Gold Comes in Bricks (6 page)

“This man was married?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s separated from his wife?”

“No. He told me later he was taking a matrimonial vacation while she was taking one of her own.”

“What was hers?”

“I have my doubts about that, too. She was working for a big oil company which had interests in China. She had to go over to wind up the books when they were closing the Shanghai branch.”

“Why the suspicions?”

“The big boss also went over. He was on the same boat. She was sweet on him.”

“Then what?”

She said, “Honestly, Donald, there were some things about him I didn’t like—definitely. And there were other things that appealed to me very much. He enjoyed himself so much. He was—fun.”

“You came back. You still didn’t know he was married.”

“That’s right.”

“He told you he was single?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“Then what?”

“Then he wrote me letters.”

“You answered them?”

“No. I’d found out he was married then.”

“What’s his name?”

“I’m coming to that in a minute.”

“Why not tell me now?”

“No. You’ll have to get the rest of the picture first.”

“Was this man Ringold?”

“Good Lord, no!”

“All right.”

“I wouldn’t answer his letters because I knew he was married, but I liked getting them. They were love letters —I told you that—but they were full of reminiscences about our trip. Some things were so lovely. We sailed into Tahiti late one night—you’d have to see that to realize it—the native dancers waiting around little fires. We could see the red points of light dotting the shore. Then, as the ship came in, we could see the forms of the dancers around the fires. We could hear the drums beating, that peculiar
Tap-tap-TAP! Tap-tap-TAP! Tap-tap-TAP!
Then they threw more fuel on the fires. Someone turned floodlights down on the quay, and there were these dancers, with nothing on but grass skirts, stamping their bare feet in the rhythm of a dance, then pairing off and facing each other in a sort of hula which became more and more violent. Then, at a signal, they’d all start a running kind of dance around the fires. He reminded me of that—and other things. They were wonderful letters. I saved them and read them over whenever I felt blue. They were so vivid—”

I said, “Sounds like things a magazine would pay money for, but I don’t see why
you
should pay thirty thousand dollars for letters you didn’t answer.”

She said, “Brace yourself, because I’m going to give you a shock.”

I said, “You mean that the letters did something to you that he himself hadn’t been able to do? That you—”.

She colored. “No, no, no! Don’t be a fool.”

“I can’t imagine anything else that would be worth thirty thousand bucks to a young woman who’s as independent as you are.”

“You’ll understand when I tell you.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me.”

“The man’s name,” she said, “was—”

She broke off.

“What’s his name got to do with it?” I asked.

She took a deep breath, and then blurted, “Hampton G. Lasster.”

“That’s a funny name to get romantic about,” I said. “You seem to think it should mean something. What is he, a—” All of a sudden an idea hit me with the force of a blow. I stopped mid-sentence and stared at her. I saw by her eyes that I was right. “Good Lord,” I said, “he’s the man who murdered his wife.”

She nodded.

“Wasn’t there a trial?”

“Not yet. Just a preliminary hearing. He was bound over.”

I grabbed her shoulders, spun her around so I could look down in her eyes. “You didn’t have an affair with this man?”

She shook her head.

“Did he see you after you got back?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t ever write to him?”

“No.”

“What happened to his letters?”

“Those are what I was buying back,” she said.

“How did Ringold get them?”

“Some smart detectives working out of the district attorney’s office figured that what they needed to make a perfect case against Lasster was a motivation—one which would prejudice a jury. They checked back on Lasster just as much as they could. He couldn’t account for his time covering a period of eight weeks during the summer, while his wife was away. The detectives couldn’t find where he’d been.”

“Then, in searching a woodshed, they came on an old trunk which had a steamer label on it. They traced that back and found out about the trip to the South Seas, then got a passenger list, and interviewed passengers. Of course, it was a cinch after that. They found out that Lasster had been definitely interested in me while he was on the cruise.”

“Still,” I said, “if you were reasonably discreet, that didn’t give them anything they could work on—not if he kept his mouth shut.”

“But don’t you understand? It gave them just the lead they wanted. They waited for the right opportunity, managed to break into the house, go through my room in my absence, and— Well, they found the letters. You see what that means. I can swear on a stack of Bibles a mile high that I haven’t written Lasster or seen him since I found out he was married. No one would believe me.”

“How did it happen you bought the letters in three installments?”

She said, “There were three detectives. After they got the evidence, they did a little thinking. They were drawing a low salary from the county. If they turned the letters over to the district attorney, they wouldn’t even get a raise in pay. I was supposed to be a wealthy woman— Of course, they didn’t appear in it themselves. They got Ringold to act as intermediary. I don’t know how much Ringold was making out of it, but it was arranged that I’d buy the letters in three installments.”

I pushed my hands down in my pockets, stuck my legs straight out in front of me, crossed my ankles, and stared at my toes, trying to see the picture, not only as she saw it but to get angles that she didn’t know anything about.

Now that she’d started talking, she didn’t want to stop. She said, “You can see what it would mean to a woman like me. The district attorney is crazy to get a conviction in that case. In the first place, they don’t know whether it was an accident and she fell and struck her head, or whether Lasster hit her with something. Then, even if the district attorney can prove that Lasster hit her, Lasster’s lawyer could bring up that Shanghai trip and might be able to make a showing of emotional insanity or whatever it is a lawyer pulls when he’s trying to prejudice a jury by making them think that a woman needed killing anyway.

“Well, the district attorney could put a stop to all that right at the start if he could introduce a lot of stuff about me, make it appear that Lasster was infatuated with me, and wanted to get rid of his wife so that he could marry me. I was wealthy and—well, not exactly ugly. He could put me up in front of the jury in a way that would absolutely crucify me, and if he had those letters, he could rip Lasster to pieces the minute he got on the witness stand and tried to deny it, or he could draw the worst sort of conclusions if Lasster didn’t try to deny it.”

I kept thinking, and didn’t say anything.

She said, “When the detectives first got the letters, they thought Hampton’s lawyer might buy them off, but Hampton hasn’t much money. I think it was the lawyer who suggested they work through Ringold and get the money out of me.”

“Who’s the lawyer?” I asked.

“C. Layton Crumweather,” she said. “He’s the lawyer, incidentally, who does the legal work for Bob’s corporation, and I’ve been terribly afraid that he’d say something, but I guess those lawyers can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.”

“Are you certain Crumweather knows about the letters?” I asked.

“Ringold said he did, and I suppose, of course, that Lasster told him. I guess when a man gets arrested for murder, he tells his lawyer everything, no matter whom it may affect.”

I said, “Yes, I guess he does.”

She said, “Of course, Crumweather wants to keep those letters out of the district attorney’s hands. Naturally, he wants to get an acquittal in that murder case. The letters would clinch the case against his client. From all I can hear of Crumweather. I think he’s very smart.”

I got up and started pacing the floor. Suddenly I turned and said, “You didn’t open that envelope when he gave it to you last night.”

She stared at me with eyes that began to get wider and rounder. “Then you
were
in that room, Donald?”

“Never mind that. Why didn’t you open the envelope?”

“Because I’d seen Ringold put the letters in the envelope and seal it. That’s just what he’d done with the other letters. He’d show them to me and then—”

“Did you open that envelope after you got home?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t. There were so many startling developments and—”

“Did you burn it?”

“Not yet. I was getting ready to, and then you—”

“How do you know this whole thing isn’t a trap the D.A. set for you?” I asked.

She stared at me. “How could it be?”

“He wants to use those letters to prove motivation for the murder. It won’t do so much good to show letters that Lasster wrote you unless he can show that you answered them,
but
if he can show that you paid thirty thousand dollars to get those letters back, that would be better than anything else.”

“But, Donald, can’t you see? He won’t have the letters. He-”

“Where did you put that envelope?”

“In a safe place.”

“Get it.”

“It’s in a safe place, Donald. It’s too dangerous to—”

“Get it.”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Perhaps you know best,” and went upstairs. About five minutes later she came back with a sealed envelope. “I know these are the letters all right. I saw Ringold put them in. Then he sealed the envelope. That was just the way he’d handed me the other letters—showed them to me, then sealed them in an envelope—” I didn’t wait for her to finish. I reached across, took the envelope out of her hand, and tore it open. There were half a dozen envelopes on the inside. I shook those envelopes out into my hand, opened each one in turn. They were filled with neatly folded sheets of blank paper bearing the imprint of the hotel in which Ringold had been murdered.

I looked up at Alta Ashbury. If attendants had been strapping here to the chair in the gas chamber at San Quentin she couldn’t have looked any more ghastly.

CHAPTER SIX

B
ERTHA WAS WAITING
in the agency car to take me to my jujitsu lesson. She had an afternoon paper on the seat beside her, and was jumpy.

“Donald, this is one time you can’t get away with it,” she said.

“Can’t get away with what?”

“They’ll catch you.”

“Not until they get some lead to work on.”

“But sooner or later they’ll catch you. My God, why did you do it?”

“What else
could
I do? I’d taken the adjoining room. I’d bored a hole in the panel of the door. That connecting door was unlocked on the other side. Win, lose, or draw, I was elected.”

“But why did you go in Ringold’s room?”

“Why not? I was hooked any way—if they caught me.”

“Donald, you’re trying to protect that girl again.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Donald, you simply
must
give me the facts. My God, suppose the cops should run you in? I’d try to get you out, of course, but what would I have to work on?”

I said, “You can’t drive and talk. Get over and let me take the wheel.”

We made the switch. I said, “Get this straight. Alta Ashbury was being blackmailed. It doesn’t make any difference what for. The person who was blackmailing her was a lawyer named Crumweather—C. Layton Crumweather.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “She must have gone to see Ringold. The description fits and—”

“The description may fit, and she may have gone to
see
Ringold, but the man who was blackmailing her was Crumweather.”

“How do you know?”

“He was interested in getting some dough for the defense of a client of his—a man who was charged with a crime.”

“Who, lover?”

“I’ve forgotten his name.”

She glared at me.

“Now then,” I went on, “the only way we can handle this thing—to get Alta in the clear and to get me out of it—is to be in a position to put the screws down on Crumweather. He’s a crooked lawyer.”

“They’re all crooked.”

“You’re cockeyed. About two per cent are crooked—and they’re damn smart. They cover a lot of territory. Some of the honest ones are stupid. The crooked ones can’t afford to be.”

“Stick up for lawyers if you want to, but give me the dope.”

“Crumweather,” I said, “is making a specialty of beating the Blue Sky Law.”

“It can’t be beaten. They’ve tried that before.”

“Any law can be licked,” I said. “I don’t care what it is.”

“Well, you studied it. I didn’t.”

I said, “The Blue Sky Law can be licked. The way Crumweather is licking it is taking old corporations which have forfeited their charters to the state for failure to pay their franchise taxes, reviving those corporations, and letting them engage in an entirely different form of business. In order to do that, he first buys up the stock of defunct corporations. It isn’t every franchise forfeiture that gives him just what he needs. He needs a corporation that had nearly all of its stock issued and which has no corporate liabilities. He buys up the old shares of stock which have become private property in the hands of a bona fide purchaser, then he revives the corporation. He finds out what his clients are going to sell the stock for and gives them the certificates at a price which gives him a ten-per-cent profit on every share that’s sold. He instructs his clients to avoid the appearance of selling generally to the public, but keeps them in the position of making individual private transactions.”

“Well?” she asked.

“We’ll never touch him on the blackmail,” I said. “He’s too slick and too far removed. The only way to hook him is to get him where we can bust him with some of this corporation crooked work. It isn’t going to be easy because he’s plenty smart.”

“How did you find all this out?” Bertha Cool asked, staring at me steadily.

“By spending expense money,” I told her, and that had her stymied.

“How are you and the girl getting along?”

“All right.”

“Is she trusting you?”

“I think so.”

Bertha heaved a sigh of relief. “Then the agency will continue on the job?”

“Probably.”

“Donald, you’re a wonder.”

I took that opportunity to say, “I’ve already approached Crumweather as a prospective client. I thought I could handle the situation that way. I can’t. He’s too wise. He covers his tracks every time he makes a move. There’s only one other way to do it.”

“What’s that?”

“Become an innocent purchaser for value of some of the stock in one of the other corporations he’s promoted.”

“What makes you think it’s Crumweather who’s doing the blackmailing?”

“It has to be. It’s the only way it makes sense. Earlier today I thought it might have been a trap set by the D.A., but it isn’t or they’d have sprung it by this time. Crumweather is representing a client. It’s an important case. A lot of public attention is going to center on it. It’s a chance for him to make a big grandstand. He could, of course, do it just for the advertising, but Crumweather isn’t built that way. He saw there was an opportunity to bring pressure to bear on Alta Ashbury and make her put up dough. He did it. He got twenty thousand of her money. Something went wrong on the last ten.”

“Donald, I’m going to ask you something. I want you to tell me the absolute truth.”

“What?”

“Did
you kill him?”

“What do
you
think?”

“I don’t think you’d do it, Donald. I don’t think there’s a chance in ten thousand, but it looks— Well, you know how it looks. You’re just the type who would fall head over heels for a girl and do something desperate to save her.”

I slowed for a signal light, and managed a yawn.

Bertha shook her head and said, “You’re the coolest customer I ever saw. If you only weighed fifty pounds more, you’d be a gold mine to Bertha.”

“Too bad,” I said.

We drove for a while in silence, then I said, “I’m going to need a secretary and an office. I’ll either hire one or have to borrow Elsie Brand.”

“Donald, are you crazy? I can’t fix you up in an office. That costs money. It costs altogether too much money. You’ll have to find some other way of working your plant, and I can’t let Elsie Brand go, even for half a day.”

I drove along without saying anything, and Bertha got sore. Just before I drove the car into a parking lot in front of the Jap’s gymnasium, she said, “All right, go ahead, but don’t go throwing money away.”

We went up to the gymnasium, and the Jap threw me all over the joint. I think he just practiced with me the way a basketball player practices tossing balls through a ring. He gave me a couple of chances to throw him, and I used everything I had, but I could never get him up and slam him down on the canvas the way he did me. He’d always manage to twist himself around in the air, and come down on his feet, grinning.

I was awfully fed up with it. I’d hated it from the start. Bertha said she thought I was getting better. The Jap said I was doing very nicely.

After the shower, I told Bertha to be sure to get me a suite of offices for a week, be sure the name I gave her was on the door, see that the furniture looked all right, and have Elsie Brand on hand to take dictation.

She fumed and sputtered, but finally decided to be a good dog. She promised to ring me up late that evening, and tell me where it was.

Henry Ashbury got hold of me that night before dinner. “How about a cocktail in my den, Lam?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

The butler brought us cocktails in a little cubbyhole fixed up with guns hung on the walls, a few shooting trophies, a pipe rack, and a couple of easy chairs. It was one place in the house where no one was allowed to go without a special invitation from Ashbury, his one hideaway from the continual whine of his wife’s voice.

We sipped the cocktails and talked generalities for a minute, then Ashbury said, “You’re getting along pretty well with Alta.”

“I was supposed to win her confidence, wasn’t I?”

“Yes. You’ve done more than that. She keeps looking at you whenever you’re in the room.”

I took another sip of my cocktail.

He said, “Alta’s first check was on the first. The second one was on the tenth. If there was to have been a third one, it would have been on the twentieth. That was yesterday.”

I said, very casually, “Then the fourth one would be due on the thirtieth.”

He looked me over. “Alta was out last night.”

“Yes. She went to a movie.”

“You were out.”

“Yes. I was doing a little work.”

“Did you follow Alta?”

“If you want to know, yes.”

“Where?”

“To the movie.”

He gulped the rest of his cocktail quickly and exhaled a sigh of relief. He picked up the cocktail shaker, refilled my glass, and poured his own full to the brim. “You impress me as being a young man who has sense.”

“Thanks.”

He fidgeted around a minute, and I said, “You don’t need to make any build-up with me. Just go ahead and get it off your chest.”

That seemed to relieve him. He said, “Bernard Carter saw Alta last night.”

“About what time?”

“Shortly after the—well, shortly after the shooting took place.”

“Where was she?”

“Within a block of the hotel where Ringold was killed. She was carrying an envelope in her hand and walking very rapidly.”

“Carter told you?”

“Well, no. He told Mrs. Ashbury, and she told me.”

“Carter didn’t speak to her?”

“No.”

“She didn’t see him?”

“No.”

I said, “Carter is mistaken. I was following her all the time. She put her car in the parking lot near the hotel where Ringold was killed, but she didn’t go to the hotel. She went to a picture show. I followed her.”

“And after the picture show?”

“She wasn’t there very long,” I said. “She came out and went back to the car— Oh, yes. I believe she stopped to mail a letter at a mailbox along the way.”

Ashbury kept looking at me, but didn’t say anything. I said, “I think she had a date to meet someone at the picture show, and that someone didn’t show up.”

“Could that someone have been Ringold?” he asked.

I let my face show surprise. “What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know. I was just wondering.”

“Quit wondering, then.”

“But it
could
have been Ringold?”

“If he didn’t show up, what difference does it make?”

“But it
could
have been Ringold?”

I said, “Hell, it
could
have been anybody. I’m telling you she was at a movie.”

He was silent for a minute, and I took advantage of that silence to ask him, “Do you know anything about your stepson’s company—the one of which he’s president—what it’s doing?”

“Some sort of a gold-dredging proposition. I understand they have a potential bonanza, but I don’t want to know about it.”

“Who does the actual peddling of the stock?”

He said, “I wish you wouldn’t call it that. It sounds— well, it sounds crooked.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know, but I don’t like it referred to in those terms.”

“All right, fix the terms to suit yourself, then tell me who’s peddling the stuff.”

He looked me over thoughtfully. “At times, Lam,” he said, “that restless disposition of yours makes you say things which border on insolence.”

“I still don’t know who peddles it.”

“Neither do I. They have a crew of salesmen, very highly trained men, I understand.”

“The partners don’t sell?”

“No.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

“It isn’t all I wanted to know.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Seen the evening paper?”

I shook my head.

“There are some fingerprints in there. They’ve developed a pretty good set from the door and doorknob in that room in the hotel. I thought that man they’re looking for resembles you somewhat.”

“Lots of people resemble me,” I said. “They’re mostly clerks in dry goods stores.”

He laughed. “If that brain of yours had a body to go with it, you’d be invincible.”

“Is that a compliment or a slam?”

“A compliment.”

“Thanks.”

I finished my cocktail and refused another. Ashbury had two after I quit.

Ashbury said, “You know a man in my position has an opportunity to pick up financial information which might not be available to an ordinary man.”

I accepted one of his cigarettes, and listened for more. “That’s particularly true in banking circles.”

“Go ahead. What is it?”

“Perhaps you are wondering how I found out about Alta’s ten-thousand-dollar checks.”

“I was able to make a pretty good guess.”

“You mean through the bank?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not exactly through the bank, but through a friendly official in the bank.”

“Is there any difference?” I asked.

He grinned. “The bank seems to think there is.”

“Go ahead.”

“I got some more information from the bank this afternoon.”

“You mean from the friendly official in the bank, don’t you?”

He chuckled and said, “Yes.”

When he saw I wasn’t going to ask him what it was, he said impressively, “The Atlee Amusement Corporation called up the bank and said a check had been stolen from its cash drawer, that it was a check payable to cash, and signed by Alta Ashbury in an amount of ten thousand dollars. They wanted to be notified if anyone should present that check; said they’d sign a complaint, on a charge of theft.”

“What did the bank tell them?”

“Told them to ring up Alta and have her stop payment on the check.”

“That was a telephone call?”

“Yes.”

“The person at the other end of the line said it was the Atlee Amusement Corporation?”

“Yes.”

“Man’s voice or woman’s?”

“A woman’s. She said she was the bookkeeper, and secretary to the manager.”

“Any woman can say that into any telephone and it sounds the same at the receiving end of the line.”

He thought that over, then slowly nodded.

The cocktails began to take effect. He got in an expansive mood. He leaned over and put a fatherly hand on my knee. “Lam, my boy,” he said. “I like you. There’s a certain inherent competency about you which breeds confidence. I think Alta feels the same way.”