I felt a hand on my arm. “Don’t look so grim. I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a manic-depressive bitch.”
I shook my head. “Not you. Just playing with might-have-beens. This town sometimes does it to me. I don’t really know why I keep coming back. Maybe it’s not such a hot idea. Maybe when something’s over one should just get the hell out. For good. Maybe you should think about that.”
“I know,” she said. “But if I ever go, I want to go on my own terms. I don’t want to feel that I was driven out… Here we are.”
It looked like a single, long, rather ancient adobe structure right on the sidewalk—actually, I remembered, it was a historical edifice with a plaque to prove it—but an archway let us through the first array of shops to reveal that the building was actually a great hollow rectangle surrounding a pleasant courtyard with flower beds and flagstone paths: a plaza, in the local idiom. There were small stores, art galleries, and professional offices.
Madeleine led me along one of the paths through the flower beds, across to a door on the far side of the open space. The brass plate on the door read: JOSEPH P. BIRNBAUM—ATTORNEY AT LAW. It was apparently a fairly large suite of offices. Around the corner to the left was a small gallery displaying some of the bright, delicate, decorative black-velvet paintings the Indian artists seemed to favor at one time, although I thought they’d been phased out in favor of the Fritz-Scholders type of rugged redskins, a much more intriguing art form. Off to the right, beyond another archway that, I remembered, led out to the parking lot behind, was an architect’s office and an antique store.
“Easy now, baby,” I said as Madeleine, still ahead of me, reached for the knob.
She glanced at me sharply, shocked. “Matt, what…?”
Then she checked herself, and stepped aside to make way for me. I felt the tug at my hip, and the sudden lack of weight in the revolver-holster as she acted on her endearment cue, a little belatedly. I pressed the catch to release the stainless-steel automatic into my hand. Holding it concealed, as before, I turned the doorknob cautiously with my free hand and shoved the door away from me hard, letting it slam inward, hoping I wasn’t scaring an innocent legal secretary out of her nylon panty hose. I heard Madeleine, behind me, gasp at the sight of the shambles revealed by the open door.
In a moment we were inside, and I had the door closed. I set the dead-bolt lock to make sure it stayed that way. I stepped quickly off to the left, waving Madeleine off to the right; no sense making an easy double shot for anybody, although there was nobody in sight, just a thoroughly torn-up reception room. The upholstered furniture had been slashed open and ripped apart by somebody who enjoyed destroying things with a knife. Photographs and paintings had been yanked from the walls and smashed. All the drawers from the bank of files behind the secretary-receptionist’s desk had been hauled out and emptied, and the desk drawers as well. On the desk I saw, only slightly askew, a small, neat nameplate: MRS. PATRICIA SILVA.
“Matt, how did you know…?”
“Never mind it right now,” I whispered, just as she had whispered, although after the slamming-open of the door our presence couldn’t be a secret to anybody in the place. “Which is Birnbaum’s office?”
She gestured with the .38, straight ahead beyond the desk. She spoke in more normal tones: “Right over there. It’s big. Windows on the parking lot. Two more offices, smaller, at the end of this room—over there—for the young lawyers he takes on from time to time. Bathroom between them.”
“And what’s the door at this end, over behind those files?”
“That’s the storeroom for clients’ papers—kind of a vault, really. It’s like musty library stacks in there. It should be locked…”
“No, stay put,” I said as she started forward. “You cover me, I’ll do the exploring. I’ve had more practice.”
“Matt, how did you know something was wrong?”
“My left ear itched.” I grinned at her briefly. “Once early on, as the British say, I went through a door carelessly and got a leg shot out from under me, even though I’d had a feeling something was wrong. So now I respect any little warning tickle. Like I think I said once before, why should you have all the ESP in the outfit? Watch those doors while I check in here.”
The storage-room door wasn’t locked. Well, to be accurate, it was locked but the key was in the lock—part of a sizable key collection on a split ring, not the kind you’d usually leave hanging in locks. We hadn’t seen it because of the out-jutting file cabinets. I opened the door and found that the dark storeroom beyond, crowded with metal shelves, had been just as thoroughly scrambled as the outer office, to the point where there was no possible way, short of a complete inventory, of learning what, if anything, was missing. Which could have been the idea. I came out to find her still standing warily where I’d left her, gun ready.
“Another disaster area,” I reported. “Cover me while I check the back offices and the can.” I grinned tightly. “Professional note: make sure of the unimportant spaces first so nobody can jump out of them at you when you finally get around to concentrating on the important ones.” The two small offices and the bathroom were empty. They had also been torn apart, but less thoroughly, as if the searchers hadn’t had much hope of finding anything back there. Or as if they’d been tiring of their labors when they got that far; and you could see why. Emerging, I drew a long breath, and said, “Stay right here. Holler if anybody comes.”
I went through the door into Birnbaum’s office the way it says in the book, latest revised edition. I could have saved myself the trouble. The two people in the big comfortable room—well, it had been comfortable before the rip-it-apart boys had got at it—were no threat to anybody, at least not to anybody with a strong stomach. Lawyer Birnbaum himself wasn’t so bad. He was merely dead, slumped over his disordered desk without a mark on him. I could see part of his long, dark, face; probably a sensitive, intelligent, and friendly old face in life. The hair was gray, wavy, and hardly disordered at all. His skin was still quite warm to the touch, but not as warm as it should have been.
The woman sprawled in one of the deep chairs provided for clients was a different story. She’d been a short woman with a comfortably upholstered body and a comfortable round face. The heavy hair, only slightly streaked with gray although she’d been in her fifties, had been pulled back to a neat bun at the nape of her neck, but it had mostly escaped confinement now and was straggling wildly. She’d been wearing a neat brown trousers-suit and a white silk blouse with a bow at the throat; but the bow had been yanked apart and the blouse wrenched open. Blouse and jacket together had then been forced off her shoulders and down her arms, binding them to her body. The straps of her businesslike brassiere had been cut with a knife, and the garment dragged downwards to free her generous breasts. It was now a twisted rag around her middle—a bloodstained rag, because the tip of her right breast had been sliced away leaving a circle of raw flesh about two inches in diameter from which, as long as she was alive, the blood had poured freely, soaking her clothes and the chair in which she sat. But it had stopped bleeding now.
I moved closer to determine the cause of death: a skillful knife-thrust into the neck that had severed the spinal cord. A gagging sound made me whirl to see Madeleine behind me, her face white and sick.
“I told you to stay put,” I said. “Use the bathroom if you’re going to puke; don’t mess up the scene of the crime.”
“I’m… all right. Don’t be so damn tough-guy, tough guy. Some people haven’t seen as many mutilated bodies as other people.”
I nodded. “Good girl. Just a minute while I take a quick look around.”
I went over and rechecked Joseph P. Birnbaum as carefully as I could without moving him. There was a wall safe, open, in the alcove beside the big stone fireplace; I guessed the legal-looking papers and envelopes strewn on the rug below it represented its former contents. I sniffed, and approached the fireplace, and found the smoke-smell stronger
there. A considerable amount of paper had recently been burned there and the ashes hammered apart with a poker that had been left lying on the hearth. I saw something crumpled and brownish more or less intact at the rear of the fireplace and used the poker to fish it out cautiously: a scorched, wadded-up manila envelope of considerable size, say 10X14. Laying down the poker, and carrying my find, I returned to Madeleine.
“Let’s get out of here. Watch out for that blood on the rug.”
Following her out into the reception room, I found myself glancing back uneasily with a feeling that there was something I’d overlooked. Then I realized that I was trying to locate the little piece of meat that was missing. Sick. I closed the door behind me. Madeleine turned abruptly; and I held her for a moment as she fought for control. She drew a long, ragged breath and freed herself.
“Oh, God, poor Uncle Joe! Poor Miss Pat!”
“You knew her?”
“Of course. A nice widow lady. She came to work here right after her husband died in an auto accident. She was still… quite young and pretty back then, in a plump, girlish sort of way. Very bright, very competent, very kind, very pleasant. His wife was an invalid, a whining, demanding bitch. We always thought they’d eventually… I hope to God he at least slept with her occasionally so they got something out of it. All those years!” She swallowed hard. “Why would somebody do that to her? And what happened to him, could you. tell?”
I said, “Presumably they were trying to force the safe combination out of him. All this”—I waved a hand at the shambles around us—“was probably done as much to terrorize them as to determine that the stuff the goons were after wasn’t anywhere but in the safe. Obviously the show was run by a guy who likes busting things up and throwing them around and slashing them with a knife. I’ve met a few like that.” Something stirred in my mind as I said it, and I tried to recapture a memory, but it wouldn’t come and there was no time to work on it. “He was using the search as a way of softening them up, making sure they knew they were dealing with a ruthless gent who wanted something badly and would stop at nothing. Then, when they’d been properly impressed, the pressure really went on: the elderly gent slammed down behind the desk with a gun at his neck watching his middle-aged lady having her clothes wrenched apart and cut apart, seeing her thrown into a chair, seeing the knife at her breast; he trying to gasp out the safe combination but not getting it out quite in time to save her because he was starting to have trouble with his breathing and because he was dealing with a hasty guy who likes using that knife… But the old man got the number out at last in spite of the agonizing pain in his chest. Then he put his head on the desk and died. He did have a heart condition, didn’t he?”
Madeleine nodded somberly. “Yes, he’d had a coronary… oh, years and years ago. Fifteen years? He’d made a good recovery from that; but then he had another one and almost died at the time of my trial. Even after… after I was sent to Fort Ames, I heard from my folks that he was still in the cardiac ward just barely making it. He was a very tough old character, but it would have left him pretty vulnerable, wouldn’t it? And an experience like this…!” She shook her head. “Shouldn’t we be calling the police?”
“As soon as we’ve figured out what to tell them. And what not to tell them. They’ll want to know why it was done; what the murderers were trying to find. Did find. They’ll want to know if it had anything to do with us, with you.”
She licked her lips. “Did it, Matt?”
“It could have,” I said bluntly. “We can check. They burned a considerable amount of rather flimsy paper and were careful about hammering apart the ashes, but the manila envelope was more fire-resistant and didn’t really matter to them anyway. Here it is.”
I smoothed out the heavy envelope on Mrs. Silva’s desk, a little embarrassed about the ashes I was spreading around. I reminded myself that the place was a mess, anyway, and the lady was dead. A corner of the envelope had been burned away, and there were blackened places where the fire had tried to catch but hadn’t quite made it. But the writing, done boldly with a very black felt-tipped pen, was quite legible: CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL—DO NOT OPEN! Upon receipt of legal proof of my death this envelope must be delivered intact and un-opened to my wife, Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw, appearing in person to receive it. Signed: Roy Malcolm Ellershaw.
There was a long silence; then Madeleine sighed deeply. “I wondered why Uncle Joe was so insistent on my coming here; I couldn’t really see why the estate business couldn’t be handled by mail.” She shook her head. “Poor Roy. Everything he did for me was wrong, wasn’t it? If he’d just left Uncle Joe some loophole—but there never was any proof of death.”
I said, “I suppose it was a problem in legal ethics. Your husband was the client in this instance, not you, even though Birnbaum had known you since you were a kid. With your trial coming up, it seems likely that Birnbaum fought with his lawyer’s conscience about opening the envelope in spite of the client’s strict instructions, to see if there was something inside that would help your case… Whether that moral conflict brought on his second coronary or not, we’ll never know; but by the time he was functioning again, after a fashion, it was all over and you were already in prison. And he was a sick old man and couldn’t bear to face that decision again. Until enough years had passed that Roy Ellershaw, the client, could be considered legally dead, and his wishes could be obeyed at last.”
“And whether or not it would have helped me, it’s burned now,” she said grimly. “So I can’t even use it to help me now.”
“The experts can do very fancy things with ashes nowadays, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic,” I said. “That must have been the reason you had to be killed when you got out of Ames. The people with whom we’re dealing, call them the CADRE people, must have learned somehow that your husband had left you more than what was found in your safe-deposit box, maybe even a whole second copy of the Monkey House computer stuff. It’s quite possible that the stuff Bennett stole from your bank made reference to additional material awaiting you elsewhere, but obviously it didn’t say where. So they presumably searched all the likely places where Roy Ellershaw might have cached something for you—it would be interesting to see if there were some unexplained burglaries or break-ins eight or nine years ago—but it never occurred to them he might have approached the lawyer representing his parents-in-law. Until you got back here and made a beeline for your Uncle Joe; and somebody started wondering, just like you, why Mr. Birnbaum had been so insistent upon your coming in person to clean up some estate matters that could undoubtedly have been handled by remote control. So they sent out the wrecking squad and hit the jackpot.”
“So in a way I’m responsible for bringing this… this disaster upon two nice people.” Her voice was bleak. “I’m gaining on it, aren’t I? Yesterday I helped send a man crashing to his death in a canyon, and today I’m accessory to two murders. And now we had better call the police.”
I said, as she reached for the phone, “Don’t trouble yourself. I think they’re here.” I’d heard heavy footsteps outside. “At least we’ve got company coming, and it sounds official. Let me have that .38 back, quick.”
I tucked it away, and returned the .25 to its arm clip. Somebody was trying the knob even as I moved towards the locked front door.
“Open up! Police!”
“Hold your horses, I’m coming,” I shouted. “Take it easy coming in, Officer. Federal government here.”
Whatever that might mean. One of these days—or years—I’m going to have to learn how a real FBI-type G-man does it. I got out my fancy identification folder. It made me a little clumsy getting the door unlocked one-handed, but you never know with cops. They do get nervous, and I wanted the situation perfectly clear from the start. I didn’t want to have to shoot one just to stay alive…
The door slammed back the instant the bolt was clear. Well, I’d anticipated that and stepped back, but the husky uniformed gent who charged in wasn’t holding a gun
, as I’d expected. It would have slowed him down a bit, and we’d have had to go through the up-with-the-hands routine, and the assume-the-position-against-the-wall routine; but he just grabbed the wrist of the left hand in which I was displaying my ID and wrenched it around behind me, ignoring the leather folder that dropped to the floor, swinging me around roughly at the same time. Holding me there facing away from him, my arm twisted up between my shoulder blades, he gave me a nasty one-handed pat-down and found the .38 on my hip and yanked it free.
“I’ve got this one.” His voice was harsh with strain. “Put the cuffs on the woman.”
“Already have.” This one was just a voice, with a slight local accent.
“Close the door.”
“Already have.”
The one behind me released his hammerlock. “You! Straight ahead. Hands against the wall. High!”
I said plaintively, “Officer, I’m not wearing this sling for show, I can’t raise my—”
“Forward march! You’ll be surprised what you can do when you really try!”
“Matt, watch out!”
It was a warning cry from Madeleine. I threw myself down but not quite fast enough; the baton or billy club or whatever they call it nowadays glanced off the back of my skull hard enough to make my extremities tingle as if they’d been frozen and were just coming back to life. I almost lost the little automatic as it slipped into my hand; then I was rolling away and coming back up…
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