Lay Her Among The Lilies (3 page)
Read Lay Her Among The Lilies Online
Authors: James Hadley Chase
"Not a word."
"She's being tapered off a drug jag. That's strictly confidential."
"Bad?"
She shrugged.
"Bad enough."
"And in the meantime when the cat's in bed the mice'll play, huh?"
"That's about right. No one ever comes near the place. She's likely to be some time before she gets around again. While she's climbing walls and screaming her head off, the staff relaxes. That's fair enough, isn't it?"
"Certainly is, and they certainly can relax."
She finished her drink.
"Now, let's get away from Maureen. I have enough of her nights without you talking about her."
"You on night duty? That's a shame."
"Why?" The green-blue eyes alerted.
"I thought it might be fun to take you out one night and show you things."
"What things?"
"For a start I have a lovely set of etchings."
She giggled.
"If there's one thing I like better than one etching it's a set of etchings." She got up and moved over to the whisky bottle. The way her hips rolled kept me pointing like a gun-dog. "Let me freshen that," she went on. "You're not drinking."
"It's fresh enough. I'm beginning to get the idea there are things better to do besides drinking."
"Are you? I thought perhaps you might." She shot more liquor into her glass. She didn't bother with the Whiterock this time.
"Who looks after Maureen during the day?" I asked as she made her way back to the settee.
"Nurse Fleming. You wouldn't like her. She's a man-hater."
"She is?" She sat beside me, hip against hip. "Can she hear us?"
"It wouldn't matter if she did, but she can't. She's in the left wing, overlooking the garages. They put Maureen there when she started to yell."
That was exactly what I wanted to know.
"To hell with all man-haters," I said, sliding my arm along the back of the settee behind her head. She leaned towards me. "Are you a man-hater?"
"It depends on the man." Her face was close to mine so I let my lips rest against her temple. She seemed to like that.
"How's this man for a start?"
"Pretty nice."
I took the glass of whisky out of her hand and put it on the floor.
"That'll be in my way."
"It's a pity to waste it."
"You'll need it before long."
"Will I?"
She came against me, her mouth on mine. We stayed like that for some time. Then suddenly she pushed away from me and stood up. For a moment I thought she was just a kissand-good-bye girl, but I was wrong. She crossed the room to the door and turned the key. Then she came back and sat down again.
III
I parked the Buick outside the County Buildings at the corner of Feldman and Centre Avenue, and went up the steps and into a world of printed forms, silent passages and oldyoung clerks waiting hopefully for deadmen's shoes.
The Births and Deaths Registry was on the first floor. I filled in a form and pushed it through the bars to the redheaded clerk who stamped it, took my money and waved an airy hand towards the rows of files.
"Help yourself, Mr. Malloy," he said. "Sixth file from the right."
I thanked him.
"How's business?" he asked, and leaned on the counter, ready to waste his time and mine. "Haven't seen you around in months."
"Nor you have," I said. "Business is fine. How's yours? Are they still dying?"
"And being born. One cancels out the other."
"So it does."
I hadn't anything else for him. I was tired. My little session with Nurse Gurney had exhausted me. I went over to the files. C file felt like a ton weight, and it was all I could do to heave it on to the flat-topped desk. That was Nurse Gurney's fault, too. I pawed over the pages, and, after a while, came upon Janet Crosby's death certificate. I took out an old envelope and a pencil. She had died of malignant endocarditis, whatever that meant, on 15th of May 1948.
She was described as a spinster, aged twenty-five years. The certificate had been signed by a Doctor John Bewley. I made a note of the doctor's name, and then turned back a dozen or so pages until I found Macdonald Crosby's certificate. He had died of brain injuries from gunshot wounds. The doctor had been J. Salzer; the corner, Franklin Lessways. I made more notes, and then, leaving the file where it was, tramped over to the clerk who was watching me with lazy curiosity.
"Can you get someone to put that file back?" I asked, propping myself up against the counter. "I'm not as strong as I thought I was."
"That's all right, Mr. Malloy."
"Another thing: who's Dr. John Bewley, and where does he live?"
"He has a little place on Skyline Avenue," the clerk told me. "Don't go to him if you want a good doctor."
"What's the matter with him?"
The clerk lifted tired shoulders.
"Just old. Fifty years ago he might have been all right. A horse-and-buggy doctor. I guess he thinks trepanning is something to do with opening a can of beans."
"Well, isn't it?"
The clerk laughed.
"Depends on whose head we're talking about."
"Yeah. So he's just an old washed-up croaker, huh?"
"That describes him. Still, he's not doing any harm. I don't suppose he has more than a dozen patients now." He scratched the side of his ear and looked owlishly at me. "Working on something?"
"I never work," I said. "See you some time. So long."
I went down the steps into the hard sunlight, slowly and thoughtfully. A girl worth a million dies suddenly and they call in an old horse-and-buggy man. Not quite the millionaire touch. One would have expected a fleet of the most expensive medicine men in town to have been in on a kill as important as hers.
I crawled into the Buick and trod on the starter. Parked against the traffic, across the way, was an olive-green Dodge limousine. Seated behind the wheel was a man in a fawn-coloured hat, around which was a plaited cord. He was reading a newspaper. I wouldn't have noticed him or the car if he hadn't looked up suddenly and, seeing me, hastily tossed the newspaper on to the back seat and started his engine. Then I did look at him, wondering why he had so suddenly lost interest in his paper. He seemed a big man with shoulders about as wide as a barn door. His head sat squarely on his shoulders without any sign of a neck. He wore a pencil-lined black moustache and his eyes were hooded. His nose and one ear had been hit very hard at one time and had never fully recovered. He looked the kind of tough you see so often in a Warner Brothers' tough movie: the kind who make a drop-cloth for Humphrey Bogart.
I steered the Buick into the stream of traffic and drove East, up Centre Avenue, not hurrying, and keeping one eye on the driving-mirror.
The Dodge forced itself against the West-going traffic, did a U-turn while horns honked and drivers cursed and came after me. I wouldn't have believed it possible for anyone to have done that on Centre Avenue and get away with it, but apparently the cops were either asleep or it was too hot to bother.
At Westwood Avenue intersection I again looked into the mirror. The Dodge was right there on my tail. I could see the driver lounging behind the wheel, a cheroot gripped between his teeth, one elbow and arm on the rolled-down window. I pulled ahead so I could read his registration number, and committed it to memory. If he was tailing me he was making a very bad job of it. I put on speed on Hollywood Avenue and went to the top at sixty-five. The Dodge, after a moment's hesitation, jumped forward and roared behind me. At Foothills Boulevard I swung to the kerb and pulled up sharply. The Dodge went by. The driver didn't look in my direction. He went on towards the Los Angeles and San Francisco Highway.
I wrote down the registration on the old envelope along with Doc Bewley's name and stowed it carefully away in my hip pocket. Then I started the Buick rolling again and drove down Skyline Avenue. Half-way down I spotted a brass plate glittering in the sun. It was attached to a low, wooden gate which guarded a small garden and a double-fronted bungalow of Canadian pine wood. A modest, quiet little place; almost a slum beside the other ultramodern houses on either side of it.
I pulled up and leaned out of the window. But, at that distance it was impossible to read the worn engraving on the plate. I got out of the car and had a closer look. Even then it wasn't easy to decipher, but I made out enough to tell me this was Dr. John Bewley's residence.
As I groped for the latch of the gate, the olive-green Dodge came sneaking down the road and went past. The driver didn't appear to look my way, but I knew he had seen me and where I was going. I paused to look after the car. It went down the road fast and I lost sight of it when it swung into Westwood Avenue.
I pushed my hat to the back of my head, took out a packet of Lucky Strike, lit up and stowed the package away. Then I lifted the latch of the gate and walked down the gravel path towards the bungalow.
The garden was small and compact, and as neat and as orderly as a barrack-room on inspection day. Yellow sun-blinds, faded and past their prime, screened the windows. The front door could have done with a lick of paint. That went for the whole of the bungalow, too.
I dug my thumb into the bell-push and waited. After a while I became aware that someone was peeping at me though the sunblinds. There was nothing I could do about that except put on a pleasant expression and wait. I put on a pleasant expression and waited.
Just when I thought I would have to ring again I heard the kind of noise a mouse makes in the wainscotting, and the front door opened.
The woman who looked at me was thin and small and bird-like. She had on a black silk dress that might have been fashionable about fifty years ago if you lived in isolation and no one ever sent you Vogue. Her thin old face was tired and defeated, her eyes told me life wasn't much fun.
"Is the doctor in?" I asked, raising my hat, knowing if anyone would appreciate courtesy she would.
"Why, yes." The voice sounded defeated, too. "He's in the garden at the back. I'll call him."
"I wish you wouldn't. I'd as soon go around and see him there. I'm not a patient. I just wanted to ask him a question."
"Yes." The look of hope which had begun to climb into her eyes faded away. Not a patient. No fee. Just a healthy young husky with a question. "You won't keep him long, will you? He doesn't like being disturbed."
"I won't keep him long."
I raised my hat, bowed the way I hoped in her better days men had bowed to her, and retreated back to the garden path again. She closed the front door. A moment later I spotted her shadow as she peered at me through the front window blinds.
I followed the path around the bungalow to the garden at the back. Doc Bewley might not have been a ball of fire as a healer, but he was right on the beam as a gardener I would have liked to have brought those three Crosby gardeners to look at this garden. It might have shaken up their ideas.
At the bottom of the garden, standing over a giant dahlia was a tall old man in a white alpaca coat, a yellow panama, yellowish-white trousers and elastic side-boots. He was looking at the dahlia the way a doctor looks down your throat when you say ' Ah-aa', and was probably finding it a lot more interesting.
He looked up sharply when I was within a few feet of him. His face was lined and shrivelled, not unlike the skin of a prune, and he had a crop of coarse white hair sprouting out of his cars. Not a noble or clever face, but the face of a very old man who is satisfied with himself, whose standards aren't very high, who has got beyond caring, is obstinate, dullwitted, but undefeated.
"Good afternoon," I said. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."
"Surgery hours are from five to seven, young man," he said in a voice so low I could scarcely hear him. "I can't see you now."
"This isn't a professional call," I said, peering over his shoulder at the dahlia. It was a lovely thing: eight inches across if it was an inch, and flawless. "My name's Malloy. I'm an old friend of Janet Crosby."
He touched the dahlia gently with thick-jointed fingers.
"Who?" he asked vaguely, not interested: just a dull-witted old man with a flower.
"Janet Crosby," I said. It was hot in the sun, and the drone of the bees, the smell of all those flowers made me a little vague myself.
"What of her?"
"You signed the death certificate."
He dragged his eyes away from the dahlia and looked at me.
"Who did you say you were?"
"Victor Malloy. I'm a little worried about Miss Crosby's death."
"Why should you be worried?" he asked, a flicker of alarm in his eyes. He knew he was old and dull-witted and absent-minded. He knew by keeping on practicing medicine at his age he ran the risk of making a mistake sooner or later. I could see he thought I was going to accuse him of making that mistake now.
"Well, you see," I said mildly, not wanting to stampede him, "I've been away for three or four years. Janet Crosby was a very old friend. I had no idea she had a bad heart. It was a great shock to me to hear she had gone like that. I want to satisfy myself that there was nothing wrong."
A muscle in his face twitched. The nostrils dilated.
"What do you mean—wrong? She died of malignant endocarditis. The symptoms are unmistakable. Besides, Dr. Salzer was there. There was nothing wrong. I don't know what you mean."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it. What exactly is malignant endocarditis?"
He frowned blankly, and, for a moment, I thought he was going to say he didn't know, but he got hold of himself, stirred his old withered memory and said slowly as if he were conjuring up a page from some medical dictionary, "It's a progressive microbic infection of the heart valves. Fragments of the ulcerating valves were carried by the blood stream all over her body. She hadn't a chance. Even if they had called me in sooner, there was nothing I could have done."
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