She let out a long strangled wail and drew her breath in rackingly and stopped coughing. I pressed one of the keys on her Dictaphone box and when somebody answered, metallic and loud, through the metal disk I said: “Bring Mrs. Murdock a glass of water, quick!” and then let the key up again.
I sat down again and watched her pull herself together. When her breath was coming evenly and without effort, I said: “You’re not tough. You just think you’re tough. You been living too long with people that are scared of you. Wait’ll you meet up with some law. Those boys are professionals. You’re just a spoiled amateur.”
The door opened and the maid came in with a pitcher of ice water and a glass. She put them down on the table and went out.
I poured Mrs. Murdock a glass of water and put it in her hand.
“Sip it, don’t drink it. You won’t like the taste of it, but it won’t hurt you.”
She sipped, then drank half of the glass, then put the glass down and wiped her lips.
“To think,” she said raspingly, “that out of all the snoopers for hire I could have employed, I had to pick out a man who would bully me in my own home.”
“That’s not getting you anywhere either,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time. What’s our story to the police going to be?”
“The police mean nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. And if you give them my name, I shall regard it as a thoroughly disgusting breach of faith.”
That put me back where we started.
“Murder changes everything, Mrs. Murdock. You can’t dummy up on a murder case. We’ll have to tell them why you employed me and what to do. They won’t publish it in the papers, you know. That is, they won’t if they believe it. They certainly won’t believe you hired me to investigate Elisha Morningstar just because he called up and wanted to buy the doubloon. They may not find out that you couldn’t have sold the coin, if you wanted to, because they might not think of that angle. But they won’t believe you hired a private detective just to investigate a possible purchaser. Why should you?”
“That’s my business, isn’t it?”
“No. You can’t fob the cops off that way. You have to satisfy them that you are being frank and open and have nothing to hide. As long as they think you are hiding something they never let up. Give them a reasonable and plausible story and they go away cheerful. And the most reasonable and plausible story is always the truth. Any objection to telling it?”
“Every possible objection,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Do we have to tell them that I suspected my daughter-in-law of stealing the coin and that I was wrong?”
“It would be better.”
“And that it has been returned and how?”
“It would be better.”
“That is going to humiliate me very much.”
I shrugged.
“You’re a callous brute,” she said. “You’re a cold-blooded fish. I don’t like you. I deeply regret ever having met you.”
“Mutual,” I said.
She reached a thick finger to a key and barked into the talking box. “Merle. Ask my son to come in here at once. And I think you may as well come in with him.”
She released the key, pressed her broad fingers together and let her hands drop heavily to her thighs. Her bleak eyes went up to the ceiling.
Her voice was quiet and sad saying: “My son took the coin. Mr. Marlowe. My son. My own son.”
I didn’t say anything. We sat there glaring at each other. In a couple of minutes they both came in and she barked at them to sit down.
21
Leslie Murdock was wearing a greenish slack suit and his hair looked damp, as if he had just been taking a shower. He sat hunched forward, looking at the white buck shoes on his feet, and turning a ring on his finger. He didn’t have his long black cigarette holder and he looked a little lonely without it. Even his mustache seemed to droop a little more than it had in my office.
Merle Davis looked just the same as the day before. Probably she always looked the same. Her copper blond hair was dragged down just as tight, her shell-rimmed glasses looked just as large and empty, her eyes behind them just as vague. She was even wearing the same one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind, not even earrings.
I had the curious feeling of reliving something that had already happened.
Mrs. Murdock sipped her port and said quietly:
“All right, son. Tell Mr. Marlowe about the doubloon. I’m afraid he has to be told.”
Murdock looked up at me quickly and then dropped his eyes again. His mouth twitched. When he spoke his voice had the toneless quality, a flat tired sound, like a man making a confession after an exhausting battle with his conscience.
“As I told you yesterday in your office I owe Morny a lot of money. Twelve thousand dollars. I denied it afterwards, but it’s true. I do owe it. I didn’t want mother to know. He was pressing me pretty hard for payment. I suppose I knew I would have to tell her in the end, but I was weak enough to want to put it off. I took the
