I had been waiting for about five minutes when Madeline arrived in a taxi.
“Why didn’t you tell me your father was C. Maurice Strong?” I asked as we walked toward the broad front porch.
She looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you know?”
“How would I know?” I asked reasonably. “Strong’s a fairly common name.”
“I guess I just take it for granted everybody knows.”
Inside the house was pervaded by the unused, dusty smell of having been locked up a long time. White dust cover were over all of the furniture.
Madeline led the way through a huge front room, a slightly smaller dining room and into a wide back hall.
She opened a door leading off the hallway and preceded me down a flight of stairs to the basement.
“Lloyd’s laboratory is down here in the basement,” Madeline explained. “He kept all his records in the lab.”
We had to pass through a game room and a laundry room before we reached the laboratory, which was under the front part of the house. It was a large room, about twenty by fifteen feet, with an electrical workbench similar to the one I had seen in Barney Amhurst’s apartment along one wall.
“He kept everything in there,” Madeline said, pointing to a single dusty filing cabinet in one corner. “What is it you’re looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ll just have to go through everything.”
Madeline drew a chair away from the workbench, looked at the dust on it and decided to continue standing. “It’s already been gone through once, you know. After the funeral we had to check through his papers for the will, insurance policies and so on.”
“Who’s we?” I asked.
“Well, me, I mean actually. But Walter Ford helped me.”
I had just pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, but instead of looking down into it, I looked over my shoulder at Madeline.
“What was that?” I asked
“I said Walter Ford helped me go through the papers.”
I frowned at her. “How did that happen? I thought you only knew Ford casually before he came into the Huntsafe Company.”
“I did,” Madeline said. “Well, it was a little more than casually. He’d had some business relationships with my father and was a great admirer of his. Lloyd and I had known him for years, but he was older than we were so we never went around in the same crowd. I think he came to Lloyd’s funeral more because of admiration for my father than because Lloyd meant anything to him. But he was very considerate. You know how people at a funeral always ask if there is anything they can do?”
I nodded in indication that I knew.
“Well, my lawyer had told me I would have to go through all Lloyd’s papers, and I was thinking about it and dreading the task when Walter came up and asked if there was anything he could do. So I said, yes, he could help me sort through Lloyd’s papers.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why him particularly? Don’t you have any close relatives?”
She shook her head. “None that live here. And because of Walter’s feeling for my father, I kind of felt that he was like an uncle or something. I don’t mean all the time. But during the emotional stress of the funeral. About the only other person I could have asked was Barney, and he was so broken up over Lloyd’s death I couldn’t ask him.”
“I see. And I suppose Ford did most of the sorting?”
“Well, yes. I’m not very good at that sort of thing.”
Since Walter Ford had been at the file before me, there was little chance I would find what I was looking for, I realized. With his propensity for blackmail, it would have gone into his inside pocket the moment he found it. Nevertheless I doggedly went through every drawer of the cabinet.
In a manila folder marked “Tax Returns,” I found duplicate copies of Lloyd Strong’s Federal forms 1040 for the three years before he died. Since there were no forms for previous years, I assumed that prior to that whatever income he had was included on his father’s annual return.
Checking over the three 1040’s, I found that most of the income reported was from royalties on patents inherited from his father, and from stock dividends and interests. The totals, I noted, came to quite impressive amounts. In each of the last two returns there was also included a Schedule C showing profit and loss on his own patents. For both years gross income amounted to less than two thousand dollars and, after deducting business expenses, both years showed a substantial net loss.
The item which interested me most was line eleven of Schedule C, “Salaries and wages not included in line four.”
For both years Lloyd Strong claimed salary payments of $3,770.00.
I said to Madeline, “Did you know your brother was losing money in the inventing business?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “But that was only temporary.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“It takes some time before royalties begin to come in from patents. Lloyd had several excellent chances to sell some of his patents outright, but since we didn’t need the money, he preferred to take a long-range view and only lease them on a royalty basis. It’s only since father died that Lloyd started patenting his inventions. And every patent he’s leased is tied up with an ironclad contract. Returns are low to start with that way, but the eventual income should be four to five times what he could have gotten by outright sales. My brother was an excellent businessman.”
By then it was pushing twelve-thirty and I offered to buy Madeline lunch. We had it in an excellent restaurant she knew from having spent her whole life in the neighborhood. The food was fine, but the lunch was no fun because Madeline kept pestering me to know what I had been looking for and I was in no mood to tell her.
“I want to talk to Warren Day before I say a word to anyone else,” I said. “I think I’ve got the answer to this case, but there isn’t a shred of proof. Before I lay myself open to a possible defamation of character suit, I want to see if Day can help me.”
“You mean you actually know who killed Walter Ford?”
“I’ve got a theory about it. It may come to nothing. And that’s all you get until I find out.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
I found the inspector leaning back in his chair, hands clasped across his lean stomach, staring out the window with an unnatural expression on his face. After studying the expression for a moment, I came to the incredulous conclusion that it was geniality.
He cocked an eye at me and said affably, “Hello, Manny.”
That unnerved me. When Day calls me “Manny” instead of “Moon,” he either wants a favor or has just received exceptionally good news.
“All this evidence of good cheer. If you’re not careful, you’ll get yourself expelled from the ogre’s union.”
This brought a frown to his face, which made him look more normal. “While I think of it, Moon, give me back that picture.”
I had forgotten I was still carrying around a piece of evidence. Taking the photograph of Bubbles and Daniel Cumberland from my pocket, I handed it to him. It disappeared into the top drawer of his desk.
“I’m going to cheer you up even more than you are, Inspector,” I said. “This ought to make you delirious.”
“You’re moving out of town,” he guessed.
I gave him a wounded look. “Then who would do your work for you? No, but I’ve got a brand-new theory about the Ford-Cumberland case.”