I started off, then I had a sudden idea and I turned back. “Would you have anything to do around six o’clock to-night?”
He grinned.
“I’ll have plenty to do around six o’clock to-night. I’m celebrating. I’ve been with this old punk for twenty months. I’ve got a lot of drinking to get in to soothe the pain out of that stretch. Why?”
“I’ve some celebrating to do myself,” I said. “If you’re not tied up with anyone, maybe we could do it together.”
He stared at me.
“Are you a drinking man?”
“On special occasions: this could be one.”
“Well, why not? My girl doesn’t approve of me drinking. I was planning to have a lone bender, but I’d as soon have a guy with me. Okay. Where and when?”
“Say seven. You know a good place?”
“Sam’s Cabin. Anyone will tell you where it is. The name’s Fulton. First name, Tim. What’s yours?”
“Lew Brandon. Be seeing you.”
“Sure thing.”
I left him, took the steps three at a time, turned left, walked the length of an ornate terrace to the front entrance.
I had a minute in hand as I tugged at the chain bell.
The door opened immediately. An old man, four inches over six foot, thin and upright, wearing the traditional clothes of a Hollywood butler, stood aside with a slight bow and let me walk into a hall big enough to garage six Eldorado Seville Cadillacs.
“Mr. Brandon?”
I said he was right.
“Will you come this way, please?”
I was led across the hall, out into the sunshine that blazed down on a patio, through french doors and along a passage to a room containing fifteen lounging chairs, a carpet so thick and soft it made me think I was walking in snow, and a couple of Picasso paintings on the wall.
Six weary-looking business men, clutching despatch cases, sat in some of the chairs. They stared at me with that numbed indifference that told me they had been waiting so long they had not only lost their sense of time, but also their sense of feeling.
“Mr. Creedy will see you before long,” the butler said, and went away as quietly and as smoothly as if he had been riding on wheels.
I sat down, balanced my hat on my knees and stared up at the ceiling.
After the others had gaped at me long enough to satisfy their curiosity, they went back into a coma again.
At three minutes past three, the door jerked open and a youngish man, tall, thin, with one of those high-executive chins and a crew cut, wearing a black coat, grey whipcord trousers and a black tie came as far as the doorway.
The six business men all straightened up, clutching at their despatch cases and pointed the way a setter points when he sights game.
His cold, unfriendly eyes ran over them and stopped at me.
“Mr. Brandon?”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Creedy will see you now.”
As I got to my feet, one of the men said, “You’ll pardon me, Mr. Hammerschult, but I have been waiting since twelve o’clock. You said I would be the next to see Mr. Creedy.”
Hammerschult gave him a bleak stare.
“Did I? Mr. Creedy thinks otherwise,” he said. “Mr. Creedy won’t be free now until four o’clock. This way,” he went on to me, and, leading the way down the passage, he took me into a smallish lobby, through two doors, both lined with green baize, to another massive door of solid polished mahogany.
He rapped, opened the door, looked in, said, “Brandon’s here, sir.”
Then he stood aside and waved me in.
II
The room reminded me of the pictures I had seen of Mussolini’s famous office.
It was sixty feet long if it was an inch. Placed at the far end between two vast windows, with a fine view of the sea and the right arm of Thor Bay, was a desk big enough to play billiards on.
The rest of the room was pretty bare apart from a few lounging chairs, a couple of suits of armour and two heavy, dark oil paintings that could or could not be original Rembrandts.
Behind the desk sat a small, frail-looking man, his horn glasses pushed up and resting on his forehead. Apart from a fringe of grey hair, he was bald and his skull looked bony and hard.
He had a pinched, tight face: small features and a very small, tight mouth. It wasn’t until I encountered the full force that dwelt in his eyes that I realized I was in the presence of a big man.
He gave me the full treatment, and I felt as if I were under X-rays and that he could count the vertebra of my spine.
He let me walk the length of the room and he kept the searchlight of his gaze on me. I found I was sweating slightly by the time I reached his desk.
He leaned back in his chair and eyed me over the way you would eye a bluebottle fly that has fallen in your soup.
There was a long pause, then he said in a curiously soft, effeminate voice, “What do you want?”
By then, and by his reasoning, I should have been completely softened up and ready to fall on my hands and knees and rap my forehead on the floor. Okay, I admit I was slightly softened, but not as soft as he would want.
“My name’s Brandon,” I said, “of the Star Inquiry Agency of San Francisco. You hired my partner four days ago.”
The thin, small face was as dead pan as the back of a bus.
“What makes you imagine I would do that?” he asked.
From that I knew he wasn’t sure of his ground, and he was going to probe first before he took the hoods off his big artillery.
“We keep a record of all our clients, Mr. Creedy,” I said untruthfully. “Sheppey, before he left our office, recorded that you hired him.”
“Who would Sheppey be?”
“My partner and the man you hired, Mr. Creedy.”
He placed his elbows on his desk and his finger-tips together. He rested his pointed, bony chin on the arch thus formed.
“I must hire twenty or thirty people a week to do various unimportant jobs for me,” he said. “I don’t recall any man named Sheppey. Where do you come in on this? What do you want?”
“Sheppey was murdered this morning,” I said, meeting his hard, penetrating gaze. “I thought you might want me to finish the job he was working on.”
He tapped his chin with his finger-tips.
“And what job would that be?”
Here it was: the dead-end. I knew sooner or later it might come to that, but I had hoped I might flush him out of his cover by bluff: it hadn’t worked.
“You’d know more about that than I do.”
He sat back in his chair, drummed on the desk for about four seconds, his face still dead pan, but I knew his mind was busy. Then he reached out a bony finger and pressed a button.
A door to the right of the desk opened immediately and Hammerschult appeared. He appeared so quickly he had to be waiting just outside the door for the summons.
“Hertz,” Creedy said without looking at him.
“At once, sir,” Hammerschult said and went away.
Creedy continued to drum on his desk. He kept his eyes lowered.
We waited in silence for perhaps forty-five seconds, then a rap sounded on the door. It opened, and a short, thickset man came in. His right ear was bent and crushed into his head. At some time in his career someone must have hit him either with a brick or possibly a sledge-hammer: no fist could have caused that amount of damage. His nose was boneless and spread over his face. His eyes were small, and had that wild light in them you might see in the eyes of an angry and vicious orang-outang. Black hairs sprouted over the top of his collar. He wore a pair of fawn flannel trousers, a white sports coat and one of those razzle-dazzle, hand-painted ties.