James Chase: Lay Her Among the Lilies

She moved out of the desk-chair as I tossed my hat at Kerman, waking him. He gave a startled grunt, rubbed his eyes and yawned.

“What’s it like—working?” he asked. “Or haven’t you started yet?”

“I’ve started,” I said, and sat down, reached for a cigarette, lit it, shot my cuffs and plunged into the tale. I gave them all the details with the exception of my session with Nurse Gurney. I skirted over that, knowing Paula wouldn’t have approved and Kerman would have got too excited to think straight. “Not much,” I concluded, “but enough to make me think it’s worth while going on with. Maybe there’s nothing wrong; maybe there is. If there is the less commotion we make the better. We don’t want to tip anyone off just yet.”

“If this guy in the Dodge was tailing you, it seems to me someone’s tipped off already,” Kerman pointed out.

“Yeah, but we can’t be sure of that. Maybe my face interested him. Maybe he was practicing to be a detective.”

I reached for the telephone. “Give me police headquarters,” I told the exchange girl.

“You got his number?” Paula asked, fluttering through the stack of cards in her hands.

“Checking it now,” I said. “Give me Lieutenant Mifflin,” I went on when an unenthusiastic voice announced Police Headquarters. There was a plop on the line, and Mifflin’s gritty voice asked, “Hello?”

Tim Mifflin was a good tough cop, and we had worked together off and on for some time. Whenever I could I helped him, and whenever he could he helped me. He had a great respect for my hunches when playing the horses, and, by following my tips, he had had the luck to make himself a little folding money.

“Malloy here,” I said. “How are you, Tim?”

“What do you care?” he snapped. “You’ve never been interested in my health and you never will be. What do you want this time?”

“Who owns an olive-green Dodge; licence number, O.R.3345?”

“The way you use Headquarters for financial gain slaughters me,” Mifflin said. “If Brandon ever finds out what I do for you he’ll screw me.”

“Well, I won’t tell him, so it’s up to you,” I said, and grinned, “and another thing, talking about financial gain, if you want to make yourself a piece of change, put your shirt on Crab Apple for a win. Tomorrow; four-thirty.”

“You really mean my shirt?”

“I’ll say I do. Sell up your home; hock your wife; break into Brandon’s safe. As good as that. Two gets you six. The only thing that’ll stop that horse is for someone to shoot it.”

“Maybe someone will,” Mifflin said, who was always over cautious. “Well, if you say so.”

“It’s the safest bet you’ll ever have. How about that number?”

“Sure, sure. Hang on. I’ll have it for you in ten seconds.”

While I was waiting I saw Jack Kerman busily dialling on the other phone.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

“Getting my bookie. That Crab Apple sounds good.”

“Forget it. I’m just telling him what someone told me. It’s a safe enough tip for a copper, but not for a friend.”

Kerman replaced the receiver as if it had bitten him. “Suppose he sells up his home and hocks his wife? You know what a dope he is on these things.”

“Have you seen his home and wife? Well, I have. I’ll be doing him a favour.” As Mifflin’s voice came on the line, I said, “What have you got?”

“O.R.3345, did you say?”

“Yeah.”

“The car’s registered in the name of Jonathan Salzer, The Sanatorium, Foothill Boulevard. That what you want to know?”

I kept the excitement out of my voice. “Maybe. Who’s Salzer? Know anything about him?”

“Not much. He runs a crank’s home. If you have a pain in your belly he fills you up with fruit juices and lets you ferment. He does all right.”

“Nothing crooked on the side?”

“For crying out loud! He doesn’t need to be crooked. He’s making a hell of a lot of dough.”

“Well, thanks, Tim.”

“You’re sure about that horse?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I said, and winked at Kerman. “Put your shirt on it.”

“Well, I’ll spring five bucks, but no more.” I hung up.

“Five bucks! The gambler!”

“Salzer’s car, huh?” Kerman said.

I nodded.

“Maybe we did tip our hand.” I looked at Paula. “Have you anything on Salzer?”

“I’ll see.” She put a card down before me. “That might interest you. It’s all the information we have on Janet Crosby.”

I read the details while she went into the card-index room that led off the outer office.

“Dancing, tennis and golf,” I said, looking across the desk at Kerman. “Doesn’t sound like someone with heart disease. Intimate friends, Joan Parmetta and Douglas Sherrill. A couple of years back she was engaged to Sherrill, but broke it off. No reason given. Who’s Sherrill anyway?”

“Never heard of him. Want me to find out?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you went along and saw this Parmetta girl and Sherrill. Tell them you used to be an old friend of Janet in her San Francisco days. You’ll have to get the background in case they try and trip you. Paula will get that for you. What I want, Jack, is their reaction to her having heart trouble. Maybe she did have a wacky heart, but if she didn’t, then we really have something to work on.”

“Okay,” Kerman said.

Paula came in.

“Nothing much,” she said. “Salzer started his sanatorium in 1940. It’s a luxury place. Two hundred dollars a week.”

“Nice profit,” I said enviously.

“Some people must be crazy. Imagine paying all that dough for a glass of fruit juice,” Kerman said, horrified. “It sounds the kind of racket we should be in.”

“Nothing else?”

“He’s married. Speaks French and German fluently. Has a Doctor of Science degree. No hobbies. No children. Age fifty-three,” Paula said, reading from the card. “That’s all, Vic.”

“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet. “Give Jack a hand, will you? He wants the dope on this Parmetta girl and Sherrill. I’m going downstairs to have a word with Mother Bendix. I want to check on the Crosbys’ staff. That butler struck me as a phoney. Maybe she got him the job.”

At first glance, and come to that, even at second glance, Mrs. Martha Bendix, executive director of the Bendix Domestic Agency, could easily have been mistaken for a man. She was big and broad shouldered and wore her hair cut short, a man’s collar and tie, and a man’s tweed coat. It was only when she stood up and moved away from her desk you were surprised to see the tweed skirt, silk stockings and heavy brogue shoes. She was very hearty, and, if you weren’t careful to keep out of her reach, she had a habit of slapping you violently on the back, making you feel sick for the next two or three hours. She also had a laugh as loud as the bang of a twelve-bore shot-gun, and if you weren’t watching for it, you jumped out of your skin when she let it off. A woman I wouldn’t want to live with, but a good-hearted soul, generous with her money, and a lot more interested in nervous, frail little blondes than a big husky like me.

The timid bunny-faced girl who showed me into Mrs. Bendix’s cream and green office edged away from me as if I were full of bad intentions, and gave Mrs. Bendix a coy little smile that could have meant something or nothing depending on the state of your mind.

“Come on in, Vic,” Mrs. Bendix boomed from across a paper-littered desk. “Sit down. Haven’t seen you in days. What have you been doing with yourself?”

I sat down and grinned at her.

“This and that,” I told her. “Keeping the wolf from the door. I’ve looked in for a little help, Martha. Done any business with the Crosbys?”