Millar said quietly: “It’s funny. I wanted to finish Leopardi myself, with my own hands, when he was at the top, when he had the farthest to fall. Just finish him and then take what came. But Gaff was the guy who wanted it done cute. Gaff, the tough mug who never had any education and never dodged a punch in his life, wanted to do it smart and figure angles. Well, maybe that’s why he owned property, like that apartment house on Court Street that Jake Stoyanoff managed for him. I don’t know how he got to Dolores Chiozza’s maid. It doesn’t matter much, does it?”
Steve said: “Go and write it. You were the one called Leopardi up and pretended to be the girl, huh?”
Millar said: “Yes. I’ll write it all down, Steve. I’ll sign it and then you’ll let me go—just for an hour. Won’t you, Steve? Just an hour’s start. That’s not much to ask of an old friend, is it, Steve?”
Millar smiled. It was a small, frail, ghostly smile. Steve bent beside the big sprawled man and felt his neck artery. He looked up, said: “Quite dead . . . Yes, you get an hour’s start, George—if you write it all out.”
Millar walked softly oven to a tall oak highboy desk, studded with tarnished brass nails. He opened the flap and sat down and reached for a pen. He unscrewed the top from a bottle of ink and began to write in his neat, clear accountant’s handwriting.
Steve Grayce sat down in front of the fine and lit a cigarette and stared at the ashes. He held the gun with his left hand on his knee. Outside the cabin, binds began to sing. Inside there was no sound but the scratching pen.
NINE
The sun was well up when Steve left the cabin, locked it up, walked down the steep path and along the narrow gravel road to his car. The garage was empty now. The gray sedan was gone. Smoke from another cabin floated lazily above the pines and oaks half a mile away. He started his car, drove it around a bend, past two old boxcars that had been converted into cabins, then on to a main road with a stripe down the middle and so up the hill to Crestline.
He parked on the main street before the Rim-of-the-World Inn, had a cup of coffee at the counter, then shut himself in a phone booth at the back of the empty lounge. He had the long distance operator get Jumbo Walters’ number in Los Angeles, then called the owner of the Club Shalotte.
A voice said silkily: “This is Mr. Walters’ residence.”
“Steve Grayce. Put him on, if you please.”
“One moment, please.” A click, another voice, not so smooth and much harden. “Yeah?”
“Steve Grayce. I want to speak to Mr. Walters.”
“Sorry. I don’t seem to know you. It’s a little early, amigo. What’s your business?”
“Did he go to Miss Chiozza’s place?”
“Oh.” A pause. “The shamus. I get it. Hold the line, pal.”
Another voice now—lazy, with the faintest colon of Irish in it. “You can talk, son. This is Walters.”
“I’m Steve Grayce. I’m the man—”
“I know all about that, son. The lady is O.K., by the way. I think she’s asleep upstairs. Go on.”
“I’m at Crestline—top of the Arrowhead grade. Two men murdered Leopardi. One was George Millar, night auditor at the Carlton Hotel. The other his brother, an ex-fighter named Gaff Talley. Talley’s dead—shot by his brother. Millar got away—but he left me a full confession signed, detailed, complete.”
Walters said slowly: “You’re a fast worker, son—unless you’re just plain crazy. Better come in here fast. Why did they do it?”
“They had a sister.”
Walters repeated quietly: “They had a sister . . . What about this fellow that got away? We don’t want some hick sheriff on publicity-hungry county attorney to get ideas—”
Steve broke in quietly: “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that, Mr. Walters. I think I know where he’s gone.”
He ate breakfast at the inn, not because he was hungry, but because he was weak. He got into his car again and started down the long smooth grade from Crestline to San Bernardino, a broad paved boulevard skirting the edge of a sheer drop into the deep valley. There were places where the road went close to the edge, white guard-fences alongside.
Two miles below Crestline was the place. The road made a sharp turn around a shoulder of the mountain. Cars were parked on the gravel off the pavement—several private cars, an official car, and a wrecking can. The white fence was broken through and men stood around the broken place looking down.
Eight hundred feet below, what was left of a gray sedan lay silent and crumpled in the morning sunshine.
* * *
PEARLS ARE A NUISANCE
* * *
ONE
It is quite true that I wasn’t doing anything that morning except looking at a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about writing a letter. It is also quite true that I don’t have a great deal to do any morning. But that is no reason why I should have to go out hunting for old Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace. I don’t happen to be a policeman.
It was Ellen Macintosh who called me up, which made a difference, of course. “How are you, darling?” she asked. “Busy?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “Mostly no. I am very well. What is it now?”
“I don’t think you love me, Walter. And anyway you ought to get some work to do. You have too much money. Somebody has stolen Mrs. Penruddock’s pearls and I want you to find them.”
“Possibly you think you have the police department on the line,” I said coldly. “This is the residence of Walter Gage. Mr. Gage talking.”
“Well, you can tell Mr. Gage from Miss Ellen Macintosh,” she said, “that if he is not out here in half an hour, he will receive a small parcel by registered mail containing one diamond engagement ring.”
“And a lot of good it did me,” I said. “That old crow will live for another fifty years.”
But she had already hung up so I put my hat on and went down and drove off in the Packard. It was a nice late April morning, if you cane for that sort of thing. Mrs. Penruddock lived on a wide quiet street in Carondelet Park. The house had probably looked exactly the same for the last fifty years, but that didn’t make me any better pleased that Ellen Macintosh might live in it another fifty years, unless old Mrs. Penruddock died and didn’t need a nurse any more. Mr. Penruddock had died a few years before, leaving no will, a thoroughly tangled-up estate, and a list of pensioners as long as a star boarder’s arm.
I rang the front doorbell and the door was opened, not very soon, by a little old woman with a maid’s apron and a strangled knot of gray hair on the top of her head. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before and didn’t want to see me now.
“Miss Ellen Macintosh, please,” I said. “Mr. Walter Gage calling.”
She sniffed, turned without a word and we went back into the musty recesses of the house and came to a glassed-in porch full of wicker furniture and the smell of Egyptian tombs. She went away, with another sniff.
In a moment the door opened again and Ellen Macintosh came in. Maybe you don’t like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don’t, I’m sorry for you.
“Darling, so you did come,” she cried. “That was nice of you, Walter. Now sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
We sat down.
“Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace has been stolen, Walter.”
“You told me that over the telephone. My temperature is still normal.”
“If you will excuse a professional guess,” she said, “it is probably subnormal—permanently. The pearls are a string of forty-nine matched pink ones which Mr. Penruddock gave to Mrs. Penruddock for her golden wedding present. She hardly even wore them lately, except perhaps on Christmas on when she had a couple of very old friends in to dinner and was well enough to sit up. And every Thanksgiving she gives a dinner to all the pensioners and friends and old employees Mr. Penruddock left on her hands, and she wore them th
en.”
“You are getting your verb tenses a little mixed,” I said, “but the general idea is clean. Go on.”
“Well, Walter,” Ellen said, with what some people call an arch look, “the pearls have been stolen. Yes, I know that is the third time I told you that, but there’s a strange mystery about it. They were kept in a leather case in an old safe which was open half the time and which I should judge a strong man could open with his fingers even when it was locked. I had to go there for a paper this morning and I looked in at the pearls just to say hello—”
“I hope your idea in hanging on to Mrs. Penruddock has not been that she might leave you that necklace,” I said stiffly. “Pearls are all very well for old people and fat blondes, but for tall willowy—”
“Oh shut up, darling,” Ellen broke in. “I should certainly not have been waiting for these pearls—because they were false.”
I swallowed hard and stared at her. “Well,” I said, with a leer, “I have heard that old Penruddock pulled some cross-eyed rabbits out of the hat occasionally, but giving his own wife a string of phony pearls on her golden wedding gets my money.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fool, Walter! They were real enough then. The fact is Mrs. Penruddock sold them and had imitations made. One of her old friends, Mr. Lansing Gallemore of the Gallemore Jewelry Company, handled it all for her very quietly, because of course she didn’t want anyone to know. And that is why the police have not been called in. You will find them for her, won’t you, Walter?”
“How? And what did she sell them for?”
“Because Mr. Penruddock died suddenly without making any provision for all these people he had been supporting. Then the depression came, and there was hardly any money at all. Only just enough to canny on the household and pay the servants, all of whom have been with Mrs. Penruddock so long that she would rather starve than let any of them go.”
“That’s different,” I said. “I take my hat off to her. But how the dickens am I going to find them, and what does it matter anyway—if they were false?”
“Well, the pearls—imitations, I mean—cost two hundred dollars and were specially made in Bohemia and it took several months and the way things are oven there now she might never be able to get another set of really good imitations. And she is terrified somebody will find out they were false, on that the thief will blackmail her, when he finds out they were false. You see, darling, I know who stole them.”
I said, “Huh?” a word I very seldom use as I do not think it part of the vocabulary of a gentleman.
“The chauffeur we had here a few months, Walter—a horrid big brute named Henry Eichelberger. He left suddenly the day before yesterday, for no reason at all. Nobody ever leaves Mrs. Penruddock. Her last chauffeur was a very old man and he died. But Henry Eichelberger left without a word and I’m sure he had stolen the pearls. He tried to kiss me once, Walter.”
“Oh, he did,” I said in a different voice. “Tried to kiss you, eh? Where is this big slab of meat, darling? Have you any idea at all? It seems hardly likely he would be hanging around on the street corner for me to punch his nose for him.”
Ellen lowered her long silky eyelashes at me—and when she does that I go limp as a scrubwoman’s back hair.
“He didn’t run away. He must have known the pearls were false and that he was safe enough to blackmail Mrs. Penruddock. I called up the agency he came from and he has been back there and registered again for employment. But they said it was against their rules to give his address.”
“Why couldn’t somebody else have taken the pearls? A burglar, for instance?”
“There is no one else. The servants are beyond suspicion and the house is locked up as tight as an icebox every night and there were no signs of anybody having broken in. Besides Henry Eichelberger knew where the pearls were kept, because he saw me putting them away after the last time she wore them—which was when she had two very dear friends in to dinner on the occasion of the anniversary of Mr. Penruddock’s death.”
“That must have been a pretty wild party,” I said. “All night, I’ll go down to the agency and make them give me his address. Where is it?”
“It is called the Ada Twomey Domestic Employment Agency, and it is in the two-hundred block on East Second, a very unpleasant neighborhood.”
“Not half as unpleasant as my neighborhood will be to Henry Eichelberger,” I said. “So he tried to kiss you, eh?”
“The pearls, Walter,” Ellen said gently, “are the important thing. I do hope he hasn’t already found out they are false and thrown them in the ocean.”
“If he has, I’ll make him dive for them.”
“He is six feet three and very big and strong, Walter,” Ellen said coyly. “But not handsome like you, of course.”
“Just my size,” I said. “It will be a pleasure. Good-bye, darling.”
She took hold of my sleeve. “There is just one thing, Walter. I don’t mind a little fighting because it is manly. But you mustn’t cause a disturbance that would bring the police in, you know. And although you are very big and strong and played right tackle at college, you are a little weak about one thing. Will you promise me not to drink any whiskey?”
“This Eichelberger,” I said, “is all the drink I want.”
TWO
The Ada Twomey Domestic Employment Agency on East Second Street proved to be all that the name and location implied. The odor of the anteroom, in which I was compelled to wait for a short time, was not at all pleasant. The agency was presided over by a hard-faced middle-aged woman who said that Henry Eichelberger was registered with them for employment as a chauffeur, and that she could arrange to have him call upon me, or could bring him there to the office for an interview. But when I placed a ten-dollar bill on her desk and indicated that it was merely an earnest of good faith, without prejudice to any commission which might become due to her agency, she relented and gave me his address, which was out west on Santa Monica Boulevard, near the part of the city which used to be called Sherman.
I drove out there without delay, for fear that Henry Eichelberger might telephone in and be informed that I was coming. The address proved to be a seedy hotel, conveniently close to the interurban car tracks and having its entrance adjoining a Chinese laundry. The hotel was upstairs, the steps being covered—in places—with strips of decayed rubber matting to which were screwed irregular fragments of unpolished brass. The smell of the Chinese laundry ceased about halfway up the stairs and was replaced by a smell of kerosene, cigar butts, slept-in air and greasy paper bags. There was a register at the head of the stairs on a wooden shelf. The last entry was in pencil, three weeks previous as to date, and had been written by someone with a very unsteady hand. I deduced from this that the management was not over-particular.
There was a bell beside the book and a sign reading: MANAGER. I rang the bell and waited. Presently a door opened down the hall and feet shuffled towards me without haste. A man appeared wearing frayed leather slippers and trousers of a nameless color, which had the two top buttons unlatched to permit more freedom to the suburbs of his extensive stomach. He also wore red suspenders, his shirt was darkened under the arms, and elsewhere, and his face badly needed a thorough laundering and trimming.
He said, “Full-up, bud,” and sneered.
I said: “I am not looking for a room. I am looking for one Eichelberger, who, I am informed lives here, but who, I observe, has not registered in your book. And this, as of course you know, is contrary to the law.”
“A wise guy,” the fat man sneered again. “Down the hall, bud. Two-eighteen.” He waved a thumb the color and almost the size of a burnt baked potato.
“Have the kindness to show me the way,” I said.
“Geez, the lootenant-governor,” he said, and began to shake his stomach. His small eyes disappeared in folds of yellow fat. “O.K., bud. Follow on.”
We went into the gloomy depths of the back hall and came to a wooden door at the end with a closed wood
en transom above it. The fat man smote the door with a fat hand. Nothing happened.
“Out,” he said.
“Have the kindness to unlock the door,” I said. “I wish to go in and wait for Eichelberger.”
“In a pig’s valise,” the fat man said nastily. “Who the hell you think you are, bum?”
This angered me. He was a fair-sized man, about six feet tall, but too full of the memories of beer. I looked up and down the dark hall. The place seemed utterly deserted.
I hit the fat man in the stomach.
He sat down on the floor and belched and his right kneecap came into sharp contact with his jaw. He coughed and tears welled up in his eyes.
“Cripes, bud,” he whined. “You got twenty years on me. That ain’t fair.”
“Open the door,” I said. “I have no time to argue with you.”
“A buck,” he said, wiping his eyes on his shirt. “Two bucks and no tip-off.”
I took two dollars out of my pocket and helped the man to his feet. He folded the two dollars and produced an ordinary passkey which I could have purchased for five cents.
“Brother, you sock,” he said. “Where you learn it? Most big guys are muscle-bound.” He unlocked the door.
“If you hear any noises later on,” I said, “ignore them. If there is any damage, it will be paid for generously.”
He nodded and I went into the room. He locked the door behind me and his steps receded. There was silence.
The room was small, mean and tawdry. It contained a brown chest of drawers with a small mirror hanging over it, a straight wooden chair, a wooden rocking chair, a single bed of chipped enamel, with a much mended cotton counterpane. The curtains at the single window had fly marks on them and the green shade was without a slat at the bottom. There was a wash bowl in the corner with two paper-thin towels hanging beside it. There was, of course, no bathroom, and there was no closet. A piece of dark figured material hanging from a shelf made a substitute for the latter. Behind this I found a gray business suit of the largest size made, which would be my size, if I wore ready-made clothes, which I do not. There was a pair of black brogues on the floor, size number twelve at least. There was also a cheap fiber suitcase, which of course I searched, as it was not locked.