This man had the shoulders of a prize fighter and the legs of a midget. He wasn’t more than five feet six in height. His thinning grey hair was unruly, and his face, that reminded me of one of those rubber dolls you can squeeze into all shapes and sizes, was as bleak and as hard as a Siberian winter. He wore his well-cut clothes carelessly. His shirt collar was rumpled, his tie hung askew, but I could see he was the important member of the party. Even the big, purple-faced man, who I guessed was Chief of Police Madvig, stood back to allow him to be the first to be greeted by Burnett.
The five men stood talking for a brief moment, then they came up the steps.
I watched them, aware that my heart was thumping and my hands were cold and clammy.
Burnett said to the short-legged man, ‘I don’t think you have met Glyn Nash. He is Dester’s secretary.’
I found myself looking into a pair of slate grey eyes. I felt my right hand squeezed in a grip that cracked my bones.
‘Nash, I want you to meet Mr. Maddux of the National Fidelity Insurance Company,’ Burnett said.
As I looked into those slate grey, wintery eyes I remembered what Dester had said about this man: He has a big reputation in the insurance world. He is smart, tough and extremely efficient. It is said of him that he knows instinctively when a claim is a fake or not. He has been with the National Fidelity for fifteen years, and during that time he has sent a large number of people to jail, and eighteen people to the death cell.
And that was what he looked like: a force to be reckoned with.
Madvig, Burnett and Bromwich drifted into the hall at the heels of Maddux. As usual Lewis stayed behind. They seemed uncertain what was going to happen whereas Maddux gave the impression that he knew exactly what he was about to do.
‘I haven’t a lot of time,’ he said. His voice matched his face. ‘Let’s get around a table and talk.’
I took them into the lounge. There wasn’t a table, but that didn’t seem to worry Maddux. He took up a position before the empty fireplace: a position that dominated the room while Burnett, Madvig, and Bromwich almost apologetically took lounging chairs that faced Maddux.
Marian and I stood in the doorway.
‘Come in, you two,’ Maddux said and waved us to two chairs slightly away from where the other three were sitting. ‘We’ll need your help.’
As soon as we had sat down, Maddux turned to Madvig.
‘I don’t know any facts except what I’ve read in the newspapers,’ he said. ‘Dester, as you know, is one of my clients. He is insured with us for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and that’s quite a piece of money. As far as my company is concerned, he is a highly valuable liability. I’d like to get the facts straight. Will one of you put me in the picture?’
Madvig nodded over to Bromwich who cleared his throat and sat forward on the edge of his chair.
‘We were notified by Mr. Nash on the night of June 25th that both Dester and his wife were missing. She was taking him to the Belle View sanatorium out at Santa Barbara. They didn’t arrive there. They were seen around half past eleven on Highway 101 by a State trooper, then they vanished.’
‘Why was he going to the sanatorium?’ Maddux asked.
‘He was a sick man: an alcoholic,’ Burnett said. ‘I talked with Mrs. Dester. She told me he was having hallucinations and was being violent. She persuaded him to go into the sanatorium. Mr. Nash here looked after him. They got on well together and he could handle him.’
Maddux looked at me. His eyes seemed to bore right through to the back of my head.
‘Was Dester violent?’
I hadn’t spent most of the night pacing the floor for nothing. If they were to be made to think Dester had killed Helen, I had to supply the motive.
‘No, he wasn’t violent,’ I said. ‘He seemed pretty ill to me: almost as if he were drugged.’
That got a reaction from Bromwich.
‘You didn’t tell me that,’ he said aggressively.
‘I told you he slept most of the time.’
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘Did Dester want to go to the sanatorium?’ Maddux broke in impatiently.
‘Yes. Mrs. Dester said he was glad she had arranged for him to go,’ Burnett said.
‘I’m asking Nash. Never mind what Mrs. Dester said,’ Maddux snapped.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Whenever I went into his room, he was either asleep or in a kind of coma. I never mentioned the sanatorium to him.’
Maddux lifted his shoulders. He nodded at Bromwich.
‘Go on,’ he said, and took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it from a much-worn leather pouch.
‘I thought as Dester owed a whale of a lot of money,’ Bromwich began when Maddux interrupted.
‘How much money?’
Burnett looked at me.
‘I haven’t had time to complete a statement,’ I said, ‘but at a rough guess it would be around twenty-seven thousand, but it’s probably more than that.’
‘I thought at first he had skipped,’ Bromwich went on. ‘I notified the patrols to look out for the car: it was unmistakable: a blue-and-cream convertible Rolls. It was found abandoned on West 9th Street. We’ve checked the airport, the station and the bus depots, but no one has seen Dester. It looked at first that, after passing through Ventura, they had turned back to Hollywood, or at least Dester had. Either that or they were held up by kidnappers who later ditched the car. Anyway, the car was brought back to Hollywood after passing through Ventura.’
I knew sooner or later he would get around to Helen’s death, and I was in an agony of suspense to learn how she had died. It was as much as I could do to sit still.
‘We continued the search for Dester,’ Bromwich went on. ‘We concentrated our search between Ventura, Glendale and West 9th Street. We got no leads. No one had seen the Rolls on the return journey. A few motorists and the State trooper had seen it on the outward journey. The State trooper had come close enough to it to see there were only two people in it: Mrs. Dester; he identified her by her white hat, and Dester.’
‘How did he identify him?’ Maddux asked from behind a cloud of blue-white tobacco smoke.
I felt my heart give a little kick, and to cover my tension, I took out my cigarette-case and lit a cigarette.
‘He saw Dester was wearing a camel-hair coat. We have a description from Miss Temple how Dester was dressed when he left the house.’
Maddux turned his eyes on Marian. He seemed to be noticing her for the first time. ‘You saw Dester leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know Dester by sight?’
‘No. It was the first time I saw him.’
‘He was supposed to be a sick man. Did he look sick to you?’
‘He was very unsteady. His eyes seemed to hurt him.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I heard him ask for the hall light to be turned out.’
Maddux scratched the side of his jaw with the stem of his pipe.
‘You mean he came down the stairs in the dark?’
My heart was banging so violently I was scared they would hear it.
‘It wasn’t really dark. There were four wall lights on, but the light was very dim.’
‘So you couldn’t see his face?’
‘No.’
‘Were you supposed to be watching him?’
‘Mrs. Dester asked me to be ready in case she needed help with him. She asked me to keep out of sight as Mr. Dester was sensitive.’
‘Did he need help?’
‘No.’
Maddux turned to Bromwich. ‘Go ahead.’
It was obvious that Bromwich didn’t like all these interruptions. His fiery face was taking on a deeper shade.