The Faberge Egg (3 page)

And eighteen goddamned years later I’m still at it, McGuffin said to himself as he opened the ship’s door to his office, adorned with the brass plate that had eluded Miles Dwindling for thirty-odd years: AMOS MCGUFFIN: CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS.

With a swipe of one arm, McGuffin cleared a place on the desk and opened the Kruger file. The pages smelled damp and musty. There were several newspaper articles, along with copies of the homicide and medical examiner’s report and a legal pad filled with McGuffin’s notes. He arranged the clippings in chronological order, discovered that the original report of the murder was missing, then remembered the yellowed newsprint in his pocket. He placed it on top of the pile and began to read:

McGuffin tossed the clipping aside. There was no need to read it. He knew better than anyone except the murderer what had happened that day. He had just returned from what was to have been a routine background investigation for an insurance company. A logger had lost a finger to a brand-new chain-saw when one of the links gave way. He wanted $10,000 for his trouble and McGuffin assumed he was entitled to it, until he got a surprised look at the rest of the family. They were seated around a cable spool in their junk-laden backyard, eating a lunch of grits and okra, but having some difficulty with the utensils. Every member of the family, down to the smallest child, was missing two or three fingers, all of them neatly chopped off by their mother with a bloody ax. This was the fifteenth attempt, each time under a false name, to run the old chain-saw scam.

The young detective walked slowly down the corridor, utterly depressed by the depraved greed he had witnessed that day. He was scarcely twenty feet from the door when he heard the shot and bolted for the office. He pulled open the door and collided with a small, moon-faced man with great bulging eyes.

“Let me go!” the little man hissed, but McGuffin held tight to his lapels.

When he squirmed and kicked and tried to bite, McGuffin slammed him hard against the wall, once, twice, and he was out. He let him slide to the floor, then lunged across the room to his boss, slumped in his desk chair, blood staining his striped shirt from suspender to suspender.

“Hold still, I’ll get a doctor!” McGuffin said, not knowing yet if Miles was alive or dead. He scrabbled across the desk for the phone, dialed the emergency number and ordered an ambulance. As he was hanging up, he saw the first glint of life in Miles’ eyes. He was warning McGuffin of something going on behind him. McGuffin turned to see the little man inching his way across the floor to the gun at the opposite side of the room, near the oak coat tree where it usually hung from Miles’ shoulder holster. McGuffin put himself between the little man and the gun, then raised his foot and brought his leather heel down on the man’s hand as hard as he could. The scream and the feel of cracking bones underfoot cheered him up after the ordeal of the children with the missing fingers.

“Who is he? Why’d he shoot you?” McGuffin demanded, lunging back across the room to his partner.

Miles seemed to smile as he shook his head slowly and helplessly. He tried to speak but managed only to summon up a froth of bloody bubbles and a gurgling sound. McGuffin put his ear close to Miles’ mouth and strained to hear.

“. . . out of his bird,” Miles Dwindling said weakly.

They were his last words. A second later, his chin dropped to his chest, and he was dead.

The ambulance attendants had to pull McGuffin off the murderer when they arrived. McGuffin had slapped him around the room for more than fifteen minutes, opening several cuts on the moon face with his new college ring, but the little man said nothing. Nor would he speak to the police or the district attorney, or the psychiatric panel that examined him. There was no evidence that the murderer and his victim had ever met or had dealings with each other through a third party. He was apparently a nut who had wandered into the office, spied the gun in its holster and decided to shoot its owner. He was unemployed at the time and living in the Europa Hotel not far from the office.

McGuffin picked up the next clipping and began to read, hoping to find some clue as to Otto Kruger’s present whereabouts, but found nothing. Most of what was known about him was supplied by Immigration. He had been an officer in the German army, serving during most of the war with the occupation forces in France. He was neither a Nazi nor a war criminal, according to Immigration.

Suddenly McGuffin remembered. There had been a friend, a comrade-in-arms who had arrived in the United States several years after Kruger. The two of them had shared a house together somewhere until shortly before the murder. McGuffin had not met the man; he had testified only briefly at the sanity hearing and then disappeared. McGuffin leafed quickly through the newspaper articles until he found the one he was looking for.

“Klaus Vandenhof!” McGuffin repeated, going to his notes. The name was familiar. It was possible that he had investigated the witnesses’ backgrounds more fully at the time than had the district attorney. Leafing quickly through his longhand notes, he found the underlined name, Klaus Vandenhof, at the top of a yellow page halfway through the sheaf of papers. Vandenhof had served as a captain in the quartermaster corps with the German occupation forces in Paris during World War II. Although he was not a member of the party, he was not allowed to immigrate until 1961, when he was sponsored by an American citizen, Otto Kruger, who had served with him in Paris. The D&B in the left margin indicated to the detective that he had ordered a Dun & Bradstreet report on him at the time, but it had apparently availed him little. Vandenhof had taught languages at Marin Junior College for a year before becoming an antiques dealer, with offices in his home.

His
home? McGuffin questioned. He had assumed that the house had belonged to Kruger. But no, he had purchased a house in his own name on Marin Hill Drive near San Rafael in 1961, the year he arrived in the United States. So it was really Otto who got the free room in exchange for sponsoring his old boss’ citizenship application. There was no record of any mortgage on the house according to Dun & Bradstreet, and “the subject lives in a luxurious manner.”

So what do you make of that? McGuffin asked himself, as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands over his paunch as he had often seen Miles do. Vandenhof took his old comrade in out of gratitude, then a few years later threw him out. This pissed off old Otto, so he went out and shot a total stranger right between the suspenders? It made no more sense now than it had then.

“Unless -!” McGuffin said, reaching again for his notes.

He found what he was looking for at the bottom of the page, pressed tightly against the right edge, “‘25 S.” It was McGuffin’s shorthand for “born in 1925 and single.” Otto Kruger was approximately the same age as his roommate and precisely single. When one heterosexual throws another out of the house, it’s not serious. But when a homosexual throws his lover out of the house, hell hath no fury to match. Could that have been the blow that hurtled Otto Kruger over the edge? And could McGuffin have overlooked something at that sexually innocent and youthful time that might have been significant?

Maybe Otto Kruger didn’t just wander in off the street, after all. Maybe he came to Dwindling’s office seeking some form of redress for a broken heart. Miles tried to explain that California was a heart balm state, but even if it wasn’t, there was still no remedy for breach of contract between homosexual lovers, no matter how unjust the situation might be. Otto blamed Miles for the unjust state of the law, grabbed Miles’ gun and shot him. Of course! Miles had to have talked to Kruger for a bit in order to have come to the conclusion that he was out of his bird. If a stranger had walked in and shot him without a word, Miles would have assumed he was a professional hit man, not a crazy.

Suddenly, it was all grotesquely clear. Kruger’s madness had festered in the hospital. For eighteen years, he lived only to take vengeance on the man who had sent him there. He had researched McGuffin’s life throughout that time, just as McGuffin was now researching his. By consulting the San Francisco phone book, he knew when McGuffin had moved his office from Post to Sansome Street. By reading the papers and watching the local news on television, he had remained abreast of the detective’s more notable cases. He had probably read of his marriage to Marilyn and the birth of their daughter, Hillary, a few years later. It was unlikely, however, that he had read of their divorce, as that had appeared only in the
Law Journal.
When Kruger was released, he assumed that McGuffin was still living with his wife and child in North Beach. And when he arrived there and saw the name McGuffin under the bell, he was sure that vengeance was finally about to be his.

Kruger must have talked his way past Marilyn, expecting to find me in the apartment. Then when he found out we were divorced, and I was no longer living there, he came unglued. He knew he couldn’t let them go because they’d tell me he was out to kill me, so he did the only thing his deranged little mind would allow. He snatched my ex-wife and my daughter. Things were happening so fast he couldn’t even compose a ransom note, so he left the yellowed clipping he’d been carrying around for eighteen years, knowing I’d know who had taken them. And the fact that he had allowed them to pack a bag offered at least some hope that he didn’t intend to kill them.

It’s possible that he hasn’t yet figured out what to do with them, McGuffin told himself. I’m the one he wants, not them. He’ll have to come to me to make a trade, and that’s when he has to slip. I may be an accidental detective, but I’ve had eighteen years at it, while he’s spent the last eighteen years being told what to wear and when to eat. It’ll be no contest.

There was, of course, an additional scenario, which McGuffin was aware of but chose not to dwell on. Unstable as Otto Kruger was, and frustrated in his carefully laid plan, he might have already panicked and killed them. No, McGuffin said to himself as he reached for the phone. He couldn’t think like that. He must assume that they were alive and focus more fully on the task of rescuing them than on anything he had ever done before.

“Operator, this is an emergency,” McGuffin said. “I must have the number and the address of Klaus Vandenhof. He last lived on Marin Hill Drive somewhere near San Rafael.”

“I’m sorry,” the operator said after a moment. “That number is unlisted.”

“But you do have a Klaus Vandenhof?”

“Yes, sir, we do.”

“Then listen carefully,” McGuffin instructed. “I’m calling from San Francisco Suicide Watch. I just got off the phone with Mr. Vandenhof. He’s taken some pills. He was trying to give me his address when he passed out. Please give me that address so I can send an ambulance.”

“I don’t have a San Francisco Suicide Watch listed among approved emergency services, sir,” the operator informed him in a singsong voice.

“We’re a brand-new voluntary organization, fully endorsed by the AMA and the mayor’s office. Give me that address before it’s too late.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not allowed -”

“Do you want his death on your conscience?” McGuffin interrupted.

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Then give me the address!”

“I’m sorry, sir, I cannot give out that information. However, I can send an ambulance to that address if you’d like.”

“I don’t want -!” McGuffin shouted, halting abruptly. “Which ambulance?”

“Marin General,” she replied.

“Go ahead, send the ambulance,” McGuffin said.

He dropped the phone in the cradle and sprang for the door. He was running full tilt down the main deck, between the lighted offices, when Elmo Bellini appeared at the end of the corridor, hands outstretched.

“McGuffin, stop!” he shouted.

“Not now!” McGuffin shouted back.

When Elmo lunged, McGuffin caught him with a stiff-arm to the chest, sprawling him backwards, head over heels.

“You’re fired!” Elmo shouted, as McGuffin disappeared out the door and down the gangplank.

McGuffin ran along the Embarcadero, then wove across the street between flashing headlights, halting finally at the service station on the corner where he always parked.

“Quick, my car!” he gasped to the young man behind the desk reading a comic book.

Alarmed by his customer’s urgency, the kid moved quickly. He had to move two cars out of the way before he was able to bring McGuffin’s to the front door. With orchestrated efficiency, the kid slipped out of the front seat, and McGuffin slipped in, passing the kid a $5 bill in the transaction. He leaned on the horn and pulled his battered car out into the Embarcadero traffic ahead of a trail of blue smoke, scattering cars right and left. He sped along the edge of San Francisco Bay, then turned onto Marina Boulevard and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the bridge, McGuffin plunged the car into a wall of dense fog, then proceeded slowly across the bay to Marin County. The outgoing lanes were crowded with revelers returning to the suburbs after a night on the town, while the fog-shrouded headlights in the incoming lanes were few and far between. He switched the windshield wipers on and glimpsed the moon glowing wet and dim through the fog billowing from under the bridge like steam from a boiling bay. When he left the bridge, the fog disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving a dry moon hanging from the sky above Sausalito. McGuffin glanced at his watch and decided it was time to make the phone call.

“Sausalito,” McGuffin whispered sibilantly as he turned at that exit. He was thinking of Jack Kerouac’s line at first hearing of the place - “There must be a lot of Italians living there.” McGuffin didn’t know about the Italians, but he knew that an Irish detective and his beautiful bride had once lived there. On a houseboat, of all places. She had insisted that McGuffin give up his apartment on Russian Hill after their marriage and move onto her “Art Barge,” as McGuffin called it. It was ironic, McGuffin often thought, that a man who didn’t like boats should have spent so much of his life living first on a Sausalito houseboat and now on a San Francisco ferry boat. But the
Oakland Queen,
McGuffin thought, remembering Elmo’s parting words, may be my last boat.