by Roy Huggins
Freddie was trying out my last bottle of Canadian whisky. He saw me, looked only faintly surprised, and said, “Not the kind of liquor you expect to find consorting with folding beds and gas beaters.
I said, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I certainly did,” he chirped, and raised the glass and peered at it.
“How long have you been here,” I asked, “and what do you know about the treasure hunt that’s being run through here?”
Ho brought his eyes back to mine. They weren’t bleary, but they didn’t focus readily.
He took a polite sip at the drink and said, “I’ve changed my mind about you, Bailey. I’ve been talking to your gravel-pussed friend, Quint. He tells me you think you’re obligated to act like a hard guy, and that you almost never kill anyone.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Then there was another reason,” he went on amiably. “One that you might be interested in.”
“Why should I be interested?”
He walked past me into the living room, looked the place over, and said, “My ex-stepmother told me you were working on the case.” He pushed a pair of pants down to the other end of the davenport and sat down.
“All right.”
He smiled suavely and took another drink. He was having the time of his life. “I had dinner at Chasen’s late last night. Friend Greg Crukston and the widow of my late father were enjoying an intimate tête-à-tête in one of the dimmer corners of the place.”
I said, “Incidentally, how long have you been here?”
He put his glass down and looked dignified. I wondered if he was drunk and trying to act sober, or sober and trying to act drunk. “I went to your office,” he said ponderously. “You weren’t there, so I called Quint, got your address and came up here. I’ve been here about one half hour, and I got in through that door.” He pointed at it. “It was open and unlocked. Naturally, if it’s open, it’s unlocked.”
“And you came up to tell me about fleeing Crukston and Mrs. Trist together. Didn’t you over see them out together before?”
“No.”
“You didn’t start hunting bluebirds after you got up here?”
“Never! Don’t believe in bluebirds.” His voice broke a little. He sounded very sad.
“Why shouldn’t she and Crukston get together? He’s pretty well tied up with most of your father’s property, isn’t he?”
He leered knowingly, nodded, and finished his drink.
“You can say that again and again and again,” he said.
“Are you trying to tell me something or just being entertaining?”
He stood up. “Let’s go see Crukston and find out.”
“Let’s clean house first.” Freddie helped me clean house, then I took him down to the corner drugstore, got Crukston’s address and left him there with a cup of coffee, drawing maps on the napkins.
Crukston was home, and he didn’t seem unhappy to see me. He showed me out onto his sun deck on the eighth floor of the Wilshire Tower. He waved me into a blue-cushioned beach chair, stretched out in another across from me and smiled.
“Glad you came by,” he said in a brisk, easy, untroubled tone. “I was going to call on you later in the day myself.” He was dressed in a blue silk robe and he sounded like someone with all the cares of a man of simple appetites and an irrefutable answer to the problem of evil.
“Sorry to see you so broken up,” I said. “Maybe I ought to come back some other time.”
He gave me a watery smile and said, “Like all people who think they’re tough, you’re actually a sniveling sentimentalist. I liked Trist, but I don’t feel a compulsion to shed any tears for him.”
“You say you were going to call on me. Who told you I wasn’t in the clink?”
He laughed now. It was a nice full laugh, as practiced as a debutante’s walk. “I knew Trist had hired you. I gave you credit for being able to prove it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like some coffee?”
I nodded, and he padded into his apartment. He didn’t come back for ten minutes, but it was worth it. The coffee was fine.
“You’re supposed to ask me,” Crukston said, “why I was planning to see you.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to get around to that.”
“I wanted to find out how much of my own private affairs I might have to tell the police.”
“Depending on what?”
“On how much Trist told you, and how much of that you passed on to the police.”
I didn’t say anything. Since Trist had told me exactly nothing, that seemed like the best idea at the time.
After a while, Crukston leered and said, “How I hate the strong silent type.”
I grinned. “I like to talk. But why should I let you in on what Trist told me?”
“Because I know what Trist told you.”
“Fine. Let’s move on to the next topic.”
He hunched his shoulders, and his dark neck seemed to grow darker still.
“I thought Trist decided not to hire you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because I proved that he was all wrong about Mildred and me.”
“I guess he didn’t believe you.” Crukston leaned back and put his feet up on a blue canvas hassock. He cocked his head at me and said, “I’m going to meet you more than halfway, Bailey. You see, I’ve got an idea Trist told you things when he first contacted you that he found out later were not true. Perhaps he never got the opportunity to tell you.”
“Could be.”
Crukston sat for a while longer, then stood up abruptly and went into the apartment. He was back again in about two minutes. There was someone with him. She was wearing lounging pajamas that clung to her. Her hair was long and loose and red—a red that nature could never have achieved, and would never want to. She was smiling a little inanely, like a bride at her first breakfast. But everything else about her said that she had breakfasted before.
Crukston beamed and said, “Mr. Bailey, Mrs. Greg Crukston.”
I said, “How do you do?”
She nodded ever so vaguely, and sat down.
Crukston said, “Better known as Miss Rita Rogell,” and his voice had a question in it, as if the name was supposed to have meant something to me.
Crukston poured her some coffee, and pretty soon we were all seated and Crukston was saying, “This is in the strictest confidence, Bailey—this matter of our marriage. Rita’s studio wants it hushed for a while.”
“It’ll be a struggle,” I whispered, “but I’ll try not to let it out.”
“Trist knew, of course. I had to tell him when I found that he was imagining things about Mildred and me. That was the afternoon before he died.”
“Maybe the studio had him killed,” I said, “He knew too much.”
Rita Rogell thought that was real funny.
Crukston said, “Why didn’t he cancel your services? He said he was going to.”
“Maybe he had something else in mind.”
Crukston had been half smiling. The smile froze. “You cultivate the mysterious mood,” he purred. “That could be almost a dangerous habit.”
I grinned. “It seems to make you nervous. When you get nervous you talk.”
He glanced at Rita Rogell and his face flushed.
I said, “Any idea who killed him?”
He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and said, “Maybe,” through the thin blue smoke that came up from his lungs. “But I’d rather not discuss the subject in front of Rita or so early in the morning.”
I looked at Crukston. His tanned face was getting a little gray, and his eyes were cloudy. There wasn’t anything more for me there, except maybe a knife in the back.
I stood up and said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and started out.
Rita said, “Do you have to go?”
Crukston said nothing.
I found my way out without any help. No one thr
ew any knives at me. As I closed the apartment door I heard a faint, high-pitched voice saying, “What’s the matter, lunkin?”
I WENT away with an idea—a bit frail, a little contradictory, but an idea. And this was a case in which a wraith of nothing would make fine company. The idea was that Crukston was afraid that Trist might have been on to something more than whether or not Crukston was making a play for his wife. And he was afraid now that Trist might have passed that information on to me.
I had some hash and eggs in the lunchroom over in the Hart Building and then went on up to the office. I called the Federal Building and asked for Jack Sawyer. I had done Jack a favor not long ago, and he was just across the street from the Hall of Records.
When he came on the phone, I asked if he had fifteen minutes, and he said, “All the time in the world.”
“Fine. Over in the Hall of Records they have lists of properties by owner.
I want you to get me the address of the business property owned by Gordon Trist. It may show joint ownership with a Greg Crukston.”
“Do they let just anybody at those records?”
“Yeah—even Federal employees.”
“Okay, Stu. Spell those names.”
I spelled them and we hung up. I spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up the office and talking to Hazel. Then Jack called back and gave me nine addresses. I wrote them on an envelope. Most of them were out on Sunset strip, and one of them was in the same block with one of the biggest bookie offices in the county.
I decided to go out and pick a horse or two and see what was new with the ponies. I parked three doors down from the place, but I didn’t go in. I didn’t go in, because the address of the bookie office was the same as the address on the envelope. I went back to the car and drove out Sunset past two more of the Crukston-Trist properties. One of them was a two-story building advertising Exclusive Portraiture, but it didn’t seem to be open for business. The other was a used-car lot with a low bungalow office—a much larger office than a tot that size would need. I had been past that lot before. There was a funny thing about it. In the daytime there were very few cars on display. At night the lot was packed with the latest models. That’s life, growing ever more complex, even for the leisure class.
I drove back to the office wondering how much Crukston had made that he hadn’t told Trist about. I was only guessing, but it seemed a simple picture: Crukston’s books would show normal rentals for all the properties being used for the higher pleasures, and the extra dividends he would pocket for himself. Neat, if your partner doesn’t get around much. Unpleasant, if he finds out about it. Particularly unpleasant if the boys who are renting from you find out you’re playing both ends against the middle.
I had checked on Trist before I went out to see him. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t play landlord to a county syndicate.
But I was only guessing, so it was time to call on Crukston again. Back at the office I picked up the phone book and looked under the C’s. No phone listed for Greg Crukston. I called information and she told me in a knife-edge voice that was as polite as you can get and still be insulting, that the number was unlisted. That was Mr. Crukston, trying hard to be one of the Hollywood folk. I called Mrs. Gordon Trist and asked her for Crukston’s number. She told me she had just tried to call Crukston herself and no one answered. That was frank of her, so I didn’t ask what she was calling him about. I asked for Sara Franzen’s number instead.
She gave it to me and said, “I thought you’d be getting around to that.”
I got around to it right away. Sara’s voice was even warmer and huskier over the phone.
I said, “This is Stuart Bailey. Name was Tate when you met me.”
“Hello, killer,” she drawled. “I beard you were out of the bastille. Did you shoot your way out?”
“I promised not to do it again.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “It isn’t really very funny, though, is it?”
“Not even slightly. But no one seems to want to weep about it—not when I’m around, anyway.”
“Which shows what a bad detective you are. I’m all cried out. And I think you’ll find that Freddie, in his own quaint way, is a bit broken up inside.”
“And the widow?”
“I haven’t seen her.”
“You’ve seen Freddie, then?”
“No. I haven’t seen anyone.”
I decided to let that one pass for the time being. “It’s time you did,” I said, “and you might be able to help me on something.”
“Fine. On the way over, you can be thinking about where to take me for dinner. It’s four-three-four N. Maysfield. I live in what is optimistically mown as the penthouse. Take the elevator to the sixth floor, turn right, and he stairs take you right to my door.”
“Be there in ten minutes.”
A stout lady and her poodle were coming out as I came up the steps, so I didn’t have to use the alcove phone. I took the self-help elevator to six and got out. I turned right and noticed that the hall turned again in just a few feet.
I made the turn and then stopped abruptly and ducked back. But it was too late. Something came down across my head and set up a chain reaction that carried right on through the floor, I dropped into a great well of darkness into greater darkness beyond.
It may have been two or twenty minutes later that I began the long hard climb that brought me back to where I found myself stretched out in the gray dimness of the corridor. I was all alone. I stood up and took an inventory. Nothing missing from wallet, nothing missing from pockets—not even my favorite clue, the ten-cent ash tray.
Then I saw something that made me feel worse than the shillelagh had. The little corridor that I had started to turn into led to the stairs, but they didn’t go up, they went down. I hadn’t forgotten. Sara Franzen had said, “Turn right.”
I went back to the elevator and on down the hall. About eight feet down, there were stairs, going up. I went on up and knocked at Sara Franzen’s door.
She wasn’t dressed for the street, and she was giving me the kind of smile that goes with not being dressed for the street. But I must have been mistaken, because she had company—Mrs. Gordon Trist.
Sara Franzen nodded me in and said, “I thought you’d probably changed your mind.”
I looked at Mrs. Trist and said, “I’m the inquisitive type. Would you mind telling me how long you’ve been here?”
She looked faintly surprised and a little irritated. But she smiled and said, “Not at all. Just a few minutes; perhaps ten.”
Sara Franzen said, “Stop talking like a policeman and let me get you a drink. You look horrible. You’re not one of those dissipated detectives, are you?” She went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
She came back with three old-fashioneds that had a dark and earnest look about them. I waited until we were all settled and ready for tome Eight conversation. Then I said, “You gave me the wrong turn. The stairs are to the left. I went right and somebody hit me with one of the crossbeams.”
Sara Franzen cocked her head at me skeptically and said, “I’m always getting that turn wrong, but you’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“Not even a little bit. But nothing’s missing. Maybe it was a tenant waiting for her husband.”
Mrs. Trist and Sara Franzen looked at each other for a moment, and Mrs. Trist took on a look of worried concern and said, “You’ve uncovered something, haven’t you? Someone was trying to kill you!”
“If I’ve discovered anything, I don’t know about it.”
“Mr. Bailey, I can’t keep you from doing what you want to do, but as far as I’m concerned, you’ve more than earned the money Gordon gave you. I want you to understand that.”
I nodded.
She finished her drink and stood up. She looked at me as if she had more to say, then sighed gently and said, “I’ll leave you two to talk.”
Sara Franzen showed her to the door. She came back and said, “
I thought you were putting on some kind of act for Mildred. Did it really happen like you said?”
“Yeah.”
“I guessed as much.”
“You gave me the wrong turn.”
“Mildred lied to you. She had been here closer to fifteen minutes.”
“So what? Why would she have come up here? She could have had her fun with my head and gone her gruesome way. The fact that she was sitting here makes her look innocent, not guilty.”
“Now I know you’re no detective. You say you were hit in the little corridor leading to the stairs. What if she had been there waiting for you, expecting to sneak up on you when you turned left? Then you come her way and she lets you have it. She looks for whatever it is she thinks you have, and then hours someone coming up the stairs.” She paused and asked, “Was the elevator still on the sixth floor when you came to?”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right. No elevator, someone coming up the stairs, so she does the natural thing—pays me a visit.”
I nodded. “And the people coming up the stairs just step over me and go on their way.”
“Don’t be silly. Maybe she heard someone coming out of an apartment on five and just thought they were on the stairs. Don’t make me do all your thinking for you.”
I took the ash tray out of my pocket, put it on the end table beside me and thought what nice slim hips Sara Franzen had.
She came back with two more drinks, handed me one and sat down again. She looked at me sourly and said, “Where are you taking me to dinner?”
“El Lobo’s are usually out of everything, but they carry my brand of cigar. How about there?”
“That sounds cozy,” she said. “Why are you working on this thing? You’re in the clear, aren’t you?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe I like having my head pulped up. I tell myself it’s because I owe it to somebody, either to Gordon Trist or whoever he left behind who might care who killed him.” I knocked an ash into my tray, and when I looked up, Sara Franzen was staring at me with a blank fascination.
