“I don’t see that that follows.”
“But after you heard he was dead, you came back.”
“You can, of course, put it that way if you want to.”
Malloy turned back to Clane and said, “Now every time I run into a blind alley, you seem to be lurking in the shadows. You and this Chinese girl. Now suppose you tell me...”
The telephone rang.
Mrs. Taonon answered it. “It’s for you, Inspector.”
Malloy sighed wearily, postponed his questioning, got up and lumbered across the room to the telephone, picked up the receiver, said, “Yeah, this is Malloy.”
He listened for several seconds while the party at the other end of the line apparently poured out a steady stream of conversation. Then Malloy said, “Uh-huh,” and then after a moment asked, “Where?”
Again there was a period of silence, broken at length by Malloy, who said, “All right, I’m up here. Bring your party up here... Yeah, I’ll do it here. G’bye.”
He hung up the receiver, walked back to his chair, settled himself comfortably, bit the tip off the end of a cigar and said, quite casually, “All of this stuff interests me. How Clane knew where he could go and find you right away. You any idea how he knew where you were, Mrs. Taonon?”
“No, I had never met him before. To the best of my knowledge I had never seen him in my life.”
“Him and this Chinese girl,” Malloy said, shaking his head. “They certainly do get around.” Then he added, all in the same breath, “That call was from police headquarters. They found your husband.”
“His body?”
“Your husband. Seems he was hiding too.”
“Where?”
“San Jose, in an auto court. You see, we thought we might find Edward Harold located in an auto court somewhere so we put out a dragnet. And, because we thought your husband might have driven him down to the auto court, we broadcast a description of your husband. Your husband didn’t drive Harold down to an auto court.”
“No?” she asked courteously.
“No.”
“And you say my husband’s alive?”
“Very much alive.”
She whirled to Clane. “What the devil were you trying to do?” she demanded.
Clane, at a loss for an answer, sat silent.
“No,” Inspector Malloy said calmly, “your husband didn’t take Edward Harold down the peninsula and put him in an auto court. You did that.”
She looked at the police inspector with the defiance of a trapped animal.
“But now,” Malloy said, “I’ve got to find out why you hid and why your husband went down the peninsula a good half to three-quarters of an hour in advance of your trip. Couldn’t have been because you stayed behind to kill George Gloster, could it?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“That package of groceries that we found down there in the room at the warehouse where Edward Harold had been concealed. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Certainly not.”
Malloy’s eyes were kindly but insistent. “Your grocer,” he said, “tells a different story.”
Color rushed to her face, then faded from it. Twice she tried to speak, but no words came out.
“So,” Inspector Malloy went on, “unless you make some satisfactory explanation, we’re going to have to hold you for investigation, which is just about the same in this instance as dumping a murder charge in your lap, Mrs. Taonon.”
She smiled at him. “Dump a murder charge in my lap,” she said, “and it will bounce right back and hit you in the face.”
Twenty
Two officers brought in Ricardo Taonon. For a moment he stood in the doorway motionless with surprise, watchful, wary, his mind probing the situation. Evidently he had not been apprised of the fact that police were there interrogating his wife, or that Terry Clane, Chu Kee and Sou Ha were also there, held in a species of unofficial custody.
Taonon stood there in the doorway for the fractional part of a second and in that brief period of time adjusted himself to the situation as he saw it. He was slender, dark, high of cheekbone, with just a slight slant to his eyes. And there was about him the reaction so characteristic of the Japanese, of smiling broadly when he found himself cornered. While he had always claimed a Chinese-Italian ancestry, rumor had it that his mother had been a young Japanese girl who had met a suave Italian on the Street of the Wild Chicken in Shanghai.
Daphne Taonon gave her husband his conversational lead. “My darling!” she exclaimed and moved toward him, face tilted.
Taonon stepped forward to take her in his arms and the period during which they clung in a passionate embrace gave her an opportunity for one swiftly whispered word.
Then Daphne moved back from the embrace. “Darling,” she said, “do you know what they told me? They told me you were dead. And do you know what this man Clane said? He said that I had killed you for the insurance.”
For a brief moment there was a flicker of dark anger on Taonon’s face, and then he threw back his head and laughed, that nervous, staccato Japanese laughter. “Well, well, well,” he said. “Mr. Clane’s vaunted powers of concentration seem to have led him far afield.”
Malloy said, “I guess I’ll do the questioning. Come over here and sit down. Where have you been, Taonon?”
“I took a little trip.”
“Went down the peninsula, headed for Salinas, registered in an auto camp under an assumed name, and hid out for a while, didn’t you?”
“Frankly,” Taonon said, “I’m given to fits of nervous depression. When I have those, I want to get away from everyone. I want to be quiet. I want to be undisturbed. I don’t want to think any business and I don’t want to have anyone talk any business to me.”
“So you got a telephone call from George Gloster and suddenly decided you wanted to go on one of these trips of retirement. Is that right?”
“I fail to see the significance of connecting up the two events,” Taonon said with dignity. “You might as well say, ‘So you opened the bathroom door and suddenly decided you wanted to get away on one of these trips’.”
“But you did get a call from Gloster?”
Taonon hesitated.
“Come, come,” Malloy said. “You did get a call from Gloster. We know that.”
“All right,” Taonon said, “I got a call from Gloster.”
“And he told you he was at the warehouse?”
“If it’s any of your business, yes.”
“It’s plenty of my business,” Malloy said. “You went down to the warehouse to see him?”
“I did.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know. It was around ten-thirty, I guess, when I arrived.”
“And Gloster was there?”
“That’s right.”
“You talked with him?”
“Not very long.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t have much to say.”
“Why did Gloster want you to come down to the warehouse?”
“He had gone down on some business or other and found evidence that someone had been living there in the warehouse, someone who had evidently got in with a key. He seemed to think that this person might have been Edward Harold. A man had jumped out of the window when Gloster entered. Gloster thought it was Harold. Gloster tried to call Nevis, but Nevis wasn’t at his apartment. He called me. I answered, and came down to see what the trouble was.”
“Any words?”
“Frankly I was irritated that Gloster hadn’t called the police. I saw no reason for him to call Nevis and me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that I knew nothing about it and didn’t want to know anything about it. I demanded that he call the police. He didn’t want to do it until he had first found out whether this party, whoever he was, had been staying there in the warehouse with the consent of one of the partners.”