She was tiny, under five feet tall, all smile and bounce. She reminded Cash of his wife's great-aunt Gertrude, who had come from England to visit the summer before. Auntie Gertie had been a hundred-fifty pounds of energy jammed into an eighty-pound package. Except in terms of spirit she was indescribable.
They exchanged shrugs and glances in her absence, but neither voiced his fear that they had been shanghaied by a lonely old woman who would use them as listening butts for slice-by-slice accounts of her seventy operations.
Cash studied his surroundings. Everything had to be older than Miss Groloch herself. It could have been a set for an 1880s drawing room, crowded as it was with garish period impedimenta. Most moderns would have found it distressingly nonfunctional and cluttered. Cash felt comfortable. Something in him barkened back to good old days he had never lived himself. But, then, as his sons had often told him, he was an anachronism himself. He was an idealistic cop.
There was no television, nor a radio, or a telephone. Incredible! The lights were the only visible electrical devices. Gas jets still protruded from the walls. Would they work? (He was unaware of the difference between natural and lighting gas.) An old hot water heating radiator stood in a corner, painted silver. Had her furnace been converted from coal? There were still coal burners around, but he couldn't picture Miss Groloch running downstairs to shovel.
She returned with delicate, tiny china cups on a silver tray.
And cookies, little shapes with beads of colored sugar like his wife had made for Christmases before the boys had grown too old for productions. There was sugar in lumps for the tea, with tongs, and cream. And napkins, of course. Luckily, she came to Cash first. John was too young to know the rituals. Cash had had maiden aunts with roots out of time, leapfrogging a generation into the past. Harald did a credible job of faking it, though, and left the talking to Norm. He nibbled cookies and waited.
'Now, then,' said Miss Groloch, seating herself primly at the apex of a triangle of chairs, 'slowed you down we have, yes? You won't be having a stroke. But busy I'm sure you are. That last gentleman, Leutnant Carstairs, the criminals said were taking over.' There were little soft
'Carstairs, ma'am?' Cash asked.
'A long time ago was that. Years. Now. I can do for you what?'
Accent and rhythm were moving more toward the Missourian, though her compound and complex sentences remained confusing.
There were concepts of feminine delicacy which went with the age into which they had plunged, concepts especially strong as regarded little old ladies. But in their business they weren't accustomed to dealing with murder delicately. 'Our officers found a man in the alley last night,' Cash said. 'Dead.'
'Himmel!' One tiny hand covered her mouth momentarily.
'We're asking everyone if they heard or saw anything.'
'No. Though Tom was restless. The weather it was, I thought.'
'Tom?'
She indicated the cat, who sat at her feet eying the cream pitcher.
'I see. Just one more thing, then. We have to ask you to look at this picture…'
'Not to be so apologetic, young man. Please to let me see it.'
Cash handed it to her, said, 'No one knows who he is.'
There were a lot of things the department didn't know, he reflected. Like how the guy died. Forensics, the coroner, and fingerprint people were all working on him.
She stiffened, grew pale.
'You know him?' Cash asked, hoping he had struck oil.
'No. For a moment I thought… He looks like a man I knew a long time ago. Before you were born, probably.'
Indian Head pennies and a corpse that was an utter mystery to everyone except, possibly, an old lady who said he looked like someone she had known before he was born. Not much to go on.
'Well, thanks for your time and the tea,' Cash said. 'We really do have to get on.'
'Welcome, Sergeant.' She accompanied them to the door, an aged but spritely gnome in Cash's imagination.
'You think she knows something?' Harald asked as they approached the four-family flat next door.
Cash shrugged. 'I think she told the truth.' But he had reservations.
John glanced at her house. 'Spooky place.'
'I sort of liked it.'
'Figured you would.'
They struck out everywhere.
'The prelims are in,' Lieutenant Railsback told them when they returned to the station. 'We've still got a John Doe.'
'Give them time,' said Cash. 'FBI won't even be awake yet.'
'Christ, it's hot in here,' John complained. 'Can't you turn it down? What ever happened to the energy crisis?'
