The High Window (17 page)

THIRTY-TWO

The moonlight lay like a white sheet on the front lawn except under the deodar where there was the thick darkness of black velvet. Lights in two lower windows were lit and in one upstairs room visible from the front. I walked across the stumble stones and rang the bell.

I didn’t look at the little painted Negro by the hitching block. I didn’t pat his head tonight. The joke seemed to have worn thin.

A white-haired, red-faced woman I hadn’t seen before opened the door and I said: “I’m Philip Marlowe. I’d like to see Mrs. Murdock. Mrs. Elizabeth Murdock.”

She looked doubtful. “I think she’s gone to bed,” she said. “I don’t think you can see her.”

“It’s only nine o’clock.”

“Mrs. Murdock goes to bed early.” She started to close the door.

She was a nice old thing and I hated to give the door the heavy shoulder. I just leaned against it.

“It’s about Miss Davis,” I said. “It’s important. Could you tell her that?”

“I’ll see.”

I stepped back and let her shut the door.

A mockingbird sang in a dark tree nearby. A car tore down the street much too fast and skidded around the next corner. The thin shreds of a girl’s laughter came back along the dark street as if the car had spilled them out in its rush.

The door opened after a while and the woman said: “You can come in.”

I followed her across the big empty entrance room. A single dim light burned in one lamp, hardly reaching to the opposite wall. The place was too still, and the air needed freshening. We went along the hall to the end and up a flight of stairs with a carved handrail and newel post. Another hall at the top, a door open towards the back.

I was shown in at the open door and the door was closed behind me. It was a big sitting room with a lot of chintz, a blue and silver wallpaper, a couch, a blue carpet and french windows open on a balcony. There was an awning over the balcony.

Mrs. Murdock was sitting in a padded wing chair with a card table in front of her. She was wearing a quilted robe and her hair looked a little fluffed out. She was playing solitaire. She had the pack in her left hand and she put a card down and moved another one before she looked up at me.

Then she said: “Well?”

I went over by the card table and looked down at the game. It was Canfield.

“Merle’s at my apartment,” I said. “She threw an ing-bing.”

Without looking up she said: “And just what is an ing-bing, Mr. Marlowe?”

She moved another card, then two more quickly.

“A case of the vapors, they used to call it,” I said. “Ever catch yourself cheating at that game?”

“It’s no fun if you cheat,” she said gruffly. “And very little if you don’t. What’s this about Merle? She has never stayed out like this before. I was getting worried about her.”

I pulled a slipper chair over and sat down across the table from her. It put me too low down. I got up and got a better chair and sat in that.

“No need to worry about her,” I said. “I got a doctor and a nurse. She’s asleep. She was over to see Vannier.”

She laid the pack of cards down and folded her big gray hands on the edge of the table and looked at me solidly.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said, “you and I had better have something out. I made a mistake calling you in the first place. That was my dislike of being played for a sucker, as you would say, by a hardboiled little animal like Linda. But it would have been much better, if I had not raised the point at all. The loss of the doubloon would have been much easier to bear than you are. Even if I had never got it back.”

“But you did get it back,” I said.

She nodded. Her eyes stayed on my face. “Yes. I got it back. You heard how.”

“I didn’t believe it.”

“Neither did I,” she said calmly. “My fool of a son was simply taking the blame for Linda. An attitude I find childish.”

“You have a sort of knack,” I said, “of getting yourselves surrounded with people who take such attitudes.”

She picked her cards up again and reached down to put a black ten on a red jack, both cards that were already in the layout. Then she reached sideways to a small heavy table on which was her port. She drank some, put the glass down and gave me a hard level stare.

“I have a feeling that you are going to be insolent, Mr. Marlowe.”

I shook my head. “Not insolent. Just frank. I haven’t done so badly for you, Mrs. Murdock. You did get the doubloon back. I kept the police away from you—so far. I didn’t do anything on the divorce, but I found Linda—your son knew where she was all the time—and I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with her. She knows she made a mistake marrying Leslie. However, if you don’t think you got value—”

She made a humph noise and played another card. She got the ace of diamonds up to the top line. “The ace of clubs is buried, darn it. I’m not going to get it out in time.”

“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 old-fashioned 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 he 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 high-handed 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.

THIRTY-THREE

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. I 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.”

His shoulders gave a quick little jerk, as if he was cold. Otherwise he didn’t move or change position.

“I’m afraid it’s getting to be one of those long stories after all,” I said, rather gently. “I’m sorry. I’d better organize it a little better. It’s not a pretty story, because it has two murders in it, maybe three. A man named Vannier and a man named Teager had an idea. Teager is a dental technician in the Belfont Building, old Morningstar’s building. The idea was to counterfeit a rare and valuable gold coin, not too rare to be marketable, but rare enough to be worth a lot of money. The method they thought of was about what a dental technician uses to make a gold inlay. Requiring the same materials, the same apparatus, the same skills. That is, to reproduce a model exactly, in gold, by making a matrix in a hard white fine cement called albastone, then making a replica of the model in that matrix in molding wax, complete in the finest detail, then investing the wax, as they call it, in another kind of cement called crystobolite, which has the property of standing great heat without distortion. A small opening is left from the wax to outside by attaching a steel pin which is withdrawn when the cement sets. Then the crystobolite casting is cooked over a flame until the wax boils out through this small opening, leaving a hollow mold of the original model. This is clamped against a crucible on a centrifuge and molten gold is shot into it by centrifugal force from the crucible. Then the crystobolite, still hot, is held under cold water and it disintegrates, leaving the gold core with a gold pin attached, representing the small opening. That is trimmed off, the casting is cleaned in acid and polished and you have, in this case, a brand new Brasher Doubloon, made of solid gold and exactly the same as the original. You get the idea?”

He nodded and moved a hand wearily across his head.

“The amount of skill this would take,” I went on, “would be just what a dental technician would have. The process would be of no use for a current coinage, if we had a gold coinage, because the material and labor would cost more than the coin would be worth. But for a gold coin that was valuable through being rare, it would fit fine. So that’s what they did. But they had to have a model. That’s where you came in. You took the doubloon all right, but not to give to Morny. You took it to give to Vannier. Right?”

He stared at the floor and didn’t speak.

“Loosen up,” I said. “In the circumstances it’s nothing very awful. I suppose he promised you money, because you needed it to pay off gambling debts and your mother is close. But he had a stronger hold over you than that.”

He looked up quickly then, his face very white, a kind of horror in his eyes.

“How did you know that?” he almost whispered.

“I found out. Some I was told, some I researched, some I guessed. I’ll get to that later. Now Vannier and his pal have made a doubloon and they want to try it out. They wanted to know their merchandise would stand up under inspection by a man supposed to know rare coins. So Vannier had the idea of hiring a sucker and getting him to try to sell the counterfeit to old Morningstar, cheap enough so the old guy would think it was stolen. They picked George Phillips for their sucker, through a silly ad he was running in the paper for business. I think Lois Morny was Vannier’s contact with Phillips, at first anyway. I don’t think she was in the racket. She was seen to give Phillips a small package. This package may have contained the doubloon Phillips was to try to sell. But when he showed it to old Morningstar he ran into a snag. The old man knew his coin collections and his rare coins. He probably thought the coin was genuine enough—it would take a lot of testing to show it wasn’t—but the way the maker’s initials were stamped on the coin was unusual and suggested to him that the coin might be the Murdock Brasher. He called up here and tried to find out. That made your mother suspicious and the coin was found to be missing and she suspected Linda, whom she hates, and hired me to get it back and put the squeeze on Linda for a divorce, without alimony.”

“I don’t want a divorce,” Murdock said hotly. “I never had any such idea. She had no right—” he stopped and made a despairing gesture and a kind of sobbing sound.

“Okay, I know that. Well, old Morningstar threw a scare into Phillips, who wasn’t crooked, just dumb. He managed to get Phillips’ phone number out of him. I heard the old man call that number, eavesdropping in his office after he thought I had left. I had just offered to buy the doubloon back for a thousand dollars and Morningstar had taken up the offer, thinking he could get the coin from Phillips, make himself some money and everything lovely. Meantime Phillips was watching this house, perhaps to see if any cops were coming and going. He saw me, saw my car, got my name off the registration and it just happened he knew who I was.

“He followed me around trying to make up his mind to ask me for help until I braced him in a downtown hotel and he mumbled about knowing me from a case in Ventura when he was a deputy up there, and about being in a spot he didn’t like and about being followed around by a tall guy with a funny eye. That was Eddie Prue, Morny’s sidewinder. Morny knew his wife was playing games with Vannier and had her shadowed. Prue saw her make contact with Phillips near where he lived on Court Street, Bunker Hill, and then followed Phillips until he thought Phillips had spotted him, which he had. And Prue, or somebody working for Morny, may have seen me go to Phillips’ apartment on Court Street. Because he tried to scare me over the phone and later asked me to come and see Morny.”

I got rid of my cigarette stub in the jade ashtray, looked at the bleak unhappy face of the man sitting opposite me, and plowed on. It was heavy going, and the sound of my voice was beginning to sicken me.

“Now we come back to you. When Merle told you your mother had hired a dick, that threw a scare into
you.
You figured she had missed the doubloon and you came steaming up to my office and tried to pump me. Very debonair, very sarcastic at first, very solicitous for your wife, but very worried. I don’t know what you think you found out, but you got in touch with Vannier. You now had to get the coin back to your mother in a hurry, with some kind of story. You met Vannier somewhere and he gave you a doubloon. Chances are it’s another counterfeit. He would be likely to hang on to the real one. Now Vannier sees his racket in danger of blowing up before it gets started. Morningstar has called your mother and I have been hired. Morningstar has spotted something. Vannier goes down to Phillips’ apartment, sneaks in the back way, and has it out with Phillips, trying to find out where he stands.

“Phillips doesn’t tell him he has already sent the counterfeit doubloon to me, addressing it in a kind of printing afterwards found in a diary in his office. I infer that from the fact Vannier didn’t try to get it back from me. I don’t know what Phillips told Vannier, of course, but the chances are he told him the job was crooked, that he knew where the coin came from, and that he was going to the police or to Mrs. Murdock. And Vannier pulled a gun, knocked him on the head and shot him. He searched him and the apartment and didn’t find the doubloon. So he went to Morningstar. Morningstar didn’t have the counterfeit doubloon either, but Vannier probably thought he had. He cracked the old man’s skull with a gun butt and went through his safe, perhaps found some money, perhaps found nothing, at any rate left the appearance of a stickup behind him. Then Mr. Vannier breezed on home, still rather annoyed because he hadn’t found the doubloon, but with the satisfaction of a good afternoon’s work under his vest. A couple of nice neat murders. That left you.”