668, page 2
What it was, was depressing as hell.
Calling it drab would make it seem too bright. Labeling it melancholy would assume there were parties in the streets every night. Characterizing it as ordinary would give luster to crab grass.
He sighed.
He sipped his scotch.
He gazed forlornly out the window and squinted as the sun blared from behind a cloud, reflecting off the shop windows across the way. The clapboard building’s high stone foundation allowed him and the other diners, except there weren’t any, to look down at the pedestrians, except there still weren’t any. And precious little vehicular traffic either. The stores were open, but in the time he’d been sitting here, alone, and blue, he’d not seen more than a handful of customers enter and leave. An empty school bus rattled southward. A hearse prowled northward. A dog and a cat wandered past side by side, heads inclined toward each other as if they were gossiping.
Marvelous, he thought.
From the bar, which was situated on the other side of the entrance hall and which he had checked and discovered was as empty as the dining room, came the strains of an organ. A solemn organ. An ominous organ that tickled his memory but refused to let him smile.
Right, he thought; and in thinking, considered the specific terms of the catch, as opposed to Hamtucket, which wasn’t all that much better but at least it had a highway exit.
The specific was … the house.
More specific than that was the time to be spent in … the house.
Generally speaking, it wasn’t a lot of time, to be sure, but in specific terms it was too long by half
To wit, although there was nothing funny about it: in order to gain final and despotic control of Stellar Artists Productions, Limited, he had to spend one entire night in the domicile that used to belong to Mr. Howmaster Maclemmon. The past tense was particularly relevant here since Maclemmon was dead. More specifically, he had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of the street in the middle of the night on the night after his hair had turned white overnight.
The organ trembled softly.
Unconsciously, Kent brushed a hand through his own, embarrassingly abundant, albeit quiet, ginger hair, and sighed his relief when none of it came out in batches.
Howmaster Maclemmon.
The conniving son of a bitch, rest his soul.
Crook, thief, consummate con man, and fairly decent amateur astronomer. He had bilked Kent out of several thousand pounds several times during their long and stormy acquaintanceship, and had been terribly nasty about it whenever Kent had demanded his money back, which was pretty much all the time.
But worse than that, the man never forgave. Anything. Evidently, if one were to consider the will and its diabolical stipulations, certainly not the time Kent had done a little bilking of his own, the consequence of which was Maclemmon’s hasty flight to Belgium from the United Kingdom on a Spanish shrimp boat in the middle of January’s worst Channel storm since 1687.
At the time, revenge had been sweet; now it tasted like stale sweat socks.
Thus, when Kent had been informed of the inheritance, and its diabolical stipulations, he could not help but wonder if this was but one last-gasp attempt by Howie the prick to get even.
Jesus; spend sunset until dawn in … the house … or lose it all to … the city of Albuquerque.
What the hell kind of a will was that?
The organ muttered a rippling foreboding.
He grunted.
That’s what I figured.
And while we’re at it, what the hell was Maclemmon doing in Hamtucket anyway? What was so special about this out-of-the-way place that he would hide here from the eyes of the world and my wrath? What was so wonderful about all this gloom that Maclemmon would revel in its despondent ambiance? What was there about the air that had done such terrible things to his hair?
Ah well, he thought; these and other questions will no doubt be answered before this thing is through.
Because, by God, he fully intended to spend that ridiculous night in the house.
Nothing, but nothing, was going to stop him from achieving his practically lifelong dream of artistic independence.
He nodded resolutely, and in nodding saw a woman enter the dining room, saw her see him, and saw her reaction, which made him wonder if his hair was falling out.
When she approached, he rose.
When she said, “Baron? Your lordship?” he nodded.
When she said, “You’re going to die if you stay in that house tonight,” he dropped back into his chair and finished his scotch, looked out the window and watched the cat bite the dog, the dog whirl in rage and bite a pudgy postman, the pudgy postman lash out with a boot, miss the dog, and fall into the gutter where a towheaded newsboy on a bicycle ran over his right hand, sending the towheaded newsboy into a wild spin that slammed him into the side of a bread van which jumped the curb and slammed into the window of Samson’s Video Bazaar.
Kent sniffed and raised an uh-oh baronial eyebrow.
Without invitation, the woman sat down.
As she set a formidable-looking purse on the table, he noted that she was rather attractive in a gloomy sort of way, wearing a severe brown suit with padded shoulders, a pale yellow blouse with ruffles that didn’t, and her long brown hair in a loose gathering at her nape.
Her pleasantly rounded face seemed puzzled for a moment. “I’m sorry, but… you are Kent Montana, are you not?”
Warily he nodded.
She held out a long-fingered hand. “Hester Kerwin.”
He shook it politely, although he permitted his expression to tell her that he hadn’t the faintest idea who she was, no offense, madam, and you can let go now, please, you’ve a grip like a bleedin’ stevedore.
She flushed slightly and withdrew her hand.
“Perhaps,” she answered hastily, “I should explain my warning.”
Perhaps, the set of his lips told her, you should.
After checking to be sure no one in the empty room could overhear, she leaned forward and whispered, “Bog-Muggoth.” He waited, hoping her condition wasn’t permanent.
She leaned back and waited.
He waited patiently, since barons were pretty good at that sort of thing. They were also pretty good at remembering faces, and although he had never met this woman before, there was something familiar about her. If he could put his finger on it, she’d probably slap him across the room, yet there was … something. Her accent, perhaps? Rhode Island, to be sure, but with a trace of—
She leaned forward again, gnawed anxiously at her lower lip, and wrinkled her nose. “Kthulkucuth,” she husked skillfully, although she did spit a little.
He waited.
She wiped her chin with a napkin, leaned back, and waited. The organ sounded downright funereal.
Finally, with her face twisted in mild confusion, she leaned forward a third time. “Do you … that is, do you speak English?” Kent’s eyes widened haughtily at the implied insult to the education of his world travels.
She in turn glanced hopelessly around the room. “My god, he doesn’t speak English. Wonderful. What the hell am I going to do now?” She looked back at him. “But if you don’t speak English, why am I wasting my time talking to you? Why don’t I just take the damn thing and leave?”
“Because,” he answered softly, “I’ll break your arm if you do. What thing?”
She gaped.
He grinned. God, he loved being inscrutable.
She said, “Why the hell didn’t you answer me before?”
“Because I didn’t understand one bloody word of what you were saying.”
“But I was speaking English! I was! You heard me.” She glanced down at her lap. “I was, I think, wasn’t I? I’m pretty sure I was.” She looked up. “I was.” She nodded sharply. “Yes, I’m fairly sure I was.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I wasn’t?”
He picked up his spoon and rapped it once on the table. “No, Miss Kerwin, you were speaking in some no doubt arcane, extinct, incomprehensible language, something about bugs and klutzes and things like that.”
“Damn,” she muttered. “I was so sure I was speaking English, no kidding.” She shook her head again, reached into her purse, and fumbled out a dozen audio tape cassettes which, he noted, were part of an extensive multilingual language course for use in an automobile or in the privacy of your own home. There was also a gun, which was a lot more impressive. “Oh, the hell with it, Montana, just give me the damn key.”
“What?”
She blinked. “Damn.” Though the gun didn’t waver, her expression did. “Was that in English, what I just said?”
He nodded.
“Thank god.” She brushed the cassettes aside with her free hand. “These things are so confusing sometimes. I—” A frown. “So what did you say ‘what’ for?”
“Because you pointed a gun at me, asked me for a key, and I was so startled that I wanted to be sure that what you wanted was what you said you wanted.”
‘The key.”
He nodded.
“Okay. Good. Give it to me.”
“And if I don’t?”
“The key,” she said flatly.
“My dear,” Kent began, and shut up when she jabbed the gun at him.
At that moment, the waitress, a plump and greying woman in a black dress and red apron, black support hose and shoes with heels thick enough for blarney, thumped over to the table. “Why, Hester,” she said, grinning, chewing gum, fussing with her hair and the dozen pencils poking out of it. “Good to see you, dear. You want something?”
“No thanks. I’m working.”
Amy Perkins, or so Kent noticed read her name embroidered on a bosom a starving child would kill for, shook her head in mild scolding. “All work, you know, girl, all work.” She turned to Kent, who couldn’t believe how magnificently she managed to ignore the gun. “Work, work, work. Two days I’ve known this young woman, all she does is work. Bad for the complexion, you know what I mean? She should settle down, find a nice young man, raise some kids.”
“Ma,” Hester said, embarrassed but pleased.
The maternal waitress would have none of it. “Now you listen to me, child. This young man here, he’s obviously well-bred, you can tell by his hair. Maybe you should get to know him better, if you catch my drift.”
“Ma!”
“She’s your mother?” Kent asked.
“Good heavens, no, no, no,” the waitress laughed. “Everybody calls me Ma, see. I guess it’s my motherly nature, you know what I mean?”
Motherly wasn’t exactly what Kent had in mind, but considering her size, and the size of those arms rippling with muscles from hefting trays all day, he chose the wiser course and smiled politely instead.
“So,” she said, “you want something else?”
He held up the glass.
She pulled a bottle from her voluminous apron, poured him five fingers, and handed the glass back. “Bar’s closed,” she explained as she noted the refill on her order pad. When the pencil was safely jammed back into her hair, she walked away. Paused. Looked over her shoulder. “You drink too much. Bad for the liver. My late husband, he drank himself to death, you know. Hester, child, talk to him. He won’t listen to me, I’m not his mother.”
She left the room.
The organ played her out.
Kent blinked. Once. Very, very slowly.
“Hey,” Hester said.
He looked.
‘The key, remember?” Her lower lip quivered. “I’m very upset. I’ll probably kill you without meaning to. Do you understand? Just give me the key.”
Making sure that she understood that he wasn’t reaching for a weapon, he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the set of keys the Boston attorney had given to him at the reading of the will, just after the man had inexplicably crossed himself four times. There were three, and aside from one fashioned in the shape of a leering skeleton, they appeared to him to be perfectly ordinary.
“You know,” he said gently, “it would be rather friendly of you, under the circumstances, if you told me why you want this key. It is, after all, my property. Or at least, it fits a lock on my property. Which lock, I don’t know because I haven’t looked at my property yet.” He smiled. “Well, I looked at it, you see, just in passing, I was in a speeding taxi at the time and it was kind of pointed out to me, but I didn’t go inside. I’m just assuming there’s something in there that unlocks when you put the key into it, if you see what I mean.”
She stared at him.
He maintained the smile.
They jumped when voices at the entrance filtered into the room. Three men stood there, speaking softly to the waitress. One was rather tall, with thick grey hair and rugged features; one wasn’t so tall, with slicked-back black hair and puffy features; and the last one was short, pudgy, with slicked-back hair and the biggest eyes Kent had ever seen this side of a magnifying glass. Despite the time of day, they wore evening wear; despite the urging of the waitress, they took one look at Kent and Hester, the tall one tipped his top hat, and they left.
Kent wondered.
The waitress shrugged and disappeared into the bar.
Hester poked his arm and said, “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? You really don’t know what that key is for, do you?”
He thought to ask her about the three men and decided that it was none of his business why they took one look at him and fled. The way things were going, he’d find out soon enough.
Therefore, when Hester repeated her incredulous query about his not knowing anything vital about the key, he said, “Haven’t the foggiest.”
“You don’t know what Maclemmon was up to, do you?”
“Haven’t spoken to him in years.”
“You don’t know about Pilandra and Quentin and Kenilworth and Ivan and Caroline and Rex and Wally and John and Marsha, do you?”
“Rex?”
Her shoulders sagged in defeat, her cheeks puffed as she blew a soft breath and spat a curse after it, and she swept the cassettes wearily back into her purse, sneered at the gun and put it away.
“I’ve missed something, right?” he asked in a sparkling fit of stupidity he excused only because of his desperate greed for Stellar Artists Productions and because he was, in situations like this, stupid.
“Baron,” she answered, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Miss Kerwin,” he replied, seeing no reason why he shouldn’t pursue his stupidity since it seemed inevitable anyway, “perhaps you should explain before we part.”
“Part?”
He frowned. “Well … yes.”
“You mean I’m fired?”
“You are?”
“You mean you don’t want me?”
Courage, Kent, he ordered; courage.
“Fired,” she said to the empty room. “He doesn’t even know what I can do, and he fires me.”
Courage.
“It was the gun, wasn’t it?” she decided, snapping her fingers. “You’re pissed because of the gun.” She slapped the heel of her hand against her brow. “I knew it. I just don’t think, you know? Sometimes I just… act. Impulses. Instincts. Uncontrollable fancies. You have no idea the trouble I get into sometimes.”
Kent smiled. Painfully. “Miss Kerwin—”
“Fired,” she muttered, and a tear shimmered in one eye before she brushed it away with the side of her thumb.
“You are not fired,” he answered impetuously, and crossed his fingers under the table.
“I’m not?”
“No. Why should you be?”
“Because you said we were parting.”
“But aren’t we?”
“Not if I’m not fired.”
“But you’re not.”
“Then we’re not parting.”
“We’re not?”
“Am I fired?”
“Not so’s I notice.”
She grinned. “Good.” She stood. “Glad that’s settled.” She stepped away from the table. “Let’s go, Baron. I’ll tell you all about Caroline and Wally and Ivan and Quentin and Rex and Pilandra and Kenilworth and John and Marsha on the way.”
“Rex?”
She pulled him to his feet, patted his arm, and led him to the door. “You won’t regret it, believe me.”
He stopped. “Miss Kerwin.”
“Pushy, right?” she said immediately. “Too pushy. Headstrong. Reactive.”
He put a finger to her lips, not incidentally noting they were much softer than they looked. “Miss Kerwin. Hester. Who, if you don’t mind me asking, the hell are you?”
“Didn’t the lawyer tell you?”
He shook his head.
“Hell, Baron, I’m your housekeeper.”
“Ah.”
She shrugged. “At least I will be until you’re dead.”
2
Hamtucket boasted many grim and dismal streets among those streets that performed the function of connecting one street to another unless you cut through someone’s back yard. Most of the homes were inhabited by shopkeepers and artisans whose livelihoods had been slowly, inexorably eroded by the disastrous failure of the ice cream factory two decades before, and the unexpected collapse of the burgeoning boa and boater businesses which had, in their burgeoning, kept half of Boston and most of Hartford at the pinnacle of fashion awareness. But the boas bombed under constricting charges of destructive featherbedding, the boaters sank without a tip, and the ice cream melted when the refrigerator blew out, killing four men, including the foreman; and the workers, try as they might, couldn’t find other employment unless they commuted to Providence and Newport.
Houses fell into genteel disrepair; stores held more sales and made less profit; children grew up and moved away; adults moved away and returned when they couldn’t find employment in Providence and Newport; schools closed; the police force was reduced because crime had been reduced by the absence of anything marginally worth stealing.
It was, in a word, pretty bad times.
Times of decay and dissolution, of desperation and despair, and much of it, although not all of it since some people were too rich to worry about depression, could be found on the typical street known as Langford Place.
