by Ellery Queen
Mrs. Lestina appeared in the arched doorway. “She’s not asleep. I guess you can talk to her for a very few minutes.”
We followed her to a room at the end of one wing of the house. A white-uniformed nurse was waiting at the door. “Don’t say anything to upset her, will you? She’s always fighting sedation as it is.”
The room was large but poorly furnished, with a mirrorless bureau, a couple of rickety chairs, a brown-enameled hospital bed. The head on the raised pillow was swathed in bandages through which tufts of blonde hair were visible. The woman sat up and spread her arms. The white of her eyes were red, suffused with blood from broken vessels. Her swollen lips opened and said, “Clare!” in a tone of incredulous joy.
The sisters hugged each other, with tears and laughter. “It’s wonderful to see you,” the older one said through broken teeth. “How did you get here so fast?”
“I came to stay with Gretchen. Why didn’t you call me, Ethel? I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“I’m dreadfully sorry, darling. I should have, shouldn’t I? I didn’t want you to see me like this. And I’ve been so ashamed of myself. I’ve been such a terrible fool. I’ve lost our money.”
The nurse was standing against the door, torn between her duty and her feelings. “Now you promised not to get excited, Miss Larrabee.”
“She’s right.” Clare said. “Don’t give it a second thought. I’m going to leave school and get a job and look after you. You need some looking after for a change.”
“Nuts. I’ll be fine in a couple of weeks.” The brave voice issuing from the mask was deep and vibrant. “Don’t make any rash decisions, kiddo. The head is bloody but unbowed.” The sisters looked at each other in the silence of deep affection.
I stepped forward to the bedside and introduced myself. “How did this happen to you, Miss Larrabee?”
“It’s a long story,” she lisped, “and a sordid one.”
“Mrs. Falk has told me most of it up to the point when Dewar made you drive away with him. Where did he take you?”
“To the beach—I think it was in La Jolla. It was late and there was nobody there and the tide was coming in. And Owen had a gun. I was terrified. I didn’t know what more he wanted from me. He already had my twenty-five thousand.”
“He had the money?”
“Yes. It was in my room at Gretchen’s house. He made me give it to him before we left there. But it didn’t satisfy him. He said I hurt his pride by leaving him. He said he had to satisfy his pride.” Contempt ran through her voice like a thin steel thread.
“By beating you up?”
“Apparently. He hit me again and again. I think he left me for dead. When I came to, the waves were splashing on me. I managed somehow to get up to the car. It wasn’t any good to me, though, because Owen had the keys. It’s funny he didn’t take it.”
“Too easily traced,” I said. “What did you do then?”
“I hardly know. I think I sat in the car for a while wondering what to do. Then a taxi went by and I stopped him and told him to bring me here.”
“You weren’t very wise not to call the police. They might have got your money back. Now it’s a cold trail.”
“Did you come here to lecture me?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I was half crazy with pain,” she said. “I hardly knew what I was doing. I couldn’t bear to have anybody see me.”
Her fingers were active among the folds of the sheets. Clare reached out and stroked her hands into quietness. “Now, now, darling,” she crooned. “Nobody’s criticizing you. You take things nice and easy for a while, and Clare will look after you.”
The masked head rolled on the pillow. The nurse came forward, her face solicitous. “I think Miss Larrabee has had enough.”
She showed us out. Clare lingered with her sister for a moment, then followed us to the car. She sat between us in brooding silence all the way to Pacific Beach. Before I dropped them off at Gretchen’s house, I asked for her permission to go to the police. She wouldn’t give it to me, and nothing I could say would change her mind.
I spent the rest of the night in a motor court, trying to crawl over the threshold of sleep. Shortly after dawn I disentangled myself from the twisted sheets and drove out to La Jolla.
La Jolla is a semi-detached suburb of San Diego, a small resort town half surrounded by sea. It was a gray morning. The slanting streets were scoured with the sea’s cold breath, and the sea itself looked like hammered pewter.
I warmed myself with a short-order breakfast and went the rounds of the hotels and motels. No one resembling Dewar had registered in the past week. I tried the bus and taxi companies. Dewar must have slipped out of town unnoticed. But I did get a lead on the taxi driver who had taken Ethel to the Mission Rest Home. He had mentioned the injured woman to his dispatcher, and the dispatcher gave me his name and address. Stanley Simpson, 38 Calle Laureles.
Simpson was a paunchy, defeated-looking man who hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He came to the door of his tiny bungalow in his underwear, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “What’s the pitch, bub? If you got me up to try and sell me something, you’re in for a disappointment.”
I told him who I was and why I was there. “Do you remember the woman?”
“I hope to tell you I do. She was bleeding like a stuck pig, all over the back seat. It took me a couple of hours to clean it off. Somebody pistol-whipped her, if you ask me. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but she said no. Hell, I couldn’t argue with her in that condition. Did I do wrong?”
“If you did, it doesn’t matter. She’s being taken good care of. I thought you might have got a glimpse of the man that did it to her.”
“Not me, mister. She was all by herself, nobody else in sight. She got out of a parked car and staggered out into the road. I couldn’t just leave her there, could I?”
“Of course not. You’re a Good Samaritan, Simpson. Exactly where did you pick her up?”
“Down by the Cove. She was sitting in this Buick. I dropped a party off at the beach club and I was on my way back, kind of cruising along—”
“What time?”
“Around ten o’clock, I guess it was. I can check by schedule.”
“It isn’t important. Incidentally, did she pay you for the ride?”
“Yeah, she had a buck and some change in her purse. She had a hard time making it. No tip,” he added gloomily.
“Tough cheese.”
His fogged eyes brightened. “You’re a friend of hers, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you say I rate a tip on a run like that? I always say, better late than never.”
“Is that what you always say?” I handed him a dollar.
The Cove was a roughly semicircular inlet at the foot of a steep hill surmounted by a couple of hotels. Its narrow curving beach and the street above it were both deserted. An off-shore wind had swept away the early morning mist, but the sky was still cloudy, and the sea grim. The long swells slammed the beach like stone walls falling, and broke in foam on the rocks that framed the entrance to the Cove.
I sat in my car and watched them. I was at a dead end. This seas wept place, under this iron sky, was like the world’s dead end. Far out at sea a carrier floated like a chip on the horizon.
A Navy jet took off from it and scrawled tremendous nothings on the distance.
Something bright caught my eye. It was in the trough of a wave a couple of hundred yards outside the Cove. Then it was on a crest: the aluminum air-bottle of an Aqua-lung strapped to a naked brown back. Its wearer was prone on a surfboard, kicking with blackfinned feet toward the shore.
He was kicking hard, and paddling with one arm, but he was making slow progress. His other arm dragged in the opaque water. He seemed to be towing something, something heavy. I wondered if he had speared a shark or a porpoise. His face was inscrutable behind the glass mask.
I left my car and climbed down to the beach. The man on the surfboard came toward m
e with his tiring one-armed stroke, climbing the walled waves and sliding down them. A final surge picked him up and set him on the sand, almost at my feet. I dragged his board out of the backwash and helped him to pull the line that he was holding in one hand. His catch was nothing native to the sea. It was a man.
The end of the line was looped around his body under the armpits. He lay face down like an exhausted runner, a big man, fully clothed in soggy tweeds. I turned him over and saw the aquiline profile, the hairline mustache over the blue mouth, the dark eyes clogged with sand. Owen Dewar had made his escape by water.
The skindiver took off his mask and sat down heavily, his chest working like a great furred bellows. “I go down for abalone,” he said between breaths. “I find this. Caught between two rocks at thirty-forty feet.”
“How long has he been in the water?”
“It’s hard to tell. I’d say a couple of days, anyway. Look at his color. Poor stiff. But I wish they wouldn’t drown themselves in my hunting grounds.”
“Do you know him?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“Never saw him before,” I said, with truth.
“How about you phoning the police, Mac? I’m pooped. And unless I make a catch I don’t eat today. There’s no pay in fishing for corpses.”
“In a minute.”
I went through the dead man’s pockets. There was a set of car keys in his jacket pocket and an alligator wallet on his hip. It contained no money, but the driver’s license was decipherable: Owen Dewar, Mesa Court, Las Vegas. I put the wallet back, and let go of the body. The head rolled sideways. I saw the small hole in his neck, washed clean by the sea.
“Holy Mother!” the diver said, “He was shot.”
I got back to the Falk house around midmorning. The sun had burned off the clouds and the day was turning hot. By daylight the long treeless street of identical houses looked cheap and rundown. It was part of the miles of suburban slums that the war had scattered all over Southern California.
Gretchen was sprinkling the brown front lawn with a desultory hose. She looked too big for the pocket-handkerchief yard. The sunsuit that barely covered her various bulges made her look even bigger. She turned off the water when I got out of my car.
“What gives? You’ve got trouble on your face if I ever saw trouble.”
“Dewar is dead. Murdered. A skindiver found him in the sea off La Jolla.”
She took it calmly. “That’s not such bad news, is it? He had it coming. Who killed him?”
“I told you a gunman from Nevada was on his trail. Maybe he caught him. Anyway, Dewar was shot and bled to death from a neck wound. Then he was dumped in the ocean. I had to lay the whole thing on the line for the police, since there’s murder in it.”
“You told them what happened to Ethel?”
“I had to. They’re at the rest home talking to her now.”
“What about Ethel’s money? Was the money on him?”
“Not a trace of it. And he didn’t live to spend it. The police pathologist thinks he’s been dead for a week. Whoever got Dewar got the money at the same time.”
“Will she ever get it back, do you think?”
“If we can catch the murderer and he still has it with him. That’s a big if. Where’s Clare, by the way? With her sister?”
“Clare went back to L.A.”
“What for?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged her rosy shoulders. “She got Jake to drive her down to the station before he went to work. I wasn’t up. She didn’t even tell me she was going.” Gretchen seemed peeved.
“Did she get a telegram or a phone call?”
“Nothing. All I now is what Jake told me. She talked him into lending her ten bucks. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it was all the ready cash we had, until payday. Oh, well, I guess we’ll get it back, if Ethel recovers her money.”
“You’ll get if back,” I said. “Clare seems to be a straight kid.”
“That’s what I always used to think. When they lived here, before Ethel met Illman and got into the chips, Clare was just about the nicest kid on the block. In spite of all the trouble in her family.”
“What trouble was that?”
“Her father shot himself. Didn’t you know? They said it was an accident, but the people on the street—we knew different. Mr. Larrabee was never the same after his wife left him. He spent his time brooding, drinking and brooding. Clare reminded me of him, the way she behaved last night after you left. She wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. She shut herself up in her room and acted real cold. If you want the honest truth, I don’t like her using my home as if it was a motel and Jake as a taxi service. The least she could of done was say goodbye to me.”
“It sounds as if she had something on her mind.”
All the way back to Los Angeles I wondered what it was. It took me a little over two hours to drive from San Diego to West Hollywood. The black Lincoln with the searchlight and the Nevada license plates was standing at the curb below the redwood house. The front door of the house was standing open.
I transferred my automatic from the suitcase to my jacket pocket, making sure that it was ready to fire. I climbed the terraced lawn beside the driveway. My feet made no sound in the grass. When I reached the porch I heard voices from inside. One was the gunman’s hoarse and deathly monotone.
“I’m taking it, sister. It belongs to me.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Sure, but not about this. The money is mine.”
“It’s my sister’s money. What right have you got to it?”
“This. Dewar stole it from me. He ran a poker game for me in Vegas, a high-stakes game in various hotels around town. He was a good dealer and I trusted him with the house take. I let it pile up for a week, that was my mistake. I should’ve kept a closer watch on him. He ran out on me with twenty-five grand or more. That’s the money you’re holding, lady.”
“I don’t believe it. You can’t prove that story. It’s fantastic.”
“I don’t have to prove it. Gelt talks, but iron talks louder. So hand it over, eh?”
“I’ll die first.”
“Maybe you will at that.”
I edged along the wall to the open door. Clare was standing flat against the opposite wall of the hallway. She was clutching a sheaf of bills to her breast. The gunman’s broad flannel back was to me, and he was advancing on her.
“Stay away from me, you.” Her cry was thin and desperate. She was trying to merge with the wall, pressed by terror.
“I don’t like taking candy from a baby,” he said in a very reasonable tone. “Only I’m going to have that money back.”
“You can’t have it. It’s Ethel’s. It’s all she has.”
He raised his armed right hand and slapped the side of her face with the gun barrel, lightly. Fingering the welt it left, she said in a kind of despairing stupor, “You’re the one that hurt Ethel, aren’t you? You like hurting people, don’t you?”
“Listen to reason, lady. It ain’t just the money, it’s a matter of business. I let it happen once, it’ll happen again. I can’t afford to let anybody get away with nothing. I got a reputation to live up to.”
I said from the doorway, “Is that why you killed Dewar?”
He let out an animal sound and whirled in my direction. I shot before he did, twice. The first slug rocked him back on his heels. His bullet went wild, plowed the ceiling. My second slug took him off balance and slammed him against the wall. His blood spattered Clare and the money in her hands. She screamed once.
The man from Las Vegas dropped his gun. It clattered on the parquetry. His hands clasped his perforated chest, trying to hold the blood in. He slid down the wall slowly, his face a mask of smiling pain, and sat with a bump on the floor. He blew red bubbles and said, “You got me wrong, I didn’t kill Dewar. I didn’t know he was dead. The money belongs to me. You made a big mistake, punk.”
“So did you.”
He went on smil
ing, as if in fierce appreciation of the joke. Then his red grin changed to a rictus, and he slumped sideways.
Clare looked from him to me, her eyes wide and dark with the sight of death. “I don’t know how to thank you. He was going to kill me.”
“I doubt that. He was just combining a little pleasure with business.”
“But he shot at you.”
“It’s just as well he did. It leaves no doubt that it was self-defense.”
“Is it true what you said? That Dewar’s dead? He killed him?”
“You tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got the money that Dewar took from your sister. Where did you get it?”
“It was here, in the house. I found it in the kitchen.”
“That’s kind of hard to swallow, Clare.”
“It’s true.” She looked down at the blood-spattered money in her hands. The outside bill was a hundred. Unconsciously she tried to wipe it clean on the front of her dress. “He had it hidden here. He must have come back and hid it.”
“Show me where.”
“You’re not being very nice to me. And I’m not feeling well.”
“Neither is Dewar. You didn’t shoot him yourself, by any chance?”
“How could I? I was in Berkeley when it happened. I wish I was back there now.”
“You know when it happened, do you?”
“No.” She bit her lip. “I don’t mean that. I mean I was in Berkeley all along. You’re a witness, you were with me on the train coming down.”
“Trains run both ways.”
She regarded me with loathing. “You’re not nice at all. To think that yesterday I thought you were nice.”
“You’re wasting time, Clare. I have to call the police. But first I want to see where you found the money. Or where you say you did.”
“In the kitchen. You’ve got to believe me. It took me a long time to get here from the station on the bus. I’d only just found it when he walked in on me.”
“I’ll believe the physical evidence, if any.”
To my surprise the physical evidence was there. A red-enameled flour canister was standing open on the board beside the kitchen sink. There were fingerprints on the flour and a floury piece of oilskin wrapping in the sink.
