Punch With Care Read online

  He broke off as the town’s fire-house siren, affectionately known as the Bull Moose, gave its preliminary warming-up yelp for its daily piece de resistance, the ear-shattering one o’clock blast.

  Instantly, Jennie came flying out of the house and snapped on the midget radio, which she’d left lying on the flagstones.

  “Golly!” Cummings said. “Time for the Quick Quiz Question! You got paper to take it down on? I’ve got my pencil ready! I—”

  “Ssh, listen!” Jennie said breathlessly. “Listen, now!”

  She and the doctor stared at each other in blank bewilderment as a blare of hot jazz issued from the little set.

  “For goodness sakes! What’s wrong?” Jennie picked-up the radio and peered at the dial.

  “Wrong station, maybe?” Cummings suggested.

  “No! It’s smack on WBBB! Why, isn’t that funny! And the Bull Moose hadn’t stopped when I snapped it on! It hadn’t hardly started to be one o’clock! Asey, what’s the time by your watch?”

  “Approximately one-four.”

  “Four minutes past? Tch, tch, tch!” Jennie clucked her tongue. “That means the Bull Moose was late! Hm! Sylvester’ll hear about this! Why, he must’ve been a good three and a half minutes late with that ole siren just now!”

  “Sylvester,” Cummings said cheerfully, “might as well write his will and pick out his tombstone design. He’ll be tom apart by sunset.”

  “Sylvester?” Asey said. “Hey, what is all this, anyway? Who’s Sylvester? What were you two expectin’ to hear?”

  “For a man that’s supposed to be so darn great and so dam bright and so darn wonderful,” Jennie retorted irritably, “you do seem to miss more that’s goin’ on around you! I s’pose it’s on account of your being away so much! Well, you see, we didn’t have any time siren during the war because we saved the siren for an air raid signal—”

  “I know all that! ” Asey said.

  “And when we returned to what we laughingly refer to as a peace-time basis,” Cummings said, “it was unanimously voted to sound the Bull Moose at one instead of the traditional twelve o’clock noon.”

  “Uh-huh, I’d noticed that,” Asey said. “After all, you can’t not notice the Bull Moose! But I never understood why the time was changed.”

  “Because of the Quick Quiz Question, of course!” Jennie said. “This way, nobody could miss it! When you hear the Bull Moose, you turn on your radio for the Question—oh, you must’ve noticed how I always rush to the radio just at one o’clock!”

  “You rush to it so many times durin’ the day,” Asey said, “I hardly pay much attention to any specific hour. Why’s this Question thing so important to everyone?”

  “Why, you take down this Quick Quiz Question they ask at one,” Jennie explained in the same tones she might have used in speaking to a very young and very stupid child, “and then you run find the answer if you don’t know it—and you usually don’t—and then when they call you on the phone and ask you the answer in person, you tell ’em—and you get things! Free! Only yesterday, a girl in Taunton got an electric fan, and a wrist watch, and a waffle iron—goodness knows we could use a new one! And cartons of cigarettes, and theater tickets, and a hundred dollars cash, and a pair of nylons, and five pounds of butter! All free, and all just for knowing what a Turdus Migratorius was!”

  “There, see?” Cummings said with irony. “A munificent horn of plenty disgorging rare and precious items on your very doorstep—provided you’ve equipped yourself with such little smatterings of incidental information as the Latin name for a robin! I personally never miss it—poor, poor Sylvester!”

  “Who’s Sylvester, an’ where does he come in on this Question project—ooop, sorry, Jennie, that word just slipped out! Who’s Sylvester?”

  “In a sense,” Cummings said, “he’s the power behind the throne. Owing to some small part or other being currently unavailable—I don’t know whether something’s struck and not producing it, or whether it’s price ceiling trouble, or just a plain shortage—anyway, the automatic mechanism of the Bull Moose is out of order. During the crisis, Sylvester Nickerson sounds the Bull Moose with his bare hands. He—”

  “Hold it!” Asey said. “I remember—he’s the one they used to call Silly Nick, isn’t he? Tall, gangly fellow, always chewin’ tobacco, who used to sit on the movie house steps at four in the afternoon so’s to be on time for the first show at seven?”

  Cummings nodded. “Sylvester owes his fame to always having been at least two hours ahead of time. Fie made a fortune during the war—standing in butter and meat lines for people. Many’s the time I’ve seen him camped in front of the A & P at three in the morning! Well, while Silly Nick is no mental colossus, he’s on time. Never knew him to miss before—by the way, Jennie, did the Taunton woman miss the Doubler? The Doubler,” he added parenthetically for Asey’s benefit, “occurs when you answer the Question right. It’s an unannounced quickie they spring on you, and if you hit it, your loot is doubled. So—”

  “Listen! The phone’s ringing!” Jennie interrupted excitedly. “What’ll I do?”

  Asey drily suggested that she answer it.

  “But s’pose it’s Station WBBB calling for the Question answer—and here we don’t even know what the Question is! Oh, dear, I always knew if ever I missed one day, that’d be the day they called—”

  Muttering to herself, she rushed indoors only to reappear within a minute, still muttering.

  “Getting me worked up like that!” she said disgustedly. “It was only that Mrs. Douglass, Asey. She’s lost another house guest. Carolyn Barton Boone, that blonde who’s—why goodness me, doctor, whatever are you making such noises for?—in the papers so much. Mrs. Douglass says will you please find her.”

  “Asey Mayo!” Cummings was spluttering with indignation. “You told me you didn’t know the Douglasses!”

  “I don’t,” Asey said. “Except two or three times when I’ve been home, Mrs. Douglass’s called an’ said she’s lost a guest, an’ since I’m a detective, do I mind awfully findin’ ’em please. An’ then a few minutes later, she calls back an’ says they’ve found the company they mislaid, an’ it was awfully nice of me. I never did anything about any of her lost guests, I never met her or saw her, an’ I don’t even know whereabouts they live!”

  “Pochet Point.” Cummings arose and threw away his cigar stub. “Come on, man, get started!”

  “See here, doc!” Asey leaned back in his chair. “In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, that flibberty-gibbet’ll call back an’ say that her company’s turned up for lunch. She always does.”

  “What a wonderful excuse to go there!” Cummings seemed almost to be talking to himself. “Marvelous! If she’s really lost, you can find her, and if she isn’t, it’s a splendid chance just to drop in and meet her casually—come on!” he tugged at Asey’s arm. “Get up! And while we’re gone, Jennie, call around among your friends and see if you can’t manage to locate someone who happened to hear the Question.”

  “And what about lunch?” Jennie demanded with a touch of asperity. “It’s all ready!”

  “Oh, we’ll be back inside of half an hour—come on, Asey, rouse yourself! This way you won’t have to dress up, you can be your picturesque self, complete with yachting cap and fishing clothes. Give me thirty minutes out of your life! You’ll never miss ’em!”

  “Wa-el, all right,” Asey said as he got to his feet. “I’ll be big. I’ll humor you—”

  “Not my car!” Cummings steered him away from the battered sedan in the driveway. “We’re going in your new Porter roadster!”

  “Do we have to take that confounded Christmas tree, doc? It’s so doggone flashy! The old one’s so much—”

  “The new one!” Cummings insisted. “Come along!” Before the pair reached the garage, the telephone rang once more, and Jennie hurried inside to answer it.

  She was at the back door calling Asey at the top of her lungs as the brand-new Porter roadster glide
d down the driveway and on to the main road, but neither Asey nor the doctor heard her frantic yells or noticed her wild wavings.

  “Oh, dear!”

  Jennie shrugged as the chrome-plated car flashed along the shore road, and then she walked slowly back into the kitchen.

  “Well,” she murmured, “I s’pose there’s no sense wasting it!”

  Deftly, without any superfluous gestures, she poured soup from a saucepan into a thermos bottle, packeted sandwiches in waxed paper, wrapped up slabs of sugar gingerbread, slid two apple puffs into a covered dish, packed the lot neatly in an oblong basket, and tucked a damask dinner napkin over the top.

  She had opened the door of Cummings’s sedan and was setting the basket on the floor when the telephone again sent her scurrying back to the kitchen.

  “Oh, hello, Emma!” she said. “No, we missed the Question, too. That darn old Sylvester was late with the Bull Moose! Yes, Asey’s been back home a day and a half—Porter Motors is striking. You heard rumors on the radio it was bein’ settled? Well, Emma, to tell you the truth, I don’t think he’ll go whipping back to the plant right now, even if a settlement’s in the air. Nope, I think he’s going to be pretty busy right here in town for a while. I’m just setting out to take him his lunch. Why? Because Mrs. Douglass just called to say that Carolyn Barton Boone—you know, that pretty blonde who’s in the papers and newsreels so much—well, she’s just been murdered over to Pochet Point.”

  2

  “MRS. DOUGLASS really isn’t a flibberty-gibbet at all,” Cummings remarked casually as Asey stopped for the red light at the village four corners. “You’ve got entirely the wrong impression—you know, I begin to sense what you mean about this car. I keep feeling I should sit up on the boot and bow to the populace and have myriads of rose petals thrown at me.”

  Asey chuckled.

  “It was originally built to the specifications of a Balkan prince,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you that? We nearly shipped it to him a dozen times durin’ the war, but something always cropped up to keep it from startin’ to London. Then it turned out he’d strung along with the wrong People’s Party, and hadn’t enough money left to buy even one of the six horns. So Bill Porter an’ I tossed for the thing, an’ I lost. I don’t think,” he added, “that I ever saw a vehicle with more useless gadgets, generally speakin’. That curved hook by your elbow is to hang one of them fancy dress uniform swords on, for example.”

  “Oh, won’t you find that handy, now! ” Cummings said with irony. “If there’s one little accessory you’ve always needed, it’s a resting hook for your jewel-encrusted sword! As I was saying, Asey, Louise Douglass really isn’t a flibberty-gibbet. She and Harold Douglass are a pleasant, amusing couple—and believe it or not, their beachwagon’s blank!”

  “How’s that again, doc?” Asey inquired.

  “The side panels of the front doors of their beachwagon,” Cummings explained. “They’re blank. You know, no whimsical house-names, like ‘Rising Gorge’ or ‘Wits End’, no manufactured family-names, like ‘Tom-Mary-Joe’, or ‘MywyfanI’, or something. No pictures, not even a carefully worked out latitude and longitude. They own the only blank beachwagon on Cape Cod. And that’s what I call the acid test of restraint!”

  “I haven’t been over to Pochet Point in years,” Asey said thoughtfully, “but the only house I recall there is old Aunt Della Hovey’s, with all the fields around it.”

  “That’s it. That’s the one. And what’s more,” Cummings said, “it hasn’t been renovated under the guidance of a modernistically minded architect, either. They promised Aunt Della when they bought the place that they’d keep certain things as they were, and they have actually done what they promised—see here, you don’t for a moment suppose that Carolyn Barton Boone’s really lost, do you? There are some pretty treacherous marshes and bogs over this way!”

  “If she’s followin’ the tradition of the Douglass’s other guests,” Asey said soothingly, “she’s just got mislaid, an’ they only noticed it because she didn’t turn up at lunch time.”

  As he slowed the car down at a cross roads, Cummings suddenly pointed over toward the edge of a swamp at the right.

  “Good Lord, look there! See that thin girl standing by the pines?” he said. “That’s one of the Larrabee project group who came to my office. I think she’s the ex-Wave Jennie mentioned. Now what on earth is she doing there with a notebook? What would that swamp have to do with Public Health and Welfare?”

  “Mosquito control’s the only explanation I could offer,” Asey said. “Huh, I don’t see anybody else around! Must be that the projects boiled down to just her, now—which lane here, doc, the left?”

  They drove for several minutes along a rut road bordered with post and rail fencing.

  “They keep their fences neat an’ mended,” Asey observed. “Usually the summer folks let ’em go all to rack an’ ruin—oh, doc! Look! Look at her!”

  He braked the roadster so abruptly that Cummings’s head thudded against the windshield.

  “Her? Carolyn Barton Boone?” he demanded. “Where? Where is she? Did you catch sight of her?” Rubbing his forehead, he peered anxiously around. “Where? Where is she?”

  “Look, doc!” Asey pointed. “Look over there!” Cummings, staring in the direction indicated by Asey’s finger tip, snorted with irritation.

  “I can’t see anything!” he said. “Nothing except the railroad!”

  Asey pushed his yachting cap back on his head, then leaned his elbows against the wheel, and stared at the doctor.

  “You can’t,” he said gently, “see anything but a railroad? But a railroad? Oh, for Pete’s sakes, doc! Nothin’ but a railroad! Where did it come from? An’ look—look up back of the house there! An engine—a baby Baldwin! An’ a Pullman!”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes!” Cummings said impatiently. “I know, I know! That’s the Pochet Point and Back Shore Railroad!”

  “But whose is it? An’ what’s it doin’ here? An’ how’d it get here? An’ when? I never saw it before! No one ever told me about this! Where’d it come from?”

  “Oh, for the love of heaven!” Cummings said in exasperation. “I wish you’d stop bouncing up and down with excitement and get along to the house and Carolyn Barton Boone—we came to see her, remember? This old railroad just belonged to Louise Douglass’s grandfather, that’s all.”

  “I see,” Asey said. “I see! Something the old gentleman used to keep in his hip pocket, I don’t doubt, an’ one day it just shook out an’ landed here? How nice, now! Something to remember grampa by!”

  Cummings opened his mouth, closed it again, and then drew a long breath.

  “Let’s stop being sardonic,” he said with icy sweetness, “shall we? Let’s just get the hell on our way! Why, man alive, you can see the Pochet Point and Back Shore any time! In fact, Harold Douglass won’t let you get away from this place without taking at least two round trips—you never went through more childish fiddle-de-dee! First he sells you a ticket in the station. Then—”

  “Station? Where’s the station?” Asey craned his neck.

  “Then,” Cummings ignored the interruption, “then he takes off his ticket-seller’s green-visored cap and puts on a conductor’s cap and coat, and gets on the train, and punches the damn ticket for you—with a lot of dramatic flourishes. Then he takes off the conductor’s cap and coat and puts on an engineer’s outfit, complete with bandanna, and then he rides you around and around and around—I give you my word, I thought I’d either have to dump the fire or derail the thing to get out of his clutches! Now I promise you faithfully—after I’ve met Carolyn Barton Boone, I’ll see to it that you’re given the whole silly works!”

  “Doc, don’t you like railroads?” Asey asked curiously.

  “I can take railroads,” Cummings returned with dignity, “or I can leave railroads alone, and at this moment, I ask nothing more of life than to leave this one, rapidly! Oh, drive along to the house!”

&nb
sp; “A narrow gauge—a two-foot narrow gauge! It must’ve been an old short line somewhere,” Asey said. “Of course, it must’ve been! Happen to know what line it was in the good old days, doc?”

  “It was the Harmony and North Budget,” Cummings said. “Or something that sounded like that. Get along!”

  “The Harmony and North Blodgett! Why, I knew that line! I used to take it, years ago, to get to old Cap’n Porter’s place in Maine!” Asey said. “What a job they must’ve had to pick this outfit up an’ bring it way out here, an’ lay track—why, they must have nearly three-quarters of a mile of track!”

  He started up the roadster with such suddenness that the doctor bounced back against the leather seat, and then he stopped with such force on the gravel turntable by the Douglass’s house that the doctor’s forehead again smacked smartly against the windshield.

  By the time Cummings had located the push button which opened the car door, Asey was already striding past the house in the direction of the engine and the Pullman, drawn up by the little, box-like station.

  “Asey!” Cummings called after him in aggrieved tones. “Asey, come back here! Come—”

  After the fourth futile shout, the doctor gave up and hurried after him.

  “The old Harmony and North Blodgett! Look at that old Pullman, doc, look at her!” Asey said with admiration. “Isn’t she a beauty? They made Pullmans back in the days when they made her! That’s luxury de luxe! Look at that fine gold leaf stripin’, an’ the gold filagree work—”

  “While I shrink from throwing any monkey wrenches into this nostalgic rhapsody,” Cummings said in his most acidulous tones, “may I point out that we came here for a definite purpose? Think back! We came to find Carolyn Barton Boone, so that I might fulfill my desire—”

  “To shake hands an’ say howdy. I know. But I just got to take a glance—doc, this is the very same Pullman I used to travel on to Blodgett Centre. Look!” he pointed to the ornate gilt lettering running along the side. “The ‘Lulu Belle’! Isn’t she something!”

  Cummings stared stonily at the Lulu Belle as Asey raptly walked the fifty-foot length of it.