Charles Williams: Man on a Leash

He switched off the lights and went back into the kitchen, pushing the button in the doorknob to relock the door. There was another entrance to the combined living room and dining room from this end of the kitchen. It was a long room with a deep shag carpet, and most of the opposite wall was covered by drawn white drapes. At the right were a dining table and then a teak buffet and a long sofa sitting back to back to divide it from the living-room area. In the latter there were two large armchairs and a coffee table and a white brick fireplace, but the first and overall impression was of books, record albums, and hi-fi equipment.

He started toward that end of the room, but as he passed the end of the sofa, he saw a piece of luggage sitting on it. There was a faintly jarring incongruity about it in this otherwise neat and well-ordered room, and he stopped, for some reason remembering his question to Brubaker on whether there had been any sign of a fight. Why would somebody with a seaman’s passion for a-place-for-everything-and-everything-m-its-place leave his suitcase in the living room?

It was a small streamlined case of black fiber glass with no identification on it of any kind. He flipped the latches. It was unlocked. On top was a folded brown silk dressing gown. He lifted it out of the way and poked through the contents beneath it: pajamas, a rolled pair of socks, a laundered shirt in plastic, a couple of ties, a pair of shorts, and a plastic bag containing a soiled shirt and some more underwear. At the bottom were a zippered leather toilet kit, a half-empty box of Upmann cigars, and some books of paper matches variously advertising a San Francisco restaurant, a Las Vegas hotel, and a savings and loan association. He shrugged. There was nothing of interest here, and Brubaker had no doubt already searched it anyway.

But why was it here? He idly lifted one of the aluminum tubes from the cigar box, twisted off the cap, and slid the cigar out. It was encased in a thin curl of wood veneer and then a tightly rolled paper wrapper. He removed these and sniffed it. He’d smoked cigars for a brief period in his early twenties before he’d given up smoking altogether, but even after all these years he could still appreciate the aroma. He went out into the kitchen, found a knife in one of the drawers, cut the tip off it, and lighted it with one of the paper matches.

He took a deep, appraising puff, removed it from his mouth, let the smoke out slowly, and gestured with judicial approval. If you had to kill yourself, do it in the imperial manner; arrive at the operating room for the thoracotomy on a stretcher of royal purple borne by Nubian slaves. He picked up the silk robe to put it back in the bag; something slithered out of its folds, something golden and soft that might have been the pelt of some unfortunate honey-colored animal or the scalp of a Scandinavian settler. It was a hairpiece; a fall, he thought, was the correct terminology.

He looked at it helplessly for a moment and then sighed. That certainly didn’t raise any doubts it was the old man’s case; if you looked at it in the light of history, it merely confirmed it. No doubt his mother, unless she’d forsworn the practice early in the game, could have suited up an average sorority by filtering the old rooster’s bags for lipsticks, mascara pencils, pants, bras, and earrings. While it sure as hell could help answer a great many questions if you knew the identity of this molting San Francisco roommate and where she was now, at the moment it was of no help at all. He dropped the fall back in, folded the robe over it, and closed the bag. He wondered if Brubaker had spotted it and then decided he wouldn’t be much of a cop if he hadn’t.

Big hi-fi speakers were mounted in the corners of the living room opposite the sofa. They’d been housed in some dark wood he thought was ebony. The components—turntable, FM tuner, and amplifier—were mounted on teak shelves in the center of the same wall, themselves encased in the same wood as the speakers. Above and on both sides were shelves of operatic and symphonic albums, several hundred of them at a conservative guess. Most of the balance of the wall space was taken up with books. Romstead walked over and ran his eye along the rows, lost in admiration for the far-ranging and cultivated mind of a man whose formal education had ended at the age of fourteen. Though mostly in English, there were some in German and French and his native Norwegian, and they ranged from novels and biography to poetry and mathematics.

His thoughts broke off suddenly at the sound of a car coming up the drive, scattering gravel. He stepped out into the kitchen and parted the curtains above the sink just as it slid to a stop behind his and the driver got out and slammed the door. It was the hell-for-leather Valkyrie in the Continental.

She was five eight, at least, a statuesque figure of a woman clad in a peasant blouse and skirt in a flamboyant combination of colors and snugged in at their juncture around a surprisingly slender waist considering the amplitude of the bust above and rounded hips below. The tanned legs were bare, and her shoes appeared to consist principally of cork platforms an inch and a half thick. She carried an oversized straw handbag in the crook of her left arm and moved with a self-assured sexy swing as she came toward the flagstone walk. Romstead noted the shade of the rather carelessly swirled blond hair, and his eyes were coldly speculative as he let the curtain fall back in place. In a moment the doorbell chimed. He went out into the vestibule and opened the door. She looked up at him; the blue eyes went wide, and she gasped.

“Oh, no! Even the cigar!”

He removed it from his mouth. “I stole it,” he said. “It belongs to the United States Customs.”

“Well, that figures, too.” She gave a flustered smile then that didn’t quite match the eyes. “Excuse me, I don’t know what I’m saying, you startled me so, the very image of him—I mean younger, naturally—but when you just loomed up there at me puffing on the same cigar—oh, heavens, I’m Paulette Carmody, your next-door neighbor.”

“How do you do,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”

She preceded him into the living room and sat down on the sofa right beside the suitcase with no apparent notice of it while girlish chatter continued to pour forth like whipped cream from a ruptured aerosol can.

“—just now heard you were in town, and then it struck me, I mean, that car I’d passed on the road, it did have California tags, and I was just positive I’d seen San Francisco on the dealer’s license plate holder, and I said I’ll bet anything that was Eric—”

She had crossed her legs,, revealing an interesting expanse of golden thigh, and Romstead reflected that if the front of that peasant blouse were cut any lower, she’d better never lean down or frothy conversation wouldn’t be the only thing to well forth. He wondered about it. Maybe she was a harmless fluff-brain, but he didn’t think so. She was forty to forty-five, and she’d been around. There were intelligence and tough-mindedness in there somewhere. He listened with grave courtesy while she said what an awful thing it had been and she wanted him to know how sorry she was.

“Are you moving in?” she asked then.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “I just borrowed a key to have a look.”

“Oh, I see.” She gestured. “I thought perhaps the suitcase was yours.”

“No.” He shrugged. “I just assumed it was his. It was sitting there when I came in.” Ma’am, there’s nobody here but us chickens, and you know we wouldn’t have searched it. “I wish I could offer you a drink or something.”

“You know, I could use a beer. He always kept some Tuborg in the refrigerator.”