Pearls Are a Nuisance
PEARLS ARE A NUISANCE
ONE
It is quite true that I wasn’t doing anything that morning except looking at a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter and thinking about writing a letter. It is also quite true that I don’t have a great deal to do any morning. But that is no reason why I should have to go out hunting for old Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace. I don’t happen to be a policeman.
It was Ellen Macintosh who called me up, which made a difference, of course. «How are you, darling?» she asked. «Busy?»
«Yes and no,» I said. «Mostly no. I am very well. What is it now?»
«I don’t think you love me, Walter. And anyway you ought to get some work to do. You have too much money. Somebody has stolen Mrs. Penruddock’s pearls and I want you to find them.»
«Possibly you think you have the police department on the line,» I said coldly. «This is the residence of Walter Gage. Mr. Gage talking.»
«Well, you can tell Mr. Gage from Miss Ellen Macintosh,» she said, «that if he is not out here in half an hour, he will receive a small parcel by registered mail containing one diamond engagement ring.»
«And a lot of good it did me,» I said. «That old crow will live for another fifty years.»
But she had already hung up so I put my hat on and went down and drove off in the Packard. It was a nice late April morning, if you care for that sort of thing. Mrs. Penruddock lived on a wide quiet street in Carondelet Park. The house had probably looked exactly the same for the last fifty years, but that didn’t make me any better pleased that Ellen Macintosh might live in it another fifty years, unless old Mrs. Penruddock died and didn’t need a nurse any more. Mr. Penruddock had died a few years before, leaving no will, a thoroughly tangled-up estate, and a list of pensioners as long as a star boarder’s arm.
I rang the front doorbell and the door was opened, not very soon, by a little old woman with a maid’s apron and a strangled knot of gray hair on the top of her head. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before and didn’t want to see me now.
«Miss Ellen Macintosh, please,» I said. «Mr. Walter Gage calling.»
She sniffed, turned without a word and we went back into the musty recesses of the house and came to a glassed-in porch full of wicker furniture and the smell of Egyptian tombs. She went away, with another sniff.
In a moment the door opened again and Ellen Macintosh came in. Maybe you don’t like tall girls with honey-colored hair and skin like the first strawberry peach the grocer sneaks out of the box for himself. If you don’t, I’m sorry for you.
«Darling, so you did come,» she cried. «That was nice of you, Walter. Now sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.»
We sat down.
«Mrs. Penruddock’s pearl necklace has been stolen, Walter.»
«You told me that over the telephone. My temperature is still normal.»
«If you will excuse a professional guess,» she said, «it is probably subnormal — permanently. The pearls are a string of forty-nine matched pink ones which Mr. Penruddock gave to Mrs. Penruddock for her golden wedding present. She hardly ever wore them lately, except perhaps on Christmas or when she had a couple of very old friends in to dinner and was well enough to sit up. And every Thanksgiving she gives a dinner to all the pensioners and friends and old employees Mr. Penruddock left on her hands, and she wore them then.»
«You are getting your verb tenses a little mixed,» I said, «but the general idea is clear. Go on.»
«Well, Walter,» Ellen said, with what some people call an arch look, «the pearls have been stolen. Yes, I know that is the third time I told you that, but there’s a strange mystery about it. They were kept in a leather case in an old safe which was open half the time and which I should judge a strong man could open with his fingers even when it was locked. I had to go there for a paper this morning and I looked in at the pearls just to say hello —»
«I hope your idea in hanging on to Mrs. Penruddock has not been that she might leave you that necklace,» I said stiffly. «Pearls are all very well for old people and fat blondes, but for tall willowy —»
«Oh shut up, darling,» Ellen broke in. «I should certainly not have been waiting for these pearls — because they were false.»
I swallowed hard and stared at her. «Well,» I said, with a leer, «I have heard that old Penruddock pulled some cross-eyed rabbits out of the hat occasionally, but giving his own wife a string of phony pearls on her golden wedding gets my money.»
«Oh, don’t be such a fool, Walter! They were real enough then. The fact is Mrs. Penruddock sold them and had imitations made. One of her old friends, Mr. Lansing Gallemore of the Gallemore Jewelry Company, handled it all for her very quietly, because of course she didn’t want anyone to know. And that is why the police have not been called in. You will find them for her, won’t you, Walter?»
«How? And what did she sell them for?»
«Because Mr. Penruddock died suddenly without making any provision for all these people he had been supporting. Then the depression came, and there was hardly any money at all. Only just enough to carry on the household and pay the servants, all of whom have been with Mrs. Penruddock so long that she would rather starve than let any of them go.»
«That’s different,» I said. «I take my hat off to her. But how the dickens am I going to find them, and what does it matter anyway — if they were false?»
«Well, the pearls — imitations, I mean — cost two hundred dollars and were specially made in Bohemia and it took several months and the way things are over there now she might never be able to get another set of really good imitations. And she is terrified somebody will find out they were false, or that the thief will blackmail her, when he finds out they were false. You see, darling, I know who stole them.»
I said, «Huh?» a word I very seldom use as I do not think it part of the vocabulary of a gentleman.
«The chauffeur we had here a few months, Walter — a horrid big brute named Henry Eichelberger. He left suddenly the day before yesterday, for no reason at all. Nobody ever leaves Mrs. Penruddock. Her last chauffeur was a very old man and he died. But Henry Eichelberger left without a word and I’m sure he had stolen the pearls. He tried to kiss me once, Walter.»
«Oh, he did,» I said in a different voice. «Tried to kiss you, eh? Where is this big slab of meat, darling? Have you any idea at all? It seems hardly likely he would be hanging around on the street corner for me to punch his nose for him.»
Ellen lowered her long silky eyelashes at me — and when she does that I go limp as a scrubwoman’s back hair.
«He didn’t run away. He must have known the pearls were false and that he was safe enough to blackmail Mrs. Penruddock. I called up the agency he came from and he has been back there and registered again for employment. But they said it was against their rules to give his address.»
«Why couldn’t somebody else have taken the pearls? A burglar, for instance?»
«There is no one else. The servants are beyond suspicion and the house is locked up as tight as an icebox every night and there were no signs of anybody having broken in. Besides Henry Eichelberger knew where the pearls were kept, because he saw me putting them away after the last time she wore them — which was when she had two very dear friends in to dinner on the occasion of the anniversary of Mr. Penruddock’s death.»
«That must have been a pretty wild party,» I said. «All right, I’ll go down to the agency and make them give me his address. Where is it?»
«It is called the Ada Twomey Domestic Employment Agency, and it is in the two-hundred block on East Second, a very unpleasant neighborhood.»