by Paul Ernst
The frown disappeared and she shivered a little. “That’s right,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you very much, Sam.”
I don’t know quite what I had thought she would say, but this was not it. I started wavering around in my mind about her again.
We stepped into an elevator and I pushed the ninth-floor button; the elevators, as I’d had occasion to find out before, were attended up till midnight, after which they were automatic. Another detail making plausible the story of the theft of the Duysberg diamond.
We got to the Keppert floor with the old Cates brain working hard. At her door, while she was fishing a key from her pocketbook, I came out with the best I was capable of at the moment: “Guess I’d better walk through the apartment before I leave. Just to be sure no one’s hiding in there—”
“Marylin is home,” replied Ellen, too politely. “I doubt that any investigation is necessary. Nice try, though.”
“Well, you know, the Home Protection Company. That’s me.”
The Keppert door opened as Ellen was reaching with the key. Howard Denham stared at us from the threshold, with Marylin Keppert looking over his shoulder. They seemed relieved at seeing Ellen and surprised at seeing me.
“What kept you?” Howard asked Ellen. “Couldn’t you get a cab?”
“We thought we’d walk,” Ellen told him. She turned to me to say good night. I looked at Marylin and said, “You’ve heard all about the evening from Denham, I suppose.”
Marylin opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again and just nodded. She was certainly a pretty girl, taller than Ellen, on the Junoesque side, with dark hair and uninspired brown eyes. Pretty, and yet pretty less as a girl than as a budding young matron.
An attractive, normally placid person, she was not placid now. There was little color in her cheeks, and she put her arm around Ellen and said, “You poor darling, what a dreadful time you’ve had.” Then she stared levelly at me. “You’re here officially, or what?” the stare demanded.
“I’d better report in,” I said, as easily as I could manage. I walked past Denham and Marylin in the doorway, leaving Ellen to follow after a slight hesitation. Denham had his hat in his hand, had been about to leave when he opened the door on Ellen and me. He dropped the hat on the nearest chair and closed the door again.
I looked around the living room in which, last time I’d been here, I had asked a lot of very embarrassing questions of the various Kepperts concerning a large, and missing, diamond. It was a big room and a lavishly furnished one, reflecting all the wealth and taste of Mrs. Keppert and Senator Keppert. There was, among other things, a working fireplace, and while it had a brassbound antique screen before it now in June, still the three who faced me moved unthinkingly toward it and, convinced, I guess, that I was going to stay awhile, sat down around it. I sat down next to Ellen; if she hadn’t wanted me to, she should not have chosen the sofa with room for another beside her.
I said, “It’s a lovely mess we’re in.”
“‘We’?” Marylin repeated politely.
“Yes. ‘We.’ I meet Ellen at the Club Fifty…”
“You didn’t meet her there,” said Denham frostily. “You followed her there. She told me so.”
“I saw her turn into the place alone, and went in after her.” I shrugged. “Put it any way you like, I think Ryan is convinced I met her there. And he knows of the loss of your Duysberg diamond, and knows I was the insurance adjuster on the case. I believe he has nice, cozy thoughts of collusion between Ellen and me.” I saw Ellen start a little; evidently this angle had not occurred to her before. “So I repeat—the mess ‘we’ are in.”
“What does the diamond have to do with anything?” said Denham, still frosty.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do any of you?”
“All I know is that this place was robbed a month ago, and the diamond and several other things were taken,” Denham said.
“Would you know why Allen Siltz, a well-known if somewhat shady diamond broker, was at the Club Fifty tonight? Along with you and Ellen?”
“I didn’t even know Ellen was there, till later when the place cleared out a bit,” said Denham.
“You knew Siltz was there?”
“No. I didn’t know he was there. In fact I never heard of Siltz before tonight.”
I hadn’t come in here with a plan of attack in mind, or indeed with any attack at all, but he made me sore.
“Well, here’s one you do know,” I said. “Why did you show up there with ten thousand dollars in cash in your pockets?”
There was a start of protest from Ellen and an electric sort of silence on Marylin’s part. Neither looked at him, however; they just stared at me.
“So we’re in a mess,” said Denham through his teeth. “You work hand in glove with Ryan and are with him during his whole investigation, yet he lists you as a suspect.”
“What about the ten thousand?” I said.
“I don’t have to answer any of your…”
“You do not,” I agreed. “But it would help us all, me included, if you did. I am not a cop, but I have occasionally thought things through and come up with answers. If I have a few facts to work on. So why the ten thousand tonight?”
“I’m not a pauper. I could lay my hands on slightly more than that if I wanted…”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t. I’m just asking—why tonight, when a girl dancer is killed?”
“The reasons for my having that money don’t concern you. And they haven’t the slightest connection with Rose Rosslyn.”
“That’s all the answer?”
“That’s all the answer you’re going to get.”
I sighed. “Okay. You can be sure it’s not all the answer Lieutenant Ryan, of Homicide, will get. But—okay… Now. Does anyone here want to speak of snapshots or bronze mermaids? In particular, mermaids?”
I stared at Denham, who just looked puzzled, and at Marylin, who was beautiful and expressionless, and at Ellen, who was scowling.
“I told you about the mermaid,” she said.
“You sure did,” I replied. “An Oscar in reverse! But before you could get it from Rose, she was killed. So somebody doesn’t think the mermaid is just a comical gag.”
Ellen got up from beside me. “Goodness!” she said. “Almost two o’clock. We’d better break this up and all get some rest. I think we may need it for tomorrow. Good night, Sam.”
I sat there a moment, feeling frustrated and angry. Denham got up, too. And Marylin.
“So nice of you to try to help us,” murmured Marylin. “But since none of us have anything to hide, I’m sure we won’t need helping. Good night, Mr. Cates.”
“Want to go down in the elevator with me?” Denham said, coming to stand beside me.
So I got up, too; it was that or sit in there alone talking to myself. I could have spanked the Keppert females, and socked Denham on the jaw. Except that Denham looked as if he might have a much harder sock than I.
Denham and I went toward the door. Marylin watched us go, with no emotion showing on her face but with her hands caught together in front of her. Ellen looked at us, and, at the last instant before the door closed, looked at me. With a hint of a smile on her soft, young mouth. Thoughts of spanking vanished utterly, submerged in other thoughts of less punitive nature…
“See you tomorrow,” said Denham to the girls, and he shut the door.
We went to the elevator in which Ellen and I had ascended, still there on the ninth floor. Denham walked apart from me, his shoulders extra straight in their fine dinner jacket, his hands shut tight. He did not like me. He did not like me because of the mention of the ten thousand dollars. That had thrown a jolt into the little assemblage, all right.
I said in the elevator, “I suppose the Senator and Mrs. Keppert have been notified of this commotion?”
“Yes,” Denham said, punching the Down button with unnecessary vigor. “They’ll fly up in the morning to be wit
h Marylin and Ellen.”
“I wonder what they’ll think of the ten thousand dollars,” I remarked idly.
He turned on me, and I thought I’d get it then. Right on the button. But he turned reluctantly away from me again. I was beginning to get a theory as to why he was so admirably restrained. And as to why he’d had ten thousand dollars with him at the 50. It was not a very nice theory.
We hit the lobby floor and the door slid back. “Shall we share a cab?” I said.
He didn’t answer; he just looked down as if to see how many crawly little feet I had, and then went on out the lobby door ahead of me. I followed, and had a cab door slammed in my face, and finally found a taxi of my own and was driven home.
I live on Madison in the Sixties in a building that is old and small but, for the three tenants of us who have fixed apartments up above the stores, quite comfortable. It is a walk-up and I am on the third floor, which sometimes gives me more exercise than I strictly need; but my apartment is roomy and quiet, with the bedroom on a rear passageway, and with a full-sized kitchen which, along with many bachelors, I am reasonably skilled in using. I was thoroughly satisfied with the place as a home, and with my routine as a life. Of course, a girl like Ellen might not think the joint so satisfactory, used as she was to luxury like the Kepperts’…
I couldn’t imagine why the thought of Ellen in these rooms had come to me, so I dismissed it. The hell with Ellen. She was just a symbol in a case to me, to be considered only in a strictly impersonal way.
I mixed a highball containing a slightly higher percentage of alcohol than those served by the 50, and sat down to think thus impersonally about her and about the rest of the Rosslyn affair. The thoughts, I had to admit, were terminated mainly by question marks.
Why had Ellen gone to the 50 tonight—alone? Just to see Rose about the snapshot and mermaid? She could easily have snatched herself an escort from among her friends, without taking him into her confidence, if that were the sole reason for the visit.
Why was Denham there with all that cash? Had he and Ellen really not known of the other’s presence? Could be. If they had known each other’s intention to visit the place, they could have gone together, providing Ellen with an escort and Denham with a cover for whatever business transaction he had in mind… Unless each had felt it imperative to keep his transaction secret from the other?
Why had Checckia been so upset after looking through his safe? He’d insisted no money was gone from it, and the fact that a lot was there, visible, would seem to bolster up his statement: a thief would have taken all, not just some. So if it wasn’t money that was missing—what was it?
Had Allen Siltz, diamond broker, really been at the 50 only to sell Checckia some diamonds for an investment?
Did the Duysberg diamond figure in this anywhere?
What had happened to the murder gun, and to the slug that had passed through Rose Rosslyn’s head and, reasoning circumstantially at least, embedded itself in the paneling in Gar Checckia’s office?
No thoughts. No constructive thoughts, at any rate. Save one—about the mermaid.
I believed the bronze mermaid did have something to do with Rose’s murder, and I believed I knew a little about said mermaid. And about the much larger statue of a mermaid against which Dick Rosslyn had been leaning when the snapshot was taken. And about the town in which both had their origin.
It was Sea City, New Jersey.
Sea City is an average ocean resort town, as like the resort towns to north and south of it as a bead on a string. It has the usual kind of summer visitors and the usual cynics making up its winter population and attending to the working needs of the community. It charges the usual rates and has the same climate and surf.
A few years ago the Sea City Chamber of Commerce, trying to get away from this usualness, this averageness, and to make their summer haven distinctive in at least some small manner, had sat around and hatched up a brainstorm. They’d commissioned a well-known sculptor to cast in bronze a figure of a mermaid balanced on her gracefully curved tail. This statue they had set up on the boardwalk in the center of the town. Then they had followed with the manufacture of little mermaid figurines and encouraged all the beach shops to sell them as souvenirs. Sort of a town trademark.
I don’t know if it did the resort any good, and sitting in my apartment living room that evening I didn’t care. All I was interested in was the fact that I knew where the snapshot of Dick Rosslyn, dead in an auto smash-up, had been taken, and where the little mermaid in Rose’s dressing case had come from.
Sea City, New Jersey.
I got up and went to the bedroom and methodically hung my coat on a hanger in the closet. I am a methodical man; I’ll make some girl a good wife. I went back and sat in the warmth sifting in an opened window, and continued sipping my nightcap. The traffic noises came in muted from in front and below; and in another part of town similar traffic noises would be impinging on Rose Rosslyn’s eardrums, and she wouldn’t hear them.
The murder gun, I thought, would have to be around the Club 50. And, equally importantly, the little lead slug which it had fired and with which it could be matched.
I leaned back in the chair, and my clock struck half-past two. Of course if this man, Barkasy, had lied, and some other unnamed outsider had gone backstage—someone who had then hurried out and taken the gun with him…
The light from the floor lamp next my chair was in my eyes. I turned it out. Dodge Duffy. Funny… He faced the curtained doorway every time he faced the orchestra, yet he’d sworn he didn’t see any of the four go in—Bohr, Siltz, Ellen, Denham…
I slept.
You know how it is when you’re pretty tired and fall asleep in a nice, comfortable easy chair. You can wake up in half an hour feeling reasonably human, or you can struggle out of it next morning with cricks in your back, a sprained neck, and a fur jacket on your tongue.
I was well on the way toward the latter accomplishment when I opened my eyes and got wide-awake in about two-thirds of a second. For another third of a second I was confused, but then I realized that I had not waked, but had been waked, and I promptly closed my eyes again and set the wheels buzzing up above my eyebrows while I tried to figure it out.
The living room was as I’d seen it when I leaned back with the clock tolling two-thirty—rather dimly lit, very quiet now, with only the clock’s fussy ticking on the mantel to break the silence. I didn’t think the clock had wakened me, though. Something else…
I opened an eye a little and glanced at the clock. It showed a quarter after four. The window was black with the darkness before dawn. The bedroom door, wide open, showed more of the same blackness…
Someone was in the bedroom.
Don’t ask me how I knew that. I don’t know how. But, sitting there with my neck still in the crooked position it assumes when one sleeps sitting up, I became instantly convinced of it.
Somebody was in that dark room. I could fairly feel the stare of hidden eyes. No noise, though. Had the owner of the eyes heard the changed tempo of my breathing when I woke? Seen my own eyes open for an instant? I let out a long, disturbed sigh and moved my head a little. Then I began breathing slowly and regularly again, listening meanwhile to the fussy ticking of my little clock—and for any other sound that might occur.
I heard only the clock. For minute after minute. It is hard to guess at the passing of time in any situation, and impossible when suspense rides herd on all your guessing. But I figured conservatively that a half-hour had gone by—which would mean about five minutes—when there was a sound other than the ticking and the hollow, late-night moan of an occasional car down in the street.
A rustle of fabric in the bedroom as someone stealthily moved. A rustle that seemed almost in that dark doorway, and then diminished a trifle, indicating that instinct had been more trustworthy than common sense and that someone had been staring at me from the room’s blackness.
Satisfied now that I was really asleep? Or la
ying a trap for me?
The second question stilled an impulse I had had to spring from my chair and dive through the doorway in a surprise tackle on whoever might be beyond it. I kept on sitting there in the dim light, breathing regularly, eyes closed. Planning.
I didn’t have a gun in the place; never carried one, did not even own one. There was nothing within reach that I could use as a club. And, though I am no more frail than most, I’m no more athletic, either. Not for me the feats of Mighty Mouse.
I heard a faint rattle from the other room and couldn’t place it for a moment. But then I did, and I changed my mind about the running broad jump for the intruder.
The faint clink, metal against metal, was made by the hangers in my coat closet. A hand was furtively moving the suits and coats there, with the hook part of the hangers now and then barely touching. My uninvited guest was at the closet door.
I got up slowly, very slowly, from my chair. Seemed like I took a minute for each move, but I expect the process of getting to my feet noiselessly did not take that long. I went on tiptoe to the bedroom doorway, keeping to one side so that anybody at the closet door would not be apt to see me by glancing back. I reached the doorway without mishap.
The closet in my bedroom is to the right of one entering. The bedroom door opens to the left, so it was not in my way. I stayed there by the door out of range of whoever was at the closet, till I heard another faint clink. Then I slid into the darkness and toward the closet.
I got a glimpse of a dark figure at the opened closet door. Its back was turned. Midstep, I caught a faint flash of metal in one of the figure’s hands. My foot came down softly, but not softly enough. A floorboard creaked.
I jumped then, but it was too late. The figure whirled. The hand holding the metallic thing came down, and there was a thunking sound as something hit my head and, an instant later, a stab of pain.
I reached foggily for the black bulk, and the metal thing came down again, and a third time, and that was all.
6
I DON’T think I was out for very long. I believe I heard my front door click quietly but swiftly closed just as I began to be aware of shooting pains playing around the side and top of my cranium. I can’t be sure of this; but the window was still black with the pre-dawn when I opened my eyes. It was also—the bedroom window—opened a lot wider than it had been when I went in there to hang my coat up and loosen my tie and get more comfortable in the June warmth.