one of the security people spotted me and took me for an undesirable. There was some plush maroon furniture near the entrance to the Squire Restaurant, opposite the hotel’s main entrance off Mason Street. I parked myself on an overstuffed couch and watched people move in and out, back and forth. And waited.
At 3:20 I was still waiting. Maybe Ozimas didn’t go to Big Sur after all, I thought. Maybe she got hold of him and he told her he didn’t know any dealer in antique miniatures named Charles Eberhardt, and that made her balk at keeping our appointment.
I was fretting with that possibility when I saw her. She came in through the main entrance and stopped and held her cane up in front of her in a discreet away, so that the gold head was visible. I got off the couch and went her way, taking my time so I could size her up. From a distance she looked small and frail in a bulky fur coat, like somebody’s nice old white-haired grandmother-one who happened to have a couple of million dollars or so. Up close there was no mistaking the toughness in her seamed and rouged face and her shrewd gray eyes, the imperiousness of her bearing. Or the fact that she was a woman who knew what she wanted and usually got it, one way or another.
“Mrs. Prine? I’m Charles Eberhardt.”
She looked me up and down, once, as if she were examining a curious artifact. If the artifact made any impression on her she didn’t show it. She said, “How do you do, Mr. Eberhardt. I apologize for being tardy; I was unavoidably detained.”
Sure you were, I thought. She’d been late on purpose-I understood that now. A double-edged ploy, no doubt, designed to test Mr. Eberhardt’s sincerity and to froth up his eagerness to sell her a Cosway snuff box.
I said, “No apology necessary, Mrs. Prine.”
“You’ve bought the Cosway?”
I smiled at her. “Shall we go into the lounge, where it’s more private?”
“No. It’s too dark in there. I’ll want to examine the piece, of course.”
“Of course.” I gestured toward where I’d been sitting before; none of the furniture there was occupied. “Over this way?”
She nodded and we went that way and took opposite ends of the same lumpy couch. She said, “Now then, Mr. Eberhardt, the Cosway.”
I said pleasantly, “Now then, Mrs. Prine, my name isn’t Eberhardt and I don’t have any Cosway box.” I told her what my name was and that I was the private detective she wouldn’t talk to last week. I also offered her one of my business cards.
She didn’t take the card; she looked at it as if it were something unclean. Looked at me the same way, with a sprinkling of contempt and malice thrown in. “I do not care to be lied to,” she said in a chilly voice, and started to get up.
“I think you’d better stay a while,” I said. “I know you’ve got Kenneth Purcell’s Hainelin snuff box; I know you paid Eldon Summerhayes seventy-five thousand dollars for it four months ago.”
She went rigid. She seemed to pale a little, too; at any rate the rouge on her cheeks appeared redder now. The look she gave me this time was one of hatred. She said in a biting whisper, “Blackmail.”
“Not at all, Mrs. Prine. I don’t want anything from you except the answers to some questions.”
That pushed her a little more off balance, which was where I wanted to keep her. The way to handle Margaret Prine, I had decided, was the same way Kerry had handled the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.
“Questions?” she said. “What questions?”
“About the Hainelin box. About where Summerhayes got it and why everybody pretended it was lost when Kenneth fell.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she said.
“That’s right, you don’t. But how would it look for you if I took my information to the authorities?”
“I admit to nothing. You can’t prove I have the Hainelin.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But does it matter? Kenneth Purcell was murdered, Mrs. Prine; I think I can prove that. So was his brother. How would you like to be arrested as an accessory to double homicide?”
“Accessory?” The hatred was still in her eyes, but so was uncertainty, now, and the emotion I most wanted to see: fear.
“That’s right. The Hainelin box may be important evidence in Kenneth’s murder. You bought it and are holding it without having informed the authorities of the transaction; technically that’s suppressing it, and suppressing evidence in a homicide case is a felony.”
“I had nothing to do with Kenneth’s death!”
“Whether you did or not, you could still be tried on a felony charge. A good lawyer could probably get you off-but what about the publicity? What would that do to your reputation?”
She clamped her mouth shut as a group of people passed, on their way into the Squire Restaurant. She didn’t speak when they were gone, either; she was thinking over what I’d said. The seamed skin of her face had the look of parchment stretched too tight around the shape of her skull, so that it might tear at any second.
It didn’t take her long to make up her mind. Not much more than a minute had passed when she said in a stiff, controlled voice, “Ask your questions.”
“Where did Summerhayes get the Hainelin box?”
“From Alicia Purcell. Or so he told me.”
“How did she come to have it?”
“He said she found it among Kenneth’s effects.”
“When?”
“Two days after his death.”
“Then why did she keep up the pretense that it was lost?”
“She told Eldon she needed cash. If she had reported finding the box it would have legally become part of Kenneth’s estate; she would not have been able to sell it until his will cleared probate.”
“That sounds pretty flimsy,” I said. “She sold it illegally anyway, didn’t she?”
“I’m sure I don’t care how it sounds to you. I am only telling you what Eldon Summerhayes told me.”
“Meaning you didn’t care how flimsy it sounded, or how illegal the deal was, as long as you got the Hainelin.”
Her lips pulled in tight at the corners and her eyes snapped at me. But she held her tongue.
I said, “Why did Mrs. Purcell need such a large amount of cash?”
“Some sort of investment, I gathered.”
“You gathered. Didn’t you ask Summerhayes?”
“No. I did not.”
“Did he tell you how much he paid her for the box?”
“Seventy thousand dollars.”
“So his commission for arranging the deal was five thousand?”
“That is correct.”
“That is incorrect,” I said. “He paid her fifty and kept twenty-five for himself.”
That surprised her, and it made her even angrier than she already was; I could see the anger like sparks in those sharp gray eyes. But it also served to tighten her control. When she spoke again it sounded as though the words were being squeezed out through a roller press.
“If you are telling the truth,” she said, “that is a matter between Eldon and myself. It has no bearing on anything else.”
“Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Have you had any contact with Mrs. Purcell since you bought the box?”
“Hardly.”
“Why ‘hardly’? Don’t you get along with her?”
“I despise her. She has the morals of an alley cat.”
So do you, Maggie, I thought, in your own sweet way.
I said, “How about Kenneth? What did you think of him?”
“As little. He was a boor, a drunkard, and a womanizer.”
“Uh-huh. Who do you think pushed him off that cliff?”
“I don’t believe anyone pushed him, no matter what you say. His death was an accident.”
