Lay Her Among the Lilies vm-2 Page 17

  As I opened the door, I heard footsteps. I stood quieter than a mouse that sees a cat, and waited. The hatchet-faced nurse came along the corridor, humming to herself. She passed quite close to me, and would have seen me if she had looked my way, but she didn’t. She kept on, opened a door on the other side of the corridor and went into a dimly-lit room. The door closed.

  I waited, breathing gently, feeling a lot better for the whisky. Minutes ticked by. A small piece of fluff, driven by the draught from under the door, scuttled along the corridor apologetically. A sudden squall of rain lashed against the grill-covered window. The wind sighed around the house. I kept on waiting. I didn’t want to cosh the nurse if I could help it. I’m sentimental about hitting women: they hit me instead.

  The nurse appeared again, walked the length of the corridor, produced a key, unlocked the main door before I realized what she was doing. I saw the door open. I saw a flight of stairs leading to a lighted something beyond. I jumped forward, but she had passed through the doorway and closed the door behind her.

  Anyway, I consoled myself I wasn’t ready to leave yet. The door could wait. I decided I would investigate the room the nurse had just left. Maybe that was where Anona was.

  I eased out the cosh, resisted the temptation to take another drink and walked along the corridor. I paused outside the door, pressed my ear to the panel and listened. I heard nothing but the wind and the rain against the mess-grilled window. I looked back over my shoulder. No one was peering at me from around the other doors. The corridor looked as lonely and as empty as a church on a Monday afternoon. I squeezed the door handle and turned slowly. The door opened, and I looked into a room built and furnished along the lines of the room in which I had been kept a prisoner.

  There were two beds; one of them empty. In the other, opposite me, was a woman. A blue night lamp made an eerie light over the white sheet and her white face. The halo of fair hair rested on the pillow, the eyes were studying the ceiling with the perplexed look of a lost child.

  I pushed the door open a little wider and walked softly into the room, closed the door and leaned against it. I wondered if she would scream. The rubber-lined door reassured me that if she did no one would hear her; but she didn’t. Her eyes continued to stare at the ceiling, but a nerve in her cheek began to jump. I waited. There was no immediate hurry, and I didn’t want to scare her.

  Slowly the eyes moved along the ceiling to the wall, down the wall until they rested on me. We looked at each other. I was aware I was breathing gently and the cosh I held in my hand was as unnecessary as a Tommy gun at a choir practice. I slid it back into my pocket.

  She studied me, the nerve jumping and her eyes widening.

  “Hello, there,” I said, cheerfully and quietly. I even managed a smile.

  Malloy and his bedside manner: a talent to be discussed with bated breath by his grandchildren; if he ever had any grandchildren, which was doubtful.

  “Who are you?” She didn’t scream nor try to run up the wall, but the nerve kept on jumping.

  “I am a sort of detective,” I said, hoping to reassure her. “I’m here to take you home.”

  Now I was closer to her I could see the pupils of her blue eyes were like pin-points.

  “I haven’t any clothes,” she said. “They’ve taken them away.”

  “I’ll find you some more. How do you feel?”

  “All right.” The fair head rolled to the right and then to the left. “But I can’t remember who I am. The man with the white hair told me I’ve lost my memory. He’s nice, isn’t he?”

  “So I am told,” I said carefully. “But you want to go home, don’t you? “

  “I haven’t a home.” She drew one long naked arm from under the sheet and ran slender fingers through the mop of fair hair. Her hand slid down until it rested on the jumping nerve. She pressed a finger against the nerve as if to hide it. “It got lost, but the nurse said they were looking for it. Have you found it?”

  “Yes; that’s why I am here.”

  She thought about that for some moments, frowning.

  “Then you know who I am?” she said at last.

  “Your name is Anona Freedlander,” I said. “And you live in San Francisco.”

  “Do I? I don’t remember that. Are you sure?”

  I was eyeing her arm. It was riddled with tiny scars. They had kept her drugged for a long time. She was more or less drugged now.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Can you get out of bed?”

  “I don’t think I want to,” she said. “I think I would rather go to sleep.”

  “That’s all right,” I told her. “You go to sleep. We’re not ready to leave just yet. In a little while: after you’ve had your sleep, we’ll go.”

  “I haven’t any clothes, or did I tell you that? I haven’t anything on now. I threw my nightdress into the bath. The nurse was very angry.”

  “You don’t have to bother about anything. I’ll do the bothering. I’ll find you something to wear when we’re ready to go.”

  The heavy lids dropped suddenly, opened again with an effort. The finger slid off the nerve.

  It wasn’t jumping any more.

  “I like you,” she said drowsily. “Who did you say you were?”

  “Malloy. Vic Malloy: a sort of detective.”

  She nodded.

  “Malloy. I’ll try to remember. I have a very bad memory. I never seem to remember anything.” Again the lids began to fall. I stood over her, watching. “I don’t seem to be able to keep awake.” Then after a long pause and when I thought she was asleep, she said in a faraway voice: “She shot him, you know. I was there. She picked up the shot-gun and shot him. It was horrible.”

  I rubbed the tip of my nose with my forefinger. Silence settled over the room. She was sleeping now. Whatever the nurse had pushed into her had swept her away into oblivion. Maybe she wouldn’t come to the surface again until the morning. It meant carrying her out if I could get out myself. But there was time to worry about that.

  If I had to carry her I could wrap her in the sheet, but if she insisted on walking, then I’d have to find her something to wear.

  I looked around the room. The chest of drawers stood opposite the foot of the bed. I opened one drawer after the other. Most of them were empty; the others contained towels and spare bedding. No clothes.

  I crossed the room to the cupboard, opened it and peered inside. There was a dressing-gown, slippers and two expanding suit-cases stacked neatly on the top shelf. I hauled one of them down. On the lid were the embossed initials A.F. I unstrapped the case, opened it. The contents solved my clothes problem. It was packed with clothes. I pawed through them. At the bottom of the case was a Nurse’s uniform.

  I dipped my fingers into the side pockets of the case. In one of them I found a small, blue-covered diary dated 1948. I thumbed through it quickly. The entries were few and far between. There were several references to ‘Jack’, and I guessed he was Jack Brett, the naval deserter, Mifflin had told me about.

  24.1 Movie with Jack. 7.45.

  28.1 Dinner L’Etoile. Meet Jack 6.30.

  29.1 Home for week-end.

  5.2 Jack rejoining his ship.

  Nothing more until March 10th.

  10.3 Still no letter from Jack.

  12.3 Dr. Salzer asked me if I would like outside work. I said yes.

  16.3 Start work at Crestways.

  18.3 Mr. Crosby died.

  The rest of the diary was a blank as her life had been a blank since that date. She had gone to Crestways presumably to nurse someone. She had seen Crosby die. So she had been locked up in this room for two years and had drug shot into her in the hope that sooner or later her mind would deteriorate and she wouldn’t remember what had happened. That much was obvious, but she still remembered. The horror of the scene still lingered in her mind. Maybe she had come suddenly into the room where the two girls had been fighting for the possession of the gun. She may have drawn back when Crosby had taken a hand in the s
truggle, not wishing to embarrass him, and she had seen the gun swing on Crosby and the shot fired.

  I looked at the still, white face. Sometime, but not now, there had been character and determination in that face. She wasn’t the type to hush anything up, nor would she be influenced by money. She was much more likely to insist on the police being called. So they had locked her away.

  I scratched the side of my jaw thoughtfully and flapped the little diary against the palm of my hand. The next move was to get out, and get out quickly.

  And as if in answer to this thought, there was a sudden and appalling crash that shook the building: it sounded as if part of the house had collapsed.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin, reached the door in two strides and jerked it open. The corridor was full of mortar and brick dust, and out of the dust came two figures: guns in fists, running swiftly towards Hopper’s room—Jack Kerman and Mike Finnegan. At the sight of them I gave a croaking cheer. They pulled up sharply, their guns covering me.

  Kerman’s tense face broke into a wide, expansive grin.

  “Universal Services at your service,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Want a drink, pal?”

  “I want transport for a nude blonde,” I said, hugging him, and took a slap on the back from Mike that staggered me. “What did you do—pull the house down?”

  “Hooked a couple of chains to the window and yanked it out with a ten-ton truck,” Kerman said, grinning from ear to ear. “A little crude, but effective. Where’s the blonde?”

  Where the mess-grill window had been there was now a gaping hole and shattered brickwork.

  I hauled Kerman into Anona’s room while Finnegan guarded the corridor. It took us about ten seconds to wrap the unconscious girl in a sheet and carry her out of the room.

  “Rear-guard action, Mike,” I said as we swept past him to the hole in the wall. “Shoot if you have to.”

  “Sling her over my shoulder,” Kerman said, twittering with excitement. “There’s a ladder against the wall.”

  I helped him climb up on the tottering brickwork. A naked arm and leg hung limply near his face.

  “Now I know why guys join the Fire Service,” he said, as he began his cautious climb down the ladder.

  Below I could see a large truck parked near the house and at the foot of the ladder I spotted Paula. She waved to me.

  “Okay, Mike,” I called. “Let’s go.”

  As Mike joined me, the door at the end of the corridor burst open and the hatchet-face nurse appeared. She gave one gaping look at us and the ruined wall and started to scream.

  We scrambled down the ladder and piled into the truck.

  Paula was already at the driving-wheel, and, as we scrambled into the back of the truck, she let in the clutch and drove crazily across the flower beds.

  Kerman had laid Anona on the floor and was looking down at her.

  “Yum, yum,” he said, and twirled his moustache. “If I’d known she was as good as this, I’d have come sooner.”

  Chapter V

  I

  A buzzer buzzed, and the platinum blonde unwound her slinky form from behind her desk and came over to me. She said Mr. Willet would see me now. She spoke as if she were in church, and looked as if she should have been in the front row of Izzy Jacob’s pretties at the Orchid Room Follies.

  I followed the sway of her hips across the outer office to the inner sanctum. She tapped on the door with an emerald green nail, opened it and tucked up a stray curl the way women have as she said, “Mr. Malloy is here.”

  She stood aside as my cue to enter. I entered.

  Willet was entrenched behind his super-sized desk and was staring dubiously at something that looked like a Last Will and Testament, and probably was. A fat, gold-tipped cigarette burned between two brown fingers. He waved me to a chair without looking up.

  The platinum blonde went away. I watched her go. At the door she managed to snap a hip so it quivered under the black sheen of her silk dress. I was sorry when the door closed on her.

  I sat down, and looked inside my hat and tried to remember when I had bought it. It seemed a long, long time ago. The hatter’s imprint was indecipherable. I told myself I’d buy myself a new hat if I could persuade Willet to part with any more money. If I couldn’t, then I’d make do with this one.

  I thought these thoughts to pass the time. Willet seemed lost in his legal film-flammery: a picture of a big-shot lawyer making money. You could almost hear the dollars pouring into his bank.

  “Cigarette,” he said suddenly and absently. Without taking his eyes off the mass of papers he clutched in his hand, he pushed the silver box towards me.

  I took one of the fat, gold-tipped cigarettes I found in the box and lit it. I hoped it would make me feel like a moneymaker too, but it didn’t. It looked a lot better than it tasted: that kind of cigarette usually does.

  Then suddenly, just as I was getting ready to doze, he tossed the papers into the out-tray, hitched forward his chair, and said, “Now, Mr. Malloy, let’s get at it. I have another appointment in ten minutes.”

  “Then I had better see you some other time,” I said. “We won’t be through in ten minutes. I don’t know how much you value the Crosby account, Mr. Willet, but it must be worth a tidy sum. Without shouting it from the house tops it wouldn’t surprise me if you won’t have the account much longer.”

  That jarred him. He stared at me bleakly, crushed out his half-smoked cigarette and leaned halfway across his desk.

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “Do you want it in detail or do you want just a quick peep at it?” I asked. “It’s bad either way, but in detail it sort of creeps up on you.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “A half an hour, maybe more; and then you’ll want to ask questions. Say an hour, maybe a little longer. But you won’t be bored.”

  He chewed his lower lip, frowning, then reached for the telephone and cancelled three appointments all in a row. I could see it hurt him to do it, but he did it. A ten-minute interview with a guy like Willet would he worth a hundred bucks, maybe more—to him, not to you.

  “Go ahead.” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Why haven’t you been in touch with me before?”

  “That’s part of it.” I told him, and laid my hat under my chair. I had a feeling I might he buying a new one before very long. “I’ve spent the past five days in an asylum for the insane.”

  But I wasn’t going to jar him so easily again. He made a grunting noise, but his expression didn’t change.

  “Before I get started,” I said, “maybe you might tell me about Miss Crosby’s banking account. Did you get a look at it?”

  He shook his head.

  “The bank manager quite rightly refused. If he had shown it to me and the fact had leaked out, he would have lost the account: it’s worth a lot of money. But he did tell me the insurance money had been converted to bearer bonds and has been withdrawn from the account.”

  “Did he say when?”

  “Soon after probate.”

  “And you have written to Miss Crosby asking her to call on you?”

  “Yes. She’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  “When did you write to her?”

  “Tuesday: five days ago.”

  “Did she answer by return?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I don’t think she’ll keep the appointment. Anyway, we’ll see.” I tapped the ash into his silver ashtray. “All right, that covers the points we made together. Now I’d better get on with my tale.”

  I told him how MacGraw and Hartsell had called on me. He listened, sunk down in his chair, his eyes as anonymous as a pair of headlights. He neither laughed nor cried when I described how they had beaten me up. It hadn’t happened to him, so why should he care? But when I told him how Maureen had appeared on the scene, his brows came down in a frown, and he allowed himself the luxury of tapping on the edge of his desk with his fingernails.

  That was p
robably the nearest he would ever get to a show of excitement.

  ‘“She took me to a house on the cliff road, east of San Diego Highway. She said it was hers: a nice place if you like places that cost a lot of money and are smart enough to house movie stars in. Did you know she had it?”

  He shook his head.

  “We sat around and talked,” I went on. “She wanted to know why I was interested in her, and I showed her her sister’s letter. For some reason or other she seemed scared. She wasn’t acting: she was genuinely frightened. I asked her if she was being blackmailed at that time, and she said she wasn’t, and that Janet was probably trying to make trouble for her. She said Janet hated her. Did she?”

  Willet was playing with a paper-knife now; his face was set, and there was a worried look in his eyes.

  “I understand they didn’t get on: nothing more than that. You know how it is with stepsisters.”

  I said I knew how it was with stepsisters.

  Time went by for a few minutes. The only sound in the room was the busy tick of Willet’s desk clock.

  “Go on,” he said curtly. “What else did she say?”

  “As you know, Janet and a guy named Douglas Sherrill were engaged to be married. What you probably don’t know is Sherrill is a dark horse; possibly a con man, certainly a crook. According to Maureen, she stole Sherrill from Janet.”

  Willet didn’t say anything. He waited.

  “The two girls had a showdown which developed into a fight,” I went on. “Janet grabbed a shot-gun. Old man Crosby appeared and tried to take the gun away from her. He got shot and killed.”

  I thought for a moment Willet was going to jump right across his desk. But he controlled himself, and said in a voice that seemed to come from under the floor, “Did Maureen tell you this?”

  “Oh. yes. She wanted to get it off her chest. Now here’s another bit you’ll like. The shooting had to be hushed up. I was wrong about Dr. Salzer signing Crosby’s certificate. He didn’t sign it. Mrs. Salzer signed it. According to her she is a qualified doctor, and a friend of the family. One of the girls called her and she came around and fixed things. Lessways, who isn’t the type to make things awkward for the wealthy, accepted the yarn that Crosby was cleaning his gun and shot himself accidentally. He took their word for it. So did Brandon.”