Here I did smell chloroform. I flipped on the light, snatched the pad away from the young man’s pillow, and shook him. He struggled up and grabbed his head. “Who in hell are you?” Jack McGuire was built to ask such questions, a fine mountain of man, mostly shoulders. Redheaded, blue-eyed, and sudden.
“Moved in yesterday, first floor. Prowler broke in, but nobody—” Mac was into his pants and barking about the old ladies before I finished, and then out in the hall shouting: “Hey, Mrs. Mapp! Mrs. Keith!” Nice boy. Plain-spoken. He’d have the house steaming in three minutes. Meanwhile I gave his room a photographic glance. Decent poverty, self-respecting. A work shirt with oil stains — mechanic? Glamor photograph on the bureau, a cute wench with a heart-shaped face; another beside it of a muscular lady unquestionably Mom. Razor, toothbrush, comb, and towel laid out as if for Saturday inspection by a second lieutenant. I shoved the toothbrush into a comfortable diagonal to please myself, and withdrew to a sound of screaming.
They were nice old ladies in a hugely cluttered nest. A double window overlooked Martin Street. That would be their headquarters in normal times, but now the thin one was standing up in bed and screaming while the fat one asked her if everything was all right. Mac said it was. Having touched off the eruption, he was shoving the lava back, barehanded. I liked Mac.
Agnes Mapp was stout, Doris Keith lean. I learned later that they were from New London, and had a low opinion of Massachusetts, where they had been living on widows’ pensions for twenty-six years; this burglary was the first occasion when the Commonwealth had snapped back at them. Mrs. Keith subsided to the horizontal, and Mrs. Mapp took over the screaming, waving at the bureau. “It’s all upsettled!” In that mass of furniture, corsets, work-baskets, china ornaments, and, yes, antimacassars, I wondered how she knew. “We never let the red vahz set next the pink hairbrushes, never! Oh, Dorrie!” she wept. “Look! He’s stolen our album!”
I mumbled I’d call the cops. Mrs. Keith was recovering, and demanding in a severe baritone that Mac explain. He and I contemplated each other in a sympathy bridging the Salvayan-human gap. I went downstairs.
I met Angelo limping up from the basement in yellow pajamas. Feuermann, roused by the screaming, padded after me. I asked him to call police and he ducked back to the hall telephone without fuss. Angelo was muttering.
“Save Mama climbing the stairs.”
“Sure. She needn’t. Come back down with me. Just a prowler, maybe got away with a few dollars. Ladder under my window. Chloroform.”
“Oops!” said Angelo, catching some normal pleasure of excitement. “But Bella—” He forgot Bella, hurrying to his mother as we entered the basement living room. She was in her rocker, gray-faced, clutching a blue wrapper. I wasn’t sure she could get up. I tried to be stuffily humorous and soothing in the account I gave her.
“Never had nothing like this happen, Mr. Miles — never—”
“Mama,” Angelo urged, “don’t fret. It isn’t anything.”
She pulled his head against her. He drew free gently, and rubbed her aimless-wandering hands. Her color improved. Her breathing was almost right by the time Feuermann joined us. Reassuringly important, he said the police would be along shortly, meanwhile we’d better see what was missing. His common sense was golden, his Jovian fussing over Rosa more useful than my efforts. Angelo mumbled about Bella and slipped out. I spoke of the old ladies’ missing album.
“Funny,” said Feuermann. “If they say it’s missing it is — couldn’t misplace a pin in that room. They won’t even let Rosa dust. Got a notion my own is missing. Remember, Miles, I showed you a snap of old 509 when she was new out of the yards, and one of me and Susan and Clara when she was twelve. Where’d I put that album when we were done with it?”
“Top of your bookcase.”
“Right. Always do. Seems to me it was gone when I put on the light. Now what would a burglar want of pictures? Huh?”
I wondered if I knew….
The others missed the small cry outside. My Martian hyperacusis is sometimes a burden: I hear too much I’d rather not. But it can be useful. I don’t recall running. I was just there, in the back yard, in light from the kitchen window, with Angelo. He was kneeling by that pile of rags. It partly covered Bella, whose neck was broken. “Why?” said Angelo. “Why?”
I helped him to stand, frail in his rumpled pajamas. Come on back in the house. Your mother might need you again.”
He didn’t cry or curse. I wished he would. He squinted at the ladder and the ground between it and the fence. Earth and paving tones were dry, unmarked. Angelo said: “I’m going to kill whoever did that.”
“No.”
He wasn’t listening. “Billy Kell might know. If it was the Diggers—”
“Angelo—”
“I’m going to find him. I’m going to break his own neck for him.”
3
“Angelo,” I said, “stop that.” And I searched my fair memory of the Crito. “’And will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?’”
He recognized it, and remembered. His stare turned up to me, foggy and sorrowful but at least becoming young. He tried to curse them, and it changed to crying, which was better. “The damn — oh, the damn—”
“All right,” I said. “Sure.” I held his forehead while he tried to vomit and couldn’t. I steered him back into the kitchen, made him splash cold water on his face and comb his wild hair with his fingers.
There was a new bumbling voice in the living room, a broad-beamed cop getting the story from Feuermann and being nice to Rosa. His prowl-car partner was upstairs conferring with Mac. I took him outside to look at the ladder, and showed him Bella. “Why, the damn dirty—”
The difference was that Angelo had spoken from inner flame. Patrolman Dunn merely resented violence and disorder. He didn’t talk about breaking necks. Nor read the Crito. I learned from his comments that the job had the trademarks of someone named Tea-shop Willie — the back-yard approach, carefully non-lethal use of chloroform. Teashop would have an alibi, Dunn said, and it would be a pleasure to bust it over his think-box.
“Does he specialize in lodging houses?”
“Nup,” said Dunn, not liking me much. “And this ain’t a money neighborhood, Lord knows. But it’s got the marks. You missing anything?”
“Haven’t really looked,” I lied. “My wallet was under my pillow.”
Dunn went back in the house, murmuring: “Known the missus here ten years. People’re mighty fond of Mrs. Pontevecchio, mister.” There was warning in it, but only because I was what New England calls a foreigner.
They used up an hour or so, and sent for a fingerprint team. Teashop Willie rated that, as a favorite old offender; I suppose Dunn would have been startled if they’d found anything. I could have told him the burglar was wearing gloves. We were not grafting finger tips when Namir resigned in 30,829. The stolen photograph albums tormented Dunn. I think he decided Willie had gone whacky under the stress of a demanding profession. Feuermann and Mac had both lost a little money. The old ladies kept their cash in what Mrs. Keith referred to as a safe place, and she invited no deeper inquiry, implying indirectly that all policemen were grafters, Cossacks, and enemies of the poor. I thought: “Hoy!” Dunn and his pal left us at six-thirty with kind wishes. My only recollection of Dunn’s partner is that he was a modest man with a modest wart, who told me personally that no stone would be left unturned. We never heard any more from them about it, so I picture him as still somewhere in the broad uncertainties of the world, turning stones. With all deference to Mrs. Keith, I think policemen are a very decent lot, and I only wish human beings wouldn’t make things so tough for ’em.