handsome man leaning gracefully, though a bit unsteadily, against the mantelpiece. “Wife? Children? Home?”
“None of them,” Helene told him. “No money, either. Ernie raised so much hell when he was a young man that his old man decided to leave him in Rodney’s charge. He lives here.” She added, “But I never heard of his having any particular dislike for postmen.”
“Nobody dislikes postmen,” Malone said. “That’s why it’s so extraordinary when somebody murders three of them.”
He looked up at the oil painting over the fireplace and momentarily lost interest in the people in the room. It showed a delicate, pretty girl in the clothes and hair dress of 1910. She had a softly rounded face, a smiling gentle mouth; her wild, lovely eyes matched the blue of her dress. Even in the painting, her yellow hair looked exquisitely soft. Her hands, folded in her lap, were tiny and very pale. For a moment, Malone wondered why the face was so familiar. Then he remembered. He’d seen it looking out at him from the large framed photograph in the library.
“That was Annie,” Helene whispered, seeing Malone’s glance. “Annie Kendall. Uncle Rodney’s sweetheart. There’re pictures of her all over the house.”
The little lawyer nodded slowly. It pleased him that her name should be Annie and not Anne. It seemed proper, somehow. He said, “I can understand any man not wanting to believe that girl was dead, and waiting for a letter from her all these years.”
“You men!” Helene said scornfully. “Annie Kendall was a bitch on wheels. The only thing she liked about Rodney Fairfaxx was his money, and everybody who liked him was greatly relieved when she went down on the Titanic. Maybe it did make him a little cracked, but at least he’s been better off than if she’d come back and married him.”
Malone muttered something in which women and cats were unflatteringly compared.
At this point, Mrs. Abby Lacy turned her small hard eyes on the little lawyer and said, “Well, Mr. Malone. What are you going to do about it?”
“Everything possible,” Malone said. “I assure you everything possible is being done to make Mr. Fairfaxx comfortable.”
She sniffed and said, “I consider Rodney Fairfaxx’ being in jail in the worst possible taste.”
“It’s a damn shame,” Malone said agreeably, “but only a few weeks ago the police department lost their copy of Emily Post.”
Uncle Ernie considered that very funny. Mrs. Lacy considered it to be nothing of the sort. She also considered Uncle Ernie to be a disgrace, and said so. Under cover of the resulting heated conversation, Malone slipped unnoticed across the room to Elizabeth Fairfaxx.
“I hate to abandon such an unusually pleasant gathering,” Malone said, “but it would help me tremendously if you’d show me around the grounds.”
She grinned. “I don’t like it here, either,” she said. “Wait a minute till I get a wrap.”
As they reached the bottom of the front steps, he said, “I really do want to look at the grounds, you know. And,” he added, “it really was a pleasant gathering.”
“I like you much better when you’re telling the truth, Mr. Malone,” she said. Suddenly her hazel eyes flashed. “I can’t bear the thought of Ken marrying that awful woman’s daughter.” She caught her breath and said it over again, “That awful woman’s awful daughter.”
“Maybe it’s love,” Malone said coyly. “Maybe she’s Miss Right.”
Elizabeth Fairfaxx expressed her opinion of that theory with a very unladylike noise.
“Of course,” Malone said, fishing for information, “you’ve probably known her a lot longer than I have.”
“I’ve know her all my life,” Elizabeth Fairfaxx said. “She was a repulsive little girl.”
“Was she on the hockey team at boarding school, too?” Malone asked. If so, he reflected, Helene might be able to provide still more personal information.
“She was,” Elizabeth Fairfaxx snapped. “And by that time, she was a repulsive big girl. Let’s not talk about her. Which would you like to see first, the rose garden or the pool?”
Malone looked around the dreary vista of half-drifted snow, dead grass, withered plants and barren trees. “I’ll save the roses until later,” he told her. “Right now, I’d like to see the spot where someone stood to kill three postmen.”
In the neighborhood where Malone had grown up, the fortunate and looked-up-to families were those who had back yards. Those yards were usually about twenty by thirty, hemmed in by high board fences. Sometimes they showed a pathetically unsuccessful attempt at gardening. Far more often they were decorated mainly with vacant tin cans, ancient rubbish, and tired cats, but at least they were places in which to keep the younger children of the family off the streets. Malone himself had learned to walk in just such a yard which belonged to a kindhearted neighbor. Usually, however, there was no yard at all, only a tiny cement-paved areaway.
In this neighborhood, he knew, land itself was worth fabulous sums per foot. When a bit of it was sold for a luxurious apartment hotel to be constructed, the transaction was important financial news. Thus the fact that the Fairfaxxes and other families in the neighborhood hung on to big, walled-in spaces around their homes for the sole purpose of raising grass, trees and rose bushes struck him as not only unpardonable arrogance, but unforgivable waste.
Elizabeth Fairfaxx seemed to sense what he was thinking. “Uncle Rodney wanted to sell this place a few months ago,” she said. “He loves it, he’s always loved it, but he said it was a nuisance to keep up and entirely too extravagant in this day and age. Not that he can’t afford it. He’s very rich, you know, but he said that in the modern world, waste space was a sin and a shame.”
Malone looked a trifle startled. The statement didn’t seem quite to fit Rodney Fairfaxx, the gentle little man who collected stamps, made no protest at being taken to jail, and still waited for a letter from a long-dead sweetheart. “Why didn’t he sell then?” the little lawyer asked.
“Abby Lacy wouldn’t let him.” Elizabeth Fairfaxx kicked savagely at a stone and sent it hurtling down the walk. “When Uncle Rodney and Mr. Lacy built these houses, they signed an agreement that neither one of them, nor their heirs, would sell unless the other agreed.” She scowled. “And if something should happen to Mrs. Lacy, Gay is just mean enough that she wouldn’t let Uncle Rodney sell.” Her manner changed abruptly. She smiled and said, “Sorry to bore you with all this. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
The Fairfaxx house was set in the center of its walled-in garden. Malone walked all the way around it, not only because he wanted to show proper appreciation to his guide, but because he also wanted to discover every possible way someone from outside could enter or leave the grounds. On the side away from the alley were the now desolate rose garden, some uncomfortable-looking concrete benches, and a tiny circular pool filled with mud, dirty water, and half-melted ice and snow. A pleasant enough spot in the summer, no doubt, Malone reflected, but right now—well, he’d seen a lot of far more cheerful graveyards. Beyond it was a house dimly seen through the trees. Malone pointed to it and said, “Who lives there?”
“Nobody,” Elizabeth Fairfaxx said, in a curiously tight voice. “It’s been empty for years.” She walked on abruptly, too abruptly. Malone followed, his hands deep in his overcoat
