This Is Murder

Chapter Four

Natalie Rice pushed open the door of Sam Moraine’s private office. There were newspapers clamped under her arm, a stack of mail in her hand. She came to a surprised stop as she saw Sam Moraine seated at his desk, smoking.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

He nodded his head, his eyes fixed upon distance. He continued to smoke, puffing out little meditative clouds of white smoke.

“You thought I was in jail?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I presume the papers are full of it?”

“Yes. They didn’t mention your name. They said, ‘The head of a prominent downtown advertising agency.’ ”

“Nice of them,” Moraine remarked. “It won’t fool anyone — not for long.”

She looked about her at the drawn curtains, walked across to the wall and turned off the lights.

“How long have you been here?” she asked, raising the curtains.

He blinked slightly as the bright sunlight poured in through the window.

“I don’t know. Since three or four o’clock this morning.”

“You got out without any trouble?”

“Yes. Phil Duncan pulled some wires to get me out.”

“Was Barney Morden in on the arrest?”

“No, Barney was okay, but I think he talked too much at that. There was a leak somewhere, and I think it must have come from the district attorney’s office.”

“I don’t trust Mr. Morden,” she said. “I think he’s sort of a yes-man for Mr. Duncan, and I think he pretends to be very friendly and respectful to you, only because it’s good business for him to do so. If he ever had a chance, he’d turn against you.”

“Probably,” Moraine said absently. “Most men would.”

“Most men would what?”

“Turn against anyone if it became to their advantage to do so.”

“How cynical you are.”

“That’s not being cynical; that’s simply appraising facts at their face value. Has there ever been a case on record when a person with social position kept up a friendship with someone where the friendship meant forfeiting that social position?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You see it happen all around you every day.”

Her face was white now. She placed the mail on the desk, held the side of the desk with both hands as though to steady herself.

“Look here,” she said, “did you mean anything personal by that?”

His eyes showed his surprise. “Why, no, of course not.”

“Very well,” she said.

He was staring at her curiously now. She was quite evidently badly shaken.

“What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He stared at her speculatively.

“Will you see clients to-day?”

“No. I’m going to try and avoid everyone. There’ll be a lot of newspaper reporters. There’ll probably be some detectives.”

“The detectives will come here?”

“Yes, of course.”

She dropped into a chair and said, “Pardon me, Mr. Moraine, but I feel faint.”

“Water?” he asked, jumping to his feet.

She shook her head.

He opened a drawer in his desk.

“Brandy?”

She hesitated a moment, then nodded.

“I think I’ll have one, myself,” he told her, handing her a glass and pouring one for himself. “It may relax me so I can get to sleep. I’ll lie down on the couch here and doze a bit. If I get sleepy, you keep out the reporters and detectives.”

“What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them anything. Tell them I’ve gone to Timbuktu; tell them I ran away with another man’s wife; tell them I’ve skipped out with funds belonging to a bank; tell them anything. It’s no crime to he under circumstances like these. I want privacy, sleep, and a chance to think.”

“I hope,” she said, “you won’t think I’m too personal, but I gathered you were all finished with the affair.”

“I am,” he told her, slowly, “and I’m not. There’s something about this that interests me.”

“How did it happen you were arrested?”

“I took the money out to the kidnapers. The federal men had been tipped off to the kidnapping. They were waiting to grab us all when we came ashore. I don’t think they really wanted me. I think they just wanted to throw a scare into me and establish a precedent that it was poor business to pay ransom money without communicating with the federal authorities.”

“But they did arrest you?”

“Oh, yes, they took me down there and Phil got me out. There’s no question about that.”

“How about the woman — the dentist’s wife?”

“Mrs. Hartwell, you mean? Oh, she’s sitting pretty. They’re dressing her up for the sob sections of the newspapers.”

“From what I read in the paper her story wasn’t very clear.”

“She’s hysterical,” he said.

“Are the federal men going to try and break down her story?” she said.

He looked at her in surprise.

“Why should they?” he asked.

She started to say something, then checked herself.

Moraine, watching her, said encouragingly, “Go ahead. What was it you wanted to say?”

“Nothing,” she told him. “After all, it’s none of my business. The Grantland woman has been calling again. And that Johnson contract requires your attention. The Pelton Paper Products wants you to work out a slogan and...”

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted, good-naturedly. “It isn’t that important. We were talking about something else.”

“I was commenting upon something which didn’t concern me,” she remarked. “That is, I was about to.”

“Whenever I try to get personal with you,” he observed, “you take refuge in a secretarial efficiency.”

“Well, isn’t that the way you want it?” she asked.

“No,” he said frankly, “it isn’t.”

“It’s the way it should be.”

He shook his head, staring at her in steady appraisal.

“No,” he said, “it isn’t. You know all about me. I know very little about you. You know how I feel toward the Grantland woman. You know what Tm going to do with the Johnson contract, and you could probably work out a slogan for the Pelton Paper Products Company that’s just about the same type and probably just as good as the one I’d work out. Yet I don’t know a single thing about you. You came to me without references. I had ten applicants for secretary. You made the highest mark in the intelligence examination which I gave. You also did the fastest shorthand, the neatest typing, but when I asked you about references, you stalled. I knew you were stalling. But I don’t pay much attention to references. I’m willing to take human nature as I find it, so I told you we’d waive the references.”

Her eyes stared steadily into his.

“So you could throw it up to me afterwards?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “but, since you want to know, I’ll tell you. You have something in your past. You’re frightened by this kidnapping business. Perhaps you’ve had some contact with kidnapers. Perhaps you think you know the people who are in on the job.”

She got to her feet with dignity.

“I like this position,” she announced. “It’s just the type of work that I care for. As long as you’re doing advertising work. But when you start dabbling around in kidnapping cases on the side, I think it’s time for me to quit.”

“You’re resigning?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Because I’m mixed up in a kidnapping case?”

“Partly.”

“Just what’s the reason? I fail to see the connection.”

“I’m interested in the business,” she said. “You’re certainly not going to be able to put in much time on business if you’re dabbling around in these things.”

“Go on and come clean,” he said, laughing. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

“I don’t have to fool anyone,” she said, her eyes blazing. “You have no right to make any such insinuations.”

“Oh, yes you do,” he told her. “Remember, I’m something of a psychologist. I noticed the concern in your face and in your manner when I told you that officers were going to be hanging around here to-day. At about that time, you decided you were going to quit. I also noticed that when I mentioned something about friends with social position turning a cold shoulder to one who is unfortunate, I hit pretty close to a bull’s-eye. Now, then, Miss Natalie Rice, suppose you come clean and tell me how much of your reason for quitting is because officers are going to be hanging around the place.”

Her face was dead white, the eyes large, dazed, and helpless. Slowly she sat down in a chair.

“Not going to cry?” he asked.

“No,” she said; “I don’t cry.”

“Good girl. Little more brandy?”

“No, thank you. One’s enough.”

“How near right am I?” he inquired kindly.

She managed a smile.

“About ninety-eight per cent, perhaps ninety-nine per cent.”

He offered her a cigarette. She took it, leaned forward for his match, then settled back with a sigh.

Moraine lit a cigarette and regarded her with steady, patient, unprejudiced appraisal.

“Ever hear of Alton G. Rice?” she asked.

He knitted his forehead.

“Yes. But I can’t remember in what connection. Wasn’t he in politics, or mixed up in some...”

“Embezzlement,” she finished.

“Exactly,” he announced. “City Treasurer, or something, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“Go on,” he invited.

“He is my father,” she said simply.

Moraine’s voice showed sympathy. “Isn’t he... that is...”

“Yes. He’s in jail.”

Moraine nodded.

“His term,” she said, “has about finished.”

Moraine, smoking, waited, watching her with eyes that had trained themselves to miss no faintest flicker of facial expression.

“When he was sentenced,” Natalie Rice went on, “there was a very decided belief on the part of the district attorney’s office that he was withholding over fifty thousand dollars in cash that had been secreted somewhere. They offered to make his sentence lighter if he’d turn in that money. He told them that he couldn’t, that he didn’t know where it was.”

“Was Duncan district attorney then?” Moraine asked.

“No. It was the one before Duncan.”

“All right. Go ahead. Pardon the interruption. I was just trying to get it straight.”

“The authorities thought I knew where it was,” Natalie Rice went on. “They thought Dad had turned it over to me. The bonding company put detectives on my trail. They shadowed me night and day.”

“Did you know where it was?” Moraine asked, staring shrewdly at her.

“No, of course not. Father hadn’t embezzled anything. It was a political frame-up. He was a hold-over from one of the other administrations, and he was watching for graft on some of the paving contracts. Dixon and some of his gang decided that they wanted Dad out of the way. They couldn’t get him out of office any other way, so they hatched up that embezzlement.”

“But money was embezzled?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Who got it?”

“Dixon, I think. I’m not certain. Dixon, or some of his men.”

“How do you know?”

“I only know what Dad told me. He had his suspicions, but he could never prove anything.”

“Go ahead.”

“You talk about friends valuing social position more than friendship. You don’t know anything about it. You should have been through what I went through. I thought I was in love, and I’m willing to swear the boy I was engaged to thought he was in love with me. But he couldn’t stand the pressure — the detectives shadowing us all the time, friends snubbing me and commencing to snub him... So I watched my opportunity, gave the detectives the slip, and never went back, even for my clothes. I began all over again. I did everything. I washed dishes. I waited tables. I punched doorbells.”

“But you had a fine secretarial training,” he pointed out.

“Try and use it,” she said bitterly. “People employing secretaries want to know something about them. They want references. They want to know lots of things. Sometimes they want to have a secretary bonded.

“No one cares who you are when you’re washing dishes, and if you can make the sales by punching doorbells, the companies that go in for door-to-door canvass don’t care what your background is. I was trying to build up a background. Then, after I’d made some progress, I got in touch with an employment agency to look over secretarial positions. About that time, I heard that you were going to hire a secretary; that you were going to give a competitive examination and intelligence test. I decided that if I could qualify for that I might be able to stall along on the references.”

“Which you did,” he said.

She met his eyes steadily.

“Which I did,” she admitted.

He grinned at her. “There’s a lot to politics that the dear taxpayer doesn’t know anything about.”

“Are you,” she asked scornfully, “telling me?”

Moraine regarded the smoke from his cigarette.

“Do you think the detectives will recognize you?”

“They’re very likely to.”

“And you mentioned something about breaking down this Hartwell woman’s story?”

“I thought,” she said, “that it sounded rather farfetched. I noticed that the newspapers gave her a lot of sympathetic slush, but her story of the kidnapping sounded rather vague to me.”

“She was hysterical.”

“Not so hysterical that she forgot to be evasive.”

Moraine nodded slowly.

“I think,” he said, “that I’m going to give you a job that will take you out of the office so you won’t have to be around when the detectives come in.”

“What sort of a job?”

“Doing a little detective work yourself.”

“On what?”

“On this kidnapping business.”

“Good heavens,” she exclaimed; “aren’t you finished with that? We have an office full of work. You’ve been up all night, been in jail part of the night.”

He grinned at her.

“To tell you the truth, I never had so much fun in my life. I never realized mixing around in criminal stuff could be such a kick.”

“Someone will stick a gun in your chest and go bang, bang,” she said, laughing nervously.

“Even so, it would be a lot of fun. You know, I’m bored to death with contracts and slogans, and advertising copy and all that sort of thing. Let’s let some of the assistants run the business. I want you to find out something for me.”

Her brief excursion into the personal was definitely finished. Her face became expressionless, her voice was that of an efficient secretary.

“Yes, Mr. Moraine,” she said; “what is it you want?”

Moraine looked at her, half-smiling. Then, as she made no effort to return his smile, said, “You heard the conversation I had with Wickes. He wanted me to pay ten thousand dollars for the girl. He gave me the ten thousand dollars. I paid it. I went out in my yacht.

“They picked me up in a speed boat and took me out to a little sailing yacht. She might have been a remodeled fishing boat. It was windy in the bay last night, and it was bobbing around pretty lively. The girl was down there. She was seasick, and I mean she was seasick. I paid the money and they gave me the girl.

“Now, there was something funny about the way that money was paid. They insisted that it had to be in old twenty-dollar bills; that there couldn’t be any numbered sequence to the bills; that there couldn’t be any marks on them, and all that sort of stuff. But when I paid over the bills, the kidnapers made the most perfunctory examination of the bills. They didn’t count the money. They didn’t even take the bills out of the money belt. They just looked at it and then gave me the girl.

“Now, then, after we’d loaded the girl aboard my yacht and the speed boat was putting away, someone flung something after me. It struck me in the chest. I picked it up. It was a woman’s purse. I put it in a drawer in my cabin and proceeded to forget about it. I’d have remembered it when we were getting off the yacht if it hadn’t been for the federal men who touched off all the fireworks and took us down to jail.”

Her eyes showed her interest, but her voice was that of a perfectly trained office assistant as she said, “Yes, Mr. Moraine, I’m following you.”

“You remember that she’s been missing around two weeks. Her story is that she spent most of that time on a little yacht out on the ocean somewhere; that she was kept drugged part of the time; that she never saw the yacht itself, only the interior of the cabin where she stayed.

“Now, inside of two weeks, she’d have adjusted herself to the motion sufficiently to have had her sea legs. She wouldn’t have been seasick in the bay even when it was kicking up a nice little chop. That’s one thing to remember.

“The next thing is that after I got out of jail, I remembered the purse and decided I’d go back and take a look through it before I said anything to the federal men. I was in bad enough as it was, and if it hadn’t been for Phil Duncan, they’d probably have kept me in jail all night.

“So I went back to the yacht and got the purse. It had the usual assortment of lipstick, powder, a little money, a handkerchief, and some of that sort of stuff. There were a couple of keys and an envelope addressed to Ann Hartwell, at Saxonville.”

“Just the envelope?” Natalie Rice asked.

“Just the envelope. There wasn’t any letter in it.”

“Rather strange that she’d have saved the envelope without saving the letter. One would think it would naturally be the other way around. She might have saved the letter but not the envelope.”

He nodded slowly, and took from his pocket a card and handed it to her.

It was the card of a taxicab company. On the back of the card, written in pencil, was “Sam # 13.”

“It was in her purse?” she asked.

“In the purse,” Moraine told her.

“Do you suppose it’s hers?”

“I don’t know. There’s a fair picture of her in the paper. You could build up a description from it. I thought perhaps you could locate the driver noted on the card, and pump him a little. But it wouldn’t be advisable to use the newspaper picture because then he might get wise and spill some information to the officers.”

“You don’t want the officers to know about this?”

“Not just yet.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“I’m darned if I know,” he told her, grinning, “unless it’s just because I feel someone played me for a sucker, and I want to convince him he picked a wrong fall guy.”

“But,” she pointed out, “if there’s something fishy about that kidnapping, the authorities are almost certain to find it out. I think they must have suspected, even if the newspapers aren’t writing it up that way. And you’re under suspicion already. If you get mixed up in it again and they cross your back trail when they start investigating, they’ll put you in a very uncomfortable position. That is, if you don’t mind my talking about something which doesn’t concern me.”

“Not in the least,” he told her. “In fact, that’s the fascination of the thing — the thought that I’ve got to keep one jump ahead of the authorities. You know, I love to play poker. I don’t care anything at all about winning money. In fact, we play for such low stakes that no one can win or lose very much, no matter how the cards run. Usually, I win. I know that Phil Duncan gets a kick out of playing. He does it as a relaxation. I know that Barney Morden isn’t particularly fond of me. He’s a hard one to figure. He may be hostile to me down underneath. At any rate, he is, in a poker game. He tries to figure out my system. He doesn’t pay much attention to Duncan. He concentrates on me. He tries to get money from me, tries to figure when I’m bluffing so he can call me. I get a lack out of it.

“Now, this thing is just like the poker games, only I get a bigger kick out it. I’m playing for bigger stakes. I have to match my knowledge of psychology and of human nature against a certain element of personal risk. I think Tom Wickes played me for a sucker, or the Hartwell woman did. I’m not certain which. I can’t figure it out exactly. They started to play Phil Duncan for a sucker, but he and Barney Morden were a little too formidable for them to buck. I entered the picture. I was apparently soft-boiled, so they decided to pick on me.

“Probably it’s simply a question of hurt vanity, coupled with getting a thrill out of the thing. But I want most awfully to find out the whole low-down on this situation before the police do, or before the federal men do, and then see if I can’t spring it in such a way that it will make those people sorry they ever picked me as a live one.”

“Is there anything else?” she asked noncommittally.

He looked at her shrewdly.

“In case you don’t approve of what I’m going to do,” he said, “you’re making a determined effort to keep your feelings to yourself.”

“I intend,” she told him, her hand on the doorknob, “to continue to do so. Thank you very much, Mr. Moraine, for giving me the chance to get out of the office. And thank you for... for... understanding.”

She slipped quickly through the door and closed it behind her.

Moraine sat for several seconds, staring musingly at the door through which she had vanished.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a buzzer. Moraine frowned, looked at his watch, clicked a switch, and said, “Yes, what is it?”

Natalie Rice’s voice came from the loud-speaking inter-office telephone system on his desk. Her voice was quavering with excitement and nervousness.

“A Doctor Richard Hartwell is out here,” she said. “He won’t tell me the nature of his business. He says he’s going to smash the door down if I don’t let him in, and...”

The voice broke off. There was the sound of a quick struggle. The door to Sam Moraine’s private office was thrown open explosively.

A tall man, with a haggard face, glittering eyes, and nervously twitching lips stood on the threshold, staring at Moraine.

Holding to his arm, her face white and determined, Natalie Rice tugged at his coat sleeve.

Moraine got to his feet.

“I presume,” he said, “I have the pleasure of addressing?...”

“Doctor Richard Hartwell,” the man said.

Natalie Rice continued to hang to his coat sleeve.

“Look out!” she screamed. “He has a gun!”