by Alice Duncan
Blast. I was getting nowhere fast, and the knowledge left me feeling helpless. I didn’t like the feeling one little bit. I opened the door to the office—the ’phone was ringing—and decided crime-solving wasn’t my forte.
“Mr. Templeton’s office. Miss Allcutt speaking.”
“Oh.”
Mrs. Persephone Chalmers. Joy and rapture unbounded.
“Yes, Mrs. Chalmers?” My tone was polite, even if I wanted to shriek at her to loosen her talons and free my boss from her clutches.
“Oh.”
My teeth were going to be ground down to a mere nub by the time Ernie finished Mrs. Chalmers’ case.
“How did you know it was I?”
Because you’re the only person I know who begins her every utterance with that darned breathy “Oh.” Naturally, I didn’t say that. “I recognized your voice.”
“Oh.”
Eye-roll time.
“Oh. You’re very clever, Miss Allcutt. Mr. Templeton told me so.”
He did, did he? That actually made me feel a teensy bit better. “How kind of him. May I help you?” I wanted to get the stupid woman off the wire so I could think some more, even though thinking didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere.
“Oh. Mr. Templeton and I met this morning. I wondered if he was back in his office yet. If he is, I should like to speak with him.”
“I’m sorry. He hasn’t returned to the office.”
Ernie turned me into a liar at that very moment when he opened the office door and strode inside. He was smirking, the rat, and gave me a cat-in-the-cream-pot grin. I didn’t react, although it was an effort.
“Mrs. Chalmers,” I said, instead of throwing my notebook at Ernie. “He just this second arrived. Will you hold the wire for a moment?”
“Oh, yes, thank you.”
I covered the receiver with my hand and hissed at Ernie. “Mrs. Chalmers wishes to speak with you.”
The wretched man had the audacity to wink at me before he went into his office and picked up his receiver. I squelched an unseemly desire to eavesdrop on their conversation and went back to thinking about Rupert and Lulu and the two Hartlands. I knew Rupert hadn’t committed the second murder, and in my heart I knew he hadn’t committed the first one. Also, Lulu was the very last person on earth whom I would suspect of being anyone’s accomplice to a violent act. Not only that, but I didn’t think she was strong enough to smother a full-grown man with a hospital pillow if he were to struggle against it, and what able-bodied human being wouldn’t struggle against being smothered? No one whom I could think of.
Hmm. I suppose Lulu could have donned a nurse’s uniform and given the man a hypo injection before smothering him. Oh, but wait. Hadn’t Ernie or Phil said that he’d already have been given a hypo by a real nurse? I do believe they had. Or maybe it had merely been a pill. Sill and all, a pill might do the trick. In that case, Lulu could have crept into his room wearing her nurse’s uniform and smothered him as he lay in his bed, helpless.
I felt my brows furrow and stopped frowning. My mother always said that a lady never wrinkled her brows. Not that what a lady might do with her brows had ever stopped Mother from frowning, especially at me. However, my notion about Lulu in a costume made me think that there were others in the world who probably had better access to nurses’ outfits than Lulu LaBelle. And who better than someone working in the motion-picture business?
No one. That’s who. And that pointed straight to Jacqueline Lloyd.
And she, according to expert testimony—I mean Phil Bigelow—had been out cold all night long. So if it was she who’d perpetrated the first evil deed, she must have had an accomplice to perpetrate the second one. Who that accomplice was remained unknown at this point.
Bother.
Before I could scream in frustration, Ernie exited his office and slapped his hat on his head. “Have to go out for a while, kiddo. Hold down the fort.”
“Do you have an appointment with someone?” I asked. It might not have been any of my business, but I thought a confidential secretary should have access to her employer’s schedule. Besides, I didn’t want him consorting with the ethereal Mrs. Chalmers any more than necessary.
“Got to meet somebody downtown.”
I thought we were already downtown. “Very well. Do you know when you will return?”
“My, my, aren’t we formal today?”
I frowned at him in spite of the possibility of a wrinkled forehead. “Darn it, Ernie, I’m your secretary, and I make your appointments. I need to know when you’ll be in the office and when you won’t be in the office.”
He chuckled. He would. “Calm down, kiddo. I was only teasing you. I’ll be back by one-thirty, I should think.”
I sniffed. “Thank you ever so much.”
And he left me to my fuddled thoughts. I knew he was going to see that wretched Persephone Chalmers person. I knew it.
Just before noon, I made another trip down the hall, craving information that I wasn’t sure anybody would—or even could—give me.
Miss Dunstable looked up from her typewriter, which got a lot more work than mine did, and smiled a welcome. She was such a nice person, and so professional she made me feel inferior by comparison. I trusted myself, however, and knew that I would eventually develop that same degree of secretarial confidence if I kept working at it.
“Good morning again, Miss Allcutt.”
“Miss Dunstable, I hate to keep bothering you, but—”
“Nonsense,” she said, removing her fingers from the keys. She had been typing very fast, and I decided to practice more. While I didn’t have a whole lot of work to practice on, I could bring some of my old typewriting books to work and do the exercises. “I’m about to go to lunch, and I only wanted to finish that last page.”
I guess she’d done so, because she took it out of the typewriter and laid it face down on her desk. Client confidentiality at work, by gum.
“In fact,” she said, “I’ve been pondering what you said earlier in the day, and I think you might be on to something important.”
“You do?” I’m sure my wide-open eyes and similarly gaping mouth conveyed my shock. Sylvia Dunstable, bless her professional secretarial heart, was the first person so far in my entire life who had taken any of my suggestions seriously. Which just goes to show. I’d known from the moment I first set eyes on her that she was a person of discernment and intellect.
“Yes. About Miss Lloyd. I might be able to give you some information.” She glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “But we can’t talk here.”
I looked around, too, although I don’t know why. “Of course not.”
She donned a bright smile. “Say, have you had lunch yet? Maybe we can catch a bite and discuss this matter.”
“Oh, I’d love to,” I said, thinking that having luncheon with a fellow secretary was a wonderful idea. Who knew? This might be the beginning of a long friendship. Chloe was always going out to lunch with her women friends. Thus far during my sojourn in Los Angeles, I hadn’t met too many women since most of Ernie’s female clients hadn’t struck me as potential candidates, and most of Chloe and Harvey’s dinner guests have been married couples or single men. But Sylvia Dunstable . . . well, she was what I aspired to be. “Just let me run down the hall and get my hat and handbag.”
“I’ll lock up here and join you,” she said.
I tripped merrily down to Ernie’s office, happy not merely to be taken seriously for once, but also to be dining out with a real potential friend.
We took the elevator to the lobby and both smiled at Lulu when we passed her desk. She still looked glum, so I stopped for a second. “Try not to worry too much, Lulu. We’re working very hard to find the culprit.”
Looking up at me with hopeless blue eyes, she asked, “Who’s we?”
A trifle disconcerted, I said, “Why, Ernie and me, of course.”
She nodded and said “Thanks,” but I don’t think she meant it.
“We can take my car,” said she. “It’s right down the block a bit.”
I’d thought we were going to walk to Chinatown or eat in one of the little drugstores or sandwich shops on Figueroa, but I was certainly not averse to traveling farther afield. “Sounds good to me.”
“I know a perfectly darling little place off of Sunset. Have you ever eaten Mexican food before?”
Thinking of a trip Ernie and I had taken to Pasadena the previous month, I said confidently, “Yes, and I loved it.”
“Good. Then you’ll really like the place I have in mind.” She stopped beside a nice-looking Ford Model T. “Here’s my car. Hop in.”
“Thanks.”
Sylvia started the engine and pulled out onto Figueroa Street, where the lunchtime traffic was starting to thicken.
I was most impressed with her driving ability. I had seldom driven an automobile, since I’d grown up with chauffeurs and Chloe always drove when we went shopping or anything. I knew that you had to put your foot on the clutch and move the shift lever, and that there was a gear called neutral, in which you should never leave your car since it might roll away from you. And I think there’s a reverse gear if you want to back up, but so far nobody I’ve ridden with has ever had to back up. Chloe had given me a couple of lessons in her Roadster, but I had no confidence that I’d ever be able to drive in traffic.
Therefore, I watched Sylvia Dunstable with interest. “How long have you been driving?”
“Oh, years and years.” She downshifted without a single grind of a gear.
“My sister has begun teaching me to drive.”
“Mmm.”
Since she was watching the other cars on the road and didn’t seem interested in my driving ambitions, I decided to start a conversation about the case. “I’ve thought a good deal about the murders, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they were both premeditated. Therefore, I think that in this case motive might be a factor.” I hoped she wouldn’t disparage my conclusion, given her greater experience in the murder line.
To my gratification, Sylvia nodded vigorously. “Yes, I think you’re right. After you left my office this morning, I thought some more about the matter and came to the same conclusion.”
That made me feel good, because it meant I didn’t have to try to convince her that these murders weren’t spur-of-the-moment violent acts. “Do you suppose there’s any possibility—I know this will sound silly—but . . . well, it occurred to me that perhaps Mrs. Hartland, who made her living from gossip, might have unearthed some truly scandalous stuff about Jacqueline Lloyd.” I hastened to add, “Not that I have anything against Miss Lloyd, you understand, but she seemed the most likely candidate. I mean, her career is only just starting, and it could be cut short if any kind of scandal hit the light of day. Plus, she was there both times. That is to say she was there for the first séance when Mrs. Hartland was killed and at the second one, when Mr. Hartland collapsed.”
“Hmm.”
“I overheard Ernie—Mr. Templeton, I mean—and Mr. Bigelow talking about blue movies, and the only person I could think of who might be hurt if the public learned about her involvement in such things was Jacqueline Lloyd.”
“I see,” said Sylvia Dunstable. “You may be right.”
“Of course, since she couldn’t possibly have committed Mr. Hartland’s murder, she’d need an accomplice.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“Then it occurred to me that Mrs. Hartland might possibly—I know this sounds silly, too—have been blackmailing Miss Lloyd.”
I waited for Miss Dunstable to laugh, but she didn’t. Rather, she turned left onto a little street a few miles away from the Figueroa Building that looked to me as if not many people traversed it on a regular basis. It was kind of twisty and led up a hill. “I don’t think that sounds silly at all,” she said. “It actually sounds quite plausible.”
Shocked and grateful, I exclaimed, “You really think so?” Wouldn’t Ernie be dumbfounded when I unearthed the truth before he did! The notion made my heart sing, which I suppose wasn’t kind of it. But, darn it, I was tired of him always disparaging my efforts at detection.
“Oh, my, yes. In fact, I’ve thought about nothing else since you visited me earlier in the day.”
Better and better. “I think Mrs. Hartland found out about Miss Lloyd acting in those blue movies Mr. Templeton and Mr. Bigelow were talking about, and that she was blackmailing her.” I waited a second for a reaction. When one didn’t come, I said less confidently, “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve hit the nail square on the head.”
“And then, when Mrs. Hartland died, George Hartland went through her papers, discovered Miss Lloyd’s dark secret, and took over the blackmail scheme from his late mother.”
“That seems supremely logical to me.”
My heart glowed. When I glanced at the scenery, I noticed that we were kind of up in the hills and that there wasn’t much of anything around us but sagebrush and straggly trees. I’d never been in this part of Los Angeles before. Yet it was very close to the office. We hadn’t traveled far at all. It seemed an unlikely place for a restaurant. “Say, where is this place we’re going?”
“Not much farther. It’s a darling place. You’ll love it. And the scenery is wonderful. You can see almost all of Los Angeles from the top of the hill.”
“My goodness.” I looked around eagerly, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that struck me as restaurant-like. I had no luck, because there was nothing around but . . . well, nothing. Not only that, but the twisty road had become extremely narrow, with a scrubby slope heading upward on my side and a sheer drop-off on Miss Dunstable’s side. What an odd place for a restaurant to be.
But that didn’t much matter, and since Miss Dunstable seemed to be an expert driver and unconcerned about the steep decline on her side, I resumed the conversation. “Anyway, if my theory is correct about Miss Lloyd, as I said before, she must have had an accomplice who killed Mr. Hartland, because the nurses said she was under sedation and sound asleep all night.”
“Absolutely.”
“The only problem is that I can’t figure out who her accomplice might be,” I admitted.
The car slowed to a crawl. “You can’t?”
There was a smile in Miss Dunstable’s voice that I couldn’t account for. I’d been gazing out the car’s window at the sagebrush and Spanish broom—that stuff smells positively heavenly in the early summer, by the way, but now the plants were brown and shriveled and heavy with dried-up seed pods—so I turned to glance at her.
And there, staring me in the face, was a revolver, held by none other than Miss Sylvia Dunstable!
Chapter Sixteen
Astonished, I said, “What . . . ?”
“I’m really sorry you started snooping, Miss Allcutt, because so far you seem to be the only one with a brain who has been.”
“What?” I said again, sounding, I’m sure, as stupid as I felt.
“And I regret having to do what I have to do, because I honestly like you.”
“But . . .” Not a bit better. In my defense, however, Sylvia Dunstable was pointing a gun at me. I believe I can be forgiven if my brain was swirling and I couldn’t think clearly.
The car stopped on the twisty dirt path halfway up the hill. Unfortunately, once Sylvia pulled the emergency brake lever she was able to hold the gun steady and it was still pointed at my face. “But I honestly don’t have any choice. Don’t you see? You ought to have taken Mr. Templeton’s advice and stayed out of it.”
“But why are you doing this? Why are you pointing a gun at me?” I cried, finally able to form coherent, if unhelpful, sentences.
“I have to do this because you’ve come too close to the truth.”
“What truth? I don’t understand.”
She sighed with what seemed like genuine regret, although my facility for judgment wasn’t a
t its best at that moment. “Jacqueline Lloyd and I are sisters, Miss Allcutt.”
“Sisters!”
“Yes, indeedy. We came here from Tennessee about five years ago.”
“T-Tennessee? You did?”
“Oh, my, yes. We had to, you see, because life had become intolerable for us at home.” She sneered and repeated the word home as if it tasted bad.
My mouth had been hanging open pretty much ever since the word sisters had escaped it. I shut with a clack. “I’m . . . you did? It was?”
“It was, and we did.”
“Oh. Um . . . you went through quite a bit in Tennessee, you say?” As you can probably tell, my thinking processes hadn’t fully regained their full strength and vigor.
“Quite a bit?” Her laugh was positively ugly. I hadn’t believed a noise so sardonic could issue from her ever-so-professional-and-proper lips. “It was hell, pure and simple. Our parents were dead, and our uncle, who was supposed to take care of us and protect us . . . well, let’s just say he didn’t, and that he wasn’t the only man around who had noticed my sister’s beauty.”
Although I wasn’t sure since my own background was so pristine, I got the impression that Miss Dunstable referred to something sordid and unnatural, and I felt sorry for her. Until my eyes lit on that blasted gun once more. However, in the interest of self-preservation, I said, “I’m sorry you had such a difficult time.”
Again the bitter laugh. “You have absolutely no idea, Miss Allcutt. You’ve clearly been protected from the wicked, wicked world.” The sneer looked as ugly as the laughter sounded. “Suffice it to say that we came west to Los Angeles, thinking that Jacqueline might be able to break into the pictures. And she did, eventually. Jacqueline—she’s the elder of the two of us—had to work at all sorts of strange jobs to put food on the table before she hit the big time. It wasn’t her fault that she had to do some things we aren’t proud of. She was forced to work very, very hard. She was only sixteen years old, for heaven’s sake.”