Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery vol. 33 (1977)

by Ellery Queen

  “No. I had a—a kind of a fatal feeling when I saw him. I just know that he’s connected in some way with Ethel’s disappearance. I’m scared.”

  She leaned against the door, breathing quickly. She looked very young and vulnerable. I said, “What am I going to do with you, kid? I can’t leave you here alone.”

  “Are you going away?”

  “I have to. I saw Edward. While I was there, he had a visitor from the HP. They found your sister’s car abandoned near San Diego.” I didn’t mention the blood. She had enough on her mind.

  “Edward killed her!” she cried. “I knew it.”

  “That I doubt. She may not even be dead. I’m going to San Diego to find out.”

  “Take me along, won’t you?”

  “It wouldn’t be good for your reputation. Besides, you’d be in the way.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I promise. I have friends in San Diego. Just let me drive down there with you and I can stay with them.”

  “You wouldn’t be making this up?”

  “Honest, I have friends there. Gretchen Falk and her husband, they’re good friends of Ethel’s and mine. We lived in San Diego for a while, before she married Edward. The Falks will be glad to let me stay with them.”

  “Hadn’t you better phone them first?”

  “I can’t. The phone’s disconnected. I tried it.”

  “Are you sure these people exist?”

  “Of course!” she said.

  I gave in. I turned out the lights, locked the door, and put her bag in my car. Clare stayed very close to me.

  As I was backing out, a car pulled in behind me, blocking the entrance to the driveway. I opened the door and got out. It was a black Lincoln with a searchlight mounted over the windshield.

  Clare said, “He’s come back.”

  The searchlight flashed on. Its bright beam swiveled toward me. I reached for the gun in my shoulder holster and got a firm grip on nothing. Holster and gun were packed in the suitcase in the trunk of my car. The searchlight blinded me.

  A black gun emerged from the dazzle, towing a hand and an arm. They belonged to a quickstepping cube-shaped man in a double-breasted flannel suit. A snap-brim hat was pulled down over his eyes. His mouth was as full of teeth as a barracuda’s. It said, “Where’s Dewar?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Owen Dewar. You’ve heard of him.”

  The gun dragged him forward another step and collided with my breastbone. His free hand palmed my flanks. All I could see was his unchanging smile, framed in brilliant light. I felt a keen desire to do some orthodontic work on it. But the gun was an inhibiting factor.

  “You must be thinking of two other parties,” I said.

  “No dice. This is the house and that’s the broad. Out of the car, lady.”

  “I will not,” she said in a tiny voice behind me.

  “Out, or I’ll blow a hole in your boy friend here.”

  Reluctantly she clambered out. The teeth looked down at her ankles as if they wanted to chew them. I made a move for the gun. It dived into my solar plexus, doubling me over. Its muzzle flicked the side of my head. It pushed me back against the fender of my car. I felt a worm of blood crawling past my ear.

  “You coward! Leave him alone.” Clare flung herself at him. He sidestepped neatly, moving on the steady pivot of the gun against my chest. She went to her knees on the blacktop.

  “Get up, lady, but keep your voice down. How many boy friends you keep on the string, anyway?”

  She got to her feet. “He isn’t my boy friend. Who are you? Where is Ethel?”

  “That’s a hot one.” The smile intensified. “You’re Ethel. The question is, where’s Dewar?”

  “I don’t know any Dewar.”

  “Sure you do, Ethel. You know him well enough to marry him. Now tell me where he is and nobody gets theirselves hurt.” The flat voice dropped, and added huskily, “Only I haven’t got much time to waste.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re completely mistaken. I’m not Ethel. I’m Clare. Ethel’s my older sister.”

  He stepped back and swung the gun in a quarter circle, covering us both. “Turn your face to the light. Let’s have a good look at you.”

  She did as she was told, striking a rigid pose. He shifted the gun to his left hand and brought a photograph out of his inside pocket. Looking from it to her face, he shook his head doubtfully.

  “I guess you’re levelling at that. You’re younger than this one, and thinner.” He handed her the photograph. “She your sister?”

  “Yes. It’s Ethel.”

  I caught a glimpse of the picture over her shoulder. It was a blown-up candid shot of two people. One was a pretty blonde who looked like Clare five years from now. She was leaning on the arm of a tall dark man with a hairline mustache. They were smirking at each other and there was a flower-decked altar in the background.

  “Who’s the man?” I said.

  “Dewar. Who else?” said the teeth behind the gun. “They got married in Vegas last month. I got this picture from the Chaparral Chapel. It goes with the twenty-five dollar wedding.” He snatched it out of Clare’s hands and put it back in his pocket. “It took me a couple of weeks to run her down. She used her maiden name, see.”

  “Where did you catch up with her? San Diego?”

  “I didn’t catch up with her. Would I be here if I did?”

  “What do you want her for?”

  “I don’t want her. I got nothing against the broad, except that she tied up with Dewar. He’s the boy I want.”

  “What for?”

  “You wouldn’t be inarested. He worked for me at one time.” The gun swiveled brightly toward Clare. “You know where your sister is?”

  “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  “That’s no way to talk now, lady. My motto’s cooperation. From other people.”

  I said, “Her sister’s been missing a week. The HP found her car in San Diego. It had bloodstains on the front seat. Are you sure you didn’t catch up with her?”

  “I’m asking you the questions, punk.” But there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice. “What happened to Dewar if the blonde is missing?”

  “I think he ran out with her money.”

  Clare turned to me. “You didn’t tell me all this.”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  The teeth said, “She had money?”

  “Plenty.”

  “The bum! The bum took us both, eh?”

  “Dewar took you for money?”

  “You ask too many questions, punk. You’ll talk yourself to death one of these days. Now stay where you are for ten minutes, both of you. Don’t move, don’t yell, don’t telephone. I might decide to drive around the block and come back and make sure.”

  He backed down the brilliant alley of the searchlight beam. The door of his car slammed. All its lights went off together. It rolled away into the darkness and didn’t come back.

  It was past midnight when we got to San Diego, but there was still a light in the Falks’s house. It was a stucco cottage on a street of identical cottages in Pacific Beach.

  “We lived here once,” Clare said. “When I was going to high school. That house, second from the corner.” Her voice was nostalgic and she looked around the jerry-built tract as if it represented something precious to her. The pre-Illman era in her young life.

  I knocked on the front door. A big henna-head in a housecoat opened it on a chain. But when she saw Clare beside me, she flung the door wide.

  “Clare honey, where you been? I’ve been trying to phone you in Berkeley, and here you are. How are you, honey?”

  She opened her arms and Clare walked into them.

  “Oh, Gretchen,” she said with her face on the redhead’s breast. “Something’s happened to Ethel, something terrible.”

  “I know it, honey, but it could be worse.”

  “Worse than murder?”

  “She isn’t murd
ered. Put that out of your mind. She’s pretty badly hurt, but she isn’t murdered.”

  Clare stood back to look at her face. “You’ve seen her? Is she here?”

  The redhead put a finger to her mouth, which was big and generous-looking, like the rest of her. “Hush, Clare. Jake’s asleep, he has to get up early, go to work. Yeah, I’ve seen her, but she isn’t here. She’s in a nursing home over on the other side of town.”

  “You said she’s badly hurt?”

  “Pretty badly beaten, yeah, poor dear. But the doctor told me she’s pulling out of it fine. A little plastic surgery and she’ll be as good as new.”

  “Plastic surgery?”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid she’ll need it. I got a look at her face tonight, when they changed the bandages. Now take it easy, honey. It could be worse.”

  “Who did it to her?”

  “That lousy husband of hers.”

  “Edward?”

  “Heck, no. The other one. The one that calls himself Dewar, Owen Dewar.”

  I said, “Have you seen Dewar?”

  “I saw him a week ago, the night he beat her up, the dirty rotten bully.” Her deep contralto growled in her throat. “I’d like to get my hands on him just for five minutes.”

  “So would a lot of people, Mrs. Falk.”

  She glanced inquiringly at Clare. “Who’s your friend? You haven’t introduced us.”

  “I’m sorry. Mr. Archer, Mrs. Falk. Mr. Archer is a detective, Gretchen.”

  “I was wondering. Ethel didn’t want me to call the police. I told her she ought to, but she said no. The poor darling’s so ashamed of herself, getting mixed up with that kind of a louse. She didn’t even get in touch with me until tonight. Then she saw in the paper about her car being picked up, and she thought maybe I could get it back for her without any publicity. Publicity is what she doesn’t want most. I guess it’s a tragic thing for a beautiful girl like Ethel to lose her looks.”

  I said, “There won’t be any publicity if I can help it. Did you go to see the police about her car?”

  “Jake advised me not to. He said it would blow the whole thing wide open. And the doctor told me he was kind of breaking the law by not reporting the beating she took. So I dropped it.”

  “How did this thing happen?”

  “I’ll tell you all I know about it. Come on into the living room, kids, let me fix you something to drink.”

  Clare said, “You’re awfully kind, Gretchen, but I must go to Ethel. Where is she?”

  “The Mission Rest Home. Only don’t you think you better wait till morning? It’s a private hospital, but it’s late for visitors.”

  “I’ve got to see her,” Clare said. “I couldn’t sleep a wink if I didn’t. I’ve been so worried about her.”

  Gretchen heaved a sigh. “Whatever you say, honey. We can try, anyway. Give me a second to put on a dress and I’ll show you where the place is.”

  She led us into the darkened living room, turned the television set off and the lights on. A quart of beer, nearly full, stood on a coffee table beside the scuffed sofa. She offered me a glass, which I accepted gratefully. Clare refused. She was so tense she couldn’t even sit down.

  We stood and looked at each other for a minute. Then Gretchen came back, struggling with a zipper on one massive hip.

  “All set, kids. You better drive, Mr. Archer. I had a couple of quarts to settle my nerves. You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve gained five pounds since Ethel came down here. I always gain weight when I’m anxious.”

  We went out to my car, and turned toward the banked lights of San Diego. The women rode in the front seat. Gretchen’s opulent flesh was warm against me.

  “Was Ethel here before it happened?” I said.

  “Sure she was, for a day. Ethel turned up here eight or nine days ago. Tuesday of last week it was. I hadn’t heard from her for several months, since she wrote me that she was going to Nevada for a divorce. It was early in the morning when she drove up—in fact, she got me out of bed. The minute I saw her, I knew that something was wrong. The poor kid was scared, really scared. She was as cold as a corpse and her teeth were chattering. So I fed her some coffee and put her in a hot tub, and after that she told me what it was that’d got her down.”

  “Dewar?”

  “You said it, mister. Ethel never was much of a picker. When she was hostessing at the Grant coffee shop back in the old days, she was always falling for the world’s worst phonies. Speaking of phonies, this Dewar takes the cake. She met him in Las Vegas when she was waiting for her divorce from Illman. He was a big promoter, to hear him tell it. She fell for the story, and she fell for him. A few days after she got her final decree, she married him. Big romance. Big deal.

  “They were going to be business partners, too. He said he had some money to invest, twenty-five thousand or so, and he knew of a swell little hotel in Acapulco that they could buy at a steal for fifty thousand. The idea was that they should each put up half, and go and live in Mexico in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives. He didn’t show her any of his money, but she believed him. She drew her settlement money out of the bank and came to L.A. with him to close up her house and get set for the deal.”

  “He must have hypnotized her,” Clare said. “Ethel’s a smart businesswoman.”

  “Not with something tall, dark, and handsome, honey. I give him that much. He’s got the looks. Well, they lived in L.A. for a couple of weeks, on Ethel’s money of course, and he kept putting off the Mexican trip. He didn’t want to go anywhere, in fact—just sit around the house and drink her liquor and eat her good cooking.”

  “He was hiding out,” I said.

  “From what? The police?”

  “Worse than that. Some gangster pal from Nevada was gunning for him, still is. Ethel wasn’t the only one he fleeced.”

  “Nice guy, eh? Anyway, Ethel started to get restless. She didn’t like sitting around with all that money in the house, waiting for nothing. Last Monday night—a week ago Monday, that is—she had a showdown with him. Then it all came out. He didn’t have any money or anything else. He wasn’t a promoter, he didn’t know of any hotel in Acapulco. His whole buildup was as queer as a three-dollar bill. Apparently he made his living gambling, but he was even all washed up with that. Nothing. But she was married to him now, he said, and she was going to sit still and like it or he’d knock her block off.

  “He meant it, too. Ethel said. She’s got the proof of it now. She waited until he drank himself to sleep that night, then she threw some things in a bag, including her twenty-five thousand, and came down here. She was on her way to get a quickie divorce in Mexico, but Jake and me talked her into staying for a while and thinking it over. Jake said she could probably get an annulment right in California, and that would be more legal.”

  “He was probably right.”

  “Yeah? Maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea after all. We kept her here just long enough for Dewar to catch her. Apparently she left some letters behind and he ran down the list of her friends until he found her at our place. He talked her into going for a drive to talk it over. I didn’t hear what was said—they were in her room—but he must have used some powerful persuasion. She went out of the house with him as meek as a lamb and they drove away in her car.

  “That was the last I saw of her until she got in touch with me tonight. When she didn’t come back I wanted to call the police, but Jake wouldn’t let me. He said I had no business coming between a man and his wife and all that guff. I gave Jake a piece of my mind tonight on that score. I ought to’ve called the cops as soon as Dewar showed his sneaking face on our front porch.”

  “What exactly did he do to her?”

  “He gave her a bad clobbering, that’s obvious. Ethel didn’t want to talk about it much tonight. The subject was painful to her in more ways than one.”

  “Did he take her money?”

  “He must have. It’s gone. So is he.”

  We were on the freeway w
hich curved past the hills of Balboa Park. The trees of its man-made jungle were restless against the sky. Below us on the other side, the city slopes like a frozen cascade of lights down to the black concavity of the bay.

  The Mission Rest Home was in the eastern suburbs, an old stucco mansion which had been converted into a private hospital. The windows in its thick stucco walls were small and barred and there were lights in some of them.

  I rang the doorbell. Clare was so close to my back I could feel her breath. A woman in a purple flannelette wrapper opened the door. Her hair hung in two gray braids, which were ruler-straight. Her hard black eyes surveyed the three of us, and stayed on Gretchen.

  “What is it now, Mrs. Falk?” she said brusquely.

  “This is Mrs.—Miss Larrabee’s sister Clare.”

  “Miss Larrabee is probably sleeping. She shouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “I know it’s late,” Clare said in a tremulous voice. “But I’ve come all the way from San Francisco to see her.”

  “She’s doing well, I assure you of that. She’s completely out of danger.”

  “Can’t I just go in for a teensy visit? Ethel will want to see me, and Mr. Archer has some questions to ask her. Mr. Archer is a private detective.”

  “This is very irregular.” Reluctantly she opened the door. “Wait here and I’ll see if she is awake. Please keep your voices down. We have other patients.”

  We waited in a dim high-ceilinged room which had once been the reception room of the mansion. The odors of mustiness and medication blended depressingly in the stagnant air.

  “I wonder what brought her here,” I said.

  “She knew old lady Lestina,” Gretchen said. “She stayed with her at one time, when Mrs. Lestina was running a boardinghouse.”

  “Of course,” Clare said. “I remember the name. That was when Ethel was going to San Diego State. Then Daddy got killed and she had to drop out of school and go to work.” Tears glimmered in her eyes. “Poor Ethel. She’s always tried so hard, and been so good to me.”

  Gretchen patted her shoulder. “You bet she has, honey. Now you have a chance to be good to her.”

  “Oh, I will. I’ll do everything I can.”