The Count of 9

by Earl Stanley Gardner

  “She doesn’t have me all to herself.”

  “Your services, I mean.”

  “Just what did you want me to do?”

  “To get Phyllis to remember that Dean Crockett told her in strict confidence that the theft of the little jade idol was to be a put-up job and that he had arranged for me to do it and that I was acting under his orders.”

  “Do you think he told her that?”

  “Oh, I’m certain he did.”

  “Why are you so certain?”

  “Because it would have been such a natural thing for him to have done, and…you know, he told Phyllis lots of things. If she only wants to cudgel her brains a little bit, she can remember.”

  “Suppose she doesn’t?”

  “Then that will be just too bad.”

  “For whom?”

  “For her—perhaps for both of us. Donald, you simply have to stand back of me in this thing. Am I going to have to use my wiles on you?”

  She was cuddled up as close as she could get now, holding my arm tight against her body.

  “What do you think you’re doing now?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m just commencing now. This is just a preliminary—do you want to see a real wile?”

  “No,” I told her. “Get the hell away from me for a minute and let me think.”

  She pouted. “Now, was that nice?”

  I said, “You’re a babe in the woods, an amateur. You just don’t have any idea of what the police will do when the going gets tough. They’ll take you to pieces.”

  “Well, suppose they do?” She looked up defiantly and said, “I guess I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that I can get immunity for anything I did if I give them evidence that will help them in a murder case. The trouble is, I don’t want to turn against Phyllis.”

  I pushed her away and got to my feet.

  “Okay,” I said, “try it and see where you come out.”

  “Donald!”

  “You heard me.”

  “Aren’t you going to be cooperative?”

  “And find myself in the can for suborning perjury, and then get Phyllis into a spot where she loses her case before it even starts? Don’t be funny. If you know anything, go tell it to the police. And remember this, when you do, they’re going to take you to pieces.”

  “They are not,” she said defiantly. “I’ll get immunity.”

  She wiggled off the couch with a great show of legs and started toward me.

  I walked over to the door, unbolted and opened it, went out and pulled the door shut behind me.

  Just as the door was closing I heard her scream vindictively, “You sonofabitch!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Phyllis Crockett answered the telephone.

  “Donald Lam talking,” I said. “I have to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Now, if possible.”

  “Come on up,” she invited.

  “Where? The penthouse or the studio?”

  “The studio,” she said. “I’ve left word at the desk that you’re to be admitted whenever you come up.”

  “How have things been?” I asked.

  “All right.”

  “Rough?”

  “Not too rough.”

  “They’re going to get worse,” I told her. “I’ll be up.”

  I hung up the telephone, drove to the apartment house, and the clerk at the desk smiled at me as though I owned the place. I went on up to the twentieth floor and pressed the button on Mrs. Crockett’s studio.

  She was wearing a black strapless gown that showed lots of flesh. “Hello, Donald,” she said. Her face looked drawn and taut.

  “Where are you going in that?” I asked.

  “In what?”

  I pointed to the dress.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked.

  “That isn’t the question,” I said. “You’re a widow, remember? You’re supposed to be prostrated with grief.”

  “Phooey!” she said. “There’s no use making a pretense like that. Dean and I had been physically separated for more than a year and— Do you know what he did the day of his death?”

  “What?”

  “It seems he’d had his attorney prepare divorce papers earlier in the week. He telephoned his attorney to file the divorce papers the next morning.”

  “The attorney didn’t do it?”

  “There wasn’t any next morning. He was dead.”

  “Do the police know that?”

  “The police know it, the newspapers know it, everybody knows it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ve been hounding me to death—not the police so much as the reporters. I gave the police a straight story, and they’re giving me a breathing spell.”

  “They’re checking every angle of your story,” I said. “If they find the least thing wrong with it, they’ll come back at you hard.”

  “Well, they can’t find anything wrong with it.”

  “What about the reporters?”

  “They’ve been asking the most impertinent questions. I wouldn’t see them at all. Melvin Olney has been worth his weight in gold.

  “That’s one thing about Melvin, Donald. He was loyal to Dean Crockett while Dean was alive, but he knew Dean’s shortcomings just as well as anyone else. We had a nice talk after you left. He told me that he wanted to stay on, that his loyalty had been to Dean but that if I would let him stay on with me, his loyalty would be with me.”

  “Why should he stay on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you want with a press agent?”

  “He’s more than that, Donald, he’s a manager. He handles things and sort of takes charge and knows the ropes. He’s really done a job with the newspaper people. He’s been courteous and considerate but he’s kept them away from me.”

  “Have you been out?”

  “No.”

  “When did the police get finished with this apartment?”

  “About two hours ago. They told me they were finished and that I could go ahead and use it. I’ve been down here most of the time so that in case any of the newspaper men did get in they—”

  “This place isn’t so good,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “You can keep the reporters out of the penthouse but you can’t keep them out of here.”

  “…I didn’t care about having Melvin know that I was seeing you right now. I told him I was going down to the studio and try to get a little rest.”

  “He knows you’re down here?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “I want you to think back to yesterday—the day of the murder.”

  “What about it?”

  I said, “I called here in the afternoon and gave you that blowgun.”

  “You didn’t really give it to me, you left it here with me to be delivered to Dean.”

  “That’s right. Now, I want to know what you did after I left.”

  “Painted.”

  “Did you go to the bathroom?”

  “Why, Donald,” she said. “How do I know? I’m a normal human being. I go to the bathroom once in a while and I can’t remember two or three days later every trip I made to the john.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Did you go to the bathroom for some special purpose?”

  She smiled and said, “If I went it must have been for a special purpose.”

  I said, “Sylvia Hadley says you went into the bathroom, closed the door, and were gone for some time. She says you pushed the blowgun out of the bathroom window. She heard the window being raised and saw the tip of the blowgun.”

  “She’s a liar. She couldn’t have seen it.”

  “You mean she’s a liar because you didn’t do it, or that she’s a liar because she couldn’t have seen it?”

  “Both.”

  “Let’s try an experiment,” I said. “What do we have here that is about the length of that blowgun? What about a mop stick, or a bro
om if we come right down to it?”

  “I have a brush with a long handle, but I don’t see what you’re trying to prove. Sylvia simply couldn’t have seen a thing.”

  I said, “We’ll talk about that in a minute. I want you to go in the bathroom, open the window and stick the handle of that long-handled brush out just as far as you can push it.”

  She started to say something, changed her mind, went to the closet, came out with the brush, walked into the bathroom and opened the bathroom window.

  “Like this?” she asked.

  “Like that,” I said.

  I walked over to the frosted-glass window, tilted the pane so the window was open about two inches, then went to the model stand, stood on it and looked back through the opening in the window.

  I could see the last ten or twelve inches of the brush handle.

  I closed the window, said, “Okay. She could have seen it.”

  “She could have?”

  I nodded.

  She bit her lip.

  “She’ll be telling the police pretty quick,” I said. “Now then, if you didn’t kill your husband, you certainly have put yourself in quite a spot. If you did kill him, you’ve put yourself in the gas chamber.”

  “Donald, I didn’t kill him.”

  “ Did you open the window and push the blowgun out?”

  Her eyes were downcast. “Yes,” she admitted in a low voice.

  “How come?”

  “It was almost immediately after you left, Donald. I knew that my husband would want to know about the blowgun having been recovered. I remembered his window was open. I went to the bathroom and while I was in there I started thinking. I opened the window a crack to see if I could see him.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was he?”

  “In that little closet where his body was found. He was standing right near the window. His back was turned toward me and he was talking with someone. I…I think it…I couldn’t see who it was. It might even have been a woman.”

  “All right. What did you do?”

  “Opened the window and called his name.”

  “Did he hear you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I called a second time and then pushed the blowgun out of the window so he could see it and hollered ‘yoo hoo.’”

  “Did he hear you?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I saw that he was talking with this person and that he was so completely preoccupied he wouldn’t hear me call, so I pulled the blowgun in, stood it in the corner, closed the bathroom window and went back to go on with my painting.”

  “Why didn’t you use the flashlight to attract his attention? You could have thrown a beam of light on the wall of that closet that would have attracted his attention.”

  “I just didn’t think about it at the moment.”

  “Isn’t that what you use that flashlight for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should have thought of it.”

  “But that would have attracted the attention of my husband’s visitor and that might have interrupted something important. I didn’t want to do that.”

  “Do you use that flashlight signal often?”

  “No. Dean didn’t want to be disturbed when he was in his study—I’d use the light to signal him only when I had something important—not just for chitchat.”

  “What about Sylvia?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to know about her.”

  She said, “You’ve seen enough of her, you should know her.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ve seen all there is to see.”

  “Oh,” I said, “is she like that?”

  “Of course she’s like that. She’s completely uninhibited and like many women with really beautiful figures, she’s an exhibitionist. She likes to show her body. She likes to have people pay attention to her.”

  “What people?”

  “All people.”

  “Dean Crockett?”

  She said wearily, “Oh, I suppose so. Although Dean at times could be completely preoccupied with his work and at those times he’d brush women to one side as though they were annoying distractions—I guess the way he looked at it, that’s what they were.”

  “But you don’t think he brushed Sylvia to one side?”

  “I don’t think he did. If Sylvia got her mind made up, she wouldn’t brush off easily.”

  “You didn’t care?”

  “Would it have helped if I had?”

  “Probably not, but what I’m getting at is whether you had any suspicions and if so why you kept on being so nice to Sylvia.”

  “What should I have done?”

  “Lots of wives would have scratched her eyes out.”

  “If I scratched the eyes out of every woman Dean Crockett the Second had bedded, there’d be a lot of blind women groping their way through life.”

  “But I gathered you felt he was too preoccupied to—”

  “Oh, he had his moments. When he’d snap out of it he was a fast worker.”

  “There were two jade Buddhas?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How was Sylvia fixed for money?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all about that part of her life. I do know she had some sources of supply. Not long ago she asked me to endorse a check so she could get it cashed. It was for a thousand dollars.”

  “Payable to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who issued the check—do you know?”

  “Yes. I looked at the signature—I had to, since I was actually guaranteeing the check. Sylvia didn’t like it. She thought I was snooping. I laughed at her. I told her I wouldn’t guarantee anyone’s check without looking at the signature.”

  “Who had signed it?”

  “Mortimer Jasper.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I’ve met him at art auctions.”

  “Is Sylvia a girl who appreciates beauty in art?”

  “She appreciates beauty in her own figure and in her own mirror—but I like her, Donald.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She’s so completely uninhibited, I guess.”

  “Suppose she was hard pressed for money for one reason or another. She had a chance to steal those carved jade Buddhas and sell them. Who could she have sold them to?”

  Phyllis shook her head and said, “No, that’s not like Sylvia. Sylvia at times can be a regular little tramp, but in money matters she’d be honest. She—” Abruptly she caught herself.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Come to think of it,” she said, “Sylvia has been acting strangely the last two or three weeks. The other day I saw her sitting in a sports car with Mortimer Jasper. They were parked downstairs. He’d evidently driven her to work and I…well, I just wondered at the time. They had their heads close together and were talking and—”

  “Just who is Mortimer Jasper?” I asked.

  “That depends on whom you ask.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Well, some people think he’s a sportsman, a man about town, a collector of unusual Oriental art, and some people think he’s…”

  “Go on,” I said. “Some people think he’s what?”

  “Well, sort of a fence.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “He has a place, a little shop of sorts, down in the business district, but I don’t know what his home address is. I guess you can find him in the phone book.”

  “Did you tell the police anything about trying to attract your husband’s attention and holding the blowgun out the window and calling to him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  “All right,” I told her. “That’s where you’ve put your neck in a noose. Now t
hen, I want you to think pretty carefully. After I left, you went to the bathroom.…Did Sylvia go to the bathroom?”

  “Heavens, I don’t know, Donald. Everyone has to some time. We were here alone painting and… Yes, that’s right. Wait a minute, she did.”

  “And the blowgun was in the bathroom?”

  “Yes. I stood it right there in the corner.”

  “How long was she in the bathroom?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t time her. I went on with my painting and…to tell you the truth I was completely absorbed in what I was doing and didn’t pay much attention to what happened, but I do remember she went to the bathroom because I was trying to get just the effect I wanted on the painting and I was having a little trouble with it. I wished she was back there on the modeling stand so I could see just the way the light was coming in. I remember that much very distinctly.”

  “When the police come back,” I told her, “tell them that you’re simply not able to answer any more questions today.

  “Now then, get out of that dress and put on something quiet, conservative and indicative of sorrow.”

  “I don’t feel any sorrow.”

  “Yes, you do,” I told her, “and you’re going to be sure the world knows how you feel. Your husband was not particularly close to you. He was a very strange character. He was always aloof. You never seemed to get to know him, but you respected him and you admired him from a distance. You put him on a pedestal.

  “Unfortunately, he didn’t care for women. He was so preoccupied with his explorations that he didn’t pay much attention to sex life and you drifted apart physically. You’re sorry things had to be that way, but that’s the way they were. You do miss him tremendously and of course you’re terribly sorry he was murdered. You certainly hope the police are able to find his murderer. You have hired detectives to help dig out clues for the police. And mind you get that straight, you haven’t hired detectives to help the police solve the murder; that wouldn’t be smart; you have only hired detectives to help unearth clues which will be turned over to the police so they can solve the crime.

  “Now then, here’s something I want you to do.”

  “What?”

  I said, “Give me a sheet of paper.”

  She opened a drawer and tore a sheet of paper from a sketchbook.

  I took my pen and wrote on it, “I hereby authorize and empower the firm of Cool & Lam to try to locate and take possession of the carved jade Buddhas which were stolen from my husband’s collection in the penthouse.”