The D.A. Breaks an Egg

14

“You fellows want in this Furman apartment?” Hardwick asked.

“We want in,” Brandon said. “But we don’t want any kickback.”

“Leave that to me. We’ll go in.”

“When?”

“Now. The place is right around the corner.”

“How about keys?” Selby asked.

“I got a passkey from the manager. It’s all ready for us to go in if we want.”

Selby said, “I have a friend who’s supposed to be waiting to meet us at the apartment, a newspaper woman...”

“Friendly newspaper?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, bring her along,” Hardwick said. “It’s okay by me. My instructions are to co-operate with you boys to the limit. Whatever you want is what I want.”

They rounded the corner and Sylvia Martin in her car, seeing the three men walking toward the entrance to the apartment house, gave Selby a tentative flashing glance, then demurely lowered her eyes and turned her head, taking the part of a modest young woman who, while waiting for her escort to return, has yielded to a brief flicker of curiosity.

“That your friend?” Hardwick asked.

Selby walked over and opened the car door. “It’s all right, Sylvia,” he said. “Miss Martin, may I present Bert Hardwick, of the local sheriff’s office?”

“Glad to know you,” Hardwick said. “Mr. Selby here says you’re to come along, and these boys are running the show as far as we’re concerned.”

Sylvia smiled her thanks, and the four of them entered the apartment house and without even pausing at the manager’s office climbed up two flights of stairs to the apartment Rose Furman had rented.

Hardwick inserted the passkey and opened the door, then stood to one side.

Rex Brandon entered the room. Doug Selby followed, then Sylvia Martin, and after them came Hardwick who closed the door behind him.

Brandon said, “I’m going to ask you to stand over in a corner, Sylvia, and not touch anything. Keep your eyes open, but let Doug and me make the search.”

It was a two-room apartment. The living room had been fitted up as an office with a typewriter, a small safe, and a cabinet containing stationery. A waste basket by the small desk was cleaned out so that there was not so much as a crumpled piece of paper on the bottom. The typewriter, however, was open on the desk, and there was a piece of paper in it as though the occupant of the apartment had been interrupted in the midst of a letter and forced to leave upon some urgent matter of business.

Hardwick, Brandon and Selby, moving in concert, walked over to the typewriter.

The document was addressed to Barton Mosher, and was headed “Final Report.”

And there, in midsentence, the report ended.

Selby, Brandon, and Hardwick bent over the typewriter studying the report.

“Well, that’s as far as she got,” Hardwick said. “Someone came and picked her up. Someone who was in one hell of a hurry. You note that she’d promised to complete this report and send it to Mosher at his hotel. She didn’t have time to do that. She didn’t even have time to finish the sentence. Whatever hustled her off to Madison City was something important and mighty urgent. And her client was calling for her. She didn’t call Mosher at the hotel, and he didn’t hear anything from her because she was dead. She must have been killed within a very short time after she arrived in Madison City.”

“Now,” Brandon said, “let’s start finding out how she got to Madison City. That may be important.”

“Her car’s down in the parking lot that’s reserved for tenants of the apartment house,” Hardwick said. “We’ve covered that. She didn’t go in her car.”

Selby said, “It would be interesting to find out just what she was working on. She was originally in Windrift on another job. Then Mosher hired her. That job took her to Madison City and while she was there she got in touch with someone who wanted her for a job of considerable importance.

“She evidently insisted that she return here to make a complete report to Mosher before she returned to Madison City. When she returned to Madison City she was to ride with her new client — not in her own car. Why?”

“Probably,” Hardwick said, “because she was to go on an undercover job where she’d be with someone as a friend or relative or something of that sort. The car’s registered in her name and would be a giveaway.”

“Let’s look around,” Selby said.

Sylvia Martin said eagerly, “We could see whether she had any clothes with her. Apparently she didn’t, Doug, and... there’s a purse over on that desk.”

Selby said to Hardwick, “One of the strange things about the case was that there was no purse found by the body of the murdered woman. That set us all off on a false lead.”

Hardwick opened the purse on the desk. “This looks like the one she must have been carrying. It has her driver’s license and all that in it. I tell you she was going on an undercover job and she didn’t want to have a thing on her that would disclose her identity.”

“Now, who the devil would hire a woman private detective in Madison City, Doug?” Rex Brandon asked. Selby shook his head.

“I don’t suppose she was foolish enough to leave books containing a list of her clients around the apartment,” Brandon said. “And yet she must have kept some books.”

“She was pretty cagey from all we could find out about her,” Hardwick said. “Played them very close to her chest. The most logical person whom you’d expect to hire a private detective is a lawyer. You got any lawyers out there who go in for private detectives?”

Selby gave the matter frowning consideration, then shook his head.

“You sure got one out there,” Hardwick said, grinning. “Doesn’t old A. B. Carr practice out in your bailiwick now?”

“More or less,” Brandon said stiffly.

“He’s supposed to have retired, or be trying to retire,” Hardwick went on. “That’s a laugh. That guy has a finger in a lot of things. He’s acquired enough influence around here so he very seldom shows up in court any more. He very seldom has to. The way he can fix things is a caution.”

Selby said, “His wife knew Daphne Arcola. Seems peculiar that there’d be so many coincidences involving him.”

“They’re not coincidences with him,” Hardwick pointed out. “It’s what you might call a law of cumulative recurrence. You start doing business with a bank, and first thing you know it’ll turn out that Carr got the banker’s son out of a scrape two years ago and the banker is very anxious to see that Carr is kept satisfied. You get mixed up in a real estate deal and you’ll find that Carr kept one of the brokers from losing his license a year ago last September, and when you get into court... well, I guess I’d better stop right here. Only don’t think that little things are a coincidence when you’re having dealings with that fellow. You cross his back trail every time you start walking. That’s not coincidence. It’s because he gets around.”

Brandon said, “I’d like to put him where he wouldn’t get around so much.”

“Who wouldn’t,” Hardwick retorted. “Didn’t you fellows pretty nearly have him nabbed awhile ago?”

“He married the prosecution witness, or the one whom we would have had to call as the prosecution witness,” Brandon said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Hardwick chuckled. “I remember now. I heard something about that. Well, what do you want to do here, fellows?”

“I’d give a lot to find out just who she’s been working for,” Selby said. “That other job she was on in Windrift, Montana, might mean something.”

“I may be able to help you on that one,” Hardwick said.

“I doubt if she left any documentary evidence lying around here in her apartment,” Selby pointed out. “She was evidently away for days at a time and she certainly was too smart...”

“I didn’t bank on that,” Hardwick said. “There’s one other angle that might help.”

“What’s that?”

“The telephone. There’s a switchboard down here and they charge by the call. I told the manager downstairs to have a list prepared of all the telephone numbers she had been calling in the last two or three weeks. The manager hated to do it, but she finally came around. Just a second and I’ll call the manager. She should have the list ready and I’ll make a quick check for repeat numbers.”

Hardwick went over to the telephone, talked with the manager a few minutes, then hung up, said over his shoulder, “Okay, boys, I’ll call the office. I think I can have some information for you in just a minute. I have a telephone number that she’s been calling a few times lately. Let me call the office and I’ll translate that into a name and an address and we can start working from there.”

Hardwick called the office and held the phone. After a few moments he said, “Okay, boys. The party we want is Mrs. Barker C. Nutwell at the Willington Apartments. They’re out on Western Avenue. Want to finish looking around here, and then take a look at Mrs. Nutwell?”

“There’s darn little to find here,” Brandon said. “She must have carried most of her business in her head. Look at that report she was making in the typewriter. She didn’t even put in a sheet of carbon paper for so much as a single carbon copy, and there isn’t a filing case in the apartment. Even the wastebasket is cleaned slick as a whistle.”

“I know,” Hardwick said. “The manager said she didn’t even get her mail here... Let’s go talk with this Nutwell party. She may know something.”

“You have the address on Western?” Selby asked.

“I have it,” Hardwick said. “Let’s all go in my car. I know the short cuts and which intersections I can go through without slowing down.”

“You can slow down for all of them, as far as I’m concerned,” Brandon said. “We’re not in that much of a hurry.”

“We probably aren’t at that. How about the reporter?”

Sylvia Martin looked pleadingly at Doug Selby.

“She comes,” Selby said.

“Okay, you’re the boss. We’ll all go in my car. Let’s get started.”

The low drone of the siren moved into higher frequencies until it became a peremptory scream as the big car split its way through traffic, rocketed through red lights, passed up boulevard stops, and swung around streetcars.

Within a matter of minutes, Hardwick brought the car to a stop in front of the Willington Apartments and two minutes later they were knocking on the door of an apartment.

They heard slow, shuffling steps, the thump-thump-thump of a cane. Then the door was opened a crack until the safety chain locked it in position.

Skeptical gray eyes peered out at them with cold hostility from a wrinkled face.

“Mrs. Nutwell?” Selby asked.

“That’s right. Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m Mr. Selby, the district attorney of Madison County. And this is Rex Brandon, the sheriff of Madison County, with me. This other gentleman is Mr. Hardwick, of the sheriff’s office here.”

Hardwick pulled back his coat so she could see the badge which he was wearing.

“Well, what do you want?”

“We want to talk with you.”

“You’re talking.”

“We’d like to have more privacy.”

“You’ve got all you need.”

“Some of the things we have to say are confidential.”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“Very well, then. Why did you employ a private detective? And when did you last hear from her?”

The gray eyes surveyed Selby’s face in careful appraisal. “You fooled me at first,” she said. “Looked too soft to be a district attorney. I guess you’re all right. Who’s that girl there?”

“A friend of mine,” Selby said.

“Where’s she from?”

“Madison City.”

“Well, all right, I guess it’s okay for you to come in. Come on.”

She loosened the chain on the door, then stood to one side, and opened the door.

The four visitors filed in, and Mrs. Nutwell closed the door, slipped the safety chain into catch, then turned the bolt on the door.

She was a woman in the late sixties, evidently afflicted with rheumatism, and her bony hand clutched a cane which she used as she walked, but there was a birdlike dexterity about her, a quickness, and a deft assurance with which she planted the cane on the floor, which made her seem surprisingly light of foot.

The apartment was spacious and apparently consisted of several rooms. It was well furnished, with an abundance of deep, comfortable chairs, spread about in advantageous positions as though Mrs. Nutwell was accustomed to entertaining rather large groups of friends and was anxious to see that they were all comfortable.

“Sit down,” she said. “Guess you can all find chairs. Pick a comfortable one. I like to be comfortable when I’m sitting down. My old bones are getting pretty sore, and I have to sit in comfortable chairs. Do a lot of reading and don’t like to keep thinking about how I’m feeling when I’m reading. Want to forget about myself. Used to want to think about myself all the time — that’s when I was young. Now I want to forget myself every time I can for as long as I can. Getting harder to do all the time. Well, somebody better start talking.”

She settled herself in a chair, looking from one to the other with quick, eager, birdlike twists of her head.

Selby leaned forward in his chair. “We’re trying to find out something about why you got in touch with Rose Furman, and just what you know about her.”

“That’s my business.”

“Unfortunately,” Selby said, “events have made it our business.”

“What sort of events?”

Hardwick said, “Suppose you just answer our questions for a while, Mrs. Nutwell, and then we’ll explain to you why we want the information.”

“And suppose I don’t?” she snapped. “Don’t try to browbeat me, young man!”

Selby said, “We’re not here out of idle curiosity, Mrs. Nutwell.”

“I s’pose that’s right. It ain’t idle, but it’s curiosity just the same.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“Well,” she demanded truculently.

Selby said patiently, “We’d like to know about why you hired Rose Furman.”

“Who says I hired her?”

“We have reason to think you did.”

“Well, if she’s been talking, I’ll certainly do something about that.”

“She hasn’t been talking,” Selby said.

“Well, it looks mighty queer to me. Can’t blame a body for being suspicious. Here you folks come up here and start trampling all over me. What’s wrong with hiring a detective? S’pose I did? What’s a detective for?”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” Selby said.

“Find out things for a body, I guess. Guess a person has a right to get information.”

Selby nodded.

“Why do they let detectives carry on their profession if it’s illegal to hire them?”

“It isn’t,” Selby reassured her, “but for certain reasons we’re trying to check up on Rose Furman.”

“What reasons?”

Selby held the gray eyes. “Rose Furman is dead.”

The woman in the chair gave a quick, convulsive start. “What’s that you say?”

“She’s dead.”

“Young man, you aren’t lying to me?”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“How’d she die?”

“She was murdered.”

“Who killed her?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Sounds like a cock-and-bull story to me.”

There was another interval of silence. Hardwick started to say something but Selby flashed him a warning glance, and the deputy lapsed into silence.

“Well, what do you want to know?” Mrs. Nutwell demanded again.

“How you happened to hire her, and what you know about her.”

“Well, under the circumstances, looks as though you might be entitled to ask a question or two. I hired her on account of my brother.”

“What about your brother?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“How did you happen to hire her?”

“Well, I looked around a little bit. I wanted to get some private detective I could trust. I’d heard a lot about them. Some of them are good, some of them ain’t worth a snap of your finger. Some of them string you along, make all sorts of reports aimed to keep you spending money until they bleed you white. Didn’t want that kind. Wanted someone that would do the job quietly and competently. That’s the trouble with people nowadays. They just ain’t competent. Can’t get anybody to dig in and really do a job.”

Selby nodded. “And how did you happen to find Rose Furman?”

“Friend of mine told me about her. She doesn’t send in reports. Sends a telegram once in a while, but gets results. She’s quiet and keeps in the background. Doesn’t want a lot of people knowing she’s a detective. Just has a certain trade and for the most part handles business for women. Leastwise, that’s what I found out about her when I investigated and, believe me, I did investigate. Never was a person to go around throwing money to the birdies, giving it to people I didn’t know anything about. They’ll fool you, all of them.”

“So you looked her up pretty carefully?”

“You bet I did.”

“Now what was there about your brother that...”

“My brother died,” she interrupted. “I didn’t like what they said about the way he died. Didn’t sound right to me. He was my younger brother, Carl Remerton. I’m a widow. Married Barker Nutwell when I was eighteen but he died six or seven years ago. My brother Carl’s wife also died. We always were pretty close. He understood me and I understood him. Seven years younger than I am. Wanted to be a playboy after his wife died. Told him he was a damned fool. Leave that gallivanting around to the younger folks.

“Well, he’d worked hard all his life. No play. Just keeping his nose pushed right down against the grindstone all the time. Made money, but what good did it do him? Made lots of money. People with money aren’t happy. Trouble with having money is you get to depend on money. People who are happy are the ones who have friends.

“When you get money, everyone wants to take it away from you. You have to stand guard over it all the time. Get a little bit careless with it, and you’re right back to where you were in the first place, poor as a church-mouse. Put in all of your time trying to stand between people and your money, and what does it get you? Nothing but ulcers and blood pressure. But I couldn’t talk to Carl. He wouldn’t listen. He was a worker, that boy. Certainly did dig in and work all his life — partially due to his wife. Ain’t going to say anything against her. Made up my mind I wouldn’t when he married, and I never did, and ain’t going to begin now.”

She clamped her lips in a firm straight line and glared at her visitors in grim silence.

“Yes, I can understand,” Selby said, reassuringly, “but, without saying anything against his wife, you can tell us that after she died your brother began to take life a little easier.”

“Of course he did. You should have seen the change in him. Of course he missed her and he did a little grieving but actually it was just like a weight had dropped off of him. Made a big change in him — too much of a change. He never could do things by halves. He started playing just like he worked.”

“Women?” Selby asked.

“How do I know,” she snapped. “I didn’t go spying on him.”

Selby was contritely silent, and, after a moment, she said, “Carl always loved to play poker, gamble, bet on the horses, things like that. He wanted life, gaiety, wanted to go around to night clubs, watch them dance. Get out there on the floor and do a right smart bit of dancing himself. Foolish for a man his age to do it. He’d just turned sixty. A man had ought to start taking care of himself then. Your heart gets tired. Even if it doesn’t tell you about it, it’s still tired. Go pouring a lot more work on it, dancing around a crowded floor in air that’s loaded with alcohol, perfume and tobacco, and there ain’t any good going to come of it. Well, that’s what he wanted, and that’s what he got.”

“Did he have any children?”

“Not a chick. I’m his only living relative.”

“And therefore you inherited the money?” Selby asked.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I just asked.”

“Of course I did. That is, I will. What about it?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, then, nothing.”

“Can you tell me more about your brother’s death?”

“He went to this dude ranch up in Windrift, Montana, and I don’t know what he was doing up there. Never tried to find out. Never cared. I suppose he was frolicking around and trying to have a good time, and if that’s the way he wanted things, why that’s the way he wanted them, and that’s that.

“But when he died, he died pretty sudden-like, and when I started checking up on things I started looking for a bunch of travelers’ checks he carried with him all the time. They’d been cashed. Just a day or two before he died he’d started cashing checks, quite a lot of checks, not too many, but quite a lot.”

“How many?” Selby asked.

“Ten or fifteen thousand dollars, somewhere around in there. I can’t remember the exact amount, thirteen thousand and something, I think it was.”

“All the checks he had with him?”

“No, not all. He carried twenty thousand dollars in checks with him wherever he went. This was his way of being independent. That was his way of showing that he could do whatever he wanted to.

“Land sakes, life isn’t made that way. People can’t do what they want to. People are always doing what they don’t want to do. That’s the way life works, and don’t ask me why. It’s just the fact that you can’t develop none by doing only the things you want to do. You do the things life makes you do, and somehow or other it seems to work out all right. But you take people who are in a position where they can do whatever they want to, and first thing you know they don’t know what they want to do, and then they get sort of goofy. Leastwise, that’s the way it seems to me.”

“So you hired this detective to go and find out what your brother had been doing?”

“Hired this detective to go find out what caused my brother to cash those travelers’ checks, and find out a little more about how he died. Doctors said his heart just gave way. Well, that’s all right. His heart wasn’t as strong when he was sixty as it was when he was twenty, but I just wanted to check up. Just wanted to satisfy myself. Wanted to find out what had happened to him.”

“And did you?”

“Well, I found everything was all right. Leastwise, that’s what that detective wired me.”

Mrs. Nutwell got up from the chair, tapped her way across the room to a writing desk, opened it, and took out a yellow Western Union envelope. She removed the telegram from the envelope and handed it to Selby.

Selby said, “This telegram was sent from Corona at nine-thirty Tuesday night, and reads:

Selby said, “May we take this telegram, Mrs. Nutwell?”

She hesitated, then said, “Well, I guess it’s all right. You say she was murdered?”

“That’s right, apparently within two hours after she sent this wire. It seems she returned to Los Angeles, started to type out a report on another case, was interrupted by some client who called for her and insisted she leave immediately for Madison City with him — and she must have sent you this wire on the road to Madison City.”

“And you don’t have any idea who did the killing?”

“No, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“She was a mighty competent young woman. She certainly knew her way around. Knew about life and about people. I talked with her. She told me she wouldn’t send me in any report; that she didn’t do business that way; that she took a case and went out and made a job of it. When she was finished she had the story. She told me she wasn’t going to go running up a lot of expenses on me, but that I’d just have to sort of trust her. I felt certain she’d come back with the whole story and tell it to me all at once. She said reports just cramped her style. She said she didn’t want to have to start making guesses before she had all the facts.”

“How long ago did you hire Rose Furman?” Selby asked.

“Must have been three or four weeks.”

“And you gave her money?”

“I gave her four hundred against expenses. I agreed to pay her another four hundred for a complete report, where Carl went the last few days of his life, whom he was with and all that. If you find any notes she made on that, I want ’em.

“And,” Mrs. Nutwell added, with sudden conviction, “you won’t find any. She was too smart to have left as much as the scratch of a pen. You want to bet, young man?”

“No,” Selby said, “I don’t want to bet.”

Sylvia Martin quietly slipped her folded notes back in her purse. She had her story.