“Yeah, in some things.”
Grey’s face reddened. “What is that supposed to mean, Hammond?”
“I forgot. When was the—”
Grey cut me off. He said, “I don’t care to discuss this any further. If you want more information, then go ask the police. Perhaps they have time to waste with cretins.”
“Lots. They talked to you, didn’t they?”
I was a real friendly guy that afternoon. I got up and went through the door. Grey’s secretary was still typing in the outer office. She looked up from her work and addressed me in a cheery tone:
“Did you get what you came for?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got what I came for. But now that I’m here, I see something else I might like too.” I smiled a cute smile and waited for her to catch on. I didn’t wait much.
“You can’t always get what you want. Bye-bye, Mr. Hammond.”
I laughed a little, winked at her, went out the door.
My office would never win any awards for interior decoration, or anything else for that matter. I leased it in a building that used to be a profitable hotel until the neighborhood ran down and they turned it into an office building for seedy businessmen like myself. There were a few seedy dentists in the building too. Anyway, my office still looked like a hotel room with a small bedroom off the hallway door and an even smaller bathroom adjoining it. I’d filled the bedroom with a secondhand sofa that was also a foldaway bed, an elementary school teacher’s desk I’d bought at a sale when the school burned down, a filing cabinet I got from the same school, and two chairs: one for myself and one for my client. The bathroom I’d filled with a lot of air.
I was lying flat out on the sofa, holding a glass of whiskey on the middle of my stomach. I had eaten dinner in my apartment and come back here to think. The most conclusive decision I’d come to since lying there was that the ceiling was dirty. The second most conclusive decision I’d reached was that I should call Pamela Dyer. I moved to the desk to carry it out.
I rang her number a long time before the maid answered. I identified myself and asked to speak to Mrs. Dyer. A few seconds later, she came on.
“Hello, Mr. Hammond. Robert said that you might try to contact me. I don’t believe I have anything to say to you, though.” Her voice was hard and distant.
“Don’t you want to recover your pendant?”
“Yes, of course. But I’ve been answering questions for a week now, and still I don’t have it back. Answering questions doesn’t seem to do any good, Mr. Hammond.”
“Let’s try some of mine anyway. Can you describe the pendant for me?”
There was a short pause. “Oh very well,” she said. “The pendant is made of gold and is shaped like a heart, or the outline of a heart. It’s strung on a fine chain, which is also made of gold. There are blue diamonds inlaid along the circumference. The diamond at the top cusp is larger than the others and is of unusually fine quality. That diamond is what makes the pendant so valuable: it’s one of the largest blue diamonds in the world.”
“Oh,” I said. It sounded pretty gaudy to me. Maybe Mrs. Dyer didn’t have good taste in anything. “How did you acquire the pendant?”
“My late husband gave it to me for our tenth anniversary.”
“How long ago was that?”
“None of your business,” she snapped.
“Right; but how long ago was it?”
She made a snarling sound. I hardly recognized her voice as she barked, “Go fry your face in a pan, Hammond.” Then she hung up.
My mouth fell open like it usually does. Nothing in there but teeth and stale air. I was really pumping ’em dry. No scrap of information escaped detective Hammond. He knows all the right questions and all the right ways to ask them.
I wheeled back in my chair to the filing cabinet and opened the drawer with the only thing important in it to get a bottle of whiskey. I poured an inch or so of the stuff into my glass. It wasn’t very good, but I took my medicine and liked it. I was going to see Mrs. Dyer in person, and I needed all the help I could get.
She lived in a ritzy section of north Phoenix. I didn’t have any trouble locating the house because it was as big as a barn — and only a bit more handsome. It was lit up like some kind of government building with floodlights that shone up from the ground. I pulled into the circle drive and parked my dusty Ford behind a shiny new Mercedes. At least my car was in good company; I knew I wouldn’t be with Pamela Dyer.
I crossed to the front door and banged on it with the ornate knocker that hung there. After a while the porch light came on, and a tall woman in a black crepe dress answered the door. She was forty or so, big-boned and rugged looking. Her hair, black as her dress, was wound tightly in a severe bun many years out of style. She looked me over slowly with an expression most people save for child molesters and Bolsheviks. It had to be Pamela Dyer.
“Who are you?” she asked sternly.
“Hammond,” I said. “August Hammond.”
“You’re the private investigator who called, then?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes burned greenly. “Come in,” she said, and led me into a large sunken living room.
I looked around. The room was a fine illustration of what a lot of money and no taste can accomplish. Antique furniture from twelve different periods cluttered it. Expensive-looking pictures hung on all four walls at irregular intervals, and a large Persian rug lay in the middle of the floor on top of the regular carpet.
There was also a tall man with a big gun in the far right corner.
I said, “Is that your maid, Mrs. Dyer?”
The man began laughing like a sick horse and walked in to the middle of the room, pointing his Colt Army .45 at me. “That’s right, smart guy,” he said. “I’m the maid and I’m here to do a little house-cleaning. Check him for a gun, Pammie.”
There wasn’t anywhere to check except my belt line because I didn’t have a jacket on, just short sleeves. I don’t carry a gun unless I think I’ll need it, and I didn’t think that night. Mrs. Dyer patted my waistline anyway — about as firmly as you’d caress a hot stove. She stepped back when she was finished, and the tall guy with the gun came up and dug it into my stomach. His big red face was pitted with acne scars, and his breath smelled of liquor. But so did mine.
He said, “Pammie doesn’t like smart-guy private detectives tracking their gumshoe prints all over her neat little house, so she called me to help her clean up. What do you think of that, smart guy?”
“It’s fine — if she wants to fumigate after you leave.”
He didn’t like that one, and he told me so by swinging the flat of the .45 into my left cheek — hard. I staggered back but didn’t fall. I got mad then and decided to take my chances. Pockface had the gun pointed to the side because of the follow-through on his swing. I lunged toward his gun arm, bringing my knee up into his groin as I came forward. A half second later, we both hit the ground and he lost his grip on the .45. I slugged him once in the jaw and struggled across the Persian rug to reach the gun. I would have made it too, if Pamela Dyer hadn’t hit me in the back of the head with one of her antique chairs.
My arms buckled under me then, and I began to lose consciousness. The last thing I remembered was Pockface kicking me in the ribs. It’s funny, but I hardly felt it at all.
The sun peeped through a crack in some expensive curtains, and a wonderful day began outside. I felt like throwing up.
I was lying face down on the Persian rug in Mrs. Dyer’s sunken living room. Beside me lay the remains of what had once been an Italian antique chair. Or maybe it was French; I’m not an expert. I knew without checking that the back of my head was missing. I checked anyway and found a matted patch of bloody hair on a bump big enough to convince me that my head was reproducing by fission.