Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

Chapter Twenty-Five

But actually what Ed Friday had told me had been of some help. Not much, but at least it gave me the glimmer of a new idea.

While it was possible that everything he had said was pulled out of thin air in order to stall me off until his bodyguard rejoined the conversation, it was equally possible that he had been telling the truth. I inclined to take a middle course and accept his story as embroidered truth.

Never having been quite happy about Friday as the engineer of Ford’s murder, I was inclined to believe his explanation that his attempt to steer me away from the case stemmed from concern that I might uncover something in Ford’s background which would upset one of Friday’s business deals. But I was equally inclined to doubt that the illegal act Friday mentioned was merely suspected by him. I believed that whatever the illegal act of his “associate” had been, Friday did not merely suspect it, but had proof of it. It seemed unlikely to me he would have gone as high as two thousand dollars to get me to refuse Ford’s case if he had only a vague suspicion that his business deal was in danger.

What particular deal he had been talking about, it was of course impossible to say, as his interests were so varied; it could be anything from stock-market shenanigans to a corporation merger. However, it was just possible Friday’s “business deal” was his backing of the Huntsafe Company. The possibility made it at least worth looking into.

Stopping at a drugstore, I phoned Madeline Strong.

“You just caught me going out the door,” she said. “I was on my way over to the jail to see Tom. Anything new?”

“Nothing concrete. I just developed the beginning of a wild new theory. Tell me, Madeline, where did your brother Lloyd live just before he died?”

“With me. We always lived together.”

“At the apartment you live in now?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “In our old family home over on Euclid. We were both born there, and after the folks died we just continued to live there. After Lloyd was killed, the place was too big for just me alone, so I moved here.”

“And sold the house, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s for sale, but there haven’t been any takers. It’s too big for what most people want nowadays.”

“Lloyd’s stuff still there? His papers and records, I mean?”

“Everything’s there. Except dishes and a few pieces of furniture I moved here. I’ve been meaning to have a household sale one of these days but just haven’t gotten around to it.”

“Forget your visit to the jail,” I said. “I want you to meet me at the house. What’s the address?”

“Fourteen twenty-one Euclid.”

“Suppose we meet there in twenty minutes?”

“All right,” Madeline said.

“Don’t forget the key,” I advised, and hung up.

When I arrived at 1421 Euclid, I understood why the place had been unable to find a taker. It was an attractive enough white frame building in apparently good condition and with a wide, tree-shaded lawn on all four sides. But it was big enough to serve as a hospital. From the outside I judged it contained at least twenty rooms.

On the front lawn there was a slim metal post supporting a horizontal bar from which hung a gold-lettered sign. The sign read, “C. Maurice Strong,” and the moment I saw it I suddenly realized where all Madeline’s money had come from, and why she had seemed so surprised that I didn’t know who she was the day I had asked her if she could afford my fee.

In the field of electronic invention, C. Maurice Strong was about second in line to Thomas Edison. Both he and his wife had died in an auto accident about four years before, I recalled, and I remembered that in the feature articles appearing in all the local papers after his death, the list of his inventions had been longer than his obituary. Just to mention a couple of random items, he owned about half the patents in the fields of radio and television, and once had received a citation from the government for turning over to it without charge his patents on radar and automatic gun control.

I had been waiting for about five minutes when Madeline arrived in a taxi.

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was C. Maurice Strong?” I asked as we walked toward the broad front porch.

She looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you know?”

“How would I know?” I asked reasonably. “Strong’s a fairly common name.”

“I guess I just take it for granted everybody knows.”

Inside the house was pervaded by the unused, dusty smell of having been locked up a long time. White dust cover were over all of the furniture.

Madeline led the way through a huge front room, a slightly smaller dining room and into a wide back hall.

She opened a door leading off the hallway and preceded me down a flight of stairs to the basement.

“Lloyd’s laboratory is down here in the basement,” Madeline explained. “He kept all his records in the lab.”

We had to pass through a game room and a laundry room before we reached the laboratory, which was under the front part of the house. It was a large room, about twenty by fifteen feet, with an electrical workbench similar to the one I had seen in Barney Amhurst’s apartment along one wall.

“He kept everything in there,” Madeline said, pointing to a single dusty filing cabinet in one corner. “What is it you’re looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ll just have to go through everything.”

Madeline drew a chair away from the workbench, looked at the dust on it and decided to continue standing. “It’s already been gone through once, you know. After the funeral we had to check through his papers for the will, insurance policies and so on.”

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Well, me, I mean actually. But Walter Ford helped me.”

I had just pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, but instead of looking down into it, I looked over my shoulder at Madeline.

“What was that?” I asked

“I said Walter Ford helped me go through the papers.”

I frowned at her. “How did that happen? I thought you only knew Ford casually before he came into the Huntsafe Company.”

“I did,” Madeline said. “Well, it was a little more than casually. He’d had some business relationships with my father and was a great admirer of his. Lloyd and I had known him for years, but he was older than we were so we never went around in the same crowd. I think he came to Lloyd’s funeral more because of admiration for my father than because Lloyd meant anything to him. But he was very considerate. You know how people at a funeral always ask if there is anything they can do?”

I nodded in indication that I knew.

“Well, my lawyer had told me I would have to go through all Lloyd’s papers, and I was thinking about it and dreading the task when Walter came up and asked if there was anything he could do. So I said, yes, he could help me sort through Lloyd’s papers.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why him particularly? Don’t you have any close relatives?”

She shook her head. “None that live here. And because of Walter’s feeling for my father, I kind of felt that he was like an uncle or something. I don’t mean all the time. But during the emotional stress of the funeral. About the only other person I could have asked was Barney, and he was so broken up over Lloyd’s death I couldn’t ask him.”

“I see. And I suppose Ford did most of the sorting?”

“Well, yes. I’m not very good at that sort of thing.”

Since Walter Ford had been at the file before me, there was little chance I would find what I was looking for, I realized. With his propensity for blackmail, it would have gone into his inside pocket the moment he found it. Nevertheless I doggedly went through every drawer of the cabinet.

In a manila folder marked “Tax Returns,” I found duplicate copies of Lloyd Strong’s Federal forms 1040 for the three years before he died. Since there were no forms for previous years, I assumed that prior to that whatever income he had was included on his father’s annual return.

Checking over the three 1040’s, I found that most of the income reported was from royalties on patents inherited from his father, and from stock dividends and interests. The totals, I noted, came to quite impressive amounts. In each of the last two returns there was also included a Schedule C showing profit and loss on his own patents. For both years gross income amounted to less than two thousand dollars and, after deducting business expenses, both years showed a substantial net loss.

The item which interested me most was line eleven of Schedule C, “Salaries and wages not included in line four.”

For both years Lloyd Strong claimed salary payments of $3,770.00.

I said to Madeline, “Did you know your brother was losing money in the inventing business?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But that was only temporary.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“It takes some time before royalties begin to come in from patents. Lloyd had several excellent chances to sell some of his patents outright, but since we didn’t need the money, he preferred to take a long-range view and only lease them on a royalty basis. It’s only since father died that Lloyd started patenting his inventions. And every patent he’s leased is tied up with an ironclad contract. Returns are low to start with that way, but the eventual income should be four to five times what he could have gotten by outright sales. My brother was an excellent businessman.”

By then it was pushing twelve-thirty and I offered to buy Madeline lunch. We had it in an excellent restaurant she knew from having spent her whole life in the neighborhood. The food was fine, but the lunch was no fun because Madeline kept pestering me to know what I had been looking for and I was in no mood to tell her.

“I want to talk to Warren Day before I say a word to anyone else,” I said. “I think I’ve got the answer to this case, but there isn’t a shred of proof. Before I lay myself open to a possible defamation of character suit, I want to see if Day can help me.”

“You mean you actually know who killed Walter Ford?”

“I’ve got a theory about it. It may come to nothing. And that’s all you get until I find out.”