The Count of 9 Read online

  “Any old time,” Bertha said. “I’ve got all the rest of the afternoon—what there is of it.”

  “Well,” I said, “you were standing by the elevator watching people as they went in, watching people as they went out. The blowgun was over five feet long. You’d have to be pretty dumb to let somebody walk by you carrying a five-foot blowgun.”

  “You mean it hadn’t been taken out at all?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “it was taken out. It must have been taken out. The place was searched and there wasn’t any blowgun. It either was taken out or thrown off the roof. And there was no indication it had been thrown off the roof.”

  “Go ahead,” Bertha said.

  “So,” I told her, “it was only necessary to look around for something that could be taken out of the place without exciting attention, something that would hold a blowgun over five feet long. Once you started thinking along those lines, it wasn’t at all difficult.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In the pole of that club flag that the secretary took out.”

  “Then he stole it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s the one who took it out.”

  “Sure, he’s the one who took it out,” I said, “but I doubt if he knew the blowgun was in there.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, in the first place,” I said, “the job had to be carefully engineered. The poles on those flags are made so they can be driven deep into hard ground. They’re made of sturdy wood. Now, somebody who knew the exact dimensions of this blowgun had to take that club flag and bore a hole in the pole, or have a hole bored in the pole. You can’t do that just on the spur of the moment. In the first place, it is a delicate job and a high precision job. And in the next place, it would leave shavings, sawdust and litter.”

  “You mean it was done outside of the penthouse?”

  “Done outside of the penthouse well in advance and cut to very careful measurements.”

  “I’ll be a dirty name,” Bertha said. “Fry me for an oyster.… Who do you think planned the whole thing?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “We were paid to get the loot back.”

  “How about this Buddha?” Bertha asked.

  “The Buddha was simple.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Bertha said, with grudging, unwilling admiration in her voice. “You just got a list of the guests, walked to the guest who had taken the thing and said, ‘Give it back,’ and that’s all there was to it.”

  “Actually,” I said, “it was even simpler than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We knew,” I said, “that the inside of the private elevator going to the penthouse was equipped with X-rays just like these booths you stand in before you go into some of the state prisons. Whenever anyone left the penthouse apartment, he was standing right in front of an X-ray machine for a few seconds; long enough for the watcher with a fluoroscope on the back of the elevator to get a complete inventory.

  “You knew that, I knew it, and, presumably, the person who was going to take the jade Buddha knew it—but no jade Buddha showed up in the X-ray machine. Therefore, it didn’t go down in the elevator—at least in the ordinary manner.”

  “What do you mean, in the ordinary manner?”

  “I mean the person who went down with that idol wasn’t X-rayed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was one person who couldn’t be X-rayed. There must have been an arrangement to shut off the X-ray when this one person went down. I could think of only one person who would have had that arrangement.”

  “Who?”

  “The photographer. He was carrying cameras and films in and out. An X-ray would have fogged the films. Since the pictures of the banquet shindig weren’t fogged, it’s a cinch the photographic equipment wasn’t X-rayed—either in or out.”

  Bertha blinked her eyes, adjusting to that. “And the photographer had it?”

  “It was concealed in his equipment. We’ll put it that way.”

  “What did he say when you got it?”

  “He doesn’t know I have it. I stole it from him.”

  “Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said.

  I got up and walked out.

  Chapter Eight

  Elsie Brand showed me a clipping from the paper. “Seen this?” she asked.

  It was a gossip column with a lot of news about persons in the public eye, a lot of veiled insinuations which probably had been made up out of the columnist’s head, such as: “What contractor is living in a fool’s paradise, ignorant of the fact that his wife has had private detectives trailing him for two months now and knows all about that apartment up on Nob Hill…? How does it happen that whenever a certain lawyer, whose last name begins with M, always finds night work for his secretary it’s on the Wednesday evening when his wife is attending her club meeting…?”

  “What about it?” I asked Elsie.

  She placed the tip of her finger on a paragraph near the bottom: “It is rumored that a wealthy individual who spends much of his time cruising around in foreign countries, getting material for a tax-exempt foundation, has been away from home too much, too often and too frequently. His much younger wife has other plans for spending the rest of her life.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” I asked.

  “It should,” she said.

  I was about to say something when Bertha Cool appeared in the doorway, standing militantly with the dark wood blowgun in one hand, the jade Buddha in the other.

  “Don’t think I’m going to go parading up there with this junk,” she said.

  “You’re going to fix the fee, aren’t you?”

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  “Then you’d better have the last contact with the client.”

  “The last contact,” Bertha said, “will be when I fix the fee. I’m not going to do it in his house, going up there like a delivery boy.

  “I’ve been thinking this thing over. Donald, you have to admit that when it comes to financial matters, Bertha has the right hunches.…Now, here’s the way to play this. You take this stuff up and deliver it. You tell him about how you recovered it. Don’t make it look so damn simple and easy, the way you did when you were telling it to me.

  “Dress it up a bit. Tell him about the way you reasoned things out, only don’t tell him that you started in the middle of the book. Go back to first principles. Tell him about casing the joint so as to determine there really was only one elevator. Dress it up.”

  “He may resent that,” I said.

  “He can resent it and be damned. We have a living to make. He’s already put a value on that bunch of junk at nine thousand bucks. We’ve got it back for him without any fuss or trouble.”

  I shook my head and said, “Nix, Bertha, nix.”

  “What the hell do you mean, nix? I’m talking about money.”

  “I’m talking about money, too,” I told her. “But let’s be logical about it. If it had taken a month to grab this stuff, we could have built it up into a big play. The way it is, we went out and grabbed it.

  “We can’t possibly build that up into a big job without getting in trouble with questions of business ethics and all of that. Therefore, since it’s got to be a relatively small job anyway, why not minimize the thing and make it appear we toss those things off every day before breakfast?

  “We send him a bill for the work of one operative for one day, and dress it out a little with expenses in the line of taxi fares, meals and incidentals. We get in solid with a new client. The next time Crockett has any job, we’re in on it. Any time Crockett’s friends want anything done, they’ll come to us because they’ll have heard all about us from Crockett.”

  Bertha blinked her eyes and said, “I’ll think it over. I’ll sleep on it before I send him a bill. You may have a point.”

  “I know I have a point.”

  “All right, Donald, you take the junk up there.”
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br />   I said. “If you promise to make the guy a nominal charge, I’ll take the stuff over and give him a build-up on the work.”

  “It’s a go,” Bertha said, and literally shoved the stuff into my hands.

  “Want me to telephone and tell him you’re coming?” Elsie Brand asked.

  I hesitated for a moment, then grinned and said, “No, I want to see the guy’s face when I hand him the stuff. That hole couldn’t have been bored in the flagpole without somebody in the house knowing about it—in other words, that had to be an inside job. I want to find out whether Dean Crockett the Second carefully arranged to have this stuff missing and then called us in as window dressing, and, if he did, why he did it.”

  “Don’t get tough with him,” Bertha warned.

  “I won’t unless I see a blazed trail leading to where I want to go,” I told her.

  “How about the photographer? Couldn’t he have done the whole thing?” Bertha asked.

  “He might have,” I told her, “but I have another idea on that.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not certain the photographer even knew the idol was in the camera.”

  “Why?”

  “The way it was wrapped in cotton.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  I said, “Suppose some woman wanted that idol and knew that the best way to get it out of there was to conceal it in a camera. That Speed Graphic that the idol was in had a wide-angle lens. In other words, it was a one-shot camera. The photographer used that to take a picture of the guests at the table, and then that was the last shot he was going to make with it that night.

  “Anybody that knew the photographer and knew cameras could be pretty certain of that, so that was the camera in which to hide the jade idol.

  “So some woman who wanted that idol used Lionel Palmer as a cat’s-paw to get the chestnut out of the fire for her. Then she intended to come drifting into Palmer’s studio to make an appointment, ask some question or perhaps to keep a date with Palmer, who is about the most obnoxious type of hound you can imagine. She watches for an opportunity, opens the back of the camera, slips out the idol and that’s that.”

  “What about the cotton?” Bertha asked.

  “That’s what makes me think the photographer didn’t do it.”

  “Go on,” Bertha said.

  “The cotton was just pushed in there loose. Loose threads of cotton can stick to the inside of a camera and raise merry hell with photographs. A photographer might have put a soft cloth inside the camera, but he wouldn’t have been apt to have packed the idol in loose cotton and then put it in the camera.”

  Bertha’s greedy little eyes lit up. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got an idea. Tell him that for the moment you can’t tell him where you recovered the idol because you’re working on it to try and fix the responsibility. That’ll give us four or five days’ more work. You can hang around that photographer’s studio and see who comes in.”

  “I couldn’t hang round that guy for a week without killing him,” I told her.

  “Then I’ll cultivate him,” Bertha announced. “It’s an idea we can develop. Then we can make a complete report to Crockett and tell him whether his photographer should be fired or whether the guy is a tool.”

  “You try hanging around him,” I told her, “and you’ll learn about the facts of life.”

  “I know the facts of life,” Bertha said.

  “You’ll learn ramifications, variations.”

  “I’ve been ramified, verified and mutated,” she said. “Get the hell out of here. You go make a build-up with Crockett, and I’ll take on the job of turning this photographer inside out…or maybe we could get Eva Ennis to do it. I notice he fell for her.”

  I shook my head and said, “You’re all wet, Bertha. The thing to do is to put the cards on the table with Crockett, make a quick turn on the thing, and then if he wants any additional information about Lionel Palmer, he’ll give us the job of finding out.”

  Bertha sighed wearily. “Arguing with you,” she said, “is as bad as trying to argue with the calendar. Get the hell out of here and do it your way. You’re going to, anyway.”

  Chapter Nine

  I couldn’t get past the guy at the desk in the apartment house without telling him where I was going—that damn blowgun.

  If I had been able to walk in there as though I owned the place, I could have at least taken a chance at bulling my way past the desk. But that blowgun made me stand out like a sore thumb.

  “You’ll have to be announced,” the man said.

  “Donald Lam,” I said, “calling on Mr. Crockett.”

  He relayed a message upstairs, said, “Mr. Lam, Mr. Crockett is not available at the moment, but his wife will see you in her studio. It’s on the twentieth floor, on the other side of the building. I’ll have a boy take you up.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Come to think of it, no one was going to surprise any expression on the face of Dean Crockett the Second. The guy had himself surrounded with too many fences. He wasn’t going to be surprised—period.

  A boy rode up to the twentieth floor with me, then, instead of going toward the place where the secret elevator went to the penthouse, he detoured me down a corridor and pushed the chimes on Apartment 20-a.

  Mrs. Crockett came to the door, all smiling and gracious. She was wearing a painter’s smock and smelled a little of turpentine.

  She saw what I was carrying and her face lost its smile. An expression of shocked amazement came into her eyes.

  “The blowgun!” she said.

  “The blowgun,” I said. And added, “I also have—”

  “Mr. Lam. do come in.”

  She dismissed the bellboy with a smile and I entered the apartment.

  “This is my hobby,” she said, by way of explanation. “This is where I spend a good deal of my time. I love to paint, and my husband is away so much, you know. I have a good deal of time.”

  She glanced at me mischievously. “And they do say as how the devil finds mischief for idle hands.”

  “So you are afraid to have yours idle?” I asked.

  “Not afraid,” she said. “I think it’s better that way.” Then she looked at me again and said, “They’re not idle all the time. Come into my painting room.”

  The apartment had evidently been specially designed for a studio. There were panes of frosted glass reaching high and on an angle. There were drapes so that the light could be controlled. There was an easel, a canvas on it, dozens of canvases around the room, and a nude model standing on a dais in a position somewhat resembling the female figures which for a while were put on cars.

  “Oh, I forgot about you,” Phyllis Crockett said. “I…but I guess you won’t mind.”

  “Well, it’s pretty late to voice an objection if I did,” the model said.

  Phyllis Crockett laughed. “I daresay Mr. Lam has seen nudes before.”

  She walked over to a chair, looked around and said, “Where’s that robe of yours, Sylvia? I—”

  “I hung it in the closet after I took it off.”

  “I’ll get it,” Mrs. Crockett said, “and then I’ll present you formally.”

  The girl laughed and said, “Oh, go ahead, present me and then I’ll get the wrap.”

  Phyllis said, “Miss Hadley, this is Donald Lam. He’s been working on a job for…well, he has some things to leave for Dean.”

  Sylvia Hadley smiled at me, said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lam.”

  She walked calmly over to the closet.

  She slipped a robe over her shoulders, walked over and sat down.

  That was the first time I took a good look at her face. It was the face of the girl whose photographs I had seen in Lionel Palmer’s studio earlier in the day.

  Suddenly an idea hit me between the eyes.

  “You have the blowgun and the—” Mrs. Crockett asked.

  “The blowgun,” I said firmly, interrupting her.

  �
��Oh, I thought you said you had the—”

  “The blowgun,” I interrupted again, smiling. “The other part of the job is, I think, showing progress, but…” I turned to the model and said, “You’re a professional model, I take it, Miss Hadley?”

  She shook her head and smiled.

  “Actually,” Mrs. Crockett said, “she’s a friend of mine, and a very demure young lady except when she’s modeling. But recently she’s been thinking some of making modeling a career. There was a change in her status, and—”

  Sylvia Hadley laughed and said, “Oh, don’t pull any punches, Phyllis.”

  She turned to me. “My husband turned out to be a perfect heel. He went through everything I had, then picked up with another woman and left me high and dry. Phyllis is awfully nice trying to pretend this is a neighborly favor I’m doing for her, but actually she’s paying me for it.

  “I knew she painted and hired models, and I felt that I had what it took, so I asked her to pay me the same rate she paid the models.

  “Now there you have it, Mr. Lam, and there’s no need for any embarrassment or covering up. After all, I’m working for a living.…We do have a break every once in a while, and there you have the story in a nutshell.”

  I looked around at some of the paintings and said, “Evidently you have rather steady work.”

  Phyllis laughed. “I don’t know whether you noticed, Mr. Lam, but she has an absolutely divine figure. I want to put it on canvas in as many different poses as I can.”

  “I noticed,” I said dryly.

  “The paintings?”

  “The figure.”

  “I thought you had,” Sylvia remarked demurely.

  “Your husband’s not available?” I asked Mrs. Crockett.

  “My husband,” she said, “has what is known as a hibernating suite. It’s most annoying. He goes in there every so often when he has a job to do and closes and locks the door. And when he’s in there, nothing, absolutely nothing, disturbs him, Mr. Lam. He isn’t available to his wife, to his friends, or to anyone.

  “That’s where he writes some of his travel books. He sits in there and dictates by the hour.…”

  “A secretary?” I asked.