Erle Gardner - Beware the Curves

The night janitor was accustomed to the crazy goings-on of a detective agency. He grumbled a bit about people who tried to run offices on a twenty-four-hour basis, but took me up.

I latch-keyed the door and went on in to Bertha’s private office.

Bertha was being very maternal to a sad-eyed woman around thirty, who was sitting perfectly still in the chair, but who had been twisting her gloves until they looked like a piece of rope.

Bertha beamed. “This is Mrs. Endicott, Donald.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Endicott,” I said.

She gave me a cold hand and a warm smile.

“Donald,” Bertha said, “this is the damnedest story you ever heard in your life. This is absolutely out of this world. This is— Well, I want Mrs. Endicott to tell you in her own words.”

Mrs. Endicott was a brunette. She had big dark eyes, high cheekbones, smooth complexion, and, aside from a general air of funereal sadness about her, might have been a professional poker player. She’d learned somewhere to keep her emotions under complete control. Her face was as expressionless as the marble slab of a gravestone.

“Do you mind, dear?” Bertha asked.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Endicott said in a low but strong voice. “After all, that’s why we got Mr. Lam up out of bed, and he can’t very well work on a case unless he knows the facts.”

“If you can just give him the highlights,” Bertha said, “I can fill him in later on.”

“Very well,” Mrs. Endicott said and twisted her gloves so tight it seemed the stitching would start ripping.

“This goes back almost seven years,” she said.

I nodded as she paused.

“Just the highspots,” Bertha said, in a voice that was dripping with synthetic sympathy.

“John Ansel and I were in love. We were going to get married. John was working for Karl Carver Endicott.

“Karl sent John Ansel to Brazil. After John got to Brazil, Karl sent him on an expedition up the Amazon. It was a suicide trip. Karl claimed he was looking for oil prospects. There were two men in the party. He offered each of them a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus to make the trip if they completed the mission successfully.

“They were, of course, under no obligations to go, but John wanted that money very badly because that would have enabled us to get married and he could have started a business of his own. That trip was legalized murder. It was carefully designed to be such. I didn’t know it at the time. The expedition didn’t stand one chance in a thousand. The cards were stacked against them, and Karl Carver Endicott made damn certain that the cards were stacked against them.

“After a while Karl came to me with tears in his eyes. He said he had just received word that the entire party had been wiped out. They were, he said, long overdue and he had sent planes out to search. He’d also sent out ground parties. He’d spared no expense.

“It was a terrific shock to me. Karl did his best to comfort me and finally offered me security and an opportunity to patch up my life.”

She stopped talking for a moment and gave her gloves such a vicious twist that the skin over the knuckles went white.

“You married him?” I asked.

“I married him.”

“And then?”

“Later on he fired one of his secretaries. She was the first who told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. But everything fitted in with other facts as I’d come to know them.

“This ex-secretary told me that Karl Endicott had made a very careful examination in order to pick out a locale for a suicide trip. He had sent John Ansel to his death just as surely as though he had stood him up in front of a firing squad.”

“Did you go to your husband and face him with the facts?” I asked.

“There wasn’t time,” she said. “I had the most terrible, the most awful, unexpected, devastating experience. The telephone rang. I answered it. John Ansel was on the line. The other member of the expedition had perished. John had survived absolutely incredible hardships in the jungle, had finally reached civilization, and then had learned that I was married.”

“What did you do?”

She said, “In those days I hadn’t learned to control my emotions. I became completely, utterly hysterical. I told John that I belonged to him, that I always had belonged to him, that I had been tricked into marriage. I told John I must see him. I told him that I was leaving Karl immediately.

“And then I did something that I shouldn’t have done. Then I–I want you to understand, Mr. Lam, that I was hysterical. I... I was suffering from a terrific shock.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I told John over the telephone exactly what the score was. I told him that he had been sent into the jungle on a mission that constituted legalized murder. I told him that Karl wanted him out of the way and that the whole thing had been deliberately planned so that he could trick me.”

“Then what?” I asked.

She said, “For a while there was an absolute silence, then a click. I couldn’t tell whether the person at the other end had hung up the telephone or whether the connection had been broken. I finally got the operator and told her I’d been cut off. She said my party had hung up.”

“What date was this?” I asked.

“That,” she said bitterly, “was the date my husband met his death.”

“Where was John Ansel when he phoned you?”

“In Los Angeles at the airport.”

“All right. What happened?”

“I can’t explain everything that happened without telling you something about Karl. Karl was ruthless, possessive, cold-blooded and diabolically clever. When Karl wanted something, he wanted it. He wanted me. I think one of the main reasons he wanted me was because, after he had made the first overture, he found that I was not responsive.

“By the time of John’s telephone call, things were getting to a point where I had learned a great deal about Karl’s character, and I think he had gone a long way toward getting over his infatuation, if you want to call it that. After all, being married to an unwilling woman whose heart is elsewhere satisfied Karl’s love of conquest, but that was about all.”

“You faced your husband with what you had learned?”

“I did, Mr. Lam, and I would have given anything if I had only used my head instead of letting my emotions run away with me. However, for months I had been fighting myself, controlling my emotions, keeping myself under wraps. When I blew up, I blew up all over. We had a terrific scene.”

“What did you do?”

“I slapped his face. I–If I had had a weapon I would have killed him.”

“And then you walked out?”

“I walked out.”

“And what happened?”

“John Ansel had been at the airport. There was a helicopter service to Citrus Grove. He took the helicopter, picked up a taxicab and drove directly to Karl’s estate. I learned afterwards what happened.”

“All right. What did happen?”

“John rang the doorbell. Karl answered the bell personally. Karl knew, of course, that John was alive because in my anger I had told him. John hadn’t communicated with the office when he had reached civilization because of certain discoveries that he had encountered on the expedition. Still loyal to Karl’s interests, he had been planning on making a confidential communication to Karl before disclosing that he had survived the jungle expedition and facing the inevitable newspaper inquiries. However, I think that even before I told him, Karl had learned somehow that John had returned.”

“Go on.”

“I think perhaps Karl had been intending to face it out. After all, John couldn’t prove anything, or so Karl thought, but one look at John’s face and Karl knew that John knew and— Well, the John Dittmar Ansel who had been sent to Brazil on that suicide mission was not the John Dittmar Ansel who returned. John had lived in the jungle. He had lived with death at his elbow. He had been part of a constant struggle between life and death.”