Elsie came over and said quietly, “I’m very sorry to interrupt you, but there’s a young woman on the line who has to talk with you, Donald. She says it’s very important.”
“Give her name?”
“No.”
“Okay,” I said.
I gave Eva Ennis a smile which she could interpret as a promise that I’d be back to resume the conversation at some future date.
Elsie Brand walked beside me as I went toward the office.
“I’ll have to send her a copy of the game laws,” I said.
“The girl on the telephone?”
“Eva Ennis.”
“Why the game laws?”
“I want her to learn something about open seasons, poaching on private property, and getting a hunting license.”
I grinned and picked up the telephone.
A frightened feminine voice said, “Donald, I have to see you right away.”
“Who is this?”
“Sylvia Hadley.”
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“Lots of things are going to happen. I hope you can get here before they start happening.”
“Where’s here?”
“My apartment.”
“Where?”
“Cresta Vista, Apartment 319. Will you come?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It depends on what it’s all about. I’m working on a case and my time belongs to my client.”
“Donald, please, please, please come,” she said. “It’s important, both to me and to you. It…it’s terribly important to Phyllis.”
I hesitated just long enough to let her know I wasn’t eager, then said, “Very well. I’ll be up.”
“Just as quickly as possible, please, Donald.”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
I said to Elsie, “I’m going to be out for an hour or so in case anyone wants me.”
“Be careful,” Elsie said.
“Why careful?” I asked.
“Because I know you can’t be good,” she told me.
Chapter Fourteen
I pushed the mother-of-pearl button on the side of the door at 319 and Sylvia called through the door, “Who is it?”
“Lam,” I said.
She flung the door open. “Oh, Donald!” she said. “Donald, I’m so glad you came!”
Her hands were on my arm, the fingers gripping, her eyes looking into mine, her lips half-parted. “Oh, Donald,” she said, “this is terrible. It’s absolutely terrible.”
“All right,” I told her, “let’s get down to brass tacks. Tell me what’s so terrible about it.”
She closed the door and turned the bolt. “Come over here, Donald,” she said, “and sit down.”
She led the way to a davenport, sat down, kicked her shoes off, doubled up her legs so the tightly stretched expanse of nylon stockings was visible, and sat very close to me, her hands with interlaced fingers resting on my shoulder. “Donald,” she said, “it’s terrible. I don’t want to tell you, but I have to.”
“All right, go on. Tell me,” I said.
“That jade idol.”
“What about it?”
“I took it.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Donald, I don’t believe you’re paying any attention to me at all.”
“Of course I am. You took the jade idol. Mind if I smoke?”
“No,” she pouted.
“Want one?”
She hesitated, then said, “All right.”
I gave her one of my cigarettes and held my lighter. She leaned forward for the light, holding my hand with one of hers, her eyes looking up from the flame to my face. “Donald, I need your help. I need it so terribly, terribly much.”
“Go on,” I said, “you stole the jade idol. What happened?”
“Donald, I can tell from the way you’re acting you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you stole the jade idol.”
“Well, then, why are you so…so sort of casual about the whole thing?”
“What do you want me to do, drop down on the floor and throw a fit? You stole the jade idol. You’ve decided to tell me about it now because you know that I found out you had stolen the idol and the method you used to smuggle it out of the apartment.”
“No, no, Donald, I swear that’s not true! If you’ll only listen. If you’ll only let me tell you the whole story.”
“Go on,” I said. “You wanted me to get out here in a hurry. You acted as though you didn’t have much time.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Better use what you have then.”
She squirmed around, getting a little closer to me. The skirt slipped back over the tightly stretched stockings, exposing the upper part of her legs, her lips were within inches of my ear.
“Donald,” she said, “I was disloyal to my friend.”
“What friend?”
“Phyllis.”
“How were you disloyal?”
“I did things with…with her husband.”
“What sort of things?”
She hesitated and said, “Well, for one thing, he wanted me to participate in a scheme, a plot.”
“What sort of a plot?”
“I don’t know, but he had something all planned out. He was a deep thinker and whatever it was he had planned was part of a carefully thought-out scheme.”
“What did he want you to do?”
“He wanted me to steal the idol.”
“Oh,” I said, “that’s it. Your defense now is that you took the idol because he asked you to. Is that it?”
“Of course, Donald. That’s what I’m telling you—what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Well, you’ve told me.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve just told you the naked facts.”
“And now you want to dress them up?”
“Nudity is interesting,” she said, “but nakedness is not artistic.”
“All right,” I said, “you object to nakedness. Go ahead and dress up the facts.”
“Donald, I have an idea that you’re condemning me in advance, without hearing what I have to say.”
“I’m trying to hear what you have to say.”
“Well, you’re not making it easy for me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Be sympathetic. I— Oh, Donald, I feel terribly alone and helpless. I just want to have some strong man to…to take me and protect me.”
“I’m not strong.”
“Yes, you are, Donald. You’re wonderful, only you don’t know it.”
“Is this part of the naked truth?” I asked. “Or part of the dressing?”
“I do believe you’re trying to be nasty,” she said, and tried to shake me, but wound up by shaking herself, her body moving back and forth against mine.
I leaned forward and reached for an ashtray.
She took a deep breath. “It was like this,” she said. “Dean Crockett came to me and told me that he wanted to arrange a theft on the night of that party. He said that he wanted to have the second of the two jade Buddhas disappear.”
“Why?”
“He wanted an excuse to hire detectives.”
“Why?”
“That’s something I don’t know.”
“Suppose you tell me just what Dean Crockett told you.”
“He told me that he was very anxious to have it appear that some thief had stolen the second of the carved jade Buddhas from his collection. One of the jade Buddhas had been stolen about three weeks ago. He said he was going to hire a detective to protect his study. He had also put an X-ray arrangement in the elevator so that he could turn this X-ray on.”
“Simply to keep people from stealing things?” I asked.
She said, “I gathered that had been put in for another purpose.”
“What?”
“So that people entering the apartment could be X-rayed to see if they were carrying any weapons. As
soon as a person entered the elevator, the X-ray machine was turned on and a fluoroscope picked up the image. There was some kind of an arrangement by which the image on the fluoroscope was projected on a screen above. I don’t know whether it was done by mirrors or some sort of a special television circuit. Anyway, a person entering the elevator going either up or down could be studied all the way by someone watching in a little hidden compartment back of the elevator shaft.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and laughed. “Talk about feeling naked. My Heavens, you should see a woman in that fluoroscope! You can see every bone in her body and the metal garter clasps and everything like that. It’s the same system they have in prisons. Visitors in the high-security prisons, you know, have to be X-rayed. You stand in one of these booths and they study everything you have.…” She giggled and said, “You should see a man in that fluoroscope if you really want to see something.”
“How come?”
“Oh,” she said, “men carry such an assortment of junk. You can see the cigarette cases, the coins in their pants pockets, fountain pens, tiepins, cuff links, everything.”
“You’ve watched people go up and down in the elevator?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Just for kicks?”
“No, I’ve worked for Mr. Crockett.”
“What do you mean, worked?”
“Well, I’ve sat there on guard when he expected someone to call on him who might have a weapon. He’d have people monitor the persons going up and down in the elevator and sometimes I did that monitoring for him.”
“You got to know him quite well?”
“ Real well.”
“So then he told you he wanted this jade Buddha stolen?”
“Yes.”
“And he wanted that stolen so he could have an excuse to keep a detective on the job guarding the place?”
“Yes, that was part of it.”
“What was the rest of it?”
“I don’t know. That’s what sort of worries me.”
“And just what were you supposed to do?”
“Well, he was going to get this detective who would be hard-boiled, and…well, she would— You see, it had to be a woman because he wanted her to be able to search women guests if it became necessary, and—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s back up and take another look at that. Why did he want women guests searched?”
“To keep them from taking anything.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t think so. Crockett was wealthy. If he had decided to search any woman guest, he could have really got in a tough spot.”
“But not if the woman guest had something concealed on her that she was taking from the apartment.”
“He’d have to catch her red-handed,” I said. “He’d have to be absolutely certain of what he was doing, and—suppose the woman guest simply refused to be searched and put it up to him to call the police and lodge a charge, if he was going to carry things that far.”
“Well, couldn’t he do that?”
“He could have, but he wouldn’t actually have done it.”
“He told me he was going to get a woman who was so tough that nobody was going to talk her out of anything.”
“He had the woman detective all picked?”
“Yes. Your partner, Bertha Cool.”
“Then why did he want you to steal the jade Buddha?”
“I think, Donald, he was laying a foundation for something that was scheduled to happen the day after the party. I think that’s why he wanted to be certain that something was missing.
“Anyway, he told me what to do. I was to wait until the coast was clear, then I was to smash the glass in the glass case which contained the remaining jade Buddha. I was to wrap it in cotton and put it in the back of the camera Lionel Palmer used for the group shots—the one with the wide-angle lens. Mr. Crockett told me that that camera would be used only once during the evening, and that would be to take a shot of the guests all assembled at the table. After that, he said Lionel wouldn’t use it and it would be perfectly safe to put the jade Buddha in. You see, the X-ray was always turned off when Lionel Palmer went up and down because once they didn’t do it and every picture Lionel took was all fogged. The X-rays simply ruined the film.
“I think that was the time that Lionel first found out about the X-ray machine in the elevator. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to his films but he knew that there had been some kind of sabotage, so he went to Dean Crockett and told him that something had happened and that he rather suspected he’d been in front of an X-ray machine sometime during the evening.”
“So then Crockett told him about the X-ray in the elevator?”
“I don’t know whether he told him or not, but he did tell Lionel that he would look into the matter and if there was any truth to the charge he’d see that it didn’t happen again. He talked vaguely about protective measures that had been installed by some detective agency and said he didn’t know too much about them.”
“All right,” I said. “Dean Crockett told you to take the jade Buddha and put it in the camera. Then what?”
“Well, of course, Lionel would carry it out and then I was to drop in and see Lionel the next day and…well, Lionel had taken some publicity pictures of me and I was to come in for more pictures.
“Mr. Crockett said he would see that Lionel would be in the darkroom developing and printing pictures all day, making enlargements for publicity purposes. He said if I hung around a bit, I wouldn’t have any difficulty getting to the shelf where the cameras were kept and taking the carved jade Buddha out. And then no one would ever know how it got out of his place.”
“So what?”
“So you…big smart you, came along and figured out where the jade Buddha was and went and took it out of the back of Lionel’s camera, and then you put somebody watching Lionel’s studio so that when I showed up to try and get the Buddha out of the camera, you were able to put the finger on me.”
“And you knew that?”
“I figured it out after a while.”
“And why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because I’m frightened.”
“Why?”
“Because Lionel is not going to back me up.…I’ll be accused of stealing the jade Buddha. Before I realized the whole situation, I talked too much to Lionel, and he knows that I’m the one who put the jade Buddha in his camera, and the one who came to get it. Of course, when it was gone I accused Lionel of having found it and concealed it somewhere, and…I guess I’ve led with my chin.”
“And?” I asked.
She stroked the side of my cheek with her fingertips, ran her fingers up into my hair and stroked the hair back gently. “And now,” she said, “I seem to be more or less in your power because, with Dean Crockett gone, there’s no one to back up my story and…I could be in a horrible fix unless you decided to help me out.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “it hasn’t occurred to you that I am working on the case…and for a client.”
“Of course it has. That’s why I wanted to see you.”
“I’m working for someone else, Sylvia.”
“Of course. For Mrs. Crockett.”
“Therefore, I’m not able to do anything for you.”
“Donald, turn around and look at me,” she said.
“I’m listening. I don’t need to look.”
“I want to look at you. I want you to look at me.”
She placed her hand under my chin and gently but firmly pulled my head around to hers.
“Now, keep looking at me, Donald,” she said. “I want you to know that I wouldn’t have asked you to come here if I didn’t feel that you needed me as much as I needed you.”
“Why do I need you?” I asked.
“In order to protect Phyllis.”
“And how are you going to help me protect Phyllis?”
“Because,” she said, “I could forget about Phyllis going into the bathroom and closing the door and then hearing the window open, and…well, I got curious and I turned around and looked out of the window over my shoulder.”
“Now,” I said, “I presume that you want to tell me that you were able to see the bathroom window by looking over your shoulder.”
“No, I couldn’t see the bathroom window. I was standing on the modeling platform and that’s near the bank of frosted-glass windows. Some of those windows swivel in and out for ventilation, not very far, just far enough to let the air in.…They don’t want to have them swing out far enough so that persons in other apartments can see in and observe what’s happening because in that event…well, you know, they’d be looking in at the nude models—some people seem to think that it’s a great novelty to see a woman with her clothes off.”
“To some people it is.”
“It doesn’t need to be,” she said gently. “After all, it’s natural, Donald. What’s wrong with nudity?”
“You’re talking about a bathroom window,” I said.
“Oh, yes. I looked over my shoulder and, of course, I couldn’t see the bathroom window, but I could see out of the window through the little crack that was open, and— Donald, is it a crime to suppress evidence?”
“Yes.”
“And if I told you I saw something significant and you kept it from the police it would be a crime?”
“I wouldn’t have seen anything,” I said.
“I know, but if I saw something and told you about it, and you told me to keep it from the police, then it might—”
“But I wouldn’t tell you to keep it from the police.”
“Not even if I saw the tip of a blowgun out of the bathroom window—saw it moving up and down like someone was taking aim?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“I’m not being silly, Donald. I’m trying to be helpful.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to help me.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Sylvia, but it’s no dice.”
Her eyes grew hard. “What do you mean, it’s no dice? You mean you’re going to throw me overboard?”
“ I’m not going to throw you overboard.”
“Are you going to let Phyllis?”
“How could Phyllis throw you overboard?”
“By keeping you all to herself.”
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