“Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said, as I walked out and left her sitting there, snapping her fingers in an ecstasy of exasperation.
Chapter 8
I woke up about one-thirty and had trouble getting back to sleep. A whole series of events were chasing around in my mind trying to fit themselves into a pattern.
Three or four times I would doze off, only to waken with a start as all of the various ideas started chasing each other around like puppies at play. Finally about two-thirty I slipped into fitful sleep. It was broken by dreams and finally shattered by the ringing of the telephone bell.
I groped for the receiver.
Bertha Cool was on the line. I knew by the tone of her voice that we’d struck pay dirt.
“Donald,” she said in her most cooing voice, but mouthing the words as though each one had been a dollar rung up in the cash register, “Bertha hates to bother you at night, but could you get dressed and hurry to the office?”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I can’t explain, Donald, but we have a client who is in very great trouble. We—”
I said, “Listen, Bertha, are you dealing with the man who was arrested, with the woman who was with him, or with some lawyer?”
“The second,” she said.
“I’ll be right up. Where are you now?”
“I’m at the office, Donald. It’s the strangest, the weirdest story you ever heard in your life.”
“Mrs. Endicott there with you?”
“Yes,” Bertha said shortly.
“I’ll be up.”
I tumbled out of bed, into a shower, hit the high spots with an electric razor, jumped into clothes and drove through deserted streets to the office building.
The night janitor was accustomed to the crazy goings-on of a detective agency. He grumbled a bit about people who tried to run offices on a twenty-four-hour basis, but took me up.
I latch-keyed the door and went on in to Bertha’s private office.
Bertha was being very maternal to a sad-eyed woman around thirty, who was sitting perfectly still in the chair, but who had been twisting her gloves until they looked like a piece of rope.
Bertha beamed. “This is Mrs. Endicott, Donald.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Endicott,” I said.
She gave me a cold hand and a warm smile.
“Donald,” Bertha said, “this is the damnedest story you ever heard in your life. This is absolutely out of this world. This is— Well, I want Mrs. Endicott to tell you in her own words.”
Mrs. Endicott was a brunette. She had big dark eyes, high cheekbones, smooth complexion, and, aside from a general air of funereal sadness about her, might have been a professional poker player. She’d learned somewhere to keep her emotions under complete control. Her face was as expressionless as the marble slab of a gravestone.
“Do you mind, dear?” Bertha asked.
“Not at all,” Mrs. Endicott said in a low but strong voice. “After all, that’s why we got Mr. Lam up out of bed, and he can’t very well work on a case unless he knows the facts.”
“If you can just give him the highlights,” Bertha said, “I can fill him in later on.”
“Very well,” Mrs. Endicott said and twisted her gloves so tight it seemed the stitching would start ripping.
“This goes back almost seven years,” she said.
I nodded as she paused.
“Just the highspots,” Bertha said, in a voice that was dripping with synthetic sympathy.
“John Ansel and I were in love. We were going to get married. John was working for Karl Carver Endicott.
“Karl sent John Ansel to Brazil. After John got to Brazil, Karl sent him on an expedition up the Amazon. It was a suicide trip. Karl claimed he was looking for oil prospects. There were two men in the party. He offered each of them a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus to make the trip if they completed the mission successfully.
“They were, of course, under no obligations to go, but John wanted that money very badly because that would have enabled us to get married and he could have started a business of his own. That trip was legalized murder. It was carefully designed to be such. I didn’t know it at the time. The expedition didn’t stand one chance in a thousand. The cards were stacked against them, and Karl Carver Endicott made damn certain that the cards were stacked against them.
“After a while Karl came to me with tears in his eyes. He said he had just received word that the entire party had been wiped out. They were, he said, long overdue and he had sent planes out to search. He’d also sent out ground parties. He’d spared no expense.
“It was a terrific shock to me. Karl did his best to comfort me and finally offered me security and an opportunity to patch up my life.”
She stopped talking for a moment and gave her gloves such a vicious twist that the skin over the knuckles went white.
“You married him?” I asked.
“I married him.”
“And then?”
“Later on he fired one of his secretaries. She was the first who told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. But everything fitted in with other facts as I’d come to know them.
“This ex-secretary told me that Karl Endicott had made a very careful examination in order to pick out a locale for a suicide trip. He had sent John Ansel to his death just as surely as though he had stood him up in front of a firing squad.”
“Did you go to your husband and face him with the facts?” I asked.
“There wasn’t time,” she said. “I had the most terrible, the most awful, unexpected, devastating experience. The telephone rang. I answered it. John Ansel was on the line. The other member of the expedition had perished. John had survived absolutely incredible hardships in the jungle, had finally reached civilization, and then had learned that I was married.”
“What did you do?”
She said, “In those days I hadn’t learned to control my emotions. I became completely, utterly hysterical. I told John that I belonged to him, that I always had belonged to him, that I had been tricked into marriage. I told John I must see him. I told him that I was leaving Karl immediately.
“And then I did something that I shouldn’t have done. Then I–I want you to understand, Mr. Lam, that I was hysterical. I... I was suffering from a terrific shock.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I told John over the telephone exactly what the score was. I told him that he had been sent into the jungle on a mission that constituted legalized murder. I told him that Karl wanted him out of the way and that the whole thing had been deliberately planned so that he could trick me.”
“Then what?” I asked.
She said, “For a while there was an absolute silence, then a click. I couldn’t tell whether the person at the other end had hung up the telephone or whether the connection had been broken. I finally got the operator and told her I’d been cut off. She said my party had hung up.”
“What date was this?” I asked.
“That,” she said bitterly, “was the date my husband met his death.”
“Where was John Ansel when he phoned you?”
“In Los Angeles at the airport.”
“All right. What happened?”
“I can’t explain everything that happened without telling you something about Karl. Karl was ruthless, possessive, cold-blooded and diabolically clever. When Karl wanted something, he wanted it. He wanted me. I think one of the main reasons he wanted me was because, after he had made the first overture, he found that I was not responsive.
“By the time of John’s telephone call, things were getting to a point where I had learned a great deal about Karl’s character, and I think he had gone a long way toward getting over his infatuation, if you want to call it that. After all, being married to an unwilling woman whose heart is elsewhere satisfied Karl’s love of conquest, but that was about all.”