by Paul Ernst
I handed it back and Ryan took it without looking at it. “By the way, Cates, you may be a wonder boy to your insurance company, but we’re not your insurance company.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re to keep your nose out of this. I don’t want you fumbling around and stirring up a lot of mud.”
“Even if I get an idea on it, I’m not to…”
“You’re to keep out of it! Understand?”
I am not, I hope, a stubborn person. But this wasn’t the way to insure the Cates co-operation. I won’t say that I would not have gone on my own course regardless of what Ryan said; but this, a direct and arrogant order, was certainly not the way to stop me.
I said meekly, “Okay. There’s a thing, though. I’m still an employee, Ryan, and my work takes me to Long Island and New Jersey and Connecticut, and other points within an hour or so of town…”
“Send someone else,” said Ryan shortly. “Good-by.”
I went back to my own office and reported to the company the recovery of the Duysberg diamond. I was a little more vague about the method of the recovery than I need have been. Then, as my time is pretty much my own, I put on my hat, said I’d phone back soon, and left the building.
I went to the Morning Star newspaper morgue.
Dink Hannah was there, looking a little older and greener than when I’d seen him last time, on an arson job. “What’s up? Somebody steal his own car and put in a claim?”
“Somebody’s smashed up a car,” I said. “Turn me loose with last June’s papers, will you?”
The item was small and on an inside page. June 28, the year before. “Richard Rosslyn, dancer, of this city, was killed late yesterday afternoon in an auto accident near Euler’s Grove, New Jersey…” It went on with an account of his theatrical activities, mentioning his sister, but I skimmed that. The important thing was the confirmation of the Sea City locale. For Euler’s Grove was within a few miles of Sea City, as I happened to know from a Home Protection job I’d been on once down there.
I thanked Dink and went out and took a cab to upper Park Avenue. The Kepperts’ apartment.
I had venom in my heart. I had it because last night I’d kept on liking Ellen Keppert in spite of everything. I had, to put it frankly, fallen harder for the dame in a couple of hours than I ever had for any other in a couple of years. Right now I could remember every detail about her—the dark blond hair, the dark blue eyes, the short upper lip with almost childish glimpses of nice white teeth, the way she looked up at a man and sort of laughed without laughing, the way she could take it as well as dish it out…
She’d dished it out, all right! “You’re my alibi. If anything should come out later, how comforting to be able to say, ‘Why, Mr. Cates, of the Home Protection Insurance Company, was with me every minute of the time.’”
Well, something had come out later, and Mr. Cates of HPIC was in it up to here. I wanted to see her face when I reported to the insured about the recovery of their stolen property.
I arranged my features into obtuse and friendly lines and rang the Keppert bell. The houseman let me in and I went to the big living room. The Senator and Mrs. Keppert had hurried home from Washington to be with their sweet niece during this time of crisis, so four people faced me near the fireplace.
The Senator, tall, thin and platinum-haired, shook my hand; Mrs. Keppert, vivacious and smartly dressed and almost as classically beautiful as Marylin, nodded brightly to me; Marylin nodded not quite so brightly; and Ellen shook my hand. And smiled as if agreeably surprised. I must say she didn’t look the worse for wear, in spite of what she’d been through last night and the continuing dark cloud she must know she was still under today. But then, women are more durable than men; made of some sort of imperishable pink plastic, I sometimes think.
The Senator said, “Won’t you sit down?” and I sat down across from Ellen and refused a cigarette. You’d be amazed how nicely insurance adjusters are usually received—when they call as adjusters and not as snoopers as I had last night. You’d think the average citizen had a slightly guilty conscience. The same treatment is given tax assessors, I understand.
I said, “Good news. Your Duysberg diamond has been found.”
“No!” said Mrs. Keppert. Then, “How wonderful! You don’t know how I loved that diamond.” She was charming in her enthusiasm, looking ten years younger than her age. A still beautiful woman. I could have gone for her myself.
“In some pawn shop, I suppose?” Senator Keppert said.
Marylin said nothing, and Ellen said nothing.
“It was found,” I said, “in my coat pocket. Last night.”
“Your—” exclaimed Ellen. She changed it quickly. “You’re joking.”
“No. Sometime last night, after the commotion at the Fifty, someone, before being searched, dropped the thing into my pocket. I didn’t find it out till hours later, when someone else climbed into my bedroom window to retrieve it.”
“But—last night!” said the Senator. Then his eyes took on a hint of Ryan’s flatness and his lips thinned. “And last night a member of this family was at the Fifty. And it was this member who reported the loss of the diamond in the first place. You are trying to make something of these things in your mind, Mr. Cates?”
Hospitality was rescinded. The tax assessor hadn’t been as pleasant as was hoped. Marylin, whose Mary Garden type of full-blown beauty had a faintly bovine touch for my taste, stared with outraged, heifer eyes. Mrs. Keppert’s darker eyes snapped. Ellen…
She was the one I’d thought I might surprise into some betraying action. She was the one I was concentrating on, without actually seeming to stare at her. But I stared at her with the reaction I did get.
For Ellen laughed.
She looked at me, and tried to stop, and kept on laughing. “Oh, dear! I’m sorry. I know it was serious for you… But think of Lieutenant Ryan’s expression if he’d found it in your pocket.”
“Think of me in a cell, while you’re at it,” I snapped.
She did stop then. “I know. I’ve said I was sorry. It’s no laughing matter. But I—Who do you think put it in your pocket?”
I practically swallowed my collar button but recovered most of the gullible, friendly look. “I have no idea. And when I turned the diamond in to Ryan and told him about it, he had no idea, either. But of course it’ll come out later, along with the other answers to this mess.” I couldn’t help letting her have that, at any rate.
“Let’s hope it’s soon,” murmured Mrs. Keppert, nodding her charming, youthful-looking head. Then she stared at me with polite inquiry, as did the three other Kepperts. What now? You have reported the recovery of the lost diamond. Time for you to run along?
I got up. It was time. I’d come here legitimately to make a routine report, but also to observe Ellen’s expressions and reactions when I made it.
The reaction I’d got was laughter. And if you think that helped, you’re mistaken.
“I’ll keep in touch with you if anything further develops,” I said, smiling at Marylin and Mrs. Keppert and the Senator. And at Ellen. I don’t know but what a few teeth showed a little in the last smile; I’d have loved to have my hands around the throat of the Senator’s pretty niece at that moment.
The houseman handed me my hat, and I went out.
7
I WAS talking to myself when I left the building. Funny, huh? Get me into a jam like that and then laugh about it!
I looked around the building entrance to see if I could spot a Ryan man. I couldn’t, which did not mean that none were in the neighborhood. I hailed a taxi and was driven to the garage on Ninth where I stable an elderly but faithful car.
It was about eleven when I drove this out of the garage, still thinking of Ellen. I was lucky, I told myself. Because I was a bachelor and liked being a bachelor and if I’d met Ellen in any other circumstances she’d have knocked me tail over apple cart, and then I might have wound up trying not to be a bachelor any m
ore. As it was, of course, I could be sure she wasn’t worth a man’s regard. Nor his thoughts. So I told myself to stop thinking about her. Think about the afternoon’s work instead. This little trip down southward.
Into New Jersey.
I went across the George Washington Bridge and clocked in onto the newly finished, supercolossal New Jersey Turnpike, and as I went through the tollgate I still didn’t know if I’d been followed since leaving Ryan’s office.
To make sure, out of sight of the cop cars around the tollgate, I speeded up a bit. My car is a nondescript-looking maroon heap, but it had amused me to put a motor under the faded hood that was almost twice as powerful as the one that came with the car from the factory. I held it at a hundred for a while—barely passing a few other speed enthusiasts, at that—and then slowed and pulled over to the road shoulder and stopped. One check they have on these turnpikes is by timing the arrivals and departures at the tollgates. I sat till my time caught up to my speed—and also while I looked to see if anyone had been following.
Nothing happened except that I had to remind myself again to stop thinking about Ellen Keppert. I went on my way, and out the exit nearest Sea City. The road was a small blacktop, seeming fantastically narrow, curvy and crowded after the turnpike. I breezed along as swiftly as I could, and began smelling the salt in the air after a brief run. I wondered if it were on this road that Dick Rosslyn had had his fatal accident a year ago.
And I wondered, not for the first time, just what Dick had been to Ellen Keppert. She had insisted to me that she had not known him well. Not nearly as well, she said, as she had known Rose. Yet she had known him well enough to want the snapshot and mermaid from Rose as mementos.
Oh, well, cut out the woolgathering, now. Get back into the spirit of pure investigation, pursuing only the possible significance of mermaids.
Salt marsh claimed the areas beside the road, and there were short wooden bridges across which the car rumbled and clattered, and then a longer bridge over a shallow but wide arm of the Atlantic, and at the entrance to this bridge was the sign, Sea City.
Sea City is as different from its sisters as one grain of beach sand is different from another. You roll across the marsh bridge and onto a wide street with sand in drifts on either side. A big wooden arch, sand-scoured, says Welcome. Along the several blocks of this street are the older houses, sagging here and there, mostly shingle-sided. Toward the ocean are the stores. The drugstore is by far the biggest, selling everything from beach sandals to straw hats, and with stacks of big city papers outside on a stand.
Around the stand were clustered middle-aged men in old slacks and shirts who looked as if only by a determined effort were they being able to persuade themselves that vacations are fun. Just inside the wide doorway were the magazine racks, and around these were girls and girls and girls, in shorts, halters and tan.
The drugstore was almost at the ocean end of the street, and I found a place to park near it and walked on to the water’s edge. This was bordered for about two blocks by a boardwalk, bravely imitating, in its brief length, the boardwalk at Atlantic City.
Looking up left, northward, I saw the mermaid statue, and I went to it. Six feet high, perhaps, with remarkably scaly-looking scales, a remarkably fishy-looking tail, and then the upper torso of a woman remarkably statuesque in the right places. Not a bad mermaid, at that, with a green-bronze complexion and a big bronze conch shell held between her graceful metal hands.
Several couples were at the boardwalk rail beside the mermaid as I got there, and one of these, a pair of youngsters whose hands seemed to have grown together, so closely were they clasped, came toward it, ignoring me as if I’d never been hatched. The girl leaned against the mermaid and the boy took her picture. Then he leaned against the mermaid and she took his picture. Then I began to have some use in the world for them, after all, and the boy asked politely if I would snap a shot or two of them together. Ah, love.
And who, I wondered, had snapped Richard Rosslyn here last summer before he was killed? And who had been snapped by him in turn?
The young couple wandered off, with pictures in the box of the camera that would one day possibly be framed and set on a mantel where the eye could easily see them when it was raised from babies, vacuuming, or study of a dental bill for braces on young teeth. Or would one of the pictures someday turn up in a night club in the dressing case of a girl just murdered?
I went on past the mermaid and to a novelty shop. No mermaid statuettes in the window any more; the vogue—or possibly Chamber of Commerce compulsion—for selling them seemed to be in force no longer. I asked where the Sea City newspaper was. A very nice girl, brown as a coffee bean from the sun, said it was around the next corner backing up to the row of buildings on the main street, and I went there.
The Sea City Ledger was in a white clapboard box of a building with a front twice as high as its back, and the faint odor of fish might have come from the salt marsh in back of the town, or from the ghost-wares of the original fish market occupant of the building years ago. The Ledger, I saw, was a weekly, which would save time.
A taciturn-looking middle-aged man was sitting with his feet on an opened desk drawer just inside a railing a few yards from the doorway. He was as lank as a shad and with almost as many bones showing. A pipe smoldered in his lean jaws, and he was dressed in the kind of business clothes I’d like to wear myself. T shirt and blue canvas pants.
I said, “Hi,” and leaned on the railing.
He said, “Hi,” and leaned back in his chair.
I said, “What’s the formality that opens the gates of the Sea City Ledger morgue?”
“You ask the proprietor,” he said.
“You?”
“Uh-huh. Mort Channing.”
“Sam Cates, insurance adjuster.”
“You’re a little previous,” he said. “I wasn’t planning to set my shop afire till fall.”
“That’s all right,” I told him. “As long as I can see your back files first.”
He grinned a little. “Permission granted. But how far back?”
“The first issue after June twenty-eighth of last year.”
He looked at me for a moment with a shade less friendliness and a lot more speculation in his eyes. Then he shrugged, said that would be the July 4th issue, and got it for me.
In New York Dick Rosslyn had drawn a brief obit on a rear page. Here, and probably in Euler’s Grove, too, he was front page and nearly a quarter of that; a local auto death was major news. I read the full account. Extension truck with telephone poles sticking out in back, approaching a bridge. Car coming much too fast behind. The truck driver said he’d slowed for the bridge as the law required. He also said there were red flags tied onto the ends of the poles, which projected far beyond the rear wheels. He also said that it was just turning dusk, which, as everybody knows, is a mean light for driving.
At any rate this young fellow in the convertible behind him hadn’t slowed when the truck did, and had run smack into the projecting poles. They were just windshield high, and it was lucky he’d had a wallet and identification cards, for otherwise no one could have told who he’d been.
He was from New York, the account stated, and had been a dancer, employed currently at the Ring and Rose. He had been observed about town and on the boardwalk in the company of a young woman, but she had not put in an appearance following the accident.
While I’d been reading this, the lank man in the blue jeans and T shirt had been looking at me. He hadn’t looked to see what account, on what page, I was perusing, but he said, “The Rosslyn accident?”
I nodded. “It’s much more complete than the city news account. I thought it would be. That’s what I drove down to see. One of the things.”
He puffed his pipe.
I said, “There’s mention of a young woman companion of Rosslyn’s, before the accident. The implication is that they were extremely chummy.”
“I don’t believe I said that anyw
here in the item,” he replied, looking at the pipe smoke.
“You write things, there’s a feel about them. Can you remember the affair? Remember anything about the woman?”
“I remember seeing him around Main Street once or twice. Drugstore, I think—that’s the clubhouse in a resort town. But I never saw the woman. That was second-hand reporting.”
“Where was Rosslyn staying?”
“Had a room in one of the smaller hotels. Funny thing, though. Cap Haller, who runs the place, said he didn’t stay there. He’d come in every day or two to pick up mail, or maybe with laundry to send out. That was all. As if he paid six bucks a day just for an address.”
“Where did he stay, then?”
Mr. Mort Channing, publisher, owner and star reporter of the Sea City Ledger, shrugged his T-shirted shoulders.
There’d been an undercurrent of some sort in Channing’s manner, and he had guessed too easily what I wanted of the July 4th issue. I said, “Your memory is good about a thing that happened a year ago.”
He paused as if perhaps he wouldn’t reply. But then I could see him make up his mind to do so. “It was recently refreshed,” he said quietly.
I waited, and he puffed at his pipe and got no smoke and lit a match to it. Gray clouds issued forth again.
“Ten days ago,” he said. “Fellow about your age, only bigger and much prettier. In the most elegant sport clothes I’ve seen in years. I’m quite sure he didn’t work for any insurance company—I don’t think he toils for anyone. He wanted to read about the Rosslyn accident, too.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s help you didn’t have to give me. I appreciate it.”
He waved. I considered offering him the price of a year’s subscription to the Ledger and don’t bother to mail it, and then didn’t. He was not the kind you pay for favors. I thanked him again and went back to my car near the drugstore.