The Murder of Miranda

by Margaret Millar

  Aragon said, “Is there a phone booth around?”

  “At the south end of the corridor. But you can use the phone on my desk if it’s for a local call.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Oh. Well.” She looked slightly annoyed, as though she considered listening to other people’s talk a privilege that came with her territory.

  “I am going to call my wife,” Aragon said. “She works at a hospital in San Francisco and the call will be put through a switchboard. The operators all know my voice and are certain to monitor the conversation, so it won’t be very interesting.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “I wouldn’t want you to think you’re missing anything.”

  The switchboard operator at the hospital recognized his voice.

  “Dr. MacGregor’s on Ward C right now, Mr. Aragon. You want me to page her?”

  “Please.”

  “Hold on. Won’t take a minute.”

  The minute dragged out to three. He put in four more quarters, and as the last one clanked into its slot he heard Laurie’s voice.

  “Tom?”

  “Hi.”

  There was a silence, the kind there often was at the be­ginning of their calls, as if they were trying to bridge the distance between them and it seemed, for a time, impossi­ble.

  Then, “Laurie, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Business-type stuff only. I’m on duty.”

  “This is a business call.”

  “Really?”

  “You’ve just been appointed my special assistant in charge of regenerative processes.”

  “What’s the salary?”

  “It’s a purely honorary position.”

  “I figured it would be,” she said. “You’re a terrible tight­wad.”

  “Of course, if you’re not interested, there’s a roster of beautiful blondes whose qualifications I’ve been studying.”

  “Tell them to get lost. Now, what exactly do you mean by regenerative processes?”

  “I’ve been doing a rundown on rejuvenation clinics. Most of them operate outside the country because they use illegal drugs or unorthodox methods, shots of KH-3, mon­key and lamb embryo glands, hypnotherapy, plasmapher­esis, deep sleep, et cetera.”

  “So?”

  He hesitated. “I’d like you to find out if there’s one that uses goat glands.”

  “Goat glands? Now what have you got yourself into?”

  “The story’s kind of long and I’m running out of change. Will you do it?”

  “I guess so. How do you know such a place exists?”

  “Smedler’s wife heard about it at the country club. Do you think you can find out by tonight? I’ll be at the apart­ment from six—”

  There was a sudden click and the long-distance opera­tor’s voice: “Your time is up. Please deposit another twenty-five cents.”

  “All I’ve got is two dimes. Will you—?” She wouldn’t. The line went dead. He spoke into it anyway. “Hey Laurie, I forgot to tell you I love you.”

  The Admiral’s daughters came charging through the front door, pursued by the dust devils that were whirling down the road behind them.

  Neither wind nor sun had affected Cordelia’s face, which remained as sallow and somber as usual, but Juliet had turned pink from her forehead all the way down to the pearl choker that emphasized the neckline of her favorite thrift shop dress. Everything about her seemed to be in motion at the same time, as though one of the dust devils had caught her and

  infected her with frenzy. She shook her head and giggled and moved her arms around so that her bracelets kept jangling, clank, clank, clank. Cordelia didn’t have on as many

  bracelets but she wore a ruby and silver necklace, jade earrings, a pair of ruby-eyed owl pins, a diamond-studded pendant watch, a gold wristwatch and half a dozen rings.

  Cordelia gave her sister a kick on the ankle to calm her down and said to Ellen, “We are back. Notice anything different about us?”

  “Your mother was here,” Ellen said. “She left half an hour ago.”

  “You’re avoiding the subject. Besides, she never comes to this place anymore. She

  hates it.”

  “Considers it gross,” Juliet added. “Hoi polloi.”

  “You must notice something different about us. If you don’t, you’re not trying. Concentrate. Use your eyes.”

  “And ears. That’s a clue. Use your ears. Listen.”

  Ellen listened and heard clank, clank, clank, clank. “The bracelets? Has it anything to do with the bracelets?”

  “Not just the bracelets,” Cordelia said sharply. “Every­thing. We’ve changed our image.”

  “Cordelia read about it in a magazine.”

  “I thought about it before I ever read it in a magazine. That was merely the clincher, an article on How to Change Your Image in Twenty-Four Hours. So we went down to the bank this morning and took our jewelry out of the safe-deposit box and we’re going to wear it from now on, every­where we go, night and day, even in bed. We are sick of being plain.”

  “No more plain.”

  “You are looking at the new us.”

  “The new us.” Beneath the excitement there was a note of anxiety in Juliet’s voice. “In bed, Cordelia? My earrings hurt already and I’m not even lying down yet.”

  “Stop fussing. Nobody gets a new image for nothing.”

  “Well, I don’t see why it has to hurt. Are you sure the article specified in bed?”

  “It did.”

  “I’m going to hate that part. It’s fine for you, you sleep flat on your back like you’re on an operating table having your gall bladder out. But I’m a side sleeper.”

  “You’ll have to change. That’s what this is all about, change. You’re the new you now, so act like it.”

  The new Juliet nodded. The old Juliet simply decided to cheat. Instead of wearing the earrings at night, she would keep them on her bedside table so that in case of an earth­quake or fire she could put them on in a hurry. No one would be any the wiser, unless Cordelia got scared by a strange noise and came barging into her room in the mid­dle of the night. Anyway, the new Cordelia might not be scared of strange noises.

  Cordelia fingered the ruby and silver necklace. “You don’t recognize this, do you, Ellen? Ha, I knew you wouldn’t. You’re not a noticer the way I am.”

  “And I,” Juliet said. “I’m a noticer, too. In fact, I recog­nized it first. She wore it to the club’s open house at Christ­mas with a green dress. Red and green, it looked very Christmasy.”

  “Are you telling this, Juliet, or am I?”

  “You are, Cordelia.”

  “Then let me proceed. We went to an auction last week and saw this necklace with a matching bracelet that was to be sold as a set. I wanted both, but there’s a limit on my charge card so I bought the necklace and Juliet bought the bracelet.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ellen said. “ Who wore it at the Christ­mas open house?”

  “Mrs. Shaw,” Cordelia said.

  “She looked very Christmasy,” Juliet said.

  Ellen caught up with Aragon in the corridor. “Admiral Young’s daughters are here. They have some information which may or may not be accurate, but I think you should talk to them.”

  The two girls were half hidden behind the door of Ellen’s office like children ready to pop out and say boo when a grownup came along. Aragon smiled at them in a friendly way but they didn’t respond.

  “Why, it’s him,” Cordelia said. “The man who was star­ing at us this morning. Like in Singapore, that kind of stare.”

  “Singapore? I’m sure you’re mistaken.” But Juliet glanced nervously around the room as though planning an escape if one proved necessary. Cordelia was very fre�
�quently right. “Why, this is our very own club and we’re just as safe here as—”

  “Pops had two ensigns following us around Singapore, and what good did that do?”

  Juliet couldn’t remember the ensigns and had only the vaguest recollection of ever being in Singapore, let alone of what had actually happened. But she was too sensible to admit this to Cordelia, who would merely take it as addi­tional proof of Juliet’s inferiority.

  “Stop this nonsense, girls,” Ellen said briskly. “I want you to tell Mr. Aragon what you told me.”

  Cordelia came out from behind the door, her arms crossed on her chest in a defensive posture. “Why does he want to know?”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  “We are not talking to any lawyer unless our lawyer is also present. Everybody who watches television knows that.”

  “Oh, Cordelia,” Juliet said with a touch of sadness. “We don’t have a lawyer.”

  “We’ll get one immediately.”

  “Very well, you get one, but I refuse to pay for my half of him. He’ll be entirely on your charge card.”

  “Wait a minute,” Aragon said. “We should be able to settle this quite simply. You hire me and I’ll waive the fee for my services.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m free.”

  “Bull,” Cordelia said.

  “No bull.”

  “I never heard of a free lawyer.”

  “There aren’t many of us around. Business is good but the pay’s lousy.”

  “The arrangement seems rather loose, but it’s not costing us anything, so all right, you’re hired.”

  Aragon congratulated himself. Not every young lawyer could afford to acquire in a single day such clients as the Admiral’s daughters and little Frederic Quinn. If the trend continued, it would be very handy, probably downright necessary, to have a working wife.

  The girls had a whispered conference behind the door, punctuated by the clank of Juliet’s bracelets and the bron­chial wheeze she developed when she became excited. Then Cordelia approached Aragon, licking her thin pale lips.

  “No one could possibly connect us with Miranda Shaw’s disappearance. We didn’t get hold of her necklace and bracelet until a week ago when we spotted them at an auction. It wasn’t a regular auction, more of a small estate sale where the prices are set ahead of time. There’s this nice quiet young man who sells valuables other people want to get rid of for one reason or another.”

  “We think he’s a fence,” Juliet said.

  Cordelia silenced her sister with a jab in the ribs. “He seems to be a perfectly legitimate businessman who con­ducts auctions, the refined low-key kind. Most auctioneers are such screamers. Mr. Tannenbaum never raises his voice. Every now and then when we’re downtown we pop into his establishment to see what’s available.”

  “Sometimes we buy, sometimes we spy,” Juliet said.

  “We don’t actually spy, we just look around with our eyes wide open. I mean, you can never be sure, can you, Mr. Aragon?”

  Aragon agreed that you could never be sure, at the same time feeling a twinge of sympathy for the unfortunate Tan­nenbaum. It was not an enviable fate, being the target of the girls’ suspicions, the recipient of their pop-ins, the focus of their wide-opens. He hoped the occasional sale recom­pensed Tannenbaum to some degree.

  He said, “Was the jewelry expensive?”

  “It’s crude to ask the price of things,” Cordelia reminded him.

  “Yes. However—”

  “A mark of ill-breeding.”

  “Right. But I’d still like to know. It may be important.”

  Juliet let out an anxious little wheeze. “You hear that, Cordelia? He said—”

  “I heard him.”

  “We’ve never done anything the least bit important in our whole lives.”

  “Oh, we have so. We were born, weren’t we? And Mrs. Young’s often told us how much it changed her life. That’s important, changing someone’s life.”

  “She didn’t mean it nice.”

  “Important things aren’t necessarily nice.”

  “I still don’t see what harm would come from answering the man’s question about the jewelry.”

  “Mind your own business, sister.”

  “It’s half my business,” Juliet said. “The bracelet was put on my charge card. If I want to tell someone what’s on my own charge card, I can. It’s a free country.”

  “You shut up.”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars. So there, ha ha! Fifteen hun­dred dollars.”

  Tannenbaum’s place of business was on Estero Street in the lower part of the city. Two blocks to the east was the barrio where Aragon had been born and raised and gone to schools where English was in reality, if not in theory, a second language. The barrio was gradually filling up with the debris of poverty: pieces of abandoned cars, tires and doors and twisted bumpers, broken wine jugs and baby strollers, fallen branches of half-dead trees, disemboweled sofas and dismembered chairs.

  Estero Street, at one time almost part of the barrio, had been salvaged by a downtown rehabilitation plan. Its two- and three-story redwood houses, built before the turn of the century, had been carefully restored and painted. Yards were tended, hedges clipped, lawns raked and clus­ters of birds-of-paradise and lilies-of-the-Nile bloomed un­der neat little windmill palms. The upper floors of the houses had been made into apartments, and the ground floors into small offices occupied by a travel agent, a chiro­practor, a realtor, a bail bondsman, an attorney, an art dealer, a watch repairman.

  In the window of what had once been somebody’s parlor was a small discreet sign: R. Tannenbaum, Estate Sales and Appraisals. An old-fashioned bell above the front door announced Aragon’s entrance. He found himself in a hall whose walls were hung with tapestries, some large enough to be used as rugs, some so small they were framed under glass. In a single spotlighted display case a collection of miniature musical instruments was arranged in a semicircle on a red velvet stage: a golden harp, an ivory grand piano, violins and cellos with silver strings fine as spider silk, trumpets and French horns carved from amethyst and woodwinds from tourmaline. No prices were shown. Tannenbaum’s merchandise—if the tapestries and miniatures were typical—was not that of an ordinary fence doing busi­ness in a small city like Santa Felicia. Fences gravitated south to Los Angeles and San Diego or north to San Fran­cisco.

  A large black and brown mongrel came loping down the hall like an official greeter, and behind him, Tannenbaum himself. He was a tall angular man about forty, wearing a beard and rimless glasses and formally dressed in a dark vested suit and tie, white shirt with cuff links and carefully polished black oxfords.

  Putting his hand on the dog’s head, he said, “My part­ner, Rupert, likes you.”

  “Tell Rupert I like him back.”

  “He knows. In our profession we develop a sixth sense about people. At least in my case it’s sixth, in Rupert’s it’s probably first. Perhaps a very long time ago it was our first, too, and our initial reaction to the approach of a stranger was, is this a friend or an enemy? It remains a good ques­tion. You are—” Tannenbaum narrowed his eyes to con­centrate their focus—“I’d guess somewhere in between, leaning a bit towards friend, right?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I see you were admiring my miniatures. Or perhaps admire isn’t quite the word. I don’t care for miniatures myself, life is small and meager enough. A sculpture by Henry Moore, that’s what I covet, though my mean little hall here is hardly the place for one.”

  Tannenbaum had a soft pleasant voice which made what he had to say seem more interesting than it actually was. He went on to describe the particular Henry Moore he would have liked to own, now in a private collection in Paris. Evidently Rupert had heard it all before. He went back to his rug at the rear of the hall, leavi
ng the practical end of the business to his partner.

  The dog’s action seemed to remind Tannenbaum of his duties. He said, “What can I do for you?”

  Aragon presented his card, which Tannenbaum glanced at briefly before putting it in his inside breast pocket. The pocket was already bulging, Aragon noticed, as if Tannenbaum’s collections were not confined to valuables like tap­estries and miniatures.

  “Are you buying or selling, Mr. Aragon?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “You want information?”

  “Yes.”

  “My profit on information will never buy me a Henry Moore. However, in the interests of good will and that sort of thing, I’ll try to oblige. What’s on your mind?”

  “Our office is holding some important legal documents which must be signed by one of our clients. I have cause to believe she’s also one of yours, Miranda Shaw, Mrs. Nev­ille Shaw.”

  “So?”

  “Mrs. Shaw has, for all practical purposes, disappeared.”

  “Well, I haven’t got her,” Tannenbaum said reasonably. “My partner wouldn’t approve.

  Rupert took an immediate dislike to her. Probably her perfume too much and too musky. Rupert has such a sensitive nose it sometimes af­fects his judgment. I myself found her attractive, though a bit over the hill, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I might, but the fact is I’ve never met her.”

  “You should.”

  “My boss thinks I should, too, and the sooner the better.”

  Tannenbaum brushed a piece of lint off one of the tapes­tries. His movements were quick and precise, as if even the least important of them was thought out in advance for maximum efficiency. “Mrs. Shaw is not one of my regular customers. She came in about three weeks ago with a num­ber of things she wanted to sell me then and there. I ex­plained to her that my business is usually done on consignment and there would be a delay in payment. Some of the stuff might go immediately—for example, I’ve had a buyer waiting a long time for a coin collection like Shaw’s. But other items, like the antique silver chess set and the jewelry, would have to wait for the right buyers. Mrs. Shaw was anxious to avoid a delay, so she offered to take what­ever I was willing to pay her on the spot. I gave her what I believed to be a fair price considering the financial risk I was assuming. Actually, the deal’s turning out better than I expected—some of the jewelry has been sold already. I included it in an estate auction which I conducted last week and the right buyers came along.”