“Kind of slide it out,” I said, “when you’re not looking.”
“Hadn’t you better,” she said very quietly, “get on with telling me about Merle? And don’t gloat too much, if you have found out a few family secrets, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I’m not gloating about anything. You sent Merle to Vannier’s place this afternoon, with five hundred dollars.”
“And if I did?” She poured some of her port and sipped, eyeing me steadily over the glass.
“When did he ask for it?”
“Yesterday. I couldn’t get it out of the bank until today. What happened?”
“Vannier’s been blackmailing you for about eight years, hasn’t he? On account of something that happened on April 26th, 1933?”
A sort of panic twitched in the depths of her eyes, but very far back, very dim, and somehow as though it had been there for a long time and had just peeped out at me for a second.
“Merle told me a few things,” I said. “Your son told me how his father died. I looked up the records and the papers today. Accidental death. There had been an accident in the street under his office and a lot of people were craning out of windows. He just craned out too far. There was some talk of suicide because he was broke and had fifty thousand life insurance for his family. But the coroner was nice and slid past that.”
“Well?” she said. It was a cold hard voice, neither a croak nor a gasp. A cold hard utterly composed voice.
“Merle was Horace Bright’s secretary. A queer little girl in a way, overtimid, not sophisticated, a little girl mentality, likes to dramatize herself, very oldfashioned ideas about men, all that sort of thing. I figure he got high one time and made a pass at her and scared her out of her socks.”
“Yes?” Another cold hard monosyllable prodding me like a gun barrel.
“She brooded and got a little murderous inside. She got a chance and passed right back at him. While he was leaning out of a window. Anything in it?”
“Speak plainly, Mr. Marlowe. I can stand plain talk.”
“Good grief, how plain do you want it? She pushed her employer out of a window. Murdered him, in two words. And got away with it. With your help.”
She looked down at the left hand clenched over her cards. She nodded. Her chin moved a short inch, down, up.
“Did Vannier have any evidence?” I asked. “Or did he just happen to see what happened and put the bite on you and you paid him a little now and then to avoid scandal—and because you were really very fond of Merle?”
She played another card before she answered me. Steady as a rock.
“He talked about a photograph,” she said. “But I never believed it. He couldn’t have taken one. And if he had taken one, he would have shown it to me—sooner or later.”
I said: “No, I don’t think so. It would have been a very fluky shot, even if he happened to have the camera in his hand, on account of the doings down below in the street. But I can see he might not have dared to show it. You’re a pretty hard woman, in some ways. He might have been afraid you would have him taken care of. I mean that’s how it might look to him, a crook. How much have you paid him?”
“That’s none—” she started to say, then stopped and shrugged her big shoulders. A powerful woman, strong, rugged, ruthless and able to take it. She thought. “Eleven thousand one hundred dollars, not counting the five hundred I sent him this afternoon.”
“Ah. It was pretty darn nice of you, Mrs. Murdock. Considering everything.”
She moved a hand vaguely, made another shrug. “It was my husband’s fault,” she said. “He was drunk, vile. I don’t think be really hurt her, but, as you say, he frightened her out of her wits. I—I can’t blame her too much. She has blamed herself enough all these years.”
“She had to take the money to Vannier in person?”
“That was her idea of penance. A strange penance.”
I nodded. “I guess that would be in character. Later you married Jasper Murdock and you kept Merle with you and took care of her. Anybody else know?”
“Nobody. Only Vannier. Surely he wouldn’t tell anybody.”
“No. I hardly think so. Well, it’s all over now. Vannier is through.”
She lifted her eyes slowly and gave me a long level gaze. Her gray head was a rock on top of a hill. She put the cards down at last and clasped her hands tightly on the edge of the table. The knuckles glistened.
I said: “Merle came to my apartment when I was out. She asked the manager to let her in. He phoned me and I said yes. I got over there quickly. She told me she had shot Vannier.”
Her breath was a faint swift whisper in the stillness of the room.
“She had a gun in her bag, God knows why. Some idea of protecting herself against men, I suppose. But somebody—Leslie, I should guess—had fixed it to be harmless by jamming a wrong size cartridge in the breech. She told me she had killed Vannier and fainted. I got a doctor friend of mine. I went over to Vannier’s house. There was a key in the door. He was dead in a chair, long dead, cold, stiff. Dead long before Merle went there. She didn’t shoot him. Her telling me that was just drama. The doctor explained it after a fashion, but I won’t bore you with it. I guess you understand all right.”
She said: “Yes. I think I understand. And now?”
“She’s in bed, in my apartment. There’s a nurse there. I phoned Merle’s father long distance. He wants her to come home. That all right with you?”
She just stared.
“He doesn’t know anything,” I said quickly. “Not this or the other time. I’m sure of that. He just wants her to come home. I thought I’d take her. It seems to be my responsibility now. I’ll need that last five hundred that Vannier didn’t get for expenses.”
“And how much more?” she asked brutally.
“Don’t say that. You know better.”
“Who killed Vannier?”
“Looks like he committed suicide. A gun at his right hand. Temple contact wound. Morny and his wife were there while I was. I hid. Morny’s trying to pin it on his wife. She was playing games with Vannier. So she probably thinks he did it, or had it done. But it shapes up like suicide. The cops will be there by now. I don’t know what they will make of it. We just have to sit tight and wait it out.”
“Men like Vannier,” she said grimly, “don’t commit suicide.”
“That’s like saying girls like Merle don’t push people out of windows. It doesn’t mean anything.”
We stared at each other, with that inner hostility that had been there from the first. After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screen and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.
The trees down below cast heavy shadows under the moon. In the middle of the garden there was a sort of garden within a garden. I caught the glint of an ornamental pool. A lawn swing beside it. Somebody was lying in the lawn swing and a cigarette tip glowed as I looked down.
I went back into the room. Mrs. Murdock was playing solitaire again. I went over to the table and looked down.
“You got the ace of clubs out,” I said.
“I cheated,” she said without looking up.
“There was one thing I wanted to ask you,” I said. “This doubloon business is still cloudy, on account of a couple of murders which don’t seem to make sense now that you have the coin back. What I wondered was if there was anything about the Murdock Brasher that might identify it to an expert—to a man like old Morningstar.”
She thought, sitting still, not looking up. “Yes. There might be. The coinmaker’s initials, E. B., are on the left wing of the eagle. Usually, I’m told, they are on the right wing. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
I said: “I think that might be enough. You did actually get the coin back, didn’t you? I mean that wasn’t just something said to stop my ferreting around?”
She looked up swiftly and then down. “It’s in the strong room at this moment. If you can find my son, he will show it to you.”
“Well, I’ll say good night. Please have Merle’s clothes packed and sent to my apartment in the morning.”
Her head snapped up again and her eyes glared. “You’re pretty highhanded about all this, young man.”
“Have them packed,” I said. “And send them. You don’t need Merle any more—now that Vannier is dead.”
Our eyes locked hard and held locked for a long moment. A queer stiff smile moved the corners of her lips. Then her head went down and her right hand took the top card off the pack held in her left hand and turned it and her eyes looked at it and she added it to the pile of unplayed cards below the layout, and then turned the next card, quietly, calmly, in a hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.
I went across the room and out, closed the door softly, went along the hall, down the stairs, along the lower hall past the sun room and Merle’s little office, and out into the cheerless stuffy unused living room that made me feel like an embalmed corpse just to be in it.
The french doors at the back opened and Leslie Murdock stepped in and stopped, staring at me.
33
His slack suit was rumpled and also his hair. His little reddish mustache looked just as ineffectual as ever. The shadows under his eyes were almost pits.
He was carrying his long black cigarette holder, empty, and tapping it against the heel of his left hand as he stood not liking me, not wanting to meet me, not wanting to talk to me.
“Good evening,” he said stiffly. “Leaving?”
“Not quite yet. I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t think we have anything to talk about. And I’m tired of talking.”
“Oh yes we have. A man named Vannier.”
“Vannier? I hardly know the man. I’ve seen him around. What I know I don’t like.”
“You know him a little better than that,” I said.
He came forward into the room and sat down in one of the I-dare-you-to-sit-in-me chairs and leaned forward to cup his chin in his left hand and look at the floor.
“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”
He lifted his eyes and almost smiled. “Who thereupon turns as pale as paper, froths at the mouth, and pulls a gun out of his right ear.”
I sat down near him and got a cigarette out. “That’s right. We ought to play it together sometime. You got a gun?”
“Not with me. I have one. You know that.”
“Have it with you last night when you called on Vannier?”
He shrugged and bared his teeth. “Oh. Did I call on Vannier last night?”
“I think so. Deduction. You smoke Benson and Hedges Virginia cigarettes. They leave a firm ash that keeps its shape. An ashtray at his house had enough of those little gray rolls to account for at least two cigarettes. But no stubs in the tray. Because you smoke them in a holder and a stub from a holder looks different. So you removed the stubs. Like it?”
“No.” His voice was quiet. He looked down at the floor again.
“That’s an example of deduction. A bad one. For there might not have been any stubs, but if there had been and they had been removed, it might have been because they had lipstick on them. Of a certain shade that would at least indicate the coloring of the smoker. And your wife has a quaint habit of throwing her stubs into the waste basket.”
“Leave Linda out of this,” he said coldly.
“Your mother still thinks Linda took the doubloon and that your story about taking it to give to Alex Morny was just a cover-up to protect her.”
“I said leave Linda out of it.” The tapping of the black holder against his teeth had a sharp quick sound, like a telegraph key.
“I’m willing to,” I said. “But I didn’t believe your story for a different reason. This.” I took the doubloon out and held it on my hand under his eyes.
He stared at it tightly. His mouth set.
“This morning when you were telling your story this was hocked on Santa Monica Boulevard for safekeeping. It was sent to me by a would-be detective named George Phillips. A simple sort of fellow who allowed himself to get into a bad spot through poor judgment and over-eagerness for a job. A thickset blond fellow in a brown suit, wearing dark glasses and a rather gay hat. Driving a sand-colored Pontiac, almost new. You might have seen him hanging about in the hall outside my office yesterday morning. He had been following me around and before that he might have been following you around.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Why would he do that?” I lit my cigarette and dropped the match in a jade ashtray that looked as if it had never been used as an ashtray.
“I said he might have. I’m not sure he did. He might have just been watching this house. He picked me up here and I don’t think he followed me here.” I still had the coin on my hand, looked down at it, turned it over by tossing it, looked at the initials E. B. stamped into the left wing, and put it away. “He might have been watching the house because he had been hired to peddle a rare coin to an old coin dealer named Morningstar. And the old coin dealer somehow suspected where the coin came from, and told Phillips, or hinted to him, and that the coin was stolen. Incidentally, he was wrong about that. If your Brasher Doubloon is really at this moment upstairs, then the coin Phillips was hired to peddle was not a stolen coin. It was a counterfeit.”