‘Where Lieutenant Raynor lay dying.’
‘He was a good man.’ The lad pulled off his cap in an unconscious tribute, staring at the hand-sized smear of red-brown.
‘You knew him.’
‘He’d only been here for a little while, but it’s not a very large base, you get to know most of the officers. And he was one of the good ones.’
‘Any ideas about who would have wanted to do this?’
‘Nope. Most of the fellows felt the same way about him I did.’
‘I see.’
‘What was he doing out here, do you know?’
I turned to look over the great shining expanse of the Pacific, set alight by the low-lying sun. ‘He was sitting and looking at the moon, smoking one of his small cigars, and waiting to meet a man he regarded as a friend. And I suspect that the man who did this had his own ambiguous feelings about Raynor. He killed him, but he couldn’t quite bear to turn his back and abandon Raynor’s dead body out here on the hillside, knowing what the gulls would do to it. Nor could he bring himself to push Raynor off the cliff to the sea.’
‘Wouldn’t be all that easy, to push him off.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, it looks simple, just roll something over and splash, but in fact the slope’s just a little too gentle for that. ’Bout six months ago, we had a horse break its leg along here, had to shoot it, and the major ordered us to shove it off the cliff. Took ten of us the better part of the day to get the cursed thing anywhere near the water. ’Course, a man’d be simpler, but not real easy. Not unless you could pick him up and throw him.’
I studied him for a while, so intently that the young man began to look nervous, as young men do. ‘Let us take a closer look at that cliff,’ I said. At that, his nervousness increased.
‘Uh, mister, I really wouldn’t if I was you. I mean, no offence meant, but you’re not a real young man.’
‘I shall endeavour to remain on the land side of the water-line, Corporal.’
My youthful helpmeet sheltered my every step as we approached the steeper portion of the cliff, although I could see what he meant, that at this part of the cliffs, there was no convenient spot at which one could absolutely guarantee that a rolled object would continue rolling without fetching up on rock or shrub.
I could also see something else. At the very point at which the slope became impossible, when I had resorted to hunkering onto my heels with one hand on the ground and Corporal Larsen’s firm grip on my coat-tails for support--the point, in short, at which farther progress became impossible--I spotted a lump of white half-way to the breaking waves, and even more precipitously, a light shape that could be the raw colour of broken wood.
I looked around into the worried brown eyes of my assistant. ‘Which position on a belaying rope do you prefer?’ I asked. ‘The anchoring end, or the dangling?’
TEN
The lad would not hear of my dangling out over the ocean. In fact, he came perilously near to arguing with me entirely, considering that he was a soldier under orders, and only agreed to assist me when I pointed out that our other, equine companion might also serve to anchor the rope.
Further delay came when he would have set out for the fort, where the nearest rope lay, on foot. It appeared that the nag which had transported me here was an officer’s horse, thus rendered off-limits to a mere corporal.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I told Larsen. ‘Even if you travel at a jog-trot we’ll be working that cliff in the dark. Take the horse and go. If anyone questions you, you’re on a personal mission from Major Morris. But, lad? Don’t give anyone details.’
In the end, the threat of impending darkness tipped him into obedience. With none of the caution demonstrated by the major and me, Larsen flung himself into the saddle and dug in his heels, not even pausing to adjust the stirrups to his shorter legs. Rider and mount flashed over the top of the hill, and he must have kept up the breakneck racing attitude because he rode the two-mile journey to the barn and back again in far less time than I would have credited to that particular creature. He dropped off the winded animal, led it along the slope to where I stood and, as soon as I had the reins in my hand, began dragging his equipment from the saddle.
Along with the sack, the rope, and three apples, he had brought a lantern, which indicated how long he thought this was going to take us.
I showed him how to fashion a climbing harness out of the rope, then tied the other end of it to the saddle, looping the middle around the saddle-horn. The corporal eyed the process dubiously, but seemed reassured by my knots as much as the attitude of disinterested competence I created for his benefit. He set off down the hill uncertainly, testing the play of rope as he went, but by the time he reached the sharper decline, he was moving easily, trusting my control of the situation.
Before long, he turned around to traverse the slope backwards, braced fully against the rope that was scouring my palms. The horse was tired enough that the peculiarity did not cause it to startle, which was as well. The sun rested a thumb’s breadth from the horizon, and Corporal Larsen was invisible to me, nothing but a tension on the hemp running through my hands. I felt him move down, responding to the single tug by holding the rope firm, then at the double tug played out more of the line. There was a single loop remaining at my feet, and I was considering the challenge of persuading the horse to move down the hillside a few yards when another single tug came, and I held fast. Finally there came a series of sharp tugs, and I began to haul the line steadily in against the pommel. In a few minutes the bulk of the rope lay across my boots, then a long shadow wavered across the hillside as the last rays of the sun gave outline to my assistant’s form.
His boyish face with flushed with adventure and triumph as he wrestled himself free from the no-doubt painfully constricting harness, then walked over to present me with his treasure. However, he took one glance at the state of my palms and gave an exclamation of dismay.
‘Your hands! Oh, that was really stupid of me, not to have brought gloves! Here, let me wrap them.’
‘Your California weather is so clement, I neglected to wear my own,’ I admitted. ‘It’s nothing, I shall just need to take care that I do not add my own stains to the marks on the towel. Show me what you’ve found, lad, and stop fussing over me.’
He insisted on tying off his relatively clean handkerchief, however, before he would give me his sack. While I opened its top, he tidied the rope like a good soldier, but his eyes never left what I was doing, and his actions were somewhat distracted by his attentions.
The wooden object I had spotted was the business end of a base-ball bat, split from the handle by the force of the blows, still clotted despite the rain with the killing residue. Shards of bone had been driven an eighth of an inch into the hard wood.
‘I couldn’t find the other part,’ Larsen said, sounding apologetic.
‘It’s probably floated half-way to Hawaii by now,’ I reassured him, and reached for the other object in the sack.
There is a shroud held in veneration by the Roman Church, displayed in a church in the Italian city of Turin, that appears to show the face of a bearded man around whom it was wrapped at death. Being old and odd, this remarkable object is of course identified as the winding-sheet of the Saviour, although there is no proof of the matter.
The cloth I unwrapped on that darkening hillside was weirdly similar to the Turin shroud. As I unpeeled the sodden object, stains appeared; I spread it flat, and in a peculiar coincidence, the last rays of that day’s sunlight travelled across it, then went dim, as Corporal Larsen and I stood staring down at the clear imprint of a man’s agonised face, pressed into the cloth.
We made use of the lamp Larsen had brought, darkness catching us up as we passed through the tunnel to Fort Baker. Although he would have had me in the saddle, I could see no reason to perch on high while the corporal laboured at my side, and in the end we walked together in front of the horse, which bore the stained towel a
nd the murder weapon as if bearing Raynor’s body home.
Back at Fort Baker, I was disappointed to find the military police from the Presidio in possession. I needed a conversation with the good major, but such would not be provided this evening. Instead, I turned over the items my young friend had recovered from the cliffside, and made an appointment for the following afternoon.
The Army launch El Aquario was busy shuttling back and forth across the passage, and after retrieving my unnecessary brief-case from Morris’s office, I went down to the dock to await its next trip. As it happened, Lieutenant Jack Raynor waited there as well, on his final voyage across to the Army mortuary. I stood on the pier, and later on the tossing deck, contemplating the wrapped form of the young officer and addressing him with my silent questions. A promising young officer with secrets to keep: Why had he died?
The lieutenant did not say.
When I returned to the hotel, the desk-man handed me an envelope with the hand-written initials BB at the upper left corner. I opened it as I rode up in the lift, and found inside the dates of Lieutenant Raynor’s presence in the city over the last month of his life, both at the club, and when he had been free during the daylight hours. At this juncture, I did not know that it would do me any good, but I folded it into my pocket and walked down the silent hallway to my empty room.
It was long since dark, and truth to tell, I was feeling my age. I should have liked nothing better than a large and leisurely meal, a book, and my currently solitary bed, but my day was far from finished. Instead, I called for a hurried plate of sandwiches and descended to the hotel’s Turkish baths, which restored me sufficiently that I might consider the remainder of the night without outright loathing. I resumed my semi-formal evening wear, dropped my silk hat onto my freshly trimmed head, pulled a pair of thin leather gloves over my abused hands, and set out for the Blue Tiger cabaret.
The man at the door tipped his hat to me, recognising instantly the generous patron of the night before. I was guided up the stairs again to the balcony, shown to a table overlooking the stage, and provided a bottle of champagne on ice. I was later than I had anticipated, and Martin Ledbetter gave a sour glance at the sweating silver bucket.
‘They wouldn’t bring the bubbly until you were here to pay for it,’ he said, reaching for the glasses.
‘Still, they did allow you to sit down,’ I pointed out.
He did not deign to answer.
Billy Birdsong was already on the stage, half-way through the second of her two evening’s performances. I was interested to hear a different set of songs from the previous evening, an indication that many of the audience were repeat visitors. She also wore a different costume from those she had appeared in; I wondered idly just how extensive her repertoire and her wardrobe were.
Again, we were summoned to her dressing room after the show, and seated amongst the chocolate and flower tributes. She stripped off her stage face, painted on her other face of less exaggerated femininity, and changed into an embroidered frock of light wool.
When she emerged from behind the screen, I stood up, but instead of accompanying her down the street to her bistro, I escorted the remaining staff and hangers-on out of the room, placed Ledbetter outside in the hallway to keep them from returning, and closed the door firmly.
Wordlessly, I held out the pearl necklace; the singer took it, with hands that were uncertain with apprehension, and returned to me my stick-pin.
‘Sit down,’ I told her, and reached for the nearest bottle of an admirer’s wine, scrabbling through the debris atop the table for a cork-screw.
Hesitantly, frightened, she obeyed. She took the glass I handed her, drank its contents as if it held medicine, and sat expectantly.
‘He’s dead,’ I told her.
The green eyes closed. ‘I knew it,’ she whispered. ‘He’d have come back, otherwise. How?’
‘Murdered.’
The singer stared up at me in horror, and said, ‘God. Because of me?’
‘As yet, there is no reason to believe his death had anything to do with you. The Army police are looking into it, but more to the point, I will continue to investigate the matter.’
‘The police? Oh no.’
‘In my cursory search of your Lieutenant Raynor’s quarters, I saw nothing that would bring your name into this at all. The only thing I found was this.’ I took from my note-case one of the two items I had removed from Raynor’s pocket, and placed it on the table in front of the singer. ‘He had it in his wallet. I thought you might want it returned.’
She looked at the studio portrait of herself, which was signed,
With love and kisses from Billy
‘No, I don’t suppose his family needed to see that.’
She sounded bitter, as would any person required to deny their very existence; my need to move the investigation forward had to be put, temporarily, behind reassuring my client. ‘His family is of no importance,’ I said firmly. ‘What matters is that Lieutenant Raynor cared enough to risk carrying your photograph in his breast pocket.’
There followed the usual teary self-recrimination of a client, which becomes no less tiresome with the number of times one is forced to witness it. However, eventually the singer’s tears receded and she sat staring at herself in the dressing-table mirror; I knew that in a moment, she would see her ravaged face and reach, half-heartedly but inevitably, for the make-up pots.
For a performer, the sentiment ‘Life must go on’ runs closer to the surface than for other people.
‘The first night, you told me that one evening when you were walking with Lieutenant Raynor, he saw someone he knew, and retreated from a confrontation.’
‘Yes.’
‘I need to know every detail of that incident.’
‘What’s to tell? We were walking arm-in-arm, he spots two people a couple blocks up, he pulls me into an alley and we take another route to my place.’
‘When would this have been?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied in a despairing little voice. I felt like shaking her, but instead merely leant forward so that I dominated her vision.
‘Think, Billy. What you were doing, how you felt, what was going on that night.’
‘I really don’t--Wait a minute,’ she broke off. ‘It was the night after he gave me the pearl. And that was on the full moon, I remember because Jack held it up to the window and compared the two, and said I would remember that night whenever the moon was full. He was such a romantic boy,’ she said, and began to weep again.
Ruthlessly, I pressed on. ‘So he gave you the necklace on the Sunday?’
‘Monday,’ she said, and blew her nose.
The moon had been at its fullest on the Sunday night, but I did not think the singer would have perceived the difference. ‘Monday, then. So you saw these other people on the Tuesday night?’
‘That sounds right.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘I only caught a glimpse.’ Her hand sought out a piece of cotton wool, and absently dabbed it into the jar of cold cream.
‘Men or women?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. There was a man and a figure in a dress. It was night and there was a street-light, but it was behind them, so between the fact that I only had a glance before Jack pulled me off the street and the fact that I couldn’t see their faces, I can’t be sure. But afterwards I thought maybe the woman was a kid who used to work with me, a few years ago when I was just getting started.’
‘A boy?’
‘Right. Very pretty face but couldn’t sing worth a plugged nickel, and two left feet when it came to dancing. As soon as I could afford better, I let him go. But I hadn’t seen him in years, and I can’t be at all certain it was him.’
‘What was his name?’
‘He called himself Merry, Merry Whisker was it? No, Winkle. Merry Winkle. I probably have a photo of him in my scrapbook at home, if you like.’
‘That would be extraordinarily helpful.
’
‘I’ll send it to the hotel, shall I?’
‘Thank you. What about the man? Old or young?’
‘I really couldn’t see him--’
‘I understand, but impressions can be remarkably accurate.’
‘Well, young then.’
‘Tall or short?’
‘Short,’ she answered immediately. ‘That much I did see, that Merry, if it was Merry, was taller than him.’
‘Clothes?’
‘Against the light that way, he was just an overcoat and a hat. No uniform, if that’s what you’re after.’
‘And when you call to mind the attitudes of their persons, how they walked and the manner in which they moved, what would you say was their relationship? Brothers? Friends?’
‘Frankly, they looked like a pro and her john. A professional. Which is why I even remember it, because once it came to me that it looked like Merry, I thought how sad his life must be.’
‘I see. Where precisely did this take place?’
By this time I had been in San Francisco slightly over a month, and bore in my mind a clear map of her primary streets and districts. When Billy Birdsong told me the name of the street on which she and Raynor had been walking, the approximate cross-street, and in what direction the other two had been seen, I knew precisely where the encounter had taken place. I got from her a description of ‘Merry Winkle’ and questioned her further for some minor detail of dress or person, but she had nothing else, and soon her eyes began to tear up again. I summoned her dresser from the hall-way outside, and asked the woman to accompany Miss Birdsong home.
Outside of the Blue Tiger, young Ledbetter hovered at my elbow, the very picture of impatience. ‘What happened?’ he demanded. ‘Why were you talking to her for so long? And what are we doing now?’