Killing Town Read online

  They were having coffee, and his hand was on top of hers. Old boy friend maybe, here to talk her out of the mistake she was about to make with some out-of-town bum…

  Couldn’t see his face—his back was mostly to me, he leaning in to her, she leaning in to him. Then Melba noticed me in the window behind him and, after a tiny look of surprise, motioned me to come around to the front door.

  She met me there and her guest came along. His features were familiar—they echoed Melba’s own, with a masculine cast that still possessed a near long-eyelashed prettiness, and a tan you only got with plenty of vacation time. Like when you’re the boss. And that smile of his was broad and white, so perfect he either had a hell of a dentist or an in with God.

  “Mike,” she said, “this is—”

  “Lawrence Charles, Mike,” he said, his voice smooth and deep. “Melba’s big brother, only brother actually.”

  We shook hands, his grip firm but not showing off.

  “Pleased to meet you, Larry,” I said, taking the same liberty he’d taken with me.

  The smile remained but tightened a little. “I prefer Lawrence. Perhaps you prefer Michael?”

  “No. If you’re not my mother, it’s Mike.”

  He gave that the laugh it didn’t deserve, then my bride-to-be’s brother led us to the couch, playing host. Melba sat, tucking her legs under herself, and I dropped in next to her, not too close, while Lawrence pulled up a chair and settled in, facing us. His loafers were as Italian as his sportscar, and he was drenched in a cologne I recognized: Canoe. But for all his best efforts, some fish smell was making its way into the boat.

  “So,” he said, “I understand you kids met at the Stage Door Canteen. The USO! So romantic, like something out of the movies.”

  I was looking for sarcasm or any hint of an inflection that might indicate his disapproval. It wasn’t there. A bum rolls into town riding a box car and now is about to marry this guy’s sister—another mouth at the wealthy Charles family trough. And he seemed fine with it.

  “Yes,” Melba said to her brother, her smile overdoing it, “we exchanged a few letters, while Mike was overseas, but imagine my surprise when he turned up in town.”

  Imagine my surprise when I was framed for rape and murder. And imagine my surprise when the town’s favorite little rich girl gave me an alibi and a marriage proposal.

  “Well, it’s an unusual story, all right,” Lawrence said, with a quick roll of the eyes. He got out a silver cigarette case and selected a smoke, then offered me one and I took it. He produced a matching silver lighter and fired me up. The cig was strong, even harsh, but I liked it.

  He read my reaction and smiled as he gave himself a light. “French smoke. Gauloises. Best in the world, I say.”

  And only the best for Lawrence Charles.

  “D’you serve in Europe,” I asked, “and pick up a taste for these there?”

  His face lost all expression for a moment, then his mouth half smiled, the Gauloises bobbing in the other corner. “No, I didn’t serve. Flat feet, I’m afraid.”

  Or maybe connections on the draft board.

  “One of the great frustrations of my life,” he went on. “But I must say I admire you for your service, Mike. I hear you won the Bronze Star.”

  “I came out of it breathing and that was the point of the exercise.”

  He stowed the smile away. “And you were on the police, too, I understand, in New York City?”

  Was Belden his source, I wondered, or had it just gotten around the well-greased Killington grapevine?

  “Briefly,” I said. “I was declared over-enthusiastic and wound up on a desk, and that’s not my style. I opened up an office of my own and now I’m still mostly sitting at a desk. But business will pick up.”

  He was nodding. “I’m sure it will. We’re moving into some real prosperity in this country, although frankly my family’s business did well even in the Depression. People have to eat, and canned foods like ours fit a lot of pocketbooks.”

  Enough to buy Italian cars and shoes, anyway.

  He leaned in and patted his sister on the knee. She looked away, as if the gesture embarrassed her. “Mel tells me you haven’t talked about where you’ll settle down. Were you thinking of staying with your little detective agency, and living in the city? Perhaps we might tempt you with a job here in the fishing industry.”

  I inhaled the strong smoke, held it, let it back out. “I’ve caught a few in my time.”

  The smile was back. “Are we talking bad guys or fish, Mike?”

  “I was talking fish, but that does work both ways. Your sister and I will talk about this, obviously… but I don’t think I’m the executive type, if that’s what you’re offering.”

  That seemed to offend him, just a little, but the smile didn’t falter. “I wasn’t exactly offering anything, Mike. I was just…”

  “Fishing?”

  He chuckled, raised a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I only wanted to drop by and let you kids know I’m behind you all the way. Marriage is such a wonderful institution.”

  Was it Groucho who said, But who wants to live in an institution?

  The cigarette was in his fingertips and he made smoke trails as he gestured. “I’ve been married for fifteen years, Mike, very happily. Eva’s a wonderful girl and we have two boys, one six, one ten, and they really make all the hard work worthwhile.”

  Yet somehow the Alfa Romeo didn’t strike me as a family car.

  “Eva’s great,” Melba blurted, the smile still looking forced. “And the boys! Wild Indians but so sweet.”

  “And we don’t have a governess, either,” Lawrence said, raising an eyebrow. “Eva does it all herself. She’s a treasure.”

  “A national treasure!” Melba said.

  She seemed a little nervous, sitting there with her arms folded and her legs tucked under her, as if she were trying to make herself as small a target as possible. Maybe having to trot out the story we’d concocted about how we met had thrown her a little.

  “You have a nice set-up,” I told him, “assuming you don’t mind being tied to the family business. Did you ever want to go into anything else? My old man had a bar and when I turned my back on that, he didn’t speak to me for a year.”

  “I had ambitions,” Lawrence admitted, the smile more relaxed now. “Wanted to be an actor, if you can believe that.”

  He had the looks and mellow, radio announcer voice for it.

  “But the Old Man encouraged me to help him expand the business,” he said, “and after college, I came up with the idea of using our cast-off scraps and skins for a glue factory—and he was enthusiastic right off the bat. He backed me all the way and it’s been hugely successful from the start.”

  “I never heard of fish glue, frankly.”

  He shrugged. “It’s no different from using the remains of horses and cows. Instead of ears, tails, scraps of hide, tendons, and bones, we process bones, heads, scales, and skins of fish from our cannery.”

  Melba shifted uncomfortably.

  But her brother was on a roll: “We wash and soak the resulting stock, and cook it in open vats, into what we call glue liquor. It thickens into jelly.”

  “Honestly, Lawrence,” she said, “Mike doesn’t care to hear you talk shop.”

  Lawrence frowned at his sister, but I spoke up.

  “No, this is interesting,” I said. “Anyway, I like to see a man with a genuine interest in his work.”

  Lawrence gave me yet another smile, and a nod, and said, “Anyway, these are early days for you and me, Mike. We have a lot of getting to know each other to do. I just wanted to assure you that however… unusual these circumstances might be, my sister has my full support. And that means you have it, too.”

  “Well, thanks, Lawrence. That’s real nice to hear.”

  Lawrence let out a sigh, patted his thighs, then stood. “And speaking of work, I need to get back to it. Melba, thanks for the coffee. Mike, would you walk me out to my ca
r?”

  I said sure, and he took me by the arm as we strolled to his sportscar. When we were there, he said softly, “Mike, the Old Man wants to talk to you. Nothing to be leery of—he just wants a word. Surely that’s understandable in a situation like this.”

  “There is no rule book,” I said, “for a situation like this, Lawrence. But I’ll be happy to talk to him.”

  “Good. He’s at the house right now. It’s on the Bluff.” He handed me a folded slip of paper. “There’s the address and directions. Go alone.”

  Then he smiled at his sister, who was in the doorway, got into his fancy ride and glided away. And, yes, even on gravel that thing could glide—it was that smooth.

  But then so was its driver.

  * * *

  Already I was lying to my intended. I had told her I was going into town to try to connect with my army buddy’s widow. Instead— wondering if I was about to be offered a pay-off, or possibly have my life threatened—I was calling on the patriarch of the family fortune, who ruled atop the Bluff.

  The Bluff was where the new wealth of the first half of the last century had staked out the best views of Killington Bay for their lavish dwellings. Early on, this part of the country had plenty of dough in lumbering and saw mills, and flourished as an agricultural center; but by now this was really a one-industry town, unless you counted the cannery and the fish-glue factory as two.

  So it was no surprise that among sprawling gingerbread mansions, some looking a little long in the tooth by now, the near-palace of the Charles family had a block to itself, right at the top, sitting in a private little park of manicured shrubbery and magnificent maples. Residences on the downslope reflected their corresponding incomes until at the foot was slum housing.

  But of course the Charles place was no slum. The stately L-shaped limestone Federal Colonial, three stories with a two-story wing, wore a cedar-shingled roof with two chimneys, red-shuttered windows, and a white-pillared porch, its double front door crowned with transom windows.

  The brass bell was the kind you pulled and chimes pealed within. I waited for admittance, expecting a butler. I got someone else.

  He was as tall as me and half again as wide, but not really fat, his bulk well packaged in a tailored gray suit with a pale-blue tie, his white shirt as crisp as the white smile in the broad oval face. His nose was wide, the nostrils ready to pull in enough air for two men, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows untamed, his eyes the same pale blue as his tie. His hair managed to be thinning and bushy at the same time, and as white as the shirt and the teeth.

  “Mike!” he said, his voice the same baritone as his son’s, only with a sandpaper edge. “I’d know you anywhere.”

  He shoved a hand at me like a gardening tool going into moist earth and I took it. His grip might have popped my fingers like toothpaste tubes if I hadn’t been ready for it. Senator Charles may have been born to money, but those hands had worked. Maybe his daddy started him scaling fish or working on a fishing boat with netting and gaffs.

  Him “knowing me anywhere” only meant he’d seen photos of his prospective son-in-law in the paper, and the only trick was recognizing me when my face wasn’t swollen up from the wet leather glove treatment.

  “Senator Charles?” I asked.

  “Yes. But we’re not going to stand on formalities, and we’ll certainly drop the honorific. I’m Ernest.”

  Was that a noun or an adjective?

  “Your son prefers Lawrence to Larry,” I said, as he ushered me in with a fatherly arm around my shoulder. He smelled of Old Spice, not Canoe. “I’m going to guess you’re not an ‘Ernie.’”

  The half-smile he gave me was wider than most full ones. “No. Never did care for that. Never even heard it used till this last war—Ernie Pyle and all. To that degree, my son and I are both a little old-fashioned.”

  We were crossing a surprisingly narrow if high-ceilinged entryway, with a formal living room through a wide archway to my right, and a library to my left, a hallway hugging the second-floor staircase straight ahead. Everything was grand, but unpretentiously so. This was one of those George Washington Slept Here houses.

  He steered me to the library and deposited me in an overstuffed leather chair. I was asked if I’d like something to drink and said beer.

  “Excellent choice,” he said, and went to a trawler-size desk and used a phone with several lines. He said to someone, “Would you bring two beers for our guest and myself ? Thank you, dear.”

  The walls were all books, mostly the leather-bound kind nobody reads, but near the desk, whose swivel chair’s back was to some front windows, the volumes were a twentieth-century mix of fiction and non-, and catalogues and magazines were stacked. A half-dozen four-drawer wooden file cabinets were grouped back there as well.

  He saw me looking as he plopped down across from me on another brown leather chair. Four of these were arranged mid-room around a coffee table with a number of popular novels piled casually—Drums Along the Mohawk, Northwest Passage, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and half a dozen others.

  “I do most of my work here at home,” the Senator said, as if admitting a shameful secret. “That’s a liberty I take as owner and chief high muckety-muck. Oh, I go in to the plant twice a week, where people can get at me. A man can’t duck all his responsibilities.” He came forward conspiratorially. “But I tell you, Mike, I simply cannot abide the smell of fish.”

  I laughed. “Well, that would be a drawback in your line.”

  He chuckled and leaned back, his hands on the arms of the leather chair; he looked like the benevolent dictator he apparently was. “Some people don’t mind it, the fishy fragrance. Some people don’t notice it, after they’ve been around it long enough. But it still registers on this old schnozzola.”

  A short, heavy woman with a pretty face and nicely coiffed medium-length blonde hair trundled in with two bottles of Rheingold and two pilsner-style glasses on a tray. She wore a yellow-and-white house dress, not the black-and-white livery of a maid. She poured the beer with professional aplomb and gave me a nice smile, and nodded at her boss. Calling her pleasantly plump would have been a stretch, but you could see she’d been a knockout once.

  He thanked her and she paused a moment, somewhat hopefully, as if expecting a tip or something. Then she went out, vaguely disappointed, as he raised his glass to me. “To my future son-in-law.”

  I raised my pilsner. “What growing boy couldn’t use a rich father-in-law?”

  That only made him smile, though I’d said it to needle him a little.

  “You must be wondering why I’d take a stranger in with such open arms,” he said. His face was one of those ugly ones that was pleasant to look at. “Well, I am happy to have my daughter finally settle down and make a real woman of herself.”

  “Sir, there are few women any more real,” I said, “in my experience.”

  “Oh, she’s a beauty, all right. But the girl has never settled down nor shown any sign of ever doing so. Her mother died when she was young, so there wasn’t much guidance. Oh, I don’t mean to imply she was… wild or anything. She just didn’t… land anywhere.”

  We both sipped beer.

  He said, “You must have looked pretty darn good in uniform to make the impression you did, back there at the Stage Door Canteen.”

  The story had got around and everybody in the Charles clan seemed eager to buy it.

  “Seeing the jam I was in,” I said, “must have touched her heart. Somehow she knew I’d come to town to look her up, and felt she had to come forward and help me. She did, of course, and we just… clicked.”

  “And the rest is history,” he said, with a sage nod.

  How could he be buying this baloney? She lies me out of stir, and right then falls head over heels and—poof!—we head to the courthouse?

  “I know you must be concerned, Mike, that Melba’s original story… having seen you that night… might be questioned by the authorities. Now that she’s about to marry you—the sold
ier boy she fell for in such a storybook fashion—one might expect them to be… suspicious.”

  “One might,” I said.

  “But as you may have guessed,” he went on, shrugging casually, “I have a good share of influence in this town. I can assure you that you’ll be left alone, and that my daughter won’t be challenged. The alibi will stand.”

  “Good to hear.”

  He leaned forward again. “I, uh… spoke briefly with Lawrence on the phone. He said you seem reluctant to have us find a place for you in the family business.”

  I waved that off. “Your daughter and I haven’t got that far yet, sir.”

  “Not ‘sir.’ Ernest. I did some calling around, Mike, and have learned of your war hero status, and your brief career as a… shall we say, controversial officer with the New York constabulary. And how you’ve only just recently opened your own office.”

  I drank some beer, nodded. “That’s right. You may have learned that I’m licensed and bonded, too.”

  “Yes. Good for you, son. But I wonder if you might consider moving your operation here to Killington. I could help you do that.”

  I shifted in my leather chair. It made a rude sound. “Sir… Ernest… that’s generous. But an area this size can’t really support my kind of business.”

  He gave me a smile Macy’s Santa Claus would have killed for. “You might be surprised. You’d have no competition here, and the cities and towns and hamlets of Rhode Island and Connecticut might avail themselves of your services. We’re not that far from Boston, either, you know.”

  The hard sell.

  “Ernest, I’ll give it serious thought. Will that do for now?”

  His nod was enthusiastic. “Of course it will. And wherever you lovebirds alight, I hope you’ll consider giving this old man a few fresh grandchildren to bounce on his knee. My daughter will be thirty soon and she needs to stop spending all her time flitting around shopping and going to Broadway shows and dating this one and that one, and… well, she needs a real man in her life. And you clearly fit the bill.”

  He stood and extended his hand again for a second shake. I was being dismissed, but in a nice way.