I moved away from the front door, off to the right, where the drive went around to the back of the house. I went past the gleaming gray Lincoln and around boxy maroon house additions, and going around the final corner at last I came to the rear of the house, where the blacktop spread out into a solid black pool, a parking lot. A bulky sagging dirty red barn and a low shiny white aluminum four-car garage stood next to one another, both uncomfortable at the association. Beyond the blacktop, varicolored slabs of slate formed a large patio full of tubular lawn furniture in green and yellow. There was no one in sight.
A door just at the corner of the house attracted my attention. I went over to it and opened it and it led into a narrow sort of entranceway with coats and hats and jackets and sweaters hanging from nails stuck into the walls along both sides. Overshoes and rubbers were lined along the floor, and a snow shovel leaned in the corner.
I stood thinking of science fiction. Until I started running the bar, I used to spend a lot of my unemployed days flat on my back, reading science fiction. There’s a particular science-fiction story that was written over and over again and that I always enjoyed, about a young man in some future society who goes through a lot of dangerous adventuring, with mysterious people after him and various threats on his life and some sort of secret organization in the background, and at the end of the story you find out nobody ever really meant to hurt the young man at all, the whole thing was a kind of test to see if he was good enough to join the secret organization, and of course he always is.
As I had opened the door of the house, I remembered those stories, and in a sudden rush of fantasy I had told myself that on the other side of this door would be Uncle Al and Mr. Agricola and Patrolman Ziccatta and Artie Dexter and Chloe and the two men from the black car, and they’d congratulate me, I’d passed the test with flying colors and I was now a member of the organization. But what did I actually find, within that door? Overshoes and sweaters.
Secret organizations may menace people for the fun of it in future societies, but in the society we live in now they only do it if they mean it.
Well. There was another door, directly in front of me. I opened it, and it led me to a huge old farm kitchen full of huge new city-kitchen appliances. Like everything else around here, the kitchen was empty. I crossed it, to a swing door that stood open, and moved on tiptoe down a hall.
Now at last I did see someone. In a room to the right of the hall, three people sat around a table talking. The colored woman the size of a barrage balloon would be the cook, the white-haired red-nosed man in the gray uniform would be the chauffeur, and the husky broken-nosed man in the white shirt and a gun in a shoulder holster would be someone I didn’t want to meet right now. Or ever.
They were talking about graduated income tax, and they all seemed to be opposed to it, though what they thought it was doing to them I didn’t stick around to find out. None of them was looking in my direction, so I flitted past the doorway like the lover in a French bedroom farce, and continued on down the hall.
Ahead of me, someone was playing an awful lot of lush piano very badly. I moved closer, down the hallway. Rooms to left and right were all empty.
The piano-playing was coming from within a room shut off by double sliding doors. But the doors didn’t quite meet; leaning close and peeking between them, I could see a girl in billowing pink sitting at a piano in a band of sunlight, playing with fingers that twinkled and spun. Her hair was yellow bright, and long, and in thick delicate waves like yellow mist reflecting the sunlight. Her face was pretty as a greeting card, and it seemed to me, though I couldn’t see all that clearly, that her eyes were blue. She was slender, with slender arms and a narrow waist, and long slender legs tapering to tiny thoroughbred ankles down where her toes in pink pumps touched the piano pedal. She was, I suppose, eighteen or nineteen, and as lovely a vision as could be imagined.
She was playing the sort of thing Liberace plays, only far worse. And from the dreamy expression on her face as she played, I could only assume she dreamt of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I turned away. Although I’d only been able to see a narrow pie-slice of that room, the expression on her face had been enough to tell me she was alone there.
Stairs on my left led upward. There were still rooms I hadn’t seen on the first floor, I was sure of that, but I didn’t know exactly how to get to them. Simply because it was easiest, I chose to continue my search upstairs.
And hit the jackpot on the first try. At the head of the stairs — carpeted, happily — was a hall, and on the right a door slightly ajar. I looked in there, and it was a den or office, with bookcases on the walls and a desk and leather sofa and bar and filing cabinet. The man sitting at the desk, glowering in irked thought at the door, must be Farmer Agricola. Husky, fiftyish, jowly, with the arrogant look of the wealthy and powerful, this could be no one but the head of the house.
I ducked back before he saw me, and took the time to gather what few wits and what tiny shreds of courage I could find, erecting them into a shaky substitute for a backbone. I stood there three or four minutes in the hall, at the head of the stairs, taking deep silent breaths and letting them out just as silently, with the faint sound of that lovely girl’s rotten piano-playing in my ears, and finally I forced myself to move, striding forward and pushing the door open the rest of the way and marching directly into the path of that glower.
“Mr. Agricola,” I said, talking fast, “I’m Charlie Poole, and I’ve got to talk to you because you’re making a terrible mistake.”
He didn’t move. No surprise showed in his features at all. He glowered at me as though I’d been standing in front of him like this for hours and he was beginning to get bored with me.
Had he known all along? Was there someone behind me, waiting only for the nod from that heavy head?
“Mr. Agricola,” I said, and turned my own head quickly, but there was no one behind me at all. I looked back. “I’ve got to talk to you, Mr. Agricola,” I said.
Nothing.
Suspicion struck me, horrible suspicion. I said, “Mr. Agricola?”
I moved forward, across the room. His eyes did not follow me. He kept glowering at the doorway.
Ripples were running up my back, shivering that had nothing to do with cold. My teeth even began to chatter a little bit. “Mister,” I said. “Mister.”
The room wasn’t very brightly lit, not very brightly lit at all. Heavy draperies across the windows cut down the sunlight to a mere bronze memory of itself, and the massive dark furniture with which this study was furnished seemed to absorb what light was left. In the semi-dark, only his eyes were oases of light, glowering in fury at the doorway.
I moved around the desk, beside him, and I could see that the hilt of the knife in his back had caught in the back of his chair, holding him upright. As though he’d been standing behind the desk when he’d been stabbed, and had dropped into the chair, hooking the hilt and hanging himself there in final impotent rage.
This was the first corpse I’d ever seen without a camera between me and it, so I don’t know how long I stood there, fascinated by the knife and the balance of the body the way a bird is fascinated by the snake, but I hadn’t moved when the voice from the doorway said, “Hey!”
I was startled out of reverie. I turned my head, and saw the broken-nosed man just unlimbering the gun from its shoulder holster. I put my hands up in the air and said, “Don’t shoot.”
He pointed the gun at me, but he didn’t shoot. “I got him, Mr. Agricola,” he said.
“Uhhhh,” I said, wondering how to break the news gently.
But I didn’t have to. This broken-nosed man surely had more experience than me with corpses; at any rate, it took him less time to understand he was in the same room with one. He said, “Oh ho?” And then, “All right, you.”