“You’re asking a lot of questions, aren’t you?”
I grinned at her.
“I’m a curious guy. Isn’t she bad enough to have a doctor?”
She looked at me.
“Between you and me, I don’t know. I’ve never seen her.”
I sat up, spilling some of my whisky.
“You’ve never seen her? What do you mean? You nurse her, don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it worries me, and I have to tell someone. Promise you won’t pass it on?”
“Who would I pass it on to? Do you mean you’ve never even seen Maureen Crosby?”
“That’s right. Nurse Flemming won’t let me into the sick-room. My job is to fob off visitors, and now no one ever visits, I haven’t a thing to do.”
“What do you do, then, at night?”
“Nothing. I sleep at the house. If the telephone rings I’m supposed to answer it. But it never rings.”
“You’ve looked in Maureen’s room when Nurse Flemming isn’t around, surely?”
“I haven’t, because they keep the door locked. It’s my bet she isn’t even in the house.”
“Where else would she be?” I asked, sitting forward and not bothering to conceal my excitement.
“If what Flemming says is right, she could be in the sanatorium.”
“And what does Nurse Flemming say?”
“I told you: she’s sweating out a drug jag.”
“If she’s in the sanatorium, then why the deception? Why not say right out she’s there? Why put in a couple of nurses and fake a sick-room?”
“Brother, if I knew I’d tell you,” Nurse Gurney said, and finished her drink. “It’s a damned funny thing, but whenever you and I get together we have to talk about Maureen Crosby.”
“Not all the time,” I said, getting up and crossing to the divan. I sat by her side. “Is there any reason why you can’t leave Salzer?”
“I’m under contract to him for another two years. I can’t leave him.”
I let my fingers stroke her knee.
“What kind of guy is Salzer? I’ve heard he’s a quack.”
She slapped my hand.
“He’s all right. Maybe he is a quack, but the people he treats are just over-fed. He starves them and collects. You don’t have to be a qualified man to do that.”
My hand strayed back to her knee again.
“Do you think you could be a clever, smart girl and find out if Maureen is in the sanatorium?” I asked, and began a complicated manoeuvre.
She slapped my hand, hard this time.
“There you go again—Maureen.”
I rubbed the back of my hand.
“You have quite a slap there.”
She giggled.
“When you have my looks you learn to slap hard.”
Then the front-door bell rang: one long, shrill peal.
“Don’t answer it,” I said. “I’m now ready not to talk about Maureen.”
“Don’t be silly.” She swung her long legs off the divan. It’s the grocerman.”
“What’s he got I haven’t? “
“I’ll show you when I come back. I can’t starve just to please you.”
She went out of the room and closed the door. I took the opportunity to freshen my drink, and then lay down on the divan. What she had told me had been very interesting. The uncared-for garden, the crap-shooting chinamen, the whittling chauffeur, the smoking butler all added up to the obvious truth that Maureen wasn’t living at Crestways. Then where was she? Was she at the sanatorium? Was she sweating out a drug jag? Nurse Flemming would know. Dr. Jonathan Salzer would know, too. Probably Benny Dwan and Eudora had known.
Perhaps Glynn & Coppley knew, or if they didn’t they might wish to know. I began to see a way to put this business on a financial footing. My mind shifted to Brandon. If I had Glynn & Coppley behind me, I didn’t think Brandon would dare start anything. Glynn & Coppley were the best, the most expensive, the top-drawer lawyers in California. They had branch offices in San Francisco, Hollywood, New York and London. They were not the kind of people who’d allow themselves to be nudged by a shyster copper like Brandon. If they wanted to they had enough influence to dust him right out of office.
I closed my eyes and thought how nice it would be to be rid of Brandon and have a good, honest Captain of Police like Mifflin in charge at Headquarters. How much easier it would be for me to get co-operation instead of threats of dark alley beatings.
Then it occurred to me that Nurse Gurney had been away longer than it was necessary to collect a few groceries, and I sat up, frowning. I couldn’t hear her talking. I couldn’t hear anything. I set my drink down and stood up. Crossing the room I opened the door and looked into the lobby. The front door was ajar, but there was no one to see. I peeped into the passage.
The door of the opposite apartment looked blankly at me and I returned to the lobby. Maybe she was in the johnny, I thought, and went back into the sitting-room. I sat and waited, getting more and more fidgety, then after five minutes I finished my drink and went to the door again.
Somewhere in the apartment a refrigerator gave a whirring grunt and made me jump halfway out of my skin. I raised my voice and called, “Hey!” but no one answered. Moving quietly, I opened the door opposite the living-room and looked around what was obviously her bedroom. She wasn’t there. I even looked under the bed. I went into the bathroom and the kitchen and a tiny room that was probably the guest-room. She wasn’t in any of these rooms.
I went back to the living-room, but she wasn’t there either. It was beginning to dawn on me she wasn’t in the apartment, so I went to the front door, along the passage until I arrived at the main corridor. I looked to right and left. Stony-faced doors looked back at me. Nothing moved, nothing happened; just two lines of doors, a mile of shabby drugget, two or three grimy windows to let in the light, but no Nurse Gurney.
V
I stared blankly out of the window of the small living-room at the roof of the Buick parked below.
Without shoes or stockings she couldn’t have gone far, I told myself, unless… and my mind skipped to Eudora Drew, seeing a picture of her as she lay across the bed with the scarf biting into her throat.
For some moments I stood undecided. There seemed nothing much I could do. I had nothing to work on. The front-door bell rings. She says it’s the grocerman. She goes into the lobby. She vanishes. No cry; no bloodstains; no nothing.
But I had to do something, so I went to the front door and opened it and looked at the door of the opposite apartment. It didn’t tell me anything. I stepped into the passage and dug my thumb into the bell-push. Almost immediately the door opened as if the woman who faced me had been waiting for my ring.
She was short and plump, with white hair, a round, soft-skinned face, remarkable for the bright, vague, forget-me-not blue eyes and nothing else. At a guess, she was about fifty, and when she smiled she showed big, dead-looking white teeth that couldn’t have been her own. She was wearing a fawn-coloured coat and skirt that must have cost a lot of money, but fitted her nowhere. In her small, fat, white hand she held a paper sack.
“Good morning,” she said, and flashed the big teeth at me.
She startled me. I wasn’t expecting to see this plump, matronly woman who looked as if she had just come in from a shopping expedition and was now about to cook the lunch.
“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, lifting my hat. “I’m looking for Nurse Gurney.” I waved to the half-open front door behind me. “She lives there, doesn’t she?”
The plump woman dipped into the paper sack and took out a plum. She examined it closely, the eyes in her vacant, fat face suspicious. Satisfied, she popped it into her mouth. I watched her, fascinated.
“Why, yes,” she said in a muffled voice. “Yes, she does.” She raised her cupped hand, turned the stone out of her mouth into her hand in a refined way and dropped the stone back into the sack. “Have a plum?”
I said I didn’t care for plums, and thanked her.
“They’re good for you,” she said, dipped into the sack and fished our another. But this time it didn’t pass her scrutiny and she put it back and found another more to her liking.
“You haven’t seen her, have you?” I asked, watching the plum disappear between the big teeth.
“Seen who?”
“Nurse Gurney. I’ve just called and I find the front door open. I can’t get any answer to my ring.”
She chewed the plum while her unintelligent face remained blank. After she had got rid of the plum stone, she said. “You should eat plums. You haven’t got a very healthy colour. I eat two pounds every day.”
From the shape of her that wasn’t all she ate.
“Well, maybe I’ll get around to them one day,” I said patiently. “Nurse Gurney doesn’t happen to be in your apartment?”
Her mind had wandered into the paper sack again, and she looked up, startled. “What was that?”
Whenever I run into a woman like this I am very, very glad I am a bachelor.
“Nurse Gurney.” I felt I wanted to make signs the way I do when I talk to a foreigner. “The one who lives in that apartment. I said she doesn’t happen to be in your apartment.”
The blue eyes went vague.
“Nurse Gurney?”
“That’s right.”
“In my apartment?”
I drew a deep breath.
“Yeah. She doesn’t happen to be in your apartment, does she?”
“Why should she be?”
I felt blood begin to sing in my ears.
“Well, you see, her front door was open. She doesn’t appear to be in her apartment. I wondered if she had popped over to have a word with you.”
Another plum came into view. I averted my eyes. Seeing those big teeth bite into so much fruit was beginning to undermine my mental stability.
“Oh, no, she hasn’t done that.”
Well, at least we were making progress.
“You wouldn’t know where she is?”
The plum stone appeared and dropped into the sack. A look of pain came over the fat, blank face. She thought. You could see her thinking the way you can see a snail move if you watch hard enough.
“She might be in the—the bathroom,” she said at last. “I should wait and ring again.”
Quite brilliant in a dumb kind of way.
“She’s not in there. I’ve looked.”
She was about to put the bite on another plum. Instead she lowered it to look reproachfully at me.
“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do.”
I took off my hat and ran my fingers through my hair. Much more of this and I would be walking up the wall.
“I knocked first,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Well, if she’s not with you I’ll go back and try again.”
She was still thinking. The look of pain was still on her face.
“I know what I would do if I were you,” she said.
I could guess, but I didn’t tell her. I had a feeling she would insult at the drop of a hat.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’d go downstairs and see the janitor. He’s a very helpful man.” Then she spoilt it by adding, “Are you sure you won’t have a plum?”
“Yeah, I’m quite sure. Well, thanks, I’ll see the janitor like you said. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” she said, and smiled.
I backed away, and as she closed the door she put another plum into the maw she called her mouth.
I rode down the elevator to the lobby and walked down a flight of dark, dusty stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs a door faced me. It bore a solitary legend: Janitor. I raised my hand and rapped. A lean old man with a long, stringy neck, dressed in faded dungarees, appeared. He was old and bored and smelt faintly of creosote and whisky. He squinted at me without interest, said one word out of a phlegmy old throat, “Yes?”
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get much help out of him unless I shook him out of his lethargy. From the look of him he seldom came up out of the darkness, and his contacts with human beings were rare. He and Rip Van Winkle would have made a fine business team, providing Winkle took charge of things; not otherwise; decidedly not otherwise.
I leaned forward and hooked a finger in his pocket.
“Listen, pally,” I said, as tough as an Orchid City cop. “Shake the hay out of your hair. I want a little co-operation from you.” While I talked I rocked him to and fro. “Apartment 246—what gives?”
He swallowed his Adam’s apple twice. The second time I didn’t think it would come to the surface again, but eventually it did—but only just.
“What’s up?” he said, blinking. “What’s the matter with Apartment 246?”
“I’m asking you. Front door’s open; no one’s there. That’s where you come in, pally. You should know when a front door’s been left open.”
“She’s up there,” he said owlishly. “She’s always up there at this time.”
“Only this time she’s not. Come on, pally, you and me are going up there to take a look around.”
He went with me as meek as a lamb. As we rode in the elevator, he said feebly, “She’s always been a nice girl. What do the police want with her?”
“Did I say the police want anything with her?” I asked, and scowled at him. “All I want to know is why the front door’s open when she isn’t there.”
“Maybe she went out and forgot to shut it,” he said after turning the matter over in his mind. I could see he was pleased with this idea.
“Now you’re getting cute,” I said as the elevator came to a creaking standstill. I was glad to get out of it. It didn’t seem strong enough to haul one, let alone two people. “Did you see her go out?”
He said he hadn’t seen her go out.
“Would you have seen her if she went?”
“Yes.” He blinked, and his Adam’s apple jumped a couple of notches. “My room overlooks
the front entrance.”
“Are you sure she didn’t come out during the past ten minutes?”
No, he couldn’t be sure about that. He had been cooking his lunch.
We went down the long corridor into the cul-de-sac and into Nurse Gurney’s apartment.
We went into each room, but she still wasn’t in any of them.
“Not there,” I said. “How else could she have left the building without using the front entrance?”
After staring blankly at the wall, he said there was no other way out.
I poked a finger towards the opposite apartment.
“Who’s the fat woman who eats plums?”
This time his Adam’s apple went for good.
“Plums?” he repeated and backed away. I guess he thought I was crazy.
“Yeah. Who is she?”
He looked at the door of Apartment 244, blinked, turned scared old eyes on me.
“In there, mister?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head.
“No one’s in there. That apartment’s to rent.”
I felt a sudden chill run up my spine. I shoved past him and sank .my thumb into the bell-push. I could hear the bell ringing, but nothing happened; nobody came to the door.
“Got a pass key?”
He fumbled in his pocket, dragged out a key and handed it over.
“Ain’t nobody in there, mister,” he said. “Been empty for weeks.”
I turned the lock, pushed open the door and went into a lobby just like Nurse Gurney’s lobby. I went quickly from room to room. The place was as empty and as bare as Mrs. Hubbard’s cupboard.
The bathroom window looked on to a fire-escape. I pushed up the window and leaned out. Below was an alley that led into Skyline Avenue. It would have been easy for a strong man to have carried a girl down the escape to a waiting car below.
Leaning far out I saw a plum stone on one of t
he iron steps. Pity she hadn’t swallowed it. It might have choked her.
Chapter III
I
There was a time when I proudly imagined I had a well-furnished, impressive, non-gaudy, super-de-luxe office to work in. Between us, Paula and I had spent a lot of hard-earned money on the desk, the carpet, the drapes and the book-cases. We had even run to a couple of original water colours by a local artist who, to judge by his prices, considered himself in the Old Master class: probably he was, although it was a pretty close-kept secret. But all this was before I had a chance of seeing the other offices in Orchid Buildings. Some of them were smarter than mine, some were not, but those I had seen didn’t make me wish to change mine until I walked into the office of Manfred Willet, the President of Glynn & Coppley, Attorneys at Law. Then I saw at a glance I would have to save many more dollars before I could hope to get anywhere near the super-de-luxe class. His office made mine look like an Eastside slum.
It was a big room, high ceilinged and oak panelled. A desk, big enough to play billiards on, stood at the far end of the room before three immense windows, stretching up to the ceiling. There were four or five lounging chairs and a big chesterfield grouped around a fireplace that could have been used as a hidey-hole for a small-sized elephant. The fitted carpet was thick enough to be cut with a lawn mower.
On the over-mantel and scattered around the room on tricky little tables were choice pieces of jade carvings. The desk furniture was of solid silver that glittered with loving care and constant polishing. Off-white Venetian blinds kept out the sun. A silent air-conditioning plant controlled the temperature. Double windows, sound-proof walls and a rubber-lined door insisted on complete silence. A stomach rumble in this office would sound like a ton of gravel going down a shoot.
Manfred Willet sat in a padded, swivelled chair behind the immense desk, smoking a fat oval cigarette fitted with a gold-tipped mouthpiece. He was tall and solid, around forty-five. His dark hair was flecked with grey, his clean-shaven, strikingly-handsome face matched the colour of his mahogany desk. His London-cut suit would have made any movie star green with envy, and his linen was as immaculate and as white as the first snowdrop of spring.
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