The Narrow Cell. Ronal Kayser
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that white armband’s a good thing to wear in a dim-out, running about the streets. And of course Mr. Bowling would notice if she neglected to wear it. He was very keen about details—old-maidish, as Mrs. Wyeland put it.
“But”—hastily—“we were lucky to have him in charge. I know, the wardens found him difficult at times. And the ladies didn’t appreciate having him come poking into their attics after fire hazards. Still, if we have a real raid instead of a practice one fine day they may be grateful to him after all.”
Kenmore nodded; he imagined it had been 7:55 or later when Dorothy Wyeland arrived and found Henry Bowling dead.
“Here,” said he, returning the flashlight. “You’d better be out front when the doctor gets here.”
And having dismissed Wyeland, Kenmore turned and stared at Henry Bowling’s desk.
On the desk lay two sheets of pink paper. The lieutenant glanced at these; at first casually.
Both were filled out in large, pencil-printed characters. At 7:03, there’d been an UXB reported from 30 Pheasant Lane; and at 7:17, an explosion and spreading fire at the Richfield filling station at Toyon and Balboa Streets.
Kenmore’s mustering frown owed to the fact that the pink sheets were mimeographed, and not the standard printed forms supplied by the War Duty Office.
There was nothing else on the desk except half a dozen pencils methodically arranged in a wire holder; an ashtray and a briar pipe; a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, an eraser, a flashlight, and an alarm clock.
Kenmore observed that the pencils were sharpened after the fashion of professional draughtsmen, being pared to a wedge point rather than a round one. The pipe had been tamped full, lighted, and then let go out with the tobacco scarcely blackened.
The lieutenant’s frown became an expression which pressed up pads of muscle under his grey eyes, and knotted other muscle pads at the corners of his wide mouth.
He stepped back, glanced around the room, and then walked behind the desk.
In the top, right-hand drawer lay two copies of the Handbook for Air Raid Wardens, a pamphlet on extinguishing incendiary bombs, and a booklet, What You Can Do.
The second drawer held only some loose sheets of typing bond paper. These were letter headed: The Valley Press, Mankato, Minnesota. H. R. Bowling, Publisher.
The third and lowermost drawer was larger. Its contents included a civilian’s white-painted steel helmet, a training gas mask in its canvas carrier, a fly-spray gun, and an 8-oz. bottle that bore the label Formaldehyde
The central shallow drawer had nothing in it except a miscellany of paper clips, penknife, pipe cleaners, and (curiously) a clip of ’06 cartridges.
On the left side of the desk was space for a typewriter, and a lower drawer in which were stacked some copies of the dim-out proclamation under a city telephone directory.
That was all for the desk. Placed against the wall behind it, stood a steel filing cabinet.
This, when Kenmore turned to it, disclosed an index of the homes in the sector, divided by posts; it cataloged the residents in detail: the children under six, and adults over sixty-five, and the infirm and otherwise handicapped, and the household pets . . . together with the location of each house’s water taps and garden hose, and electric switches, and gas cut-offs.
Then there was another section, given over to correspondence, mostly mimeographed, and much of it directives from the war duty office.
Lieutenant Kenmore looked into the other rooms—there were only three; a tiny kitchen, a tinier bath, and a bedchamber.
Henry Bowling had kept these rooms closed off; they were chillish and damp, and looked unused in a long time. Perhaps he had never put them to any use at all. The wicker furniture of the bedchamber, the flat-spring bed without a mattress, the picture of Yosemite that had come unglued from its frame—none of it suggested the accommodations the owner of the big house would offer a guest.
All the windows, like the one in front, were sand-bagged; the kitchen door, locked and made secure with a bolt besides. Kenmore looked attentively to this bolt, which wore an undisturbed film of dust.
He stood in the other, front room, staring at the desk; considering.
He had found absolutely nothing to explain Henry Bowling’s sardonically amused phone message.
But he had found enough to feel very sure Henry Bowling had not died by accident.
IV
“So he fled with all that he had; and he rose up, and passed over the river, and set his face toward the mount Gilead.”—GENESIS 31:21.
Grandfather did likewise, and that is how New Gilead got its name.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.
“It’s no use, that’s that,” said James Myatt, M.D.
Lieutenant Kenmore made the notation in his pocket memo book: Pronounced dead by physician 8:43 p.m. In this interval two uniformed officers had hastened from the La Jolla sub-station with an inhalator. District warden Sam Elliot and the local civilian defense corps chief, Dr. Lauren Wallace, had come from the control room.
And Darwina Roydan appeared—she being the drill umpire who had handed Wyeland his incident envelope.
Kenmore brightened. For if the ill winds brewed by the Catherine Hope Case had blown good to anyone, his acquaintance with Darwina Roydan was that good . . . But at the moment Miss Roydan merely stood by in the shadows. Kenmore intended to renew the acquaintance, and was otherwise occupied now.
“Cause of death?” said he.
“Why, carbon monoxide—it was that heater in there, of course,” thought Myatt.
“Those unvented heaters play the very devil,” Elliot muttered.
The man who had tried to administer artificial respiration sighed, “Well, you’d better go inside, Jessie,” to Mrs. Axiter. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
Kenmore said: “Just a minute.”
He got from the other a dark, narrowly questioning look.
“We have to file a report on accidental deaths,” the lieutenant observed. “Names of witnesses, who found the body, and so on.”
“I thought you knew. It was the girl, Wyeland’s little girl.”
“And she notified you?”
“She came to the house,” the other said. He produced a wallet, and from it a card that read: Kane & Ffleming, Insurance, with Foster V. Ffleming printed in its lower corner. “She told Mrs. Axiter. I came out with her and we got Mr. Bowling into the fresh air. I’d seen carbon monoxide poisoning before, and I guessed it was that, all right.”
“This was at approximately eight o’clock, I understand? He was entirely unconscious when you found him?”
“Yes, he’d fallen out of his chair. On the floor behind the desk. He might have struck his head in falling, I thought.” Ffleming added, “I don’t think Mrs. Axiter can tell you any more than this.”
Kenmore did not put any questions to Mrs. Axiter. He said, indeed, he thought it would be a kindness on Darwina Roydan’s part to see Jessie Axiter into the house.
Darwina did so, assisted by Ffleming and Dr. Myatt.
And as Wyeland had gone to telephone the mortuary, it left the lieutenant with the district warden and the incident officer.
“Oh, Elliot,” said he, turning to the guesthouse door. “Dr. Wallace.”
The two men followed him inside. Kenmore asked, “You phoned your test signal blue at what time?”
“Why,” said Elliot, “at