10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [35]
Never mind, my father soothed him, the many Hoopwestern voters who went to the races might approve.
Mervyn, unconvinced, shut his mouth grimly for half an hour, but as the day expanded decided to salvage at least crumbs from what he considered the ruins of canvassing’s best weekend opportunity and got busy on the telephone, with the result that we were invited to lunch with the racecourse stewards and were otherwise showered with useful tickets. Mervyn, from long experience, knew everyone of influence in the county.
He blamed me, of course, for the switch, and perhaps with reason. If he’d had his way he would have been dancing happy attendance on Orinda, walking backwards in her presence. What he would have done with A. L. Wyvern I couldn’t guess, but presumably he was used to the enigmatic shadow, as the Anonymous Lover had been deceased Dennis Nagle’s best friend also. They played golf.
Mervyn’s disappointments, I thought, shrugging off his ill will, were just too bad. In his life’s terms, success lay in getting his candidate elected or, if not elected, a close runner-up. Mervyn was not about to ruin his own reputation as agent out of tetchiness with Juliards, father or son.
The chilly atmosphere in the offices was lightened by an unexpected visit from the woman who ran the charity shop next door. She and Mervyn knew each other well, but she was fascinated to meet the new candidate, she said; she had seen us come and go, she wanted to shake hands with George, she’d heard his son was a doll, she wondered if we would like a homemade apple pie.
She put her offering on my father’s desk.
“Kind of you, Amy,” Mervyn said, and in his manner I read that not only had he known his neighbor a long time but he’d undervalued her for probably the whole period.
Amy was one of those people easy to undervalue; an apologetic, unassuming middle-aged widow (Polly said) who received gifts of unwanted junk, spruced them up a bit to sell, and would never have dipped into the till before passing on the proceeds to the charity that maintained her. Amy was fluffy, honest and halfway to stupid: also kind and talkative. One day of unadulterated Amy, I thought, would last a lifetime.
It was easy not to listen to every word in the flow, but she did grab our attention at one point.
“Someone broke a pane of glass in our window on Wednesday night and I’ve had a terrible job getting it mended.” She told us at far too much length how she’d managed it. “A policeman called, you know, and asked if the window had been broken by a rifle bullet but I said of course not, I clean the floor first thing when I arrive every morning because, of course, I don’t live upstairs like you can here. There’s only a bathroom and one small room I use for storage, though sometimes I do let a homeless person sleep there in an emergency. Anyway, of course I didn’t find a bullet. I told the policeman, Joe it was, whose mother drives a school bus, and he came in for a look ’round and made a note or two. I saw it in the paper about the gun going off and maybe someone was shooting at Mr. Juliard, you never feel safe these days, do you? And then, just now when I was dusting an old whatnot that I can’t seem to sell to anybody, I came to this bump, and I pulled it out, and I wonder if this was what Joe was looking for, so do you think I should tell him?”
She plunged a hand into a pocket in her drab, droopy cardigan and put down on the desk, beside the apple pie, a squashed-looking piece of metal that had certainly flown at high speed from a .22 rifle.
“I do think,” my father said carefully, “that you should tell your friend Joe, whose mother drives a school bus, that you’ve found the little lump of metal stuck in a whatnot.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do.”
Amy picked up the bullet, squinted at it, and polished it a bit on her cardigan. So much for residual fingerprints, I thought.
“All right, then,” Amy said cheerfully, putting the prize back in her pocket. “I was sure you would know what I should do.”
She invited him to look around her shop,