The Brass Cupcake Read online

  “Well, a year ago, I called on Aunt Elizabeth. I still wouldn’t let her give me anything, but I told her that I was willing to be her friend. She cried. She went all to pieces. Here was something she had tried to achieve for twenty years, and now she had it. She was a woman without real warmth, I guess. Pretty austere. But with a strong, strong sense of family. And I guess she was afraid of dying alone. Maybe she regretted never marrying. I don’t know. At any rate, I used to go and have tea with her once a week, on Sunday afternoons. The third time or the fourth, I forget, a man named Furness Trumbull was there.

  “I hadn’t seen Furny since I was a little kid. His people had a summer place near ours. He was about fourteen when I was six, and I remembered him because he used to take me out in his little catboat. His people lost their money at the same time Dad lost his. Furny had never made any of it back, but Trumbull is a good name in Boston. There isn’t much to Furny, I guess. He makes himself agreeable to wealthy old ladies. He’s always a house guest somewhere.

  “It wasn’t enough for Aunt Elizabeth to get me back into the fold. She wanted to marry me off to Trumbull. I guess maybe she wanted to see children in the family again before she died. Furny, of course, knew that to marry me would open Aunt Elizabeth’s purse strings for him. But I’ll give the man a little credit and say he was and is genuinely attracted to me. Between the two of them they began to put on the pressure. By then, seven or eight months ago, I was the manager of the bookstore. I quit and went down to New York City with my savings. A model agency took me on. Then a funny thing happened. I began to get lonely for Aunt Elizabeth. I began to feel sorry for her. Furny came down, week end after week end, to talk me into going back to Boston. I didn’t want to go. Then, in December, Aunt Elizabeth and Furny came down in her car and Aunt Elizabeth pleaded with me. She told me that Furny loved me, and that he had become almost a son to her. Furny sat there and beamed at me. He asked me to marry him.

  “They kept at me until finally we reached a compromise. Aunt Elizabeth said she was coming down here to Florida and that Furny would come down too. She wanted to pay my way and have me come down also, with the idea that the three of us would be in a new environment and maybe I would see things in a different light.

  “Cliff, there comes a time when you get tired of fighting. I agreed to come along, and I suppose I was acknowledging defeat right there, because I expected, without admitting it to myself, that I would let Furny talk me into marriage. A woman gets tired of that kind of life where there’s no razor on the bathroom shelf, no pipe on the mantel. They both kept at me until I agreed to come down here. The Franklins drove Aunt Elizabeth down and she got to Florence City early in January. Furny couldn’t come with her. He wanted to come down with me in my little car, but I said no, and he flew down, using money that I guess Aunt Elizabeth gave him, and got here a few days after I arrived. The three of us have been going places together, with Aunt Elizabeth paying the bills. Furny is staying over at the Baybright, two blocks below Aunt Elizabeth’s apartment.

  “Well, we’ve had some scenes. Oh, very polite scenes with everybody speaking in soft voices, but scenes just the same. I let Furny kiss me and there was nothing there. I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to him. It made Furny pretty moody. The idea was that if I would agree to marry him, Aunt Elizabeth would stake us to a round-the-world cruise lasting a full year, and she would come along too. I know that sounds a little ridiculous. And she kept telling me that she was leaving me everything in her will. Aunt Elizabeth was not the sort of woman who can see anyone’s point of view but her own. She kept at me because of the horrid little place where I’m living. I gave in on one point. The day before she was killed, I agreed to move into the Tide Winds with her as soon as the week was up. I suppose, if nothing had happened, I would just have made one concession after another until I found myself bedded with Furny.”

  “And now?”

  She looked at me with a somber expression. “I might still marry him. He’s being insistent. He keeps telling me that it’s what Aunt Elizabeth would have wanted. He knows that I’m going to get all the money now. I keep thinking that it’s the money that my father wanted, that she wouldn’t let him have. It isn’t good money to have, Cliff.”

  “Money has no memory.”

  “Now you have me sorted out. Now you know everything about me worth knowing, Cliff. Now you can tell me what you meant when you said something about trusting me this afternoon on the beach. I know you’re with the insurance company.”

  I drew marks with my thumbnail on the tablecloth. I told her the story. I told her where I fitted. I told her that I was willing to pay $325,000 for the return of the stones, no questions asked. I told her that she had already answered the main question I wanted to ask: Who would profit from her aunt’s death through association with Melody? The answer, of course, was Furness Trumbull.

  After going through it, I looked up at her. She was staring at me.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing, Cliff. The way you explain it, you’re going to lose either way by working on this case. It doesn’t sound very bright.”

  I stared hard at her. “And how about you? What did you have to gain by coming down here?”

  “That’s different. I’d just got to the point where nothing seemed very important any more.”

  “And you’re the only one in the world that could happen to, I suppose.”

  “You use sarcasm like a club, Mr. Bartells.”

  “Part of never growing up is the conviction that you’re unique, baby.”

  “If you think Furny could kill an old lady, you’re more naïve than unique.”

  We glared hard at each other. But unlike that moment on the beach, no grins arrived to dissolve it. When I paid Mamma, she sensed the mood immediately and gave me a pitying look. I helped Melody get the red cape around her shoulders. I shut her into the car, got behind the wheel, and headed back through the city to our route.

  I tried to reason out my anger with her. When I was painfully honest in my analysis, I found that her indecision as to whether or not to marry Furny now that the aunt was dead had started my annoyance. And that was ridiculous. I didn’t care who she married or how often. A man is either a man or a boy. But a woman can be a twist, a broad, a bim, a skirt, a dish, a piece, or half a hundred other names, many of them savage, most of them earthy. It is interesting from a philological point of view. I drove staring straight ahead down the shafts of light, and I told myself that this was another one. Just pick the right word. Push the right buttons. Turn to the right combination.

  Three miles from Florence City, I wrenched the car off onto the sandy shoulder, fighting it and slowing it down as it bounced and slewed.

  I cut the lights and motor and reached for her. “Just what was expected,” she said acidly in the darkness.

  I slipped my hand under the cape and down to the concave place at the small of her back and pulled her roughly to me, finding her unresisting lips in the darkness. The spice of the food was still heavy on her breath. She came limp and lax into my arms, like a sand-stuffed dummy, and, feeling a perfect fool, I continued the kiss on and on, getting nothing from it or from her.

  I let her go. “Enjoy it?” she asked. She laughed.

  I growled something at her. I started the motor and turned on the lights. “Wait a minute, Cliff,” she said. I turned toward her. She was smiling. She came over against me and wound both fists up in the lapels of my jacket and kissed me on the lips. The kiss burned like candle wax that drips on the back of your hand. Fire came out of her and seared the night.

  As I reached for her she pushed herself violently away. “Now drive me home, Cliff. Quickly, please.”

  I pulled up in front of the Coral Strand. “I’m sorry, Melody.”

  “Don’t be. I think I know what it is, in you. Sort of a process of getting even, isn’t it? Never mind. Please don’t bother to get out.” She slipped out quickly and pushed the door shut. I watched her walk under the nigh
t light and back to her room.

  5

  HARRY BANSON came into the diner the next morning when I was halfway through breakfast. He got coffee at the counter and came over to the booth.

  “Good morning. Aren’t you being pretty brave, Harry? Lots of people might see you sitting with me.”

  “Lay off,” he said sullenly. He lifted a spoonful of coffee and blew on it before putting it in his mouth. The spoon rattled off his yellow teeth.

  “Officially,” he said, “I’m warning you. Powy told me to hunt you up.”

  “He get stuck in his swivel chair?”

  “Damn you, Cliff, I’m doing the best I can. He told me to hunt you up and give you the word.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “He says any more reckless driving inside the city limits and you get your license lifted.”

  I leaned back. It answered a few questions. “Who was in the prowl car? Gilman and De Rider? You take this back to Powy. You tell him I was well under the speed limit until I crossed the city line. From there on, what I do is none of his business.”

  Harry Banson wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. The moisture flattened out the curly black hair on the back of his hand. I watched it spring up, hair by hair, as he rested his yellowish hand in the sunlight on the table.

  “So I told you. Now maybe I can ask you why you pull a damn fool thing like taking that Chance girl out of town.”

  “Sure you can ask me. Ask me again.”

  He sighed. “I’m asking you again.”

  “Because, as representative of the Security Theft and Accident Insurance Company, Incorporated, I find it necessary to contact the policy holder. Since the policy holder happens to be dead, I am forced to contact the next person in line, the person who will receive either the stolen gems or the face value of the policy.”

  “Powy doesn’t want you in this one.”

  “Then I suggest he contact my employers and tell them about it. I work for a living.”

  “You just got no sense, Cliff. No sense at all.”

  He went to the cash register and paid his dime check and went out, squinting against the sunlight, his shirt stuck to his back. The unseasonable February heat was continuing, and it had an odd stickiness about it more typical of August than of February.

  I walked down to the office, gave sallow Wilma Booton a broad wink, and went into my office. Mart was out on a couple of routine investigations. Arthur Myers was out too. Kathy came into my office and shut the door behind her.

  “Gosh, Cliff. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

  I stared hard at the neckline dip of her dress. “It certainly is.”

  “You stop that. Are you going to make a recovery on the stones, Cliff?”

  I spoke out of the corner of my mouth. “We can’t talk here, kid. Come on over to my place about eight tonight.”

  She threw her shoulders back. “You know very darn well I’m never going up to that apartment of yours, and besides, I have a date with Andy tonight.”

  “Ah. Andrew Hope Maybree the Third. Keep away from those teeth, sugar. You could get a bad laceration.”

  “Andy’s a very serious type.” This was said with great contempt for all the Cliffs of this world.

  “Ask him to tell you the one about the three old ladies on the train.”

  Her eyes went wide and then, under her deep tan, a flush crept up from her throat. It was a dead giveaway. She yanked the door open and fled, my laughter following her.

  I walked back and got in the car and drove out to the Baybright. A haughty young lady with pinch-on glasses stared over my head and asked me if I were a friend of Mr. Trumbull. I explained that I was, in a manner of speaking. She unbent a little bit and told me that Mr. Trumbull was “taking” breakfast on the terrace overlooking the pool. He would be outside Apartment K.

  He would be, and he was. He sat at a small table in the sun, wearing swimming trunks with a green porpoise embroidered on the right pants leg. He was reading a folded paper that looked to be the air edition of the New York Times.

  He glanced up at me with that absent look reserved for the help. “Well?”

  I pulled a chair away from the row against the wall and put it near the table where it would still be in the shade.

  “Have I had the pleasure?” he asked, in the tone of voice that indicated that there could never be any pleasure in it.

  “Melody told me to look you up, Mr. Trumbull.”

  He was quick on his feet. “Ah! How nice! You’re a friend of hers, of course.”

  “One of the best. Lovely girl, Melody.”

  We stared at each other. I wanted him to ask me what I wanted. He was equally determined to let me fumble it out by myself. The guy was built. No question of it. Heavy shoulders and good clean arm muscles. He had that baked-in tan that never completely disappears. Crisp brown hair and brown eyes. He had that look of fading and superficial boyishness which seems to appeal to the dowager set. I knew the type from seeing a lot of them in postwar Florence City. Having no money themselves, they have managed, through a sharpening of the instinct for survival, to fasten themselves to the moneyed groups.

  The tweedy, stag-line, Cannes, horsy, column-bait, so charming chiselers. The rich collect them like kings of old collected court jesters. And these boys know when to play the clown, when to apply the bite, which bedrooms to stay out of, and which ones to frequent. Amateur touts at the races, sharpies at the bridge table, heavy winners at canasta, they manage to live the parasite’s existence with considerable studied charm.

  They set off the parties, rhumba like experts, bully the waiters. And, when their luck is in, they marry a Melody Chance and live at last in the way they have been pretending to live all along.

  “Melody tells me, Mr. Trumbull, that before her aunt’s tragic death, there was some talk of you two being married.”

  The sun heat made the sweat run down through the triangular patch of hair on his broad chest. He laughed in great delight. “That is amusing, Mr.…”

  “Bartells. Cliff Bartells.”

  “Forgive me for laughing, Mr. Bartells, but it struck me funny. It’s in poor taste to laugh at such a time, I know. I’m afraid Melody was a little reticent with you if she said anything about ‘some talk’ of our being married. My dear fellow, there’s no question of it. Of course, this has been a horrid shock to Melody. There’s so much to do, with the lawyers arriving and all, and the body to be sent to Boston for burial. We are having to put marriage out of our minds for the time being, but once it is all over, that poor child and I will be married and go away together. Someone has got to help her get over this. She was desperately fond of Miss Stegman, you know.”

  I took his cigarettes off the table and lit one. I puffed the smoke toward him. “She kept this great love under a barrel, I guess.”

  “I’ve known Melody since she was a small child. Who are you, anyway?”

  I grinned at him. “I’m the guy who’s trying to contact the thieves and buy back the junk jewelry for three hundred and seventy-five thousand bucks, Trumbull.”

  The only sign of anger was the knotting of his jaw muscles. “In other words, you lied to me, Bartells. You’re no friend of Melody’s.”

  “You can’t be sure, though, can you?”

  He gave me a wide boyish smile, but the brown eyes were cool. “If you really don’t mind, old boy, I would like to read the paper.”

  I stood up. “Nice for you the old lady is dead, with you marrying the heiress and all.”

  I couldn’t rock him. He didn’t lose his smile. “I suppose you feel you have to say things like that, being sort of a semipoliceman or something. It must make you feel more like a man, probably. Permit me to think in your terms, old boy. Regardless of whether she lived or died, I was in a position to profit, you might say.”

  “How about if Melody doesn’t marry you?”

  “That’s my personal affair, and the idea is absurd anyway. You might check with your local police. You�
��ll find I’m working very closely with them. You’ll also find that they are quite well convinced that I shall hound them until the murderer is found. Miss Stegman was too close to me for me to be rational about this.”

  Though I instinctively disliked him, I had to admire his touch. He handled me so neatly that I began to wonder if Melody had been entirely on the level with me.

  “Good day, old man,” he said.

  I nodded gloomily at him and went back off the terrace. Some teen-agers were sloshing around in the pool, screaming at each other. I wished I could drop off too many years, leap in, and rassle the girls myself. I wished I could punch Trumbull in his patrician nose. I wished Kathy would come to the apartment. And I wished something would break, somebody would want to get in touch.

  I went back to my room and climbed the open staircase. The edge of a piece of paper peeped out from under my door. I picked it up and recognized Kathy’s familiar backhand.

  “A call came and I suppose you’ll know what it means. I don’t. A man said to tell you he’s got a good dog in the seventh. Have you been betting, Cliff? You told me that was for sucker tourists. Kathy.”

  I walked in, leaving the door open, and cursed Kathy for being an empty-headed fool. All cops aren’t dense. Powy might have made sense out of that note, given enough time. I was sorry that I’d told Johnny Alfrayda that Kathy could be trusted. She was completely trustworthy in one sense, of course. But this sort of lapse could be dangerous.

  I stripped off my shirt and put the phone base on my chest as I dialed the office from the comfort of the day bed. I got hold of Kathy.

  “Don’t say anything but short answers, darlin’. How long ago did that call come in?”

  “About ten minutes after you left the office. You sound mad, Cliff.”

  “I am. Shut up. Now get this straight. If the same joker calls again, you tell him this: ‘Cliff has his bet down.’”

  “Cliff has his bet down,” she repeated in a small obedient voice. She sounded so crushed that I relented.