The Recycled Citizen (2 page)

“What’s happening now, I wonder? It’s not like Osmond Loveday to bother us at this hour on a Sunday night. The center’s, not open. I’m surprised he’s even awake. Osmond’s one of those early-to-bed fellows. He gets up at the crack of dawn and takes walks in the Public Gardens.”

“Ought to be exterminated, all of ’em,” grunted Jem, who never walked any farther than the nearest martini if he could help it. “Setting a bad example to the youth of America.”

Cousin Theonia adjusted the lace flounces over her comely wrists and moved the conversation to a less controversial plane, as was her wont. “Dolph looks wonderful, Mary. You must be taking splendid care of him.”

“I try to.” Mary’s pleasant face became, for the moment, almost as beautiful as Theonia’s. “The Lord knows Dolph’s been a good husband to me.”

“Why, Mary,” teased Sarah, “a person might think you were absolutely batty about him.”

“And did you think I’d married him for his money?” Mary’s Irish was up. “If you want the honest truth, I’d had a crush on Dolph since I heard him speak that time at the West End Senior Citizens’. I couldn’t believe my good luck when I met him at your house not long after that, and he asked me to have dinner with him at the Ritz. I felt like Cinderella meeting the prince.”

Jem made a spluttering noise he didn’t quite manage to cover up. Mary turned on him.

“Oh, I know Dolph’s no Rudolph Valentino. He acts kind of pompous sometimes, and I’m not saying he’s any great intellect compared to his smart relatives, meaning no offense to yourself, Jem, since you’ve been so nice about coming to the center and singing dirty songs to the old ladies, God bless ’em. But Dolph honestly does believe it’s his bounden duty to do some good in the world. It shines right out of him. If you were a person with nothing in this world to hang on to, and here came this big, important, rich man willing to treat you like one of his own and help you put food in your mouth and money in your pocket …”

She had to pause. Then she went on, almost fiercely. “Well, I’m not the only one who loves him. Down at the center they think he’s God, or darn close to it. And you can laugh all you want to, Jem Kelling.”

“I shouldn’t dream of laughing at you, Mary me darlin’,” Jem assured her, quite soberly for him. “Any man who managed to live with Aunt Matilda and Uncle Fred all those years without bopping either one of them over the head in a house strewn with articles admirably designed for bopping should ipso facto become a candidate for sainthood, in my considered opinion. And now he tells us he’s still putting up with that perambulating pip-squeak, Osmond Loveday. Remind me to step around to the Cowley Fathers and take up the question of beatification first thing tomorrow morning, will you, Sarah? On second thought, you’d better make it sometime during the afternoon. Ah, here comes his potential holiness now. What’s up, Adolphus?”

W
HAT WAS UP WAS
nothing good’ They all knew that before Dolph opened his mouth. Mary reached up and took her husband’s hand.

“What’s the matter; dear?”

“Chet Arthur got mugged.”

“Oh, Dolph! Chet’s been one of our regulars ever since we opened the center,” Mary explained to the others. “Is he hurt, dear?”

“He’s dead.”

“Who—”

“I don’t know, Mary. Somebody noticed him lying in the alley between Beacon and Marlborough Streets, down near the Massachusetts Avenue end. They thought he must be drunk and called the police. The only identification he had on him was his SCRC membership card, so the police tried to call the center and got the emergency number, which is Osmond’s, because he’s nearest.”

“And Osmond flew into a tizzy and started pestering you. What does he expect us to do about it?”

“Well, damn it, Mary, somebody has to go over.to the morgue and identify the body.”

“Why can’t Osmond go himself? He’s right there in town, for goodness’ sake.”

“He says he’s not feeling well. Neither am I, but what the hell? Sorry, everybody, don’t let me break up the party.”

Max Bittersohn was already on his feet. “Come on, Dolph, I know you hate driving in the dark. I’ll drive your car, and the rest can go in mine when they’re ready to leave.”

“I’m going with you,” said Sarah.

The upshot, of course, was that everybody went except Mary.

“You won’t mind going with Max, will you, Dolph? I really ought to stay and help Genevieve clean up the kitchen. She must be tired.”

Sarah doubted that. Genevieve had put in a good many years under Great-aunt Matilda’s iron heel; working for Mary must be her idea of heaven. The truth of the matter was that Dolph was all geared up to spare the little woman and do his duty like a soldier, and Mary was too good a wife to crab his act.

As they sorted themselves out for the ride, Sarah couldn’t help thinking they were an unusual group to be so closely allied. Theonia, the raven-haired, sloe-eyed, almost alarmingly well-mannered offspring of a Gypsy mother and an Ivy League anthropology student who’d got more closely involved with his subject than he’d meant to, was perhaps the most exotic.

Certainly she was the most striking to look at, and showed every intention of remaining so. Theonia still carried her height proudly, although she’d given up wearing high heels when she married Brooks. She walked every day to maintain a reasonable balance between her excellent appetite and her Rubenesque figure. During the daytime she dressed in simple black or dark red with a modest string of pearls. At night she burgeoned forth in wondrous creations of her own.

This being a brisk September evening, Theonia had put on a sumptuous wine-colored velvet dinner gown she’d first espied as a marked-down negligee in Filene’s Basement. She’d remodeled the velvet to follow the lines of her expensive foundation garment and trimmed it with creamy lace taken from what would have been called a teddy by Sarah’s late mother-in-law, to whom the teddy had once belonged.

Such a gown really called for a sable cloak, Sarah thought. In deference to Brooks’s views on the wanton slaughter of fur-bearing mammals for human adornment, however, Theonia had bought three yards of black woolen coating material and made herself a stole. With this draped carefully over her high-piled hair and flung around all that lace and velvet, she rather suggested a middle-aged Tosca on her way to stab Baron Scarpia.

Brooks Kelling, standing five feet six inches tall and weighing perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds, might have been considered a laughable consort to so queenly a spouse, but nobody laughed at Brooks. Something about him put one in mind of those unassuming chaps John Buchan used to write about: the ones who could speak fluently any obscure foreign dialect that happened to serve the immediate purpose, could contrive an impenetrable disguise with a handful of dust and a trick of the mind, could construct any required device from whatever bits and pieces might lie at hand, could endure any hardship or face any peril with a hymn on their lips and a Sunday School text in their hearts, could effect the downfall of the Schwarzestein at the precise moment when it appeared to be inevitably in der Siegeskrohe, then go back to scratching the backs of their pedigreed pigs and taking twenty-mile strolls across the moors with Carlyle’s “Essay on Burns” for company.

Brooks was a photographer of ospreys’ nests and a former entertainer at children’s birthday parties. He could build almost anything but was inclined to be fussy about his materials. He spoke only Andover-Harvard and had no trouble making himself perfectly understood in it anywhere, under any circumstances. He altered his appearance by wearing a straw boater with a feather of the crested grebe tucked into the hatband during the summer, and a greenish-gray felt hat with a feather of the ruddy turnstone in the winter. The only perils he’d ever quailed at were bossy widows who wanted to marry him, but Theonia had relieved him of those. The Schwarzestein wouldn’t have got to first base with Brooks Kelling and had never been known to try.

Jeremy Kelling was about Brooks’s height and roughly twice his girth. There was a cousinly resemblance between them, but Sarah could never have pictured Uncle Jem photographing an osprey’s nest or thwarting the Schwarzestein or anybody else by agility or guile. He might, she supposed, succeed in paralyzing a foe with a jug of his special-formula martinis. More likely he’d yell for his man Egbert to handle the matter. Lately, to Sarah’s annoyance, he’d taken to yelling for Max.

In Sarah’s personal opinion Max Bittersohn was far and away the most distinguished member of the group. She could well believe his ancestors had been priests in the temple of Solomon while the Kellings were still painting themselves blue and being nasty to the Picts. Max was just about six feet tall and looked less than the forty years he’d soon have attained. His dark brown hair had a marvelous wave to it; his gray-blue eyes saw a great deal more than most people realized they did.

Lately the expression on Max’s handsome though by no means pretty face had been often anxious. That was due to impending fatherhood; normally Max was a cheerful man, though never boisterous like Jem. By profession Max was a private detective specializing in the recovery of precious art objects. Recently he’d developed a sideline: fishing members of the enormous Kelling tribe out of hot water.

Sarah herself had been Max’s first Kelling catch, and the only one he’d never felt any urge to throw back. She was small and slight like Brooks, had a modified version of the square Kelling jaw, but had mercifully escaped the Kelling nose. Her hair was brown, much lighter than Max’s, and was showing a tendency to curl now that she’d had it cut short. Her skin was delicate and inclined to be pale except when she blushed. She was still under thirty and as happy as an expectant mother could be, considering how many relatives’ good advice she had to endure.

The luxurious car Max drove was his only step in the direction of ostentation, and not much of one at that since he used it often on business, needed plenty of trunk space to bring back the rescued Rembrandts and dealt mostly with rich clients who expected him to look successful. Dolph plunked himself down in the front passenger seat without waiting to be asked. Sarah shrugged, slid under the steering wheel and put her feet up on the hump in the middle. Max checked to make sure his impending offspring was in no danger of being squashed, then took his place behind the wheel. Theonia sat in back with Brooks on her right and Jem on her left, like a hybrid tea rose between two Boston baked beans.

All but Dolph lived on Beacon Hill. Jem shared a memento-filled flat on Pinckney Street with his long-suffering henchman, Egbert. Brooks and Theonia were at present managing the historic brownstone on Tulip Street that Sarah had inherited from her first husband, Alexander Kelling, and then had turned into a remarkably high-toned boardinghouse. Sarah herself had retreated with Max to a small apartment next door while waiting for their new house at Ireson’s Landing to be finished.

At this time of night it was about a twenty-minute run from Chestnut Hill. Max made it in fifteen. “I’ll drop the rest of you at the boardinghouse and get Sarah up to bed before Dolph and I go on to the morgue, if that’s okay.”

“I don’t want to go to bed,” Sarah protested.

“Then stay with us till Max gets back. Mothers-to-be must be humored,” said Theonia.

Theonia herself had never been a mother, but she had a way of investing her pronouncements with an authority it would have seemed folly to question. She might have acquired the knack during her earlier career as a tea-leaf reader, but anyway, Max yielded. Sarah went into the house with the rest and accepted a glass of hot milk in deference to her delicate condition. Jem asked for black coffee. Brooks and Theonia drank something called Snoozybye Tea, and thus it was that Max found them when he got back from his direful errand.

“It was Arthur, all right,” he told them. “Dolph’s pretty cut up. This is the first violent death they’ve had among the SCRC members, and he’s blaming himself. He thinks it wouldn’t have happened if he’d got that warehouse remodeled sooner.”

“Poor Dolph,” said Sarah. “Mary’s right about him, you know. Where is he now?”

“I ran him back to Chestnut Hill. We weren’t long at the morgue. There was nothing to stay for. Dolph promised to send an undertaker around in the morning, and they presented us with Arthur’s personal effects.”

He held up a worn and ripped brown paper shopping bag with SCRC stamped in big green letters on one side. “This is it, except for the membership card in his pocket and the clothes on his back. He’d been bit over the head from behind with a tire iron, which was left at the scene. Dolph thinks he might have had a little money on him. Arthur was a conscientious collector and came in with a bunch of bottles and cans to be redeemed every day. The cops who picked him up said there were maybe a dozen empty soft-drink cans scattered around the body, presumably from the torn bag.”

“Died with his boots on, eh?” said Brooks. “I suppose there might be worse ways for a person in his situation to go. Will there be a funeral?”

“Oh yes, it’s a perquisite of membership. The members are all elderly, you know, so they lose one to Father Time every so often, and they always make a point of giving them a decent send-off. Dolph says it was Mary’s idea. Maybe it doesn’t help the dead person much, but it makes the rest feel better. They go to a community church nearby, one of their members who used to be janitor in a church or something conducts a nonsectarian service, then they troop back to the center for coffee and cake.”

“How perceptive of dear Mary,” said Theonia softly, “letting those dear people know they’ll be decently cared for even after they’re gone. Brooks darling, do you think I ought to bake something?”

“Why don’t you check with Mary in the morning, my dear? She’ll know better than I. Max, can I offer you something? Tea? Brandy?”

“Brandy, if you don’t mind. I could use it.” Max was fiddling with the tattered shopping bag. “Poor bugger. Hadn’t a damn thing but this, and some son of a bitch wouldn’t even let him keep it. I suppose these printed bags were Mary’s idea too?”