Fashioned for Murder

by George Harmon Coxe

  “I have something for Linda, Julian,” Nason said, moving his hand toward his inside pocket, “so don’t get trigger-happy. It’s only an envelope.” He handed it to the girl and said, “I found it in your trunk.”

  He told her how he had located her old address and how he had gone there and what had happened when Julian showed up. He explained his conversation with Kate Harper and how Kate had remembered the letter Linda’s mother left with her will.

  “I guess you didn’t examine that trunk very thoroughly,” he said.

  “But I did.” Linda sat down, holding the letter with both hands. She wet her lips and stared at it as though afraid to open it. “I remember what Mother said, ‘My story is in your trunk.’”

  “Along with the rhinestones,” Nason said. “You got the jewel box but you didn’t get the letter.”

  “Because I was looking for a story.” She explained again about the manuscripts her mother had. She said the trunk contained a lot of odds and ends, and summer clothes that she did not need, and so she had taken what she wanted and left it there. “I was looking for bulky things, typescripts, with a lot of pages. I found several manuscripts and took all of them with me when I got the jewel box. But they were just stories, like others I had read. I never dreamed that—”

  “Why don’t you open it?” Nason said gently.

  The girl glanced at him, and a tightness came about her mouth as she set herself for the task ahead. Her fingers trembled and she had trouble with the flap but presently she had it open and was taking out two 81/2-by-11 sheets which were crowded with typewriting and single-spaced. Then, her head bowed and the letter in her lap, she began to read and the room was still again.

  It remained still for five full seconds, and then Linda gave a little cry and her head came up. “Yes.” Her voice was a whisper and she glanced from face to face. “This is what she meant about ‘her story.’ It’s about Father.”

  Then she was reading again, hurriedly now, her gaze traveling swiftly back and forth, the paleness still in her cheeks. She finished a page and crammed it behind the next one, and, because he could no longer stand the suspense, Nason shifted his weight and brought his eyes up to take stock of the room.

  In addition to the divan, refectory table, and chairs, he saw that there were two end tables with lamps and ash trays, a rack for magazines, among which was a copy of Fashion Parade, and in the corner a walnut piece that looked like a cellarette and made him think how wonderful it would be to take time out for a drink.

  Linda was still reading, and Paul Sanford stood by the edge of the divan watching her. Raoul Julian remained by the safe, and Nason realized that no longer was the big man intent upon the emeralds on the table. He was watching the girl; he had forgotten temporarily the contents of the safe, and, so great was his concentration, Nason could have tried for the automatic, had he not been so far away.

  “My father did bring the Elcazar emeralds to New York!”

  The girl’s voice startled Nason again. He saw now that the bewilderment was still in her eyes, but there was new light, too, an excited eagerness that made her voice quick and jerky.

  “But he didn’t steal them,” she said. “He didn’t have anything to do with that murder and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Julian’s voice cut across the words, hard and metallic. He waited until he had the girl’s attention. “Suppose you start at the beginning.”

  Linda Courtney composed herself with an obvious effort. She rearranged her face and her hands. When she was ready, she went on in measured tones.

  “My father knew Luis Elcazar, who owned the emeralds, and just before Father left for the States—Mother and I had already gone—Luis telephoned him and asked him to take the collection to New York. This was in 1936, and the Elcazar estate needed money because the land was mostly in coffee and the price was down.”

  “Raoul can probably verify that,” Nason said.

  “Let her finish.” Julian’s voice was blunt.

  Linda regarded them questioningly, and Nason explained. “Raoul is really Eduardo Elcazar,” he said. “I guess I didn’t tell you. Luis was his uncle.”

  “Continue, please,” Julian said.

  “Well,” said Linda. “Luis needed money, and he told Father he wanted to sell this collection, but if he had to pay duty on it, it would hardly be worth the trip. He was going to follow Father to New York, and he said he could probably get twenty-five or thirty thousand for the pieces—”

  “What?” Sanford sounded incredulous. “Thirty thousand!”

  “Your father believed that?” Julian said.

  “He did then,” Linda said. “He’d never seen or heard of the collection, and what did he know about such things? Luis said he could get twice the price, in New York that he could in Bogotá—providing he didn’t have to pay duty—and he said customs seldom bothered a diplomat’s baggage, and why couldn’t Father carry them in his brief case? If Luis had told the truth,” she said, still on the defensive, “if he had said the collection was worth probably a half-million dollars, Father would have refused. He would have been scared to do a thing like that, and Luis knew it and that’s why he lied.”

  She paused, daring them to deny this. “The way it was, Luis had been a friend of Father’s. He had helped him in Bogotá and lent him money, and Father knew he was under obligation, and so did Luis. He asked Father to do this for him as a personal favor. He didn’t even offer him any money—not then. He said Father could keep the pieces for a couple of weeks until Luis could pick them up, and then, after he had disposed of them, he said he’d give Father a thousand dollars for his trouble.”

  Paul Sanford blew out his breath. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “A thousand dollars.”

  “Don’t you believe it?” Linda demanded with some acerbity.

  “Me?” Sanford fashioned a smile. “Certainly I believe it. I knew your father slightly, and he impressed me as one who wouldn’t shirk an obligation. He wouldn’t know the difference between the genuine article and an imitation, and he certainly wouldn’t be a party to any half-million-dollar smuggling job, no matter how much was in it for him. But on a personal basis, if he felt under obligation, I think he’d take the chance. Yes, I believe it.”

  “Oh,” Linda said, and sounded mollified. “Well, anyway, he did. He brought the pieces in without the slightest difficulty. He didn’t tell Mother or anyone else, and he had a job with some exporting company and forgot about the jewelry—until he found out what had happened in Bogotá.”

  She glanced at the letter, studied it a moment, and now her voice grew quiet.

  “It doesn’t say how he learned about it, but he did discover that Luis Elcazar had been murdered on the afternoon he left Bogotá. So he telephoned a friend of his there and found out that the Elcazar emeralds had disappeared that same day. He found out they were valued at half a million and that the police were looking for them. He didn’t know what to do,” she said, not looking at anything now but staring straight ahead.

  “He hadn’t killed Luis Elcazar, but he was afraid he could not prove it. The police in Bogotá suspected the nephew”—she moved her head slowly and examined Julian as if she could not quite believe he was really that nephew—“but did not arrest him. They didn’t arrest anyone, and Father knew what would happen if he came forward and admitted that he had the Elcazar emeralds. He was tortured by his conscience and his fears, and Mother says he did not talk much or sleep well those last weeks, or seem to know what he was doing half the time. She thinks that was why the taxi ran him down, because witnesses said Father walked in front of it without realizing it was there.”

  “Your mother wrote this?” Paul Sanford asked.

  “From what Father told her,” Linda said. “In the hospital. He knew he was going to die; he knew she would find the jewelry. He had to tell her.”

  Nason shifted his weight and found the muscles in one leg were cramped from standing so long and so still. He had not moved once since the gi
rl began to talk, and the story had held him fascinated, one part of his brain refusing to accept it and the other believing it completely. He believed it now and found it easy to understand the rest of it.

  “So then your mother was scared,” he said.

  Linda turned toward him but he did not think she saw him. “Yes,” she said, and then she was talking again, explaining how her mother had kept the secret all through the years, believing her husband, yet always aware of a possibility she did not want to think about. So long as the murder remained unsolved, she dared not come forward with her husband’s story because she felt sure that everyone would assume him guilty.

  There was, Linda said, no way her mother could clear the Courtney name, but she could, and did, keep the secret for ten years, never wearing the pieces out, seldom wearing them in the house in front of Linda, encouraging her daughter to continue calling them rhinestones, as she had done when she was younger.

  “She knew what she should have done,” Linda said. “She should have thrown them away, in the river or some place where they would never be found. But she couldn’t make herself do such a thing because they were so beautiful and so valuable. Not until she had her heart attack and knew she hadn’t long to live, could she face the matter, and even then, she could not make herself dispose of them. That’s why she wrote this letter, why she put them in my old jewel box where no one but me would find them.”

  Linda stopped, and tears filled her eyes. There was no sob in her throat, only a weariness and a faint ring of apology in her tone. “She asked me to forgive her,” she said, her voice hushed. “She said I was young and I would know what to do.” She folded the letter, head down and cheeks wet. “Oh, if only I’d looked for this letter instead of a story—”

  “What would you have done?” someone said, and Nason was a little surprised to find it was Julian, his smile enigmatic, the gun held carelessly as he awaited an answer.

  Linda’s head came up and she blinked. She smeared the wetness beneath her eyes. “Why—I don’t know,” she said, as though the thought had never occurred to her.

  Nason eyed the big man with contempt. “So you’re the guy, after all. You killed your uncle, but you missed the emeralds because he didn’t have them. You’ve been looking for them ever since.”

  “I had given up.”

  “Until ten days ago.” Nason paced two steps and came back, his glance touching the magazine rack and the copy of Fashion Parade, which was wedged in with other things. He picked it out and rapped it against the heel of his hand. “Until you saw this. That brought you to New York in a hurry, didn’t it?” he said. “And you met Linda and made your play. You had a chance to look over her apartment and probably get an impression of the lock. You’re the one who searched it the day she was in Boston, aren’t you? You came around the other night and lifted the settings, too, I guess. The trouble was someone else saw this picture and recognized the pieces. Ned Gault, for one. And probably Albert Wylie—or were you and Wylie in it together?”

  He hesitated. When Julian continued to watch him narrowly he said, “You had a sweet idea, you or Wylie, of getting Linda to pose with those pieces while Keith and Franks switched colored glass for the emeralds. The trouble was Franks got greedy and arranged a phony stick-up, which was stupid and didn’t fool you for long. When you figured it out, you went down to his shop, and he ran for it—with the emeralds in his hand—and you shot him in the back.”

  He explained how Franks had come to the apartment and died there without speaking. He waited for an argument, and when none came he glanced about, finding Linda sitting erect and dry-eyed in the chair and Sanford waiting attentively for him to continue. Julian was attentive, too, his smile grimly amused.

  “I see you’ve been giving this a lot of thought,” he said. “Keep going.”

  “All right, I will.” Nason took a breath and put his thoughts in order. “I guess it was about that time that Ned Gault started moving in. And Wylie, too. So far in that you doped him this afternoon so you could come out here and know he’d be there when you got back.”

  “So you found out about that, too?” Julian flattened his mustache with a thumb; then he shrugged. “Unfortunately it was the only way. We could no longer agree.”

  “Anyway,” Nason said, “Gault followed Linda in New York and in Boston. He must have seen Irene Keith and Norman Franks come out of my studio building; he saw the stick-up man enter and leave. Now, even a man with Gault’s knowledge of crooks might not recognize that thug, but, being a gem expert, he would damn well recognize Norman Franks for what he was. He came to Franks’s office the night I was there,” he said, “but by that time Franks was dead. So he had to start working on Irene Keith, and you found out about it. Then, in order to be safe, you had to kill Irene and take care of Gault as well.”

  Julian nodded and remained unperturbed. His dark face revealed nothing. His voice stayed matter-of-fact. “You have an excellent theory there,” he said. “You’ve only made a couple of mistakes. One is that Gault was working for me.”

  Nason was not ready for this one, but he fought back his surprise and maintained his attack by telling of the photographs he had taken from Gault’s office and stating that the paper used for the prints had come from South America.

  “Certainly,” Julian said. “They were made for my uncle years ago. After his death I brought them to New York with me and told Ned Gault the story because I was convinced that if the Elcazar collection ever got to New York, Gault would be the one man who would find it out. Naturally, when I saw the picture in Miami I came direct to Gault.”

  “And Gault double-crossed you, and you had to kill him—or try to.” He took a breath, let it out noisily. He found he was still holding the copy of Fashion Parade and stared morosely at it. “And all because of this picture.”

  Julian’s voice hardened. “We have had a fine talk,” he said, “and I have six emeralds here, and now I would like the rest of them.”

  Nason turned back the cover of the magazine. He gazed down at the picture printed on the right-hand side, a portrait of a slim, dark-haired girl in a white evening gown and long gloves against a grey background. It was a good picture. It was very smart, if you liked your women skinny.

  Nason tossed it on the divan and saw that Julian had started to unroll the velvet cloths. “We will look through here,” the big man said. “You will help me, Sanford.”

  Paul Sanford stood with his hands thrust in his jacket pockets, the thumbs hooked over the edges. His straight-nosed, intelligent face was pale but impassive and he seemed not at all scared by the automatic, in Julian’s hand.

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” he said. “I think you’re out of your mind, but if you have any ideas about me or my garnet collection, why don’t you take them and get out? I don’t imagine you’ll get very far, but if that’s what you want, go to it.”

  Julian studied him a moment and began to unroll one of the cloths with his left hand. Nason had his eyes on what he hoped was the cellarette at the end of the room.

  “Is that a cellarette?” he said. “Is it all right if I have a drink?”

  “Help yourself,” Sanford said.

  “And behave,” Julian added.

  Nason moved carefully to the cellarette. He took pains to keep his hands in sight while he opened it and inspected the bottles and glasses. When he noticed a bottle of imported gin, he selected this and a two-ounce jigger, pouring it nearly full.

  “I’m in need of a straight one,” he said. “Anyone else?”

  There was no reply to this, and no one but Julian watched him move back to the table and put the glass down. Two of the velvet rolls had been opened now, and the big man was working on the third. By the time he had them all unrolled, the table was covered with garnets of all sizes and colors, none of them remotely resembling the six fiery-green emeralds which were lined up at one side.

  And Julian was having trouble. He had to watch the two men, and he had to keep far eno
ugh back so that neither could grab the gun. This did not give him much chance to inspect the garnets, and he said to Nason, “Spread them out so I can see them better.”

  Nason obeyed, examining the dark-red stones as he did so. When he found a large, oval-shaped specimen, he looked it over, remarking that he did not remember seeing it before. Then, while the others looked on in amazement, he calmly dropped it into the jigger of gin.

  Linda said, “Jerry!” in a voice that was both surprised and reprimanding.

  Someone swore softly but in that moment Nason did not hear it. He was watching the glass and the dark-red stone at the bottom, distorted now by the liquid surrounding it. Quite unconscious of those about him, he forgot to breathe; he could not have moved had he wanted to because he was unable then to think of anything else. For him there was only the stone and the glass; the gin, still white—or was it?

  A second went by, and then another. Then all at once he knew. He wanted to shout, to point at this miracle that he had made happen. For the watery quality of the liquid had now assumed a faintly darker hue that, almost imperceptible at first, became pale red, no longer just at the bottom, but all through the glass, deepening slowly until the contents seemed to be no longer gin but wine.

  He knew then. So did the others. They might not understand the experiment but they knew that, whatever the stone at the bottom of the glass, it was not a garnet but something colored like a garnet.

  After that, things were a little hazy for Nason.

  He was never sure who reacted first and was only vaguely aware of what happened because of his previous concentration. Somehow he heard Linda’s sudden gasp. He felt her beside him and heard the rush of movement somewhere to the right. He looked up and saw Raoul Julian across the table, and now the big man’s dark face was stiff and the automatic was swinging up toward Linda.

  Julian shouted some command and stepped to one side so that he could aim. “Look out!” he yelled, and there was a crashing sound as the French doors slapped open.

  Half turning, seeing Sanford lunge through the opening, Nason grabbed Linda and pulled her down on the divan, falling with her but rolling off the edge and coming to one knee.