The Faberge Egg (2 page)

“Did she have a suitcase with her?” McGuffin asked the landlady.

Mrs. Delia shook her head helplessly. “I couldn’t see.”

It looked as if Hillary had packed her winter clothes and left her summer clothes, while her mother had taken three dresses and a raincoat. The detective didn’t know what to make of it until he spied the yellowing newspaper clipping lying on top of the chest of drawers.

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR SLAIN IN OFFICE ran the aged but familiar headline. McGuffin’s face paled, and his hand trembled as he reached for the clipping. He glanced at it, there was no need to read it – and then slipped it into his jacket pocket and turned to Mrs. Delia.

“The man who came for them would have been in his late sixties, small, with a round face and pop eyes. Does that sound like the man who took them away?” McGuffin asked.

“It was dark, I couldn’t see good,” Mrs. Delia answered fearfully. “I’m sorry, Mr. McGuffin.”

“It’s all right, I know who he is,” McGuffin said, crossing to the phone on the nightstand beside the bed. He picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. “This is an emergency,” he said calmly to the woman who answered. “Please put me through to the Napa Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

McGuffin made his way slowly through the night-shift chain of command until, on the third try, he found an attendant able to give him the information he required.

“Otto Kruger was an inmate here for almost eighteen years. He was released last month,” the attendant informed him.

“Released!” McGuffin exclaimed. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because it was decided by a panel of psychiatric experts that he was no longer a threat to himself or to society,” the attendant answered frostily.

“Well, you can tell your panel of psychiatric experts that their harmless patient has abducted my wife and daughter. So will you please look in your file and tell me where I can find the sonofabitch!”

“I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to give out that information,” the attendant replied.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” McGuffin shouted. “He has my wife and daughter! He may kill them if I don’t get to them in time!”

“I’m sorry. I cannot give out . . .”

“Look, I can get a court order, we both know that. But that’ll take
time
, and I don’t have time. So for God’s sake, man, please, bend the rules just this once. There are two lives in your hands.”

“I understand, don’t think I don’t,” the attendant answered in a soothing voice. “But I have my orders.”

“Fuck your orders!” McGuffin shouted, followed quickly by a dead phone line. “Goddamnit!” he said, slamming the receiver in its cradle.

“Mr. McGuffin . . . ,” the landlady rebuked mildly, as the detective lunged for the door.

McGuffin bounded down the stairs and fairly leaped from the porch to the alley. He ran down the strip of pavement and turned right, then sprinted down the middle of the street in the direction of Washington Square, shouting for a taxi. At the corner of Columbus and Union, he slid into a stopped cab through the left door, while a young couple was entering from the right.

“Police business!” McGuffin gasped, shoving the young woman out of the cab and pulling the door shut. “The Embarcadero, as fast as you can go,” McGuffin ordered.

“Hey, come back here!” the young man shouted after the departing cab.

McGuffin gave the kid behind the wheel the route to the
Oakland Queen
and the kid followed it, barely slowing for stop signs, squealing around corners, and roaring down the straightaways.

“You a real cop?” the kid asked, grinning at McGuffin in the mirror.

McGuffin looked at the young man’s eyes in the mirror. The kid was enjoying the excitement. “Yeah, I’m a real cop,” McGuffin answered.

The driver skidded the cab into a near U-turn and came to a sharp stop just inches from the gangplank leading to the ferry boat. It was a neat move, so McGuffin gave the kid a twenty, then jumped out of the car and hurried up the gangplank. The boat was empty, but the architects’ offices were lighted to ward off the vandals McGuffin was supposed to guard against in exchange for free rent in the wheelhouse. It was scarcely dignified work for a “real cop,” but it was only temporary, until he made a big score and moved into a posh suite in the financial district, he had been telling himself for more than five years. Until then he was forced to endure the landlord’s insulting messages which were periodically taped to the wheel-house door, directly over the detective’s name and title. He found three of them upon his return from the Caribbean, all of which he threw away unread. However, when he got to the top of the gangway and saw an envelope pinched between the door and the jamb, he eagerly snatched it away and quickly tore it open, hoping it might be a message from Otto Kruger. Instead, it was still another message from Elmo Bellini, the architect-owner and captain of the
Oakland Queen.

McGuffin opened the door to his office and apartment, dropped the note in the waste can with the others, then walked across the cabin and began rummaging through his desk drawers. He was looking for a ring of keys which he hadn’t seen in years. He found several keys to unknown locks, but not the one he was looking for. Finally, he found them, hanging from a hook beside the main hatch. He snatched the ring from the hook as he pushed through the hatch and hurried down the gangway. One of these keys opened the door to the engine room, converted now to storage bins for the tenants of the boat. Not knowing what else to do with his ex-boss’ files and few personal possessions after his murder, McGuffin had packed everything in a large trunk, then dragged it after him for the next eighteen years. He walked to the green hatch at the end of the main deck and then tried several keys before finally opening the hatch.

The big diesel engines were gone, replaced by rows of chicken-wire bins piled high with old records and discarded office furniture. McGuffin’s bin, the only one without a padlock, was at the end of the line. Pushing through skis, crutches and abandoned appliances, McGuffin began hauling cartons aside. Miles Dwindling’s ancient trunk, a turtleback affair with oak ribs, was at the bottom of the pile, wedged tightly against the bulkhead. Wisely, McGuffin had left it unlocked for eighteen years. A cracked, leather-bound appointment book bearing the faded embossed name “Miles Dwindling, Private Investigator” lay atop a sheaf of yellowed papers. McGuffin had gone carefully through the appointment book and papers some eighteen years before, hoping but failing to find some connection between his boss and a stranger named Otto Kruger. He pushed the book aside and began digging through the layers of memory, like archeological strata, searching for the newspaper account of Otto Kruger’s trial for the murder of Miles Dwindling.

Beyond the first layer, he found a single faded photograph of a little girl with Shirley Temple curls, the only evidence of the marriage that had come apart early on, due no doubt to Miles’ relentless pursuit of his profession. McGuffin had phoned her mother to tell her of her ex-husband’s death, but the woman had expressed little concern. Miles Dwindling was an honest and honorable man, a learned scholar, and a wonderful conversationalist, but to her he was just a failed husband. Like me, McGuffin thought, as he plunged deeper into the trunk.

There was Miles’ checkbook, showing a little over $200 in his account, $105 of which belonged to McGuffin for a week’s work. Nobody could ever say Miles was on the take. He went out of the world only a little less poor than he had come in. There was an empty wallet in the bottom of the trunk, an unused passport, a Swiss army knife, an empty shoulder holster (the district attorney’s office had never returned Miles’ revolver, which Otto Kruger had used to kill him), a silver humidor, a large fountain pen, a tin statue of a black crow stamped “Souvenir of Tijuana,” a tarnished basketball trophy, an equally tarnished pair of captain’s bars, and last but hardly least, Miles’ magical mystery bag.

Staring at this pathetic collection of a lifetime filled McGuffin with a great sadness. He had been pursuing Miles Dwindling’s profession for more than eighteen years, and he had little more than this himself to show for it. McGuffin found the Kruger file at the very bottom of the trunk, removed it and closed the lid. He would look at it upstairs in his office.

Eighteen goddamned years, he said to himself as he walked through the engine room, heels echoing hollowly on the steel deck. It was a grim joke played on a young man who had intended to be a lawyer. He had just graduated from college and intended to enter the University of San Francisco Law School in the fall. However, in the meantime he needed a summer job, so he had answered a vague but apparently harmless classified ad in the
Examiner.
He could still remember it.

He had forgotten the number, but he’d never forget Miles Dwindling, lean as a plank, all suspenders and cigar, pacing about in his nearly bare, Post Street office while holding forth on the “ineluctable verities of the case at hand.” There was nothing on the door to identify Dwindling or his profession, the fledging law student saw when he arrived at the given number. He knocked, and a moment later the door was opened by a well-preserved older man in a striped shirt and tie, wearing a dark felt hat low over his eyes. He removed the cigar from his mouth and stared down his nose at the young man in the hall.

“Master McGuffin, I should say,” were his first words.

“Yes, sir,” Amos replied.

“Come in, come in,” Miles Dwindling beckoned.

The air in the small room seemed yellow, whether from the cigar smoke or the reflection from the bare floor and few pieces of oak furniture. “I didn’t know if I had the right place,” McGuffin said. “There’s no name on the door.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Dwindling said, pulling the door closed after McGuffin. “I’ve been meaning to say something to my landlord about that for thirty-odd years.”

“You’ve been in business that long, have you?” McGuffin asked, hoping to learn what that business was.

The “field of law,” it turned out after several minutes of circumlocution, was a broad one indeed.

“That’s right, I’m a private investigator,” Dwindling finally admitted. He paced while McGuffin sat in the oak chair beside the desk.

“You mean you want somebody to take pictures of people in motel rooms and repossess cars, stuff like that?” McGuffin abruptly inquired.

A look of grave concern crossed the old man’s face. He stopped pacing and placed his cigar on the edge of the oak desk. It was burned uniformly on four sides as if done by an interior decorator. “I fear, Master McGuffin,” he began, notching his thumbs in his suspenders, “that despite your sunny appearance, you harbor a dangerous predilection for the gloomier aspect of life. True, sometimes the private investigation business is good and sometimes it’s not so good. But I assure you, Master McGuffin, it is almost always exciting.”

“You mean dangerous, don’t you?” McGuffin replied.

“On rare occasions,” the old detective answered.

McGuffin knew better, but if the job paid well enough, he might be willing to risk it for one summer. “How much does it pay?”

“Aha!” Dwindling said, reaching for his cigar. “There, I’m afraid, your pessimism is more than warranted.”

“I have to have at least $150 a week,” McGuffin warned, hoping for $125.

“Would that I could.”

“A hundred and twenty-five?”

“One hundred, which is $25 more than the budget allows. Plus a host of experiences that will enrich and ennoble you beyond all coin.”

“I can’t do it,” McGuffin said, starting out of the chair.

“With the possibility of a bonus,” he added, laying a hand on the applicant’s shoulder.

“What kind of bonus?”

“The private investigation business is an unexpectedly changeable one, Master McGuffin. If a particularly lucrative assignment should come our way, I should feel morally constrained to see that you partake of it.”

Knowing better, Master McGuffin eventually allowed the old detective to persuade him to take the job. He began that very evening, trailing a suspected embezzler as he made the rounds of the North Beach night spots. At about midnight, when both the suspect and McGuffin were quite drunk, the suspect got up from his table at the Matador and staggered over to McGuffin at the bar. Even drunk, the man was big and dangerous, McGuffin sensed, as he looked up at the narrowed eyes glaring intently at him. McGuffin was ready to dive off the barstool and quit his job when the drunk smiled and asked pleasantly, “Don’t I know you from someplace?”

McGuffin heaved a sigh of relief and answered, “You know, you look familiar to me, too.”

“Let’s have a drink,” the suspect proposed, to which the detective readily agreed.

Although McGuffin had never been in the army, it was decided after the second drink that that was where they had met. And after two more, it was decided that they had been close friends in dangerous times. Then, when the suspect and the detective were the last customers in the bar, the suspected embezzler threw an arm over the detective’s shoulder and weepily informed him, “I got somethin’ botherin’ me real bad, buddy, and you’re the only guy I can tell it to.”

“Sure, pal, tell me about it,” McGuffin urged.

The next day, Miles Dwindling sat at his desk listening with a slowly sagging jaw as his new employee read his first report, listing every penny that was stolen and where it was now hidden.

“How did you do that?” the old detective asked when McGuffin had finished.

“I don’t know, I guess he just wanted to talk,” McGuffin answered.

“That face, Master McGuffin, is a gift from the gods. You will go far in this business.”

McGuffin smiled sheepishly. He hadn’t told the old man that he was leaving in the fall. And when Dwindling’s client rewarded him with an extra $1,000, which Miles, true to his word, split evenly with his new employee, McGuffin realized that quitting on the old man would be the hardest and cruelest thing he had ever done.