The Case of the Solid Key

by Anthony Boucher

  “Less the essential ten per cent, it should come to twenty-seven hundred dollars.”

  “Does a Watson get a cut?”

  Fergus started the car. “Look, Norm. I wasn’t kidding. If you’ve got nothing better on your hands while you’re waiting to hear from G. G. and Carruthers, I’d be damned glad if you would sort of stooge for me.”

  “What are the duties?”

  “Hang around, listen to me talk, point out flaws (notice my modesty), ask questions …”

  “Questions like maybe what is a private detective doing in the Carruthers Little Theater?”

  “That’s starting out right. Cultivate curiosity; that’s the biggest help as ever was in cracking a case. If anything seems odd or irrelevant—any goddamned thing at all—find out about it. Like for instance tonight at the party—”

  “What party?”

  “Didn’t you know? Hilary Vane’s throwing a shindig of sorts in his garret. You come along and help me keep an eye open. And stay curious.”

  “I’m still curious about what you’re doing in this galley.”

  Fergus took a last puff at Jackson’s cigar and squashed it in the dashboard tray. “I’d like to know,” he said softly, “what a lot of people are doing in this galley. Including Detective Lieutenant Andy Jackson. I know Andy pretty well—worked on several cases with him—and I know he’s one of the smartest men on the force. And if he’s investigating Carruthers too, it means the state of Denmark is positively aromatic compared to that theater.”

  “I know what you mean. I’ve had the damnedest feeling myself of something hanging fire and getting all set to explode under our feet. But where do you come in?”

  “Me? I’m investigating Carruthers for Warren F. Dayton. Remember the lush and luscious Carol? Her papa’s one of the biggest brokers in this man’s town. And he doesn’t like the idea of his pride and joy becoming what she fondly thinks is an actress. So he hired me to take a gander at the place and find whatever I could to prove even to her that she’s being taken by a racket.”

  “And is she? Remember I’m more than a Watson; I’m an interested party.”

  “Answer: she is. And I think by now I’ve got just about enough evidence to satisfy Dayton. I’ve discovered that Carruthers’ fees vary according to what he thinks he can get out of a person; that the ‘talent scouts’ he points out in the audience are usually personal friends of his with no connection with the studios; that Paul Jackson, who’s supposed to be his greatest pupil, never heard of him; that the contracts he draws up, just in case anybody should get spotted, demand unheard-of percentages; that he rejects or accepts both plays and actors not on any ground of merit but on what he can chisel out of them—”

  “Nice guy,” said Norman dazedly. “But look. He said I wasn’t to pay anything.”

  “The old come-on. Wait till you settle down to discuss terms. Here’s a little case in point: Kingsley Bennett—nice guy—used to work on a newspaper copy desk. Hadn’t worked steady in years—picked up odd jobs now and then on screwball sheets around town. Turned out a play, satire on California political movements. Not brilliant maybe, but not bad; pretty good stuff in it. Carruthers gets hold of him, talks him into how it’ll be the hit of the century. Bennett sits home writing and rewriting on the damned thing and shelling out to Carruthers for advance production expenses regularly like a gong. He works so hard on the play that he doesn’t even pick up odd jobs any more, and things start happening to his savings account. Carruthers caught on to the idea that he was broke and told him that the political situation had changed so much it would be impossible to do the play. By that time he’d paid our Rupert over five hundred dollars, and not one step had been taken toward the production. He was living in the shabbiest hole-in-the-wall you ever saw, and he took his last cash on earth to rent a housekeeping apartment.”

  “Why that?”

  “Because it had a gas oven. He used it two weeks ago.” Fergus drove on in silence.

  They were passing through Griffith Park and into the expensive residential district beyond. “Where are we going?” Norman asked.

  “If the volcano’s due to erupt, we ought to snatch a little peace and quiet while we can. We’re going to call on Lewis Jordan.”

  When Norman looked back later on that afternoon, he saw it as the one moment of serenity in that terrible week. Other scenes, even the times when he was alone with Sarah, were taut and tense. This was a time when a man might relax, stretch out the legs of his spirit, and breathe deep of quietude.

  You felt something of this when you saw the little house, set back off the road in the mountains behind the rich homes, the little house designed and built by Jordan himself and basking in the hot sun with the compact relaxation of a cat. There was a literal cat too (named Nansen after Jordan’s great colleague), who greeted them with the politeness of complete indifference.

  And you knew the full depth of this unpretentious ease when Jordan welcomed you and made tea and talked. You didn’t remember the talk so much, though it was good—talk of why a man can live on meat alone in Baffin Land (provided he remembers to eat the fat with the lean), talk of Jordan’s work in the Ukrainian famine and in the repatriation of the Armenians, talk of the Oklahoma Indians, of Norman’s victorious one-act play, of Fergus’ eminent basketball career, and of the absurd contretemps in Pershing Square two weeks before, when Jordan had succumbed to his famous temper and laid out with one good left the pudgy man with a Legion button who had called him a fifth-column pacifist.

  All this was interesting (your own play, to your surprise, least so of all), but it was the embroidery. What you remembered was the essential stuff—the purring cat, the strong hot tea, the kindly vigor of Jordan’s voice, the trim shipshape room with its many books and its surprising display of masculine neatness, the bright-budded pepper plant on the window sill, and the wealth of sun flooding the room and the contented beings in it.

  Happiness is assuredly desirable, ecstasy perhaps more debatably so; but contentment, the purest and rarest of the three, is beyond price.

  “Good for our immortal souls,” said Fergus as they drove away. “We’ve come up for air; now we can plunge back into the Carruthers stench. And the damnedest thing is that Jordan is messed up with that stench and doesn’t even realize it.”

  “You mean the insurance?”

  “I do. And I’m worried.”

  “How did you learn about that? Is your interest there professional?”

  “In a way it is. I’ll tell you. Dan Rafetti’s a good friend of mine, and he’s an investigator for the Southwest National. He tangled with a gang of fur thieves last week and wound up in the hospital—bullet in his shoulder. So while he’s laid up, he’s asked me to keep an eye on Lewis Jordan. Unofficial-like—professional courtesy.”

  Norman’s sense of contentment was fading rapidly. “Do you think—is Jordan in any danger?”

  “When he’s worth fifty grand to Rupert Carruthers? What,” asked Fergus, “do you think?”

  Chapter 5

  “This is an unbirthday party,” Hilary Vane had fluted in greeting. “So far as I know, not one of my guests was born even remotely near this date; so when could be a better time for a party?”

  This was a mildly amusing remark when you first heard it; but when it had been repeated to each new arrival with the same hand flourish and head toss, it began to lose much of its charm.

  The party was not, in fact, remarkable for its charm, Norman had decided by eleven o’clock. He had come partly because there was a good chance that Sarah might be there and they two might straighten out the exasperating business of last night’s stand-up, and partly because he was curious to see more of this assortment of people who were the Carruthers Little Theater. An author should know the group that may do his play. And a Watson should know the group which he may help to investigate.

  Not that anything about the party so far had provided the least bolstering for Fergus’ suspicions or for his own earli
er sensation of the rumbling volcano. It was just a party, as informal and inconsequential as the place in which it was held, the ill-lit garret over a garage which was Hilary Vane’s home. There was nothing to do but drink; and since the liquor provided was a revoltingly sweet sherry, Norman did very little even of that.

  If Sarah had come, the evening might have been bearable. But there was no sign of her, and boredom descended on Norman like a thug’s noose. He slewed about in his chair to peer at the bookcase beside him, but the light (provided by one dim bulb and a few candles in tallow-dripped bottles) was such that there was no hope of reading anything beyond the titles of what appeared to be a first-rate collection on theater arts. He rose, glass in hand (even occasionally driven to the desperate deed of sipping its brown sirup), and began wandering from group to group.

  The first pair he encountered consisted of the host, expounding his views on the theater with fluent eagerness, and Fran Owen, listening soddenly and reaching occasionally for the decanter beside her.

  “The essence of the Theater,” Hilary was saying, “is and remains theatricality. Sometime around the great Griffith days there sprang up the idea that the screen is the ideal and true medium for color and action; but what the cinema actually excels in is detailed naturalism—genre work—study of middle-class milieu. What is drab naturalism on the stage can become selective and significant on the screen. The film is, in fact, so completely realistic a medium that the stage must now place more emphasis than ever on its non-realistic—one might almost say, not sur-, but superrealistic qualities.”

  Fran gulped and nodded. “The essence of the essence is the essence,” she observed profoundly.

  “Exactly. And therefore our efforts as torch-bearers—no, George Kelly ruined that word forever—as part and parcel of the great theatrical tradition must be …”

  Norman wandered on. On a couch in the darkest corner sat the heroic Hardy Evans and the pneumatic Carol Dayton. Sat is not quite the word; this was something between sitting and reclining, something perhaps like the posture of an antique Roman at a banquet. In this corner was silence, broken only by little gasps from Carol, half giggle, half groan.

  Norman had nothing of the voyeur in his make-up. He turned away quickly, finished his glass, and quietly damned whatever was keeping Sarah from the party.

  The third couple group, that of Fergus and Betsy, was a pleasant one. It was neither so abstractedly talkative as the Hilary-Fran pair nor so preoccupiedly carnal as Hardy and Carol. Betsy seemed to be perched on the young Irishman’s lap more from a shortage of furniture than out of amorous willfulness; but once there, she looked prepared to enjoy her position. Their hands were twined lightly and pleasingly, and their voices chatted with that ease which comes only when you would not be afraid of silence.

  Betsy was the first to notice Norman in his wanderings. “Hello, Mr. Harker. Are you having a good time?”

  “You should feed me my cue better. You look at your drink and you ask me, ‘What are you having?’ And then I say, in the immortal words of George Kaufman, ‘Not very much fun.’”

  Betsy giggled and then frowned. “But I haven’t got a drink on account of I don’t drink and it saves a lot of trouble because they wouldn’t sell it to me in bars anyway ’cause look how young I am but still it makes trouble anyway because when I ask for milk they usually almost always don’t have any so I guess really whatever you do it isn’t simple ever, is it? But I’m sorry you’re not having any fun, Mr. Harker.”

  “Matter, Norm?” Fergus asked. “Isn’t this your hopeful idea of a Hollywood party? I swear to you, if you’re making marks in your mental notebook, this is as typical as they come. People drink bad wine and talk and neck and seethe.”

  “Seethe is a silly word,” said Betsy. “Every time I say it only I don’t much because it isn’t really a word you have much use for but when I do say it I always feel like I was talking baby talk and I’m really not the type to because I’m too young.”

  Norman squatted on the floor at their feet. “And why should people seethe, aside from what we might laughingly term the sherry?”

  “Why? Well, for one thing …” He jerked a thumb at the dark couch. “Hardy had other interests, you know, before Carol started her Blitzkrieg.”

  Norman followed Fergus’ eyes to the sodden Fran Owen. So that was how she had sought to forget this black beast which gnawed at her. He broke off his musing to listen to Betsy.

  “It’s funny the way words change, isn’t it? When I was a little girl only of course I don’t mean I’m grown up now ’cause I’m not but I mean when I was really little that used to mean something you sat in to take a bath and now just think of the awful things it means.”

  “That, my sweeting,” said Fergus, “is a profound problem in semantics. I suggest you send it to Stuart Chase and worry the pants off him.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to worry people. I never do excepting you and that’s just because you’re sweet and a girl has to worry somebody I guess like yesterday about Mr. Carruthers only that came out all right, so there.”

  “Oh that,” said Norman. “I’d been wondering. How did you get out of your dilemma?”

  “That nice Mr. Jordan came in while I was talking to Mr. Carruthers and he said would I wait outside because he had some important business so I waited outside and then when he went out he told me to go on in and so I went in and then Mr. Carruthers told me not to worry on account of everything was going to be all right.”

  “By the bones of Saint Kevin,” said Fergus, “it’s a miracle and nothing else.”

  “Is it?”

  Norman looked up to see Mark Andrews. The candle near them made a high light on the stage manager’s high forehead, and his tired lean face loomed over them like an El Greco. Norman lifted his empty glass in greeting, and Andrews nodded.

  “Can I join the happy throng? I’m tired of sitting in a corner listening to Hilary on the Theater and watching the Dayton on Life.”

  “Sure,” said Fergus cordially. “We’ll make our own party, that’s what we’ll do. And what do you think of this sudden heart of gold in the great Rupert?”

  “I think,” said Mark Andrews, “that it’s a very unsudden heart of gold in the great Lewis. I talked with him about it.”

  Betsy said, “Ooooo! Tell me. Because he didn’t say anything to me, he just told me to go in now and I didn’t even know if he did anything or if it just happened or what.”

  “Nothing about Rupert Carruthers,” said Andrews, “just happens. What did take place—maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but how’s chances on your keeping quiet about it?”

  Betsy crossed her heart and hoped to die.

  “All right. Jordan told Carruthers he’d assume full responsibility for your payments until you’re ready to take them up again yourself. He even handed Carruthers a couple of bills and told him to tell you that through some mix-up in accounting you had a small refund coming to you.”

  “But,” Betsy protested, “I didn’t, at least I don’t think so. And he never told me any such thing.”

  “Rupert Carruthers,” said Fergus, “reminds me of a migratory bird. Always going south.”

  Mark Andrews surveyed Fergus intently for a moment. “O’Breen,” he said at last, “you’ve always been damned eager to find out what you can about Carruthers. I don’t know if it’s the pure curiosity of an honest Irish gossip or if it’s something else. And just in case it is something else, here’s another tidbit for you.”

  “Go on,” said Fergus noncommittally.

  “Carruthers had a proposition to make to Betsy. No,” he added hastily as Fergus’s blue-green eyes began to blaze, “not what that sounds like. I’ve never known Carruthers to make a pass at a woman. There is,” he admitted with reluctant admiration, “a certain quality of single-mindedness about him. But the idea was this: Betsy could stay on if she’d sign a new agreement—pay nothing immediately, but consent to a ten per cent raise in her fees and give him the right
to garnishee her wages as soon as she’d landed a job and take every cent—including interest at the legal maximum.”

  “Oh I knew about that,” said Betsy. “I mean I knew he said I wouldn’t have to pay anything now if I signed a paper and then I could pay him later only I wasn’t worrying about the terms on account of I don’t understand those things so of course I was going to sign it because Mr. Carruthers must be all right mustn’t he? or he wouldn’t be running a theater, would he?”

  “The bastard,” said Fergus between tight-set teeth.

  “And who,” asked Hilary Vale lightly, “is talking about Rupert Carruthers?”

  Fergus looked up at his host. “You recognize the description?”

  Hilary was carrying the decanter and began filling people’s glasses as he spoke. “I have heard it used before,” he admitted.

  “And you agree?”

  “Are we letting down our back hair? Even our strong and silent stage manager?” He turned to the girl behind him. “Well, Fran, do we agree?”

  “There are,” Fran stated judiciously, “bastards and bastards.” She raised her glass in a shaky hand. “Ladies and gemman, I give you Rupert Carruthers—the bastard with knobs on.”

  Betsy said, “What does that mean?”

  “Fran,” Hilary explained, “chooses to honor Mr. Carruthers with an idiom culled from the lower reaches of the tongue of that nation from which he claims to stem—that tight little, right little island in which he was director of the Theater Imperial. Exactly as he was the coach and adviser of that brilliant young juvenile, Paul Jackson.”

  Fergus quirked a red eyebrow. “You know that too?”

  “I knew Paul slightly at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. He went direct from there to Metropolis. And he never mentioned Rupert Carruthers’ role as Svengali in his young life.”

  “But what I can’t see,” Norman objected, “is why you all stick to the Carruthers Little Theater if that’s the way you feel about it. Why not walk out in a body and the hell with Rupert, knobs and all?”