by Unknown
y face was still nestling in the center of a divot when I began to remember things again. I remembered groggily for a moment and then very clearly and I didn’t know whether to be sore at myself or get a laugh out of it.
“At least,” I mumbled as I got my feet under me, “I’m probably the first shamus in the history of International that could knock himself out with one dive to the chin.”
But when I started to pat my pockets, there wasn’t anything to laugh about. Everything I’d had on me had been lifted—wallet, watch, keys, gun, a pocketful of change. And the Woodring letters and the three brass apes.
It was pretty. And to make things complete, I took three steps in the darkness and put my hoof down on top of my new hat, for which I’d laid out seven bucks just the day before. I swore for a while but there wasn’t any satisfaction in it.
“Go on up to the house and take your medicine,” I told myself, “you long-eared dope.”
I got the wreck of my hat on and headed for the house. It turned into something definite as I got nearer, a big and very white affair of Norman architecture with a long stretch of two stories of blank windows.
Faint light inched through venetian blinds at a lower window and I leaned on the bell-push. After a minute or so, a light went on over the door. The door opened three inches on a chain and a long, white nose and eyes that had all the genial expression of marbles looked out at me.
A mouth under the long nose said, “Yes? Are you the detective person? The detective person who phoned?”
“You weren’t expecting any detective persons who didn’t phone, were you?”
Osgood couldn’t seem to think offhand of the answer to that one but he didn’t take the chain off the door.
I said, “Yes, Osgood, I am the detective chappie, the one that phoned. And I’m here to see Mr. Kirkwood. How about it?”
He finally collected himself enough to get the door unchained and I went in. When I got in, I took a good look at Osgood and he squirmed around a bit under it. In fact, he seemed to be in somewhat of a dither about something. He looked a lot like a fish but a husky fish with good shoulders and big hands that had plenty of bone and muscle to them. He wore a woolly bathrobe but trousers showed below the bathrobe and he had shoes on, not slippers. The shoes were damp around the soles, the toes.
“Lot of dew on the grass tonight, Osgood,” I said.
“Dew? I don’t understand, I’m sure,” he said. But his eyes couldn’t help darting down toward his shoes and then back at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Or did you get your shoes wet running around on these Chinese rugs?”
He licked his lips and tried to go English butler on me. He said, “I went outside a short while ago, it so happens, sir. I thought I had heard a shot somewhere on the grounds and I made a brief investigation.” His eyes fastened themselves on my skinned-up face, my wreck of a hat. “I found nothing but it occurs to me that perhaps you might know quite a lot about it.”
“Maybe I do,” I said. “How about Mr. Kirkwood?”
“Please wait in there.”
He showed me a small reception room off the hall and left me there with a reluctant look on his face, as though he didn’t quite trust me not to walk off with the bric-a-brac.
The room was furnished with Louie-or-something furniture, all very elegant, and the one thing out of place was a big, bronze figure of the three apes on a small table. They made me remember the yarn I was going to have to tell Kirkwood and I felt like asking them to move over and make room for a fourth and the biggest monkey of all.
But it wasn’t Kirkwood that showed up. It was two women. One of them I knew must be Mrs. Woodring and the other, the younger one, her daughter. The Woodring dame gave me the impression of a dowager queen, aching to go on the loose. Her hair was brassy yellow and, even at this hour, put up in curls and ringlets and waves. Her negligee was a generation too young for her and gave the world a load of a not-so-small bosom. She had wrinkles in her cheeks and a roll of fat between her shoulders and eyes that had a yen in them. She looked like October playing at being April and it made you sorry for her and disgusted with her at the same time.
The daughter, Mrs. Kirkwood, was another order. She had a tall, lithe body and blue eyes that would have been beautiful if they hadn’t had the blank, expressionless look of the blind. Her face was pale and strong and stopped just short of being pretty. She came into the room, holding on to her mother’s arm, but she had so much more to her that she almost gave the impression of leading the older woman.
Mrs. Woodring’s voice sounded scared and patronizing and coy, all at the same time. She said, “You wished to see me, young man?”
I said, “No, ma’am. I want to see Mr. Kirkwood.”
She arched her bosom a little farther out of the negligee. “Young man, this is my home. You can tell me whatever you have—”
The girl said in a low voice, “Mother, please. Paul will take care of this.”
“Nonsense, Anne,” la Woodring said. “There are a lot of very queer things going on around here this evening and—”
The girl protested again, “Mother, please—”
“I say there is something mysterious going on. Why was Paul so insistent that I stay home tonight? Why is this young man here at this hour? I insist on knowing what it’s about.”
But she didn’t have a chance to shoot any questions at me because just then the draperies at the door parted and Kirkwood was there. He was immaculate and sleek and casual on the surface but he was breathing a little fast, as though he had just stopped being in a hurry as he got to the door of the room.
He slapped a look of pure venom at me and then shifted gears with his face so fast that by the time Mrs. Woodring had her eyes around to him, he was wearing a smile for her that damn near had a caress in it.
She looked back at him the same way, and I thought it just as well that Anne Kirkwood was blind.
La Woodring said, “Paul, what is it that’s going on tonight? You’re all acting so queerly and what’s this man here for?”
“Now, Mother,” Kirkwood said, “don’t you bother your head about this man. Osgood should have told me at once that he was here instead of disturbing you.”
“But, Paul—”
Kirkwood kept on smiling, patted the old lady on the shoulder. The way he did it was sensuous. The old dame beamed horribly.
He said, “You’re just imagining things, Mother. This man is here to give me a report on a business investigation. Now you and Anne trot along upstairs and I’ll join you there as soon as I’ve finished with him.”
Mrs. Woodring didn’t argue. She said, “Very well, Paul, dear,” as meek as oatmeal, and the two women turned to go. It was pretty apparent that Kirkwood called the shots around that household and no wonder he didn’t want Sivaja chiseling in on his territory.
When the women were gone, Kirkwood turned on me and there wasn’t any smile in his eyes. He said savagely, “You fool, I told you and that woman detective merely to get in touch with me. The last thing I wanted was for you to show up here. I’ll see that your agency hears about this in the morning.”
I let it pass. I said, “Have you heard about Sivaja?”
He didn’t say anything right away. His eyes bored at me and then he said, more quietly, “What should I have heard?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “Murdered.”
Kirkwood didn’t look shocked but he did look surprised. I couldn’t tell whether the surprise was real or not and I wished I hadn’t led up to it quite in that way, that I had socked him with the information without any preliminaries. Then, maybe, I could have told whether he was actually surprised or putting on an act.
He found a cigarette and lit it very carefully, his face dark and taut with thought. Finally he said, “That changes things. Or, rather, it accomplishes what I wanted accomplished, although in a different way. Have your agency send its bill to my office.”
“You’re not interested in who killed him o
r why?”
“There’s no reason why I should be, is there?”
“When I’ve finished,” I told him, “you can figure that out for yourself.” I gave him the scenario from the moment we’d walked into Sivaja’s study until the time I’d picked my chin out of the blue grass, minus all my belongings, including the letters and the three brass apes.
As I wound up, Kirkwood was looking faintly worried and also pretty sore and not a little contemptuous. He said nastily, “You call yourself a private detective and come to me with a story like that?”
“That’s my story,” I said, “and I’m stuck with it. The point is, are those letters important enough to you so that you want ’em back?”
Kirkwood said, still nasty, “After a performance like this, you think you should get them back?”
“They won’t shoot a guy for trying,” he said, “except sometimes. Now if it was the letters that someone was after in particular, it spells blackmail. With Sivaja dead, have you any idea who would have blackmail notions in connection with Mrs. Woodring?”
Kirkwood said he didn’t. But he looked thoughtful.
I said, “How about the butler?”
“Osgood? That’s ridiculous. He’s been with Mrs. Woodring for ten years. If that’s a sample of your thinking—”
“Maybe it isn’t as lousy thinking as it seems,” I said. I was getting a little fed up with his down-the-nose attitude. “It so happens that outside of Miss Jordan, Osgood was the only person I’d informed that I was going to show up here when I did. And it’s sort of plain that whoever took the pot shot at me was waiting for me and that he knew who he was waiting for. Also, Ossie has been prowling around outside just this evening. Of course, he might have passed the word to someone else after I’d talked to him on the phone.”
Kirkwood said, “Ridiculous,” again but he wasn’t so sure of it this time.
I stood up, said, “Whoever got the letters, you want them back. That’s the main idea.”
“And how do you propose to get them back?”
“Whoever has them will want money for them. In order to get money, they have to ask for it. Just as soon as you or Mrs. Woodring receive any communication about them, let me know. We’ll go on from that point.”
Kirkwood agreed to let me know but I wasn’t too certain whether he meant it or was just “yessing” me to get me on my way. He let me out without benefit of butler and I started a six-block hike to Western and Washington, where I figured I could find a cab.
tried to do a bit of thinking while I hiked but, after all, a guy has to have a few facts to build his guesses on. I didn’t even feel too sure of my guess about Osgood. If he had been with the Woodring dame for ten years, he must have had plenty of chances in that time to blackmail her if he was that kind of a guy. Maybe, at that, it hadn’t been the letters that were wanted when someone let fly the slug at me; maybe it had been the three apes.
Those apes were certainly running through the whole thing, even to the extent of finding counterparts among the people involved. Sivaja had bragged that he spoke no evil and he undoubtedly wouldn’t speak any from now on. And Anne Kirkwood, poor woman, didn’t have to hold her hands over her eyes like the second ape because those blind eyes couldn’t see evil right in front of them.
That was stretching the comparison a little, because very probably neither Kirkwood nor la Woodring were what you could call evil. My guess was that Kirkwood was a gigolo who had married himself into a dough-heavy family; and Mrs. Woodring’s tired coyness was sickening rather than nasty. But, even so, I wouldn’t have wanted either of them before my eyes long at a time.
As for the third ape, the one that couldn’t hear any evil, I felt as though I could match that one, myself. If I’d been holding my fingers in my ears all night, I couldn’t have known any less about what was really going on. That wouldn’t have bothered me too much if I hadn’t been working with Sue Jordan. I knew that sooner or later I’d probably find out what it was all about but when I got to that point, I had a hunch, I’d probably discover Sue sitting there and waiting for me.
At Western I found a Yellow and gave the hacker my address. When we got to the apartment where I park my extra shirt, I said, “Listen, cap, I haven’t got any money on me.”
The hacker stuck a steamboat-jawed face through the door at me and growled, “You’re the second ginzo that’s pulled that one on me tonight. What do I look like, Santa Claus?”
“No,” I said, “although a beard would improve you. But what I’m trying to tell you is that if you’ll come upstairs with me, I’ll find some dough.”
He looked happier and we went inside the lobby. It was dark except for a floor lamp in a corner. Somebody sitting in a chair in another corner got up and started for me. My hand began to go for my gun before I realized I didn’t have any gun and then I started backward, getting tangled up with the cabdriver.
The guy coming toward me said, “Hello, Thorne. I’ve been waiting to see you.”
He came farther into the light and I saw it was Fred Manners. I said, “For cat’s sake, don’t do things to me like that. How do you know I haven’t got a weak ticker? Have you got a buck?”
“Huh?” Manners said. He had a friendly, kiddish-looking face and it was puzzled.
“What I said was, have you got a buck?”
He still seemed as though he was trying to add things up and make sense but he said, “Oh, sure,” and fished a dollar bill out of his pocket. I passed the bill to the cabdriver.
Up in my apartment I found some Teacher’s Highland after knocking over a couple of Aunt Frieda’s elephants that I’d parked wherever I could find room. I cussed the elephants, picked them up and poured a couple of drinks. After I had them poured, Manners said he didn’t use it, so I slid mine down and held the other one ready to follow when reinforcements were needed.
He scratched one pale eyebrow and grinned uncertainly. He said, “I’ll bet you wonder why I showed up here at this hour.”
“If you could find anyone to lay the bet with, you’d win.”
“Well, it’s this way. This little thing tonight does me out of my job as the doc’s body-guard.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But that doesn’t make me the WPA.”
“Sure, I know. I just thought—well, I’ve had some experience and I thought maybe International might have something.”
I said, “It’s a lot too late for kidding. Or do you really expect me to believe you stayed up all night just so you could make out an employment application? What’s on your mind?”
“That’s really it,” he said. He spread his knees, put a hand on each knee and looked at me straight. “At least, that’s mostly it. I knew that in order to get a job with International, you have to have something more than just a wild desire to please. Well, I’ve got something more and it’s too hot to let lie around forever. Your agency would like to solve tonight’s killing, wouldn’t it?”
“Not particularly,” I said. “That’s the police department’s worry. What made you think we’d be interested?”
He laughed at me, said, “Now you’re trying some kidding. After all, you’re working for Kirkwood, aren’t you?”
“What would you know about that?”
“Pal-enty, Thorne, pal-enty. Do you want to hear what I’ve got to tell?”
“Sure,” I said. “I like to hear anything. Go ahead.”
He shook his head. “I’ve always wanted a job with a top agency. If this is good—and it will be—do I connect with International?”
I was watching his face and there was youthful confidence plastered all over it; he knew he had something hot. I said, “Tim Harper does the hiring. All I can do is put in a good word for you.”
“Fair enough. I’ve heard your word carries weight there. So here it is. Maybe I’d better start about six months back when the doctor hired me.”
“I’ve been wondering how you happened to hook up with him.”
He told me, “Through
Gerda.”
When I looked blank, he said, “Gerda Frake, who was secretary for Levy. She’s my fiancée. I met her when we were both working for the Hunter Medical Lab. That was before I decided I’d have more fun starving as a private dick than as a stock clerk. The lab let her out and she got this job with Levy. So when this Dutchman from St. Louis tried to kill Levy, Gerda recommended me as a body-guard.”
“What about this Dutchman?” I said.
“Do you mean, did he kill Levy? It’s possible. He certainly hated Levy’s guts. It’s a funny thing, too—Levy wanted to pay back everything the guy had lost but we couldn’t locate him. You see, Levy was really on the level about this Doctor Sivaja stuff of his. He’d got so he believed the ‘no evil’ stuff he was dishing out and he was trying to live up to it. However, I sort of doubt this Dutchman did it. From all I’ve heard, he was one of these guys that has to shoot off his mouth for five minutes before he does something and Levy, so the cops say, was knocked off fast and quiet.”
“Go ahead. You’re just getting a good start.”
“That’s right,” he said. His eyes were pale gray under the pale eyebrows and very sharp but not hard. “Have you given a thought to Paul Kirkwood as a possibility?”
“No,” I said, sounding surprised. “Why should I?”
“Because he’s a swell possibility. Maybe you work for him but I’ll lay odds I know more about him than you do. It so happens he started to put pressure on Levy three months ago to leave the Woodring dame alone. Levy wasn’t a sap, even though he had fallen for his own line, and he put me to work checking on Kirkwood.
“It took me a while but I finally got a line and, to cut it short, I found out Kirkwood wasn’t any lily, himself. He left New York six years ago just one train ahead of an indictment for embezzlement from a stock firm he was working for. About a year after he married the blind Woodring girl, the indictment was quashed. I suppose he settled up with dough he’d found in the family treasury.”
“Did Kirkwood know that Levy had this information?”