by Ellery Queen
I stepped inside without answering her. The kitchen was bright and clean, but it had a slightly musty, disused odor. The bread in the breadbox was stale. The refrigerator needed defrosting. There was a piece of ham moldering on one shelf, and on another a half-empty bottle of milk which had gone sour.
“She’s been gone for some time,” I said. “At least a week. We should check her clothes.”
“Why?”
“She’d take some along if she left to go on a trip, under her own power.”
She led me through the living room, which was simply and expensively furnished in black iron and net, into the master bedroom. The huge square bed was neatly made and covered with a pink quilted silk spread. Clare avoided looking at it, as though the conjunction of a man and a bed gave her a guilty feeling. While she went through the closet I searched the vanity and the chest of drawers.
They were barer than they should have been. Cosmetics were conspicuous by their absence. I found one thing of interest in the top drawer of the vanity, hidden under a tangle of stockings: a bankbook issued by the Las Vegas branch of the Bank of Southern California. Ethel Illman had deposited $30,000 on March 14 of this year. On March 17 she had withdrawn $5,000. On March 20 she had withdrawn $6,000. On March 22 she had withdrawn $18,995. There was a balance in her account, after service charges, of $3.65.
Clare said from the closet in a muffled voice, “A lot of her things are gone. Her mink stole, her good suits and shoes, a lot of her best summer clothes.”
“Then she’s probably on a vacation.” I tried to keep the doubt out of my voice. A woman wandering around with $30,000 in cash was taking a big chance. I decided not to worry Clare with that, and put the little bankbook in my pocket.
“Without telling me? Ethel wouldn’t do that.” She came out of the closet, pushing her fine light hair back from her forehead. “You don’t understand how close we are to each other, closer than sisters usually are. Ever since father died—”
“Does she drive her own car?”
“Of course. It’s a last year’s Buick convertible, robin’s-egg blue.”
“If you’re badly worried, go to Missing Persons.”
“No. Ethel wouldn’t like that. She’s a very proud person, and shy. Anyway, I have a better idea.” She gave me that questioning-calculating look of hers.
“Involving me?”
“Please.” Her eyes in the darkening room were like great soft centerless pansies, purple or black. “You’re a detective and evidently a good one. And you’re a man. You can stand up to Edward and make him answer questions. He just laughs at me. Of course I can’t pay you in advance—”
“Forget the money for now. What makes you so certain that Illman is in on this?”
“I just know he is. Fie threatened her in the lawyer’s office the day they made the settlement. She told me so herself. Edward said that he was going to get that money back if he had to take it out of her hide. He wasn’t fooling, either. He’s beaten her more than once.”
“How much was the settlement?”
“Thirty thousand dollars and the house and the car. She could have collected much more, hundreds of thousands, if she’d stayed in California and fought it through the courts. But she was too anxious to get free from him. So she let him cheat her and got a Nevada divorce instead. And even then he wasn’t satisfied.”
She looked around the abandoned bedroom, fighting back tears. Her skin was so pale that it seemed to be phosphorescent in the gloom. With a little cry she flung herself face down on the bed and gave herself over to grief.
I said to her shaking back, “You win. Where do I find him?”
He lived in a cottage hotel on the outskirts of Bel-Air. The gates of the walled pueblo were standing open, and I went in. A few couples were strolling on the gravel paths among the palm-shaded cottages, walking off the effects of the cocktail hour or working up an appetite for dinner. The women were blonde and had money on their backs. The men were noticeably older than the women, except for one, who was noticeably younger.
I passed an oval swimming pool and found Edward Illman’s cottage, number twelve. Light streamed from its open French windows onto a flagstone terrace. A young woman in a narrow-waisted, billowing black gown lay on a chrome chaise at the edge of the light. With her arms hanging loose from her naked shoulders she looked like an expensive French doll which somebody had accidentally dropped there. Her face was polished and plucked and painted, expressionless as a doll’s. But her eyes snapped open at the sound of my footsteps.
“Who goes there?” she said with a slight Martini accent. “Halt and give the password or I’ll shoot you dead with my atomic wonder-weapon.” She pointed a wavering finger at me and said, “Bing. Am I supposed to know you? I have a terrible memory for faces.”
“I have a terrible face for memories. Is Mr. Illman home?”
“Uh-huh. He’s in the shower. He’s always taking showers. I told him he’s got a scour-and-scrub neurosis, his mother was frightened by a washing machine.” Her laughter rang like cracked bells. “If it’s about business you can tell me.”
“Are you his confidential secretary?”
“I was.” She sat up on the chaise, looked pleased with herself. “I’m his fiancée, at the moment.”
“Congratulations.”
“Uh-huh. He’s loaded.” Smiling to herself, she got to her feet. “Are you loaded?”
“Not so it gets in my way.”
She pointed her finger at me and said bing again and laughed, teetering on her four-inch heels. She started to fall forward. I caught her under the armpits.
“Too bad,” she said to my chest. “I don’t think you have a terrible face for memories at all. You’re much prettier than old Teddy-bear.”
“Thanks. I’ll treasure the compliment.”
I set her down on the chaise, but her arms twined round my neck like smooth white snakes and her body arched against me. She clung to me like a drowning child. I had to use force to detach myself.
“What’s the matter?” she said with an up-and-under look.
A man appeared in the French windows, blotting out most of the light. In a white terry-cloth bathrobe he had the shape and bulk of a Kodiak bear. The top of his head was a bald as an ostrich egg. He carried a chip on each shoulder, like epaulets.
“What goes on?”
“Your fiancée swooned, slightly.”
“Fiancée, hell. I saw what happened.” Moving very quickly and light for a man of his age and weight, he pounced on the girl on the chaise and began to shake her. “Can’t you keep your hands off anything in pants?”
Her head bobbed back and forth. Her teeth clicked like castanets.
I put a rough hand on his shoulder. “Leave her be.”
He turned on me. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“Edward Illman, I presume.”
“And who are you?”
“The name is Archer. I’m looking into the matter of your wife’s disappearance.”
“I’m not married. And I have no intention of getting married. I’ve been burned once.” He looked down sideways at the girl. She peered up at him in silence, hugging her shoulders.
“Your ex-wife, then,” I said.
“Has something happened to Ethel?”
“I thought you might be able to tell me.”
“Where did you get that idea? Have you been talking to Clare?”
I nodded.
“Don’t believe her. She’s got a down on me, just like her sister. Because I had the misfortune to marry Ethel, they both think I’m fair game for anything they want to pull. I wouldn’t touch either one of them with an insulated pole. They’re a couple of hustlers, if you want the truth. They took me for sixty grand, and what did I get out of it but headaches?”
“I thought it was thirty.”
“Sixty,” he said, with the money light in his eyes. “Thirty in cash, and the house is worth another thirty easily.”
I looked
around the place, which must have cost him a hundred dollars a day. Above the palms, the first few stars sparkled like solitaire diamonds.
“You seem to have some left.”
“Sure I have. But I work for my money. Ethel was strictly from nothing when I met her. She owned the clothes on her back and what was under them and that was all. So she gives me a bad time for three years and I pay off at the rate of twenty grand a year. I ask you, is that fair?”
“I hear you threatened to get it back from her.”
“You have been talking to Clare, eh? All right, so I threatened her. It didn’t mean a thing. I talk too much sometimes and I have a bad temper.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
The girl said, “You hurt me, Teddy. I need another drink. Get me another drink, Teddy.”
“Get it yourself.”
She called him several bad names and wandered into the cottage, walking awkwardly like an animated doll.
He grasped my arm. “What’s the trouble about Ethel? You said she disappeared. You think something’s happened to her?”
I removed his hand. “She’s missing. Thirty thousand in cash is also missing. There are creeps in Vegas who would knock her off for one big bill, or less.”
“Didn’t she bank the money? She wouldn’t cash a draft for that amount and carry it around. She’s crazy, but not that way.”
“She banked it all right, on March fourteenth. Then she drew it all out again in the course of the following week. When did you send her the draft?”
“The twelfth or the thirteenth. That was the agreement. She got her final divorce on March eleventh.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
“I have not. Frieda has, though.”
“Frieda?”
“My secretary.” He jerked a thumb toward the cottage. “Frieda went over to the house last week to pick up some of my clothes I’d left behind. Ethel was there, and she was all right then. Apparently she’s taken up with another man.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No, and I couldn’t care less.”
“Do you have a picture of Ethel?”
“I did have some. I tore them up. She’s a well-stacked blonde, natural blonde. She looks very much like Clare, same coloring, but three or four years older. You should be able to get a picture from Clare. And while you’re at it, tell her for me she’s got a lot of gall setting the police on me. I’m a respectable businessman in this town.”
He puffed out his chest under the bathrobe. It was thickly matted with brown hair, which was beginning to grizzle.
“No doubt,” I said. “Incidentally, I’m not the police. I run a private agency. My name is Archer.”
“So that’s how it is, eh?” The planes of his broad face gleamed angrily in the light. He cocked a fat red fist. “You come here pumping me. Get out, by God, or I’ll throw you out!”
“Calm down. I could break you in half.”
His face swelled with blood and his eyes popped. He swung a roundhouse right at my head. I stepped inside of it and tied him up. “I said calm down, old man. You’ll break a vein.”
I pushed him off balance and released him. He sat down very suddenly on the chaise. Frieda was watching us from the edge of the terrace. She laughed so heartily that she spilled her drink.
Illman looked old and tired and he was breathing raucously through his mouth. He didn’t try to get up. Frieda came over to me and leaned her weight on my arm.
“Why didn’t you hit him,” she whispered, “when you had the chance? He’s always hitting other people.” Her voice rose. “Teddy-bear thinks he can get away with murder.”
“Shut your yap,” he said, “or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Button yours, muscle-man. You’ll lay a hand on me once too often.”
“You’re fired.”
“I already quit.”
They were a charming couple. I was on the point of tearing myself away when a bellboy popped out of the darkness.
“A gentleman to see you, Mr. Illman.”
The gentleman was a brown-faced young Highway Patrolman, who stepped forward rather diffidently into the light. “Sorry to trouble you, sir. Our San Diego office asked me to contact you as soon as possible.”
Frieda looked from me to him and began to gravitate in his direction. Illman got up heavily and stepped between them.
“What is it?”
The patrolman unfolded a teletype flimsy and held it up to the light. “Are you the owner of a blue Buick convertible, last year’s model?” He read off the license number.
“It was mine,” Illman said. “It belongs to my ex-wife now. Did she forget to change the registration?”
“Evidently she did, Mr. Illman. In fact, she seems to’ve forgotten the car entirely. She left it in a parking space above the public beach in La Jolla. It’s been sitting there for the last week, until we hauled it in. Where can I get in touch with Mrs. Illman?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for some time.”
The patrolman’s face lengthened and turned grim. “You mean she’s dropped out of sight?”
“Out of my sight, at least. Why?”
“I hate to have to say this, Mr. Illman. There’s a considerable quantity of blood on the front seat of the Buick, according to this report. They haven’t determined yet if it’s human blood, but it raises the suspicion of foul play.”
“Good heavens! It’s what we’ve been afraid of, isn’t it, Archer?” His voice was as thick as corn syrup with phony emotion. “You and Clare were right after all.”
“Right about what, Mr. Illman?” The patrolman looked slightly puzzled.
“About poor Ethel,” he said. “I’ve been discussing her disappearance with Mr. Archer here. Mr. Archer is a private detective and I was just about to engage his services to make a search for Ethel.” He turned to me with a painful smile pulling his mouth to one side. “How much did you say you wanted in advance? Five hundred?”
“Make it two. That will buy my services for four days. It doesn’t buy anything else, though.”
“I understand that, Mr. Archer. I’m sincerely interested in finding Ethel for a variety of reasons, as you know.”
He was a suave old fox. I almost laughed in his face. But I played along with him. I liked the idea of using his money to hang him, if possible.
“Yeah. This is a tragic occurrence for you.”
He took a silver money clip shaped like a dollar sign out of his bathrobe pocket. I wondered if he didn’t trust his roommate. Two bills changed hands. After a further exchange of information, the patrolman went away.
“Well,” Illman said. “It looks like a pretty serious business. If you think I had anything to do with it, you’re off your rocker.”
“Speaking of rockers, you said your wife was crazy. What kind of crazy?”
“I was her husband, not her analyst. I wouldn’t know.”
“Did she need an analyst?”
“Sometimes I thought so. One week she’d be flying, full of big plans to make money. Then she’d go into a black mood and talk about killing herself.” He shrugged. “It ran in her family.”
“This could be an afterthought on your part.”
His face reddened.
I turned to Frieda, who looked as if the news had sobered her. “Who was this fellow you saw at Ethel’s house last week?”
“I dunno. She called him Owen, I think. Maybe it was his first name, maybe it was his last name. She didn’t introduce us.” She said it as if she felt cheated.
“Describe him?”
“Sure. A big guy, over six feet, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the beam. A smooth hunk of male. And young,” with a malicious glance at Illman. “Black hair, and he had all of it, dreamy dark eyes, a cute little hairline mustache. I tabbed him for a gin-mill cowboy from Vegas, but he could be a movie star if I was a producer.”
“What made you think she’d taken up with him?”
“
The way he moved around the house, like he owned it. He poured himself a drink while I was there. And he was in his shirtsleeves. A real sharp dresser. Custom-made stuff.”
“You have a good eye.”
“For men, she has,” Illman said.
“Lay off me,” she said in a hard voice, with no trace of the Martini drawl. “Or I’ll really walk out on you and then where will you be?”
“Right where I am now. Sitting pretty.”
“That’s what you think.”
I interrupted their communion. “Do you know anything about this Owen character, Illman?”
“Not a thing. He’s probably some jerk she picked up in Nevada while she was sweating out the divorce.”
“Have you been to San Diego recently?”
“Not for months.”
“That’s true,” Frieda said. “I’ve been keeping close track of Teddy. I have to. Incidentally, it’s getting late and I’m hungry. Go and put on some clothes, darling. You’re prettier with clothes on.”
“More than I’d say for you,” he leered.
I left them and drove back to West Hollywood. The nightblooming girls and their escorts had begun to appear on the Strip. Gusts of music came from the doors that opened for them. But when I turned off Sunset, the streets were deserted.
All the lights were on in the redwood house on the hillside. I parked in the driveway and knocked on the front door. The draperies over the window beside it were pulled to one side, then fell back into place. A thin voice drifted out to me.
“Is that you, Mr. Archer?”
I said that it was. Clare opened the door inch by inch. Her face was almost haggard.
“I’m so relieved to see you.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“A man was watching the house. He was sitting there at the curb in a long black car. It looked like an undertaker’s car. And it had a Nevada license.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It lighted up when he drove away. I saw it through the window. He only left a couple of minutes ago.”
“Did you get a look at his face?”
“I’m afraid not. I didn’t dare go out. I was petrified. He shined a searchlight on the window.”
“Take it easy. There are plenty of big black cars in town, and quite a few Nevada licenses. He was probably looking for some address.”