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

by Howard Fast

  “All right. Drop around this afternoon and I’ll have it for you.”

  “Please, Alan, I want it now.”

  “Now? I can’t drop everything.…”

  “You can. It won’t take you five minutes. I’m in a phone booth in a gas station, but I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

  “Masao, I can’t just …”

  “The next time you want a traffic ticket fixed …”

  “When did you ever fix a ticket for me? When?”

  “I’ll call you back in ten minutes.” Then Masuto hung up, paid for the gas, and drove off. Back in Beverly Hills, he stopped at a pay phone and called Toyada again.

  “Okay, Masao — I got what you want. To put it succinctly, their condition is lousy. They are up to their ears in debt, and they have a quarter-of-a-million bank loan callable in about thirty days. Unless they have resources not listed, it’s questionable whether they can meet it. Maybe they can float another loan to cover, maybe not. One doesn’t know. If you’re going to lend them money, think twice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Look, Masao, if you’re on the pad and you got money to burn, come around and see me. Stay away from places like Holmbey’s.”

  “Very funny. Goodbye.”

  6

  ELLEN BRIGGS

  Driving to North Camden — north being north of the railroad tracks, the line through Beverly Hills that separates the middle class from the rich — Masuto recalled that he had not only seen Ellen Briggs play Major Barbara but he had also seen her play Hedda Gabler at the Huntington Hartford Theatre, which was quite different from the little shack on Las Palmas where she had performed in the Shaw play. The part was notably different as well, for while he had never cared for the Ibsen play as a dramatic work, he was always intrigued by the character of Hedda Gabler — the frustrated, hate-filled woman whose morality had disappeared under the pressure of her anger, who could kill and destroy without compassion or regret. He had always wondered whether there could be a great performance of the Hedda Gabler role without the actress sharing some part of the nature of Ibsen’s character.

  Well, he knew very little about actresses; but why hadn’t Ellen Briggs mentioned the Hedda Gabler role? How could any actress resist saying, once he had complimented her on the Major Barbara role, “But did you see me as Hedda Gabler at the Huntington Hartford?”

  Of course, there were the circumstances. Her mother’s death, the funeral, and then the breaking into her house and the senseless chaos visited upon it. Perhaps the additional misery of the talented actress who does not make it. She was at least forty now, and Masuto had spent his life close enough to the entertainment industry to know that, with a few incredible exceptions, the actor who does not make it by forty will never make it.

  It was half-past ten in the morning when Masuto parked his car in front of the Spanish Colonial house on Camden, and he had that strange feeling — not unusual when one is awake most of the night — that somewhere he had lost a day. Also, he had missed his regular early morning practice of meditation. Well, a day like today is not so different from a koan; he smiled a bit at the thought. He himself practiced in the Soto School of Zen, but in the Rinzai School one meditated upon a thing called a koan, a proposition that defies reason; and Masuto had always felt that murder, the destruction of one human being by another, defied both reason and civilization. It was certainly not an apt comparison, but it amused him.

  When he rang the doorbell, Ellen Briggs opened the door for him, and the change in her appearance from the day before was so marked that he had to look twice to make sure it was the same woman. She wore old blue jeans that fit her slender figure tightly and a blue work shirt open at the neck, and her hair was drawn back and tied behind her head. She looked twenty years younger than the grief-stricken woman he had seen the day before, and the lack of makeup added to her attractiveness.

  She stared at him blankly for a moment, then smiled. “Of course — Detective Masuto.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Briggs. May I come in?”

  “Please.”

  The living room was back in place and orderly. “I’m working in the kitchen now,” she explained. “It’s good for me to have all this to do. You know, I don’t suppose the thieves were in the house for more than an hour, but it will be three days before I clear up the wreckage.”

  “It’s always easier to destroy,” Masuto agreed. “Actors will rehearse a play for weeks, and a critic will destroy it with a few words.”

  “I like that notion.” She stared at him with interest. “You are a most unusual policeman.”

  “You don’t have to stop what you were doing. I will be happy to sit in the kitchen, and I can talk to you while you work. I just have a few questions to ask you.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I would.”

  She led him into the kitchen. “No, I shall not go on working. We will have tea together.”

  He watched her with interest as she put up the water to boil, prepared the teapot, and set out a plate of sliced pound cake. She moved easily and gracefully, and he found himself admiring her and liking her.

  “You have no accent at all,” he observed.

  “Accent?”

  “Foreign accent, I mean. You were born in Germany?”

  “But I left there when I was three years old. So the fact that I have no accent is hardly remarkable.”

  “That was in 1940?”

  “Yes — but how did you know I was forty years old?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Not a flattering guess, Sergeant Masuto.”

  “It has nothing to do with your appearance. I simply felt it was before the war began. Later it would have been almost impossible.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Do you want lemon with your tea?”

  He shook his head. “Your father was Jewish?”

  “Half Jewish — but in Nazi Germany that was enough. My mother was not Jewish, but Hitler was not concerned with such niceties.”

  “When did your father die?”

  “He died in Germany, in a concentration camp. Some friends helped my mother to escape in 1940, and we got to England, and then here after the war.”

  “That must have been a hard time for both of you.”

  She put two slices of cake on a plate and handed it to him, looking at him rather quizzically. “I was very young. It was harder for my mother. But these things are not pleasant for me to talk about, and I don’t see what such matters have to do with my home being broken into.”

  “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 wi
ll 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.”