by Jerry eBooks
I STUDIED him, beginning to understand the crazy implausibility of the situation. My agency had despatched me south to see the nephew of former Senator Marcus Cartwain. Therefore, if Nixon had been sent to pick me up, there was only one possible conclusion I could draw.
“Do you mean to say you’re chauffeuring for the Cartwains?” I demanded. “Ex-Senator Cartwain, who headed the Cartwain Committee that wrecked you?”
“Y-yes.” He spread his hands. “Give me a break, Palmer! Don’t tell them who I am. If you do, they’ll fire me. All I want is a chance.”
“Once you threatened to kill me,” I interrupted him. “Now you beg me for favors.”
“I didn’t m-mean those threats.” The nervous tic twitched his shoulder again. “It was just that I saw my reputation, my career, my whole life going down in ruins. I blamed you, then. But later I realized you had nothing to do with it.”
“Nice of you.”
“It was my own fault, for trying to defend that profiteer. By tying up with a fellow like that I left myself wide open for trouble. Marcus Cartwain was running for reelection and he made political capital out of smearing me. Not that it did his campaign any good when it came to count the votes.”
“So all right,” I said. “So he was licked, and he left his home state and retired to California. So now you’re one of his servants, and that makes no sense whatever. He must realize you hate him for what he did to you. Then why would he hire you, alias or no alias? Don’t tell me he didn’t recognize you. I did. You haven’t changed that much in a year.”
“He hasn’t recognized me,” Nixon said, “because he’s blind.”
I felt my own eyes widening. “What?”
“It’s true. He lost his sight a few months ago. He hasn’t let the newspapers know it. Pride, I guess. But I found it out, and I applied for the job when his former chauffeur quit, and—well, he hired me.”
“Why?”
“Why did he hire me? I’m a good driver. Maybe a better driver than I was lawyer. More careful, anyway.”
“No. Why did you go after the job? What’s your game? Revenge? Waiting for a chance to get even?”
“I’d be silly to admit that, even if it were true. You’d warn Cartwain. You’d tell him who I am.”
“I would indeed.”
“But it’s not true. Maybe I had some such idea at first. I’ve had some pretty bitter moments. But not any more. I’m playing it straight, and if you’ll just give me a break I’ll keep on playing it straight. I give you my oath.”
The oath of a paroled convict isn’t often a thing of too great substance. Yet somehow, as I looked at Nixon, I felt that he meant what he said. He seemed sincere, and as a rule I’m not easily fooled.
I gripped his forearm, squeezed it hard for emphasis.
“I make no promises,” I said. “I want time to think it over. But for the time being, I won’t give you away—and never mind the gratitude.” Then I said: “Now tell me why the Cartwains wanted me sent down to see them.”
“That I wouldn’t know. Young Gerry—I mean Mr. Gerald—is waiting for you out in the car. The Senator’s nephew, you know.” Nixon’s lips curved downward at the corners. “He didn’t like getting wet, so he sent me in after you.”
“Let’s go,” I said, and made for the exit.
The rain was still a production number. I was dripping when I reached the limousine; so was Nixon.
He opened the tonneau door for me.
“Mr. Gerald, sir, this is Don Palmer of San Francisco.”
Inside the car, Gerald sat in the far corner—dapper, expensively tailored, his expression a little sardonic. Faint lines of dissipation were beginning to etch themselves into his face, and even without the dome light I could see he needed some sun-tan to relieve his unhealthy pallor.
Behind the chauffeur’s back, I put a quick finger to my lips. Whatever young Cartwain had to tell me, I didn’t want it discussed where Nixon could overhear. That seemed only a reasonable precaution under the circumstances.
POKER-FACED, Gerald neither greeted me nor acknowledged my impulsive gesture. That was all right, though. It indicated that he had caught the signal and knew how to obey orders. I was pleased by this, because it helped modify the original impression of him that I’d had back in Washington a year before.
Then he had struck me as a hard-drinking, hard-spending playboy with more money than brains. Now, I reflected, he was beginning to show signs of sense. He was growing up.
I got in beside him, sitting in the opposite corner so my wet topcoat wouldn’t soak his suit the way the coat was soaking the mohair upholstery. Up front, Nixon slid under his wheel, got his engine and twin windshield wipers going. The long, luxurious car whispered into forward motion.
I whispered, too, after first making sure the glass partition was closed between tonneau and front compartment.
“Easy with the conversation until later. That is, if what you want to tell me is confidential.”
Gerald nodded absently. The limousine cleared an uneven place in the paving, then flowed like poured oil through Burbank and out toward the Valley. Our tires hissed steadily against the rain-slick asphalt and the side windows began to steam up, so that the occasional service station neon signs we passed glowed like ghostfire, vague and intangible.
Then we made an abrupt turn—and young Cartwain toppled out of his corner to sag limply against me, like a rag doll.
Startled, I shoved him off.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said sharply. “Are you drunk?”
He didn’t answer.
I propped him by pressing my hand against his side. Something wet and sticky met my fingers, something that might be blood. It was blood, from a stab wound. I touched his neck, found no pulsation where the artery ran.
Gerald Cartwain was dead. I had been riding with a corpse.
CHAPTER II
Disappearing Corpse
IN RAPID sequence, I reviewed everything I could remember since getting into the car. I recalled the way young Cartwain had sat in his comer, unmoving, not speaking. I had thought his silence was because of the warning signal I had given him, but now I knew better. I knew he had never seen that signal. And his faintly supercilious smile, I realized, had been something else entirely—the beginning of risus sardonicus, the death grin.
Nor had his pallor been from dissipation. He had lost color as his blood drained out of that knife wound in his side. Even his head nodding could be logically explained. That had happened when the limousine had jounced on a rough place in the paving.
In brief, he had been dead from the start. He had been murdered before I climbed in beside him.
I wedged him back in his corner of the seat, then got out the automatic from my topcoat pocket. Leaning forward, I slid the glass partition open behind Edgar Nixon’s head. Then I pressed my gun muzzle to the nape of his neck.
“Pull over,” I said.
He winced at the feel of steel on him. Maybe the tone of my voice had something to do with it, too.
“Wh-what—”
“Pull over and stop.”
“But—but—”
“You heard me, killer. I’m not fooling.”
He slapped down hard on his brake pedal and the limousine edged over to the right, sliding a little on the wet street. The sudden deceleration sent Gerald Cartwain’s body lurching frontward. His dead face hit the partition with a sickening sound. Then, grotesquely, he landed in a crumpled heap on the floor.
The car stopped.
I opened the left-hand door and stepped out fast, so that the merest shifting of my gun kept its sights lined on Nixon. At the moment, there was no traffic in either direction. There was only the incessant rain and the sound of its steady drumming.
We were in an undeveloped section of the Valley, a few acres not yet subdivided or cluttered with little stucco houses. The vacant lots stretched off to either side like drowned fields, brown and weedy and smelling the sour smell of earth t
oo long wet.
“Come out,” I said to the chauffeur.
“I—I don’t understand.”
“Come out. With your hands in front of you and empty.”
He scrambled from under the wheel. “All right. I’m out. What now?”
“That,” I said, and inclined my head toward what was sprawled inside the car’s tonneau.
He turned and looked in. Under the soaked cling of his livery you could see his thin body going stiff with shock. He backed away from the limousine’s open door and slowly faced me. His eyes were more protuberant than usual, and the muscles of his throat moved visibly.
“Holy Pete!” he said. “It’s Gerald. Is—is he—”
“Dead, yes. Murdered.”
“You—killed him? But why? Why?”
“Let’s have none of that, Nixon. Accusing me isn’t even clever. You can’t get out of it that easily.”
He breathed noisily. “What do you mean, I can’t get out of it? Surely you don’t think, you’re not saying—”
“I’m saying you stabbed him.”
“Oh, no! No!”
“You stabbed him before you went into the airport depot to get me.”
“No,” he repeated harshly. “No, you’re wrong.”
“The chances are he had recognized you. He knew you were the Edgar Nixon his uncle had helped send to prison. Maybe that was why he wanted me down here. He could have hired plenty of private detectives in Los Angeles, but they wouldn’t do. He wanted me especially, because I could confirm your identification. I’d been the Cartwain Committee’s special investigator in Washington and I was one man who would know you on sight.”
He kept saying, “No, no,” over and over, mechanically, like a phonograph record with a broken groove.
“You were afraid it was something like that, but you couldn’t be sure. And so, to make sure, you murdered him before I could get together with him.”
“No. No, you’re wrong.”
I PUT my face close to his.
“You should have killed me, too,” I said. “You might have got away with it, then. You overlooked a bet there. Or did you lose your nerve? Maybe one murder was all you could stomach. Is that how it was, Nixon?”
“No. He was alive when I left him in the car.
He sent me into the station to get you. He gave me your name. He was alive, I tell you. How could he talk to me if he wasn’t alive?”
“You’re lying.”
“No I’m not. If you didn’t kill him, then it must have happened while you and I were talking in the airport waiting room. Look, Palmer, you’ve got to believe me—”
“But I don’t,” I said, and reached for the handcuffs I always carry in my back pocket. “Maybe you can convince the police, but I don’t believe a word of it.”
“You—you’re going to turn me in?”
“Definitely.”
His knees buckled under him and he went down, his back sliding along the side of the car. It was a smart trick. It threw me off guard. I thought he had fainted. Instead, he suddenly doubled forward and launched himself at me. He butted me in the stomach.
I didn’t expect that and I wasn’t prepared for it. Pain went through me like a sword and I dropped the handcuffs. I staggered and tried to keep from collapsing. My leg muscles cramped. Nixon came up and swung a punch at my chin. I couldn’t parry it, couldn’t get out of the way. His fist landed, hard and clean . . . .
Rain, beating against the nape of my neck, brought me back to consciousness. I was lying prone in the gutter behind the limousine, where Nixon had apparently dragged me after he had knocked me out. My stomach hurt like fury from being butted, and my jaw ached with a steady, constant throb like the pounding of drums. Feebly I pushed myself up on all fours, then sat for a moment on the low curb. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn’t wearing my topcoat. It had been stripped off me.
My gun was gone, too. And so was Nixon.
Well, he would have needed the topcoat to cover his brown livery and make him less conspicuous for a getaway. As for the automatic, there was no telling what he might need that for. I could guess, though.
When I gathered enough strength I stood up. Swaying drunkenly, I moved to the car and peered inside. What I saw swept the last of the cobwebs out of my mind. Because what I saw was—nothing.
Gerald Cartwain’s corpse had disappeared.
I pulled my pencil flashlight, sprayed its concentrated white glow all around me. Raindrops resembling falling gray bullets cut slantwise across the lightbeam, but there was no trace of the murdered man.
Swearing, I searched the weedy vacant lots beyond the sidewalk, trudged through soft spongy mud until I had covered the entire area.
I didn’t find young Cartwain.
And I didn’t find Edgar Nixon.
Back at the limousine, I discovered the ignition key still in the lock. I jammed myself under the wheel, pressed the starter. A smooth, surging flow of power answered my foot on the throttle paddle and I headed forward, making plans.
At a red and white Chevron station a mile farther on, I pulled in and took a quick look at the address on the cat’s registration certificate. Then I asked the station attendant how to find that address. He got out a city map, put me straight.
Ten minutes later I gained my destination—a big neo-Colonial mansion perched on a knoll, surrounded by rolling lawn and reached by a graceful private driveway. I went up the driveway in second, my rear tires spitting gravel at the night.
Then I was vigorously thumbing the mansion’s front doorbell.
My strap watch showed nine-thirty—not late enough for people to be in bed. But nobody answered my ring. Again I jabbed at the button and this time, after a long wait, the door opened.
“Yes, sir?” the girl who answered my ring asked.
SHE was a brunette in the black taffeta of a housemaid. Her skin was tawny, creamy; her face young but wise. The taffeta was tight over curves that were ample, though not lush. She looked at me with dark, impersonal eyes that gave you the impression of seeing more than they pretended to see.
“Is this Senator Cartwain’s house?” I said. “Yes, sir. Former Senator Cartwain,” she added, as if to correct any mistaken notions I might have about his political status. “But he has retired for the night, sir.”
“That’s all right,” I said, and pushed past her. “He’ll be getting up again, soon enough. Right now, where’s your phone?”
“Really, sir, I can’t have this,” the maid protested.
I had already noticed what I wanted, on the other side of the oak-paneled reception hall. I made for the telephone, picked it up, dialed 0 for operator and asked for Police Headquarters. Then I asked for Homicide, while the maid stared at me in growing bewilderment. “Homicide?” I said a moment later. “This is Don Palmer of the Schindemann Detective Agency, San Francisco. I’m calling from the residence of ex-Senator Cartwain near Van Nuys. That’s right, Cartwain.” I gave the address. “I want to report a murder. Cartwain’s nephew and ward, Gerald. Stabbed. And his body stolen. I suggest you put out a radio reader for the Cartwain chauffeur—real name Edgar Nixon, but using an alias. About six-two, prominent eyes, thin build, wearing brown whipcord livery and a light tan topcoat which he took from me after knocking me unconscious. Yes, I’ll be waiting here for your crew. Right.”
I hung up.
Behind me there was a muffled thudding noise. I pivoted, saw that the taffeta-clad maid had crumpled to the floor. It was a genuine faint, I discovered when I loped over to her and stooped down. Her breathing was shallow and her dark eyes walled back so that only the whites showed.
There was a formal staircase to the left, and footfalls sounded on the upper steps. Then they reversed themselves swiftly and faded off. I kept trying to shake the maid awake, and the pattering click of high heels sounded again on the staircase. This time they came almost all the way down.
“Bring some water,” I said, without glancing toward the stairs. “Or better sti
ll, brandy.”
Then I looked up and saw a blonde girl standing on the fourth step from the bottom.
The long barreled .22 target automatic in her hands was pointed straight at my head.
CHAPTER III
A Muffled Scream
THE footfalls I had heard had been the blonde’s, of course. They had started downstairs, had seen me leaning over the maid, had assumed I was a prowler and had gone back to get her gun.
“Whoever you are, put up your hands,” she said now.
There was something vaguely familiar about her, some trick of expression or conformation of features I thought I ought to recognize, although I knew I had never seen her before. She wore a light blue negligee and matching satin mules, and her hair was the shining yellow of new gold, done in a braided cornet around her head.
She looked to be in her early twenties, or younger, and her mouth was compressed to a firm line—the only sign of emotion she allowed to show. Her eyes were bluer than the negligee, and as unwavering as the target pistol she aimed at me.
“Take it easy,” I said. “This isn’t what it seems to be.”
“I told you to put your hands up. What have you done to Lora? If you’ve hurt her—”
Lora, then, was the maid’s name. I lowered her, stepped back.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I haven’t done anything to her. She fainted when I phoned the police and accused your chauffeur of murder.”
“Our chauffeur? You mean Judley?”
“If that’s what he’s been calling himself. He’s really Edgar Nixon.”
That didn’t seem to mean anything. She frowned over it briefly and let it go.
“What’s this you’re saying about a murder?” she demanded.
“I think I’d sooner tell it to Senator Cartwain. Get him for me. Tell him Palmer wants to see him—Don Palmer of the Schindemann Detective Agency, San Francisco.”