“They were some alike,” Tinchfleld said, staring at me gravely. He raised his voice. “Emma!”
A stout woman in a print dress opened the inner door of the cabin. An enormous white apron was tied around what had once been her waist. A smell of coffee and frying bacon rushed out.
“Emma, this is Detective Dalmas from Los Angeles. Lay another plate and I’ll pull the table out from the wall a ways. He’s a mite tired and hungry.”
The stout woman ducked her head and smiled and put silver on the table.
We sat down and ate bacon and eggs and hot cakes and drank coffee by the quart. Tinchfleld ate like four men and his wife ate like a bird and kept hopping up and down like a bird to get more food.
We finished at last and Mrs. Tinchfleld gathered up the dishes and shut herself in the kitchen. Tinchfleld cut a large slice of plug and tucked it carefully into his face and I sat down in the Boston rocker again.
“Well, son,” he said, “I guess I’m ready for the word. I was a mite anxious about that piece of gold chain bein’ hid where it was, what with the lake so handy. But I’m a slow thinker. What makes you think Melton murdered his wife?”
“Because Beryl Haines is still alive, with her hair dyed red.”
I told him my story, all of it, fact by fact, concealing nothing. He said nothing until I had finished.
“Well, son,” he said then, “you done a mighty smart piece of detectin’ work there—what with a little luck in a couple of places, like we all have to have. But you didn’t have no business to be doin’ it at all, did you?”
“No. But Melton took me for a ride and played me for a sucker. I’m a stubborn sort of guy.”
“What for do you reckon Melton hired you?”
“He had to. It was a necessary part of his plan to have the body correctly identified in the end, perhaps not for some time, perhaps not until after it had been buried and the case closed. But he had to have it identified in the end in order to get his wife’s money. That or wait for years to have the courts declare her legally dead. When it was correctly identified, he would have to show that he had made an effort to find her. If his wife was a kleptomaniac, as he said, he had a good excuse for hiring a private dick instead of going to the police. But he had to do something. Also there was the menace of Goodwin. He might have planned to kill Goodwin and frame me for it. He certainly didn’t know Beryl had beat him to it, or he wouldn’t have let me go to Goodwin’s house.
“After that—and I was foolish enough to come up here before I had reported Goodwin’s death to the Glendale police—he probably thought I could be handled with money. The murder itself was fairly simple, and there was an angle to it that Beryl didn’t know or think about. She was probably in love with him. An underprivileged woman like that, with a drunken husband, would be apt to go for a guy like Melton.
“Melton couldn’t have known the body would be found yesterday, because that was pure accident, but he would have kept me on the job and kept hinting around until it was found. He knew Haines would be suspected of murdering his wife and the note she left was worded to sound a bit unlike a real suicide note. Melton knew his wife and Haines were getting tight together up here and playing games.
“He and Beryl just waited for the right time, when Haines had gone off to the north shore on a big drunk. Beryl must have telephoned him from somewhere. You’ll be able to check that. He could make it up here in three hours’ hard driving. Julia was probably still drinking. Melton knocked her out, dressed her in Beryl’s clothes and put her down in the lake. He was a big man and could do it alone, without much trouble. Beryl would be acting as lookout down the only road into the property. That gave him a chance to plant the anklet in the Haines cabin. Then he rushed back to town and Beryl put on Julia’s clothes and took Julia’s car and luggage and went to the hotel in San Bernardino.
“There she was unlucky enough to be seen and spoken to by Goodwin, who must have known something was wrong, by her clothes or her bags or perhaps hearing her spoken to as Mrs. Melton. So he followed her into town and you know the rest. The fact that Melton had her lay this trail shows two things, as I see it. One, that he intended to wait some time before having the body properly identified. It would be almost certain to be accepted as the body of Beryl Haines on Bill’s say-so, especially as that put Bill in a very bad spot.
“The other thing is that when the body was identified as Julia Melton, then the false trail laid by Beryl would make it look as though she and Bill had committed the murder to collect her insurance. I think Melton made a bad mistake by planting that anklet where he did. He should have dropped it into the lake, tied to a bolt or something, and later on, accidentally on purpose, fished it out. Putting it in Haines’ cabin and then asking me if Haines’ cabin had been searched was a little too sloppy. But planned murders are always like that.”
Tinchfleld switched his chaw to the other side of his face and went to the door to spit. He stood in the open door with his big hands clasped behind him.
“He couldn’t have pinned nothing on Beryl,” he said over his shoulder. “Not without her talkin’ a great deal, son. Did you think of that?”
“Sure. Once the police were looking for her and the case broke wide open in the papers—I mean the real case—he would have had to bump Beryl off and make it look like a suicide. I think it might have worked.”
“You hadn’t ought to have let that there murderin’ woman get away, son. There’s other things you hadn’t ought to have done, but that one was bad.”
“Whose case is this?” I growled. “Yours—or the Glendale police’s? Beryl will be caught all right. She’s killed two men and she’ll flop on the next trick she tries to pull. They always do. And there’s collateral evidence to be dug up. That’s police work—not mine. I thought you were running for re-election, against a couple of younger men. I didn’t come back up here just for the mountain air.”
He turned and looked at me slyly. “I kind of figured you thought old man Tinchfleld might be soft enough to keep you out of jail, son.” Then he laughed and slapped his leg. “Keep Tinchfleld Constable,” he boomed at the big outdoors. “You’re darn right they will. They’d be dump fools not to—after this. Let’s mosey on over to the office and call the ‘cutor down in Berdoo.” He sighed. “Just too dump smart that Melton was,” he said. “I like simple folks.”
“Me too,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
They caught Beryl Haines on the California-Oregon line, doubling back south to Yreka in a rent car. The highway patrol stopped her for a routine border fruit inspection, but she didn’t know that. She pulled another gun. She still had Julia Melton’s luggage and Julia Melton’s clothes and Julia Melton’s checkbook, with nine blank checks in it traced from one of Julia Melton’s genuine signatures. The check cashed by Goodwin proved to be another forgery.
Tinchfield and the county prosecutor went to bat for me with the Glendale police, but I got hell from them just the same. From Violets M’Gee I got the large and succulent razzberry, and from the late Howard Melton I got what was left of the fifty dollars he had advanced me. They kept Tinchfleld constable, by a landslide.
PEARLS ARE A NUISANCE
1
It is quite true that I wasn’t doing anything that morning except looking at a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about writing a letter. It is also quite true that I don’t have a great deal to do any morning. But that is no reason why I should have to go out hunting for old Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace. I don’t happen to be a policeman.
It was Ellen Macintosh who called me up, which made a difference, of course. “How are you, darling?” she asked. “Busy?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “Mostly no. I am very well. What is it now?”
“I don’t think you love me, Walter. And anyway you ought to get some work to do. You have too much money. Somebody has stolen Mrs. Penruddock’s pearls and I want you to find them.”
“Possibly you think
you have the police department on the line,” I said coldly. “This is the residence of Walter Gage. Mr. Gage talking.”
“Well, you can tell Mr. Gage from Miss Ellen Macintosh,” she said, “that if he is not out here in half an hour, he will receive a small parcel by registered mail containing one diamond engagement ring.”
“And a lot of good it did me,” I said. “That old crow will live for another fifty years.”
But she had already hung up so I put my hat on and went down and drove off in the Packard. It was a nice late April morning, if you care for that sort of thing. Mrs. Penruddock lived on a wide quiet street in Carondelet Park. The house had probably looked exactly the same for the last fifty years, but that didn’t make me any better pleased that Ellen Macintosh might live in it another fifty years, unless old Mrs. Penruddock died and didn’t need a nurse any more. Mr. Penruddock had died a few years before, leaving no will, a thoroughly tangled-up estate, and a list of pensioners as long as a star boarder’s arm.
I rang the front doorbell and the door was opened, not very soon, by a little old woman with a maid’s apron and a strangled knot of gray hair on the top of her head. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before and didn’t want to see me now.
“Miss Ellen Macintosh, please,” I said. “Mr. Walter Gage calling.”
She sniffed, turned without a word and we went back into the musty recesses of the house and came to a glassed-in porch full of wicker furniture and the smell of Egyptian tombs. She went away, with another sniff.
In a moment the door opened again and Ellen Macintosh came in. Maybe you don’t like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don’t, I’m sorry for you.
“Darling, so you did come,” she cried. “That was nice of you, Walter. Now sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
We sat down.
“Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace has been stolen, Walter.”
“You told me that over the telephone. My temperature is still normal.”
“If you will excuse a professional guess,” she said, “it is probably subnormal—permanently. The pearls are a string of forty-nine matched pink ones which Mr. Penruddock gave to Mrs. Penruddock for her golden wedding present. She hardly ever wore them lately, except perhaps on Christmas or when she had a couple of very old friends in to dinner and was well enough to sit up. And every Thanksgiving she gives a dinner to all the pensioners and friends and old employees Mr. Penruddock left on her hands, and she wore them then.”
“You are getting your verb tenses a little mixed,” I said, “but the general idea is clear. Go on.”
“Well, Walter,” Ellen said, with what some people call an arch look, “the pearls have been stolen. Yes, I know that is the third time I told you that, but there’s a strange mystery about it. They were kept in a leather case in an old safe which was open half the time and which I should judge a strong man could open with his fingers even when it was locked. I had to go there for a paper this morning and I looked in at the pearls just to say hello—”
“I hope your idea in hanging on to Mrs. Penruddock has not been that she might leave you that necklace,” I said stiffly. “Pearls are all very well for old people and fat blondes, but for tall willowy—”
“Oh shut up, darling,” Ellen broke in. “I should certainly not have been waiting for these pearls—because they were false.”
I swallowed hard and stared at her. “Well,” I said, with a leer, “I have heard that old Penruddock pulled some cross-eyed rabbits out of the hat occasionally, but giving his own wife a string of phony pearls on her golden wedding gets my money.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fool, Walter! They were real enough then. The fact is Mrs. Penruddock sold them and had imitations made. One of her old friends, Mr. Lansing Gallemore of the Gallemore Jewelry Company, handled it all for her very quietly, because of course she didn’t want anyone to know. And that is why the police have not been called in. You will find them for her, won’t you, Walter?”
“How? And what did she sell them for?”
“Because Mr. Penruddock died suddenly without making any provision for all these people he had been supporting. Then the depression came, and there was hardly any money at all. Only just enough to carry on the household and pay the servants, all of whom have been with Mrs. Penruddock so long that she would rather starve than let any of them go.”
“That’s different,” I said. “I take my hat off to her. But how the dickens am I going to find them, and what does it matter anyway—if they were false?”
“Well, the pearls—imitations, I mean—cost two hundred dollars and were specially made in Bohemia and it took several months and the way things are over there now she might never be able to get another set of really good imitations. And she is terrified somebody will find out they were false, or that the thief will blackmail her, when he finds out they were false. You see, darling, I know who stole them.”
I said, “Huh?” a word I very seldom use as I do not think it part of the vocabulary of a gentleman.
“The chauffeur we had here a few months, Walter—a horrid big brute named Henry Eichelberger. He left suddenly the day before yesterday, for no reason at all. Nobody ever leaves Mrs. Penruddock. Her last chauffeur was a very old man and he died. But Henry Eichelberger left without a word and I’m sure he had stolen the pearls. He tried to kiss me once, Walter.”
“Oh, he did,” I said in a different voice. “Tried to kiss you, eh? Where is this big slab of meat, darling? Have you any idea at all? It seems hardly likely he would be hanging around on the street corner for me to punch his nose for him.”
Ellen lowered her long silky eyelashes at me—and when she does that I go limp as a scrubwoman’s back hair.
“He didn’t run away. He must have known the pearls were false and that he was safe enough to blackmail Mrs. Penruddock. I called up the agency he came from and he has been back there and registered again for employment. But they said it was against their rules to give his address.”
“Why couldn’t somebody else have taken the pearls? A burglar, for instance?”
“There is no one else. The servants are beyond suspicion and the house is locked up as tight as an icebox every night and there were no signs of anybody having broken in. Besides Henry Eichelberger knew where the pearls were kept, because he saw me putting them away after the last time she wore them—which was when she had two very dear friends in to dinner on the occasion of the anniversary of Mr. Penruddock’s death.”
“That must have been a pretty wild party,” I said. “All right, I’ll go down to the agency and make them give me his address. Where is it?”
“It is called the Ada Twomey Domestic Employment Agency, and it is in the two-hundred block on East Second, a very unpleasant neighborhood.”
“Not half as unpleasant as my neighborhood will be to Henry Eichelberger,” I said. “So he tried to kiss you, eh?”
“The pearls, Walter,” Ellen said gently, “are the important thing. I do hope he hasn’t already found out they are false and thrown them in the ocean.”
“If he has, I’ll make him dive for them.”
“He is six feet three and very big and strong, Walter,” Ellen said coyly. “But not handsome like you, of course.”
“Just my size,” I said. “It will be a pleasure. Good-bye, darling.”
She took hold of my sleeve. “There is just one thing, Walter. I don’t mind a little fighting because it is manly. But you mustn’t cause a disturbance that would bring the police in, you know. And although you are very big and strong and played right tackle at college, you are a little weak about one thing. Will you promise me not to drink any whiskey?”
“This Eichelberger,” I said, “is all the drink I want.”
2
The Ada Twomey Domestic Employment Agency on East Second Street proved to be all that the name and location implied. The odor of the anteroom,
in which I was compelled to wait for a short time, was not at all pleasant. The agency was presided over by a hard-faced middle-aged woman who said that Henry Eichelberger was registered with them for employment as a chauffeur, and that she could arrange to have him call upon me, or could bring him there to the office for an interview. But when I placed a ten-dollar bill on her desk and indicated that it was merely an earnest of good faith, without prejudice to any commission which might become due to her agency, she relented and gave me his address, which was out west on Santa Monica Boulevard, near the part of the city which used to be called Sherman.
I drove out there without delay, for fear that Henry Eichelberger might telephone in and be informed that I was coming. The address proved to be a seedy hotel, conveniently close to the interurban car tracks and having its entrance adjoining a Chinese laundry. The hotel was upstairs, the steps being covered—in places—with strips of decayed rubber matting to which were screwed irregular fragments of unpolished brass. The smell of the Chinese laundry ceased about halfway up the stairs and was replaced by a smell of kerosene, cigar butts, slept-in air and greasy paper bags. There was a register at the head of the stairs on a wooden shelf. The last entry was in pencil, three weeks previous as to date, and had been written by someone with a very unsteady hand. I deduced from this that the management was not over-particular.
There was a bell beside the book and a sign reading: MANAGER. I rang the bell and waited. Presently a door opened down the hall and feet shuffled towards me without haste. A man appeared wearing frayed leather slippers and trousers of a nameless color, which had the two top buttons unlatched to permit more freedom to the suburbs of his extensive stomach. He also wore red suspenders, his shirt was darkened under the arms, and elsewhere, and his face badly needed a thorough laundering and trimming.
He said, “Full-up, bud,” and sneered.
I said: “I am not looking for a room. I am looking for one Eichelberger, who, I am informed lives here, but who, I observe, has not registered in your book. And this, as of course you know, is contrary to the law.”
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 90