Джеймс Чейз - There’s Always A Price Tag

As soon as we had sat down, Maddux turned to Madvig.

‘I don’t know any facts except what I’ve read in the newspapers,’ he said. ‘Dester, as you know, is one of my clients. He is insured with us for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and that’s quite a piece of money. As far as my company is concerned, he is a highly valuable liability. I’d like to get the facts straight. Will one of you put me in the picture?’

Madvig nodded over to Bromwich who cleared his throat and sat forward on the edge of his chair.

‘We were notified by Mr. Nash on the night of June 25th that both Dester and his wife were missing. She was taking him to the Belle View sanatorium out at Santa Barbara. They didn’t arrive there. They were seen around half past eleven on Highway 101 by a State trooper, then they vanished.’

‘Why was he going to the sanatorium?’ Maddux asked.

‘He was a sick man: an alcoholic,’ Burnett said. ‘I talked with Mrs. Dester. She told me he was having hallucinations and was being violent. She persuaded him to go into the sanatorium. Mr. Nash here looked after him. They got on well together and he could handle him.’

Maddux looked at me. His eyes seemed to bore right through to the back of my head.

‘Was Dester violent?’

I hadn’t spent most of the night pacing the floor for nothing. If they were to be made to think Dester had killed Helen, I had to supply the motive.

‘No, he wasn’t violent,’ I said. ‘He seemed pretty ill to me: almost as if he were drugged.’

That got a reaction from Bromwich.

‘You didn’t tell me that,’ he said aggressively.

‘I told you he slept most of the time.’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

‘Did Dester want to go to the sanatorium?’ Maddux broke in impatiently.

‘Yes. Mrs. Dester said he was glad she had arranged for him to go,’ Burnett said.

‘I’m asking Nash. Never mind what Mrs. Dester said,’ Maddux snapped.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Whenever I went into his room, he was either asleep or in a kind of coma. I never mentioned the sanatorium to him.’

Maddux lifted his shoulders. He nodded at Bromwich.

‘Go on,’ he said, and took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it from a much-worn leather pouch.

‘I thought as Dester owed a whale of a lot of money,’ Bromwich began when Maddux interrupted.

‘How much money?’

Burnett looked at me.

‘I haven’t had time to complete a statement,’ I said, ‘but at a rough guess it would be around twenty-seven thousand, but it’s probably more than that.’

‘I thought at first he had skipped,’ Bromwich went on. ‘I notified the patrols to look out for the car: it was unmistakable: a blue-and-cream convertible Rolls. It was found abandoned on West 9th Street. We’ve checked the airport, the station and the bus depots, but no one has seen Dester. It looked at first that, after passing through Ventura, they had turned back to Hollywood, or at least Dester had. Either that or they were held up by kidnappers who later ditched the car. Anyway, the car was brought back to Hollywood after passing through Ventura.’

I knew sooner or later he would get around to Helen’s death, and I was in an agony of suspense to learn how she had died. It was as much as I could do to sit still.

‘We continued the search for Dester,’ Bromwich went on. ‘We concentrated our search between Ventura, Glendale and West 9th Street. We got no leads. No one had seen the Rolls on the return journey. A few motorists and the State trooper had seen it on the outward journey. The State trooper had come close enough to it to see there were only two people in it: Mrs. Dester; he identified her by her white hat, and Dester.’

‘How did he identify him?’ Maddux asked from behind a cloud of blue-white tobacco smoke.

I felt my heart give a little kick, and to cover my tension, I took out my cigarette-case and lit a cigarette.

‘He saw Dester was wearing a camel-hair coat. We have a description from Miss Temple how Dester was dressed when he left the house.’

Maddux turned his eyes on Marian. He seemed to be noticing her for the first time. ‘You saw Dester leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know Dester by sight?’

‘No. It was the first time I saw him.’

‘He was supposed to be a sick man. Did he look sick to you?’

‘He was very unsteady. His eyes seemed to hurt him.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I heard him ask for the hall light to be turned out.’

Maddux scratched the side of his jaw with the stem of his pipe.

‘You mean he came down the stairs in the dark?’

My heart was banging so violently I was scared they would hear it.

‘It wasn’t really dark. There were four wall lights on, but the light was very dim.’

‘So you couldn’t see his face?’

‘No.’

‘Were you supposed to be watching him?’

‘Mrs. Dester asked me to be ready in case she needed help with him. She asked me to keep out of sight as Mr. Dester was sensitive.’

‘Did he need help?’

‘No.’

Maddux turned to Bromwich. ‘Go ahead.’

It was obvious that Bromwich didn’t like all these interruptions. His fiery face was taking on a deeper shade.

‘We had a report from a motorist that he had seen the lights of a car out at Newmark’s forestry station. It wasn’t until the motorist had read of Dester’s disappearance that he thought of reporting what he had seen. Newmark’s station has been up for sale these past five weeks and the motorist happened to know no one was working there. I went up there and found Mrs. Dester. She was dead.’

I leaned forward to tap off the ash of my cigarette, partly turning my face so they couldn’t see it. I felt I was losing colour.

‘A window of one of the huts had been broken; the lock on the door had been removed. She was in one of the rooms, tied hand and foot and gagged. She had been dead about twenty-six hours. I reckon she died within an hour after the State trooper had seen her on the highway.’

Maddux asked the question I had been waiting for.

‘Was she murdered?’

‘I guess so,’ Bromwich said. ‘She had received a very violent blow on the jaw and she had taken a heavy fall, landing on the back of her head. The spinal cord at the base of the skull was fractured by the blow and the fall completed the fatal injuries. The M.O. says she must have died soon after receiving the blow.’

I was ice cold now. Only by the frantic instinct for self-preservation did I manage to keep my face expressionless.

‘Whoever hit her obviously didn’t know he had killed her,’ Bromwich went on importantly, ‘or he wouldn’t have tied her up like that.’

‘If he were smart,’ Maddux said quietly, ‘that’s just what he would do so he could plead to a manslaughter rap if he were caught.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Bromwich said uneasily. He looked across at Madvig, who gave him a cold stare from his close-set eyes. ‘I had thought of that too.’

‘Any clues?’ Maddux asked.

‘Not a thing. No fingerprints. The gag was a scarf that belonged to her. The ropes came from a crate in the room.’ Maddux began to pace up and down before the fireplace.

‘And no sign of Dester?’

‘We’re still hunting for him. He can’t get away.’

‘What makes you think he’s in a position to get away?’

Madvig spoke for the first time.

‘We’re working on the theory that Dester murdered his wife.’

Maddux paused. He looked at Madvig, then at Bromwich, then at me. It was as much as I could do to meet the hard, staring eyes. Then he looked at Burnett.

‘Do you think Dester would murder his wife?’

‘Dester was an alcoholic. He might do anything,’ Burnett said curtly.