Росс Макдональд - Meet Me at the Morgue

A colored maid in uniform opened the door and looked down at my briefcase with suspicion.

“Is Mr. Richards home?”

“I don’t know. What is it you want?”

“Tell him it’s about the burglary.”

“Are you from the police?”

“I’m connected with the police.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come in. I guess he’ll see you.”

She left me in a room with a heavily beamed ceiling and book-lined walls. Many of the books were beautifully bound, but they looked as if they had never been read. Someone had probably bought them all at once, stacked them in the cases because the room required them, and then forgotten them.

A round-faced white-haired man in a dinner jacket darted in, leaning forward as if the floor were slanted to his disadvantage. He shook my hand vigorously. “Glad to meet you, sergeant, always glad to meet a member of your fine organization. Magnificent library I have here, eh? Cost me five thousand dollars for the books alone. Wish I had time to read them. That organ in the alcove cost three five. Sit down. Can I offer you a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’m not a detective, by the way. I’m a probation officer. The name is Cross.”

“I see,” he said uncomprehendingly. “I’m a great admirer of the work you boys are doing. Have a cigar?”

“No, thanks.”

He clipped a long pale-green cigar and thrust the end into his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said around it. “I have them specially made for me in Cuba. Cost me four fifty a thousand. I smoke a thousand of them in two months. You’d think it would spoil my condition but it doesn’t. Matter of fact, I broke eighty today, for the eleventh time. Collected a little side-bet of two hundred dollars.”

“Good for you, Mr. Richards.”

The irony was lost on him. He beamed. “I’m no Bobby Jones. But I do make enough on my game to pay my club dues. The way it works out, I get all that fine exercise for nothing. Not to mention all the fine personal contacts.” He lit his cigar, smacking his lips as he puffed, and blinked at me through the smoke. “You came about the burglary, Leah said. You haven’t recovered the rest of our stuff?”

“I’m afraid not. I came on the chance that you could give me some information.”

“About the stuff?”

“About the burglar,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

He said: “The insurance company paid me off in full, you’ll be glad to know. An aggregate of fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. That included three hundred and forty dollars for the suit. They didn’t believe at first that I pay three forty for an ordinary suit. Showed ’em the tailor’s bill, and that convinced ’em. Brand-new suit, only had been cleaned once. Matter of fact, it’d just got back from the cleaner’s. It was hanging inside the service entrance. He must have just lifted it on the spur of the moment, when he was on his way out.”

“Did you see him?”

“I didn’t. Mabel did – my wife. Apparently she had quite a long conversation with him. How about that for gullibility – inviting him into our home and treating him like a king while he was stealing her gewgaws right under her nose.” He clucked derisively. “Why do you ask? Do you have another suspect for her to look over?”

“I have some pictures here.” I tapped my briefcase. “Can I speak to your wife?”

“Don’t see why not.” He opened his mouth to shout for her and then thought bettter of it, touching a bell-push in the wall instead. “Might as well get some use out of the servants,” he said. “Lord knows they cost me enough. That maid alone gets two hundred a month and her keep. They paid me less than that when I started with the company–”

I warded off biography with a question: “Did I understand you to say there was a suspect arrested?”

“They didn’t arrest him. He was the wrong man. Mabel may be gullible, but she does have an eye for faces. I’d trust her memory for faces any time. They didn’t even bring the police into it. No case.”

“Who asked your wife to look at him?”

“The insurance investigator. That was the day after they recovered the wristwatch. I had to pay back the money they gave me for the wristwatch. Two hundred dollars. It wasn’t one of her good ones. She keeps the ones with the diamonds locked up in the safe.”

I hadn’t often interviewed a more willing, or a more confusing witness. “So the insurance investigator recovered a wristwatch?” I said hopefully.

“That’s right. It turned up a couple of weeks ago in a pawnshop in East Los Angeles. They traced the man that pawned it: he’s a photographer out in Pacific Palisades.”

“A photographer.”

“Yeah. The burglar was a photographer, too, or claimed to be. But it wasn’t the same man. The one that pawned the wristwatch said he bought it from a customer. Apparently he was telling the truth. Mabel went out to his place in Pacific Palisades with the insurance man. She walked right into the shop and talked to the fellow, pretended to be interested in getting her picture took. She got a bang out of that, Mabel’s still an actress at heart. Mabel was a very great actress at one time. I directed her myself in thirteen pictures.”

The maid appeared in the doorway. “You want me, Mr. Richards?”

“Ask Mrs. Richards to come out here – to join me in the library.”

I said when the maid had gone: “Is Mrs. Richards in good health? No heart condition or anything like that?”

“Mabel’s as strong as a horse.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“These pictures I have are pictures of a dead man.”

“He’s dead?”

“Not only that. He’s pretty badly smashed. I thought you should be warned.”

“Mabel can take it.”

“Take what, Jason?”

A woman had quietly entered the room behind us. She was slender and tall in a black evening-sheath. Her graying brunette head was small and handsome, set off by fine tanned shoulders.

“What can I take? What are you letting me in for now?” She was smiling.

“The officer here – Mr. Cross? – has some pictures of a dead body.”

“What on earth for, Mr. Cross?”

“I think it’s the man who burglarized your house.”

“He didn’t exactly burglarize –”

“No,” Richards said. “You invited him over and practically handed him the stuff on a silver platter. If it wasn’t for the insurance, I’d be out fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. No.” The adding machine in his head clicked, almost audibly. “Twelve twenty, after they recovered the wristwatch for me.”

His wife laid a hand on his arm and regarded him with calm tolerance: “But you did have insurance, so you’re not out a penny. I admit I was taken in, though.”

“How did it happen, Mrs. Richards?”

“Oh, quite naturally. This very pleasant-voiced young man called me up one morning early in February.”

“It was January,” her husband said. “January the twelfth.”

“January, then. He said he was a photographer with some home magazine, and he’d heard about our house, how beautifully done it was, and would I mind if he came and took some pictures. I said certainly not. I’m a notorious sucker, and oh so very house-proud.”

“Naturally,” her husband said. “You’ve got a fine big house, why shouldn’t you be proud of it? It cost into six figures…”

“Be quiet, Jason. He turned up later in the morning with his equipment. I showed him over the house, and he took his pictures, or pretended to. It never occurred to me to be suspicious, and I admit I was pretty careless leaving him alone in some of the rooms. Well, to make a long story short, he picked up everything loose and thanked me and bowed himself out. I even gave him a bottle of beer to drink.”