A Show of Hands Page 9

  Hanson swept the room with a glare and riveted it on Crisp, against whose inscrutable, slightly bemused expression it melted. “How did this . . . character . . . find out?”

  Crisp shrugged. “Probably Leeman Russell told him.”

  “And who—”

  “Don’t bother,” Gammidge interrupted. “When it comes to intelligence-gathering, the FBI don’t hold a candle to the poolroom.”

  Hanson stared at the fire and punctuated the ensuing silence with sharp sighs and wags of the head.

  “In fact,” said Crisp, in an effort to break the tension, “I think Einstein might have revised some of his pet theories had he known how fast news travels on an island.”

  Gammidge smiled behind his hand.

  Crisp reached into his pocket and produced a small, crumpled brown paper bag. He emptied an assortment of penny candies, rubber bands, matches, seashells, and a little bundle of fabric into his hand. “I was up at the other end of the island and I found these—”

  “This is unbelievable,” said Hanson. He looked from Crisp, a doddering old bird with his handful of sweets and trinkets, to Gammidge, who seemed to be studying the molding in one of the farther corners of the room, and back to Crisp again.

  “. . . in a tree,” Crisp concluded.

  “Mr. Crisp . . . Professor,” said Hanson condescendingly, “it’s none of your business. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to put it another way. We can’t have would-be detectives interfering with the investigation. It’s not an easy business as it is. Do you understand?”

  Hanson visited his father every other Wednesday at the Bayside Convalescent Center in Camden, trading off weeks with his younger sister. His father was senile and hard of hearing. He found that leaning close, almost brow to brow, and raising his voice was generally the only way to drive home a point and keep the old man to the subject. Unconsciously, he was applying the same tactic with Crisp, who gazed back unblinking, his eyebrows arched slightly. Hanson half expected him to start snoring. “Understand?”

  Crisp nodded slightly. “But you should examine these things,” he said weakly. Gammidge thought he looked especially feeble all of a sudden. Hanson had him cowed. Crisp seemed stupefied, scratching his head, searching the immediate vicinity absentmindedly. “Very important things,” he said.

  Hanson huffed through his nose, rolled his eyes, and picked up his cup of coffee and a muffin. “Do me a favor, Professor, keep them to yourself. I’m going to my room,” he said. “See you gentlemen in the morning.”

  “Oh, maybe you shouldn’t drink that coffee,” Crisp cautioned amiably. “It’ll keep you up all night.”

  “Nothing keeps me up,” said Hanson over his shoulder as he walked down the hall. “Fruitcakes included,” he added to himself.

  “A sound night’s sleep is a gift from God,” said Crisp softly as Hanson’s footsteps thudded up the carpeted stairs.

  Gammidge detected a change in Crisp’s tone. When he looked up from the fire, the dotty old man was melting away, his place being taken by the cagey reasoner he’d come to know.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That was all an act,” said Gammidge, “wasn’t it?”

  “I tried to turn in some very important evidence and was rather roundly rebuked for my trouble,” Crisp said. “Just trying to do my civic duty.”

  With a quiet smile Gammidge regarded his companion. “You’ve got Hanson thinking you’re a dim-witted old fossil.”

  “Seems to happen when I go out of my way to make an impression.”

  “Oh, you made an impression all right,” Gammidge said. “Just the impression you wanted, I bet. So?”

  “So?”

  “What have you got there?”

  “Well,” said Crisp. “That depends. I mean, do you ask in a professional or personal capacity?”

  “Which will get me answers?”

  “Well, since it seems Mr. Hanson is in charge of the official investigation, and as he has refused my assistance . . .”

  “Personal, then.”

  “Ah!” said Crisp, the sparkle leaping to his eye. “Well, in confidence then, I found the murder weapon and what I take to be the bottom of the girl’s swimsuit.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “I wouldn’t joke about such a thing.”

  “A wire, like you thought?”

  Crisp nodded. “Wrapped around chunks of wood at the ends.”

  “Handles.”

  “And a wadding of some kind in the middle so as not to—”

  “Cut the skin,” said Gammidge.

  “Cut the skin,” said Crisp.

  “You’ve got to turn them in, you know,” Gammidge said, after a brief silence during which he tried to convince himself otherwise.

  “I tried.”

  “I know, Crisp, but . . .” Gammidge got up and stepped to the fireplace. The howling of the wind outside sent a chill up his spine, though Matty generally kept the house at about seventy-three degrees. It was even warmer in the parlor, with the fire blazing. “I know how you feel, you know. I do. But if Hanson finds out . . .”

  “What can he say? I tried to give them to him. I’d gladly have told him the whole story. He wasn’t interested. You heard him,” Crisp said calmly. But there was nothing of the helpless old man in him now. Another facade had dropped away. Gammidge confronted another Crisp, one whose clear eyes and steady gaze portrayed a thoroughly conscious, calculating intellect. “He told me to keep them to myself.”

  “But you can’t. You made him think . . .”

  The ease with which Crisp slipped into his absentminded old man routine, as if he was putting on a favorite pair of flannel pajamas, left Gammidge both perplexed and off-balance.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Crisp. “How about if we just keep it between us a little while?”

  “No,” Gammidge said flatly. “Just . . . don’t even . . . no.”

  “I’ll tell you what scares me, Nate.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Hanson strikes me as the political type.”

  “That may be—”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, you see? This could be big, the implications of this case—you heard him. He’s the type who’s going to grab the first thing masquerading as evidence and run away with it.”

  “Come on, Crisp.”

  “He’ll have all kinds of people breathing down his neck. Politicians, the media, the public. They just want an answer. They don’t care if it’s the truth.

  “All I ask you to consider is this: Who do you think is most likely to get the truth out of this case? Who’s most likely to find out who really murdered that poor girl?”

  Gammidge was beat. He sat down and looked at Crisp. “Preconceptions?”

  “Confused priorities,” Crisp amended. He fiddled with his watchband. “I suppose Mr. Hanson has the pictures with him?”

  “Pictures?”

  “The Polaroids.”

  Gammidge had learned that Crisp said very little without a motive. His brain automatically skipped a groove or two ahead. “Don’t even think it, Professor.”

  “Think what?” said Crisp, taking a hurried gulp of coffee as Matty crossed the floor at the far end of the hall in sensible shoes.

  “You heard what he said: ‘It’s none of your business.’ He’s not about to go flashing pictures all around the place,” said Gammidge. “And how did you know they were Polaroids, anyway?”

  Crisp felt it unwise to mention Leeman at the moment. His gaze fell to his fingers. “I made a statement, and you didn’t correct me,” he said. He raised his eyes again. “One of the stronger human instincts, I find, is the need to correct people.”

  Gammidge shook his head slightly. “Well, he’s not going to show them to you.”

  “I don’t imagine he is,” Crisp agreed. “Still, he has them with him, you suppose?”

  “I suppose.” Anticipatory though he was, he couldn’t read the subtle gle
am in Crisp’s eyes. There was a brief silence. “What of it?”

  Crisp started slightly, as if he’d dozed off momentarily. “What? Oh, nothing, Nate. I was just thinking.” He nodded slightly as if in agreement with whatever he’d been thinking. “Well, it’s been a long day. I think I’ll go up to bed.” He rose from the comfort of the soft, floral print easy chair and held his palms toward the fire. “If only I had Mr. Hanson’s facility for sleep, I’d be off at a nod.”

  The observation was accompanied by a smile that made Gammidge uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure why. Crisp doddered off down the hall like an old man, mumbling to himself. “A sound night’s sleep is a gift from God,” Gammidge heard him say.

  “You’re not going to do anything foolish,” Gammidge called out in a harsh whisper.

  Crisp’s comfortable old face appeared over the banister. “I never do, Mr. Gammidge,” he said with a smile. The face disappeared, and a long shadow followed the old man upstairs.

  Gammidge couldn’t help but notice that Crisp’s footfalls made no sound.

  “He’s a ghost,” he said aloud.

  “Who’s a ghost?” said Matty as she bustled in from the kitchen, vigorously wiping nothing in particular from her hands with her terry cloth apron. She began to clear the dishes.

  “Crisp,” said Gammidge lazily.

  Matty continued to rustle within her little cloud of clean. “Oh,” she said. “He’s a poet, too.”

  All dreams have the same decorator, Crisp thought. A capricious gnomess whose motif is liquidity. One who has no intercourse with the conventions of time and space. Her walls turn to waterfalls, her days to nights, her friendly faces to doorknobs, demons, or donkey’s tails. No sooner does she establish a theme than it changes. She is at once temptress, tormentor, and torturess. Idylls metamorphose into nightmares at her merest whim. You can be in the middle of either, without knowing which is which, and you learn at an early age never to approach a corner with both eyes open, for whatever waits for you there knows your every fear profoundly.

  His was never a deep sleep. The slightest unfamiliar sound would wake him, an attribute that had saved his life many times in the past but in his declining years had become a curse. Seldom did his sleep filter beyond the shallow pools that dotted the shore of the Blessed Abyss. Pools that teemed with life and refracted light in such a way as to confound reason. Within that realm this malignant sorceress exercised a broad brush, using the full scope of his memories to splash upon her palette. She would often paint him awake with familiar terrors.

  There was a woman at the edge of his dream tonight. He knew that it was Amanda Murphy, though he saw no more than her silhouette from time to time.

  He was following her, and though she never moved, try as he might he could get no closer. She inhabited the dream and was, therefore, above space and time. He, only a visitor, was mired in them, bound to reality by the tenuous tether of life. He tried to call her name, but the words knotted and tied themselves around his heartbeat. She spoke, too, but he couldn’t make out the words. Every time she opened her mouth, blood pulsed from a gash in her throat.

  He had something in his hand. A pail of soapy water. That’s why he was chasing her—to wash the grotesque makeup from her face, the blood from her throat. As he pursued her the water splashed from the pail, leaving a perfect trail. In the darkness at his back, someone followed.

  All the while the world of dreams ebbed and flowed around him.

  “Amanda!” The sound of the cry woke him. It was the voice of an old man, clogged with sleep, made brittle by the years. His own voice. Startling. He always dreamed himself much younger.

  The household slept on, except for Matty, whose room was next door. She’d never heard him call that name before.

  Crisp went to the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water. He looked at himself in the mirror. “Old man,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said Hanson the next morning at breakfast. He spoke so softly his voice was barely audible above the scraping as Gammidge applied marmalade robustly to his toast. “There were ten pictures in that pack. One is missing.”

  “I don’t see how you can look at those things before breakfast,” Gammidge protested.

  Hanson’s cold eyes draped Gammidge in contempt. “I don’t eat breakfast.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Gammidge, biting off a piece of toast and assisting it along the proper channels with a fork full of scrambled egg. “Looking at those kinds of things this time of day’d put anybody off.”

  Hanson’s attention drifted to Crisp, who was sitting in the alcove and seemed to be struggling to remember whether he’d put his pants on. Hanson’s unspoken suspicions, though only newly formed, evaporated at the sight. “Someone must have dropped it in all the confusion.”

  “Someone,” Gammidge echoed with a nod. “More than likely someone did.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me!” Hanson said angrily.

  “Didn’t say it was, did I?” Gammidge didn’t look up from his plate.

  Matty chugged in under a full head of steam and began collecting dishes. “Has everybody had enough? Inspector? Look at all these eggs left over. Your plate ain’t even dirty.”

  “I’m not hungry, thank you,” Hanson said coldly.

  “Mr. Gammidge, you’re tuckin’ in pretty good. You want to finish up these eggs?” Without waiting for a reply, she shoveled the eggs off the platter onto his plate. “Can’t give ’em to the cat, you know. Cholest’rol.

  “Winston? What are you doin’? You look like you lost your best friend.”

  Crisp looked up slowly. Matty’s breath was almost taken away. “Why Winston, you look a hundred years old!”

  Crisp looked out the window. “Restless night, Mat.”

  “Why not give these to him?” said Gammidge. “He hasn’t eaten, has he?”

  “Winston?” said Matty. “Oh, goodness yes. He ate hours ago.”

  Gammidge glanced at his watch. “It’s only six-thirty now.”

  “I know it,” said Matty reprovingly. “I half thought you fellas was dead. Ain’t easy keepin’ all this food warm so long, you know.”

  Gammidge didn’t know whether to laugh or not, so he ate some more eggs.

  “He don’t look good, do you think, Mr. Gammidge?” said Matty under her breath. She hardly took her eyes off Crisp as she cleared away the dishes.

  “Oh, he’ll be all right,” Gammidge assured her. “He looked like that awhile last night.” He peered over his glasses at Hanson, who was scrutinizing the nine remaining Polaroids, oblivious to the ambient conversation. “Brightened right up after a while, though.” He looked at Matty. “I wouldn’t worry.”

  “Well,” said Hanson at last, rising and brandishing the Polaroids. “These tell us all we need to know.”

  “And what’s that?” said Gammidge.

  Hanson saw Crisp turn his good ear toward the words. “That’s all right, Professor,” he said, planting himself midway between Gammidge and Crisp. “I can’t see that there’s anything to hide now.”

  “Not that it wouldn’t be all over town ’fore noon even if there was,” said Gammidge. Hanson pretended not to hear.

  “Our only fear was that, somehow, the Calderwood boy wasn’t in the coffin, where he belonged.” Hanson explained. “That he’d, well, I don’t know what. These fingerprints, well . . . All sorts of crazy things go through your head sometimes when you’re faced with facts that don’t quite add up.” His gaze followed Crisp’s out the window.

  “You come up with things that sound like they’re off the front page of a grocery store tabloid,” said Gammidge. “Man Returns from the Dead to Kill Himself type of thing.”

  “Never underestimate human nature,” Hanson observed. “Bizarre things happen from time to time, especially in this business. A man gets a crack on the head, something short-circuits—you can’t rule anything out.”

  Crisp’s consciousness appeared to b
ob to the surface. “Oh, well,”—he started to reach for the bag in his pocket—“then you won’t mind taking a look at these things I found.”

  Hanson smiled benignly at Crisp. “I’ve got all the trinkets I can use, thanks. Keep them for your collection.”

  “But Mr. Gammidge seems to think they may be of some importance,” Crisp protested feebly.

  “Then give them to Mr. Gammidge,” said Hanson. “I’m sure he’ll find a use for them.” He glanced at his watch. “The boat leaves in ten minutes. I don’t intend to miss it. Gentlemen.” He left to collect his things.

  Gammidge’s face melted into the most abandoned-old-dog-about-to-be-put-to-sleep expression Crisp had ever seen. An argument Crisp could have thwarted; begging he could have parried or simply hardened his heart against. But against this trod-upon field mouse tactic he had no resource. It touched the poet in him.

  “Mr. Hanson,” Crisp said flatly.

  Hanson stopped at the foot of the stairs. He could make out only Crisp’s silhouette against the bay window. “What? Did you call me?”

  “Come here, Mr. Hanson, there’s something you must see.”

  Hanson was about to say he hadn’t time, but he was so struck by the change in Crisp’s voice that he hesitated. “What? What is it? The boat leaves in ten minutes.”

  “You won’t be on it” came the reply. “Come here, please.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Hanson protested. Nevertheless, he found himself drawn toward the speaker. “If this is your idea of a joke . . .” He reentered the parlor. “What’s this all about?”

  Wordlessly Crisp took the crumpled paper bag from his pocket and emptied it onto the table. Amid the collection of lint-covered candy, seashells, and rubber bands was the bundle of black fabric, which he spread out on the coffee table. “I found this hidden at the other end of the island.” It was a bikini bottom. The Crisp that Hanson had known was gone. In his place was someone else. Hanson listened.

  “I also found this”—he unwound the wire—“the weapon that was used to kill Amanda Murphy.” He laid it down beside the other items in evidence. “It was wrapped around her neck, and she was strangled with it.”