Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (27 page)

He said, "Yes, I can tell you. I'll come as soon
as I can get there."

He came half an hour later. He was a tall elderly
man, once very handsome and still good-looking, with a thick crop of
gray hair and steady blue eyes. He was wearing neat sports clothes.
He sat down on the couch and listened to Landers' account and said
heavily, "Oh, my God. What a terrible way for her to die. I hope
it was quick for her—that she hadn't time to be frightened. I'm so
very sorry."

"You're a relative, sir?" asked Galeano.
"There has to be an autopsy. You'll be notified when you can
claim the body."

"Yes, there'll have to be a funeral. I'll see to
it. No, not a relative." He lit a cigarette and sat back with a
little sigh.

"No, but I've known her for a long time. She was
eighty-five. It had been nearly fifty years. I was—responsible for
her, you could say. It's queer the way things happen. You don't know
who she was. Neither of you is old enough to recognize the name.
Isabel Page. She was a big star in the twenties, the thirties, up to
the war. She was a beautiful woman. She made a lot of big money and
she spent it. Those days the income tax wasn't so high. The house in
Beverly Hills, the cars, the parties. I was her butler." He
laughed ruefully. "Life's a queer proposition. I'd started out
to try to make it in show business too, but we found it was a hell of
a lot steadier work to take the servants' jobs. I was her butler and
my wife was her housekeeper. She was a good woman—a silly woman
some ways—sentimental, but very generous and warmhearted. Too much
so. She was married four times and all four of them took her for a
bundle, but it was the last one, Phillips, who cleaned her out. That
was twenty-five years ago. We'd been with her for seventeen years."
He was smoking quietly, his eyes vacant on the past. "Such a
childlike person she was. How often she'd get in some muddle and then
it'd be, But you'll fix it for me, Gregson—and I usually
could—until the very last."

"What happened?" asked Galeano.

"You see, we could never forget her kindness to
Enid. My wife. She contracted polio, and you know back then they
didn't know much about it, couldn't do much. And nobody had medical
insurance then. Isabel Page paid for everything. Enid was in the
hospital for weeks, and there were specialists, the private nurses.
You might say that it was nothing to her, she had the money. But it
wasn't just a gesture—she was a very warmhearted woman—genuinely
concerned. We both feel it was all the expensive attention and care
that pulled Enid  through—though it left her with a slight
limp. And then, Miss Page let us keep our little girl at the house. A
good many people wealthy enough to have live-in servants won't be
bothered with children, but she didn't mind. She was always so kind
to Doreen too, Christmas and birthday presents. We were with her up
to the end. Phillips cleaned her out, he'd tried to manage the money
she had left and lost all of it. She never had any judgement about
people, of course. All there was left after he took off with some
floozy was the house in Beverly Hills. I sold that for her— got a
hundred and fifty thousand. God, it'd go for a million now. And I put
it into some solid stock, she could live on the income in a modest
way. I had another job with one of the big producers up to when I
retired five years ago. But the last ten years, all this damned
inflation—" He put out his cigarette. "Well, I'd saved
and made some sound investments, rental property, and Enid and I are
O.K. I couldn't afford to keep her in luxury, but I could pay the I
rent here. Only just lately it's been worrying, the way she was
going. She'd been failing the last couple of years—up to then she
could look after herself fairly well. One of these  visiting
nurses came in every day, saw she had a bath and a hot meal. But I
was afraid she'd have to go into a nursing home, just lately she'd
taken to getting out and wandering all over—the reason I got that
I.D. bracelet for her. She wanted to go home, you see—to the house
in Beverly Hills. She was trying to get home. Well, it's finished. A
terrible way for her to go. I hope she hadn't time to be frightened."

"You'll be notified about the body," said
Landers. "It was very good of you to look after her like that,
Mr. Gregson."

He had stood up. He looked
at Landers with a little surprise. "I don't see it quite like
that," he said. "We have to pay our debts, you know."

* * *

MENDOZA GOT Home on Wednesday afternoon. When the cab
let him off at the door of the big Spanish house, he handed over the
exorbitant fare and a tip and carried his bag into the house, into
the blessed air-conditioning. It wasn't as hot as when he had left,
but the air conditioning was still welcome. He found Alison in the
living room, curled up in an armchair reading, and she scrambled up
in surprise, scattering cats. "Luis, we didn't know when to
expect you."

When she emerged from his embrace she added, "You
look tired to death,
querido
."

"Jet lag," said Mendoza. "I want a
shower and shave and there's time to get down to the office—"

"Time to go nowhere," said Alison. "You're
going to lie down for the rest of the afternoon and get some sleep.
You're not as young as you were, and you know you're exhausted. I
suppose you went to the Folies Bergere every night to whistle at all
the lovelies." He followed her meekly up the stairs, yawning his
head off. He wasn't sorry to be overruled.

So it wasn't until Thursday morning that he sat at
his desk with Higgins, Hackett, Palliser gathered around him, Hackett
missing another day off, and said, "So, Paul Goulart, the
fiancé, got himself murdered too. And it could have been a
coincidence—the crime rate's up in Paris too—but I don't think so
and neither does Rambeau. Goulart was on a late shift at the hospital
and would get home at his apartment about midnight. It looked as if
he'd surprised a burglar. The place was ransacked and he was stabbed.
The door had apparently been jimmied opened with a chisel or
something, but the lock wasn't broken. There was a good solid
deadbolt. What the detective on the case thought, and what I think,
was that somebody was waiting for him. Went in with him on some
excuse and set up the burglary. He wasn't known to have any, in the
melodramatic word, enemies. No trouble with anyone recently. But
Goulart!" said Mendoza. "Of all the people who knew her,
Goulart would never have rested until he located Juliette. He
wouldn't have been fobbed off with any polite excuses from the French
police or us. And there was no address book in that apartment, and
that's an item the burglar seldom bothers with
¡Como
no!
And he must have known 
Grandfather's address. He's the one who would have had it, damn it."

"I'm following you," said Hackett
cautiously. "But-"

Mendoza impatiently lit a cigarette from the stub of
his old one. "Iook at it. Just look at the probabilities. What
would happen when Juliette didn't come home from America? The Ducasse
girl is all wrapped up in a new marriage, and living in another town.
I doubt that she'd have Grandfather's address. Juliette was only
going to be gone for three weeks, a month. The Ducasse girl would
expect to hear from her, she'd be surprised when she didn't. She'd
write to the Paris address. Eventually, she might contact the Boyer
woman, and she'd have been surprised and worried at not hearing too.
But what would they do? How soon? By December the lease would be up
on that apartment, but the rent would have been overdue before then,
and sooner or later the managers would go in, find personal
possessions, assume she'd decamped. Theirs not to reason why. I doubt
if they'd take the trouble to look at her accumulated mail. Take
Goulart's father. He liked the girl very much, but when she didn't
contact him when she was supposed to be back, what would he think?
Put her down as a heartless female not worthy of Paul. But Goulart! A
young, energetic man with some standing—he'd have been a tiger
after her when she didn't come home. He was in love with the girl, he
knew where she was going. He'd have moved heaven and earth to find
out what had happened to her. Goulart was the key. If Juliette was to
vanish quietly away, he had to go. However, he had to be disposed
of."

"I see it," said Higgins. "But, my
God, Luis. Talk about a wholesale operation—"

"Her other friends, and she probably had a lot
of them, mostly middle-class working girls like herself, they'd
wonder and speculate. They wouldn't do anything. And if in December
or January or February Mrs. Boyer did contact the French police and
they contacted us, what is there to find? She landed at International
that day and—as Mr. Shakespeare puts it, the rest is silence."

Mendoza laughed and leaned back in his desk chair.
"So everybody is at a dead end. She had a visitor's permit, good
for six months.
Muy bien
.
Immigration isn't going to send out the troops looking for her. But
Goulart, that was a different breed of cat,
compadres
.
They had to get rid of Goulart." He brooded over his cigarette.
"He was killed on the Monday night, after Juliette landed here
on Saturday. Somebody had been busy. They had to get her keys,
possibly her address book if she brought it with her, for Goulart's
address. Somebody started for France that Saturday night. They'd know
her address from her letters, of course. Somebody cleared that
apartment of anything personal—Grandfather's letters, other
letters. And if the address book was there—that, and any list of
phone numbers. And somebody set up a little ambush for Goulart."

"And," said Palliser. "Another thing
you can deduce. If the Boyer woman or the Ducasse girl had done
anything, what would they do? Go to Goulart."

"
Exactamente
.
He had to go. And that was just the way . it's been at this
end—simple and yet—mmh—cunning. Rudimentary, but very damned
thorough. And money and lives no object."

"For God's sake, what could be behind it?"
said Higgins.

"Elias K. Dobbs," said Hackett. "Another
common name. We can start out with the phone books and city
directories."

"It would probably have worked out as smooth as
cream," said Mendoza, "if I hadn't seen the corpse. Oh,
such a nice little plan. And executed so damn smoothly too."

"Why?" wondered Palliser.

"And we still don't know," said Mendoza.

"The phone book," said Hackett.

There were six phone books
covering the county. This one had been a bastard to work all the way.
Dobbs wasn't as common a name as Smith or Brown, but common enough.
And there were a hundred or more in each of the books, even just
looking for the initials. And of course the number might be unlisted.
They started to work on it, on four books. That was at eleven
o'clock, and at noon a bank job went down at a Bank of America on
Beverly. Everybody else was out hunting heisters and there'd be dozen
of witnesses to question. They all went out on that, and what with
talking to the witnesses and taking statements, it occupied the rest
of the day.

* * *

THE NIGHT WATCH had only
one call, but it was a homicide. And it would likely give the day
boys some more legwork to do. Conway went out to look at it. The
uniformed man was waiting for him with a civilian in front of a
little old single-frame house on San Marino Street. The civilian was
a middle-aged man, sitting on the front steps with his head in his
hands. His name was Richard Scoggins. He said to Conway numbly, "We
were worried when she didn't answer the phone. My mother. She's
nearly eighty and pretty frail. We usually phoned to check on her
every day. We didn't like her living alone down here but of course
she owned the house. My wife couldn't get her all day. I thought I'd
better check. Of course I've got a key to the house—and when I
saw—" He put his head in his hands again.  The old lady
was lying on the floor of the bedroom. It looked as if she'd been
strangled. There were a few drawers pulled out, an old jewelry box on
the dressing table was empty with its lid open. Conway sent the
patrolman back on tour after he'd called the lab and while he waited
looked I through the rest of the house. He told Scoggins that later
they'd want him to look and see what was missing here, and Scoggins
just nodded silently. It didn't look to Conway as if the back or
front doors had been forced, or any of the windows. But that was the
lab's business. Let them get on with it. He went back to the office
to write the initial report.

* * *

MENDOZA SWORE over the night report. It was Galeano's
day off. They were still taking statements from the witnesses on the
bank job and now they had this damned homicide to work. And all the
damned phone books— He got Jason Grace to get back on that with
him. The first thing they had checked on had been unlisted numbers
and no Elias K. Dobbs or any E. Dobbs in the county had one. There
wasn't an Elias Dobbs listed in any of the six books, but there were
at least a hundred and fifty E. Dobbses.

"There's an easier way to do it, you know,"
said Grace reasonably.

Mendoza said savagely, "Hands off the phone,
Jase! Grandfather's part of this damn thing and I don't want to set
off the alarm on him.
¡Dios!
We'll have to take a personal look at every one of these damned
Dobbses, and whoever pulled this off may be damned canny and crafty
but I'll take a bet that when we find Grandfather and let him know
that we've connected him with Juliette he'll be surprised enough to
show it."