The Removal Company

by S. T. Joshi

  “Sir, I am pursuing a private investigation regarding Dr. William Greer. I am not at liberty to reveal more. I’d just like some information as to what’s going on.”

  This didn’t satisfy him.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, Sheriff Scintilla, but I think you’re a bit out of your depth here. Dr. William Greer has been murdered.”

  Somehow I had expected that.

  “Do you know who’s responsible?” I said.

  At that moment I heard several officers engaged in a fierce tussle with someone as they were trying to herd him downstairs. The man was putting up a good fight, but the policemen finally managed to subdue him. He was already handcuffed, and with some difficulty they led him to one of the police cars and stuffed him in.

  “That’s our man, I think,” Sargent said with some satisfaction.

  The man they had put into the police car was Arthur Vance.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Vance, what’s going on?”

  It was some hours later, and we were at Pasadena police headquarters. I had not been allowed to investigate the crime scene; indeed, in my continued absence of a convincing explanation for why I was there at all, Detective Crane and his boys were distinctly uncooperative. All I could ascertain was this:

  Grabhorn/Greer had been found dead in his bedroom, with a bullet wound—a large one—in his chest. Death was probably instantaneous, but he had suffered another injury to the back of his head when he fell back against the marble mantelpiece of his fireplace: there was blood on the corner of the mantelpiece, presumably where his head had struck it.

  Vance, meanwhile, was found in the bedroom, lying on the floor in a rather groggy condition, with the gun—his own—in his hand. The gun had been fired, and subsequent tests revealed that the bullet that had pierced Grabhorn’s heart was indeed from this weapon. No other bullets were found, and no other gunshots were heard by anyone. Under the circumstances, it was crazy to think that anyone else had killed Grabhorn.

  But Vance adhered to a wild story that he had been struck on the head by someone from behind, and woke up, sitting in the bedroom with the gun in his hand, just as the police entered the house. Sure enough, Vance did have an injury to the back of his head, of the sort that might have been made by a blackjack, but could just as well have been the result of a collision of his own against some hard substance.

  As for what Vance was doing there in the house at all, he resolutely refused to say. He did not deny that he had come to the house to investigate, even to break in: his roadster had been found only a block away. But, incredibly, Vance maintained that the front door of the house was not merely unlocked, but actually ajar. However, the police found clear evidence of forced entry on the door jamb. Vance had no recollection of going upstairs: he continued to maintain, to Detective Crane’s disgust, that he had been waylaid almost as soon as he had entered the place.

  It took some sweet-talking for me even to see Vance, who had been booked without delay and was in the holding pen. But I promised Crane that I would give him some account of myself, and of Vance, as soon as I could talk to Vance. Since Arthur wasn’t going anywhere—it was highly unlikely that a judge would allow bail to be posted for him—Crane shrugged and let me have my wish. “But you come and see me afterward!” he barked.

  I sat myself down on an uncomfortable wooden chair outside the holding pen. Vance was in a kind of brooding fury and didn’t answer my first question—hardly paid attention to it. So I repeated it with considerable emphasis:

  “Vance, what the hell’s going on? What were you doing at that house? Did you kill Grabhorn?”

  He ignored that last question. “Well, Scintilla, what were you doing there? And why didn’t you tell me you were going?”

  I was irritated. “Who’s running this investigation anyway? I’m still not sure there’s anything to investigate—except the possibility that my own client may be guilty of murder—but I’ll be damned if I come running to you like a schoolboy every time I want to do anything.”

  I was getting angrier by the minute. “And now look what you’ve done! You bloody fool!—I was on the verge of finding out something, and you had to go blow the fellow away. He was harmless, and probably didn’t even know anything—”

  Vance roared: “I didn’t kill him!”

  I was silent for a moment. Each of us fumed at the other.

  I said very quietly: “You expect me to believe this cockamamie story of you being hit on the head as you walked into an open front door, and then waking up to find yourself sitting in Grabhorn’s room with a gun—your gun—in your hand and the good doctor with a hole in his chest? Come off it, Vance. If you tell that story in court you needn’t wait for the electric chair to fry your eyes out.”

  With an inarticulate shriek Vance lunged at me, reaching his hands through the bars and almost grabbing my head. With an agility I didn’t know I had I leaped backward off the chair, upsetting it and nearly falling to the ground. The police guard, half asleep, jerked himself into action and with a billy club forced Vance to retreat.

  “You all right, mister?” the guard asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, dusting myself off. He looked at both me and Vance a little apprehensively, but I assured him: “It’s all right. Just leave us alone. We’ll be okay.”

  The guard shrugged and resumed his position near the door.

  “Vance,” I said, “we’re both tired and upset. This is not what we bargained for. For the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone would want to bump Grabhorn off and try to frame you for it. There’s something very strange going on here....”

  Vance, who had been in a furious sulk, suddenly beamed with eagerness. “I’ve been trying to tell you that all along! Didn’t I say there was something funny about this Removal Company?”

  “Oh, Vance, knock it off. How in hell do you think this Sanderson or Kratzner fellow had anything to do with this? The last time anyone knew, he was in New York.”

  “Well, maybe he’s here now! Maybe he knows that I’m trying to track him down, and...and....”

  “How?”

  As on several previous occasions, Vance was brought up short. “What do you mean, how?”

  “How does Sanderson know about you—or us?”

  Vance looked around his small cage as if an answer might be lurking in some dim corner. “Oh, God knows, Scintilla. That man might be capable of anything! I tell you he’s some kind of fiend....”

  “Oh, pipe down, Vance.” I was fed up with him and his wild theories. Maybe he was right—anything was possible—but there was no proof, no evidence, not even the faintest trace of it.

  I tried another tack. “What exactly were you doing in that house, anyway?”

  Vance looked huffy. “Same as you, Scintilla: trying to find out something. You’re not the only one who can snoop around.”

  “Why didn’t you leave that to me? Isn’t that why you hired me?”

  “Look, you have your ways, and I have mine! I didn’t know you were going to do exactly what I was doing. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Frankly,” I said, “I didn’t want you tagging along. It’s pretty obvious that you’re not in control of yourself.”

  “Oh, Scintilla, get off my case! I was perfectly in control until I got quashed on the head. None of this is my fault, damn it!”

  “All right,” I said tiredly. “All right. But what now? I’ll take your word for it that you didn’t kill Grabhorn, although for the life of me I can’t imagine who else could have. But what do I do now?”

  Vance looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “Why, just go on with the investigation! Now you clearly have something to investigate: as you say, something strange is definitely going on. Hunt down this other doctor who recommended the Removal Company; find out who Mrs. Harry Greenway is, or was. Don’t worry about me; I’ll get out of this mess somehow.”

  His own fate seemed a matter of complete indifference to Vance. It was admira
ble, I suppose—assuming that there was nothing peculiar behind it.

  I was about to go, when one more point occurred to me. “You still maintain that you found the door of the house open? You didn’t break in?”

  “No.” Vance, teeth gritted, was emphatic. “It was open. I just walked in.”

  “The police say they found clear marks that the door was jimmied. You didn’t do that?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  As a matter of fact I hadn’t heard any sound of the front door being jimmied when I was in Grabhorn’s office. Would I have? That office door was pretty heavy. I certainly wouldn’t have heard Vance—or anyone else—walk upstairs, because of the thick carpeting in both the foyer and the staircase.

  I left shortly thereafter. By this time it was nearly 3:30 in the morning, but you’d never know that from the way the police department was hopping over this murder case. I trudged upstairs and knocked on Detective Crane’s door, and was greeted with a gruff: “Come in!”

  Our talk was not very conclusive. I still didn’t know how much to tell him, and that may have made me come off as suspicious. Crane was struck, however, by my discovery of Grabhorn’s change of name: he hadn’t known that, and it gave him food for thought.

  “But I don’t see how that affects this shooting, Scintilla,” Crane said. “By whatever name Greer was going by, he was still shot by Vance.”

  “My client says he didn’t do it.” I guess I didn’t sound very convinced; maybe because I wasn’t.

  “Yeah, well, he can also say that he’s been to the moon and back: that doesn’t mean I’ll believe him. I know who he is, Scintilla: I know his father is Mister Moneybags, but that don’t make a bit of difference to me. If he’s guilty—and he is—then he’s going down.”

  “Okay, fine. He’s only my client, he’s not my brother.” I was getting a bit of a headache. “Let me ask you this, Detective: How did your men get to that house so quickly? They must have arrived within a minute or two of the shooting.”

  Crane was prepared for that. “We got a tip—claiming to be from a neighbor, although she didn’t identify herself—that someone was breaking into the house. So we sent a squad car over there at once. You know that area, Scintilla”—Crane broke into a crooked grin—“these people like to be protected: they have too much to lose from burglars. So when that car was on its way, the officers heard the shot and immediately called in for reinforcements. I was here when that call came through, so I decided to take charge.”

  I said nothing to all this. Whether the anonymous neighbor had seen me or Vance was not something I wanted Crane to clarify.

  There was not much more I could do here. Vance could fend for himself: he had the resources to do so. If he wanted me to continue the investigation, I would. But I was pretty much stymied at this end: Crane would surely not allow me to look through Grabhorn’s papers now, so finding that doctor friend of his who had recommended the Removal Company was out of the question.

  It was time to head back to New York. I wanted to see what I could find out about Mr. and Mrs. Harry Greenway.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was good to be on familiar turf again.

  Los Angeles was fine if you had a car and liked the beach, but for one accustomed to the frenetic pace of crowded Eastern cities it was as alien as the steppes of Russia. I liked being able to go anywhere I needed to go by subway, elevated, bus, ferry, or (when I felt extravagant) taxi. I liked the fact that my corner deli had nearly everything I needed for my frugal meals, that my post office, stationery store, drugstore, even police station were within walking distance of home or office.

  And, I have to confess, I was more than a little relieved that I was away from the oppressive presence of Arthur Vance. Not many clients in the past had thrown money my way so insouciantly, but I was now glad that he would be in cold storage for a while, a continent away. There was something about him that was beginning to bother me.

  At first I had felt sorry for him: he was clearly wrought up over his wife’s death—if that’s what it was—and seemed desperate to prove, at least to himself, that it had all been some mistake. Maybe he half knew—what I had learned from the late Dr. Grabhorn—that he had not been as much of a help to Katharine in her various times of need as he had hoped; that, in fact, he may have had no small part in driving her to her ultimate act. That would have been a pretty tough thing to take for a man not yet thirty.

  But now I was beginning to look at him in a different way. Perhaps, in my prejudice against the wealthy—especially the sons and daughters of the wealthy—I had underestimated his intellect and cunning. What was his game, if he had a game? I had taken practically everything he said at face value. Was his excitable, nervous temperament—bordering on hysteria, it seemed to my unprofessional medical opinion—simply an act? Was he actually manipulating me toward some unfathomable end?

  And did he, or did he not, kill William Grabhorn? What could he possibly have to gain by doing so? Did Grabhorn know something about Vance that Vance couldn’t afford to have known?

  Well, I didn’t have the answers to any of these questions. But I was glad to have a little distance from him for a while. From now on, he himself would be among my suspects.

  Right now, however, my concern was with Elena Cavalieri. As before, I needed to find something—anything—that would indicate some flaw, some cover-up in her background. If, in even the smallest particular, she was something other than what she said she was, I might have something to work with.

  Some of the background work I could do myself. That chap on the Herald-Tribune, Gene Merriwether, might be a start.

  I sauntered over to the Herald-Tribune offices on West 41st Street and asked for him at the front desk. The officious male receptionist, looking more like a police officer than a compatriot of that nails-obsessed beauty at Grabhorn’s office, gave me the once-over and grudgingly barked out directions to the fifth floor.

  Merriwether was a prepossessing young man, looking even younger than Arthur Vance although they had to be pretty much the same age. He was clean-cut, eager to please, a little harried, and trying to conceal the fact that the society columns of even a major newspaper were not exactly where he felt his talents to lie.

  After I had announced my mission, he perked up considerably. Maybe he thought this matter might somehow work to his credit. But in all fairness, his primary wish was to help his friend Vance.

  “Yes, Mr. Scintilla, I sent him that clipping.” He suddenly turned rueful. “I hope to heaven I haven’t caused more problems than before. I knew he was awful upset about Katharine’s leaving him. And I really didn’t mean to upset him.”

  “Well, he was pretty upset,” I said bluntly.

  Merriwether winced. “I’m sorry to hear that. He’s really one of my best friends.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” I shifted gears. “Tell me what led you to fancy a resemblance between Katharine Vance and this Elena Cavalieri woman.”

  “Well, there is a resemblance,” Merriwether said, a bit desperately. “A great resemblance.”

  “All right, let’s say there is. But what would lead you to think that Elena Cavalieri was Katharine Vance?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say that! I just thought Arthur would be interested in the resemblance....”

  There was something odd here. “Did Arthur tell you what had happened between him and Katharine?”

  Merriwether shifted uncomfortably in his uncomfortable chair. “Well, not very much. He just said Katharine had decided to leave him—that her mind was made up, and that there was nothing anybody could do about it.”

  So Vance hadn’t told Merriwether about the whole business with the Removal Company. That made sense: if he hadn’t told even his family, he wasn’t likely to tell even a good friend.

  “I think Arthur even said that the blow-up had happened in New York—which surprised me, because he had made no effort to look me up when he was here. I was rather hurt by that—I hadn’t seen him for
years.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Oh,” Merriwether waved his hand irresolutely, “just that they’d been pretty busy and didn’t have time to look up anyone. It didn’t convince me, although I did learn that he never saw any of our other friends here, either.” He refocused himself. “You see, what’s why I thought that maybe this Elena woman really was, or might be, Katharine. I mean, Katharine had totally disappeared! If she had stayed in New York, maybe she had changed her name, or something—you know, started her life all over again. She was still pretty young....”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Katharine? Well, I guess it would have been around 1927, when I came back home for a visit. I don’t have much of a chance to get away, you know....”

  I was startled. “That was six years ago—and four years before Katharine and Arthur Vance...er, split up.”

  Merriwether wriggled some more. “Yes, I know. It was a long time. But you don’t forget a face like Katharine’s! Anyway, remember that I wasn’t really saying this Elena was Katharine, just that she looked like her....” He trailed off indecisively.

  “Okay, fine.” This wasn’t getting me anywhere. “Just what do you know about Elena Cavalieri—now Mrs. Harry Greenway?”

  “Well, not very much....” Merriwether looked down at his shoes. Then suddenly he perked up again. “But, say! I know someone who might! Just sit tight, okay, Mr. Scintilla—I’ll be right back.”

  And before I could say or do anything he had hopped up from his chair and retreated into the bowels of the Herald-Tribune offices.

  In a surprisingly short amount of time he had in tow a slim, curvy young woman, quite good-looking, hair tied up in a bun, whose only blemish was the immense wad of gum she was chewing. She had a notepad in her hand and was giving Merriwether an irritated look as he almost dragged her to where we were seated.