THE OFFICES OF the Weeping Water Farm Insurance Company took up three rooms above the Enigma Hardware. The wooden floorboards creaked with distinctive sounds. Steam radiators under the windows put out tremendous heat that made the employees drowsy and secure on stormy days.
In the first room Mrs. Edna Carter Cutter, secretary, receptionist, information bureau, guard dog, indoor gardener, coffee maker and caterer, bookkeeper, weather forecaster, supply clerk, bank messenger, mail distributor and comptroller, sat in a leatherette chair amid two hundred potted houseplants. They crowded every surface, velvet plants, wandering jew, a purple-leaved Ti plant from the South Pacific, African violets by the dozen, a great leaning Norfolk pine in a lard tub, a lipstick plant swinging over a file cabinet, a kangaroo vine over another, a fatsia in a jug behind the door, a thicket of dumb cane beside the umbrella stand, a Boston fern, the giant of the collection, stretching its fronds over the Gestetner copier. Most of the plants had come as condolence gifts on the death of her son Vernon, run down in New York City by a drunken Marine in a stolen taxicab.
The office of Mr. Plute, the manager, was in the back with a view of an old cattle pound. There was an oak desk and three chairs, two oak file cabinets and an oak coat rack with brass hooks. The upper half of the door was set with a sheet of frosted glass that showed only Plute’s elongated shadow when he walked in front of the window. It was he who had given Mrs. Cutter the Boston fern.
The other room was divided by low cellotex panels into three cubicles where the field men and investigators sat when they were in the office. Each cubicle contained a desk, a chair, a file cabinet, a telephone. When the occupants stood up they could look into each other’s eyes, but when they sat down they disappeared except for curling tendrils of cigarette smoke or the flash of tossed paper clips.
Perce Paypumps was the old man of the office, predating Mr. Plute. He had worn out three oak chairs since 1925 through his habit of tipping back on the hind legs, and had lived through the great flood of ’27, the epidemic of farm fires in the thirties, had tramped miles through blowdowns after the hurricane of ’38 investigating claims of ruin and wreckage. When Plute was away, Perce was in charge. As senior man he had the deep judgment to do claims settlement.
John Magool was easygoing and fat, an ex-paratrooper who had ballooned up within weeks after he got out of uniform, a good talker, a good listener and a good salesman. He was on the road three weeks out of four. When he came in to write up his policies he usually found houseplants on his desk and along his share of the partitioned windowsill. He carried them out to Mrs. Cutter’s office and stood silently, vines trailing over his arms.
‘Oh, those plants! Hope you don’t mind. I was just letting them get a little sun in there and forgot you’d be in this week. You have nice sunlight in the morning, John.’
The third desk belonged to investigator Vic Bake, twenty-two, eager and smart at his first job. He had a face like a scoop of mashed potato, a slack body, a genius for making connections. A congenital wry neck forced him to carry his face thrust forward and tilted a little. Still untouched by life, except for this deformity, he divided all acts of men into connivance or philanthropy. Uncorruptible, a tattletale in youth, a teacher’s pet, a winner of gold stars, he was now trying for a bigger role. Plute, who scented his ambition, thought him a little brute and gave him the ‘fires of suspicious origin’ to weasel into, sent him off to stoop and stalk the state fire inspector, to devil the state’s attorney with his suspicions and his evidence.
A hundred miles upstate, back home, Vic’s teeming family jammed into a house that smelled of dirty laundry. The father left before full light to drive a mad route. Five of the brothers went to their work in the bobbin factory. In Weeping Water Vic had his own room and a bath at a small boarding house near the river. He thought it luxurious.
He walked to the office through the ground fog in the mild February morning. Rotten ice crunched beneath his feet. A rind of snow stretched away into the fog. On the path he saw a blue thread, a stamp, two pulpy cigarette butts, a nail in its ice coffin.
He lined up his black rubbers so the toes touched the office wall, hung his poplin raincoat on the coat rack. He rummaged then, not in Mr. Plute’s office which was locked with two keys, but in Mrs. Cutter’s desk, taking the file cabinet keys and two of her Smith Brothers’ cough drops to suck on while he read the letters and studied the office accounts ledger, then into Perce’s cubicle to go through the folder of outstanding claims and put red mental asterisks in the corners of two cases. The Hakey business where old man Hakey told his daughter’s boyfriend to take a powder and then, lo and behold, at midnight Hakey’s Farm Feeds & Seeds burst into flame. The volunteer fire department couldn’t get the fire truck started. That one stank of arson. And what about this. Cattle auctioneer, Ruben Quilliam. House burned. Nothing really obvious, but Quilliam’s wife had just divorced him, and maybe he’d been drunk and set the house on fire to show her. He’d look around, talk to Quilliam’s neighbors. Perce was too soft; he had these claims ticketed for payment.
Vic pulled out the PAID CLAIMS folder for January, just to take another look. Sometimes you got a feeling for something wrong after the fact. They looked all right. But he didn’t remember seeing this one, ‘Lantern accidentally fell in hay. No telephone. Nearest neighbor a mile away. Driveway closed by snow.’ Perce must have checked it out and not bothered to show it to him. Those lousy old farms with no electricity or phone, something happened and it was all over. Seemed funny they didn’t manage to get even one cow out of the barn. He looked at the fire inspector’s scrawled sketch of the barn. It showed the place where the fire started outside the milk room. About twenty feet from the door. About six feet from the water pump. Seemed like they could have gotten some of the cows out. Or thrown a bucket of water on the fire. And they hadn’t wasted any time putting in their claim. The postcard from the farmer was dated the afternoon of the fire. A fairly big claim, $2000. He wrote the name in his notebook. Minkton Blood. Maybe worthwhile to take a run out there and take a look around. It was never too late.