CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I
T WAS EIGHT-FORTY
when I strode into the hotel where I’d left Esther Clarde. A young woman telephone operator was on duty at the switchboard. I told her to ring Miss Claxon’s room, and tell her that Mr. Lam was waiting in the lobby.
She said, “Miss Claxon has checked out.”
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Sometime last night.”
“Can you find out exactly when?”
She said, “You’d better ask the room clerk.”
I walked over to the registration desk and asked the room clerk. He moved down to the window marked
Cashier
and said, “She paid in advance.”
“I know she paid in advance. What I want to know is when she left.”
He shook his head, started to push back the drawer of cards, then some notation caught his eye. He turned it over to the corner and looked at the pencil note. “She went out about two o’clock this morning,” he said.
I thanked him and asked if there were any messages for me. He looked through a stack of envelopes and said there were none.
I called up Bertha Cool from a booth in a restaurant a couple of doors down the street. No one answered at either the office or her apartment.
I had breakfast and smoked cigarettes over two cups of coffee. I got a newspaper, glanced through the headlines, and read the sporting news. I called Bertha Cool’s office again, and she was in.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Where are you, Donald?”
“At a pay station.”
Her voice was cautious. “I understand the police are making headway in the Ringold murder.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. There are some recent developments they can’t figure out.”
“Such as what?”
“Someone got into the hotel room, apparently early this morning, and ripped it all to pieces. The upholstery was cut open, curtains were pulled down, carpets torn up, pictures taken out of the frames— A hell of a mess.”
“Any clues?”
“Apparently none. The police aren’t exactly communicative. I had to get information that was bootlegged out.”
“Nice going,” I said.
“What are you going to do, lover?”
“Just keep circulating.”
“Mr. Crumweather’s office called up. It seems that Mr. Crumweather is very anxious to see you.”
“Say what he wanted?”
“No. He just wanted to talk with you.”
“Sociable old buzzard, isn’t he?”
“Uh huh. Donald, watch your step.”
“I’m watching it.”
“Bertha couldn’t use you, you know, if you were sleeping in a room that had iron bars all over it.”
I pretended to be surprised and hurt. “You mean you’d stop my salary if I had to go to jail over trying to solve a company case?”
Bertha fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. She said, “You’re goddam right I’d stop your salary, you impudent little squirt,” and slammed up the telephone so hard it sounded as though she’d pulled the receiver hook out by the roots.
I went back and had another cup of coffee on the strength of that, then went over to Crumweather’s office.
Miss Sykes gave me one look, said, “Just a minute,” and dove into Crumweather’s private office. It was a good minute before she came out. I figured she’d had fifty seconds worth of instructions.
“Go on in, Mr. Lam.”
I went into the private office. Crumweather beamed all over his face. He pushed out a bony hand at me, and was as effusively cordial as an applicant for a loan greeting a bank appraiser who’s called to go over the physical assets.
“Well, well, Lam, my boy,” he said, “you certainly
are
an active little chap—damnably active! You certainly do get around. Yes, sir, you certainly do.”
I sat down.
Crumweather pushed his bushy eyebrows together in level speculation, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and looked me over with cold, hard appraisal. He tried to soften the severity of his eyes by freezing his lips into a smile.
“What have you been doing since I saw you last, Lam?”
“Thinking.”
“That was clever, that idea of yours about the oil company— Now tell me, Lam, just what made you use
that
approach.”
“I thought it would be a good one.”
“It was a good one, very good indeed! Too good. Now, I want to know who put you up to it.”
“No one.”
“There’s been a leak somewhere. Someone has been talking about me. A man in my position can’t afford to have his professional reputation questioned.”
“I understand that.”
“Rumors have a way of traveling, getting garbled, distorted out of all sense of proportion.”
“They do for a fact.”
“If you’ve heard anything about any of my legal activities and came to me because it had been rumored I could beat the Blue Sky Act— Well, I want to know about it. I’d be willing to be generous— You know, grateful.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
His eyes narrowed. “I take it,” he said sarcastically, “the idea just popped into your head. You said to yourself, ‘Now, I want to approach Crumweather and get him to talk. What’s the best way to get him to open up? Ah, I have it. Tell him I want to beat the Blue Sky Act.’ ”
“That’s right.”
“Bunk!”
I puffed at my cigarette.
He studied me for a while, and then said, “You know, Donald—I’m going to call you Donald because you seem like a boy to me, not that I’m commenting on your immaturity, but simply because I’m a much older man, and I’ve taken a fatherly interest in you.”
“Have you?”
“I have indeed. You know you have a very shrewd mind. There’s something about you that appeals to me. I’ve investigated your past a bit— You’ll understand my interest in you?”
“I understand.”
He beamed, then the beam expanded into a chuckle. “You do, at that,” he said.
We were silent for a minute, then Crumweather went on. “I find that you’ve had a legal education. Most interesting. I consider a legal education a wonderful foundation for success in almost any field of endeavor.”
“Primarily in the law business,” I said.
He threw back his head and laughed. “A dry sense of humor, my boy, very dry, very interesting. You know, a man with your keenness of perception could make a great deal of money in the law business—
if he had the proper connections.
It’s very difficult for a young lawyer to open an office, finance the purchase of books and office furniture, and then wait for clients to come in.”
“So I understand.”
“But persons who have a well-established law practice are sometimes willing to consider offering junior partnerships to men with the right amount of ability.”
I didn’t say anything.
He said, “I find, Donald, that you had an argument with the grievance committee in regard to legal ethics. You told a client how to commit a murder and avoid all legal responsibility.”
“I didn’t tell him anything of the sort. I was discussing abstract law.”
“The committee didn’t so understand it. The committee also said that you were in error.”
“I know they did, but it worked out. It actually held water.”
He rocked back and forth in his swivel chair, chuckling. “It did for a fact,” he admitted. “I happen to know one of the members of the grievance committee. I called the matter to his attention. He found it an embarrassing subject.”
“You cover a lot of territory yourself,” I observed.
“At times I do—not physically, but mentally. I find that a person keeps his mind keyed to a higher pitch if he conserves his physical energy as much as possible.”
I said, “All right, let’s quit beating around the bush. Where’s Esther Clarde?”
He stroked the long angle of his bony jaw with gnarled fingers. “I’m glad you’ve brought that up. I was wondering just how to broach the subject. I—”
The secretary popped her head in the door. “A long distance call,” she said, “from—”
The smile left Crumweather’s face as though he’d ripped off a mask. His lips were ugly and snarling, his eyes hard and intolerant. “I told you I wasn’t to be interrupted. I told you what to do. Get out there and do it, and don’t—”
“It’s a long-distance call from Valleydale. The man says it’s terribly important.”
Crumweather thought that over for a minute. “All right, I’ll take the call.”
He picked up the telephone on his desk. His face was without expression. Only his eyes gave evidence of extreme mental concentration. After a while I heard a click and Crumweather said, “Hello. . . . Yes, this is Crumweather. What do you want?”
I couldn’t hear anything coming in over the wire, but I could watch his face. I saw him frown, then the eyebrows rise just a bit. The mouth tightened. He glanced at me as though afraid that, through some psychic eavesdropping, I might be hearing what was reaching his left ear through the receiver. My expression reassured him, but the tendency to furtive secrecy was strong in the man. He cupped the palm of his right hand over the mouthpiece as though that would bottle up the telephone.
After a few seconds Crumweather moved his hand from the mouthpiece long enough to say, “You have to be absolutely certain you aren’t making any mistake about this,” and then slid his hand back quickly.
Again he listened, and slowly nodded. “All right. Keep me posted.”
He listened a little while longer, then said, “All right, good-by,” and hung up. He looked at me speculatively, doubled his left fist, wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the knuckles, and squeezed until the knuckles popped. He picked up the telephone, and said to his secretary, “Let me have an outside line.” He dialed a number, taking pains to see that I couldn’t watch what number he was calling. He said, “Hello, this is Crumweather. . . . All right. Now listen, get this straight. I want the operations reversed . . . Where you’ve been selling, you’ll have to buy . . .
Quit selling immediately and buy back what you’ve sold. . .
. That’s right. ... I can’t explain . . . not right now. Do what I say. . . . Well, suppose there was more of a foundation of fact than you’d thought . . . Everything was just the way you . . . Well, let’s look at it this way. Suppose a man was making a three-minute talk, and suppose everything he said in that three minutes happened to be not only true but true on a bigger scale than he’d even dared to dream. . . . That’s right . . . You haven’t any time to waste. This thing is going to leak out. Call in all the men and get busy.”
He hung up the telephone and turned to me. It took him a minute to pick up the thread of the conversation.
“Esther Clarde,” I reminded him.
“Oh, yes,” he said, and his face once more settled into that fixed, frozen smile. “You know you made a most remarkable impression on that young woman, Donald.”
“Did I?”
“You did. I mean you
really
did.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“You should be. It was most advantageous for you, but you see, I’m an older man and a wiser man, and, if I may say so, an older friend. Before she’d take any drastic steps, she’d consult me.”
“You’ve known her for some time?”
“Oh, yes, a very nice young woman. A
very
nice young woman.”
“That makes it nice,” I said.
“I can appreciate her generosity,” Crumweather said, “in trying to protect you, Donald, but I can’t condone it.”
“No?”
“No, not for a moment. Of course, Donald, a desperate man will do almost anything, but, even so, I can’t appreciate how any man could so far forget himself as to let a woman put herself in the position of being an accessory after the fact, an accomplice to the crime of murder.”
“Indeed.”
“And I have so advised Esther Clarde. It may interest you to know, Donald, that I talked with her early this morning. I have an appointment with her at ten-thirty. I’ve persuaded her that the only thing to do is to call in the officers and confess frankly that she tried to protect you.”
“You mean reverse her statement?”
“That’s it exactly.”
“Her identification won’t amount to much if she goes on the stand now and swears I was the one who went into the hotel.”
He was positively beaming. “That’s right, Donald, that’s right. You do have a very clear legal mind,
but
if she said that you had
bribed
her not to identify you, that it was because of this bribe she lied to the officers, but that afterward she had competent legal advice and realized that that made her an accessory after the fact— Well, Donald, that legal mind of yours won’t have any difficulty in puting two and two together.”
“It doesn’t,” I said.
“I didn’t think it would.”
“Very clever,” I told him.
“Thank you,” he said, flashing his teeth in a grin. “I thought it was pretty good myself.”
“All right, what do you want?”
The grin left his face. He looked at me steadily. He said, “I want that last bunch of letters that Jed Ringold was supposed to have delivered in that envelope.”
“Why?”
“As a lawyer, Donald, you don’t need to ask that question.”
“But I am asking it.”
He said, “My client is going to be tried for murder. It’s one of those cases where a jury will act on prejudice rather than evidence. Those letters could build up a prejudice against my client, and the results would be disastrous.”
“Why didn’t you destroy them when you got your hands on them, then?”
He blinked his eyes at me. “I don’t think I understand, Donald.”
I said, “You got those letters. You wanted them destroyed so the D.A. could never use them. But you were too smart to burn them up yourself. You decided you’d let Alta burn them up and pay thirty thousand dollars for the privilege. That would get the letters out of the way just as effectively as though you’d struck the match yourself, and you’d be thirty grand to the good.”
He turned the idea over in his mind for a moment, and then nodded his head slowly. “That would have been a
splendid
idea, Donald, a splendid idea. As I told you, Donald, two heads are always better than one. A young man, particularly if he’s ingenious, thinks of things an older man might well overlook. You really must consider that partnership proposition. It would mean a career for you, my boy.”