Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Corpse in the Crystal

The blonde got a cab at the first hackstand. She wasn’t half a block away when we’d grabbed a taxi and surged into traffic behind her. She went across town, to Cedarwood Forest, the swankiest development in town, a section of wide boulevards lined with stately cedars. We watched the tail light of her cab. It slowed, turned in the white driveway of a hedge-bordered estate.

Murder gave our driver orders to drive on past. Half a block away, the chief paid the cab, and we got out and walked back. As we cut into the edge of the wide, terraced lawn, Murder said:

“This, Luke, is one of the Wendel Hobbs’ houses. His summer place, I believe. Think it over.”

As we moved like deeper shadows against the night across the lawn, I thought it over. Before, this case had been impossible. Now it was also gigantic.

Wendel Hobbs was the controlling hand behind half a dozen huge companies, a chain of paper factories, a chemical works, a major stockholde in a steel mill. He was retired from active business, eighty years old, becoming a bit doddering in his senile years, according to a couple of newspaper columnists who’d spotted him at one or two racy night spots. He had so many millions that he and his heirs couldn’t count his money in their lifetimes.

The chief found a — French door at the side of the house that opened quite easily. He hissed to me, and I inched my way through the dense shrub_I moved up beside him. We were in the Hobbs mansion.

We stood a moment, getting our bearings. This was evidently the library. Faint light filtered in from the hallway. Books, hundreds of them bound in the finest morocco, lined the walk. Here and there was a rather silly bit of bric-a-brac Hobbs had probably paid a fortune for just for amusement in his waning years.

From somewhere we could hear the subdued murmur of voices. The lawnlike carpet deadened our footsteps. We heard a woman’s voice rise and say, “I tell you, Wendel, I did the best I could!”

I was willing to bet it was the blonde talking. It was her kind of voice. Velvet, even with the strained note in it.

Near the library door, Murder drew his flashlight, shaded it, played it over a scroll-legged desk. He whistled softly between his teeth. I looked over his shoulder. He had raised the blotter on the desk. Beneath it was a packet of carbon copies. He thumbed through them. There was a carbon copy of every warning Nostra had sent out. Frank Snow. Loren Cole. Gregory Sloan. Abner Murder.

Quietly, the chief let the blotter fall back on the desk. “Hobbs,” he said. “I suddenly want to talk to old Wendel Hobbs very much.”

The hall was lighted by a brilliant chandelier. Murder inched his head out the library door, scouted the hallway with his gaze. He tugged my sleeve, and we ventured out into the glaring light.

The sound of voices was coming from a room up the hall to our left. We started toward it. At that moment footsteps sounded in the back of the hall. It was probably a servant, but we didn’t want to find out at the expense of being caught in the middle of the hallway.

We lunged silently toward a door at our right, grabbed a knob, eased inside before we were spotted. Murder’s insatiable curiosity caused him to turn on his light to see the sort of room we had ducked into.

It was a den of sorts, a big lounge, some leather easy chairs. A rack on the wall held a few loving cups and guns. There was a huge fireplace. Before the fireplace lay two men clad in the garments of workers. It didn’t take a second stab of Murder’s wan, yellow light to show that both men were dead.

I stood back while Murder bent over the two dead men. I didn’t like their staring eyes or the neat bullet holes in their temples. The chief straightened, snapped his light off. I felt his presence move over near me.

I said, “Who are they?”

“How should I know?” he sounded irked. “Their pockets are as empty as the Jordan brain. However, one little slip was made.”

“Which is?”

“On the inside of the bib of their overalls. A little cloth label. No one would think of looking for it there, except a laundry. The overalls belong to the Apex Window Washing Service.”

“Does that make sense?” I asked, after thinking it over.

“Not yet,” he said. “But it will — if I freeze in the attempt.” I sensed the strain in his voice. I had a hunch he was thinking of his blonde wife, Jo-Ann, and the Murder children. His family was never far from his thoughts when he was working on a case, especially a case as coldly and deliberately executed as this one was. The chief could never quite forget that somebody, someday, might take a grudge out on his family.

We listened for long, thick minutes. The footsteps in the hallway had died. There was no movement, no sound, until we opened the door and again heard the murmur of voices up the hall.

This time we made it to the door which concealed the owners of the voices. Murder palmed the knob. A woman talking; the cracked tones of an old man. The chief opened the door.

There was an enormous fireplace in this room too. Before it, his hands clasped behind him, stood an aged, thin man, slightly stooped, his hair a white mane. I’d seen his picture in the papers, Wendel Hobbs.

A woman sat in a high-backed deep chair near him. At the sound of our entry she jumped to her feet. It was the blonde we’d seen coming from Nostra’s house, all right. Getting a good look at her, I saw that my first assumption had been right. She was a blood-pressure raiser, definitely. A Miami beauty contest would have been a snap for her blonde, green-eyed perfection. But now her face was like chalk.

Wendel Hobbs said, “What’s the meaning of this? I’ll have you—”

“We just want palaver,” the chief said. “Don’t get apoplexy.”

The blonde said, “Who are you?”

“A civil question,” the chief said laconically, “demands a civil answer. We are private detectives. I’m Abner Murder, this is Luke Jordan.”

Wendel Hobbs made a sound that sounded almost like a groan. He drooped loosely in a chair, his faded blue eyes seeming to sink in his head.

The chief said, “I gather from your reaction, Mr. Hobbs, that you don’t exactly welcome a detective on the premises.”

Hobbs gripped the arms of his chair to still the trembling of his hands. He forced harshness into his voice. “I don’t welcome you. Either leave, or I’ll call the police.” His eyes drank in the hard, knowing smile on the chief’s lips, the light in the chief’s eyes, which were still blue but no longer baby-looking.

“It depends entirely on you, Mr. Hobbs,” Murder said. “If you want to call the police, there’s a very expensive ivory telephone on that table.” Hobbs slumped in his chair.

The blonde was still standing. “Introductions haven’t been completed,” Murder said.

“I... I’m Linda.”

“Linda?”

“Yes... just... just Linda.”

“I see,” Murder mused. “Your last name is your own. Keep it quiet if you want to. But I’d like to ask you what you were doing in the house of a crystal-gazer named Nostra tonight.”

She tried to laugh. “I? In what house? I don’t believe—”

“We saw you come out of the place,” Murder said coldly. “We know you were there.”

She took a turn about the chair, her long, red-nailed fingers gripping the back of it. “It’s none of your business, Mr. Murder.”

The chief regarded her for a long moment The fire crackled; the only sound save the rising murmur of the wind outside. “All right,” Murder said, “we’ll play it that way.”

He turned to Hobbs. “Maybe you’ll be more communicative, Mr. Hobbs, and tell us who the two dead men are in the room across the hall.”

The blonde Linda almost fainted, reeled against the chair. Hobbs rose, doddering, slumped. He looked from Murder to me, back to the chief, a very old man. He shuffled to a high secretary beside a huge window, seemed to be gazing out at the night. Then he turned from the secretary, and there was a gun in his hand. He wasn’t trembling now, either. He was cool with a coolness born of desperation. He would use that gun, I knew.