Murder in Black Letter by Poul William Anderson (classic novels to read txt) 📕

hand brushed hers accidentally in the narrow entrance. Halfway up the stairs, he realized he was holding the fist clenched.

What is this farce? he asked himself angrily. Nothing more than straight blonde hair, worn in bangs across the forehead and falling to the shoulders. Now in the full electric light he could see that it wasn't even the same hue, a good deal darker than Morna's weather-bleached mane. And Corinna Lombardi was a mature woman—young, he recalled Bruce's going over to the City last month for her twenty-second birthday party—but grown. Morna would always be thirteen.

Corinna had been nineteen when he saw her last, still living here and working in the café. That was at a little farewell dinner the Lombardis had given him, before he departed for his latest year in Italy. They had wanted him to look up Angelo's brother Luigi, the one who had made a success in the old country as a secret service man. Kintyre had visited Luigi a few times, finding him a pleasant sort with scholarly inclinations, most interested in his brilliant nephew Bruce, with whom he corresponded.

At any rate, Kintyre had had too much else to think about to pay much attention to a quiet girl. By the time he returned, as Bruce told him, she had left home after a spectacular quarrel with her parents. That was soon repaired—it had only been a declaration of independence—but she had kept her own job and her own apartment since then.

The rambling of his mind soothed him. At the time he did not realize that, down underneath, his mind was telling itself about Corinna Lombardi. It decided that she had few elements of conventional prettiness. She was tall, and her figure was good except that the shoulders were too wide and the bust too small for this decade's canons. Her face was broad, with high cheek-bones and square jaw and straight strong nose; it had seen a good deal of sun. Her eyes were greenish-gray under heavy dark brows, her mouth was wide and full, her voice was low. She wore a black dress, as expected, and a defiant bronze pin in the shape of a weasel.

Then Kintyre had emerged on the landing, and Angelo Lombardi—thickset, heavy-faced, balding—engulfed his hand in an enormous sailor's paw. "Come in, sir, please to come in and have a small glass with us."

Maria Lombardi rose for the Doctor of Philosophy. Her light-brown hair and clear profile told whence her children had their looks; he suspected that much of the brains had come from her too. "How do you do, Professor Keen-teer. We thank you for coming."

He sat down, awkwardly. Overstuffed and ghastly, the living room belonged to a million immigrants of the last generation, who had built from empty pockets up to the middle class. But families like this would eat beans oftener than necessary for twenty years, so they could save enough to put one child through college. Bruce had been the one.

"I just came to express my sympathy," said Kintyre. He felt himself under the cool green appraisal of Corinna's eyes, but could not think of words less banal. "Can I do anything to help? Anything at all?"

"You are very kind," said old Lombardi. He poured from what was evidently his best bottle of wine. "Everyone has been so kind."

"Do you know what his room was like, the past half of a year, Professor?" asked Maria. "He never invited us there."

I rather imagine not, thought Kintyre wryly. "Nothing unusual," he said. "I'll bring you his personal effects as soon as I can."

"Professor," said Lombardi. He leaned his bulk forward very slowly. The glass shivered in his fingers. "You knew my son so well. What do you think happen to him?"

"I only know what the police told me," said Kintyre.

Maria crossed herself. She closed her eyes, and he did not watch her moving lips; that conversation didn't concern him.

"My son he was murdered," said Lombardi in an uncomprehending voice. "Why did they murder him?"

"I don't know," insisted Kintyre. "The police will find out."

Corinna left her chair and came around to stand before the men. It was a long stride, made longer by wrath. She put her hands on her hips and said coldly:

"Dr. Kintyre, you're not naïve. You must know murder is one of the safest crimes there is to commit. What's the actual probability that they'll ever learn who did it, when they claim they haven't even a motive to guide them?"

Kintyre couldn't help bristling a trifle. She was tired and filled with grief, but he had done nothing to rate such a tone. He clipped off his words: "If you think you have a clue, Miss Lombardi, you should take it to the authorities, not to me."

"I did," she said harshly. "They were polite to the hysterical female. They'll look into it, sure. And when they see he has an alibi—as he will!—they won't look any further."

Maria stood up. "Corinna!" she exclaimed. "Basta, figliolaccia!"

The girl wrenched free of her mother's hand. "Oh, yes," she said, "that's how it was with the policeman too. With everybody. Don't pick on the poor cripple. Haven't you been enough of a jinx to him? Don't you see, that's exactly what he thinks! That's why he killed Bruce!"

An inner door opened, and a man entered the room. He was thirty years old, with a strong burly frame turning a little fat. He was good-looking in a dark heavy-lipped way, his hair black and curly, his eyes a restless rusty brown, nose snubbed and jaw underslung. He wore tight black trousers with a silver stripe, a cummerbund, a white silk shirt open halfway down his chest; he carried a cased guitar under one arm.

"Oh," he said. "I thought somebody'd come. Hello, Doc."

"Hello, Guido," said Kintyre, not getting up. He had nothing personally against Bruce's older brother, who had been quite a charming devil the few casual times they met. However—"He who does not choose the path of good, chooses to take the path of evil," said Machiavelli's Discourses: and Guido had been an anchor around more necks than one.

"Don't get in a bind, kitten," he said to his sister. "I could hear you making with the grand opera a mile upwind."

She whirled about on him, shaking, and said: "You could let him get cold before you went back to that club to sing your dirty little songs."

"My girl, you speak the purest B.S., as Bruce would have been the first to tell you." Guido smiled, took out a cigarette one-handed and stuck it in his mouth. "I was out of town the whole weekend, just when the cats go real crazy. If I don't make with it tonight, the man will ignite me, and what good would that do Bruce?" He flipped out a book of matches, opened it and struck one, all with the same expert hand.

Corinna's gaze went from face to face, and a beaten look crept into it. "Nobody cares," she whispered. "Just nobody cares."

She sat down. Lombardi twisted his fingers, looking wretched; Maria folded herself stiffly into a chair; Guido leaned on the doorjamb and blew smoke.

Kintyre felt, obscurely, that it depended on him to ease the girl. He said: "Please, Miss Lombardi. We don't mean that. But what can we do? We'd only get in the way of the police."

"I know, I know." She got it out between her teeth, while she looked at the floor. "Let George do it. Isn't that the motto of this whole civilization? Someday George isn't going to be around to do it, and we'll have gotten too flabby to help ourselves."

It paralleled some of his own thinking so closely that he was startled. But he said, "Well, you can't declare a vendetta, can you?"

"Oh, be quiet!" She looked up at him with a smoldering under her brows. "Of course I don't mean that. But I know who must have done it, and I know he'll have some kind of story, and no one will look past that story, because he seems like such a pathetic case. And he isn't! I know Gene and Peter Michaelis. They got what was coming to them!"

"Too much!" roared Lombardi. "Now you be still!" She ignored him. Her eyes would not release Kintyre's.

"Well?" she said after a moment.

He wondered if it was only her misery which clawed at him, or if she was always such a harpy. He said with great care: "Well, in theory any of us could be guilty. I might have done it because Bruce was—going around with a girl I used to know. Or Guido here—jealousy? A quarrel? I assume we have merely his word he was out of town on Saturday and Sunday. Shall we also ask the police to check every minute of his weekend?"

The man in the doorway flushed. "Dig that," he said slowly. "So you're going to—"

"Nothing of the sort," rapped Kintyre. "I was trying to show how a private suspicion is no grounds for—"

Guido took a long drag on his cigarette, snuffed it in a horrible souvenir ashtray, and left without a word. They heard his footfalls go down the stairs.

"I am so sorry, Mister Professor," faltered Lombardi.

"Niente affatto, signor." Kintyre stood up. "All of you are worn out." He essayed a smile at Corinna. "You were echoing some of my own principles. We pessimists ought to stick together."

She did not even turn her face toward him. But her profile was one he could imagine on Nike of Samothrace, the Victory which strides in the wind.

"I've always thought principles should be acted on," she told him sullenly.

"Corinna!" said Maria. Her daughter paid no attention.

Kintyre took his leave in a confusion of apologies. When he stood alone on the dusky street, he whistled. That had been no fun.

But now it was over with. He could let things cool down for a week or so, then deliver Bruce's possessions, and say farewell with an insincere promise to "look you up soon, when I get the chance." And there would be an end of that.

But he had thought for a heartbeat she was Morna come home to him.

His fingers were wooden, hunting for a cigarette; he dropped the pack on the sidewalk before getting one out. He could feel the first onset of the horror, moving up along the channels of his brain.

Sometimes, he thought with a remnant of coolness, sometimes distraction could head off the trouble. If he could get involved in something outside himself, and yet important to himself, so that his whole attention was engaged, the horror might retreat.

He yanked smoke into his lungs, blew it forth, tossed the cigarette to the paving and stamped on it. Then he went into the grocery. There was a public phone on the wall, he leafed through the directory until he found the name.

Michaelis Peter C.

5

He didn't call ahead, but drove on down. When he parked and got out, he saw Coit Tower whitely lit above him, on the steep art-colony heights of Telegraph Hill. Not many blocks away was Fisherman's Wharf, a lot of tourist pits and a few authentic restaurants. But here he stood in a pocket of slum, before a rotting rattrap tenement. A single street lamp a block away cast a purulent light at its own foot. Elsewhere the night flowed. He heard the nearby rattle of a switch engine, pushing freight cars over iron; a battered cat slunk past him; otherwise he was alone.

He walked across to the house with forced briskness, struck a match and hunted through several grimy scrawls on mailboxes before Michaelis' name came to him. Number 8.

The main entrance was unlocked. The hall, dusty in threadbare carpeting, held dim electric bulbs. He heard noises through some of the doors, and smelled stale cooking. A glance told him Number 8 must be upstairs. He climbed, only now starting to wonder just how he planned to do his errand.

Or what his errand was, if it came to that.

Bruce had