Meet Me at the Morgue (13 page)

“You must have seen his car, Miss Trenton. Think about it, now.”

She screwed up her eyes and mouth in concentration: the wrinkled face was like a little girl’s, cartooned by time. “It was a big car, I noticed that, blue in color, I believe.”

“What year?”

“Well, it wasn’t new. It still looked pretty good.”

“Would you know a Chrysler?”

“No,” she said. “I never did know the different makes of cars. It was some kind of sedan, I remember that.”

“Take your time now, Miss Trenton. See if you can dredge up any more facts about Kerry.”

“Is he a kidnapper?”

“Very likely,” I said, though I doubted it. More likely Kerry had been underground since February. “You sit and see what you can remember. There’s something in my car I want to show you.”

On the way back in through the hallway with my briefcase, I found that I didn’t want to enter the living-room again. Its air, laden with faint mustiness and fainter spice, was like an Egyptian tomb where a little life stirred horribly under the windings. I went in anyway. Miss Trenton was rocking placidly. There was something black and oblong in her lap.

“I remembered
something
, Mr. Cross. She did leave something behind her after all. Don’t you consider I have a right to it, with her owing me rent?”

“It depends on what it is.”

She hefted the black object in her hands. “This camera. She left it in the linen closet, but it’s possible it wasn’t hers. I remember one day her friend Kerry was taking pictures of her in the driveway. She was in one of those strapless bathing-suits, on a Sunday. Soon as I saw what was going on
in my driveway, I ordered them inside, I can tell you.”

I took the camera out of its case. It was worn but fairly good, worth perhaps a hundred dollars new. What interested me most about it was the legend stamped on the case in small gold letters: U.S.S.
Eureka Bay
. The camera itself bore a U.S. Navy serial number.

“This looks like Government property, Miss Trenton.”

“I didn’t mean to keep it,” she said quickly. “What was I to do with it? Molly left it behind her, I didn’t know where she went. I thought I’d just hold on to it until somebody came to claim it. That’s perfectly legitimate—”

“Did Molly have a friend named Fred? Fred Miner?”

“I don’t recollect the name.” Her hands were covertly wiping themselves on her skirt, as if to remove all traces of the camera. “You’ve asked me so many questions, my brain’s in a whirl.”

“Fred is a heavily built man in his thirties, very broad in the shoulders. He has a stiff back. It was broken in the war. He wears old khaki uniforms most of the time. He has rather a large head with heavy features, big jaw and a thick nose, sandy hair cut short, gray eyes. Deep bass voice, Midwestern accent. Fred likes to use Navy slang.”

“Kerry did, too,” she said unexpectedly. “Kerry talked like a sailor. I wish I could remember some of the things he said—like calling the floor a deck, things like that.”

“What about Fred Miner?”

“There wasn’t anybody answering his description. That doesn’t say he wasn’t here. I had better things to do than check up on Molly Fawn, remember that. Anything I heard or saw, it was practically forced on me.”

“I understand that, Miss Trenton. It’s been very good of you to put up with all these questions. There’s one more thing I’d like you to do. I have some pictures here, pictures of a man which were taken after the man’s death. Are
you willing to look at them, for identification purposes?”

“I guess so,” she faltered, “if it’s important.”

I laid the photos of Miner’s victim one by one in her hands. She peered down at them through her spectacles.

“It’s Kerry,” she said, in a muffled voice. “I do believe it’s Kerry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I noticed the tattoo mark on his arm, that Sunday he was taking the pictures. But I don’t understand. You said he was one of the kidnappers. Is he dead?”

“He’s dead.”

“Then he isn’t one of the criminals you’re after?”

“Not any more. He was run over by a car.”

“Isn’t that a shame. And here I was thinking he might come back any day to claim his camera.”

“I’m going to have to take the camera with me.”

“You’re welcome
to
it.” She rose suddenly, brushing her skirt with her hands, and cried out angrily: “I don’t care for any souvenirs of
that
girl and her friends, thank you. It was good riddance of bad rubbish.”

I said: “Good night. Don’t bother to let me out.”

“Good night.”

She turned the radio up. Before I started my motor, I could hear the voices brawling and lamenting in her house.

CHAPTER
16
:
      
Juncal Place was high on a terraced
hill overlooking the Westwood campus. It was a dead-end street one block long, with houses on the higher side and a steep drop on the other. The eighth and last house was set far back on a sloping lawn that ended above the sidewalk in stone retaining-walls cut by concrete stairs. It
was a pseudo-Tudor mansion with dark oak facing, drooping eaves, and leaded panes in the second-story windows. Knocking on the grandiose oak front door, I felt a little like a character in
Macbeth
.

A colored maid in uniform opened the door and looked down at my briefcase with suspicion.

“Is Mr. Richards home?”

“I don’t know. What is it you want?”

“Tell him it’s about the burglary.”

“Are you from the police?”

“I’m connected with the police.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come in. I guess he’ll see you.”

She left me in a room with a heavily beamed ceiling and book-lined walls. Many of the books were beautifully bound, but they looked as if they had never been read. Someone had probably bought them all at once, stacked them in the cases because the room required them, and then forgotten them.

A round-faced white-haired man in a dinner jacket darted in, leaning forward as if the floor were slanted to his disadvantage. He shook my hand vigorously. “Glad to meet you, sergeant, always glad to meet a member of your fine organization. Magnificent library I have here, eh? Cost me five thousand dollars for the books alone. Wish I had time to read them. That organ in the alcove cost three five. Sit down. Can I offer you a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’m not a detective, by the way. I’m a probation officer. The name is Cross.”

“I see,” he said uncomprehendingly. “I’m a great admirer of the work you boys are doing. Have a cigar?”

“No, thanks.”

He clipped a long pale-green cigar and thrust the end into his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said around it. “I have them specially made for me in Cuba.
Cost me four fifty a thousand. I smoke a thousand of them in two months. You’d think it would spoil my condition but it doesn’t. Matter of fact, I broke eighty today, for the eleventh time. Collected a little side-bet of two hundred dollars.”

“Good for you, Mr. Richards.”

The irony was lost on him. He beamed. “I’m no Bobby Jones. But I do make enough on my game to pay my club dues. The way it works out, I get all that fine exercise for nothing. Not to mention all the fine personal contacts.” He lit his cigar, smacking his lips as he puffed, and blinked at me through the smoke. “You came about the burglary, Leah said. You haven’t recovered the rest of our stuff?”

“I’m afraid not. I came on the chance that you could give me some information.”

“About the stuff?”

“About the burglar,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

He said: “The insurance company paid me off in full, you’ll be glad to know. An aggregate of fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. That included three hundred and forty dollars for the suit. They didn’t believe at first that I pay three forty for an ordinary suit. Showed ’em the tailor’s bill, and that convinced ’em. Brand-new suit, only had been cleaned once. Matter of fact, it’d just got back from the cleaner’s. It was hanging inside the service entrance. He must have just lifted it on the spur of the moment, when he was on his way out.”

“Did you see him?”

“I didn’t. Mabel did—my wife. Apparently she had quite a long conversation with him. How about that for gullibility—inviting him into our home and treating him like a king while he was stealing her gewgaws right under her nose.” He clucked derisively. “Why do you ask? Do you have another suspect for her to look over?”

“I have some pictures here.” I tapped my briefcase. “Can I speak to your wife?”

“Don’t see why not.” He opened his mouth to shout for her and then thought bettter of it, touching a bell-push in the wall instead. “Might as well get some use out of the servants,” he said. “Lord knows they cost me enough. That maid alone gets two hundred a month and her keep. They paid
me
less than that when I started with the company—”

I warded off biography with a question: “Did I understand you to say there was a suspect arrested?”

“They didn’t arrest him. He was the wrong man. Mabel may be gullible, but she does have an eye for faces. I’d trust her memory for faces any time. They didn’t even bring the police into it. No case.”

“Who asked your wife to look at him?”

“The insurance investigator. That was the day after they recovered the wristwatch. I had to pay back the money they gave me for the wristwatch. Two hundred dollars. It wasn’t one of her good ones. She keeps the ones with the diamonds locked up in the safe.”

I hadn’t often interviewed a more willing, or a more confusing witness. “So the insurance investigator recovered a wristwatch?” I said hopefully.

“That’s right. It turned up a couple of weeks ago in a pawnshop in East Los Angeles. They traced the man that pawned it: he’s a photographer out in Pacific Palisades.”

“A photographer.”

“Yeah. The burglar was a photographer, too, or claimed to be. But it wasn’t the same man. The one that pawned the wristwatch said he bought it from a customer. Apparently he was telling the truth. Mabel went out to his place in Pacific Palisades with the insurance man. She walked right into the shop and talked to the fellow, pretended to
be interested in getting her picture took. She got a bang out of that, Mabel’s still an actress at heart. Mabel was a very great actress at one time. I directed her myself in thirteen pictures.”

The maid appeared in the doorway. “You want me, Mr. Richards?”

“Ask Mrs. Richards to come out here—to join me in the library.”

I said when the maid had gone: “Is Mrs. Richards in good health? No heart condition or anything like that?”

“Mabel’s as strong as a horse.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“These pictures I have are pictures of a dead man.”

“He’s dead?”

“Not only that. He’s pretty badly smashed. I thought you should be warned.”

“Mabel can take it.”

“Take what, Jason?”

A woman had quietly entered the room behind us. She was slender and tall in a black evening-sheath. Her graying brunette head was small and handsome, set off by fine tanned shoulders.

“What can I take? What are you letting me in for now?” She was smiling.

“The officer here—Mr. Cross?—has some pictures of a dead body.”

“What on earth for, Mr. Cross?”

“I think it’s the man who burglarized your house.”

“He didn’t exactly
burglarize
—”

“No,” Richards said. “You invited him over and practically handed him the stuff on a silver platter. If it wasn’t for the insurance, I’d be out fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. No.” The adding machine in his head clicked, almost
audibly. “Twelve twenty, after they recovered the wristwatch for me.”

His wife laid a hand on his arm and regarded him with calm tolerance: “But you
did
have insurance, so you’re not out a penny. I admit I was taken in, though.”

“How did it happen, Mrs. Richards?”

“Oh, quite naturally. This very pleasant-voiced young man called me up one morning early in February.”

“It was January,” her husband said. “January the twelfth.”

“January, then. He said he was a photographer with some home magazine, and he’d heard about our house, how beautifully done it was, and would I mind if he came and took some pictures. I said certainly not. I’m a notorious sucker, and oh so very house-proud.”

“Naturally,” her husband said. “You’ve got a fine big house, why shouldn’t you be proud of it? It cost into six figures.…”

“Be quiet, Jason. He turned up later in the morning with his equipment. I showed him over the house, and he took his pictures, or pretended to. It never occurred to me to be suspicious, and I admit I was pretty careless leaving him alone in some of the rooms. Well, to make a long story short, he picked up everything loose and thanked me and bowed himself out. I even gave him a bottle of beer to drink.”

“Ale,” her husband said. “Bass Ale, imported from the old country.”

“At fabulous cost,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t mind Jason, Mr. Cross. He’s not really avaricious. He just expresses his feelings in money terms. How much am I worth, Jason?”

“To me, you mean?”

“To you.”

“One million dollars.”

“Piker,” she said, and pinched his cheek. “Does anybody bid a million one?”

He flushed. “Don’t say that. It isn’t ladylike.”

“I’m not a lady.” She turned to me, her smile fading. “I’m ready to see your pictures, Mr. Cross.”

I showed them to her, looking from them to her face. She had become very grave.

“Poor man. What happened to him?”

“He was run over. Do you recognize him?”

“I think it’s the chap, all right. I couldn’t swear to it.”

“You’re reasonably sure?”

“I think so. When was he killed?”

“Last February.”

She handed the pictures back and looked up at her husband. “You see. I told you the man in Pacific Palisades wasn’t the one. He is older and darker and heavier, an entirely different type.”

“I’d still like to talk to him,” I said. “Where is his shop, exactly?”

“I don’t recall the address. Let me see if I can describe it to you. You know the stoplight where Sunset Boulevard runs into the coast highway? It’s half a mile or so north of there, one of those slummy little buildings crowded between the highway and the beach.”