He was reading a report, a frown of concentration on his lean face. He glanced up as I came in and waved me to a chair.
‘I won’t be a second,’ he said.
Maybe my imagination was playing me tricks, but I had the immediate impression from the tone of his voice that we weren’t on the same friendly footing as we had been not an hour and half ago.
I sat down and lit a cigarette. I had got beyond fear. I was now fatalistic. I was going to bluff this thing to the end, and if my bluff didn’t work I’d take what was coming to me.
Finally, he dropped the report on the desk and leaned back in his chair while he looked fixedly at me.
His face was expressionless but his eyes were probing. He was now looking at me the way a policeman looks at a suspect — or was I imagining it?
‘Harry, have you ever met and talked with Odette Malroux?’ he asked.
My heart skipped a beat.
‘No. The family came here when I was in jail. I never got the chance of interviewing her,’ I said, deliberately misunderstanding him. I thought: the first lie. I would have to go on lying from now on until Renick caught me out in one.
‘So you don’t know a thing about her?’
‘Not a thing.’ I flicked ash into the ash-tray. ‘Why do you ask, John?’
‘I just wondered. I’m hunting for every scrap of information.’
‘Maybe there is one thing that might help. Malroux is a French national. The hereditary system in France is so fixed that a child can’t be disinherited. Odette would have come into half Malroux’s fortune by right if she had survived him. Now she is dead, his wife gets the lot.’
‘That’s interesting.’
I had the impression that this wasn’t news to him. He had known this before I told him.
There was a pause, then he said, ‘You wouldn’t know if the girl had a lover. She wasn’t a virgin.’
‘I don’t know a thing about her, John,’ I said steadily. The door jerked open and Barty came in.
‘I’ve got something for you, John,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘The L.A. police have hit the jackpot.
Practically the first hotel they called on jelled. A girl, calling herself Ann Harcourt, booked in at the Regent Hoteclass="underline" it’s a quiet, respectable hotel with no record for trouble. The clerk described her. She was wearing the blue and white dress. She arrived at the hotel at half past midnight by taxi. They have traced the taxi and the driver remembers picking her up at the airport. The only plane in at that time was from Palm City. The girl stayed in her room all Sunday and had her meals sent up. She said she wasn’t well.
She had a long distance telephone call from Palm City around nine o’clock in the evening. She remained in her room all Monday, then checked out at ten o’clock in the evening, taking a taxi from the rank. The driver says he drove her to the airport.’
‘Did she leave any fingerprints in the hotel room?’
‘She did better than that. She left a cheap plastic hairbrush which the maid saw her using. They have a beautiful set of prints from it and the prints are on the wire now. We’ll have them any minute.’
‘It’s my bet,’ Renick said, ‘Ann Harcourt was Odette Malroux.’ He picked up the report he was reading. ‘Just got the autopsy report. She was hit on the back of the head and stunned, then she was strangled. There was no struggle. She was taken by surprise. Here’s one thing that’s interesting, Barty.
Between her toes and in her shoes was sand — beach sand. It looks as if she had gone to the beach and walked along the sands to a rendezvous. The lab boys think they can place the beach where the sand came from.’
Barty grunted.
‘They are always thinking they can work miracles.’
It was uncanny and disturbing to sit there, listening to these two men talk and being sharply aware that both of them were ignoring me. I might just as well not have been in the office for all the notice they paid me.
‘Well, if you don’t want me, John,’ I said, getting up, ‘I’ll get back to my office. I’ve a whale of a lot of work to do.’
They both turned and stared at me.
‘That’s okay,’ Renick said, ‘but don’t leave the building. I’ll need you in a little while.’
‘I’ll be in my office.’
I went out and walked down the passage to my office.
Standing at the head of the stairs, the only exit to the street, were a couple of detectives, talking together. They glanced at me casually and then away.
I went into my office and shut the door.
Were these two guarding the stairs? Making sure I wouldn’t bolt?
I sat down at my desk aware of a little spark of panic in my mind. Was I already trapped? Had Renick guessed I was involved in this mess?
I tried to work, but concentration was impossible. I paced up and down, smoking cigarettes, trying to think of a way to trap O’Reilly, but I just couldn’t think of one.
After an hour, I left the office and went into the washroom. The two detectives still stood at the head of the stairs.
On my return, the telephone bell rang.
‘Come in, will you?’ Renick said.
My nerves were now really on the jump. If it hadn’t been for those two guarding the stairs, I might even have bolted.
I braced myself and walked down the passage to Renick’s office. He was just coming out as I arrived.
‘Meadows wants us,’ he said and leading the way, he went to Meadows’s office.
Meadows was at work at his desk. He looked up as we came in.
‘Well? What’s cooking?’ he asked, reaching for a cigar. ‘What’s it all about, John?’
Renick sat down. I went over to an empty desk away from them and sat down.
‘I’m satisfied now, sir, the girl was never kidnapped,’ Renick said.
Meadows paused as he was about to bite off the end of his cigar and stared.
‘Never kidnapped!’
‘It was a faked kidnapping. She and this guy in the sports suit planned it together. It’s my guess he was after the money and persuaded her to help him get it. The only possible way to get it from her father was to pretend she had been kidnapped.’
Meadows blew out his cheeks. He looked stunned.
‘You’d better be sure about this, John.’
‘I’m sure enough,’ Renick said, and went on to tell Meadows about the new evidence that had come in about Ann Harcourt. ‘We got her fingerprints ten minutes ago. She was Odette Malroux — no mistake about that. We know she went to Los Angeles on her own and came back on her own. That means she did the trip of her own free will. She certainly wasn’t kidnapped.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ Meadows muttered. ‘How did she get murdered?’
‘Her partner collected the ransom and these two agreed to meet somewhere. He probably wanted all the money, so to silence her, he knocked her on the head and strangled her.’
My hands were in fists and my nails dug into my palms as Renick talked.
‘Who is he? Have you got a line on him yet?’ Meadows asked.
‘I have several lines on him,’ Renick said quietly, ‘but not enough to book him. Doc tells me there was sand in the dead girl’s shoes — beach sand. The lab boys are trying to locate where the sand comes from. They think they can do it. It’s my bet Odette arranged to meet her killer at one of the beach centres along the coast.’
Meadows got to his feet and began to prowl around his office.
‘We’d better not release any of this to the Press, Barber,’ he said. ‘This could be dynamite.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He looked at Renick.
‘You really think this girl tried to gyp her father out of five hundred grand?’
‘I think the killer talked her into it,’ Renick said. ‘He was probably her lover. She fell for his talk and then got herself murdered.’