Джеймс Чейз - There’s Always A Price Tag

‘I guess I’m in the way,’ I said. ‘I’ll go up to my room.’

‘Stay right here, Mr. Nash,’ Maddux said. ‘There may be points where you can help us. Sit down. Sit down, Steve.’ He waited until we had sat down, then he lit his pipe and went on, ‘Well? What’s it look like?’

Harmas lit a cigarette.

‘You remember the business we had over that striptease dancer last year? When she tried to gyp us out of a million and a half bucks by a neat trick that we nearly fell for?’ he said. ‘Well, this setup seems to me to be along those lines.’

Something as cold as a dead man’s hand clutched my heart when he said that. Neither he nor Maddux was looking at me, and they didn’t see my convulsive start.

Maddux said: ‘What makes you think that?’

‘The things that have appeared to happen that couldn’t possibly have happened,’ Harmas returned, sinking further into his chair. ‘It’s so obviously a clever trick, but it beats me how it was worked. For instance, Dester was supposed to have entered the house by the cloakroom window. All the other windows in the house and all the doors were locked. The cloakroom window was open: so that was the way he was supposed to enter the house, but he didn’t because I was right outside the cloakroom window watching the house all the evening. Dester didn’t enter the house that way, so how did he get in?’

‘He could have been hiding in the house during the afternoon,’ Maddux suggested.

‘He wasn’t. Lewis told me he went over the house from top to bottom at six o’clock in the evening when I took up my position in the garden. Dester wasn’t in the house then, and he didn’t get into the house after that time, but for all that he was found dead in the study.’

Maddux moved to a chair and sat down.

‘Yes: that’s quite a point. What else?’

‘I’ve seen ten suicides from shots in the head during my career,’ Harmas went on. ‘The mess was considerable, and yet Dester bled very little. If it wasn’t absolutely impossible, I would have said he had shot himself some other place and then moved himself to his study to finish his bleeding there.’

Maddux shifted impatiently.

‘What did the medical examiner say?’

Harmas lifted his shoulders.

‘He was surprised, but he didn’t seem to be put off his conviction that Dester shot himself. After all, here was a guy, a gun at his side, shot through the head, causing instantaneous death, who hadn’t been dead for more than fifteen minutes, who couldn’t have been brought into the house since I was watching outside and all the doors and windows, except for the small cloakroom window through which it would be difficult, not to say impossible, to push a dead body, were locked. So the doc just shrugged his shoulders and said odd things happen and he had no idea why Dester hadn’t bled more than he had. He accepted the situation because there was no other theory that would fit.’

Maddux showed his white teeth in a grin.

‘But we know better, huh?’ He looked over at me. ‘I think I mentioned to you that I have had some experience in fraud, Mr. Nash. It is unbelievable the tricks some guys get up to to earn themselves an easy buck. I’ve got to the point now when I don’t rely on my eyes and ears; I rely on hunches. You’d be surprised how my hunches pay off.’

‘You’ll have to have a pretty hot hunch to explain why Dester didn’t bleed as much as he should for all that,’ Harmas said.

Maddux waved this aside. ‘What else have you got?’

‘There were no fingerprints,’ Harmas said. ‘Not one. Dester left a confession note; no prints on the paper nor the typewriter. Apparently he took a drink and dropped a bottle of whisky, but there were no prints on either the glass nor on the broken bottle. There were no prints on the gun. It had been wiped clean. There were no prints on the cloakroom window, and yet he was supposed to have opened it.’

‘Maybe he wore gloves.’

‘Then where are they? I’ve looked for them and I can’t find them. Why should a guy write a confession note in gloves?’

I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my face. I was feeling so bad I was past caring if they saw me do it, but neither of them looked at me.

‘Then there’s another thing,’ Harmas went on. ‘When Dester left the house to go to the sanatorium with Mrs. Dester, he was wearing a dark brown hat, a camel-haired coat, dark grey trousers and reverse calf shoes. When he was found in his study, he had no top coat or hat, his trousers were blue and he was wearing black leather shoes.’

‘What did Bromwich think of that?’

‘He thought maybe Dester had soiled his clothes while he was at the forestry station and had changed into the clothes he had with him in the suitcase. He’s having a search made for the camel-haired coat. He’s checking all the left-luggage depots as a start. It may take time, but he’s working first on those near where the Rolls was ditched.’

Maddux scratched the side of his jaw with his pipe stem. He looked relaxed and there was a contented expression in his eyes.

‘It looks as if we have a nice little puzzle dropped in our laps,’ he said. ‘I knew this was an attempt at fraud. I smelt it. Someone has thought up a smart idea to get himself a packet of dough. I told Bromwich to look for the other man. Well, if he won’t we will.’

‘You think there’s another man?’ Harmas said, lifting his head and staring at Maddux. ‘You think Mrs. Dester had a lover?’

‘I’m damned sure she did. Between them I think they cooked up a smart idea to murder Dester and pick up some money. She didn’t think up the idea. The last time she tried to defraud an insurance company she nearly landed herself in jail. This is a much more calculated effort; much more clever. A man thought it up, and who else could he be but Mrs. Dester’s boyfriend?’

‘You really think Dester was murdered?’ Harmas said. ‘That’s not so hot for the company, is it? We’ll have to settle the claim if he was murdered.’

I looked quickly at Maddux. Everything depended on what he would say to this. He was smiling at Harmas, taking no notice of me.

‘Now look,’ he said, ‘we have never bilked on a claim yet and we never will. Dester gave us an out when he cancelled the suicide clause. Maybe a lot of smaller companies would have kept out of this and accepted the police’s findings that Dester had killed himself, but I take a broader view. This is murder. Okay, maybe it will cost us three-quarters of a million, but in the long run it will save us money. I have never let one fraud go unchallenged. I have put eighteen smart alecs in the death cell. Other smart alecs are beginning to learn that it isn’t safe to monkey with the National Fidelity. If I let this one pass I’ll be asking for trouble. I’m not going to let it pass. I’m going to prove this is murder. It’ll be a damn fine advertisement for us, and it will act as a warning.’ His grin widened. ‘But it doesn’t mean that we will have to pay up. It might not be in the interests of the public to settle such a claim. Remember that phrase — the interests of the public. It has stopped a lot of payments in the past, and it will go on stopping them in the future. Now I’ll tell you both something. I think these two — Mrs. Dester and her boyfriend — were smart enough to know that we would come after them with everything we’ve got if Dester was murdered and she put in a claim. So what do they do? I’ll tell you: they planned to murder Dester and fix it so it would look like suicide. By doing that they knew they were passing up all hopes of making a claim. They hoped that as they weren’t making a claim, we would stand back and let them get away with the murder. Now this is the pay off.’ He leaned forward, pointing the stem of his pipe at Harmas. ‘They were smart enough to know that if we didn’t settle the claim, we would return the premiums, and do you know how much Dester has paid in premiums over the past years? He’s paid one hundred and four thousand dollars. That’s what they were after: not the three-quarters of a million. That was too dangerous to grab at, but the returned premiums were something worth having and they were safe. Okay, Dester’s debts amount to fifty thousand dollars. By the time the house, furniture, cars and what have you are sold there will be enough to pay the debts. They would have been left with one hundred and four thousand dollars which is quite a nice piece of money.’