I said: “Ah,” and let smoke out of my lungs slowly and waved it away with the flat of my hand, away from the old party across the desk from me. He looked like a non-smoker. “And without a history and not so carefully handled—how much?”
He shrugged. “There would be the implication that the coin was illegally acquired. Stolen, or obtained by fraud. Of course it might not be so. Rare coins do turn up in odd places at odd times. In old strong boxes, in the secret drawers of desks in old New England houses. Not often, I grant you. But it happens. I know of a very valuable coin that fell out of the stuffing of a horsehair sofa which was being restored by an antique dealer. The sofa had been in the same room in the same house in Fall River, Massachusetts, for ninety years. Nobody knew how the coin got there. But generally speaking, the implication of theft would be strong. Particularly in this part of the country.”
He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.
He brought his eyes down to my level slowly and said: “Five dollars, please.”
I said: “Huh?”
“Five dollars, please.”
“What for?”
“Don’t be absurd, Mr. Marlowe. Everything I have told you is available in the public library. In Fosdyke’s Register, in particular. You choose to come here and take up my time relating it to you. For this my charge is five dollars.”
“And suppose I don’t pay it,” I said.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. A very faint smile twitched at the corners of his lips. “You will pay it,” he said.
I paid it. I took the five out of my wallet and got up to lean over the desk and spread it out right in front of him, carefully. I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.
“Five dollars, Mr. Morningstar,” I said.
He opened his eyes and looked at the bill. He smiled.
“And now,” I said, “let’s talk about the Brasher Doubloon that somebody tried to sell you.”
He opened his eyes a little wider. “Oh, did somebody try to sell me a Brasher Doubloon? Now why would they do that?”
“They needed the money,” I said. “And they didn’t want too many questions asked. They knew or found out that you were in the business and that the building where you had your office was a shabby dump where anything could happen. They knew your office was at the end of a corridor and that you were an elderly man who would probably not make any false moves—out of regard for your health.”
“They seem to have known a great deal,” Elisha Morningstar said dryly.
“They knew what they had to know in order to transact their business. Just like you and me. And none of it was hard to find out.”
He stuck his little finger in his ear and worked it around and brought it out with a little dark wax on it. He wiped it off casually on his coat.
“And you assume all this from the mere fact that I called up Mrs. Murdock and asked if her Brasher Doubloon was for sale?”
“Sure. She had the same idea herself. It’s reasonable. Like I said over the phone to you, you would know that coin was not for sale. If you knew anything about the business at all. And I can see that you do.”
He bowed, about one inch. He didn’t quite smile but he looked about as pleased as a man in a Hoover collar ever looks.
“You would be offered this coin for sale,” I said, “in suspicious circumstances. You would want to buy it, if you could get it cheap and had the money to handle it. But you would want to know where it came from. And even if you were quite sure it was stolen, you could still buy it, if you could get it cheap enough.”
“Oh, I could, could I?” He looked amused, but not in a large way.
“Sure you could—if you are a reputable dealer. I’ll assume you are. By buying the coin—cheap—you would be protecting the owner or his insurance carrier from complete loss. They’d be glad to pay you back your outlay. It’s done all the time.”
“Then the Murdock Brasher has been stolen,” he said abruptly.
“Don’t quote me,” I said. “It’s a secret.”
He almost picked his nose this time. He just caught himself. He picked a hair out of one nostril instead, with a quick jerk and a wince. He held it up and looked at it. Looking at me past it he said:
“And how much will your principal pay for the return of the coin?”
I leaned over the desk and gave him my shady leer. “One grand. What did you pay?”
“I think you are a very smart young man,” he said. Then he screwed his face up and his chin wobbled and his chest began to bounce in and out and a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.
He was laughing.
It stopped after a while. His face came all smooth again and his eyes, opened, black and sharp and shrewd.
“Eight hundred dollars,” he said. “Eight hundred dollars for an uncirculated specimen of the Brasher Doubloon.” He chortled.
