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MURDER
WITHOUT TEARS
LEONARD LUPTON
Copyright © 1957 by
Graphic Publishing Company, Inc.
1
I KEPT watching the door. Yesterday she had come through that door. I had the feeling that she would come through that door again today in spite of the heat.
It was cool in the barroom. These old Hudson River houses, built by the brickyard owners, had a depth and dimension that offset humidity and June sunlight. I sat there in the caned chair at the round table with the checkered cloth and wondered what old Jason Prescott would have thought of my turning his mansion into a fashionable ginmill. I wondered what my old man would have thought of it, also. He had been straw boss at the Prescott brickyard. He had given them a service, a loyalty, a real humility that has gone out of date today. And a good thing it has.
I got a lot of satisfaction out of seeing the Prescott mansion turned into a roadhouse.
Of course it isn’t any waterfront dive. It’s five miles north of Newburyport on the Hudson River; up where the big estates still keep two or three gardeners each to tend the rolling, shaded lawns that always were and still are Off Limits to the likes of us Broomes.
Broome. When I was a kid I used to ask myself how anyone with a name like that could get to be President. My old man used to have a wry way of looking at life and he didn’t take my complaint very seriously. “Sure you could be President some day,” he used to tell me. “Think of the campaign slogan—‘Let a new Broome sweep clean!’ ”
He never took himself or his family name or his position in life very seriously. I don’t suppose he ever looked up from the job in the brickyard and wondered what it would be like to live in the big, square, brick house on the hill.
But I did. And now I knew. It took a war and a government loan and a muddle-witted ex-bootlegger to make it possible. But here I was, sitting in the big house. And that wasn’t all.
I was waiting and watching for a woman to come through that door again. To see me. One of the women who belonged up here on the hill.
I could hear pans and kettles clattering in the kitchen. I pay my chef one-fifty and keep, and the pastry chef almost as much. That’s good money up here. In the summer, for the lunch hour, my waiters wear white; but for the dinner hour they dress the part. I’ve tried to serve the best filet mignon in this part of the Valley and I’ve done something else—I’ve reversed the usual trend. I’ve tried to make my place hard to get into. It works.
Of course downstairs in the barroom it’s different. The barroom is a replica of the saloon my old man used to go to down on the flats. Everybody invited, though mostly only the right people come.
There are brass spittoons, and sawdust on the floor, and a white marble rail in front of the mahogany at just the right height to balance a tray of beer. There are mirrors all around the walls and one day a magazine illustrator, up here in the valley to release his blood pressure over a week-end, piled the rye too high on the rocks and paid off by soaping the mirrors with the kind of art that fits in well with the phony kerosene lights that have been set up in wall brackets all around the place.
The place looks like it used to look when it was down on the flats, except that the sheriff and the ambulance never come out here on a Saturday night; for the trade I get even here is the silk lapel trade and there are as many feminine shoulders, bare to cleavage as the British say, as there are dinner jackets.
It’s quite a way of life and most of the time I’m feeling a little smug and satisfied about it. My accountant says I’m making money and I’m having a subtle kind of revenge on the Prescott memory, just to pay them back for what they did to my old man. But every now and again I could still get the feeling that something was wrong.
You grow up like I did, all full of steam and ambition, and spend thirty years trying to climb maybe three or four hundred feet up a hill, and when you get there maybe you too would find that the view was wonderful and the air different—but the people merely the way you’d figured they would be.
I thought about all this while I kept watching the door. I don’t often worry about myself, or waste time looking in mirrors. But now I took a look at the wall mirror and worried a little. What would she see when she came in? I’m not tall like a knight on a white charger. My shoulders are too heavy and my jaw is too broad—and now I was fretting about the mustache that I had grown in the army to make me look older. It was no hair-line thing, but one of these Robert Preston type mustaches. I had wondered if I’d better shave it off. But that seemed a silly thing to do, now. She had seemed to like me with the mustache—after all, she was coming back.
I sat there and thought about her. It had happened last night. She had come in with another girl. They had both been in evening dress. She was just back from the Coast. I hadn’t found out yet what she’d been doing out there. I didn’t think it could have been the studios. She didn’t seem that type. Pretty enough? Sure—well, maybe not exactly pretty. What do you mean by pretty?
The feeling I got from her was not of prettiness, but of impact. Something hit me. For the first time since the war something hit me where it matters.
I remember what I thought. I thought, there’s a good-sized doll . . . and let it go at that for a minute. It shook me up a little, later, to realize that if I’d employed a floorman or a bouncer I might never have got to talk to her.
They had taken a table, just the two of them. They didn’t seem to notice that they were the only unescorted women in the place. I stopped at the table and they looked up from whatever they’d been saying. I’ve seen the time when it might have thrown me to come face to face with so much poise and assurance. But I’d picked up a little poise along the way, too. I think maybe the army helped. That’s no wisecrack. I mean it. Going through O.C.S., even infantry, and getting the gold bar—I know. There’s a gag about it. Gentleman, by act of congress.
Skip the gag. I thought I was going to lead a platoon into battle. I could field-strip an MI, a carbine, a .30 water-cooled, and a .50 air-cooled and jumble them together blindfolded and then reassemble the parts. That was considered pretty damned important. I knew how to level a mortar baseplate, make out a morning report, and what to do until the medic got there. Maybe even more important, I knew the first thing the medic would do when he did get there. Oh, I was a well-instructed 2nd Lt. of Inf.
So I became a maintenance officer in the headquarters company of a supply battalion in an armored division—me, who didn’t know a spanner wrench from a socket. A maintenance officer and, automatically, a gentleman.
Maybe it should have happened to somebody else. Maybe I would have been better off if I had never found out about being a gentleman. It caused me some misery along the way because some of the men I had to deal with were gentlemen, and not by any act of congress. But I had the great advantage of being treated like a gentleman and after a while I began to act like a gentleman, and sometimes even to think like one. And so I stood at the round table and looked down at these two girls, all of whose male ancestors had been gentlemen for generations back, and I was neither embarrassed nor distressed.
I didn’t want to make any particular fuss about it, but I wanted them to understand clearly and at once just what sort of a position they had put me in. I smiled and said, “If I may?” and sat down before they said
