“Don’t be too sure about that. Then there’s this little incident that happened to me,” I said mildly. “I was also kidnapped and held prisoner for five days, and also had a certain amount of drug pumped into me. That’s another little thing that should he reported to the police.”
“Why talk yourself out of a good job?” he returned, and for the first time since I had been in the room he allowed himself a slight grin. “I was about to suggest an extra retainer: say another five hundred dollars.”
That made my new hat a certainty.
“That tempts me. We might call it an insurance against risks,” I said. “But it would have to be over and above the fee you will pay for the work we are doing.”
“That’s all right.”
“Well, perhaps we might leave Anona Freedlander for the moment and go on with the story,” I said. “There’s quite a bit more; it gets better as it goes along.”
He pushed back his chair and got up. I watched him cross to a cellaret against the opposite wall and return with a bottle of Haigh & Haigh and two small glasses.
“Do you use this stuff?” he asked as he sat down again.
I said I used it whenever I could.
He poured two drinks, pushed one across the desk towards me, tossed the other down his throat and immediately refilled his glass. He put the bottle midway between us.
“Help yourself,” he said.
I drank a little of the Scotch. It was very good: quite the best liquor I had had in months. I thought it was wonderful how a big-shot lawyer could unbend when he sees trouble coming towards him with his name on it.
“According to Maureen, Crosby’s death preyed on Janet’s mind,” I told him. “Maybe it did, but she certainly had an odd way of showing it. I should have thought she wouldn’t have felt like playing tennis or running around at a time like that, but apparently she did. Anyway, also according to Maureen, Janet committed suicide about six or seven weeks after the shooting. She took arsenic.”
A tiny drop of Scotch wobbled out of Willet’s glass on to his blotter. He said, “Good God!” under his breath.
“That was hushed up, too. As it happened Mrs. Salzer was away at the time, so Maureen and Dr. Salzer called in Dr. Bewley, a harmless old goat, and told him Janet was suffering from malignant endocarditis, and he obligingly issued the death certificate. Janet had a personal maid, Eudora Drew, who possibly overheard Salzer and Maureen cooking up this yarn. She put on the bite, and they paid her. I got a line on her and went to see her. She was smart enough to fob me off and get on to Salzer, telling him I was offering five hundred bucks for information, and if he liked to raise the ante she would keep her mouth shut. Mrs. Salzer had an answer to that. She sent along an ex-gunman who was working at the sanatorium to reason with her. According to Mrs. S. he got rough and killed her.”
Willet drew in a long, slow breath. He took a drink like a man who needs a drink.
“The family butler, John Stevens, also knew something, or suspected something,” I went on. “I was persuading him to loosen up when he was kidnapped by six Wops who work for Sherrill. They got a little tough with him, and he died, but that still makes murder. Two murders. Now we get to the third. Are you liking this?”
He said in a gritty voice, “Go on.”
“You will remember Nurse Gurney? Mrs. Salzer admits kidnapping her, only, according to her, Nurse Gurney fell down the fire escape and broke her neck. Mrs. Salzer hid her somewhere in the desert. That’s murder, too.”
“This is fantastic.” Willet said. “It’s unbelievable.”
“It’s unbelievable only because of the motive. Here we have two people, Mrs. Salzer and Sherrill, committing three murders between them, to say nothing of kidnapping Anona Freedlander and myself, to protect a girl from newspaper publicity. That’s what makes it unbelievable. I think there’s a lot more to this business than we know about. It seems to me these two are desperately trying to keep a very lively cat from hopping out of the bag, and I want to find out what kind of cat it is.”
“It’s not newspaper publicity they’re worrying about,” Willet said. “Look at the money that’s involved.”
“Yeah, but I still think there’s a strange cat we haven’t found yet. I’m going to hunt for it. Anyway, I’ll get on. I haven’t finished yet. The punch line comes last. Maureen told me when she came into her money, Sherrill reverted to type. He turned blackmailer. He said he would circulate the rumour that because she stole him from Janet, Janet shot her father and killed herself. But if Maureen bought the Dream Ship for him, he would keep quiet. She bought the Dream Ship: that’s why she converted the insurance money into bearer bonds. She gave the bonds to Sherrill. Imagine how the newspapers would scream if it got out that Maureen Crosby was the backer of a gambling-ship. Wouldn’t that drop the whole of the Crosby money into the Research Centre’s lap?”
Willet managed to look green without actually turning green.
“She bought the Dream Ship,” he said in a stifled voice.
“That’s what she tells me. She also said she was frightened of Sherrill, and at that dramatic moment Mr. Sherrill made a personal appearance. He announced he was going to put Maureen where no one would find her and dispose of me in the same way. I was beginning to argue with him when someone from behind bent a sap over my head, and I woke up in Salzer’s sanatorium. We won’t waste time going into what happened there. It’s enough that my assistant kidded Lessways he was a well-known writer and got himself invited to the monthly visit to the asylum with the City’s councilmen. He spotted me, and got out and we took Anona Freedlandcr with us. What we have to find out is whether Sherrill has carried out his threat to hide Maureen away. If she doesn’t show up tomorrow, my bet is she’s hidden away: probably on Sherrill’s ship. But if she does show up, then I’ll be inclined to think she’s in this business with the rest of them, and she took me to her house so Sherrill could get at me.”
Willet poured another drink with a hand that wasn’t too steady.
“I don’t believe that’s likely,” he said.
“We’ll see. If Sherrill is holding her, have you any power to stop her money?”
“I haven’t any power over her money at all. All I can do is to advise the other trustees that she has broken the terms of the will.”
“Who are the other trustees?”
“Mr. Glynn and Mr. Coppley, my chiefs, who are of course, in New York.”
“Should they be consulted?”
“Not at this stage,” he said, and rubbed his jaw. “I’ll be frank with you, Malloy. They would follow out the terms of the will without hesitation, and without taking into consideration the girl might be innocent. To my way of thinking the will is over-harsh. Crosby has stipulated that if Maureen figures in the newspapers the money goes to the Research Centre. I imagine he got a little tired of her pranks, but he didn’t realize he was giving an unscrupulous blackmailer a weapon to use against her. And that’s what has probably happened.”
“It’s occurred to you we are covering up three murders?” I said, helping myself to another drink. All this talk made me dry. “So far Brandon isn’t digging too deep because he’s scared of the Crosby’s money, but if the facts turn out that Maureen’s hooked up in these murders, he’ll have to forget about her money and take some action: then you and I will be out on a limb.”
“We’ve got to give her the benefit of the doubt,” Willet said uneasily. “I’d never forgive myself if by acting too previously we caused her to lose her money unfairly. How about this Freedlander woman? How long will it be before she can talk?”
“I don’t know. Some days from the look of her. She can’t even remember who she is.”