The Count of 9 Read online

  “I am down to business,” I said.

  “You don’t look like it. What the hell are we going to do?”

  “It’s been done,” I said.

  “You can’t shove this off on my shoulders,” Bertha said. “It’s partnership business—I suppose you were out with some little tart while I was up here watching those goddam guests.”

  “You didn’t ask me to come,” I said. “ You were the one that wanted to be in the pictures. You wanted to get the credit. You were the hard-boiled babe who was going to grab the women by their heels and shake them until a six-foot blowgun fell out of their bosoms, and—”

  “Shut up!” Bertha snapped at me.

  “You were standing down by the elevator door, checking invitations?”

  “Yes!” she snapped. “And don’t ask me why I didn’t check them off the guest list or I’ll take a swing at you right here in front of all these people.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking of,” I said. “What about the caterers? How did they come up? Is there a back elevator?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s only the one elevator. Everything had to come up in that elevator, and everything had to go down in that elevator.”

  “And,” I said, “will you kindly tell me how anyone smuggled out an unjointed five- or six-foot blowgun made of one piece of wood?”

  Bertha looked at me and her little glittering eyes blinked rapidly.

  “As you told him yourself, you might have slipped up in letting a gate crasher get in,” I said, “but I certainly don’t think you’re dumb enough to stand there and let somebody walk out with a blowgun like that without at least seeing it.”

  Bertha thought things over, then a slow grin came over her face. “Then it’s been hidden,” she said. “It still has to be in the penthouse someplace.”

  “Unless someone heaved it out over the roof.”

  Bertha said, “He’s sent for his insurance agent. I’m supposed to make a statement to him. Boy, I’ll be glad when he gets here and I can get the hell out.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Not a word,” Bertha said. “He doesn’t want anyone to breathe a word to the police. He wants to keep this quiet.…What the hell do you do that makes them fall for you like that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Phyllis Crockett the Second, darling,” Bertha said. “She can’t take her eyes off of you, and she keeps striking a pose.… My God, I don’t know what it is you have. You’re a pint-sized little squirt. Dean Crockett could pick you up with one hand. He’d make two of you, and yet—”

  “Only one and a half without the padding,” I said.

  “All right, one and a half without the padding,” Bertha said. “But still…” She broke off and looked over at Mrs. Crockett musingly. “And Dean Crockett wears the padding for the family,” she said. “There isn’t any padding on his wife.”

  “You want me around for moral support?” I asked Bertha.

  “Yes. I want you to talk with the insurance man when he comes. I—this must be the guy now.”

  The elevator door opened. Melvin Otis Olney escorted a man dressed in a gray business suit. The man looked as though he’d gone to bed, had been aroused from the middle of a sound sleep and told to get over there.

  Crockett called us over to the group and introduced us. The insurance man’s name was William Andrews. He made notes and asked questions. “How much of a valuation did you place on the jade Buddha?” he asked Crockett.

  “Nine thousand,” he said, without batting an eye.

  “Carved jade?”

  “A very high quality of jade,” Crockett said. “There’s a ruby in the forehead.”

  “You had a similar jade Buddha stolen a short time ago?” the insurance man asked.

  “Yes. This was the mate to that.”

  “They were alike?”

  “Yes.”

  “In every detail?”

  “I tell you, they were a matched pair.”

  “You put a valuation of seventy-five on the other one,” the insurance man said.

  Crockett blinked his eyes for a minute, said quickly, “When I said nine thousand dollars, that was a round figure including both the blowgun and the jade Buddha.”

  “I see,” the insurance man said. “Nine thousand dollars for both. That means fifteen hundred for the blowgun.”

  “And the darts,” Crockett said.

  “Oh, yes. How many darts?”

  “Six.”

  “Could you estimate how much for the blowgun and how much for the darts?”

  “No,” Crockett said curtly. “I couldn’t. Actually, both articles are priceless. Those darts have a poison that can’t be imported into this country—in fact, that whole blowgun outfit is absolutely unique. You can’t replace it. It’s—”

  “I know, I know,” the insurance man interrupted. “I was just trying to get a basis of appraisal for the home office, but it’s all right. Fifteen hundred for the blowgun and darts; seventy-five for the jade Buddha.”

  He picked up his briefcase, whipped out a printed form, used the briefcase as a writing desk and started scribbling.

  “Oh, never mind doing it tonight,” Crockett said, his manner suddenly mollified. “I guess I just got excited. There was really no need for me to have called you, but—”

  “No, no,” the insurance man said, pausing briefly in his writing to look up with a winning smile. “That’s what we’re here for; that’s the kind of service we try to give.…Here you are, Mr. Crockett. Sign here and we’ll have your check in the mail without any further trouble.”

  Crockett read the claim and signed it. The insurance man opened his briefcase, dropped the claim in, bowed to everyone, said, “Good night…I guess I should say good morning,” and started for the elevator.

  Bertha seemed somehow stuck on dead center, so I said to Crockett, “Well, I guess there’s nothing further we can do.”

  “The hell there isn’t,” Crockett said. “I want my stuff back.”

  I smiled over at Bertha and said, “She’s the business manager of the firm.”

  “What do you mean?” Crockett said.

  “I mean,” I told him, “that you hired our agency to keep the gate crashers out, not to recover stolen property. If you want to make an arrangement with us to get stolen property back, that’s a separate job.”

  His face flushed and he took a quick step toward me, then paused. His eyes locked with mine and abruptly he laughed.

  “Damned if you aren’t right,” he said. “I guess I owe you an apology, Lam. I had you figured wrong when I met you—I guess I made a mistake.”

  “Think nothing of it,” I told him.

  Bertha said proudly, “Lots of people make a mistake about Donald. He’s little, but he’s tough—and he’s brainy as hell.”

  “Skip it, Bertha,” I said.

  “Well, I didn’t make any mistake about him,” Phyllis Crockett said, giving me her hand. “ I recognize ability when I see it. Good night, Mr. Lam, it was a real pleasure to meet you, and I’m sure my husband will be in tomorrow to discuss business matters with Mrs. Cool.”

  She turned to Bertha and said, “Good night, Mrs. Cool.”

  I called out to Melvin Otis Olney, who was piloting the insurance man over to the elevator, “Hold it, Olney, we’ll ride down in the elevator with you and that’ll save another trip.”

  “It’s all right, I’ll hold the elevator,” Olney said.

  I managed to avoid shaking hands again with Crockett so there was no further opportunity for him to disable my writing hand. We said good night, went to the elevator and the door closed.

  The insurance man looked at me, grinned and said, “Take one of my cards—I know your agency but I’d like to have a card, if you don’t mind. Just to keep my report straight.”

  I gave him one of our cards. We got out at the twentieth floor and transferred to an elevator going down to the lobby. Olney took the private el
evator back up.

  “Do you have much of this?” I asked William Andrews.

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “I get it all the time. Take some fellow like Dean Crockett. He gets a place packed with curios he’s picked up in different parts of the world. By the time he gets back and gets to looking that stuff over, he thinks it’s worth a million dollars. We don’t even try to talk him into cutting down on his valuation. It’s good business. Nobody’s going to steal all of that junk, but every so often someone picks up a piece that appeals to him, and we pay off at an exaggerated valuation. But our total valuation is so high and the premiums are so high it averages out all right, plenty all right. Everybody’s satisfied.

  “The only place we could get stuck would be in the event of a fire. But he’s in a fireproof building.…We’re willing to put a million-dollar valuation on that stuff, but if the guy died tomorrow and his estate sold it at auction, you know what they’d get?”

  I said nothing, so Andrews tapped the briefcase in which he’d put the claim Crockett had filled out.

  “They’d get about ten thousand dollars for the whole shooting works,” he said. “That blowgun they’d have to haul off to the junk pile and dump. They’d have to pay hauling charges.”

  Chapter Four

  When I entered the office the next morning, Elsie Brand said, “Bertha is biting her fingernails back to the knuckles.”

  “What does she want?”

  “You.”

  “Why?”

  “This theft at the party.”

  “I thought she was going to take care of that,” I said, grinning. “Newspapers intimated she was in sole charge.”

  Elsie was usually careful not to discuss partnership affairs, but now she said demurely, “That isn’t the way she feels this morning.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go in.”

  I went to Bertha’s private office, went through the formality of tapping on the door, and walked in.

  “My God! It’s about time you got here,” Bertha Cool screamed at me.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “That damn Buddha and blowgun.”

  “What about them?”

  “We’re supposed to get them back.”

  “He doesn’t really want them back,” I said. “If he got them back, he’d have to refund nine thousand bucks to the insurance company.”

  “That isn’t the way he talked to me. He wants them back.”

  “Well, why not get them back then?”

  “Don’t pull that line with me. How the hell do you go about getting stuff like that back? Until you joined this agency, I had a respectable run-of-the-mill business, serving papers, making reports, tracing witnesses.”

  “And making run-of-the-mill money,” I reminded her.

  “Then you started in working for me, weaseled your way into the business, and we’ve been playing tag with the state penitentiary ever since.”

  I looked at her big diamond rings.

  Bertha followed my eyes, suddenly grinned. “All right, Donald. I’m out of my depth. How do you deal with something like this without letting the police in on it?”

  She pushed her creaking swivel chair back from her desk, got up and started walking back and forth across the office with that peculiar walk of hers which was half-waddle, half-stride. “He had sixty-two guests up there,” she said. “Sixty-two. Count them. Sixty-two. All of them with invitations. I checked every damn one of them. All of them, he says, are pillars of respectability…and one of his damn pillars of respectability stole a jade Buddha and a blowgun. Now he wants them back.

  “What do you do if you can’t call the police? You can’t cover pawnshops without calling the police, and that stuff isn’t going to show up in a pawnshop, anyway. It’s in the private collection of one of those guests.…”

  “Unless that blowgun is still up there, hidden someplace under a bed or in a closet somewhere,” I said.

  “Well, it isn’t,” she told me. “I suggested one of the guests might have hidden it, and they put that whole penthouse through a wringer this morning. They searched every corner of it.”

  “Try putting an ad in the paper,” I said. “Will the person who inadvertently walked out with the curios at a certain party given by a well-known social figure please communicate with Box 420. Reward.”

  Bertha glared at me. “Don’t be facetious.”

  “I’m not being facetious,” I said.

  Bertha snorted.

  “It’s a good, logical suggestion,” I told her, “but if you don’t want to follow it, you don’t have to.”

  “If I don’t want to follow it!” she screamed. “You’re in this thing! You’re the one that’s going to have to get that stuff back. I’ve done my share. I’m not going to carry all the load of the partnership business.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I went there and stood on my two aching feet in front of that goddam elevator, being nice to people as they walked in, smiling at them, asking to check their invitations.…Don’t hand me that line of malarkey, Donald Lam. You’re going to take charge of getting these things returned, and I’m going to be busy from now on. When that damn secretary, Melvin Otis Olney, calls, I’m going to tell him you’re in charge of that branch of the business.”

  “How nice,” I said, settling down in the chair and lighting a cigarette. “How do you get along with Olney?”

  “I hate his guts,” Bertha said. “He’s a supersmooth, suave, penny-ante, slave-driving sonofabitch!”

  “And the photographer?”

  “The photographer,” she said, “was nice.”

  “He was there last night?”

  “Oh, sure, he was taking pictures all over the place.”

  “A private photographer?”

  “It depends on what you mean by private. Crockett wants pictures. Every time Crockett does anything he wants to be photographed.”

  “What was the occasion for the shindig?” I asked.

  “He’s just back from exploring the wilds of Whosis, with a lot of pictures of women carrying baskets on their heads, women naked from the waist up, dead animals with Crockett standing with one foot on the chest of the carcass, his gun resting on his arm and a fatuous smile on his face.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “I didn’t see all of it. I was waiting at the damn elevator until the guests arrived, then I went up and stood by the entrance to the elevator in the upper hall so I could check anybody that came in late.”

  “Was there anyone?”

  “A couple.”

  “Where was this trip?”

  “Someplace down in Africa or Borneo or someplace. I never did give a damn about geography.”

  “There’s a wide distance between Africa and Borneo,” I told her.

  “And a wide distance between your yakkity-yak and getting that stuff back,” Bertha said.

  “Any flag planted?” I asked. “The flag of an adventurer’s club or something of the sort?”

  “Oh, sure,” Bertha said. “They all do that. They had motion pictures of the guy sticking the flagpole in the ground, and then they had the flag there, and it was presented to somebody or other with a lot of ceremony.”

  “And that somebody took it out?”

  “That somebody took it out.”

  “Who was the somebody—do you know?”

  “Hell, no. It was some nitwit who was kissing Dean Crockett’s fanny all over the joint. He was the manager of some goddam club.”

  I got up, stretched, yawned, said to Bertha, “Okay, I’ll give it a whirl. You don’t like my idea of the ad, eh?”

  “Get out of here,” she said, “before I start throwing things.”

  I went down for a coffee break and bought a morning paper.

  Melvin Otis Olney, as a public relations expert, had done a good job. The shindig was written up in style and there were pictures of Dean Crockett the Second, standing with his foot on the chest of some rare animal, pictures of Dean
Crockett the Second planting a flag of the International Goodwill Club.

  The International Goodwill Club, it seemed, was organized for the purpose of promoting international friendship through dispensing international knowledge of customs, civilization and various cultures of different peoples and races.

  I went back up to the office, said to Elsie, “What do you know about our file clerk?”

  “Eva Ennis? Not too much.”

  “How long has she been with us?”

  “About six weeks.”

  “What’s her reaction to Bertha?”

  “Terrified.”

  “What’s her reaction to me?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather find out for yourself? After all,” she said with dignity, “I’m a secretary, not a procurist.”

  “Hold everything,” I told her. “This is business.”

  “I can imagine,” she said, sniffing.

  “Get her in here,” I told Elsie, “and just to keep your mind above the belt, you can sit in on the interview.”

  She looked at me curiously. “What’s it all about?”

  “Get her in here and you’ll find out. I don’t terrify her, do I?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Okay, get her in.”

  Elsie went out and a short time later came back with Eva Ennis.

  I looked Eva over pretty carefully. She had curves, contours and an air of sexual awareness about her that belied the demure expression which was on her face at the moment. She was wearing a high-necked sweater, a jacket and skirt. The sweater was tight.

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Lam?”

  “Sit down, Eva,” I said. “I want to talk with you.”

  She smiled at me invitingly, pushed out her chest, then glanced at Elsie.

  “Sit down, Elsie,” I said. “I want to find out something about Eva’s private love life, and I want a chaperone.”

  Eva started to say something, changed her mind, then blurted out, “I can’t imagine a better way to find out about a girl’s love life than to have a chaperone.”

  I nodded as though the remark made sense and said, “I’m trying to get a line on the photographer who was here the other day. I may want to have some work done.”