20
It was just as hot in Pasadena as the day before and the big dark red brick house on Dresden Avenue looked just as cool and the little painted Negro waiting by the hitching block looked just as sad. The same butterfly landed on the same hydrangea bush—or it looked like the same one—the same heavy scent of summer lay on the morning, and the same middle-aged sourpuss with the frontier voice opened to my ring.
She led me along the same hallways to the same sunless sunroom. In it Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock sat in the same reed chaise-longue and as I came into the room she was pouring herself a slug from what looked like the same port bottle but was more probably a grandchild.
The maid shut the door, I sat down and put my hat on the floor, just like yesterday, and Mrs. Murdock gave me the same hard level stare and said:
“Well?”
“Things are bad,” I said. “The cops are after me.”
She looked as flustered as a side of beef. “Indeed. I thought you were more competent than that.”
I brushed it off. “When I left here yesterday morning a man followed me in a coup�. I don’t know what he was doing here or how he got here. I suppose he followed me here, but I feel doubtful about that. I shook him off, but he turned up again in the hall outside my office. He followed me again, so I invited him to explain why and he said he knew who I was and he needed help and asked me to come to his apartment on Bunker Hill and talk to him. I went, after I had seen Mr. Morningstar, and found the man shot to death on the floor of his bathroom.”
Mrs. Murdock sipped a little port. Her hand might have shaken a little, but the light in the room was too dim for me to be sure. She cleared her throat.
“Go on.”
“His name is George Anson Phillips. A young, blond fellow, rather dumb. He claimed to be a private detective.”
“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Murdock said coldly. “I never saw him to my knowledge and I don’t know anything about him. Did you think I employed him to follow you?”
“I didn’t know what to think. He talked about pooling our resources and he gave me the impression that he was working for some member of your family. He didn’t say so in so many words.”
“He wasn’t. You can be quite definite on that.” The baritone voice was as steady as a rock.
“I don’t think you know quite as much about your family as you think you do, Mrs. Murdock.”
“I know you have been questioning my son—contrary to my orders,” she said coldly.
“I didn’t question him. He questioned me. Or tried to.”
“We’ll go into that later,” she said harshly. “What about this man you found shot? You are involved with the police on account of him?”
“Naturally. They want to know why he followed me, what I was working on, why he spoke to me, why he asked me to come to his apartment and why I went. But that is only the half of it.”
She finished her port and poured herself another glass.
“How’s your asthma?” I asked.
“Bad,” she said. “Get on with your story.”
“I saw Morningstar. I told you about that over the phone. He pretended not to have the Brasher Doubloon, but admitted it had been offered to him and said he could get it. As I told you. Then you told me it had been returned to you, so that was that.”
I waited, thinking she would tell me some story about how the coin had been returned, but she just stared at me bleakly over the wine glass.
“So, as I had made a sort of arrangement with Mr. Morningstar to pay him a thousand dollars for the coin—”
“You had no authority to do anything like that,” she barked.
I nodded, agreeing with her.
“Maybe I was kidding him a little,” I said. “And I know I was kidding myself. Anyway after what you told me over the phone I tried to get in touch with him to tell him the deal was off. He’s not in the phone book except at his office. I went to his office. This was quite late. The elevator man said he was still in his office. He was lying on his back on the floor, dead. Killed by a blow on the head and shock, apparently. Old men die easily. The blow might not have been intended to kill him. I called the Receiving Hospital, but didn’t give my name.”
“That was wise of you,” she said.
“Was it? It was considerate of me, but I don’t think I’d call it wise. I want to be nice, Mrs. Murdock. You understand that in your rough way, I hope. But two murders happened in a matter of hours and both the bodies were found by me. And both the victims were connected—in some manner—with your Brasher Doubloon.”
“I don’t understand. This other, younger man also?”
“Yes. Didn’t I tell you over the phone? I thought I did.” I wrinkled my brow, thinking back. I knew I had.
She said calmly: “It’s possible. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to what you said. You see, the doubloon had already been returned. And you sounded a little drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk. I might have felt a little shock, but I wasn’t drunk. You take all this very calmly.”
“What do you want me to do?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m connected with one murder already, by having found the body and reported it. I may presently be connected with another, by having found the body and not reported it. Which is much more serious for me. Even as far as it goes, I have until noon today to disclose the name of my client.”
“That,” she said, still much too calm for my taste, “would be a breach of confidence. You are not going to do that, I’m sure.”
“I wish you’d leave that damn port alone and make some effort to understand the position,” I snapped at her.
She looked vaguely surprised and pushed her glass away—about four inches away.
“This fellow Phillips,” I said, “had a license as a private detective. How did I happen to find him dead? Because he followed me and I spoke to him and he asked me to come to his apartment. And when I got there he was dead. The police know all this. They may even believe it. But they don’t believe the connection between Phillips and me is quite that much of a coincidence. They think there is a deeper connection between Phillips and me and they insist on knowing what I am doing, who I am working for. Is that clear?”
“You’ll find a way out of all that,” she said. “I expect it to cost me a little more money, of course.”
I felt myself getting pinched around the nose. My mouth felt dry. I needed air. I took another deep breath and another dive into the tub of blubber that was sitting across the room from me on the reed chaise-longue, looking as unperturbed as a bank president refusing a loan.
“I’m working for you,” I said, “now, this week, today. Next week I’ll be working for somebody else, I hope. And the week after that for still somebody else. In order to do that I have to be on reasonably good terms with the police. They don’t have to love me, but they have to be fairly sure I am not cheating on them. Assume Phillips knew nothing about the Brasher Doubloon. Assume, even, that he knew about it, but that his death had nothing to do with it. I still have to tell the cops what I know about him. And they have to question anybody they want to question. Can’t you understand that?”
“Doesn’t the law give you the right to protect a client?” she snapped. “If it doesn’t, what is the use of anyone’s hiring a detective?”
I got up and walked around my chair and sat down again. I leaned forward and took hold of my kneecaps and squeezed them until my knuckles glistened.
“The law, whatever it is, is a matter of give and take, Mrs. Murdock. Like most other things. Even if I had the legal right to stay clammed up—refuse to talk—and got away with it once, that would be the end of my business. I’d be a guy marked for trouble. One way or another they would get me. I value your business, Mrs. Murdock, but not enough to cut my throat for you and bleed in your lap.”
She reached for her glass and emptied it.
“You seem to have made a nice mess of the whole thing,” she said. “You didn’t find my daughter-in-law and you didn’t find my Brasher Doubloon. But you found a couple of dead men that I have nothing to do with and you have neatly arranged matters so that I must tell the police all my private and personal business in order to protect you from your own incompetence. That’s what I see. If I am wrong, pray correct me.”
She poured some more wine and gulped it too fast and went into a paroxysm of coughing. Her shaking hand slid the glass on to the table, slopping the wine. She threw herself forward in her seat and got purple in the face.
I jumped up and went over and landed one on her beefy back that would have shaken the City Hall.
She let out a long strangled wail and drew her breath in rackingly and stopped coughing. I pressed one of the keys on her dictaphone box and when somebody answered, metallic and loud, through the metal disk I said: “Bring Mrs. Murdock a glass of water, quick!” and then let the key up again.
I sat down again and watched her pull herself together. When her breath was coming evenly and without effort, I said: “You’re not tough. You just think you’re tough. You been living too long with people that are scared of you. Wait’ll you meet up with some law. Those boys are professionals. You’re just a spoiled amateur.”
The door opened and the maid came in with a pitcher of ice water and a glass. She put them down on the table and went out.
I poured Mrs. Murdock a glass of water and put it in her hand.
“Sip it, don’t drink it. You won’t like the taste of it, but it won’t hurt you.”
She sipped, then drank half of the glass, then put the glass down and wiped her lips.
“To think,” she said raspingly, “that out of all the snoopers for hire I could have employed, I had to pick out a man who would bully me in my own home.”
“That’s not getting you anywhere either,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time. What’s our story to the police going to be?”
“The police mean nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. And if you give them my name, I shall regard it as a thoroughly disgusting breach of faith.”
That put me back where we started.
“Murder changes everything, Mrs. Murdock. You can’t dummy up on a murder case. We’ll have to tell them why you employed me and what to do. They won’t publish it in the papers, you know. That is, they won’t if they believe it. They certainly won’t believe you hired me to investigate Elisha Morningstar just because he called up and wanted to buy the doubloon. They may not find out that you couldn’t have sold the coin, if you wanted to, because they might not think of that angle. But they won’t believe you hired a private detective just to investigate a possible purchaser. Why should you?”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?”
“No. You can’t fob the cops off that way. You have to satisfy them that you are being frank and open and have nothing to hide. As long as they think you are hiding something they never let up. Give them a reasonable and plausible story and they go away cheerful. And the most reasonable and plausible story is always the truth. Any objection to telling it?”
“Every possible objection,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Do we have to tell them that I suspected my daughter-in-law of stealing the coin and that I was wrong?”
“It would be better.”
“And that it has been returned and how?”
“It would be better.”
“That is going to humiliate me very much.”
I shrugged.
“You’re a callous brute,” she said. “You’re a coldblooded fish. I don’t like you. I deeply regret ever having met you.”
“Mutual,” I said.
She reached a thick finger to a key and barked into the talking box. “Merle. Ask my son to come in here at once. And I think you may as well come in with him.”
She released the key, pressed her broad fingers together and let her hands drop heavily to her thighs. Her bleak eyes went up to the ceiling.
Her voice was quiet and sad saying: “My son took the coin. Mr. Marlowe. My son. My own son.”
I didn’t say anything. We sat there glaring at each other. In a couple of minutes they both came in and she barked at them to sit down.
21
Leslie Murdock was wearing a greenish slack suit and his hair looked damp, as if he had just been taking a shower. He sat hunched forward, looking at the white buck shoes on his feet, and turning a ring on his finger. He didn’t have his long black cigarette holder and he looked a little lonely without it. Even his mustache seemed to droop a little more than it had in my office.
Merle Davis looked just the same as the day before. Probably she always looked the same. Her copper blond hair was dragged down just as tight, her shell-rimmed glasses looked just as large and empty, her eyes behind them just as vague. She was even wearing the same one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind, not even earrings.
I had the curious feeling of reliving something that had already happened.
Mrs. Murdock sipped her port and said quietly:
“All right, son. Tell Mr. Marlowe about the doubloon. I’m afraid he has to be told.”
Murdock looked up at me quickly and then dropped his eyes again. His mouth twitched. When he spoke his voice had the toneless quality, a flat tired sound, like a man making a confession after an exhausting battle with his conscience.
“As I told you yesterday in your office I owe Morny a lot of money. Twelve thousand dollars. I denied it afterwards, but it’s true. I do owe it. I didn’t want mother to know. He was pressing me pretty hard for payment. I suppose I knew I would have to tell her in the end, but I was weak enough to want to put it off. I took the doubloon, using her keys one afternoon when she was asleep and Merle was out. I gave it to Morny and he agreed to hold it as security because I explained to him that he couldn’t get anything like twelve thousand dollars for it unless he could give its history and show that it was legitimately in his possession.”
He stopped talking and looked up at me to see how I was taking it. Mrs. Murdock had her eyes on my face, practically puttied there. The little girl was looking at Murdock with her lips parted and an expression of suffering on her face.
Murdock went on. “Morny gave me a receipt, in which he agreed to hold the coin as collateral and not to convert it without notice and demand. Something like that. I don’t profess to know how legal it was. When this man Morningstar called up and asked about the coin I immediately became suspicious that Morny either was trying to sell it or that he was at least thinking of selling it and was trying to get a valuation on it from somebody who knew about rare coins. I was badly scared.”