Trouble in Rooster Paradise Page 3

  Light broke through the window at the bottom of the stairs, accenting my landlady’s shrine to her bump and grind days. A display case of mahogany was mounted on the wall. It contained her prized fans, manufactured by the famous theatrical costumer Lawrence Sittenberg of New York City. They were made from tail feathers wrenched from ostriches in Capetown, South Africa, then tinted and attached to celluloid handles. Alongside the case hung three framed photos linked like comic-strip panels. Each showed a younger Mrs. Berger working her fans in different stages of her act—billiard ball naked, save for rouge, high-heeled slippers and a G-string that was more thread than string. If she caught you looking at her pictures—which you couldn’t help but do when mounting those stairs—she’d holler over something like, “Sally Rand was a piker next to me, am I right? If my Otto hadn’t taken me from the life, I’d have been the big name,” or, “I kept them spellbound and comin’ back for more. Such verve and flourish I had. Those were good times. Good times.”

  We were still chewing our Nightmare Drops when we reached the top of the stairs.

  “I’m afraid Nora’s cookies deserve their sobriquet. I’ll make us some coffee to wash them down, old top,” Walter said in a whisper. “We’ll chat. Plus, the first of the Napoleonics arrived. You’ll have to see them.”

  I was easily persuaded. I needed more than burnt sweet bread to neutralize the images of a dead Christine.

  Along one wall of Walter’s room was his workbench—a wooden table, bar-high, three feet deep and ten feet wide. As a whole, the counter was unstained, but the area where he worked was peppered with dry paint droppings of every color. In the center crowding the wall were paint pots and worn brushes bunched in jars like mutant nosegays in small vases. In the far right corner sat a hot plate, an electric percolator, a can of Hills Brothers Coffee, a receptacle of Lipton’s Tea bags, and a box of Ry-Krisp.

  “Roughage is a must, Gunnar,” Walter liked to say. “It’s the key to the body’s survival.”

  The man didn’t know how right he was. His Remington typewriter was next to the Ry-Krisp, nestled up against a stack of paper anchored with an old railroad spike. That stack was Walter’s labor of love. He was helping the unlearned Mrs. Berger write a play she called The Making of a Fan Dancer. Walter struggled mightily to give it a philosophic twist. He wanted to rename it The Gymnosophist, but Mrs. Berger wasn’t buying it.

  Near his work stool, probably fifty lead soldiers on horseback stood on the bench in military columns. Each horseman’s torso had been painted crimson, and a few of the horses were already white, black, or brown.

  “British Heavy Dragoons,” he said happily, handing me one. “This allotment came special delivery this afternoon.”

  I hefted it and studied the detail of the dragoon’s drawn saber, pointed forward as if in a charge. After Walter got done with them you’d see the whites of their eyes.

  “What’s their destination?” I asked.

  “A wealthy collector in Rhode Island. He’s putting together a Waterloo diorama. It’s the kind of order Perry salivates over. He intends for me to paint the whole lot for him. Consistency of style. That kind of thing.”

  Raymond Perry headed a family-run soldier-making business out of his home in Springfield, Massachusetts. He home-cast with lead, pewter, and rubber. Walter had worked on Civil War figurines the month previous, and had told me he was looking forward to his next assignment—toy soldiers from the Napoleonic era. I’d forgotten all about it.

  “But Gunnar, here you stand all weak and weary, indulging an old friend’s passion. Let me get that coffee going.” Only the left side of his mouth lifted when he grinned. He pointed me to his channel-backed fireside chair, sans fireplace. He pulled the stool up closer for himself.

  As Walter busied himself, he explained more about his latest assignment—the new paints he’d need, the research on the uniforms he’d be doing, the completion date he’d be shooting for.

  “It’s a classic testimony to vanity, Gunnar, that the whims and idiosyncrasies of a regimental colonel often dictated the colors and patterns worn by an entire regiment—”

  Walter had probably been quiet and reclusive long before his disfigurement. He futilely insisted he was of the bourgeoisie, but I pictured him in some upper-class Philadelphia playground, contentedly playing chess with his governess but graciously admitting anyone else who cared to play. The continuous gleam in his eyes went with a gift of making you feel his serenity. Likely it was due to the real interest he showed in people—their loves, hates, wants, needs, fears, and bugaboos. He rarely ventured out in daytime. But I joined him on nocturnal excursions and many times saw him console a lovelorn waitress, buck up a burly barge worker, and play shrink to a barkeep.

  “… armies were costumed as if for a play. The Peninsular Wars were really a lethal grand pageantry ….”

  As the third Pangborn to attend Princeton, Walter absorbed its Gothic charms alongside a ripening F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Walter’s junior year he infuriated his father, “The Judge,” by rushing off to smash the Kaiser in World War One. He became a private in a Pennsylvania company. He fought in the Argonne and was badly burned when a fuel wagon he stood next to was shelled. He learned later that that very day his estranged father died of a heart attack.

  “What do you make of it, Walter?” I asked as he got the percolator going. “What we saw tonight, I mean. My story about the girl.”

  Walter plopped gently on the work stool and said, “You realize, old socks, it’s our respective perversities that take us down these roads.”

  “Sure. But we don’t go screaming. And we like the scenery.”

  “Addicted to it, I fear.”

  After the war, Walter lived in a veterans’ hospital in the Bronx—abandoned by his sole sibling, a grasping older sister who had power of attorney for their invalid mother. Walter was shut away in the kind of convalescent ward the public never sees, and he shared existence with men with no jaws, eyes, or ears. As he put it, “Each of us is in a valiant struggle to keep from going off his nut.” After the big wars, society only saw the occasional man on crutches. Wouldn’t want them to get the right idea, don’t you know.

  Walter’s father had arranged a trust fund for him in his will. When this finally went into effect on his twenty-fifth birthday, it was the salvation of Walter’s independent nature. Forsaking his blue-blood ties, he drifted out West and lived off an allowance that more than met his needs. Painting lead soldiers provided a supplemental income and occupied some of his time during the day. This, and the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that took up another wall of his room, played a big part in centering him.

  “So what’s the Walter Pangborn construct for what you saw and for the facts I fed to the cops?”

  Walter had the fingers of his right hand to his chin, and cradled his elbow with his left hand. It was a definite Walterism. When he did that he’d knead his chin and look up and off to one side.

  “Miss Johanson knew her pursuer,” Walter said. “He didn’t drive erratically, yet she suggested that he was drunk. She didn’t want you to stop the car and confront him.”

  “Yeah. I figured it was a cock-and-bull story,” I said.

  “That phrase has a quaint origin, Gunnar. It comes from the renowned Aesop’s stories of moralizing cocks and disputatious bulls. For that reason ….”

  I raised a goading eyebrow.

  “Yes … sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, it was no coincidence that Miss Johanson sat so close to you in the movie house. She made you in the lobby as a man she could use, possibly lean on if there was trouble.”

  “I thought the same thing. I was to be her Galahad if her shadow-man entered the theater.”

  “Precisely, though not likely as gallant a role as you imagine. More like scraps to be thrown to her pursuing hound. Since the hound didn’t enter the movie house, she could afford to be rude to you after the movie ended. But she miscalculated. My guess is that she saw the hound again when she step
ped outside, and that is what accounts for her accosting you with her coy amends.”

  “Aw, Walter, you mean it wasn’t my boyish charm?”

  He laughed quietly. “You’ve still got appeal, old thing—so not to worry. No, the girl probably assumed you were just another lascivious chump she could manipulate.”

  “I’ll take that as a backhanded compliment, Walter.”

  “By all means, Gunnar, you do that. Get them when you can. That’s the way.”

  Walter could easily hide the hideous marks on his chest and right arm, but the ugly scars on his right cheek and throat, as well as his deformed right ear, gave him the profile of a vermilion monster. But he was a gentle beast. I never saw his injuries once I got to know him. In fact, I don’t think anyone continued to see them once they truly began to experience his caring genius. Over the years he civilized an after-dark world of friends who wound up forgiving the repulsive, and seeing beauty in the grotesque.

  “You say Miss Johanson was noticeably relieved to find you weren’t a policeman?” Walter asked.

  “Palpably relieved.”

  He stood up to get our coffee then resumed his perch. Walter reached under his workbench for a bottle of Black & White. It was his Scotch of choice, the one that featured a picture of black and white Scotty dogs on the back of each bottle. He held it up and gave me an inquiring look. My grin gave approval for him to dose my cup. He then gave his own coffee a healthy glug.

  “Hmm, let’s think on this, Gunnar. Miss Johanson spoke of costly dreams, had some money salted away, and was not attired like the common shop girl. Yet she lived in a working class neighborhood. In her case then, I’d say that her use of distaff allurements—while not an evil thing in itself, you understand—may suggest something shady, even sinister.”

  I agreed.

  “She lived with her aunt, so she was not a kept woman. However, with the kind of beauty that transcends class distinction, she might well have had a wealthy suitor.”

  “I’m thinking that too. Yet she led me to believe she was leaving the Northwest soon.”

  “Ah, yes. Park Avenue.”

  “So what do you make of the Packard, Walter?”

  “Well, given what has befallen Miss Johanson, I’m inclined to share Detective Milland’s view that you’d not successfully lost the pursuing hound after all.”

  “Maybe she was in an affair gone bad. Her pursuer a spurned suitor.”

  “Perhaps. But if he were Miss Johanson’s suitor, then he’d have known where she lived, and your efforts at losing him would have been a meaningless gesture. If so, she might simply have been trying to get rid of him for the evening. Possibly they’d just had a bad break-up.”

  “Something doesn’t sound right,” I said.

  “I agree. But one thing is certain, whoever the hound is, tonight he turned vicious.”

  “And then he took her money and identification to make it look like robbery.”

  “Precisely. An old ruse. But shooting her near a dark alley sounds premeditated. Crimes of passion are generally more spontaneous—spur-of-the-moment.”

  “Yeah. More likely, a spurned lover would have conked her on the head with a fire poker or strangled her with his bare hands.”

  Walter nodded and took a sip from his cup.

  We sat in silence a few seconds. I heard raindrops hit the roof. A wry smile appeared on the left side of Walter’s face.

  “What is it, Walter?”

  “Oh, it’s just that conceivably our speculations merely show that we’re striking back at the encroachments of a humdrum existence.”

  “Life at Mrs. Berger’s, humdrum? Walter, you shock me.”

  The raindrops now sounded like thimbles hitting the shingles. Walter got up to shut his window.

  “Still Gunnar, perhaps we’re making an Oriental tapestry out of a warp and woof throw rug. After all, there is the real possibility that Miss Johanson was simply robbed and this exercise has been nothing more than a grisly parlor game that hasn’t been worth the candle.”

  Grisly? Yes.

  Parlor game? Not hardly.

  Chapter 4

  Before Pearl Harbor I worked for a big detective agency in Seattle. After my discharge from the army I spent over a year furthering my education by means of the G.I. Bill. I toyed with becoming the teacher my grandfather had hoped I’d become. However, the temperament to learn but not teach led me back into detective work in the spring of ’48—this time as a one-man show.

  I dreamt about Christine Johanson just before sunrise on Thursday. We were waltzing in the lobby of the Ballard Theatre. Christine began to cough violently, so Mrs. Berger cut in. She wore high heels and a sequined G-string. She wanted to tango. Thankfully, I woke up. I always woke up when Mrs. Berger came to me in my dreams. I dreaded the night I didn’t.

  It was the eighth of June. I remember, because as I dressed that morning, I was thinking that my grandmother Agnette would have been another year older had she lived. So, by breakfast Thursday morning, Christine had become a cerebral footnote. By mid-morning she would have completely faded from caring memory had a telephone call not revived my concern.

  My office was on the second floor of the two-story Hanstad Building. The owner was Dag Erickson, a local attorney I met the same month I hung up my sleuth shingle. We soon formed a working relationship that teetered on symbiotic.

  Miss Olga Peterson came out of the Hanstad Building as I tried to enter. Miss Peterson was a spinster in her mid-fifties, and her “spinning” consisted of running a flower and knickknack shop when not playing mahjong, or reading romance novels and pulp magazines.

  The envelopes in Miss Peterson’s plump hand signaled she’d missed the mailman and was headed for the mailbox out by the curb.

  “Mr. Vance,” Miss Peterson said, as I sidestepped her rotundity. I was “Philo Vance” to her, and I’d stopped correcting her the first day we met. “I see that you’ve made a purchase, Mr. Vance.”

  I smiled and hugged my parcel close to my chest. Miss Peterson generously dosed herself with over-spiced perfume that caused my eyes to water and put my gag reflex to the proof.

  She fanned her pudgy face with the envelopes and nodded at my parcel. “Shall I hazard a guess that your package has something to do with a case?” she asked. Hope was in her eyes.

  I shook my head.

  For a guy who made his living poking at underbellies, I never liked prying jabs at my own.

  “Cold medicine,” I said, and coughed to make the lie credible.

  She looked disappointed. “My stars, but Mr. Vance, for a strapping young fellow you are a sickly one. It seems every time we meet you’ve come from the pharmacy with something remedial.”

  I made a mental note to come up with a better line.

  “You’re not one of those malaria-stricken veterans, are you? Some exotic disease from the Orient, perhaps?”

  “No, Miss Peterson. I was in Europe.”

  She briefly pondered Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ailments and was working her way to the Franks, when her face untwisted and brightened.

  “We’ve missed Mr. Pangborn at our mahjong club. I trust he is well.”

  “Walter? All goes swimmingly. His is a rich and varied life.”

  “I must say, he’s a most remarkable man. Most remarkable. Why, his everyday talk is simply bedizened with engaging insights that—”

  “Are quite lost on the minds of lesser souls?” I asked, completing the familiar praise.

  “Why … yes. Just so. You must please tell him that Olga misses those little crumbs of knowledge he lets fall as we stack our tiles. He’s such a delightful east wind player. Why, sometimes that man’s perceptiveness leaves me in an attentive state—”

  “Bordering on the supernatural?” I said. “Uh-huh. Walter’s been known to have that effect on some. I think it’s part of his game strategy.”

  “Really? Oh … why, yes. Just so.”

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “Please be sure and give h
im a fresh greeting from Olga.”

  “No problem.”

  I entered the building.

  “Why, a body would think you had the plague,” Miss Peterson called after me. “My stars. It’s not natural for a vibrant young man to be medicating so often. It’s just not natural.”

  “No, Miss Peterson.”

  I tromped up the stairs. Behind and below I heard the thud and clap of her orthopedic shoes hitting the lobby floor on her return from the mailbox.

  “Black strap molasses, Mr. Vance,” she called up after me. “Remember to take two tablespoons every night. Do you hear?”

  “Yes, Miss Peterson. Molasses. Every night,” I shouted back.

  My office adjoined Dag Erickson’s. Dag had his suite enlarged during the war, reducing the remaining space I rented to two oversized pigeonholes he’d initially used for storage.

  I snatched the morning mail from the slot and had my key in the lock when an attractive young woman stepped out of Dag’s door. She’d doubtless seen me as I passed in front of the frosted glass. Miss Cissy Paget came with the pigeonholes.

  What I mean is my rent included an additional telephone in Dag’s office and Cissy as my answering service. Her filing skills were a negotiable extra. Her asking price for typing was out of my reach.

  Cissy’s heels clicked softly against the linoleum as each foot took its turn on an imaginary tightrope, causing her willowy figure to oscillate from midriff to toes. Hers was a gait a fashion model would envy, but knowing Cissy, she’d probably walked that way since she began to toddle.

  A faint scent of violets came along with her.

  “Any calls, Sweet Knees?” I said. I’d been gone only an hour.

  “Just one,” she replied, thrusting a small slip of yellow paper at me. “It came about fifteen minutes ago.”

  The note read, “Call Rikard Lundeen.” I figured it meant a job, but it made me as ambivalent as a toothache victim facing a dentist’s drill.