“Watched him why?”
He looked at me and said nothing. Then he looked back over his shoulder into the back part of the car. “How you doin’, pal?”
A thick sound that might be trying to be a voice came from under a rug on the floor of the car. “He likes riding,” De Spain said. “All these hard guys like riding around in cars. Okay. I’ll tuck the heap in the alley and we’ll go up.”
He slid around the corner of the building without lights and the car sound died in the moonlit darkness. Across the street a row of enormous eucalyptus trees fringed a set of public tennis courts. The smell of kelp came up along the boulevard from the ocean.
De Spain came back around the corner of the building and we went up to the locked lobby door and knocked on the heavy plate glass. Far back there was light from an open elevator beyond a big bronze mailbox. An old man came out of the elevator and along the corridor to the door and stood looking out at us with keys in his hand. De Spain held up his police shield. The old man squinted at it and unlocked the door and locked it after us without saying a word. He went back along the hall to the elevator and rearranged the homemade cushion on the stool and moved his false teeth around with his tongue and said: “What you want?”
He had a long gray face that grumbled even when it didn’t say anything. His trousers were frayed at the cuffs and one of his heelworn black shoes contained an obvious bunion. His blue uniform coat fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
De Spain said: “Doc Austrian is upstairs, ain’t he?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“I ain’t trying to surprise you,” De Spain said. “I’d have worn my pink tights.”
“Yeah, he’s up there,” the old man said sourly.
“What time you last see Greb, the laboratory man on Four?”
“Didn’t see him.”
“What time you come on, Pop?”
“Seven.”
“Okay. Take us up to Six.”
The old man whooshed the doors shut and rode us up slowly and gingerly and whooshed the doors open again and sat like a piece of gray driftwood carved to look like a man.
De Spain reached up and lifted down the passkey that hung over the old man’s head.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” the old man said.
“Who says I can’t?”
The old man shook his head angrily, said nothing.
“How old are you, Pop?” De Spain said.
“Goin’ on sixty.”
“Goin’ on sixty hell. You’re a good juicy seventy. How come you got an elevator licence?”
The old man didn’t say anything. He clicked his false teeth. “That’s better,” De Spain said. “Just keep the old trap buttoned that way and everything will be wicky-wacky. Take her down, Pop.”
We got out of the elevator and it dropped quietly in the enclosed shaft and De Spain stood looking down the hallway, jiggling the loose passkey on the ring. “Now listen,” he said. “His suite is at the end, four rooms. There’s a reception room made out of an office cut in half to make two reception rooms for adjoining suites. Out of that there’s a narrow hall inside the wall of this hall, a couple small rooms and the doc’s room. Got that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What did you plan to do—burgle it?”
“I kept an eye on the guy for a while, after his wife died.”
“Too bad you didn’t keep an eye on the redheaded office nurse,” I said. “The one that got bumped off tonight.”
He looked at me slowly, out of his deep black eyes, out of his dead-pan face.
“Maybe I did,” he said. “As much as I had a chance.”
“Hell, you didn’t even know her name,” I said, and stared at him. “I had to tell you.”
He thought that over. “Well, seeing her in a white office uniform and seeing her naked and dead on a bed is kind of different, I guess.”
“Sure,” I said, and kept on looking at him.
“Okay. Now—you knock at the doc’s office, which is the third door from the end, and when he opens up I’ll sneak in at the reception room and come along inside and get an earful of whatever he says.”
“It sounds all right,” I said. “But I don’t feel lucky.”
We went down the corridor. The doors were solid wood and well fitted and no light showed behind any of them. I put my ear against the one De Spain indicated and heard faint movement inside. I nodded to De Spain down at the end of the hall. He fitted the passkey slowly into the lock and I rapped hard on the door and saw him go in out of the tail of my eye. The door shut behind him almost at once. I rapped on my door again.
It opened almost suddenly then, and a tall man was standing about a foot away from me with the ceiling light glinting on his pale sand-colored hair. He was in his shirtsleeves and he held a flat leather case in his hand. He was rail-thin, with dun eyebrows and unhappy eyes. He had beautiful hands, long and slim, with square but not blunt fingertips. The nails were highly polished and cut very close.
I said: “Dr. Austrian?”
He nodded. His Adam’s apple moved vaguely in his lean throat.
“This is a funny hour for me to come calling,” I said, “but you’re a hard man to catch up with. I’m a private detective from Los Angeles. I have a client named Harry Matson.”
He was either not startled or so used to hiding his feelings that it didn’t make any difference. His Adam’s apple moved around again and his hand moved the leather case he was holding, and he looked at it in a puzzled sort of way and then stepped back.
“I have no time to talk to you now,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“That’s what Greb told me,” I said.
He got a jolt out of that. He didn’t scream on fall down in a fit but I could see it jarred him. “Come in,” he said thickly.
I went in and he shut the door. There was a desk that seemed to be made of black glass. The chains were chromium tubing with rough wool upholstery. The door to the next room was half open and the room was dark. I could see the stretched white sheet on an examination table and the stirrup-like things at the foot of it. I didn’t hear any sound from that direction.
On top of the black glass desk a clean towel was laid out and on the towel a dozen on so hypodermic syringes lay with needles separate. There was an electric sterilizing cabinet on the wall and inside there must have been another dozen needles and syringes. The juice was turned on. I went over and looked at the thing while the tall, nail-thin man walked around behind his desk and sat down.
“That’s a lot of needles working,” I said, and pulled one of the chairs near the desk.
“What’s your business with mc?” His voice was still thick.
“Maybe I could do you some good about your wife’s death,” I said.
“That’s very kind of you,” he said calmly. “What kind of good?”
“I might be able to tell you who murdered her,” I said.
His teeth glinted in a queer, unnatural half-smile. Then he shrugged and when he spoke his voice was no more dramatic than if we had been discussing the weather. “That would be kind of you. I had thought she committed suicide. The coroner and the police seemed to agree with me. But of course a private detective—”
“Greb didn’t think so,” I said, without any particular attempt at the truth. “The lab man who switched a sample of your wife’s blood for a sample from a real monoxide case.”
He stared at me levelly, out of deep, sad, remote eyes under the dun-colored eyebrows. “You haven’t seen Greb,” he said, almost with an inner amusement. “I happen to know he went East this noon. His father died in Ohio.” He got up and went to the electric sterilizer and looked at his strap watch and then switched the juice off. He came back to the desk then and opened a flat box of cigarettes and put one in his mouth and pushed the box across the desk. I reached and took one. I half glanced at the dark examination room, but I saw nothing that I hadn’t seen the last time I looked at it.
“That??
?s funny,” I said. “His wife didn’t know that. Big Chin didn’t know it. He was sitting there with her all tied up on the bed tonight, waiting for Greb to come back home, so he could bump him off.”
Dr. Austrian looked at me vaguely now. He pawed around on his desk for a match and then opened a side drawer and took out a small white-handled automatic, and held it on the flat of his hand. Then he tossed a packet of matches at me with his other hand.
“You won’t need the gun,” I said. “This is a business talk which I’m going to show you it will pay to keep a business talk.”
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it on the desk. “I don’t smoke,” he said. “That was just what one might call the necessary gesture. I’m glad to hear I won’t need the gun. But I’d rather be holding it and not need it than be needing it and not hold it. Now, who is Big Chin, and what else important have you to say before I call the police?”
“Let me tell you,” I said. “That’s what I’m here for. Your wife played a lot of roulette at Vance Conried’s club and lost the money you made with your little needles almost as fast as you made it. There’s some talk she was going around with Conried in an intimate way also. You maybe didn’t care about that, being out all night and too busy to bother being much of a husband to her. But you probably did care about the money, because you were risking a lot to get it. I’ll come to that later.
“On the night your wife died she got hysterical over at Conried’s and you were sent for and went over and needled her in the arm to quiet hen. Conried took her home. You phoned your office nurse, Helen Matson—Matson’s ex-wife—to go into your house and see if she was all right. Then later on Matson found her dead under the car in the garage and got hold of you, and you got hold of the chief of police, and there was a hush put on it that would have made a Southern senator sound like a deaf mute asking for a second plate of mush. But Matson, the first guy on the scene, had something. He didn’t have any luck trying to peddle it to you, because you in your quiet way have a lot of guts. And perhaps your friend, Chief Anders, told you it wasn’t evidence. So Matson tried to put the bite on Conried, figuring that if the case got opened up before the tough grand jury that’s sitting now it would all bounce back on Conried’s gambling joint, and he would be closed up tighter than a frozen piston, and the people behind him might get sore at him and take his polo ponies away from him.
“So Conried didn’t like that idea and he told a mug named Moss Lorenz, the mayor’s chauffeur now but formerly a strongarm for Conried—he’s the fellow I called Big Chin—to take care of Matson. And Matson lost his licence and was run out of Bay City. But he had his own brand of guts too, and he holed up in an apartment house in L.A. And kept on trying. The apartment house manager got wise to him somehow—I don’t know how but the L.A. Police will find out—and put him on the spot, and tonight Big Chin went up to town and bumped Matson off.”
I stopped talking and looked at the thin, tall man. Nothing had changed in his face. His eyes flicked a couple of times and he turned the gun over on his hand. The office was very silent. I listened for breathing from the next room but I didn’t hear anything.
“Matson is dead?” Dr. Austrian said very slowly. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.” His face glistened a little.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Greb was the weak link in your setup and somebody got him to leave town today—fast—before Matson was killed, if it was at noon. And probably somebody gave him money, because I saw where he lived and it didn’t look like the home of a fellow who was taking in any dough.”
Dr. Austrian said very swiftly. “Conried, damn him! He called me up early this morning and told me to get Greb out of town. I gave him the money to go, but—” he stopped talking and looked mad at himself and then looked down at the gun again.
“But you didn’t know what was up. I believe you, Doc. I really do. Put that gun down, won’t you, just for a little while?”
“Go on,” he said tensely. “Go on with your story.”
“Okay,” I said. “There’s plenty more. First off the L.A. Police have found Matson’s body but they won’t be down here before tomorrow; first, because it’s too late, and second, because when they put the story together they won’t want to bust the case. The Club Conried is within the L.A. City limits and the grand jury I was telling you about would just love that. They’ll get Moss Lorenz and Moss will cop a plea and take a few years up in Quentin. That’s the way those things are handled when the law wants to handle them. Next point is how I know what Big Chin did. He told us. A pal and I went around to see Greb and Big Chin was squatting there in the dark with Mrs. Greb all taped up on the bed and we took him. We took him up in the hills and gave him the boot and he talked. I felt kind of sorry for the poor guy. Two murders and he didn’t even get paid.”
“Two murders?” Dr. Austrian said queerly.
“I’ll get to that after a while. Now you see where you stand. In a little while you are going to tell me who murdered your wife. And the funny thing is I am not going to believe you.”
“My God!” he whispered. “My God!” He pointed the gun at me and immediately dropped it again, before I had time to start dodging.
“I’m a miracle man,” I said. “I’m the great American detective—unpaid. I never talked to Matson, although he was trying to hire me. Now I’m going to tell you what he had on you, and how your wife was murdered, and why you didn’t do it. All from a pinch of dust, just like the Vienna police.”
He was not amused. He sighed between still lips and his face was old and gray and drawn under the pale sand-colored hair that painted his bony skull.
“Matson had a green velvet slipper on you,” I said. “It was made for your wife by Verschoyle of Hollywood—custom-made, with her last number on it. It was brand-new and had never been worn. They made her two pairs exactly the same. She had it on one of her feet when Matson found her. And you know where he found her—on the floor of a garage to get to which she had to go along a concrete path from a side door of the house. So she couldn’t have walked in that slipper. So she was carried. So she was murdered. Whoever put the slippers on her got one that had been worn and one that had not. And Matson spotted it and swiped the slipper. And when you sent him into the house to phone the chief you sneaked up and got the other worn slipper and put it on her bare foot. You knew Matson must have swiped that slipper. I don’t know whether you told anybody or not. Okay?”
He moved his head half an inch downward. He shivered slightly, but the hand holding the bone-handled automatic didn’t shiver.
“This is how she was murdered. Greb was dangerous to somebody, which proves she did not die of monoxide poisoning. She was dead when she was put under the car. She died of morphine. That’s guessing. I admit, but it’s a swell guess, because that would be the only way to kill her which would force you to cover up for the killer. And it was easy, to somebody who had the morphine and got a chance to use it. All they had to do was give her a second fatal dose in the same spot where you had shot her earlier in the evening. Then you came home and found her dead. And you had to cover up because you knew how she had died and you couldn’t have that come out. You’re in the morphine business.”
He smiled now. The smile hung at the corners of his mouth like cobwebs in the corners of an old ceiling. He didn’t even know it was there. “You interest me,” he said. “I am going to kill you, I think, but you interest me.”
I pointed to the electric sterilizer. “There are a couple dozen medicos like you around Hollywood—needle-pushers. They run around at night with leather cases full of loaded hypodermics. They keep dopes and drunks from going screwy—for a while. Once in a while one of them becomes an addict and then there’s trouble. Maybe most of the people you fix up would land in the hoosegow or the psycho ward, if you didn’t take cane of them. It’s a cinch they would lose their jobs, if they have jobs. And some of them have pretty big jobs. But it’s dangerous because any soreh
ead can stick the Feds onto you and once they start checking your patients they’ll find one that will talk. You try to protect yourself. Part of the way by not getting all of your dope through legitimate channels. I’d say Conried got some of it for you, and that was why you had to let him take your wife and your money.”
Dr. Austrian said almost politely: “You don’t hold very much back, do you?”
“Why should I? This is just a man-to-man talk. I can’t prove any of it. That slipper Matson stole is good for a buildup, but it wouldn’t be worth a nickel in court. And any defense attorney would make a monkey out of a little squirt like this Greb, even if they ever brought him back to testify. But it might cost you a lot of money to keep your medical licence.”
“So it would be better for me to give you part of it now. Is that it?” he asked softly.
“No. Keep your money to buy life insurance. I have one more point to make. Will you admit, just man to man, that you killed your wife?”
“Yes,” he said. He said it simply and directly, as though I had asked him if he had a cigarette.
“I thought you would,” I said. “But you don’t have to. You see the party that did kill your wife, because your wife was wasting money somebody else could have fun spending, also knew what Matson knew and was trying to shake Conried down herself. So she got bumped off—last night, on Brayton Avenue, and you don’t have to cover up for her any more. I saw your photo on her mantel—With all my love—Leland—and I hid it. But you don’t have to cover up for her any more. Helen Matson is dead.”
I went sideways out of the chair as the gun went off. I had kidded myself by this time that he wouldn’t try to shoot mc, but there must have been part of me that wasn’t sold on the idea. The chair tipped over and I was on my hands and knees on the floor, and then another much louder gun went off from the dark room with the examination table in it.
De Spain stepped through the door with the smoking police gun in his big right hand. “Boy, was that a shot,” he said, and stood there grinning.