Стив Хокенсмит - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

Steele seated me carefully in a hard chair facing a battery of bright windows and tossed me his normal wintry glare.

“Andy tells me you have a legitimate interest in the Landmaier murder. You know how I feel about your playing Sam Spade in this district.”

I set myself to hold onto my temper. “I’m a Philip Marlowe man, myself, Lieutenant. Miss Elizabeth Anderson is my patient. I am concerned with her as a doctor, only. I no longer work for my brother as an operative. I have risen far above that. I now clear about four dollars an hour instead of $3.75.”

Steele smiled, which is usually the sign that he is going to wither someone.

“I would imagine that you would be making a fortune with all the crackpots we have in West L.A. We not only grow our own, but we attract them in droves from all over the continent.”

“My problem is that most of the crackpots don’t know they are crackpots, Lieutenant, and don’t ask me for psychological help.”

“Except when they get into serious trouble with the law.” Steele wiped off the smile and reverted to his normal, cool, flat glare. “Your client doesn’t need a psychologist, Karlins. She needs an excellent lawyer. Her emotional problem is that she is guilty as hell.”

“She claims to be innocent, Steele, but realizes she fouled up that lie detector test. That is why I’m here. I want to talk with your psychometrist and inspect the tapes on the polygraph run. If the girl is innocent, I can save you trouble.”

Steele surprised me then. He didn’t get mad. He just frowned.

“Suppose she is guilty, as part of her test indicates? Will you help us then, Mr. Clinical Psychologist?” he asked softly.

“If she’s guilty, you will have lost nothing. You can’t use any of that polygraphic material in court. With the money she has behind her and the legal protection she can hire, you won’t be able to pressure her into any confessions. If she’s guilty, I’ll drop out of the case and you will have lost nothing.”

Steele swiveled his chair around and looked out the window for several seconds, then swung the chair back again to face me.

“Fair enough. I’ll cooperate with you on these conditions. What you get from me and the polygraph technician does not go to the press. We’re keeping a lid on some details of the case. Agreed?”

I nodded and he went right on. “I can give you what you are looking for. I don’t think you will get anything more from the technician but you are welcome to try. Your patient actually did fairly well on the test. She apparently does not know how the murder was committed or when it was committed. She did react, however, to something that the victim did as he was dying.”

Steele swiveled the chair around to face his view of City Hall again and continued. “Here’s the picture. The girl shoved the kitchen door open a few inches, saw the upper part of his body and some of the blood, let go of the swinging door, backed up and started yelling for help. She claims she never went all the way into the kitchen. When the neighbor went into it, Elizabeth Anderson says she was lying down on her livingroom couch with a friend patting her on the head. Her claim, therefore, is that she never saw what had happened on the other side of that door.

“The neighbor who went into the kitchen — he’s one of those tennis bums who live in places like that — swears he never told her anything about what he saw in there. He was afraid it would further upset her. As for the two officers that arrived a few minutes later, they used their heads and didn’t say anything to her either. When the detectives got there, they buttoned up the room. Elizabeth Anderson never got into that kitchen until a week later, after it had been cleaned up. Then she moved out.

“Now, here’s what I don’t want the press to get. Landmaier was not shot, as those reporters printed in their stories. He was stabbed several times with a large kitchen knife. Before he died, he dipped his right index finger into a pool of his own blood and wrote a word on the asphalt tile alongside of him, a name or a word that isn’t in any English dictionary. He printed it in all caps, M-A-X-N-O-M-E, then he died.”

Steele paused a few seconds, then went on. “Your client apparently does not know that Landmaier was stabbed rather than shot. She is apparently telling the truth when she says she did not kill Landmaier, did not hire him killed, and does not know anything about how or why he was killed.”

“But she responds to the word MAXNOME,” I said to Steele’s back.

He spun around to face me, his ice-blue eyes narrowed. “When that word was thrown at her, she had a mild positive reaction to it. When she was asked if she’d ever heard of it, and denied it, she had a bigger reaction. When she was asked if she knew him or knew what the word meant, she had another positive response, a strong one. She knows what that damn set of seven letters means, Dr. Karlins. David Landmaier was trying to tell us something, and she knows what it is. You tell her from me that if she doesn’t tell us what it means that she is an accessory to the crime of murder.”

“She may not know what it means on a conscious level.”

“Then you start excavating vigorously into her unconscious levels and help her find out, Karlins.”

I cleared my throat. “Before I do that, Lieutenant, can you tell me if there is a Max Nome? Does this person exist?”

“Not locally there isn’t,” Steele growled. “Nor in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Seattle, New York, or Chicago. We found one in the Philadelphia phone directory, but he turned out to be an eighty-year-old retired steelworker. We have quizzed every one of Landmaier’s friends and relatives. None of them ever heard of Max Nome. He’s the biggest spook I ever chased.”

Steele passed me on to the polygraph technician, but he was right. I found nothing more. The test had been administered properly. She had been given all kinds of neutral names and nonsense phrases to which to react. Only to that strange name had she responded.

I decided I needed some background information on David Landmaier and went to the morgue files of the L.A. Times . One of my S.C. chums got me in. I found they had very little on him other than the bare facts that he had inherited his fortune at the age of twenty-five and had quit his job as an anthropology lecturer in a state college to devote full time to his hobbies. These were listed as the raising of quarter horses in Nevada, giving benefit performances as a zany amateur magician, drag racing modified sports cars in the L.A. area, and chasing girls all over the country.

I called Dean Ness and asked if I could talk to him about Landmaier and Elizabeth Anderson. He had just gotten home from his stockbroker’s job in the Wilshire area. A few minutes later, I had a tall one in my hand and was sitting in an ultra-modern chair in his sumptuous livingroom, the kind of chair that I didn’t think I’d be able to get out of without help.

Dean Ness sat cross-legged in the middle of the upholstered floor and frowned thoughtfully at me.

“How are things going for Elizabeth?” he asked gently. He spoke her name in the reverential tones that bankers usually reserve for discussing very large sums of money.

“Elizabeth is not quite ready to marry you, Dean. She is still grieving for David. Tell me, what do you know about him? I’ve got to learn more about him if I’m going to be able to help her. From what I’ve read and heard about him, so far, he doesn’t seem to be a real person. He’s more like something out of a comic strip.”

“David was not a real person, Mike. He was a mystical lost soul with more money than he knew what to do with. He was haunted by the fact that it came in faster than he could spend it. David was a tall, good-looking idiot with a gift for gab, who thought the planet Earth was a gigantic fun house full of pretty, willing girls, magic shows, and bright and shining race cars. I wouldn’t have minded his good fortune and his foolish antics and so on, but...”