"Hooked a couple of chains to the window and yanked it out with a ten-ton truck," Kerman said, grinning from ear to ear. "A little crude, but effective. Where's the blonde?"
Where the mess-grill window had been there was now a gaping hole and shattered brickwork.
I hauled Kerman into Anona's room while Finnegan guarded the corridor. It took us about ten seconds to wrap the unconscious girl in a sheet and carry her out of the room.
"Rear-guard action, Mike," I said as we swept past him to the hole in the wall. "Shoot if you have to."
"Sling her over my shoulder," Kerman said, twittering with excitement. "There's a ladder against the wall."
I helped him climb up on the tottering brickwork. A naked arm and leg hung limply near his face.
"Now I know why guys join the Fire Service," he said, as he began his cautious climb down the ladder.
Below I could see a large truck parked near the house and at the foot of the ladder I spotted Paula. She waved to me.
"Okay, Mike," I called. "Let's go."
As Mike joined me, the door at the end of the corridor burst open and the hatchet-face nurse appeared. She gave one gaping look at us and the ruined wall and started to scream.
We scrambled down the ladder and piled into the truck.
Paula was already at the driving-wheel, and, as we scrambled into the back of the truck, she let in the clutch and drove crazily across the flower beds.
Kerman had laid Anona on the floor and was looking down at her.
"Yum, yum," he said, and twirled his moustache. "If I'd known she was as good as this, I'd have come sooner."
Chapter V
I
A buzzer buzzed, and the platinum blonde unwound her slinky form from behind her desk and came over to me. She said Mr. Willet would see me now. She spoke as if she were in church, and looked as if she should have been in the front row of Izzy Jacob's pretties at the Orchid Room Follies.
I followed the sway of her hips across the outer office to the inner sanctum. She tapped on the door with an emerald green nail, opened it and tucked up a stray curl the way women have as she said, "Mr. Malloy is here."
She stood aside as my cue to enter. I entered.
Willet was entrenched behind his super-sized desk and was staring dubiously at something that looked like a Last Will and Testament, and probably was. A fat, gold-tipped cigarette burned between two brown fingers. He waved me to a chair without looking up.
The platinum blonde went away. I watched her go. At the door she managed to snap a hip so it quivered under the black sheen of her silk dress. I was sorry when the door closed on her.
I sat down, and looked inside my hat and tried to remember when I had bought it. It seemed a long, long time ago. The hatter's imprint was indecipherable. I told myself I'd buy myself a new hat if I could persuade Willet to part with any more money. If I couldn't, then I'd make do with this one.
I thought these thoughts to pass the time. Willet seemed lost in his legal film-flammery: a picture of a big-shot lawyer making money. You could almost hear the dollars pouring into his bank.
"Cigarette," he said suddenly and absently. Without taking his eyes off the mass of papers he clutched in his hand, he pushed the silver box towards me.
I took one of the fat, gold-tipped cigarettes I found in the box and lit it. I hoped it would make me feel like a moneymaker too, but it didn't. It looked a lot better than it tasted: that kind of cigarette usually does.
Then suddenly, just as I was getting ready to doze, he tossed the papers into the out-tray, hitched forward his chair, and said, "Now, Mr. Malloy, let's get at it. I have another appointment in ten minutes."
"Then I had better see you some other time," I said. "We won't be through in ten minutes. I don't know how much you value the Crosby account, Mr. Willet, but it must be worth a tidy sum. Without shouting it from the house tops it wouldn't surprise me if you won't have the account much longer."
That jarred him. He stared at me bleakly, crushed out his half-smoked cigarette and leaned half-way across his desk.
"What exactly do you mean?"
"Do you want it in detail or do you want just a quick peep at it?" I asked. "It's bad either way, but in detail it sort of creeps up on you."
"How long will it take?"
"A half an hour, maybe more; and then you'll want to ask questions. Say an hour, maybe a little longer. But you won't be bored."
He chewed his lower lip, frowning, then reached for the telephone and cancelled three appointments all in a row. I could see it hurt him to do it, but he did it. A ten-minute interview with a guy like Willet would he worth a hundred bucks, maybe more—to him, not to you.
"Go ahead." he said, leaning back in his chair. "Why haven't you been in touch with me before?"
"That's part of it." I told him, and laid my hat under my chair. I had a feeling I might he buying a new one before very long. "I've spent the past five days in an asylum for the insane."
But I wasn't going to jar him so easily again. He made a grunting noise, but his expression didn't change.
"Before I get started," I said, "maybe you might tell me about Miss Crosby's banking account. Did you get a look at it?"
He shook his head.
"The bank manager quite rightly refused. If he had shown it to me and the fact had leaked out, he would have lost the account: it's worth a lot of money. But he did tell me the insurance money had been converted to bearer bonds and has been withdrawn from the account."
"Did he say when?"
"Soon after probate."
"And you have written to Miss Crosby asking her to call on you?"
"Yes. She'll be here to-morrow afternoon."
"When did you write to her?"
"Tuesday: five days ago."
"Did she answer by return?"
He nodded.
"Then I don't think she'll keep the appointment. Anyway, we'll see." I tapped the ash into his silver ash-tray. "All right, that covers the points we made together. Now I'd better get on with my tale."
I told him how MacGraw and Hartsell had called on me. He listened, sunk down in his chair, his eyes as anonymous as a pair of headlights. He neither laughed nor cried when I described how they had beaten me up. It hadn't happened to him, so why should he care? But when I told him how Maureen had appeared on the scene, his brows came down in a frown, and he allowed himself the luxury of tapping on the edge of his desk with his fingernails. That was probably the nearest he would ever get to a show of excitement.
'"She took me to a house on the cliff road, east of San Diego Highway. She said it was hers: a nice place if you like places that cost a lot of money and are smart enough to house movie stars in. Did you know she had it?"
He shook his head.
"We sat around and talked," I went on. "She wanted to know why I was interested in her, and I showed her her sister's letter. For some reason or other she seemed scared. She wasn't acting: she was genuinely frightened. I asked her if she was being blackmailed at that time, and she said she wasn't, and that Janet was probably trying to make trouble for her. She said Janet hated her. Did she?"
Willet was playing with a paper-knife now; his face was set, and there was a worried look in his eyes.
"I understand they didn't get on: nothing more than that. You know how it is with stepsisters."
I said I knew how it was with step-sisters.
Time went by for a few minutes. The only sound in the room was the busy tick of Willet's desk clock.
"Go on," he said curtly. "What else did she say?"
"As you know, Janet and a guy named Douglas Sherrill were engaged to be married. What you probably don't know is Sherrill is a dark horse; possibly a con man, certainly a crook. According to Maureen, she stole Sherrill from Janet."
Willet didn't say anything. He waited.
"The two girls had a show-down which developed into a fight," I went on. "Janet grabbed a shot-gun. Old man Crosby appeared and tried to take the gun away from her. He got shot and killed."
I thought for a moment Willet was going to jump right across his desk. But he controlled himself, and said in a voice that seemed to come from under the floor, "Did Maureen tell you this?"
"Oh. yes. She wanted to get it off her chest. Now here's another bit you'll like. The shooting had to be hushed up. I was wrong about Dr. Salzer signing Crosby's certificate. He didn't sign it. Mrs. Salzer signed it. According to her she is a qualified doctor, and a friend of the family. One of the girls called her and she came around and fixed things. Lessways, who isn't the type to make things awkward for the wealthy, accepted the yarn that Crosby was cleaning his gun and shot himself accidentally. He took their word for it. So did Brandon."
Willet lit a cigarette. He looked like a hungry man who's been given a pie and finds nothing inside it.
"Go on," he said, and sat back.
"For some reason or other, a nurse named Anona Freedlander was in the house at the time of the shooting, and she saw the accident. Mrs. Salzer wasn't taking any chances. She locked the nurse up to make sure she wouldn't talk. She's been in a padded cell at Salzer's sanatorium ever since."
"You mean—against her will?"
"Not only against her will, but for two years they have been pumping drugs into her."
"You're not suggesting Maureen Crosby is aware of this?"
"I don't know."
Willet was breathing heavily now. The thought that a client as wealthy as Maureen Crosby might be charged with kidnapping seemed to shock him, although Anona Freedlander's predicament hadn't made him turn a hair.
"Incidentally, in case you're working up some sympathy for her," I said, "we got Anona out of the sanatorium last night."
"Oh?" He looked disconcerted. "Is she likely to make trouble?"
I grinned unpleasantly.
"I should think it's more than likely. Wouldn't you want to start something after being kept locked up for two years just because some rich people are shy of appearing in the newspapers?"
He fingered his chin and did some heavy thinking.
"Perhaps we could give her a little compensation," he said at last, but he didn't look very happy. "I'd better see her."
"No one sees her until she's ready to see anyone. Right now, she doesn't seem to know whether she's coming or going." I crushed out the cigarette and lit one of my own. "This kidnapping should be reported to the police. If it is, then the whole sordid story will hit the headlines. It will be your job then to hand over the Crosby millions to the Research Centre. They may or may not want you to handle the account: probably not."
"All the more reason why I should have a talk with her," he said. "These things can usually be arranged."
"Don't be too sure about that. Then there's this little incident that happened to me," I said mildly. "I was also kidnapped and held prisoner for five days, and also had a certain amount of drug pumped into me. That's another little thing that should he reported to the police."
"Why talk yourself out of a good job?" he returned, and for the first time since I had been in the room he allowed himself a slight grin. "I was about to suggest an extra retainer: say another five hundred dollars."
That made my new hat a certainty.
"That tempts me. We might call it an insurance against risks," I said. "But it would have to be over and above the fee you will pay for the work we are doing."
"That's all right."
"Well, perhaps we might leave Anona Freedlander for the moment and go on with the story," I said. "There's quite a bit more; it gets better as it goes along."
He pushed back his chair and got up. I watched him cross to a cellaret against the opposite wall and return with a bottle of Haigh & Haigh and two small glasses.
"Do you use this stuff?" he asked as he sat down again.
I said I used it whenever I could.
He poured two drinks, pushed one across the desk towards me, tossed the other down his throat and immediately refilled his glass. He put the bottle midway between us.
"Help yourself," he said.
I drank a little of the Scotch. It was very good: quite the best liquor I had had in months. I thought it was wonderful how a big-shot lawyer could unbend when he sees trouble coming towards him with his name on it.
"According to Maureen, Crosby's death preyed on Janet's mind," I told him. "Maybe it did, but she certainly had an odd way of showing it. I should have thought she wouldn't have felt like playing tennis or running around at a time like that, but apparently she did. Anyway, also according to Maureen, Janet committed suicide about six or seven weeks after the shooting. She took arsenic."
A tiny drop of Scotch wobbled out of Willet's glass on to his blotter. He said, "Good God!" under his breath.
"That was hushed up, too. As it happened Mrs. Salzer was away at the time, so Maureen and Dr. Salzer called in Dr. Bewley, a harmless old goat, and told him Janet was suffering from malignant endocarditis, and he obligingly issued the death certificate. Janet had a personal maid, Eudora Drew, who possibly overheard Salzer and Maureen cooking up this yarn. She put on the bite, and they paid her. I got a line on her and went to see her. She was smart enough to fob me off and get on to Salzer, telling him I was offering five hundred bucks for information, and if he liked to raise the ante she would keep her mouth shut. Mrs. Salzer had an answer to that. She sent along an ex-gunman who was working at the sanatorium to reason with her. According to Mrs. S. he got rough and killed her."
Willet drew in a long, slow breath. He took a drink like a man who needs a drink.
"The family butler, John Stevens, also knew something, or suspected something," I went on. "I was persuading him to loosen up when he was kidnapped by six Wops who work for Sherrill. They got a little tough with him, and he died, but that still makes murder. Two murders. Now we get to the third. Are you liking this?"
