Murder on the Rocks. Talmage Powell

drinking cokes and beer. It was a fine day for sunstroke, the best I could remember since last summer, and the season was barely under way.

      I followed the parkway to P Street, turned west to Wisconsin, and stopped for a traffic light. It was time for her to shift, but nothing was happening. “Hey,” I said, and turned to look at her, but her head lay back against the top of the seat and her eyes were closed. Her face was tranquil. I touched her hand. No response. She was breathing regularly, asleep in the sun. Asleep or passed out. The signal changed and I managed to mesh the gears. The Lancia purred up nance alley toward Philips Place.

      Georgetown is new town, old town, poor town, rich town, dark town, light town. It lies west of Rock Creek Park and north of the old C & O barge canal. Its western limit is the wall of Georgetown University and on the north, Dumbarton Oaks. In early Colonial times it was a center of periwigged fashion and Federalist snobbery that lasted a hundred years. For another eighty the close-built dwellings settled and tottered apart until only Negroes would live there, eight to a room. Then for the last twenty-five the process reversed. The New Deal’s flood of bureaucrats claimed Georgetown as its own. They tidied and rebuilt and improved and the politicians and financiers were attracted until with the exception of Foxhall Road it boasted the most expensive and exclusive real estate in the nation’s Capital. On the fringes huddle morose colonies of dikes and nances, the shops and restaurants have names that are ever so quaint, and sometimes it seemed a shame that the slaves had ever left.

      As for Washington, it has, per capita, more rape, more crimes of violence, more perversion, more politicians, more liquor, more good food, more bad food, more tax collections, more hotels and apartments, and more gold toothpicks than any city in the world. A fine place if you have enterprise, durability, money and powerful friends.

      She hadn’t given me the street number but it was listed on her car registration. The apartment was a one-story duplex. Not a reconditioned rat’s nest like most Georgetown dwellings, or one of those precious little clapboard shacks, half-a-house wide and just big enough for a brace of mannish females who own a change of khaki pants apiece, a low-cost hi-fi and a record library heavy on the Delius and Stravinsky. Instead, the duplex had an honest brick face, Colonial brick and limed mortar, with horseshoe arches over the windows, and open wood shutters. The fence enclosing the lawn was wrought-iron painted black. Beneath the duplex was a sunken garage with room for two cars. I drove down the slanting cement apron into the garage and turned off the engine. Iris hadn’t moved.

      Getting out of the Lancia, I went around and opened her door. Draping her left arm around my neck I lifted her. She was not tall but she was solidly assembled. About one-twenty, probably less. Carrying her, I walked back up the apron, turned onto the sidewalk, and went up the brick steps. At the top of the steps a walk branched toward two doorways. Hers was solid wood, painted teal blue. In place of a bronze knocker there was an antique cast-iron medallion with a bas-relief fire cart and the date 1821 in flowing script. Typically Georgetown. The door key was in the leather holder with her ignition keys. I opened the door, closed it with my heel, and looked around for a place to put her.

      Beyond the fireplace I saw a door. I walked over thick beige carpeting and through the doorway into a bedroom. It had turquoise walls, white woodwork, and lemon-colored curtains. The bed was Hollywood, double width, and the bedspread had foot-wide strips of turquoise and lemon. I lowered her onto it and pulled off her shoes. As I straightened, she stirred and murmured something but too faintly to hear. Her lips stayed parted and she looked as if she was good for at least eight hours. The room smelled faintly of expensive perfume.

      I was hot and my back was weary from carrying her. For the last couple of years my exercise has consisted of carrying briefcases and tax books and running up sails. I left her on the bed and went back through the living room to the kitchen. All gleaming new, with copper pots and pans on pegs over the electric range. The refrigerator contained, among other things, six bottles of Danish beer. I opened one, tilted it, and walked back to the living room.

      It was a big room, running the length of the house. Beyond the dinette picture window I could see a garden with lawn, flower borders, a couple of statues, and a miniature swimming pool. If it had been filled with beer I could have drained it in half an hour.

      The furniture was Japanese style with foam-rubber cushions covered with shaggy beige cloth. The wood looked like black teak. On a chocolate leather hassock lay a Siamese cat. I looked at the cat and it yawned at me, stretched, and closed its turquoise eyes. Glancing around the apartment, I decided that the decor matched the cat.

      Between the living-room and the dinette was a brick-and-wood half wall. The living-room side was a built-in bookcase. In one corner stood a hi-fi cabinet in dark teak. It looked like about fifteen-hundred dollars worth of honeyed sound. At full volume it could tear the bricks out of the wall.

      I sat on the beige sofa, sipped from the bottle, and put it down on the teakwood chow table. Against the far wall hung a row of Japanese prints. Ukiyoe. Beside the door there was a framed silk kakemono, a brush painting of a red-crested heron. Also Japanese. All very chichi. All very nice. You had an Oriental cat so you decorated your apartment in matching colors, and to avoid spoiling the effect you brought in custom-made Japanese-style furniture and silk paintings and wood prints. What else? If you had money, that is.

      Picking up the bottle, I let the cold liquid trickle down my throat. It was excellent beer. I could almost taste ripe wheat.

      No sounds from the bedroom.

      I got up, turned down the air-conditioner, and sat in a different chair. From there I could see a silver-framed photograph on top of a tansu chest. The picture looked like Iris Calvo Sewall, taken a few years ago. For no particlular reason I got up and walked over to it. The same nose, the same hair line, almost the same face. But written at an angle across the lower right-hand corner were the words: Always, Sara.

      That made it her younger sister. I studied the face and saw that the lips were slightly broader than the lips of the woman who slept in the bedroom. And they had a childish, pouty look. The corners of the mouth seemed spoiled, even selfish. The little sister. She looked like a mantrap.

      I turned and went back to the chow table, picked up my bottle and finished it. My wristwatch read three forty-two. Still time enough to grab a cab back to the waterfront, up sail, and drift down the Potomac the way I had planned before Iris Sewall braced me at Hogan’s.

      Reaching into my coat pocket, I pulled out her two five-hundred-dollar banknotes, smoothed out the wrinkles, and admired the engraving. I could drop them on the table, walk out of the door, and never come back. For a while I considered the idea and then discarded it. I had had a bottle of excellent beer at her expense and I had agreed to listen to what she had wanted so much to tell me. On top of that I told myself that I had been getting stale. Any action you can get out of a pile of tax returns and a shelf of tax books is strictly mental. And tedious.

      I persuaded myself to linger over a second bottle of beer and if Iris still slept I would leave her thousand dollars on the table and walk out.

      Just then the telephone rang.

      I reached for it, then hesitated. If it was her husband he might not like hearing a man’s voice in his wife’s apartment, separated from her or not. And Paul Sewall knew some nasty people, hoods who would sap me for laughs, then break my arches for staggering. Then again it could be her sister, Sara. Or her father, the Ambassador.

      Picking up the phone, I said, “Hello,” but there was no answer, only an exclamation of surprise, abrupt and sexless, and the wire went dead. I lowered the receiver, shrugged, and decided I should have ignored it. As I walked away from the telephone I heard a key in the front door lock. The door opened inward and a bulky Negro woman stared at me. From one arm hung the strap of a shopping bag. A shock of celery leaves stuck out of one corner.

      “Hello,” I said.

      She looked at me, then at the half-closed door, deciding whether to scream or come in the rest of the way. Finally she said, “Where’s Mis’ Iris?”

      “In the bedroom,” I said. “Sleeping.”

      “Huh!”