by Alice Duncan
I went out to lunch that day with Lulu. We dined, if it can be called that, at a little delicatessen down the street from the Figueroa Building.
“Where’d Ernie go?” Lulu asked at one point.
“He’s consulting with a client,” said I, trying to manhandle a rather hefty corned-beef sandwich into submission. Corned-beef sandwiches were another aspect of my new life that I liked a lot. Mother would pitch a fit if anyone so much as hinted at enjoying corned beef, which only proves one more time how snobbishness can get in the way of a fulfilling life. Or a filling one, anyhow.
“All morning? Must be a mighty pretty client.” Lulu giggled.
I didn’t.
Nevertheless, at about two-thirty that afternoon when, Ernie-less and bored to tears, and after vetoing the notion of visiting the Los Angeles Public Library to check out a novel or two as not being work-related, I decided to do a little detecting of my own. First I called the Los Angeles Police Department and asked to speak to Detective Bigelow.
“Bigelow,” came Phil’s voice, sounding gruffer than usual. I deduced from his tone that he was not in a good mood.
“Good afternoon, Phil. This is Mercy. Have you heard from Ernie?”
“No, damn it—sorry, Mercy. The son of a . . . um, as I told you earlier, we had an appointment at nine this morning, and I haven’t heard from him yet. Have you?”
Poor Phil sounded quite annoyed. I didn’t blame him, but my mind was uneasy. While Ernie was a casual individual, he wasn’t generally this casual. Not about his business, at least. “No. I haven’t heard a word from him. I don’t like his continued absence or this unusual silence, Phil. Do you think something might have happened to him?”
“Happened to him?” Phil snapped. “What the devil could happen to him with the Chalmers woman?”
“You’re the one who said she’s trouble,” I reminded him.
“I didn’t mean trouble trouble,” said Phil, not clearing up the matter one little bit in my mind. “Anyhow, what kind of trouble do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know, but don’t you think this behavior is unlike him?”
A largish pause on Phil’s end of the wire ensued before Phil said, “I don’t know, Mercy. Maybe he’s . . . um . . .”
I knew what he was thinking. Men. That’s all they ever think about, according to Chloe. I wouldn’t know from personal experience.
I huffed, but had to admit Phil might have something there, even if I didn’t want to believe it. I said, “Perhaps,” with as much dignity as I could, and bade Phil good day.
Nuts. I didn’t buy Phil’s theory. Not that he’d voiced it, but I knew what it was. He thought Ernie had decided upon a spot of dalliance with the lovely Mrs. Chalmers. Of course, the fact that I’d thought the same thing didn’t cheer me up any. However, I determined I needed to find Ernie. And if he were dallying with Mrs. Chalmers without having had the courtesy to keep his appointment with Phil or tell me when he’d be returning to the office so that I could pass the information on to clients who called—not that we had any—I was also going to give him a big, fat piece of my mind.
After thumbing through the client files, I telephoned Mrs. Chalmers’ home. No answer. Then, truly annoyed and not a little bit worried, I wrote down Mrs. Chalmers’ address and telephoned for a taxicab to pick me up in front of the Figueroa Building. The salary Ernie paid me didn’t run to taxicabs, but I figured Great-Aunt Agatha wouldn’t have minded. She’d been quite a good old girl, in spite of belonging to my family, which was probably why my mother had disliked her.
Mrs. Chalmers—and her husband if she had one, I suppose—lived on Wilton Place, near Second Street, in Los Angeles. As the cabbie drove me there, I decided it was a very pretty neighborhood, with big houses and awfully pretty yards. I think that, during my first few months in Los Angeles, the landscaping impressed me more than just about anything else in my new home. I suppose it’s easier to have lovely lawns, fabulous rose bushes, and all sorts of other flowers when the weather never freezes as it does in Boston. Chloe and Harvey had a gorgeous yard, and, although Chloe complained occasionally about not having a swimming pool—swimming pools were de rigueur amongst the Hollywood set, I had discovered early in my stay here—I didn’t miss it one little bit. I preferred the wonderful rose garden.
Naturally, neither Chloe nor Harvey worked in the garden. They had a staff of professional gardeners to do the work, but Mrs. Biddle, their housekeeper, made good use of the flowers therefrom.
The taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of a large white house with a massive porch and a huge double door. The cabbie opened the door for me. I asked him to wait, and I walked up a long paved pathway lined with gardenia bushes whose sweet, cloying fragrance nearly knocked me over. I climbed the short flight of stairs to the porch, crossed the porch to the gigantic doors, and twisted the doorbell. I heard the noise it made, and I waited.
And I waited.
And waited.
Frowning—where on earth could Ernie and Mrs. Chalmers have gone, and if they’d gone somewhere, why hadn’t Ernie called me or touched base with Phil?—I decided to take a chance and grabbed the doorknob. It turned easily. Then I hesitated. Did I really want to waltz into someone else’s home without having been invited?
Squaring my shoulders, I told myself firmly that I did indeed want to do that, because my boss might be in trouble. In fact, didn’t I feel a little tingle up my spine? After thinking about it for a second or three, I decided I didn’t.
Nevertheless, I gingerly shoved the door open and walked inside the house. Could this action of mine be called breaking and entering? I wasn’t sure, and I also wasn’t sure if the fact that I hadn’t actually broken anything would count if somebody found me there. Oh, well.
The door opened onto a foyer-type room, kind of like the one in Chloe’s house, only Chloe’s house has lovely tiles on the floor, and this was polished wood covered with a pretty Oriental rug. The rug looked like a Bukhara to me, although I’m certainly no expert on Oriental rugs.
Because I was still nervous, I cleared my throat and said, “Good afternoon?” in a questioning sort of voice.
No answer. Perhaps that was because I’d almost whispered the words. After taking a deep breath for courage, I repeated my greeting, more loudly this time: “Good afternoon!”
Still no answer.
Well, pooh. Now what?
Although my nerves were jangling like the bells on a Christmas sleigh, I decided it would be cowardly on my part not to finish what I’d started now that I had officially entered the house uninvited, so I set out to look for my boss. And, of course, Mrs. Chalmers.
I didn’t know the layout of the house, but having been born and reared in a place remarkably like this one, I didn’t have any trouble finding my way around. No one was in the breakfast room. No one was in the kitchen. No one was in the butler’s pantry or the dining room. Speaking of butlers, didn’t Mrs. Chalmers have any servants? In a place as big as this? I figured that a maid would probably pop up when I was searching a bedroom and screech, so I stopped and said, again loudly, “Good afternoon! Is anyone home?”
Still no answer. My nerves had begun to jump about like the Mexican jumping beans I’d seen people sell on the streets of Los Angeles, but I doggedly decided to pursue my goal. By that time, I was truly worried about my feckless boss.
Retracing my steps, I returned to the morning room and began my search in the opposite direction. There was nothing in the office but a piano and a desk. A library off the office appeared as though Mr. Chalmers, if he existed, used it as a refuge. It seemed definitely a masculine room, with leather sofas and chairs and so forth. From the library, a huge withdrawing room, furnished to the teeth with expensive pieces, opened onto a vast hallway leading to a staircase.
It was there, at the foot of the stairs, that I saw something more frightening even than having walked uninvited into someone else’s house: a lumpy bundle of filmy cloth. Not that a bundle of filmy
cloth is horrible in and of itself, but this particular bundle was light and frothy and diaphanous. And it enclosed a body. Even before I tiptoed over to see for sure, I knew the body was that of Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.
Once I determined for certain that it was she, I think I screamed, although I’m not sure. If I did, I’m ashamed of myself. After all, I aspire to the position of assistant to a private investigator. Someone in that capacity has no business screaming at the sight of bodies. Still and all, this was only the second dead person I’d encountered in my entire life who wasn’t properly laid out and made up and in a coffin. The funeral director in Boston had actually made Great-Aunt Agatha look a good deal better in death than she ever had in life.
Not so Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.
Lest you think I added to my list of failures by running away from my duty as well as screaming, let me assure you that I did not. In actual fact, I mentally braced myself—hard—and knelt beside Mrs. Chalmers’ body. I checked the pulse in her neck. There wasn’t one. I checked the pulse in her wrist. Again, there wasn’t one. And then I saw the blood-caked back of her head and leaped up and away from the corpse. Since I was kneeling at the time of my leap, I ended up in an undignified position on my rump with my legs spread out before me. From that position, I could see the entirety of the late Mrs. Chalmers, and I have to say that every bit of my former envy of the woman vanished. All I saw from this angle was a poor, seemingly silly, woman who had died before her time, and violently at that. I don’t believe she was much older than thirty, and while thirty sounded kind of old to me, at twenty-one, it wasn’t really. Heck, Ernie was almost thirty.
The smack on my rump seemed to loosen the parts of my brain that had been frozen in horror, and they began working again. If Mrs. Chalmers was dead at the foot of the stairs in her house, and if Ernie had come to her house to visit her before nine o’clock this morning, where in the world could he be now, at . . . well, I wasn’t sure what time it was. Maybe three or three-thirty? I decided I needed to get myself one of those new wrist-watches Chloe and I saw at the Broadway Department Store.
Could Ernie, too, be . . . ?
No. I didn’t want even to think of such a thing. Not Ernie. Not the man who’d given me my very first job. Not the man whom I’d come to . . . like a lot.
But where the heck was he?
Steeling my nerves—they needed a whole lot of steeling that day—I rose to my feet, tiptoed around the recumbent Mrs. Chalmers, and silently padded up the stairs, keeping my eyes and ears pricked. While I was no expert on the various causes of death available to a person, it sure looked to me as if someone had given Mrs. Chalmers a wicked bash on the head before she’d fallen—or, more likely, been hurled—down those very same steps. I allowed myself a couple of peeks at the carpet runner on the stairs, but it, too, was patterned in an intricate Oriental pattern, so I couldn’t tell if any of the reddish splotches of color might have been made by blood. If they were, they’d fallen in a remarkably regular pattern.
Boy, what I didn’t know about the art of criminal investigation could fill a book! Actually, it probably did. Maybe more than one. Perhaps I should visit the Los Angeles Public Library again soon, and this time my visit would be work-related.
But my insufficient knowledge of criminal investigation was neither here nor there. As I’ve already mentioned, as I climbed those stairs, I listened hard, trying to detect any movement in the upstairs part of the house. I’d already ascertained there was no one in the downstairs. No one alive, at any rate.
Silence as deep as that ought to be outlawed, because it’s terribly nerve-wracking. To be fair, I suppose my nerves would have been wracked even more drastically if a criminal had hurtled out of a room and hollered at me or, worse, grabbed me. Still and all, I had the creeps and the willies and the heebie-jeebies as I reached the top of the stairs and looked both ways down the hall where the stairway ended.
Nothing.
I glanced down the staircase. Mrs. Chalmers was still there. Oh, goody.
So I headed down the hallway to my right, determined to snoop until I’d found my boss. Or not found him. I hoped for the former result.
I suppose it’s considered good housekeeping to shut all the doors in a house when no one’s in the rooms behind them, but it’s really, really intimidating to open one closed door after another in a house where you suspect a murder has recently been committed. I say recently because of the relative warmth of Mrs. Chalmers’ body when I checked various parts of her for a pulse. Of course, the September heat might account for some of that warmth, but I still didn’t believe she’d been dead for too awfully long. The notion made me shudder, and I did a bit more nerve-steeling.
My gasp when I opened the last door at the end of that infinitely long corridor might have awakened the dead, although I later learned that Mrs. Chalmers hadn’t stirred in spite of it.
“Ernie!” I regret to say I squealed the name.
Ernie, who looked as if he might be dead, too, didn’t stir. Sprawled across a big bed covered with a crimson brocade throw, he lay on his stomach with his head turned to one side—the side toward me—only his eyes were closed. Oh, good Lord, he couldn’t be dead! Could he? Not Ernie!
My hand pressed to my thundering heart and with, I’m sorry to report, tears in my eyes, I hesitatingly approached the bed. As I did, I noticed something rather odd about Ernie that I hadn’t at first taken in: he was bound and gagged. I’d read books in which people had been bound and gagged, but I’d never seen anyone who had been. He also seemed to be out cold. I peered closely at him, praying he still breathed. When one of those eyes of his opened, I darned near screamed again.
“Grmph!” said Ernie.
“What?” said I.
“Grmph!” he repeated, with more emphasis this time.
I decided it might be a good idea to get the gag out of Ernie’s mouth before I attempted further communication with him. So I did. Doing so wasn’t easy. Whoever had tied the knot had been quite thorough. I didn’t have a knife with me, so I had to work the knot free with my fingers, and by the time I finally succeeded, two of my fingernails had broken and Ernie’s temper wasn’t at its best.
“God damned son of a bitch!” were the first words out of his mouth. Then he clutched his head and groaned.
While rather shocked at his language, I decided I’d better not call him to task for it. I could tell he was in a foul mood. Anyhow, I supposed he deserved to swear a little, given the circumstances.
Rather, I did my level best to untie the bonds holding his wrists together. “Darn it, these are too tight.” I was surprised, in fact, that his hands hadn’t swollen and turned blue from lack of circulation.
“Use the pocket knife in my back pocket,” he suggested in a surly voice.
Undaunted by his mood, I gingerly reached into his back pocket where, sure enough, I found one of those knives with all sorts of blades, screwdrivers, and bottle openers and things attached to them. Handy tools, those. Then, trying my very best not to draw blood, I slit the rope binding Ernie’s hands. I only slipped once or twice, to wicked grumbles from my boss. Once his hands were free, Ernie flapped them in the air, I presume to get the circulation back. Then he said, “I’ll cut the rest of them myself. If I let you do it, you’ll probably slit one of my veins.”
Although I didn’t appreciate his comment, his suggestion was fine with me, so I handed him the knife with only one small “hmph.” As he sawed at the rope binding his feet, swearing softly the while, I cleared my throat and said, “What happened, Ernie?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“If you don’t know, who does?” I asked. By that time, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind myself. Here I’d risked life and limb—or at the very least, arrest and imprisonment—to find this man, and all he could do was swear at me. I was not amused.
“Dammit, Mercy, what are you doing here? What the hell time is it?”
“Stop cursing at me, Ernest Templeton,
darn you! I came looking for you when you didn’t return to the office by two-thirty this afternoon—with, I might add, not a telephone call or a note to tell me when you’d be back. What did you expect me to tell any clients who called?”
“Huh,” said Ernie. “I suppose there were thousands of those.”
I scowled at him and didn’t rise to his bait. “And I came here because you said you’d be here! And I don’t know what time it is. When I left the office, it was early afternoon. Why don’t you look at a clock if you want to know what time it is? Or your own pocket watch?” I turned, intending to leave my irritating employer to his own devices.
Then I remembered the body at the foot of the stairs and stopped in my tracks. I did not, however, turn around to face Ernie. What I was attempting to do as I stood there was think of another way out of that stupid house.
“Listen, Mercy, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“So am I.” I still didn’t turn around. Maybe there was a back staircase. Servants were supposed to use back staircases. At our family home in Boston, Chloe and I used to think it was fun to ride up and down the dumbwaiter, but I was littler then. These days I probably wouldn’t fit in the dumbwaiter, even if I could find it in this mansion. No. There simply had to be another set of stairs somewhere.
“Mercy, please. Don’t you have any idea what time it is? I don’t remember anything since this morning. God, is it really afternoon already?”
Very well, since he sounded repentant, I turned. Still glaring, I said, “Really? You truly don’t remember anything since morning? I left the office to look for you at about two-thirty.”
I think he’d have rolled his eyes if he’d felt better. “Good God. Two-thirty? Really? I don’t remember a thing. Is it honestly two-thirty in the afternoon?” He shook his head, but I could tell he instantly regretted the gesture. “But it can’t be that late. I was supposed to meet Phil at nine.”