“I’m Lieutenant Wilson,” he said, “and I wonder if you’d have lunch with me, Miss Adams. There are a few more questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Oh, yes, lieutenant. Forgive me. I’d be happy to.”
They took a taxi to an Italian restaurant near the bay, and the lieutenant waited until they’d toasted with the Chianti.
“You are acquainted with a public accountant by the name of Ronald Quilt?”
Her laugh was condescending.
“Oh, yes, I know Ronald. He did some work for Dr Nader around last Christmas, and he still calls me now and then. He’s a nice little man, and is so interested in his writing.”
“He claims that Dr Nader actually did kill Dicer.”
“But that’s ridiculous, as you know. He couldn’t have!”
“So we believe, Miss Adams.”
“Please call me Connie.”
“Connie, how many times had Dicer called on Dr Nader before the last visit?”
“Oh, perhaps five or six. Since last fall. But he was just — a patient. Doctor Nader is no murderer!”
“I’m sure he appreciates your loyalty. But would you tell me again exactly what happened the last time Dicer called?”
Miss Adams sighed, then smiled apologetically.
“Well, I sent him in to see the doctor. After about ten minutes, he came out again.”
“But wasn’t Dr Thayer in the waiting room with you?”
“Dr Thayer came in about five minutes after Mr Dicer arrived, and we were talking when Mr Dicer came out. Mr Dicer was a very loud man, you know, and he called something back into the doctor’s office.”
“Can you remember his exact words?”
“Something like: ‘You’ll see me again!’ ”
“Did it sound like a threat?”
“I think I told you before it didn’t. I’m not sure, now.”
“How was Dicer dressed?”
“In a yellow slouch hat and checked sports coat.”
“When he went out of the office, did he look at either you or Dr Thayer?”
“No, he didn’t. He had his shoulders kind of hunched, and then he was gone.”
“Now this is important. After Dicer left, did Dr Thayer go immediately into Doctor Nader’s office, or was there a time lapse?”
“Oh, he went right in... No, wait. There was a crash in the hall. I’d forgotten about that. Mr Quilt asked me the same thing. Dr Thayer and I went out to see what it was.”
“What was it?”
“A flower vase had been knocked off a console table at the head of the stairs. Fortunately, the fall merely cracked the edge, and I set the vase back in place and rearranged the flowers. They were artificial.”
“Did Doctor Nader appear while you were doing this?”
“No. We went back and Doctor Thayer knocked on his door, and he told him to come in.”
“So that there was perhaps a gap of one or two minutes while you and Doctor Thayer were out in the hall?”
“Not more than that.”
“There is a means of access to the doctor’s inner office from downstairs, isn’t there?”
“Oh, yes, there’s a staircase from what used to be the kitchen downstairs to an alcove behind the doctor’s desk, but the door is...” She stopped suddenly and looked at Wilson with frightened eyes. “What are you asking that for?”
“I’m afraid out little armchair detective has piqued my curiosity,” he said gloomily. “I shall have to go over the field again, asking some different questions. Now about that door...?”
Doctor Thayer, a stoutish man with an impassive face, was breathing heavily from his exertions on the hand ball court of his athletic club as he sat down beside Wilson in the locker room.
“When you went into Doctor Nader’s office after Dicer had left,” Wilson said after some quick preliminaries, “what was he doing?”
“Doing? He was looking over his file box and making notes. I told you that.”
“But I didn’t press you for how he looked. Was he calm? Pale? Redfaced? Breathing heavily? This is important, Doctor Thayer.”
Thayer glowered at him, and then said with perhaps too much emphasis:
“He was just making entries on his patient cards. Cool as a cucumber.”
“Then you and he left at once for the mountains.”
“My car was waiting. He came right with me, and we drove for the next eight hours up to my cabin at Sierra Butte.”
“Was he out of your sight for any length of time for the remainder of your stay there?”
“Time to go to the john, maybe. No, I stick by what I said, lieutenant. Frank and I were together the whole time. He couldn’t have killed this Dicer fellow, no matter what.”
“Once again; did he ever confide to you what kind of business Dicer had with him?”
“No. So far as I know, Dicer was just a patient. You fellows dug up the fact he was a blackmailer, but I guess blackmailers get sick too. Ask for a look at Frank’s medical records for Dicer.”
“We have. They said Dicer had cancer.”
“Then that’s it.”
Wilson spent that evening alone in his bachelor apartment, turning the pages of a brown-covered address book. It was obviously Dicer’s blackmailing account book, found behind a picture in his apartment, and the only trace, besides Dicer’s fat bank account, that he was engaged in a lucrative, if illegal, business.
But so far it had yielded no light to Wilson, except that Dicer, the little Cockney loner, had a sense of humor. His list of “customers,” nearly fifty, were all coded with phony names, among which were Doctor Lonely Hearts, Doctor Grimm, Miss Chalkdust, and the only set of initials in the book, C.A. The key to the names, Wilson surmised, were locked up in Dicer’s memory, and had died with him.
Next to each name was the amount and date of payments. From Doctor Lonely Hearts, for instance, five thousand dollars had been collected in ten five-hundred-dollar payments.
Doctor Lonely Hearts could be Nader, of course, a fashionable society doctor. Grimm? Either a hatchet face like Thayer, or, if Dicer had been that whimsical, which he doubted, a fairy — a queer. But C.A.? It was interesting to note there were no figures opposite the initials, so perhaps no collection had yet been made.
He’d already searched into both Nader’s and Thayer’s background in the hope of finding, perhaps, an illegal abortion or some other skeleton, but had come up with nothing — which didn’t mean the doctors weren’t guilty of something which could hurt their careers. Most men were, if they’d lived long enough.
Then, just as an idea occurred to Wilson, his phone rang.
“Mr Wilson? This is Ronald Quilt.” The armchair detective sounded scared. “I just had a visit from Doctor Nader. He was very angry to hear I came to you with my story, and threatened me with bodily harm. He even struck me.”
“You want to press charges?” Wilson asked, grinning.
“No, no. He made me feel very wretched, because he had been good to me, you know, giving me accounting work, and getting me more with his colleagues.”
“So?”
“I want you to forget I ever came to you. I’ll stick to my writing for kicks, like you said.”
“It’s too late for that, Mr Quilt,” Wilson said, drawing a heart on his ink blotter. “In your amateur way, you’ve started me on something I’ve got to see through. I want to hear your reconstruction of the crime, for what it’s worth.”
“You’ll give me police protection against Doctor Nader?”
“He won’t bother you again, I promise,” Wilson said, stabbing an arrow through the heart. “You know the Cactus Bar on Broadway? I’ll meet you there in a half an hour!”