“Characters,” Nick Noble repeated. “You heard game? Cross at quarter—punt on third down. Cautious, shrewd—plays ’em safe. Dane at quarter—pass on fourth down. Reckless, brilliant—takes a wild chance and brings it off. Knew the answer then.”
“And because we couldn’t prove it,” MacDonald said, “this girl—Look, Jan—Miss Peters. Will you promise us something out of gratitude? Will you from now on be a good girl and keep your head out of the lion’s mouth?”
“No,” said Janice.
“Look. The police have worries enough without heroines. Won’t you—”
“No. I like danger. I like taking risks. And I couldn’t promise not to because you see, Lieutenant, I’ve already decided to say yes on that date you’re building up to asking me for.”
MacDonald looked at her.
Nick Noble looked at Gloomy Dane on the floor and then at his sherry bottle. “Didn’t break,” he said proudly, and proceeded to use it in its more accustomed fashion.
(1945)
Like Count Palmieri
Nick Noble noticed the little man entering the Chula Negra as he noticed everything, cursorily but completely. The little man was slight, hardly taller or heavier than Noble himself, and he was having trouble with a heavy parcel, paper-wrapped and about a foot square. He set it carefully down on the counter, sighed with relief, and gasped, “Beer …!” Lucita, Mamá Gonzales’ elder and plumper daughter, served him; and breath and life came back into him as he drank.
He wiped his face, which had the odd gift of sweating heavily without reddening, ordered another beer, and looked idly at the juke box beside the counter. Then his idle gaze changed to a startling double take. He got up, fumbling for a nickel, and approached the box incredulously.
From his regular post in the fourth booth on the left, Nick Noble could hardly hear the record. He concluded that it must be an old pre-electric recording; Mamá Gonzales kept a few such in the box for sentimental reasons. But he could almost hear it simply by watching the expression of growing ecstasy on the little man’s face.
Nick Noble sat quietly drinking his sherry and watching the comedy. The man turned and spoke rapidly to Lucita, who shrugged. He insisted, and she went back to the kitchen. Now Mamá Gonzales herself came out, trailing clouds of red pepper and bitter chocolate (today was Wednesday: lengua en mole). In no time at all she and the stranger had reached a complete misunderstanding, which Lucita was helpless to straighten out.
At last the little man asked loudly and plaintively: “Can anybody here interpret for me?”
Nick Noble’s curiosity is not confined to the criminological. He eased himself out of the booth and came up to the small group. The stranger, after one surprised glance at Noble’s pale, almost subterranean face, explained the situation.
He pointed at the juke label, which stated:
16 CENICIENTA—Geyer
“It isn’t possible,” he said breathlessly. “I’d have sworn she never recorded it. But there it is. Cenicienta—Italian Cenerentola, English Cinderella—is a Rossini opera. Wonderful coloratura contralto role—never very popular in this country—nobody sings it anywhere since Supervia died. I knew Geyer used to sing it occasionally in her younger days—incredible range!—but a record. … Listen!”
He put in another nickel. The old recording came through faintly (“On my own machine I can turn up the volume,” the man explained) but impressively. The music was not in itself great, but the perfect vehicle for the greatest voice of this century, that of Lena Geyer. The absolute authority of the recitative, the agile clarity of the coloratura passages impressed even Nick Noble. He remembered, for the first time in twenty years, that Martha had loved opera, and had been communicating her enthusiasm to him when …
The record ended, and Mamá Gonzales burst out. Nick Noble listened and gave a condensed translation: “Brought it from Mexico. Belonged to her mother. Wouldn’t think of parting with it.”
The little man presented a card which read:
With it he passed over a five-dollar bill, then, as Mamá Gonzales remained adamant, a ten. Then he took out his checkbook. Still she shook her head. He went over to the counter and undid the parcel.
“I’ve been record-hunting in the Main Street shops. I had good luck, too. There are some finds here. Tell her she can have any or all of them.”
The request was translated and rejected. Mr. Matteson sighed. “Then do you think … as a very special favor … she might … let me see the record?”
Mamá Gonzales smiled like one indulging a child’s whim, went around behind the juke box, and fetched out the disc. It bore a faded label that Nick Noble had never seen before, but Matteson recognized it. “Of course!” he observed to himself, cradling the record tenderly. “A Musofonia. Small company that used to specialize in the Latin-American trade—they go in more for these lesser Italian operas than we do. … Madam, what do you mean by wearing out this priceless treasure in a juke box?”
Her answer, omitting the saints and such, boiled down to she had no other phonograph to play her sainted mother’s records on and it wouldn’t wear out because nobody ever wanted to pay a nickel to hear it.
Regretfully Mr. Matteson set the record down. “Give her the card. Tell her to get in touch with me if she changes her mind. Meanwhile … I imagine I’ll be around again.” He rewrapped his parcel. “Thank you for your assistance, sir.”
As he departed, Nick Noble looked with amusement at his untouched second beer, forgotten in the excitement. Then he looked at the record on the counter and cried, “Hi!”
It was not the Lena Geyer. It was Ernani involami sung by Celestina Boninsegna. And under it were the five and the ten, neatly folded.
Noble’s “Hi!” brought Mr. Matteson back. He took the Geyer out of his parcel, replaced the Boninsegna therein, and pocketed the bills. “Well,” he smiled dryly, “no harm in trying, was there?”
After that, Mr. Matteson became a regular customer of the Chula Negra. Not such a fixture as Nick Noble; but whenever he went exploring in the Main Street second-hand record stores, he stopped by for a beer and a nickel’s worth of Lena Geyer. He even brought his partner in to hear the treasure.
Milton Harbrecht was also a record collector, but of a much more ponderous sort. While there was something almost charming in Mr. Matteson’s naive enthusiasm, Harbrecht took his position seriously, as befitted a man of his substantial appearance. “I tell you, Noble,” he declaimed, “we collectors are benefiting humanity. Without us, the great voices of the first quarter of this century would be lost forever. We are preserving beauty from oblivion. I look upon it as a public trust—in fact, I have been considering leaving my entire collection to the state university, with a proper endowment for upkeep.”
His pomposity faded a little when he listened to Geyer, but it returned full force when Lieutenant MacDonald (of Homicide) dropped in with the Larrimore file. He was almost rude in his abrupt and majestic departure, and Mr. Matteson explained: “He hates co—er, police officers. Some prank of his youth landed him in their custody, and he has never forgotten the treatment he received. Of course, I realize that times have changed—”
“Not quite,” MacDonald admitted. “We still have the petty sadists with us. In fact, I once had the pleasure of sending one such to the lethal gas chamber—or rather, Nick here did.”
Mr. Matteson’s eyes widened; lawyer though he was, he listened with almost a layman’s puzzled awe to an account of the Barker case and Nick Noble’s role in it. He proved such an agreeably impressed audience that he was allowed to remain while Noble looked over the Larrimore file and gave his verdict.
“Fraud, of course,” he said when his pallid eyes unglazed. “Corpse has nicotine stains only on back of teeth: means pipe. Pictures”—he waved at several glossy prints—“with cigaret. If an author doesn’t smoke pipe in publicity stills, doesn’t smoke it at all. So it isn’t Larrimore.”
Mr. Matteson goggled. He left with MacDonald, and hear
d from the Lieutenant the story of how Nick Noble had sunk from the brightest officer on the force to a thinking machine fueled by sherry. And he went home still goggling.
It was a week later that MacDonald looked in at the fourth booth on the left. “It’s your friend Matteson, Nick,” he said.
Nick Noble raised his eyes from his sherry. “Client of yours?”
“Not strictly. He’s alive, and my clients are usually dead. But somebody’s tried to steal all his beautiful records.”
“So what brings you in?”
“He came to me about it, since he’d met me. And because there’s an attempted homicide involved, I managed to stretch a point and get in on it.”
“Tell,” said Nick Noble tersely.
“His man, Charles Wilson, sleeps in a room next to the precious music room. He woke up last night to find somebody leaning over his bed and about to stab him. Saw moonlight on the blade. Now Wilson’s a Negro, but he’d be a great disappointment to fiction writers. He didn’t think it was a ghost, nor start rolling his eyes in terror, nor mutter ‘Feet, do yo’ stuff!” nor any of the other things that make nice comedy relief. He very sensibly and capably rolled off the bed and under it. The knife went into his pillow. He tried to grab the attacker’s feet from under the bed, but they got away. The intruder went into the music room, but Wilson was close on his heels, with his own knife; so the intruder made a quick exit out the window. Wilson followed, but lost his would-be murderer in the grounds. Then Wilson roused the household and they staged a general search which accomplished nothing but trampling out the invader’s footprints.”
Nick Noble nodded. “Any ideas?”
“Matteson doesn’t think it was an ordinary burglar, because such don’t know about the value of old records. I think he’s right, but some smart boy may have caught on by now. He thinks it’s an inside job framed to look pro, and he may have something there.”
“Suspects?”
“He wants me to come out there to dinner tonight,” MacDonald answered indirectly, “and bring you along. Want to come? You can meet the household and judge for yourself.”
Nick Noble hesitated.
“Collecting runs in the family,” MacDonald added. “Matteson’s father collected sherry.”
Nick Noble smiled.
The Matteson home was impressively lost among trees and shrubs in a canyon in Beverly Hills. MacDonald was about to ring the doorbell when Nick Noble tried the knob and found it unlocked. He shoved the door open and stepped in, saying, “You never know. …”
“Scotland Yard wouldn’t approve,” MacDonald observed, and followed him.
There was no one in the unobtrusively comfortable rooms at the front of the house. As they went down the hall, they passed an open door through which they could see walls lined with record-shelves. In a room a little way beyond a voice was speaking. “No, no. Ten fifty,” Mr. Matteson was saying as they came level with the door of his study. “Yes. Wait till you see their—” He broke off and nodded to his guests. “Right. Goodbye.” He hung up the telephone. “Good evening, gentlemen. Where’s Wilson, confound him?”
“No one answered,” MacDonald lied. “Making a date or bidding for some more records?”
“What? Oh. Ten fifty. Does one make dates for such oddly precise minutes? I was arguing with that partner of mine. He’s compiling a Chaliapin discography, and I caught an error in his listing of Down the Petersky. Victor record number 1050.”
“I wondered about prices,” MacDonald mused as Mr. Matteson rang for drinks. “Ten fifty would seem a lot for a record.”
“Would it?” The collector laughed. “Of course the so-called ‘classical’ records don’t fetch such fabulous prices as hot jazz. The hot collectors will readily pay up to and over a hundred dollars for old originals. With us—well, the scarcer old vocals run about five dollars from a dealer who specializes, and much less from one who doesn’t. I’ve made great finds for a quarter—and then again at auctions I’ve been forced up to twenty-five dollars. And of course there are certain records, like Lilli Lehmann’s Odeons and some of those obscure Geyers, that just never come on the market at all.”
“Then at that rate, when a burglar could be spending his time and effort on diamonds, say, would he be able to carry off enough records to make it worth his while?”
“I rather doubt,” said Mr. Matteson obscurely, “that this burglar is interested in profit.”
At that point Wilson came in with the drinks. The Negro was a handsome man of the North African type. He moved gracefully, and it was easy to imagine his deft evasion of the knife in the darkness. “Mrs. Hodzak says dinner will be ready when you’ve finished your drinks, sir,” he announced as he set down the tray.
“How good a look did you get at your assailant, Wilson?” MacDonald asked.
“Frankly, sir, none. I saw the knife rather than the man, and when I chased him he kept well ahead of me.”
“If he hadn’t attacked you, he might have pulled off his job. Why did he bother?”
“The music-room windows are soundly latched on the inside, but I sleep with my window open. I suppose that was the nearest way in to the room he wanted. I must have moved in my sleep some way, giving him the idea that I’d seen him.”
“Shrewd man,” MacDonald nodded when Wilson had gone. “That’s about the way Nick and I had doped it.—Nick! What’s the matter?”
Nick Noble stared bitterly at his glass. “First good sherry in twenty years. And my buds so rotted I can’t taste it. …”
One reason why MacDonald had welcomed the dinner invitation was pure curiosity. He had never seen Nick Noble put anything solid in his mouth, and he wanted to watch. But his curiosity remained ungratified: whenever he looked down the table, Noble was sipping his wine (he had persuaded his host to give him the domestic cooking sherry from the kitchen instead of wasting on his tasteless mouth the noble product of Jerez de la Frontera); and yet somehow his plate was clean at the end of the meal. MacDonald indulged in unprofitable speculations about osmosis.
He had plenty of time for speculation during dinner. Table talk did not precisely flow. Mr. Matteson’s mind was in the music room, as though another attempt on his beloved discs might be made at any moment. His son and daughter both ate as though it were a convenience and an economy to eat at home, but an ordeal that there was no sense in prolonging.
These children of Matteson’s were alike only in their obvious distaste for their home. The son, Edgar, MacDonald put down as that new breed of pharisee, the scientific prig. His father’s occasional attempts at conversation, whether chat about his collection or shop talk arising from his profession or the Lieutenant’s, were sharply squelched by the youth, who felt that nothing on earth had any importance if it could not be verified in a laboratory. He had one in the rear of the house where, in his hours away from the University, he carried on certain researches which he veiled in awesome mystery.
“My God, pater,“ he said once (and MacDonald winced at a locution which he had never heard on American lips before), “if you only collected decent recordings, one might understand. This is the fifth decade of the twentieth century, and you’re collecting coal-oil lamps and buggy-robes!”
Mr. Matteson protested that a great performance archaically recorded might outweigh a mediocre one presented with all the marvels of modern science; but Edgar’s lofty mind had retired to the laboratory.
Celia said little, possibly because speech might disarrange the perpetual pout into which her lips had settled. She was pretty—or at least she was young enough to seem so—but her prettiness was not enhanced by a dinner gown which even MacDonald knew was not this season’s. She confined herself to pursing up the pout even more bitterly whenever records were mentioned. Her mind was also elsewhere; MacDonald’s guess as to where was confirmed when Wilson announced that a Mr. Woodruff was waiting. For an instant the pout vanished, and there was almost life in her face as she left the table abruptly and without goodbyes.
&
nbsp; Edgar started after her, and answered his father’s “Young man, where do you think you’re going?” with a terse, “Lab.”
“You were working there last night too?” MacDonald asked.
“When the man with the knife tried to do something useful with those records? Yes. And all the to-do ruined the timing on an experiment.”
Everyone has obsessions, MacDonald reflected; and the secret of a happy family is to share them. But if the family is dividedly obsessed, some by records, some by laboratories, some by Mr. Woodruffs; and if the family money goes for only one of those obsessions …
He was not unprepared for the theories which Mr. Matteson advanced over coffee in the music room.
“… an inside job,” the little man repeated. “Which reduces it to four people. Mrs. Hodzak, the cook, was at her home that night; I checked with her sister. So that leaves …” He held up four fingers and began ticking them off as though the names were those of impersonal strangers. “Edgar. He’s always wanting money for his ridiculous laboratory, and how does he expect me to help him when he refuses even to explain his work to me? Says a mind like mine couldn’t be expected—Bah … Celia.“ (Tick.) “But not for the money. Not that she couldn’t use some, but her feline little mind would like nothing better than—”
“Smash,” said Nick Noble, with a comprehensive gesture.
“Exactly. Shatter, destroy this whole collection out of pure spite, and blame it on a burglar. That would be Celia.”
“That’s two,” said MacDonald.
Reluctantly Mr. Matteson ticked down a third finger. “Wilson. You called him shrewd. He is. He could have invented that whole story, slashed his pillow with a knife—”
“Why?”
“In his case, I should imagine, pure commercialism. Some opportunity to dispose of the records to a rival collector—”
“—such as your partner?”
Mr. Matteson nodded. “And that …” His remaining finger ticked down. He spoke awkwardly, hesitantly. “That brings me to the fourth.”
Exeunt Murderers Page 11