Family Vault Page 6

  6

  THOUGH SARAH HAD BEEN born and reared in Boston, the regions out beyond Andrew Square might have been Timbuctoo, for all she knew of their geography. She and the lady at City Hall had picked out O’Ghee’s address on a street map; nevertheless she had to search for the place, and when she did at last find it she could hardly believe she’d got it right. This wasn’t even a street, merely a sort of cul-de-sac that appeared to be one solid block of disused-looking warehouses.

  At last she noticed a few yards of chain-link fence spanning what she first thought must be a driveway. Behind it, cramped between the massive warehouses, stood a sliver of a house three stories high but not more than fifteen feet wide, covered in green asphalt shingles that had begun to curl and break at the edges. The front yard was about five feet deep, grown up to crab-grass and ragweed, the door badly in need of paint. However, lace curtains at the one front window framed a card that read, “Room for Rent,” and a wire shopping cart leaned against the railing of the minuscule porch. This had to be the place, after all.

  It looked like, and probably was, the sole remaining unit of what was once a row of wooden town houses. Some diehard householder must have fought to the end against creeping industrialism and won what was surely a hollow victory. The chain-link fence suggested a watchdog so Sarah approached with caution. However, nothing happened when she opened the gate. She ventured up the two steps and knocked at the door.

  The woman who answered was another surprise. These tacky surroundings would have prepared Sarah for birdsnest hair and a filthy apron, but Tim O’Ghee’s landlady, if such she was, clearly spent a good deal more effort on herself than she did on her house. Her hair was an architectural marvel, her face a work of art. Her rigorously girdled form was encased in a tight nylon jersey dress of exuberant pattern and her nether extremities in imitation snake-skin boots with high heels and inch-thick soles.

  “Yes?” she said doubtfully with an up-and-down glance at Sarah’s once-good tweed coat and sensible shoes.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Timothy O’Ghee,” Sarah stammered. “Do I have the right address?”

  “What do you want him for?”

  “Well, I—I borrowed some money from him yesterday and wanted to pay it back.”

  “That’s a hot one. I never knew he had any to lend.”

  “It’s a very small amount, just change for the phone, actually, but he was so kind to offer it, and slipped away before I could even thank him properly. Later I described him to my uncle and he said it must have been Mr. O’Ghee, so I thought I’d run over and see him. I live not too far from here.”

  “Oh, yeah? Whereabouts?”

  “Toward the West End,” Sarah hedged. “Is Mr. O’Ghee in now?”

  “I dunno. I been over to the Avenue, grocery shopping. Tim don’t generally come downstairs till late. I don’t serve no meals, see, but I gave him coffee and maybe a piece of toast or something. What the heck, he’s an old man. It wouldn’t seem right making him walk all the way to the Avenue for a cup of coffee.”

  She turned her head and screamed, “Tim! Tim, you up yet? Somebody’s here to see you.”

  She got no reply.

  “He don’t hear so good no more. Prob’ly laying in bed reading the racing forms. Why don’t you go on up? He won’t mind.”

  Sarah hesitated. “Couldn’t you?”

  “I don’t climb them stairs no more’n I have to. Doctor’s orders.”

  Sarah didn’t believe that for a moment. Any woman who could tramp around the stores in those murderous boots must be rugged enough for anything. However, she wasn’t about to start an argument.

  “Where would I find him?”

  “Straight upstairs and turn to your right. Tell him I got coffee on the stove.”

  The woman stepped back and disappeared into the murky recesses of the house. The stairway was directly inside the front door, steep and dark and covered in a runner that ought to have been replaced ages ago. Praying she wouldn’t catch her toe in a worn spot and break her neck, Sarah picked her way to the top.

  The old man’s door was shut. She knocked and called, “Mr. O’Ghee,” but he didn’t answer. Perhaps he’d got up and left the house while his landlady was shopping. Now that she’d come this far, she might as well make sure.

  Barging into strange people’s bedrooms was not the sort of thing Sarah had been brought up to face with equanimity. She had to fight with herself to turn the knob and push the door open.

  Tim O’Ghee was in. He lay sprawled half out of a narrow iron bed, his eyes and mouth half open, his face shrunken and still. He would not be wanting coffee, then or ever.

  Sarah wasn’t frightened, only sorry. She had seen plenty of dead old men, grandfathers, great-uncles, cousins twice and thrice removed. They had died in their own comfortable beds, most of them, or in hospitals with trained nurses in attendance and relatives around to make sure they got decently buried. Moved by pity, she reached out and touched one of the stiff, yellow hands. It felt like wax that had been kept in a refrigerator. The cold drove her back to the head of the stairs.

  “Mrs.—oh, what is your name? Please come up! Something’s happened to Mr. O’Ghee.”

  “What’s the matter?” The blonde wig gleamed in the dusk below. “What happened?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  “What do you mean, you’re afraid?” The strident voice grew harsher. “Either he is or he ain’t. You sure he ain’t in a coma? Tim’s a diabetic. You better stay with him while I get the doctor.”

  Sarah knew the old man was beyond any earthly need of her company, yet common humanity demanded that she not run out at a time like this. She started to pull the spread over him, then decided she’d better not touch anything until somebody came.

  At least she didn’t have to stand right over him. She went to the one narrow window and stood looking out, but there was nothing to see except brick walls, and these were too unpleasant a reminder of that other brick wall which she and Tim O’Ghee had seen together.

  A prickling began at the back of her neck and inched its way down her spine. Surely it could be no more than a tragic coincidence that this little man who’d appeared so chipper less than twenty-four hours ago, this man who’d known Ruby Redd and the men who bought her drinks, should so suddenly be lying here dead?

  Sarah had surprisingly little time to wonder. Hardly five minutes later, she heard voices on the stairs.

  “Caught me on the bleeper,” the doctor was explaining. “I was in the car on my way to the hospital. Checked back on the CB and my office told me to come here. Lucky you caught me when you did. Where is he?”

  “Right in here.”

  The landlady ushered a man with a leather satchel into the room, flipped her head at Sarah, then at the door. “Okay, miss. Thanks for staying.”

  It was a clear invitation to leave but Sarah didn’t budge. The doctor, obviously in a rush to do what he must and get on, hardly seemed to notice she was there, although the room was so small they were almost on top of one another. He bent over the body, tried to lift an arm and found it stiff with rigor, made a perfunctory gesture at rolling back the eyelids, then straightened up.

  “That’s the story, Mrs. Wandelowski. Too bad, but the poor old guy’s been living on borrowed time as you know. At least it was quick and peaceful. You might as well go ahead and call the undertaker. Tell whoever you get to call my office, and I’ll have my secretary send over the death certificate.”

  “What are you going to put on it?” Sarah asked.

  “Heart failure, what else?”

  The doctor turned around and gaped as though he had, in fact, been unaware there was somebody behind him. “Who are you?”

  “A friend,” she snapped, “and I must say I don’t think much of your examination. Mr. O’Ghee was perfectly hale and hearty yesterday afternoon.”

  “If you’re such a pal of his, miss, you ought to know better than that. Tim was in rough shape and had been
for years. Mrs. Wandelowski, had he been taking his insulin on schedule?”

  “How’m I supposed to know? I gave him the vials regular out of the icebox like you told me to. I didn’t watch him take no shots. What do you think I am? Them needles turn my stomach.”

  “Um.”

  The doctor looked around the tiny, bare room. There was a wastebasket beside the dresser. He looked into it, finding nothing but the front section of the previous night’s newspaper. Sarah noticed with dismay that her own face appeared on the first page in a group shot with Dolph and some policemen. The caption read, “Stripper’s Body Found in Historic Tomb.”

  He held up the paper. “Anything in here to upset him, I wonder?”

  “Oh, God, yes,” cried Mrs. Wandelowski. “I should have thought of that in the first place. Tim was right there watching when they dug her up, can you believe it? Came home white as a sheet, shaking so hard he could barely get his coat off. I sat him down in the kitchen and gave him hot coffee with a little whiskey in it, not enough to hurt a fly. I know what he can have and what he can’t. Couldn’t, I mean. Poor old Tim, I’m going to miss him.”

  She sniffled, not very convincingly, Sarah thought. “He said he knew who it was the minute he laid eyes on her. Between you and me, I think they had something going for a while, ’way back when. Tim wasn’t a bad-looking guy when he was young. I seen pictures. You know how old people are always dragging out snapshots they want you to look at. Same old lies over and over about how great they used to be.”

  She touched her eyes very carefully with a tissue. “So last night he sat there at the kitchen table talking my ear off about this broad with the rubies in her teeth till I couldn’t take no more. Made me sick to think of her laying there all this time. Anyhow, I had a date with my friend from over the Avenue, so I made him a cup of soup and told him he better go to bed.”

  “You never saw him after that?”

  “Nope. I was kind of late getting in and I figured he must be asleep. His door was shut.”

  “Anybody else in the house?”

  “Not last night. My husband’s away. On business,” she added with a glare at Sarah.

  “I see.”

  The doctor put down the paper and knelt to peer under the bed. “Ah, here we are.”

  He reached in and scooped out a handful of dust fluffs and a stray sock. With the debris came two small plastic vials and some scraps of paper.

  “Here’s the insulin he didn’t take, and here, I’d say, is what finished him off.” He spread out the scraps so the printing on them was visible. They were all alike.

  “He’s been into my candy! Tim knows better than that. It could kill him.” Mrs. Wandelowski began to laugh hysterically. “What a way to go.”

  “But those are all Milky Way wrappers,” Sarah protested.

  “So what? They been having a special.”

  “I know, we bought some too. I offered one to Mr. O’Ghee yesterday, and he refused. He said he couldn’t eat them.”

  “Look, Miss whoever-the-hell-you-are,” said the doctor wearily, “if a despondent old man decides to kill himself, he’ll take any means that comes handy. You ought to be able to figure out what happened as well as I can. It must have been one hell of a shock when they knocked down that wall and he saw his old girl friend lying there like something left over from a horror movie. Maybe he’d been daydreaming all these years she’d come back to him some day. Maybe it just started him thinking about the past and what he had to look forward to, and he decided what was the sense in going on any longer?”

  “But she wasn’t his old sweetheart,” Sarah protested.

  “He didn’t even like her. He said Ruby Redd was the meanest woman he’d ever known. He was not upset, he was excited.”

  “Look, sister, what a person says and what he feels can be two very different things. Who the hell knows why people kill themselves? It happens a damn sight oftener than you might think. Being a nice old guy, he fixes it up to look like a natural death instead of jumping in front of a subway train and messing up the tracks. And for your information, I’m still going to put heart failure on the death certificate. If you want to report me to the medical association, please feel free. Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  As she had feared, his eye lit on the newspaper. “So that’s the little game, is it? You’re the Kelling girl.”

  Mrs. Wandelowski snatched the paper away from him. “You mean that’s her, the one in the picture? Sure, look, she’s even wearing the same clothes. What gall! Weaseling her way in here, making out she’s a friend of Tim’s. What’s she after, anyways?”

  “Good question.”

  The doctor took a step that brought him nose to nose with Sarah. “What’s the big idea, kid? Figured you’d get O’Ghee to tell you which of your rich uncles was the stripper’s boy friend so you could blackmail him into buying you a mink coat or a trip to Europe?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” cried Sarah. “I—”

  “Don’t you believe one word she says,” Mrs. Wandelowski broke in. “After the way she lied to me, I wouldn’t trust her one inch. Now you listen to me, toots. I don’t care who you are or where you came from, you’re nothing but a little tramp, and I won’t have you in my house. Get out and don’t never show your face around here again or you’ll damn soon wish you hadn’t.”

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Wandelowski,” said the doctor. “Don’t get your blood pressure up. Come on, Miss Kelling, whatever you’re after, you came too late. Sorry I can’t give you taxi service back to the family mansion, but you’ve wasted too much of my time already.”

  He was herding Sarah down the stairs as he spoke, and out on the porch. Mrs. Wandelowski slammed the door behind them. There was nothing Sarah could do except walk back to the subway station and catch a train to Park Street.

  She was much later getting home than she’d meant to be. Edith was in a tizzy, messing around the kitchen, doing her best to ruin the refreshments.

  “Leave that alone and go put on your afternoon uniform,” Sarah ordered. “I told you I’d be here in time to do the food.”

  “Don’t see how,” the maid retorted. “They’ll be here in half an hour.”

  Sarah wasted no breath arguing. She had more time than that, but she was going to need every minute of it. She welcomed the rush, it kept her from brooding on that neatly timed suicide of Tim O’Ghee. By the time she’d arranged her trays of savories and crudités, and got sheets of cheese puffs chilling in the fridge, ready to pop into a hot oven at the first sound of the doorbell, she’d worked herself into a reasonable frame of mind. She even managed to change her dress and be downstairs pouring sherry when Edith, elegant in black sateen, white organdy apron, and perhaps the last frilled lace cap extant on the Hill, opened the door to the first lot of friends and relatives.

  Fortunately, Alexander and Aunt Caroline were in the group. Sarah left them to do the honors, got Edith started passing drinks and food, and bolted for the kitchen. From then on it was back and forth, lugging trays and boiling kettles, gathering up used dishes and fetching clean ones, Edith having provided about half the required number.

  The old retainer might have known there’d be a record turnout. The Kellings, one and all, adored a funeral, and with the disagreeable publicity this one had evoked they’d rallied in droves to prove they had nothing to hide. She caught a sputter here and there about not knowing better than to talk to reporters, but didn’t stop to listen.

  Thank goodness the Lackridges had come. Harry was making himself agreeable and Leila was interpreting for Aunt Caroline. That was a blessing, since Alexander would hardly have been up to it. He looked even grayer around the mouth than he had the night before. Some of the relatives were noticing.

  “Alex is taking it hard. Didn’t realize he was so fond of old Fred. Edith, these cheese puffs are marvelous. I cannot see how you do it all by yourself.”

  At last the tea, the sherry, the food, and the family were gone. Only H
arry and Leila stayed on, she still talking and he still drinking, though by now Harry had switched to scotch out of his friend’s private stock. Sarah lit the library fire and shooed them toward it.

  “Go warm yourselves while I straighten up the drawing room.”

  Alexander roused himself to say, “You’ve been working all afternoon, Sarah. Can’t Edith do that?”

  “She’s washing dishes,” said Leila.

  “She is not,” Sarah retorted. “She’s downstairs soaking her corns and watching television. She’s furious with me because I wouldn’t let her go to the funeral.”

  “People were wondering why you both stayed away.”

  “Pity the obvious answer never occurred to them. Harry, before you quite finish that bottle, why don’t you fix my husband a drink of his own whiskey? Perhaps Leila and Aunt Caroline would like one, too.”

  “What about yourself?”

  “Not if anybody expects supper. It won’t be much, I warn you.”

  In fact, Sarah hadn’t the faintest idea what she was going to serve, but nobody seemed to care. She went back to picking up cups and glasses. As a rule, Alexander would have helped, but tonight he sat hunched in the vast leather armchair that was once Uncle Gilbert’s special place, nursing his drink and letting the others talk around him. Sarah looked in once or twice to take them ice or a few leftover canapes, and it seemed to her that he hadn’t moved a muscle during the intervals.

  She opened a tin of paté they’d got in a Christmas box and were saving for some grand occasion, and took a great deal of care making dainty sandwiches. Alexander had finicky tastes for a man. Those and a cup of soup, along with what had been served earlier, ought to suffice. They were none of them big eaters.

  When the food was ready she went downstairs and told Edith, “I’ve fixed us a tray so you can forget about supper. There’s soup on the stove. If that’s not enough, boil yourself a couple of eggs.”

  “They had the funeral on the news,” said the maid without moving her eyes from the flickering screen. “You wasn’t in it. They said you was home, prostrated with shock.”