Meet Me at the Morgue

chapter 16

Juncal Place was high on a terraced hill overlooking the Westwood campus. It was a dead-end street one block long, with houses on the higher side and a steep drop on the other. The eighth and last house was set far back on a sloping lawn that ended above the sidewalk in stone retaining-walls cut by concrete stairs. It was a pseudo-Tudor mansion with dark oak facing, drooping eaves, and leaded panes in the second-story windows. Knocking on the grandiose oak front door, I felt a little like a character in Macbeth.

A colored maid in uniform opened the door and looked down at my briefcase with suspicion.

“Is Mr. Richards home?”

“I don’t know. What is it you want?”

“Tell him it’s about the burglary.”

“Are you from the police?”

“I’m connected with the police.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Come in. I guess he’ll see you.”

She left me in a room with a heavily beamed ceiling and book-lined walls. Many of the books were beautifully bound, but they looked as if they had never been read. Someone had probably bought them all at once, stacked them in the cases because the room required them, and then forgotten them.

A round-faced white-haired man in a dinner jacket darted in, leaning forward as if the floor were slanted to his disadvantage. He shook my hand vigorously. “Glad to meet you, sergeant, always glad to meet a member of your fine organization. Magnificent library I have here, eh? Cost me five thousand dollars for the books alone. Wish I had time to read them. That organ in the alcove cost three five. Sit down. Can I offer you a drink?”

“No, thanks. I’m not a detective, by the way. I’m a probation officer. The name is Cross.”

“I see,” he said uncomprehendingly. “I’m a great admirer of the work you boys are doing. Have a cigar?”

“No, thanks.”

He clipped a long pale-green cigar and thrust the end into his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said around it. “I have them specially made for me in Cuba. Cost me four fifty a thousand. I smoke a thousand of them in two months. You’d think it would spoil my condition but it doesn’t. Matter of fact, I broke eighty today, for the eleventh time. Collected a little side-bet of two hundred dollars.”

“Good for you, Mr. Richards.”

The irony was lost on him. He beamed. “I’m no Bobby Jones. But I do make enough on my game to pay my club dues. The way it works out, I get all that fine exercise for nothing. Not to mention all the fine personal contacts.” He lit his cigar, smacking his lips as he puffed, and blinked at me through the smoke. “You came about the burglary, Leah said. You haven’t recovered the rest of our stuff?”

“I’m afraid not. I came on the chance that you could give me some information.”

“About the stuff?”

“About the burglar,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

He said: “The insurance company paid me off in full, you’ll be glad to know. An aggregate of fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. That included three hundred and forty dollars for the suit. They didn’t believe at first that I pay three forty for an ordinary suit. Showed ’em the tailor’s bill, and that convinced ’em. Brand-new suit, only had been cleaned once. Matter of fact, it’d just got back from the cleaner’s. It was hanging inside the service entrance. He must have just lifted it on the spur of the moment, when he was on his way out.”

“Did you see him?”

“I didn’t. Mabel did – my wife. Apparently she had quite a long conversation with him. How about that for gullibility – inviting him into our home and treating him like a king while he was stealing her gewgaws right under her nose.” He clucked derisively. “Why do you ask? Do you have another suspect for her to look over?”

“I have some pictures here.” I tapped my briefcase. “Can I speak to your wife?”

“Don’t see why not.” He opened his mouth to shout for her and then thought bettter of it, touching a bell-push in the wall instead. “Might as well get some use out of the servants,” he said. “Lord knows they cost me enough. That maid alone gets two hundred a month and her keep. They paid me less than that when I started with the company–”

I warded off biography with a question: “Did I understand you to say there was a suspect arrested?”

“They didn’t arrest him. He was the wrong man. Mabel may be gullible, but she does have an eye for faces. I’d trust her memory for faces any time. They didn’t even bring the police into it. No case.”

“Who asked your wife to look at him?”

“The insurance investigator. That was the day after they recovered the wristwatch. I had to pay back the money they gave me for the wristwatch. Two hundred dollars. It wasn’t one of her good ones. She keeps the ones with the diamonds locked up in the safe.”

I hadn’t often interviewed a more willing, or a more confusing witness. “So the insurance investigator recovered a wristwatch?” I said hopefully.

“That’s right. It turned up a couple of weeks ago in a pawnshop in East Los Angeles. They traced the man that pawned it: he’s a photographer out in Pacific Palisades.”

“A photographer.”

“Yeah. The burglar was a photographer, too, or claimed to be. But it wasn’t the same man. The one that pawned the wristwatch said he bought it from a customer. Apparently he was telling the truth. Mabel went out to his place in Pacific Palisades with the insurance man. She walked right into the shop and talked to the fellow, pretended to be interested in getting her picture took. She got a bang out of that, Mabel’s still an actress at heart. Mabel was a very great actress at one time. I directed her myself in thirteen pictures.”

The maid appeared in the doorway. “You want me, Mr. Richards?”

“Ask Mrs. Richards to come out here – to join me in the library.”

I said when the maid had gone: “Is Mrs. Richards in good health? No heart condition or anything like that?”

“Mabel’s as strong as a horse.” He looked at me inquiringly.

“These pictures I have are pictures of a dead man.”

“He’s dead?”

“Not only that. He’s pretty badly smashed. I thought you should be warned.”

“Mabel can take it.”

“Take what, Jason?”

A woman had quietly entered the room behind us. She was slender and tall in a black evening-sheath. Her graying brunette head was small and handsome, set off by fine tanned shoulders.

“What can I take? What are you letting me in for now?” She was smiling.

“The officer here – Mr. Cross? – has some pictures of a dead body.”

“What on earth for, Mr. Cross?”

“I think it’s the man who burglarized your house.”

“He didn’t exactly burglarize–”

“No,” Richards said. “You invited him over and practically handed him the stuff on a silver platter. If it wasn’t for the insurance, I’d be out fourteen hundred and twenty dollars. No.” The adding machine in his head clicked, almost audibly. “Twelve twenty, after they recovered the wristwatch for me.”

His wife laid a hand on his arm and regarded him with calm tolerance: “But you did have insurance, so you’re not out a penny. I admit I was taken in, though.”

“How did it happen, Mrs. Richards?”

“Oh, quite naturally. This very pleasant-voiced young man called me up one morning early in February.”

“It was January,” her husband said. “January the twelfth.”

“January, then. He said he was a photographer with some home magazine, and he’d heard about our house, how beautifully done it was, and would I mind if he came and took some pictures. I said certainly not. I’m a notorious sucker, and oh so very house-proud.”

“Naturally,” her husband said. “You’ve got a fine big house, why shouldn’t you be proud of it? It cost into six figures…”

“Be quiet, Jason. He turned up later in the morning with his equipment. I showed him over the house, and he took his pictures, or pretended to. It never occurred to me to be suspicious, and I admit I was pretty careless leaving him alone in some of the rooms. Well, to make a long story short, he picked up everything loose and thanked me and bowed himself out. I even gave him a bottle of beer to drink.”

“Ale,” her husband said. “Bass Ale, imported from the old country.”

“At fabulous cost,” she said with a laugh. “Don’t mind Jason, Mr. Cross. He’s not really avaricious. He just expresses his feelings in money terms. How much am I worth, Jason?”

“To me, you mean?”

“To you.”

“One million dollars.”

“Piker,” she said, and pinched his cheek. “Does anybody bid a million one?”

He flushed. “Don’t say that. It isn’t ladylike.”

“I’m not a lady.” She turned to me, her smile fading. “I’m ready to see your pictures, Mr. Cross.”

I showed them to her, looking from them to her face. She had become very grave.

“Poor man. What happened to him?”

“He was run over. Do you recognize him?”

“I think it’s the chap, all right. I couldn’t swear to it.”

“You’re reasonably sure?”

“I think so. When was he killed?”

“Last February.”

She handed the pictures back and looked up at her husband. “You see. I told you the man in Pacific Palisades wasn’t the one. He is older and darker and heavier, an entirely different type.”

“I’d still like to talk to him,” I said. “Where is his shop, exactly?”

“I don’t recall the address. Let me see if I can describe it to you. You know the stoplight where Sunset Boulevard runs into the coast highway? It’s half a mile or so north of there, one of those slummy little buildings crowded between the highway and the beach.”

“On the left-hand side as you go north?”

“Yes. I don’t think you can miss it. It’s the only photography studio anywhere along there, and there’s some kind of a sign, and photographs in the window. Old dirty photographs, colored by hand.” She shrugged her bare shoulders as if to shake off an atmosphere. “It was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been in.”

“Why?”

“It was so obviously a failure – everything was in a mess. The man didn’t even know his business.”

“Mabel can’t stand failure,” Richards said. “It reminds her of her early life. My wife had a very rough time as a young girl, before I discovered her.”

“Before I discovered you, Jason.”

“Your husband told me you talked to the man.”

“I did. The insurance investigator suggested I go in and pose as a customer, in order to have a good look at him, and hear his voice. I made a few inquiries about sizes and prices. He couldn’t even answer them without asking the girl.”

“What girl?”

“He had a little blonde assisting him, probably his wife. Heaven knows he couldn’t be making enough in that shop to pay her a salary. The girl was rather nice, at least my vanity thought so. You see, she recognized me. Apparently she’d been catching some of my old pictures on television–”

“Don’t mention that awful word!” her husband cried.

“Sorry. She asked me for my autograph, can you imagine? Nobody’s asked for my autograph for ages.”

“Can you describe her?”

“She was a rather pretty little thing, with a turned-in page-boy bob. I noticed her eyes. She had lovely dark blue eyes, but the general effect was spoiled by her paint job. She wore too much of everything – too much lipstick and powder, even eye-shadow. Now that I think about it, I’m certain she was his wife. I remember she called him Art.” Art Lemp and Molly Fawn. The inside of my mouth went dry. “And the man, Mrs. Richards? What did he look like?”

She sensed my excitement, and answered with great care: “The best word I can find for him is amorphous. He had one of these loose, rubbery mouths – how can I describe it? The sort of mouth that can turn into anything. I pay attention to mouths, they’re so important in expressing character–”

“Age?”

“It’s hard to tell. About fifty-five or sixty.”

“Did he have a bald head?”

“No. I do recall wondering if he was wearing a hairpiece. His hair was too sleek and neat, you know? It didn’t go with the rest of him.”

I moved towards the hall. “Thank you very much, both of you. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

“I hope so,” she said.

Richards followed me to the front door. “What is this all about, Cross? Is he a receiver of stolen goods?”

“The story’s a little too long to tell you now. I’m pressed for time.”

“Whatever you say.” He stepped out onto the porch and filled his lungs with air. “Wonderful night, great view. I like to have the university down there. That cultural atmosphere, it makes me feel good. I’m a bear for culture.”

“Physical culture,” his wife said from the doorway. “Good night, Mr. Cross. Good luck.”