show it to you.”
“Well, I’ll say good night. Please have Merle’s clothes packed and sent to my apartment in the morning.”
Her head snapped up again and her eyes glared. “You’re pretty highhanded about all this, young man.”
“Have them packed,” I said. “And send them. You don’t need Merle any more—now that Vannier is dead.”
Our eyes locked hard and held locked for a long moment. A queer stiff smile moved the corners of her lips. Then her head went down and her right hand took the top card off the pack held in her left hand and turned it and her eyes looked at it and she added it to the pile of unplayed cards below the layout, and then turned the next card, quietly, calmly, in a hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.
I went across the room and out, closed the door softly, went along the hall, down the stairs, along the lower hall past the sun room and Merle’s little office, and out into the cheerless stuffy unused living room that made me feel like an embalmed corpse just to be in it.
The french doors at the back opened and Leslie Murdock stepped in and stopped, staring at me.
33
His slack suit was rumpled and also his hair. His little reddish mustache looked just as ineffectual as ever. The shadows under his eyes were almost pits.
He was carrying his long black cigarette holder, empty, and tapping it against the heel of his left hand as he stood not liking me, not wanting to meet me, not wanting to talk to me.
“Good evening,” he said stiffly. “Leaving?”
“Not quite yet. I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t think we have anything to talk about. And I’m tired of talking.”
“Oh yes we have. A man named Vannier.”
“Vannier? I hardly know the man. I’ve seen him around. What I know I don’t like.”
“You know him a little better than that,” I said.
He came forward into the room and sat down in one of the I-dare-you-to-sit-in-me chairs and leaned forward to cup his chin in his left hand and look at the floor.
“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”
He lifted his eyes and almost smiled. “Who thereupon turns as pale as paper, froths at the mouth, and pulls a gun out of his right ear.”
I sat down near him and got a cigarette out. “That’s right. We ought to play it together sometime. You got a gun?”
“Not with me. I have one. You know that.”
“Have it with you last night when you called on Vannier?”
He shrugged and bared his teeth. “Oh. Did I call on Vannier last night?”
“I think so. Deduction. You smoke Benson and Hedges Virginia cigarettes. They leave a firm ash that keeps its shape. An ashtray at his house had enough of those little gray rolls to account for at least two cigarettes. But no stubs in the tray. Because you smoke them in a holder and a stub from a holder looks different. So you removed the stubs. Like it?”
“No.” His voice was quiet. He looked down at the floor again.
“That’s an example of deduction. A bad one. For there might not have been any stubs, but if there had been and they had been removed, it might have been because they had lipstick on them. Of a certain shade that would at least indicate the coloring of the smoker. And your wife has a quaint habit of throwing her stubs into the waste basket.”
“Leave Linda out of this,” he said coldly.
“Your mother still thinks Linda took the doubloon and that your story about taking it to give to Alex Morny was just a cover-up to protect her.”
“I said leave Linda out of it.” The tapping of the black holder against his teeth had a sharp quick sound, like a telegraph key.
“I’m willing to,” I said. “But I didn’t believe your story for a different reason. This.” I took the doubloon out and held it on my hand under his eyes.
He stared at it tightly. His mouth set.
“This morning when you were telling your story this was hocked on Santa Monica Boulevard for safekeeping. It was sent to me by a would-be detective named George Phillips. A simple sort of fellow who allowed himself to get into a bad spot through poor judgment and over-eagerness for a job. A thickset blond fellow in a brown suit, wearing dark glasses and a rather gay hat. Driving a sand-colored Pontiac, almost new. You might have seen him hanging about in the hall outside my office yesterday morning. He had been following me around and before that he might have been following you around.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Why would he do that?” I lit my cigarette and dropped the match in a jade ashtray that looked as if it had never been used as an ashtray.
“I said he might have. I’m not sure he did. He might have just been watching this house. He picked me up here and I don’t think he followed me here.” I still had the coin on my hand, looked down at it, turned it over by tossing
