The Chinese Doll

Chapter 9

  Boone, Ill.

  Thursday, P.M.

My Dearest Louise:

Louise, I feel that I must apologize for what I’ve just done, without first taking the time to consult you. It affects some property jointly owned by us. There wasn’t sufficient time to ask your permission, really, because the funeral was this noon.

The funeral of the Chinese girl; Leonore, or Eleanor, or whatever her correct name might be. (Evans’ body has been returned to his widow in Croyden.)

Coming downtown this morning after writing you, I ran across Don Thompson. He mentioned in passing that the Chinese girl was to be buried this afternoon in potter’s field. That reminded me of what I had developed on her identity and I told him what little I knew, requesting that he pass it along to the police department. He appreciated that — he’s the only officeholder in the county of the opposite political party, and enjoys trumping them.

I’ve been doing a lot of moping about the Chinese doll. Perhaps it’s lack of sleep or perhaps it was the way she appealed to me the night she drove me out to the barn; it might even be my conscience dwelling on Harry Evans’ retainer of five hundred dollars. I’m unprepared to say.

But I telephoned the undertaker, determined the cost of a funeral, drew enough money out of the bank, and buried the girl. In the cemetery plot you and I own.

I hope you won’t object, darling. In your letter yesterday you said I was doing right in wanting to do something to earn that retainer, even though I could probably do nothing to help Evans. I think this was helping him. I think he had an especial interest in the Chinese girl, and I believe that what I did was giving him his money’s worth. I’m not sorry that I did. I hope you will feel the same way.

After climbing the stairs again to my office this afternoon, I found Dr. Elizabeth Saari standing in the corridor, superintending the installation of her office equipment. She was wearing a white smock over her dress and there were goose pimples on her bare arms. It was chilly in the corridor.

“Hello, Chuck,” she greeted me lightly. “Wipe off that face. You act as if you had been to a funeral.”

“I have.”

Instantly her behavior sobered and she seemed embarrassed.

“I am sorry,” she said sincerely. “An example of my misplaced humor. A relative, perhaps?”

“The doll.”

“Doll?”

“The Chinese girl. Fidelity and Friendship.”

“But Dr. Burbee said she was to be buried sometime this afternoon.”

“I changed that.”

“You changed...” She folded her arms and studied me. The examination made me uncomfortable; she has the damndest knack of causing that. Her eyes were half-shut and seemed to be saying “Softy!”

But the lips said, “You couldn’t afford that.”

“How do you know what I can afford?”

“I’ve spent the last hour in your office, waiting for my furniture to arrive. Pardon me, my friend, but that office doesn’t give the impression of belonging to a moneyed man.”

“It really wasn’t my money. It was Evans’ fee. Can you think of a better way to spend it?”

She rubbed the back of her neck with a smudged hand. A locket on a chain tinkled under her dress. Abruptly she turned on her heel and vanished into her office.

I pushed open the door and entered mine.

She had cleaned it up. The desk had been swept clean of the clutter and dusted, the typewriter was covered for the first time in years. My books were stacked in two neat piles and the mail laid beside them.

The seven separate stacks of manuscript were now one stack, held down by a paperweight. Each of the seven pages that had been atop the stacks bore dusty finger smudges; she had read the manuscript. She had also swept the floor. I remembered seeing the broom outside in the corridor. The janitor was never as ambitious as all that.

Going around behind the desk, I found your violin case (and now my letter file) and her purse lying in the swivel chair. She must have forgotten the purse. It was then that I noticed her card.

It was perched between two rows of typewriter keys, just peeping from beneath the dust cover, and it read:

Two of her cigarette stubs bearing lipstick were in the ash tray.

While I was looking at them I heard the furniture men leave her office and clump down the stairs. They said something funny to someone else at the foot of the stairs, someone who was banging on the wall with a hammer. A carpenter, hanging her shingle. Everybody laughed.

I sat down in the swivel chair and did nothing for half an hour; at first I even tried to stop thinking, without notable success.

After a while her office door opened and shut, and her footsteps came across the corridor to my door. Her image showed fuzzy and green on the frosted glass. She walked in. She had removed the smock and was wearing a light green business suit that befitted a lovely woman more than a doctor.

I suppose my face said as much; she smiled self-consciously. I discovered I was holding her purse, and passed it across the desk to her. She took a chair opposite me.

“All ready for my first patient!” she exclaimed brightly. “I wonder who it will be?”

“Haven’t you been practicing? In Chicago?”

“No. Laboratory work ever since I graduated. I got tired of it. And you must admit there is still a doctor shortage. Especially here. That’s why I chose Boone. I like small towns.”

“It isn’t so small.”

“I’m from Chicago, remember?”

I shrugged. Not being a chamber of commerce booster I didn’t really give a damn what she thought of it. I knew what my trouble was. I was beginning to like Elizabeth Saari and yet I knew too little about her. Sitting there for half an hour, doing nothing but thinking, turning a thousand points over in my mind, I wound up with a disquieting mental attitude. It was like a witch’s spell cast over me. I didn’t want to break it by conversation; yet I hardly cared to be ridden by it the rest of the day.

In short, I was feeling low-down and mean.

She didn’t help a bit, “So you paid for the funeral?”

I nodded wearily. So we were back to that again. If she continued along that line I’d begin to wish I hadn’t, just to be perverse about it.

“Why?” she insisted.

“Maybe I have a humble heart,” I said with heavy sarcasm.

“You’re not being civil, Chuck. Won’t you give me a worthwhile explanation?”

Sourly, “Why the hell should I?”

She instantly changed inside. “I’m sorry to have asked,” she retorted stiffly, and made as if to leave. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

I jumped to my feet. “Please, Elizabeth...”

She paused, still not looking at me.

“Please sit down. I apologize; let’s not fight about it.” She turned back to the chair and I rushed on. “I’m feeling rotten, that’s all. My morale has just about hit bottom. I didn’t think any girl could upset me like this.”

She sat down and fumbled in her purse for a package of cigarettes. Lighting two, she held one across the desk to me, smiling gravely. I mumbled thanks.

“I should make the apologies,” she contradicted. “I realize, now, that I’ve been prying into things that don’t concern me. From your point of view, that is. My curiosity overcame my manners. As I mentioned last night, I think you’re a nice boy. I know you are capable of doing a lot of nice things for people; but I couldn’t quite understand this.”

“You’ve nothing on me; I can’t either. Softness, I guess. For no logical reason, I wanted to do something for that doll. I did the only thing I could find to do.”

“Do you mind if... I talk about it? Just a little bit?”

I said no, go right ahead.

“It may be softness, Chuck, and then again it may not. I don’t think you are a push-over for a pretty face. You saw a girl on ice skates, you liked her appearance, and when you found her on the undertaking table the next day it did something to you, inside. That’s understandable. Furthermore, when you discovered she was to be buried...”

Elizabeth suddenly stopped like a gramophone needle taken off the record. Or like someone who had suddenly fallen over a new and startling idea and didn’t know what to do next. Her brown eyes grew very large and round. They searched a face I was careful to keep blank. I knew the idea she had stumbled over.

“Chuck,” she queried softly, “you had met that girl before the ice-skating episode, hadn’t you?”

I merely nodded. She possessed the good manners not to ask where and how and under what circumstances I had met her. Those large eyes were thoughtful and far-away. She was mentally skipping along over my back trail at a great rate. But she couldn’t find anything; she knew too little.

“A sort of a friend,” I said by way of explanation and let it go at that.

She put her hands across the desk and grasped one of mine. Her cigarette was burning uselessly in the ash tray.

“Please forgive me for this, Chuck, but do you need money?”

I laughed. “No. Thanks, anyway. The expenses weren’t large. Harry Evans paid for it.”

“You’ve already mentioned that. May I ask... the connection between you and Evans, and Evans and the girl, and the girl and you isn’t quite clear.”

“It wasn’t clear to me, until last night. I think it stacks up like this: the girl — let’s call her Leonore — was Evans’ lady friend. Mistress, if we want to be frank about it. The poetry and the Chinese symbol and another fact tend to show that.”

“Yes. And you said Evans retained you?”

“As a sort of local bodyguard. He knew he was heading for some kind of trouble, exact nature of which unknown. Meanwhile, I had met Leonore in quite another way. Now the three of us are tied together in a sort of triangle.”

“That much I can follow. And I understand your interest in the autopsy.”

“Yeah.” Her cigarette died unnoticed in the ash tray. She was still holding onto my hand. “Remember those ‘slices’ I mentioned last night in your car? Evans and Leonore were having a pretty deep love affair. Something happened to that love affair, something startling, something unexpected? Do you follow that?”

She recalled the unexpected but quite natural results of a certain chemical test, and said yes. “A baby.”

“Keep that in mind. And then Evans came in to my office for protection. He doesn’t really know what is going to happen to him, but he thinks the police will frame him.”

“That doesn’t sound like Boone.”

I shook my head. “It isn’t Boone. I’ve come to believe the chief of police is a rat; he denied me my license renewal because someone who has reason to dislike me applied pressure. But I don’t think he could or would go so far as to frame a man of Evans’ standing.

“To get back to the point: Evans walked out of this office and was killed by his mistress. They loved one another very much. What do you think of that?”

“Nothing at all. It is confusing.”

“That’s it, Elizabeth. The apparent contradiction is the fine point upon which the whole thing revolves. That contradiction has no business being there. But it exists. Find out why it exists and you’ll probably find out the answer to everything.”

“Sorry, Chuck. I’m not that bright.”

“Neither am I. I wish I was. If they loved each other as deeply as evidence suggests, he would never, never run out on her. Baby or no, he’d stick by her. Having no reason to kill him then, she promptly kills him. And shortly afterwards the death car is found, ditched. And she falls in the lake.”

“It sounds like murder for revenge, and then desperate suicide. I’m sorry, Chuck, I’m only a doctor. I’m lost.”

“I’m as good as lost. Logic tells me there is a third party mixed in somewhere. That third party can explain the contradiction of a mistress murdering her lover whom she’ll need very shortly; he can also explain why Evans expected to be framed.”

“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth suggested, “and how she left the car in one place and was ice skating in another a short while later. It’s a crying shame she decided to go ice skating that night. She could have told us...”

She stopped talking. We eyed each other.

“Yes,” I echoed, “it is a shame, isn’t it? I wondered how long it would take you to suspect something.”

Her eyes were narrow with speculation. The hands holding mine tightened around my fingers.

“Yes,” she said again, ever so softly. “It is a crying shame.”

I could see what she was thinking. Her thoughts were practically echoing my own. But Louise, what I couldn’t tell her was this: since last night when I had seen the Chinese symbol on that identification bracelet, I had known (or thought I knew) the missing third party.

Leonore was driving for the gambler. The gambler had told me it was Leonore’s first trip between downtown and the lake; but Leonore had told me it was her second. She had made her first trip after running down Harry Evans. Foolhardy as it may seem, she had gone straight to the lake.

Remember also how the gambler lost his poise when I mentioned talking to the doll? That was my mistake, Louise, for I realized, during that long half-hour wait before Beth came in, that I had said something he didn’t like.

And Leonore fell in the lake and drowned.

That gambling gentleman is probably our third party. But don’t ask me how or why Leonore killed her lover; don’t ask me why Evans expected trouble from the police; don’t ask me how the gambler fits into the picture. I don’t know.

“Beth — was there any trace of dope in the body?”

“None whatsoever. We would have found it. Why?”

“Remember my saying she was giving a lousy skating performance? She acted sort of funny on the ice. Not too sure of herself. I thought maybe she had been doped and sent out there.”

“No, it wasn’t that. Something else must have contributed to the poor skating.”

“Yeah. And that something else, whatever it was, pushed her into the lake, too.”

She didn’t have an answer to that one, and swung her gaze out the window.

I reached in the desk drawer for the telephone and put in a call for Rothman in Croyden. In a few minutes the operator informed me that Mr. Rothman couldn’t be reached at that number, but that a Mr. Liebscher of the same firm would talk to me if I so desired. Did I?

I did.

Liebscher greeted me, “It’s your nickel, chum.”

“Doesn’t Rothman ever work? And can’t you think of a new way to open a conversation?”

“Ah — it’s Charley-boy. How are you, chum?”

“Never mind my health. Look: I’m mailing you a clipping about a Chinese girl who drowned... what?”

“I said, skip it. We’ve got newspapers, too.”

“All right, here’s the story: remember what I told you earlier about Evans? That’s right. It turns out that this Chinese girl is connected with him. Or was, rather. His mistress. No — never mind how I found out. I want you to dig up some details for me, fast. I’m coming over there late this afternoon. Don’t hang up — there’s more.”

Beth had swung back from the window to watch me, a troubled expression in her eyes. I ignored the eyes.

“Liebscher: I think that lawyer — yeah, Ashley — is in on this, too. Take a quick look into his private affairs. Try to find out who some of his clients are; we might work through them. Anything that’ll give us a line on him.

“That isn’t all. I’ll want information on the big-time gambling outfits over there. Can you do it? Fine. I’ll see you sometime this afternoon. So long, now.”

I hung up.

The troubled expression in Elizabeth’s eyes had changed to worried concern and flooded over into her face.

“Chuck — do you think you ought to do that?”

“Do what?”

“Pry into this thing? It might be dangerous for you. After all, you’ve done as much as you can.”

“Elizabeth, you say you’re a doctor. Would you run out on a patient because he was dying of a disease that might kill you, too? After you had done everything humanly possible there was to do for him?”

“N...o.”

“Well, I’m not a doctor. I like to think I’m a detective. I swore no oath and I don’t have to go through with it if I don’t want to. But I won’t run out on a case just because there might be some danger in it.”

“Chuck, it isn’t a question of might be, it is. A man and a woman have been brutally murdered because of something you don’t fully understand. And yet you blindly insist upon putting your head into the bag to see if you can understand what’s inside.”

“Thank you for your interest, Elizabeth.”

She stood up and reached for her purse. “I expected something better than this, Chuck.”

“Sorry, Elizabeth.”

She opened my office door and paused on the threshold, waiting for me to say something more. I said nothing.

Finally she half turned and said slowly, “I hope you never regret the rejecting of my advice, Charles.”

The door closed and she was gone.

What the hell — was that a threat?