The Indigo Necklace Read online

  “You think Major Clary swiped Dr. Postgate’s curare?” I asked.

  Captain Jonas shook his head.

  “No. That old pill roller mislaid the stuff somewhere or other. I reckon Major Clary wouldn’t have any trouble getting his own curare extract, Mrs. Abbott. Maybe he bought it at a drugstore. Maybe he picked it up out at his hospital where, maybe, there’s so much around it would never be missed.”

  “Of course you can find the nurse,” Patrick said.

  “Listen, Lieutenant! New Orleans holds the record for the whole country when it comes to homicide.” I frowned, and he explained, “We’ve got the lowest percentage of unsolved murders of any major city. Well find the nurse. We didn’t get that record,” Jonas said, “by sitting back on our fannies and taking it easy. This is a tough town, and hard to handle, but we know our stuff. We’ll throw out a net. We’ll get the nurse, and shell talk. There won’t be anything in the papers about this case, by the way, till we’ve cracked it. Too bad she’s a West Indian. They’re harder to work on than the Louisiana Negroes. But we’ll find a way to make her talk.”

  I felt sorry for the nurse. “She’s small and quiet,” I said. “Is it true that West Indians use curare in their black magic?”

  Jonas flapped a hand. “That’s probably nothing but bunk. Clary killed his wife. Clary’s plenty smart. Maybe he himself slipped the notion into old Postgate’s mind that the nurse fooled around with curare in that voodoo or black magic or what have you.” He eyed us coldly again. “What’s doing between Major Clary and that girl with the brown hair?”

  I kicked my husband’s foot and did the answering myself.

  “Carol? Oh, they’re just relations,” I said.

  Jonas looked at me. “All the more reason with Creoles, Mrs. Abbott. Keeps the money in the family, see.

  Patrick asked, “You’re sure the nurse left the house? You didn’t search, I noticed.”

  “No need to search. There is only one way in and out of that house and she would have to come out eventually, so it’s smarter, in my opinion, to play dumb, but keep a man watching to see who and what goes in and out. Besides, old George Sears saw her. Remind me some time to tell you about George Sears. Sears thinks she went out around ten minutes past twelve, says he happened to be looking out the front window and saw her leave. Come clean, what are you trying to avoid telling me about Clary and the brown-haired girl?”

  “Nothing!” we both said.

  Jonas grinned bitterly, and let it ride. “Do you realize that his wife’s death makes Clary a very rich man?”

  “I don’t think he cares about money,” I said.

  “Lady,” Jonas said, “you don’t know anything about these French Creoles if you say a thing like that. They all love money.”

  “Well, he could use her money without murdering her, if he got a power of attorney,” Patrick said. “And if she had no relations to interfere, why not?”

  “Look here, Lieutenant Abbott. It wouldn’t be easy at all for Major Clary to get free from his wife. Which was why I asked a while ago about that brown-haired girl. She kept piping up in Clary’s defense every time I jumped on him. She’s mighty pretty, though not as pretty as the other one. Where was the other one, by the way?” We both looked blank. Jonas said, “Usually when Wick’s around, that other one’s not far away. Funny about pretty women. More than the homely ones they seem determined to throw themselves away. Remind me later to tell you about our friend Toby Wick. Now, to get back to Clary. If his wife had been crazy when they were married he could get an annulment maybe, or maybe he could wiggle around and somehow get a divorce and marry that girl. I can’t say I blame him. She’s a very pretty girl, even if her sister is prettier. But with the crazy wife out of the way he’s free to marry her at once and he also gets the dough. Well?”

  Patrick said, “I see your point. Incidentally, however, my wife is right about Clary’s seeming indifferent to money.”

  “That’s keeping up appearances again, Lieutenant. Like that sugar-sack underwear in order to make a splash twenty years hence. He’ll stand you drinks, and that sort of thing, and to do it he’ll privately cut some other corner close.”

  “I see,” Patrick said. I wished he wouldn’t concur with this policeman. I was afraid of Jonas. He was too set in his mind. You’d think from the way he talked there was only one kind of Creole, a fellow who was clannishly loyal to family, liked money, and liked to make a show. After all, these Louisiana descendants of the French had been Americans for a hundred and forty some years, so they must be Americanized a little. I mean, they just couldn’t all be so alike as he said. As though they had lived apart, on some incommunicable island, all this time. “Won’t any of the other people in that house benefit by Mrs. Clary’s death?” Patrick was asking now.

  “Sure,” Jonas said. “They’ll all benefit. They’re kin. Therefore Clary will take care of them all. But, don’t forget, there are two people there besides yourselves who aren’t blood relations—old George Sears and Toby Wick.”

  “And the servants?” I said.

  “No soap. Darkies raised in a Creole family are more Creole when it comes to giving out than the Creoles themselves. We’ll start working on Sears. In due time. Haste sometimes makes waste, as you know, Lieutenant Abbott.”

  While Detective Jonas drank a third cup of coffee and called for still more doughnuts, I, at his suggestion, reiterated in detail my story about finding the body and then being bashed by the curtain pole. I was getting very bored with that event. He listened attentively and made no comment.

  I didn’t tell him about somebody walking through our apartment for the simple reason that I hadn’t yet told Patrick. Besides, it might have no connection with Helen Clary’s death.

  “Tell us about Mr. Sears,” Patrick said then.

  “Sears has gone through a couple of fortunes,” Jonas said. “He’s from another old family here, one of the sugar-rich families which built those fine homes in the Garden District eighty or ninety years ago. Inherited a lot of money from both sides. When Miss Dollie Clary married George Sears, I guess they all thought she was sitting pretty. That was before my time, but I know how their minds work, see. But it seems George was always getting in trouble. He gambles. He got kicked out of his club finally because he was caught cheating at cards. Notice his hands, they’re a natural for funny business with cards, Lieutenant.” They were beautiful hands, supple and long-fingered, odd on that corporeal balloon. “He and Mrs. Sears always kept running back and forth between here and Paris and after the club trouble I reckon he found it handier to live abroad. Anyway, they stayed over there a long time and arrived here broke a couple of years before the war started and old Miss Clary took them in—bound to, since they’re in the family. The Creoles look after their kin.”

  “But I think that’s splendid!” I said.

  “Nobody said it wasn’t, Mrs. Abbott. I admire that quality, same as you. Only, of course, they do it because they want to keep up a front. The Sears say they’re visiting Miss Clary till the war ends and they can get back to France.”

  “How come you’re posted on Sears?” Patrick asked.

  Jonas grinned.

  “When I first joined the force as an ordinary patrolman a good while ago this was my beat. I still take an uncommon interest in what goes on in the Quarter. It’s still my precinct. Besides, just between ourselves, Sears had a little trouble last year over a gambling debt. He forged a check on an old friend, and said friend—well, it never got out, they fixed it up between them, but I happened to hear about it and it stuck in my mind. His wife’s okay, incidentally. Kind of silly, all dyed and fixed up like a house afire and putting on the dog, but okay. Miss Marguerite Clary is a fine old lady. Only...”

  “Only what?” Patrick asked, when Jonas let it go.

  It was a few minutes before he was to answer that question because, just then, the waiter came to say he was wanted on the phone. He went off to the phone near the cash desk. The telephone
was out in the open so, after a few words, he hung up and vanished out the side door into Decatur Street. To call back from a private booth, we later learned.

  “Darling, he’s awfully set against Roger,” I said then.

  “Looks like it,” Patrick said.

  “Is it good detecting to show your cards like that?”

  “He probably isn’t showing them to everyone. Personally, I wouldn’t like to be in Roger’s place.”

  “You know he didn’t do it, dear,” I said.

  Patrick’s gaze was level and grave. He said nothing.

  “But, he couldn’t, darling. He’s—why, he’s your friend, dear, so why am I the one to stand up for him like this? I mean, really and truly, I’m a lot more anxious for Carol’s sake than for his. She’s so true, and it’s the very first time she’s been in love, I bet, and it will hurt her terribly....Darling, you must do something!”

  “I’m pretty busy at the moment,” Patrick said drily.

  I remembered that. Of course, war business first.

  “Oh, darling, why—why must we land in these messes? I mean, really, when we’re only here for a few weeks maybe, and it’s such an interesting town, and all—why can’t we just enjoy ourselves eating at the French restaurants and looking at antiques on Royal Street and all, like other people?”

  “Here comes Jonas,” Patrick said.

  “Garçon?” Jonas was shouting, as he moved. He was powerful-looking when walking. His legs were more efficient-seeming than his dangling hands. “The bill, garçon. And make it snappy.” He dropped down in his chair. “That was the medical examiner,” he said. “Seems that brain specialist Postgate wants to get in on the autopsy, wants to look at her brain, he says, and maybe it’s a good idea. Seems you can tell better just what ails a mental case if you take a good look at the brain. But the old boy got an emergency call to his hospital suddenly and they wanted to know if they could do the p.m. at eight o’clock. It’s now after four. I told ‘em okay. After all, Mrs. Clary can’t get away.”

  I said, “When you went to the phone you were about to say something about Aunt Rita. Miss Marguerite, I mean.”

  Jonas looked at me. The dark circles under his eyes were very dark, his eyes a very pale blue.

  “I said she was a fine old lady.”

  “You added an only.”

  Jonas’s wry grin broadened his jowls.

  “You are a very inquisitive young lady. Well, okay. I’ll finish what I was about to say when I said only. Which is why does she let Toby Wick live in her house? And why does she let that niece of hers—the beautiful one—hang around the Good Angel Bar? That place looks better than it is. That’s one of the hottest spots in this town. And believe me, plenty of them are plenty hot.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know that Ava goes there,” I said.

  “Everybody else knows it. Oh, sure she knows it. Her sister Mrs. Sears would tell her. Mrs. Sears circulates, you know. She and George go there pretty often themselves. They’re a cut above Wick—decidedly—but I reckon he wants them and stands for their drinks. Makes up the loss out of some drunk that’s past knowing what goes on. Mrs. Sears has a kind of style, and old George has, too. Maybe Wick thinks it’s worth an occasional shot of his low-grade liquor to have their company. Specially when the price comes out of some drunk’s jeans. Hey, garçon? L’addition, s’il vous plait!”

  I said quickly, thinking he might get away without telling us, “You also said for Pat to remind you to tell him about Wick?”

  The waiter said the bill was a dollar-ten. Patrick paid it, which even though so small roused the Scotch in me, Jonas having invited us and also having been a terrific consumer of coffee and doughnuts. Patrick’s Western open-handedness often went too far, I thought. There was nothing I could do about it. The detective said nothing more at the moment about Toby Wick. He had parked in the V-shaped space where the streets come together in front of the coffee stand. We had got into the car and he had turned into Dumaine when he said, “Think I’ll drop in on Wicks place on my way home.”

  “I’d like to come along,” Patrick said.

  “Good. Well just drop Mrs. Abbott...”

  Patrick said, significantly, “If its murder, don’t forget that my wife found the body.”

  “That’s right. Only that place of Wick’s, at this hour...Oh, the Good Angel always looks all right on the surface,” he said then. He drove on past the Clary house, which was now dark. “Yes, Mrs. Abbott found the body. Mrs. Abbott got hit on the head with a curtain pole. Very coincidental,” he mused, turning up Royal as part of the maneuvering that is always necessary in getting places in the Quarter’s narrow streets.

  VII

  THE GOOD ANGEL BAR occupied an old house on Bourbon Street near St. Ann. It was a genuinely old house, dating even further back than the Clary house, and it sagged and leaned from old age as well as from never having been much to start with. You would think after taking a long look at it that either you had had too much of Toby Wick’s green whisky or rum, or that a strong wind must be blowing and at the point of tumbling it down. The walls were rough plaster inside and rough stucco outside.

  The bar stretched across the back of the room and made a sort of hook at one end. There were tables in the open spaces. The lights were shaded and the general appearance of the room was slightly exotic, but this, you soon decided, was because of the clientele, so many of whom had that look of chic which was what gave the Good Angel its special character and baffled policemen.

  When we arrived it was past four in the morning and the place was full of smartly attired people talking at the tops of their lungs to other people waiting to talk the minute they got the chance.

  A group of French sailors drank wine from stemmed glasses at the hooked end of the bar. The juke box was playing an imported record of “Lily Marlene.”

  Toby Wick, buttonholed by a bibulous young colonel of the infantry, was standing in the crowd not far from the door we entered. His lynx-eyes spotted us instantly. He lifted his glass, the kind you use for an old-fashioned cocktail, in greeting. By the time we got through the jam to the bar, he was there to make our drinks himself. He had put aside his own glass.

  He gave us better whisky than we had previously had here, thanks probably to our being with Captain Jonas.

  “I see you came back,” Jonas remarked.

  Toby said, “I shouldn’t’ve gone away.”

  ‘Why did you?”

  “I had an accident. Somebody playfully poured a glass of sherry over the back of my white coat, so I had to go home and change. I happened to be there when—well, during the excitement.”

  “Very coincidental,” Jonas said.

  “Very,” Toby said.

  He was a cold-hearted, calculating man, and it was very obvious when he was in his bar. But he had something. In a woman you might call it lure.

  We were talking in ordinary voices across the bar, as though in a little pocket of quiet, like an air bubble, tucked away in all the clamor.

  Suddenly Wick stiffened, excused himself, and went to speak to the huskiest of three bartenders, who absented himself from behind the bar briefly, and returned brushing his hands together.

  “Ever do your own bouncing?” Jonas asked innocently.

  Wick shrugged. “This business isn’t all sweetness and light. I keep the café as orderly as I can with the help I’ve got. I guess you’ve heard about the man shortage? It applies even to bartenders.”

  The juke box stopped playing. Toby excused himself and went off and started another series of French records. That music was soft and nostalgic. I had never been to Paris, but it made me long to go there.

  When Toby came back, Jonas commented that he seemed to cater only to officers. Toby said he did nothing of the kind, but that the ordinary service men didn’t hang around here much, possibly because the officers chose to come here. Maybe the G.I. couldn’t stand the tariff, Jonas suggested. Toby merely moved his shoulders. Jonas asked how the French s
ailors, with their low pay, stood up under that gaff. Toby replied that the French were a thrifty race and drank wine. “Besides, strictly between ourselves, we go easy on them,” he said then. “People like to have them here.”

  “How easy?” Jonas asked.

  “They pay whatever they like.”

  Well, French sailors are chic, with their blue-linen collars, their white bibs, and those gay little red pompoms on their white caps. That’s why he wants them here, I thought. They give this place an air. That’s why his juke box specializes in those sentimental French records. These things attract those older women in those expensive hats. Their escorts often looked limp, but there was a war on. Toby is clever. This place pays because he’s smart.

  But Jonas wasn’t impressed. When we left after a few minutes—there was no bill—without having accomplished anything so far as I could see, he drove us home talking about there being something very funny about the popularity of that bar. Why did people go there? Why did they pay Toby Wick double what they would pay at Pat O’Brien’s or the Nut Club? No entertainment. No pretty girls. Well, it wasn’t the business of the homicide division—not yet anyway—to keep an eye on the Good Angel, but considering Toby Wick...

  And he was again silent.

  “I’m not saying he had anything to do with this Clary business,” he said, as he pulled up at Royal Street to let a streetcar pass. “I merely say he is a character that bears watching. Maybe he did come home to change his suit? But how come then he stayed around? What business was it of his? Now, why does that nice old lady let him live there?”

  “Well, why does she?” I asked Patrick later upstairs.

  Patrick said, already undressing, “I shouldn’t think you’d have to be a Creole to prefer a tenant who probably pays a high rent. And Ava likes Toby, remember.”

  “Honestly, that bar is no place for her to be hanging around, dear. Did you notice how many older women there were there, with young men? Smart-looking older women. And young men not in uniform.”