Auburn nodded patiently. “Mr. Stamaty works for the coroner. I’m from the police department.”
The parlor was full of her perfume — an old woman’s perfume, heavy and sweet, like overripe fruit. “I never knew such a fuss to be made about somebody dying in their bed.”
Auburn took note of his surroundings — the chessboard, the mandolin, the potted ferns, the matched porcelain partridges with the chipped sides turned towards the wall. For some women the battle against dust is a consuming passion. Evidently Mrs. Helm wasn’t one of these.
“Mr. Stamaty’s department had one or two reasons for thinking Mr. Strode’s death might not have been natural.”
Her heavy eyebrows bunched up like storm clouds. “What do you mean? What kind of reasons?”
“The coroner’s preliminary investigation suggested that he died of suffocation.”
“You mean something cut off his air, like?”
“Something or somebody.”
Her frown deepened. “But the poor soul died in his bed. How could he have suffocated?”
“It’s only a preliminary impression. There may be nothing in it, but we have to follow up on it for the coroner.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions and look around the house.” He slipped a three by five file card from his pocket and made a notation in an upper corner. “If you don’t mind.”
They went over the details of Frank Strode’s final illness and death. “I understand Mr. Strode has no known next of kin,” said Auburn. “Who’s in charge of his affairs?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, somebody will have to take responsibility for making funeral arrangements and settling his estate. Do you know if he had a lawyer?”
“I know full well he didn’t. Mr. Strode didn’t trust nobody. Wouldn’t even put his money in the bank.”
“Kept it all here in the house, did he?”
“I guess so. I really wouldn’t know.”
“Did he have any close friends in town?”
“Just the other gentlemen that lives here in the house. Which they get along together sometimes like a cageful of tigers.”
“Any particular trouble between Mr. Strode and any of the others recently?”
“Only that he’s been talking high and mighty the last couple of weeks since he got a promotion over to the factory. Plus his usual pickiness and feistiness.”
“Have you or the tenants had any visitors at the house in the last two or three days?”
“No, sir. I’m pretty strict. No visitors after dinner, no liquor in the house, no bad language—”
They were interrupted by the entrance of a gaunt, elderly man in a tweed suit that had gone out of style three times and come back in twice. “This is Mr. Gardner,” she told Auburn. “He’s the one that found Mr. Strode dead this morning. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get on with dinner.”
Auburn identified himself. “Sit down, sir, and please make yourself comfortable,” said Gardner with the flamboyant gestures and grandiloquent manner of a frustrated actor. His broad brow and steely eye promised intellectual power and strength of character, but a sensual mouth and an irresolute chin reneged on the deal. Auburn took particular note of his hands, which were chalk-white with tapering fingers — the idle hands of an aesthete.
“Surely Strode’s death isn’t really a police matter, is it?” asked Gardner. “I mean, the chap from the coroner’s office said he was just making routine inquiries, and now...” He watched in evident dismay as Auburn entered his name on a file card.
“At this point it’s not exactly routine any more,” admitted Auburn. “All I can tell you is that the forensic examination of Mr. Strode’s body turned up some questionable findings, and I’ve been assigned to take over the investigation from here on.”
They reviewed the events of the morning. “Are you sure Mr. Strode was dead when you covered him up?”
“Good Lord, yes!” exclaimed Gardner. “I told the other investigator and I’m telling you, Strode was as dead as a frozen mackerel. What sort of questionable findings, if I may ask?”
“Did you hear anything unusual during the night?”
“No, but I sleep very soundly.”
“Were you and Mr. Strode particularly good friends?”
Gardner looked into a remote corner of the parlor and cleared his throat. “Not particularly good, no. But of course we had practically nothing in common. I’m a literary type, if you will. Started out teaching high school English, but now I do all the technical writing and advertising copy for Gromacki’s — the furniture factory, you know, up in the next block. In fact all of us here in the house work there.
“Strode was one of those poor devils that have had littleness thrust upon them, if you follow me. A good deal of native shrewdness, but lazy. Dropped out of high school because he thought it was smart to make cigarette money by working as a stock boy in a grocery warehouse while his Mends were still bisecting triangles and analyzing Paradise Lost. Sort of slid into the gutter and stayed there. A miser and a confirmed bachelor.”
“How did he get along with the other boarders?”
Gardner passed his hand over his forehead like a silent movie actor signaling discreet reflection. “Let me give you a clue, sir. We walk to work in all weathers, the lot of us. But only Frank and Boyd Bland walked together. Bland’s a blue-collar worker at the factory, the sort of chap who never quite adjusts to life outside the womb.” He leaned closer and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “I suspect he may have been a drinker at one time. I understand he came from a good family but got himself into some kind of trouble early on in life — disinherited, I don’t know... But Strode was always friendly with Bland — I think because Bland was plainly his inferior. Drebbel and I incurred Strode’s contempt because we were educated, cultivated, successful...”
Auburn had a little difficulty reconciling the notion of success with his present surroundings. “I think you said Mr. Drebbel also works at the factory?”
“Correct, sir. Hans is an engineer — still works full-time at seventy-two. Sort of a know-it-all. Devious, manipulative, but nothing very impressive in the brain department. He’s been working on some kind of pneumatic stapling gun for seven or eight years and still hasn’t got it right.”
“And what about your landlady? How did she and Mr. Strode get along?”
“Mrs. Helm? Oh, she mothers us all in her rough-and-tumble way. Basically a decent soul even if her grammar does grate on the refined ear like a rusty hinge.”
“Does she have any family of her own?”
“Not that I know of. She’s been widowed for years.” The mantel clock struck four. “Here’s Bland already.”
A squat little dumpling-faced man probably not much over fifty drifted aimlessly into the room and, discovering Auburn’s presence, gazed at him with the timid, panicky manner of a cornered mouse. Gardner made introductions.
“Sit down, Mr. Bland,” said Auburn. “I hear you and Mr. Strode were pretty good Mends.”
“Yes. I miss old Frank already.” Bland swallowed hard, and Auburn thought he was going to cry. His flabby, spade-shaped hands looked like the ineffectual flippers of some clumsy mud dwelling creature. “We looked out for each other, Frank and I. But he said he might be moving out pretty soon.” Hugh Gardner made a surreptitious exit into the hall, and a moment later they heard him going up the back stairs.
“I understand you work at the furniture factory, too, Mr. Bland. What sort of work do you do there?”
“I’m in dunnage and pack-out. Frank was trying to get me a better job in receiving; now I guess I’m probably stuck where I am.”
“How did Strode get along with the other two boarders — Gardner and Drebbel?”