The Case of the One-Penny Orange: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Two) (8 page)

“Perhaps a great deal. I'm not sure. Please forgive me. I am trying to get to the bottom of something. It's like a puzzle, and I am trying to fit the pieces together.”

“You mean the house being broken into? I don't understand.”

“Partly that. You see, Mrs. Briggs, two people were murdered during the past twenty-four hours. I am investigating these murders. I imagine you haven't seen the morning paper?”

“No, I haven't. But what can this possibly have to do with my house being robbed?”

“I'm not sure. I think there's a connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“If you will only bear with me a little — and allow me some personal questions. It's very important.”

“All right. But I'm very confused and I'm beginning to be frightened again.”

“There's no reason for you to be frightened, and if we can get to the bottom of this, it will only add to your safety and your son's safety. By the way, where is your son?”

“At school. Why my son? What has he got to do with this?”

“I'm not sure — yet.”

“Why don't you tell me the truth? What are you after? What is happening?”

She was becoming very upset, her eyes wet with moisture now. Masuto realized that she was a very emotional woman; well, what good actress wasn't. He said gently, “I will tell you what I am after, but let me do it my way. If you will simply answer my questions.”

“All right.”

“Yesterday — what time was the funeral?”

“Nine o'clock in the morning.”

“And you returned here at one?”

“Closer to two.”

“As I remember you told me yesterday, you had lunch and then you dropped your son off at school?”

“Yes.”

“You all had lunch together?”

“No, just my son and I. I dropped my husband off at his studio on Wilshire. He had some pressing things to attend to.”

“At what time?”

“I don't remember, really. What difference does it make?”

“Try to remember.”

“I think about noontime.”

“Then how did your husband get back here to the house?”

“After I dropped Bernie off, I picked up Jack at his office. It was about one-thirty, maybe a little later.”

“Your son's name is Bernard?”

“No, it's Bernie. He was named after my father.”

“I see. Tell me something about your father, Mrs. Briggs.”

“Why? How can it have anything to do with this?”

“It might.”

“What shall I tell you? I hardly remember my father.”

“Was he wealthy?”

“I suppose so. At one time. He was a publisher. Not a very large publisher, but a very good one.”

“And what happened to his wealth?”

“What happened to the wealth of any German in Hitler's time who was Jewish or half Jewish? They took everything he had, everything. When we escaped and got to England, we had nothing but the clothes on our backs. Nothing. My mother found work as a cook in a little restaurant. Then when we got to America, she became a servant, a live-in cook. She was only sixty-one when she died — so young but worn out.” Her eyes filled with tears now.

“I'm so sorry.”

“No, it's all right. My husband gets furious when I talk about the old times. He doesn't care for Jews, and once he heard me tell Bernie that I was Jewish, because after what my mother and father had been through, what else could I say, but he was in a rage with me. Why am I telling you all this?”

“Please, I want to hear about it. That's why you're talking to me.”

She smiled through her tears. “I like you, Sergeant Masuto. I'll tell you a story, and maybe you'll understand better how I feel. I was once up for a very decent part, which I did not get. Well, I wasn't right for it. But I was interviewed by the producer — his name was Deutschmaster. He was a Jew who had been a refugee and then had returned to Germany and become a very important producer. He's dead now. Well, I noticed in the pocket of his vest, inside his jacket, he had two small silver spoons, and I asked him why. Do you know what he told me — he told me that when he was a refugee in Europe, he discovered that money could be worthless, of perhaps he had none, but he had a sterling silver spoon and it bought him life for a week. So you see, the two silver spoons he carried were, as he explained to me, a sort of symbolic reminder. Do you know what I am trying to say?”

“I think so.” Then Masuto was silent, staring at her until he realized that she was becoming uncomfortable under his gaze. “Forgive me. Does the name Gaylord Schwartzman mean anything to you?”

“No. Should it?”

“I don't know. What concentration camp did your father die in, do you know?”

“Buchenwald.”

“And you say he was well-to-do once, but when your mother escaped she had nothing. But how could that be? I am not impugning anything you say, please believe me, but many others escaped and many of them brought small things with them — jewels, things of that sort.”

“Whatever she had went to pay for our way out.”

“You said that you arrived in England penniless and empty-handed. Empty-handed — do you mean that literally?”

“But you are asking me to remember something that happened when I was three years old.”

“Try. Luggage. A large handbag. Some treasured things — things that would be important to her but worthless even to the Nazis.”

“What kind of things?”

“Perhaps letters from your father — pictures, a few small mementos, things a woman would treasure.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, she had some things like that. There were some snapshots of herself and my father, some letters, a few other things, a lock of my baby hair.”

“Do you still have these things?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“In her room, but her room was so upset, like the other rooms. I haven't gotten to it yet. I worked on my son's room this morning. I felt that Mother's could wait — since she's gone.”

“May I look in her room?”

Ellen Briggs stiffened now and faced Masuto squarely. “No, Sergeant. No. Not unless you tell me what you're after and why. I have been very patient with you, but no more. You are not here with a search warrant or by any official right, but only through my tolerance. And my tolerance has run out.”

Masuto smiled. “Very well. I'll tell you.

“Yesterday, shortly before I came here, a man was murdered. He had lived for years in Beverly Hills under the name of Ivan Gaycheck. He was a stamp dealer, with a shop on North Canon Drive. His real name was Gaylord Schwartzman, and he was once a captain in the SS — at Buchenwald. He was shot through the head with a small pistol. But his store was not robbed then. Nothing was disturbed. Last night his assistant, a man by the name of Ronald Haber, was beaten to death in his apartment in West Hollywood. His apartment was ransacked, as your house was. A few hours later, Gaycheck's store was ransacked.”

Staring at him wide-eyed, she shook her head. “What has that to do with us?”

“I put together a scenario of sorts. I must, you know. Otherwise I would fumble around blindly. Gaycheck made a notation on his calendar — PM. Just the two letters. There is a stamp of enormous value. It was issued in 1847 on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. It is called the One-Penny Orange. Penny Mauritius, PM. I am guessing. Your house ransacked, nothing taken. Your father, dead in Buchenwald. Gaycheck — Schwartzman, and Buchenwald. Haber's apartment, your house, Gaycheck's store.”

“I still don't understand you.”

“Try, Mrs. Briggs. Put yourself in the place of your father — in the 1930s in Germany. He knows that sooner or later he will be arrested — unless he escapes. But if he escapes, his property will be forfeit. He plans an escape from Germany, some way to take something with him, so that he will not arrive at his destination as a pauper. But what should he take? Money? Where can he hide it if he is stopped and searched? Jewels? The same problem. The SS were not novices at searching, and your father was not the first one to think of this problem. Now tell me something — do you know what books your father's firm published?”

“Some of them. My mother loved books. She told me many stories about my father's publishing house.”

“Did he ever publish any books that related to stamp collecting?”

Her face lit up with excitement. “Yes, he did! Of course! He published the German edition of
Gibbons
catalog.”

“The British stamp catalog. Then he knew the value of British colonial stamps, and he must have known dealers and collectors.”

“I would suppose so.”

“And he was a publisher, a well-read man. He would have known the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Tell me, Mrs. Briggs, did you ever read
The Purloined Letter?
”

“I think so. Isn't that the story where a letter of great importance, instead of being hidden, is simply turned inside out and put in a letter holder with other letters?”

“Exactly. Now this is what I think your father did — and of course it is only a guess. But the pieces fit. I think that when your father realized what course he must take, he bought a stamp of great value, but not simply a stamp. An original cover.”

“What on earth is an original cover?”

“I'm no stamp expert, but I have been informing myself today. An original cover means the stamp on the posted envelope. But I understand that in those times they did not put writing paper into an envelope. They wrote on a square sheet of paper and folded it to envelop size and sealed it. The envelope was the letter. Somewhere — perhaps we'll never know where — your father found and bought an original cover, very probably of the One-Penny 1847 Mauritius Orange. He then put it away, probably with some mementos that would excite no suspicion. He didn't try to hide it. He probably took the chance that no one who saw it would know what it was — thereby hiding it in the safest manner possible — by not hiding it at all.”

“And if all this happened,” she said in a whisper, “what would be the value of this — cover, as you call it?”

“Then, in 1939, I don't know. Certainly substantial. Today, I am told, it's worth over three hundred thousand dollars, perhaps more.”

“Oh, my God — all those years of poverty. And if what you say is true, it was lost, just thrown away somewhere in Germany.”

“I don't think so. You see, your father must have been arrested suddenly.”

“He was.”

“Certainly before he had an opportunity to explain to your mother what he had done. Or perhaps she was not to know. Perhaps it was to be his secret — and then it was too late to tell her. But I think she took the cover out of Germany with her.”

“Oh, no. No. My mother worked as a servant.”

“Because she never knew.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“Understand me,” Masuto said evenly. “I am building a premise. I don't know whether I am right or wrong. But I think that all these years that cover remained among your mother's possessions. Granted, she had very little — only a few mementos. But I think that somewhere among her few possessions was this original cover. She may have kept it simply for sentimental reasons — or what is more likely is that your father told her that it was important to him, without ever telling her why.”

“She did have a little packet of letters,” Ellen remembered. “They were tied with a piece of ribbon. When I was a little girl she would look at them sometimes, but then she put them away and I don't think she looked at them for years.”

“Where did she keep them?”

“I don't think I know. You see, we only moved into this house a week ago — it's such a splendid house. This is the first time Jack — my husband — made any money. I wanted her to have a few years of peace and happiness.…” She broke into tears, covering her face with her hands. “She wouldn't have! Oh, damn it, she wouldn't have. Jack hated her. She had no peace and no happiness. I wasn't even with her when she died.”

“How did she die?”

“Oh, let me wash my face. I feel so rotten. All those years of wretched poverty, and there might have been a fortune under my nose. She could have lived like a human being. Please — please excuse me.”

She fled into the bathroom behind the kitchen, leaving Masuto to sit there and stare at the half-eaten slice of cake on his plate and to wonder whether the edifice he had created was a total fiction. He liked her, respected her, and felt his heart go out to her — and pondered the strange fact that women like Ellen Briggs so often married men like Jack Briggs. Then she came back, her eyes reddened but dry.

“I'm all right now. I suppose you want to see Mother's room?”

“Yes. But I asked you before — and you don't have to answer if it's too painful — I asked you how your mother died.”

“She died of a heart attack, Sergeant Masuto. Alone. I wasn't even there to be with her. Just three days ago. I had gone with Bernie to the school to register him. I left him there and came home. I went up to her room, and she was lying on her bed — dead.”

“I am sorry,” Masuto said. “I make you talk about things you don't want to talk about, and I force you to remember things you should not have to remember. I am so sorry.”

She led the way up the stairs. All the bedrooms were off a central hallway. Her mother's was a corner room, bright and cheerful, with a wooden balcony. But it was still in total disorder, clothes on the floor, the drawers emptied and flung about senselessly, papers and letters scattered about. Ellen walked around, picking up envelopes and folded letters. Without a word, she handed them to Masuto. They were written in German and carried old stamps of the time of the Third Reich.

“These are the letters, Mrs. Briggs?”

She nodded. Masuto handed them back to her, then walked around the room — aimlessly, it appeared to Ellen, except that his dark eyes were restless and excited. Then he got down on his knees and reached under the bed. When he stood up, he had a piece of faded blue ribbon in his hand.