an instant my scalp went tight as I thought he might be McGinty. But he was too tall. A stake-out of Hagan’s, probably, watching the house.

Then a taxi rolled to a stop before the house, and a woman got out. Without hesitation, she came up the walk toward the house. The same black hair. The same softly angular face. The slender body was thinner now; the long legs took short steps.

I rushed into the hall and jerked the front door open. My wife was lifting a slim finger to ring the bell!

We looked at each other and it was all I could do to control my feelings. She smiled.

“Hello, Steve.”

“Hello, Bry.”

We told each other that we were looking well. Then we were in the silent parlor and our bodies came together and our lips met. Finally I held her back to look at her.

“Well!” she sighed. She sat down. “Do you have a cigarette?”

I lighted one for her. She took a couple of puffs before saying through her smile, “I came prepared to be brisk, businesslike, to ask if you had a job, what you intended to do with yourself in the future. You moved too quickly for me.”

“Would you believe that I intended to come to Greensboro as soon as I got a job?”

Her eyes and mouth released the smile, growing serious. She studied my face. “I’ve always believed it, Steve. I know the bargain my folks forced on you. It was cruel, unfair. Somehow we’ll have to repay them every penny.”

I pulled a chair close and sat down before her, reaching for her hands. “Lucy told me you were up and around, but she made it seem as if—”

“Lucy has been here?”

“Last night.”

Bryanne laughed. “The dirty little plotter. I suppose she had a deal in mind. She told me she was driving down to the beach for a week. She probably guessed I was tracing you and managed to keep up with my progress so that she knew where you were about as quickly as I did.”

Her glance curved up to lock with mine, her eyes deepened. “Steve, before things can be as they should, you’ll have to forgive yourself.”

“I can do that.”

“You’ll have to forgive the folks as well,” she pleaded. “Try to understand them, Steve. From the beginning they’ve been fighting for something they thought belonged to them. They’ve been so sure that our wartime infatuation, as they called it, would blow over, but that before it did, it would cost a terrible price.”

“Do they still feel the same way?”

“Yes, but they are not so sure now. They forced us apart. They’re aware of my feelings. They also know that you seemed to be deliberately trying to destroy yourself. They’ll still fight, but their punches will lose their sting. Forgive them, Steve, and give them an opportunity to stop fighting without losing face.”

I thought of Lucy sitting in a room in the Bradley Hotel, claws unsheathed. I wasn’t sure Lucy would interpret forgiveness as such. To her it would be calling her bluff. There was a big chance she would never follow the bluff through. Doing so would involve the Quavely name, indirectly, through the husband of a Quavely, in murder. But she might feel that the Quavely name was already involved. Forgiveness certainly entailed complications.

“You always admired a fighter, Steve,” Bryanne said quietly. “They’re fighters. You’ve seen only their worst side. They do have a good side. I know you’ll never be close to them in your feelings, and I realize how much I am asking of: you. But don’t let them be an invisible barrier between you and me, Steve.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” I promised.

She almost cried. Her lips held a tremulous smile.

“There are several things you must be told,” I said.

As quietly as I could I gave her the whole story, including Lucy’s threat.

“Leave Lucy to me,” she said, when I’d finished. “I’ll register at the Lang Park Hotel and get in touch with her. Steve, I’ll be waiting. I can’t tell you how badly I feel because of this dreadful thing happening to Papa Joe. But don’t worry about Lucy, darling.”

I kissed her when the taxi came in answer to my phone call, and as I watched her go away I remembered what she had said. She would be waiting.

Chapter VII

Early in the afternoon, Vera came downstairs to take lunch up to Harold. While she was busy in the kitchen with Ellen, I went upstairs. Harold was standing at the front window looking at Hagan’s stake-out across the street.

Harold was pale and tired. From the droop of his lower lip I guessed him to be in a sullen, petulant mood.

He asked what arrangements I’d made about the funeral. After I told him, I veered our talk abruptly.

“I want to hear about McGinty.”

“What about him?”

“Everything.”

“It was personal,” he said curtly.

I wouldn’t allow him to anger me. “Not too personal for you to hope that I covered traces of what happened in the vacant cottage.”

He studied my face. “You’re not going to drag that out before Hagan?”

“I’ve got to do something. I’m Hagan’s boy so far. I’ve got a feeling that he’d have me in jail already if Wilfred hadn’t disappeared to cast a small measure of uncertainty in the police mind.”

Harold breathed deeply. “You can’t prove anything to Hagan about McGinty. You’d only be hurting yourself.”

“Not if McGinty and Papa Joe’s death are tied together.”

“They’re not.”

He didn’t intend to talk; that much was clear, reflected in the hard light in his eyes, the set of his mouth. He still believed McGinty was dead, that I had spirited his body away. He believed I was too much involved to drag the McGinty angle before Hagan.

“I wish I could convince you of the truth, Harold,” I said soberly. “And that truth is that McGinty will return.”

Fear flared in his eyes. “Will you stop being so irrational?” he cried. “Stop torturing me with impossibilities!”

I gave him a moment to calm down. “Then for such a large favor as you think I did for you,” I said, “you should be prepared to do a small one for me.”

“What is it?” he asked sullenly.

“Find Wilfred.”

“Hagan will find him. Wilfred killed Papa Joe. That’s obvious. When Wilfred is found Hagan will wring the truth out of him and this whole dirty thing will be over.” His words carried all the conviction his wishful thinking could summon.

“All the more reason for finding Wilfred,” I said.

“What makes you think I could find him?”

“Because I think Ellen knows where he is. You’re the one person who might get it out of her. He hasn’t run far, and he has let Ellen know where he is. This morning I found her fixing a plate of food, and it was not for herself. Not for me. She didn’t bring it up here, did she?”

“No.”

“Then who else but Wilfred? She wanted the food ready when she found the chance to slip it out to him.”

“It’s a slim premise.”

“I know, but it’s the only one I can think of. Will you talk to her?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

I turned to leave the room. A small lump pressed against the sole of my shoe as I started to open the door. I moved my foot, reached down, and picked up a small leaden pellet that lay between the edge of the carpet and the wall. As I walked downstairs that pellet gave me ideas and the ideas brought excitement stirring inside me.

I was feeling equal to facing Hagan when he returned an hour later.

He took possession of the parlor and had Conroy summon us one by one. I walked into his presence at about three-thirty.

He was placid, even friendly, during the half-hour I spent with him. He did his best to turn the question session into a chatty period. I repeated the answers I had given him that morning. He made no mention of the arrival of a woman in a taxi. I hoped that meant he believed Bryanne to be one of the sympathetic callers who’d besieged the house during the morning.

Hagan made the pointed suggestion that none of us should entertain the thought of leaving town, no matter how urgent the business, until Papa Joe’s death was cleared up. When I left him I had the distinct feeling that he had struck a dead end. I was still his man, but the hole was still a trifle square for the peg. He was playing out rope, waiting for a break, for someone to hang himself.

In the afternoon paper, the murder hit the front page. The heading was heavy and black, but the story was barren of real details.

Vera and Harold came downstairs and we formed a restless trio in the parlor until Harold excused himself. I caught his glance. He was going to see Ellen.

I kept Vera occupied with small talk. She was not at all reluctant to tell me about herself. She came from a small town in Michigan, she told me. After finishing college, she’d gone to New York with an eye on the publishing business. Nothing unusual. A girl of her beauty might have led a more exciting life.

When Harold returned, he gave me a short nod over her shoulder. After a while, he mentioned Papa Joe’s financial affairs. “I wonder,” he suggested, “if we’ll find anything of value in that cottage Papa Joe owned on Hickory Street.” The glance he gave me was meaningful.

I relaxed. There was nothing to do now but wait until darkness was heavy enough to cover my trip to the cottage.

I let an hour or more elapse after our quiet, desultory dinner before I set out for the cottage. Before leaving the house I turned off the light in the rear hallway, and opened the door to the back porch.

Standing in the shadows of the porch my gaze searched until it found Hagan’s back yard stake-out. I was sure he would have one. The man was lounging on a stone bench near an old rock pool that was filled with leaves and dirt. Ellen would have seen the man and had not dared take a chance on slipping out. Wilfred was doubtless a hungry boy, waiting for food that would not arrive.

A light summer breeze rushed across the yard. I let the sound of it in the trees cover any slight sounds I might have made as I eased off the porch, clinging to the shadow of the house.

I had one strip of side yard to cross between the house and trees. Once in the trees I made better speed, skirting the yard, taking to the weed-grown lots that lay between me and the cottage.

The cottage, when I reached it, was dark. I tried the back door and found it unlocked, giving me no purpose for the ring of keys I had filched from the pantry.

The floor creaked once as I entered. I stopped, listened, gripping the flashlight I’d picked up in Wilfred’s room. I moved forward again, and there was a sudden burst of movement before me.

The light flared, catching Wilfred as he flung a desperate look over his shoulder while he lunged for the door across the room.

As he yanked the door open my fingers grabbed his collar. I jerked him back and he stood breathing thickly. His face was as white as dough, his eyes jutting in an oblique angle.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said quietly. He stood quivering like a beaten pup and watched me warily as I removed my hand from his collar and stepped back from him.

“Now let’s sit down and talk this over like gentlemen.” I found a ramshackle, dusty chair and pushed it toward him. He let his body come in stiff sitting contact with the edge of it.

“It was foolish of you to run, Wilfred.”

He shook his head, breathing through his mouth.

“Let’s go back over what happened,” I said. “Last night Harold rushed into the house on Northland. A few moments later Papa Joe arrived. He spoke to Harold; then went to his room. A little while after that, Papa Joe called for you and you went up to him. After that — a blank, until Papa Joe was found this morning. What did Papa Joe want you for, Wilfred?”

“To get him a drink of whisky.” He stopped, as if the words had expended all his energy.

I waited, and said finally, “Did you get it for him?”

Wilfred nodded. “I went downstairs first, but the bottle was gone from the buffet. It was the only bottle in the house, I thought. I remembered then that young Mr. Cranford took it to his room earlier in the day. When I went up to get it, I heard him and his wife wrangling, so I didn’t go in.”

“Why not? Were you more afraid of breaking in on Harold than of refusing Papa Joe’s request?”

“I’ll say not! But I happened to think of the pint of Old Seaman you put on your bureau when you came home yesterday. I’d brought me a glass from downstairs and a bottle of ginger ale. Instead of going to young Mr. Cranford’s room for the whisky, I went to yours. The pint was still on your bureau.”

My heart began hitting my ribs with a hammer-like beat at the implications his story was unfolding.

“You poured him a drink from the Old Seaman?”

“Yes, sir. A big drink, the kind he always liked. He throwed it down his throat, made a face, and used the ginger ale for a chaser. Then he looked like somebody had hit him over the head with a club. He fell into a chair and looked at me, his eyes terrible, the color funny in his cheeks. He opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. Then he slid off the chair onto the floor.”

Wilfred chewed the side of his lip. “I thought right away he was plumb dead and that I’d poisoned him even if I hadn’t meant to. I was scared clean to my toenails. I just wanted to get away from there until they found out who did it. I was afraid that they’d catch me and wouldn’t look any further. I slipped back this morning to tell Ellen I hadn’t done it, and where I was, and for her to get me some grub.” He touched my arm timidly. “Please don’t take me back, Mr. Martin! I swear I didn’t do it, even if it was me that gave him the whisky!”

“I believe you,” I said. Tears welled in his eyes.

I waited a moment, and when the shaking ceased in his fat moon face and round shoulders, I reached in my pocket for the lead pellet I’d found in Harold’s room. I Jet the light play on the chunk of lead as I rolled it around in the palm of my hand.

Wilfred paled.

“You dropped one of the slugs,” I said. “Did you carry the rest of them away with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I found you in Harold’s room yesterday with his gun in your hand and a pair of pliers in your pocket. You went to his room with one purpose in your mind. You hated him with all the intensity of your being. You felt that only you could save your sister.”

“She wouldn’t listen to me,” Wilfred said miserably.

“Yet for all your hate you were afraid to do anything to Harold directly. You knew he was in danger of some kind, going out armed to protect himself. You wanted to remove that protection, so you peeled the slugs out of his cartridges, leaving him with a gun loaded with blanks.”

Wilfred hung his head sheepishly. “I thought it was pretty smart, Mr. Martin. Just everybody wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“Pretty underhanded, too.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

I dropped the slug back in my pocket. My mind reviewed how it had happened here in the cottage. McGinty had hurled his body away from Harold’s spitting gun, had reached the next room where he had tripped over a piece of furniture and fallen. Not knowing whether Harold had missed or whether he actually was mortally wounded, McGinty had realized his only chance lay in silence and in the hope that Harold would not follow him into the dark room and start shooting again.

When he had heard Harold rush out of the cottage, McGinty had allowed a few moments to elapse. Then he had got up and walked out, crossing the back yard along the general course of Harold’s flight.

Little wonder the yard had not revealed McGinty’s passage to me. I had been looking for a trail left by a crawling, dying man, not that of a man completely healthy, whole — and able to strike again!

Chapter VIII

Probably it gave Wilfred a turn when I allowed him to stay in the cottage, for he’d expected a forced return to the Cranford house. I was certain, though, that he wouldn’t run further now, and I didn’t want him near Harold when I sprang the business about the doctored gun. I had a purpose for Harold. I was certain of the identity of the murderer, but the only way I could convince Hagan of my belief was to give him everything Harold also had to tell.

Harold was lingering in the lower hallway when I slipped back to the house. I guessed that he was waiting for me. I nodded. “Wilfred was in the bungalow.”

“Did you learn anything? Does Wilfred know enough to get the police off our necks so Vera and I can settle Papa Joe’s estate and get out of here?”

“Perhaps. At least he told me enough to prove to you that McGinty is still alive.”

Harold’s face tightened. “You and I both know what happened to McGinty,” he said with a rasp in his voice. “What do you want — for me to say or do something that will guarantee you’ll never be implicated?”

“We’ll both know in a minute what happened to McGinty,” I corrected. “Do you know you went to the bungalow with an unloaded gun?”

“Steve, you are crazy! I checked the gun.”

“Naturally. You broke the cylinder of the revolver and there were the rims of five unfired bullets. You also heard the crashing of the gun in the bungalow. But Wilfred had already taken the teeth out of the bullets with a pair of pliers. Here is one of them. The rest he carried away.” I held the slug up before his face between my thumb and forefinger.

He stared at the bullet. Then he took a deep breath to recapture his bravado. “What are you trying to make me admit with this cock and bull story?”

“Only the truth. For Hagan’s ears.”

“Good night, Steve.”

My voice stopped him at the bottom of the stairs. “This thing is real, whether you want to believe it or not. McGinty will come again. Or he’ll phone. He’ll let you know that he’s still alive, more determined than ever to nail you. A man who followed you all the way from New York won’t give up easily. When he comes or calls, I’ll be waiting, Harold. I’ll do what I can to help you, in exchange for the truth.”

His gaze stayed fastened to my face a moment longer, then he turned and mounted the stairs.

I went into the parlor. McGinty, I was certain, would not be long in bringing my prediction to pass. He had given Harold time to consider himself safe. Now was the psychological moment to strike.

I picked up a book, settled myself in an armchair under a lamp, and opened the yellow pages. I had read a dozen paragraphs before it occurred to me that I had not bothered to take a look at the title.

The phone rang at ten forty-five. I allowed it to scream three times before I picked up the receiver.

A heavy voice asked, “Cranford?” I heard a click as the extension in the upper hallway was raised from the hook.

The voice repeated, “Cranford?” And on the extension Harold asked, “What is it?”

I replaced the receiver and began to count the minutes. When five of them had passed, Harold and Vera came downstairs.

He was a picture of abject defeat, of utter misery, of nerves too long stretched beyond the snapping point.

He stood before me, his face a pale thing of hollow shadows. Vera stood beside him, not once taking her eyes from his face.

“McGinty phoned,” he said.

“I know.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked dully.

“I want to know everything there is to know.”

“All right.” He looked around, as if searching for a place to sit down.

“And I want Hagan to know it later,” I said.

The effort to bring his ego into the battle revealed itself on his face. The effort failed, and he said in a limp voice, “It’s the only way out. I can’t go on with things as they’ve turned out to be. You’ll guarantee your help?”

“All I’m able to give. Now for a few details. First, the girl. The one you painted after she tried to commit suicide off a dock one night.”

“McGinty rescued her,” he said.

“That much I know. He brought her into the café where you were eating and you saw the girl. Was it for the first time?”

“Yes,” he said, speaking like a robot. “I asked her to come to my studio, and gave her the address. I didn’t really expect her to do it, but she came. I started the portrait. I suppose she felt she was entering a brand new world. We — kidded around—”

He glanced at Vera, and a slow flush spread over his pallor. He looked at her, at her lovely blonde beauty, the swelling curves of her beautiful young breasts as emotion quickened her breathing, he looked at her slender waist and the smoothly turned thighs under her clinging frock — and he didn’t know what to say, what he could say. Here was beauty and purity, the woman he wanted always to hold in his arms as he must now be remembering to have held her — how could he go on with a sordid story?

Suddenly he blurted, “Must we go into that, Steve? You’re a man — you know how it is, h-how things can happen. I... I—” My silence was his answer, for he drew a long, hard breath and said, “Well, after that I introduced her to some of the people I knew. She was taken with the idea of being a model, and annoyed two or three artists who gave her an opening. All of them knew — they told me — that she was a wild little thing. Completely primitive, she was, but... but she could grip a man. Sex was her whole existence.”

He stopped, his eyes alive with memories. He deliberately avoided looking at Vera now, though I had a feeling from a glance at her face that all this was no new story to her, though there might be something new in the telling.

“And where does McGinty re-enter?” I prompted.

“He fell in love with the girl. Probably it started for him when he found her there on the dock. He worshiped her. He married her.”

“Is that so bad?”

“She was going to have a baby. My baby.”

In the silence that crimped on the room only Harold’s breathing was audible. I managed words after several seconds.

“And then?”

“She must have told McGinty about us — her and me, I mean. She hated me wildly after she had to tell him. She threatened all sorts of crazy things. Her last phone call was a demand that I see her. I went to the apartment where she and McGinty lived. She had worked herself into a half crazed state. I was there alone with her when she jumped — from a tenth story window.”

His voice choked him. After a moment, he was able to go on.

“I’d been careful not to be seen entering the apartment, walking up all ten flights. I was even more careful when I left. McGinty found a cigarette stub in the apartment. She didn’t smoke, and he smoked cigars. His suspicions fastened on me immediately. When he found out the brand of cigarettes I smoked, he was certain I’d been in the apartment. Of course, he took it to the police and they dragged me in. But the cigarette is a common brand and they had no proof that I’d been near the place. McGinty was different. He decided to force it from me — a confession of murder.”

He brought his haggard gaze up. “Steve, I swear it was suicide, but you see the spot I was in? I thought McGinty would cool off. He showed no disposition to do so, making my life hell with phone calls, following me on the streets. If I pulled the police back into it there was too strong a possibility of their discovering I had been in the apartment. Perhaps some pair of unknown eyes had seen me and would remember if circumstances were arranged just the right way. Perhaps they would call it murder. I thought I had shaken loose of McGinty when we drove down from New York, but he was following, and must have been only an hour or so behind us.”

For an instant fire gleamed again in his eyes. “You see what this has cost me? My work, my peace of mind, everything!”

That blow hit Vera the hardest. It hadn’t cost him entirely everything until this moment when he had voiced the thought, reducing her love to nothing.

He said, “I was no more to blame than the girl from the wharf was. And I was wholly blameless for her death. She was destined for suicide. It was a part of the very fibers of her mind. She had tried it once, hadn’t she?” A long silence followed his words. Then he said, “What will you do now to help?”

“I’ll help you face it. It’s the only way you’ll ever get free of McGinty. Papa Joe’s death was a mistake. The poison was intended for me — to insure my silence. Papa Joe killed himself.”

Harold burst out, “He’d never commit suicide?”

“I didn’t say that. He murdered himself. You and Papa Joe believed that you’d murdered a man in the bungalow last night. You two believed that I was the lone witness who would speak, who did in fact state flatly that he would speak. You believed that I relented and removed McGinty for you. That left only Papa Joe to regard me as highly dangerous, desperately dangerous. He was fighting, remember, for his own flesh and blood, his only son, against a man he considered unspeakably inferior, an outsider.

“I can picture the working of his mind. He would meet me when I returned to the house, sound me out. If there was no chance at all that I’d keep my mouth shut, then he’d appear beaten and pour us a drink, in which he’d already dumped his sleeping capsules. Only he wouldn’t drink his and later he’d force enough whisky down my gullet and over my clothes to make it seem that my efforts to turn alcoholic had succeeded only too wall.

“McGinty would be spirited away, I would be found dead in my bed, and the doctor of Papa Joe’s choice would have little reason to doubt Papa Joe’s words as to my recent activities with a bottle. A death certificate would be quickly signed that would end it. But a drink from the wrong bottle spoiled it for Papa Joe. When Hagan has all the facts, he will have little trouble checking up to discover the truth of what I am saying. In the light of this knowledge, that weak motive he thinks I might have had for harming Papa Joe will go pale. Hagan will have method and means, the instrument of police science at his beckoning. For instance, there may be fingerprints on the Old Seaman bottle, or little signs in Papa Joe’s room, little signs all around for Hagan to read when he knows what to look for. Be that as it may, it’s a chance we’ll have to take, all of us.”

Vera turned and started from the room. Harold pushed himself up out of his chair with her name on his lips. She stopped at the doorway, and he caught her hand. She looked at him. Yes, she was sure of her man — but not for the reasons she had believed.

He had lost her. She might stay with him; she might even grow old with him; but Harold had lost his beautiful Vera forever. As she moved again, the soft curves of her breast were as full and promising as ever, but their promise was no longer for Harold.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he pleaded.

She stepped aside to allow him to walk ahead of her.

She glanced back at me.

“You never know what tomorrow holds,” I said. “I thought it was all over for me once, too.”

She said nothing, but turned to follow Harold. I picked up the phone. There were two calls I had to make. The call to Hagan could wait a few minutes. First things first.

I dialed, and the room clerk at the Lang Park Hotel came on the wire.

“We do not have a Mrs. Bryanne Martin registered,” he told me. “The only Martins registered are a Mr. and Mrs. Steven Martin.”

“Mrs. Steven Martin will do nicely,” I said. “This is her husband calling.”

While I waited for them to call her room, I thought, Mr. and Mrs. She registered for both of us.

Content

Talmage Powell
Man Sinister

Chapter 1

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII