Jade Venus

by George Harmon Coxe

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  The Jade Venus

  George Harmon Coxe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  Contents

  Chapter One: A Sinister Welcome

  Chapter Two: The Stolen Painting

  Chapter Three: Murdock Follows A Hunch

  Chapter Four: “Murder’s My Business.”

  Chapter Five: Picture Puzzle

  Chapter Six: Double-Barreled Mission

  Chapter Seven: Million-Dollar Secret

  Chapter Eight: The Lure Of Fine Art

  Chapter Nine: At The Silver Door

  Chapter Ten: Unseen Danger

  Chapter Eleven: The Reluctant Artist

  Chapter Twelve: The Smell Of Death

  Chapter Thirteen: The Only Lie

  Chapter Fourteen: No Canaries Sing

  Chapter Fifteen: Three Come Calling

  Chapter Sixteen: Alarm In The Dark

  Chapter Seventeen: A Lady Afraid

  Chapter Eighteen: A Killer Comes Close

  Chapter Nineteen: Face To Face

  Chapter Twenty: Waiting For Beautiful

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Odds Catch Up

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Murder Was A Word

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  A SINISTER WELCOME

  AFTER THE WARMTH OF THE PULLMAN, the drafty train shed was cold and damp in the gathering dusk, and Kent Murdock hunched his trench coat more closely about his throat before claiming his bag from the porter. The two Redcaps were already besieged by others from his car so he did not wait but moved with the crowd, past the baggage cars and the panting, breathless locomotive, until he stepped into the glow of the long main concourse of the station.

  For a moment then he hesitated, smiling at the familiar scene, unmindful of those who dodged past him and aware only of the fine warm glow inside that came from being home. There were patriotic posters and banners everywhere now, late in 1943, and the lines before the ticket windows were longer, but otherwise it was the same, and presently he stepped out again, a lean, dark man with good shoulders and a straight and easy way of carrying himself that remained unspoiled by the bag in his hand.

  The smile lingered beneath his officer’s cap when he started down the ramp to the street and he had nearly reached the sidewalk when he felt the hand on his arm. He kept walking as he turned, half expecting to see someone he knew; then a voice said:

  “Pardon me. Captain Murdock?”

  Murdock moved two more steps before he stopped. The man was an inch or two shorter than he was, stocky, blunt-nosed. He wore an Army cap like Murdock’s, the same sort of trench coat.

  “This way,” he said when Murdock nodded. “I have a car here. I’m Captain Erloff.”

  They turned left toward the now darkened loading-platforms. They walked perhaps thirty feet. Then Murdock stopped, puzzled now and thinking hard.

  “Wait a minute.”

  The man let go of his arm and Murdock studied him. No one but Professor Andrada—and perhaps some nameless hotel clerk—knew he was coming, and the professor was not the sort of man who met trains or bothered about sending a proxy. So just how could this Erloff know—

  “I think you must have the wrong man,” he said.

  “You’re Kent Murdock?”

  “Who sent you, Captain? Do you mind if I look at your credentials?”

  “Sure. Anything you say.”

  The man had his right hand in his pocket. He took the hand out and in it was a heavy automatic. That put the muzzle two feet from Murdock’s stomach.

  “If this isn’t enough,” he said, “there’s another behind you.”

  “Yeah,” a new voice said as something hard jabbed Murdock in the spine. “We’re the reception committee, Captain.”

  “The car is this way,” Erloff said.

  Murdock stood very still, staring at the gun, battling his sudden incredulity. He glanced over his shoulder. People still hurried in and out of the station entrance. Beyond, spotlighted in the center of the intersection, was a traffic cop; a second uniformed policeman stood talking to him. Here they stood alone and unnoticed and Murdock, adding up the odds, decided that any attempt to resist could be fatally terminated before anyone else knew what was going on. When the gun nudged him in the back again he tightened his grip on the bag and stepped slowly forward.

  Erloff moved to one side. They walked another hundred feet while the shadows got deeper and then Erloff was opening the rear door of a small sedan. “Take the other side, Leo,” he said.

  A tall youth, blond and bareheaded, walked around the car and leveled his gun through a lowered window. Murdock put his bag on the floor and climbed in as directed. Leo got behind the wheel and Erloff moved in next to Murdock, his automatic never wavering and always out of reach.

  “Pull your cap down over your eyes,” he said. “’Way down.… Or do we do it the hard way and lay you out on the floor?”

  Murdock pulled his cap over his eyes and the car made a U-turn and even now his dominant reaction remained surprise rather than anger. It had all been done so casually, so expertly. They had known exactly what to do and— His thoughts hit an obstacle and slid off on a tangent. But how could they have been so sure?

  “I don’t get it,” he said aloud.

  Not why he was being taken, but how they knew. How could they know him by sight? How could they know he was on this train? The urgency of some answer made him concentrate on this alone and suddenly it came to him. The telegram delivered to his chair while the train stopped in Providence; the telegram signed Robert and meaning nothing. He’d thought it was a mistake then and told the boy so. Now he knew it was no mistake but clever planning.

  “It was the telegram,” he said. “You couldn’t tell if I’d get off at Back Bay or South Station so you had to get on at Providence. One of you followed the Western Union boy while he paged my car—”

  “Talkative, ain’t he?” the blond youth said.

  Murdock quit thinking about it when he heard the rumble of the elevated over his head, aware that for now the other answer—how they had known what train to meet—would have to wait.

  From remembered turns he felt sure the elevated overhead was the one to Roxbury Crossing and now he tried to gauge the speed and distance. The car stopped three times in the next four or five minutes and the sounds outside told him these stops were for traffic lights. When, presently, they turned right and stopped a block or so farther on he thought he had a rough idea of where they were.

  “Okay,” Erloff said as a door opened. “This side.”

  Murdock stumbled on the sidewalk, then felt with his feet and the pattern beneath them told him he was crossing one of the old, red-brick kind. He went up five wooden steps to a porch, stepped twice and then up one more, this time into a vestibule. A bell rang distantly and fifteen seconds later a door opened. A man’s voice, thick with accent, said, “Ahh—you got him.”

  By looking sharply downward past his cap Murdock could see his wrist watch. The train had been on time and it was 7:53 when he walked through the station. It was now 8:05. About a ten-minute ride.

  “Up,” Erloff said.

  Murdock began to climb thinly carpeted stairs. Eighteen of them, a left turn. Six steps along a hall with th
e bannister on his left, another left turn and sixteen more stairs. Ahead of him someone opened a door and a switch clicked. He received a push from behind and shoved up his cap. Then he was standing in a small, square room with a high ceiling and a small high window with two bars in front of it. There was a cot with a worn blanket on it, nothing more.

  “Fine,” Erloff said.

  Leo closed the door and stood in front of it, still holding his gun.

  “Take off your coat, Captain,” Erloff said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Murdock unbelted his trench coat and pushed it back by putting his fists against his hips. He glanced round, saying nothing, watching Erloff shrug out of his coat and toss it aside, noticing now that the man wore a captain’s uniform with the insignia of the air corps on the sleeve. He wondered where Erloff had stolen it.

  “I don’t think your blouse would fit me,” Erloff said. “So if you’ll just let me have those ribbons and your identification.”

  Murdock looked at him, anger churning inside now and his dark eyes sullen. “Nuts!” he said.

  Erloff’s brows climbed and he hesitated a moment, speculating. Finally he took out his gun and glanced at Leo, nodding slightly. Leo looked pleased. His grin showed small, uneven teeth and he took a step forward and shifted his gun so he could club it. Murdock turned and got his back against the wall, watching the two men approach slowly from opposite sides. When they were about four feet away, Erloff spoke.

  “Wait, Leo.”

  Leo stopped. Erloff studied Murdock again and what he saw was a steady-eyed man with straight dark hair and good bones in his jaw; he saw and measured the lean hardness of the body beneath the smoothly fitting green jacket and apparently he decided the reflexes would be good, the muscular co-ordination excellent.

  “Okay,” he said, “so you’re not scared. That’s all right too, but not smart. I want those ribbons and identification for about an hour.” He paused and his voice got clipped and thin. “We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get this far. A little more trouble, even if it’s tough, is not going to make any difference. We’ll get what we want, one way or another.”

  Murdock thought it over and believed what Erloff said. The way these two had handled things told him they were professionals at strong arm methods and he knew that in the end they could take him. He had been in similar spots on one or two occasions in the past and he knew how difficult it was to handle two men, once they had a chance to get set. He did not think they would shoot, though that could happen if things got too tough for them. But that was not the point.

  The point was simply that he could not watch both of them at once. If it were a question of holding out a few minutes he’d have a go at it anyway, if only for his own satisfaction and his resentment at being pushed around. But in this case time meant nothing and the job he had come all the way from Italy to do could not be handled from a hospital bed.

  He put down his bitterness, hating himself for his surrender, yet knowing that what common sense told him was best. He took off the ribbons—the Purple Heart and the one from the Mediterranean area—and got out his wallet, tossing the whole thing on the cot.

  Erloff stepped back and looked relieved. He said Murdock showed good sense. He said he would be back within an hour and meanwhile Murdock might as well relax.

  Kent Murdock stood in the center of the room until the lock clicked in the door, then he went to the window and studied it. By reaching high he could grasp the bars, and he pulled himself up and held on with his left hand while he pressed the right against the glass. When he found it secure he dropped back to the floor and sat down on the cot, his mind going grimly back to the unanswered question.

  He had wired Professor Andrada that morning: Arriving tonight on the seven fifty. Will call at your house about nine. Somehow Erloff had learned about that telegram and had prepared for his arrival. He had laid his plans beautifully—at least someone had—and those plans had been productive and very shortly now he would be calling on the professor.

  Why?

  To gain entrance to the house and studio and in some way seize the shipment of old masters recently arrived from the Andrada Estate in Venatra? These had been sent by special permission of the Allied Military Government and the acting Italian Government, and such an event would have reached the newspaper columns. Erloff—or whoever had hired him—could know this much. But disposing of such loot would be more difficult than seizing it, except that—

  Murdock closed his mind against the next thought. It was not possible that Erloff could know of another picture in that collection. A picture Murdock called the Jade Venus and which had practically no intrinsic value. He shook his head against such an idea and kept his mind closed while he lit a cigarette. He inhaled and kept thinking obliquely and presently something occurred to him and a thin, wry smile warped his mouth.

  In any event, Mr. Erloff was in for a surprise. He could not know that as picture chief for the Courier-Herald Murdock had photographed Andrada on two or three occasions in the past, that he had gone to the professor for advice when he had a chance to get into the war as a museum and monument officer in the Fine Arts Division of the A.M.G. No, Andrada would not he fooled, and for a moment Murdock took some comfort in the thought; for a moment—until his mind speculated further and saw what lay beyond.

  He sat up and found the room seemed oddly cool. He stared straight ahead while a tightness grew along his back, and suddenly he was afraid. Not for himself, for Professor Andrada. Andrada would know Erloff was an impostor, but Andrada’s temper was volatile and unpredictable and it was Erloff who had the gun.

  He began to pace the tiny room, his jaw hard and a dampness in his palms. He could not discipline his thoughts now and he kept glancing at his watch. He was still pacing when he heard footsteps on the stairs and because it was even earlier than he expected—his watch said 9:04—his impatience increased as the door was unlocked.

  He watched Erloff carefully while he took off the ribbons and produced the wallet. There was nothing in the man’s face to suggest that he had had any trouble. There was no anger in his voice; if anything he acted like a man who had just done a job and done it well.

  Murdock closed off his mind again and thought only of the moment because he did not dare think beyond. He put on his coat and went into the hall. Leo was waiting.

  “The cap,” he said. “Down over your kisser, soldier.”

  Murdock pulled down the cap. They went down stairs and across the sidewalk and he felt his way into the back seat of the sedan. His bag was where he left it and he could hear Erloff climb in the other side and Leo get behind the wheel.

  He paid no attention to the route as the car started but gradually it seemed to him that the sound of traffic was heavier and more light filtered through the car windows and under the visor of his cap. He was sitting on the edge of his seat when, a few minutes later, the car began to slow down.

  “Anywhere in here,” Erloff said. “Leave the cap alone,” he said when Murdock reached for it. “Get out backward and pull your bag with you and don’t reach for that cap again until we’re on our way. Okay. Open the door.”

  The car stopped. Murdock felt along the window until he found the door lever. He opened it and got out backward and felt for his bag. He pulled it toward him and the instant he had it clear the door slammed and Leo stepped on the accelerator.

  Murdock had the cap off before the car was thirty feet away. He did not know where he was, nor care, but he got a look at the license tag and repeated it until he had memorized it. Only when that tag was out of sight did he glance round.

  He was on Charles Street, about halfway between Beacon and Boylston. It was dark here between the Common and the Garden and he ran down between the rows of parked cars, ignoring all passing traffic except taxis and these, like the others, passed him by. In the end he went all the way to Boylston before he found a vacant one and scrambled inside.

  Chapter Two

  THE STOLEN PAINTIN
G

  LIGHT BLAZED FROM THE LOWER WINDOWS of the Andrada house when the taxi stopped out front at 9:35. Murdock had already handed the driver some bills and told him to leave his bag with the hotel bell captain; now he ran up the walk to the front porch and rang the bell hard. The tension that had been mounting throughout the past hour was riding him now and he was so impatient at the short delay that when the maid opened the door he did not wait to be asked in but stepped past her into the hall.

  “Is Professor Andrada in?” he asked. “I’m Kent Murdock.”

  The maid, a curvy brunette, looked startled. She clung to the doorknob and said, “Why—why—” and then another voice said, “Yes, Arlene?”

  Murdock turned and saw the tall blond girl in the doorway opposite the stairs. She had a cloth in one hand and a small bottle in the other, and before she could say anything more Andrada’s voice called irritably from the room beyond.

  “Murdock! Is that you, Murdock?”

  Kent Murdock went swiftly past the blond girl and when he saw the professor sitting in the straight-backed chair he was so relieved he did not realize there was anyone else in the room until he heard his name and turned to see a good-looking, sandy-haired man grinning at him and advancing with hand outstretched.

  “Barry Gould,” Murdock said, remembering how they had worked together on the Courier.

  “Hiya, boy,” Gould said. “What’s this about somebody impersonating you?”

  Andrada began to sputter, his voice high, excited, accented. “Where were you, Murdock?”

  “I—I was delayed.”

  “A fine time to be delayed. While you are delayed an impostor came—about a quarter of nine. Louise and Mr. Watrous”—he glanced at the fourth man in the room—“were in here and saw him come. I had told Arlene and Louise I would be waiting in the study.”

  “Arlene let him in,” the blonde said. “Carl and I were sitting here and we saw him pass the doorway but I knew Uncle Albert expected him …”

  Murdock did not hear the end of it. He glanced at Carl Watrous, put his age at minus forty, saw that he was tall and powerfully built. His face was broad and tanned, his hair very thin on top; the perfection of his Shetland suit looked like a hundred and fifty dollars and his shoes were the hand-made kind. He was watching Andrada narrowly and Murdock glanced back at the professor. Then he thought of something.