chunder-green joint stood out like an elephant among mice. It started about a foot back from the street and there was just enough room between the building and the fences on either side for a skinny cat to slip by.
I knocked on the front door gingerly. The disgusting green colour was everywhere and it had a slimy look as if it would come off on your hand. An enormously fat woman wearing a print dress and a crazily buttoned cardigan came to the door. She filled the doorway and when she spoke her three chins turned into four or five.
‘I’d like to see Leon, please.’
She looked at me and two tears as big as grapes squeezed out of her eyes and began to traverse the fat.
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He bloody died last night.’
9
Her name was Rose Jenkins. She was a talker, and she invited me back to her kitchen, where she made tea I didn’t drink. She gave it to me in great detail: she managed the boarding house in which there were fourteen roomers. Leon she let sleep in a lean-to out back for a nominal rent. Sometimes he’d come into the house to use the toilet; for the less serious calls of nature, he’d use the backyard. I was beginning to get a rounded-out picture of Leon.
I persuaded her to stop drinking tea and talking and show me the relevant scenes. The lean-to smelled bad. You could have called it airy and in winter it would be only marginally better than being out under a tree. There was a tattered mattress on the concrete floor with a heavy tweed coat, fashionable between the wars, thrown over it. The pillow was a pile of newspapers. The toilet was off a first-floor landing. Leon had come down from that level the short way, and his neck had been broken.
‘Did anyone see the fall?’ I asked.
Mrs Jenkins shook her head and the fat bounced and jiggled. ‘No, none of them what lives in the back part of the house was home when it happened. Mr Brass come home at about eight and he found the poor soul there. He was all hunched up against the wall and terrible broken up, they said.’
‘You didn’t see him?’
She shook her head again and looked away from the stairs. I walked up them counting, thirteen in all. The toilet had a light burning inside it and some light seeped out through the cracked door. There was a light switch on the landing; I flicked it and a sixty- or seventy-five-watt bulb came on above the top stair. There was a threadbare but intact carpet outside the toilet and a runner in the same condition on the stairs. I went back to the kitchen and asked Rose whether the landing light had been on yesterday in the afternoon and evening.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Some of me roomers are quite old, you know. They need the light.’
Then I asked her why she hadn’t asked me for any identification and why she was talking so freely to me.
‘Nothing would surprise me now,’ she said.
‘How’s that?’
‘They found quite a bit of money in Leon’s room, in the mattress. The police, I mean. They wouldn’t say how much, but someone said they filled a paper bag with it. I thought you were something to do with the money.’
I let her go on thinking it. I was thinking myself. A derelict with a bag full of money isn’t unique; Griffo had had a few thousand in the bank when he died, and he’d been panhandling for years. Also, Leon wouldn’t have been the first man to be murdered for the money in the mattress, but in those cases the murderer usually bothered to take the money with him or her. I was sweating in the warm, still air when I got back to the car and that made a drink seem like a good idea.
I found a pub within walking distance from where I’d parked and went in to do some more thinking over a middy. It had begun to look as if Mrs Singer had been on to something and that someone wasn’t happy about information about John Singer being passed around. My enquiry seemed to be the likely link between the deaths of Henneberry and Leon if the latter wasn’t an accident. I didn’t think it was. Information, whatever it was, had, in this scenario, caused the deaths of two men. I didn’t have the information myself but I was still looking for it and I had to face the fact that someone might object strenuously. Not for the first time I reflected that a hundred and twenty a day wasn’t a good rate for getting dead, but there was no point in upping the fees. A thousand a day is still a poor deal.
True to my new code, I had just the one beer. Back at the car I looked across at the flats, which had lost their Hollywood Morocco air as the sun had moved on. The street was peaceful; a couple of cars drifted by and a woman strolled along the pavement with a small child weaving around beside her. It was hard to believe that two murders had been committed within a stone’s throw. Then I told myself I hadn’t clinched that the way it needed to be clinched.
Back in College Street, I had the feeling that I was crisscrossing my tracks and not finding my way out of the woods. The cop at the desk was a survivor of the days when I used to visit Evans there, and he let me go up to Frank Parker’s office without an escort. I admired Frank’s cool even more when I saw how his working conditions shaped up when everyone was in. All four detectives were at their desks; there was a fug in the air and one of the cops was hitting a typewriter like an enraged child. Another was slamming filing cabinet doors as if it was his favourite indoor sport. Parker wasn’t fazed; he had his head down and was annotating a typed sheet with a gold ballpoint pen. His shirt cuffs were folded neatly back, and under the nasty, flickering fluorescent light the scar on his arm stood out like an airstrip in the jungle. There were three phones within Parker’s reach; one rang and he unerringly grabbed the right one. He looked up, saw me and nodded. He tucked the phone under his chin and pulled a sheet of paper towards him.
I leaned against a filing cabinet and congratulated myself that I didn’t have to sit behind a desk covered with paper. Parker’s paper problem was enormous and although he looked as if he had the stuff well organised, it was threatening to organise him. He put the phone down quietly, finished his note-making and folded his hands on top of the paper. He didn’t wear any ring.
‘Hardy,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure.’
‘Busy, Frank?’
He smiled cautiously.
‘Does anyone ever come to take any of this stuff away?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so. What can I do for you?’
‘Making any progress on the Henneberry case?’
He riffled through some paper and pulled out a sheet with some of his neat ballpoint notes on it. ‘I sent a policewoman to see the Winter girl. Haven’t got her full report yet, but she says she didn’t get anything interesting out of her. She doesn’t seem to know a hell of a lot for someone who’s going to be a doctor or whatever.’
‘They’re like that. It’s pretty unhealthy in Bronte right now, isn’t it?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Did you hear about Leon?’
‘Oh, yeah, I heard about it.’ He flip-flopped his hand across the desk. ‘Down the stairs with a bump. So what?’
‘Did you hear about the money in his mattress?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve seen those stairs. They’re pretty gentle. Carpeted, too.’
He grunted and lit a cigarette.
‘I’d like to see the medical guff on Leon,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘It sounds to me like he was thrown down the stairs, not pushed-thrown. Wouldn’t you say it took a pretty strong man to do Henneberry in?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a connection between Henneberry and Leon.’
He blew out the smoke to where it could join up with the other smoke. ‘What do I want with two murders?’
