Crows Can't Count Read online

  Even in the dim light of the woodshed it glittered with a green depth which caught and held the eye in hypnotic fascination.

  I dropped it into my pocket and returned my hand to the cage. I didn’t find anything else and was just about y to give up when in a corner I encountered a little pile of pebble-like objects. I brought them out. They were four large emeralds, as fine and as deep in color as the first.

  I made certain there were no more emeralds in the cage, and left the woodshed.

  I’d been standing around five or ten minutes when Sergeant Buda came out. He walked over to me and said, “What about the candy, Lam?”

  “She ate it.”

  “I know. I know. Where did the girl get it?”

  I said, “Hell, I’m a stranger here myself.”

  “The damn candy didn’t grow there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Did anyone ask you to have a piece of candy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “The mother.”

  “But the candy was there when you came in?”

  “I didn’t notice. I had other things to occupy my attention. She thought I was a reporter. After all, a girl can hardly provide with a piece of candy every newspaper reporter who interrupts her day.”

  “But she offered it to her mother. You remember that?”

  “No, I don’t. I think the mother just walked over and helped herself.”

  “Now look, Lam, you know the mother didn’t bring that candy in with her. The daughter had it there. She asked her mother to have some.”

  I said, “I think the mother just helped herself. I don’t think the mother brought the candy with her, but I can’t swear to it. I didn’t pay too much attention to what the mother was doing. I was getting some information when the mother came in. She changed all that. She wanted me out, so I was getting out.”

  “What information were you getting?”

  “Oh, just looking around.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “Right at present, myself.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Exactly what I say.”

  “Harry Sharples says he’s hired your agency to keep an eye on things for him. He seems to be nervous.”

  “He’s made us an offer.”

  “Well, aren’t you working for him?”

  “No.”

  “Bertha thinks you are.”

  “Bertha may be working for him. I’m not.”

  “Then what are you after?”

  “Just sort of getting the general picture.”

  Buda said, “I don’t like run-arounds.”

  “I try not to give any.”

  “What do you think of the girl?”

  “Class.”

  “Hell, I’m not blind. A little on the thin side, perhaps, but a helluva swell figure just the same. That wasn’t what I was asking you about. I want to know what you think of her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He studied me for a while, then said, “Yes, you would think so. You always were an impressionable cuss as far as women were concerned. All right, get started. And don’t spill anything about this poisoning.”

  “I’ll have to report to my partner.”

  “I mean to the newspapers. Tell Bertha to keep it buttoned up.”

  “Why? Anything secret about it?”

  “There may be. Where did that knife on the floor come from?”

  “Someone dropped it.”

  “Who?”

  “The mother.”

  “The daughter didn’t say so.”

  “I think it was the mother who dropped it.”

  “How did she happen to drop it?”

  “She got sick.”

  “What was she doing with it in the first place?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. Things were sort of confused.”

  Buda kept looking at me. “Any more confused than you are?”

  “I’m not exactly confused, but I just couldn’t see everything. I was just leaving when it happened. She may have used it to open the candy.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The woman got sick and I mean she. got sick.”

  “Say anything about being poisoned?”

  “I think she told her daughter that she’d better lay off the candy, that it tasted bad, or that she thought it was poisoned, or something of that sort.”

  “And you don’t know where the knife came from?”

  “I remember seeing the knife,” I said, “but the woman was sick and I was trying to hold her, and-and well, you know, she was being really sick, and—”

  “The daughter says the knife had been on the table. Did you see it there?”

  “At some time or another it could have been.”

  “The daughter says she’d used it to scrape some paint off the edge of a picture and had put it on the table.”

  “It’s her place. She probably knows.”

  “The knife could have been on the table?”

  “Look, Sergeant, I was interested in my own line. There was a litter of stuff on the table. The knife could have been on the table under a magazine or in plain sight. The candy could have been there. Or the mother could have brought in the candy with her. I don’t know. Hell, she might even have brought the knife in with her.”

  “No,” Buda said. “The girl admits the knife was there on the table. It’s her knife.”

  I said, “Well, there you are.”

  Buda got mad. “Where the hell am I?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He didn’t like that question. He got away from it by saying, “I’ll know a little more about that candy within the next few hours. I may talk with you again.”

  “Any time, I told him, and walked out past the bungalow in the front of the lot, got in the agency car, and drove away.

  Chapter Twelve:—PASSPORT FOR SOUTH AMERICA

  ELSIE BRAND BECKONED ME OVER as I entered the outer office. “She’s in a terrible mood, Donald.”

  “It will do her good,” I said. “Raise her temperature and get the poisons out of her system. Let her stew.”

  “She’s more than stewing, she’s fairly boiling over.”

  “Been mean to you?”

  “She just glares at me. I’m afraid of her, Donald. She’s had a couple of tryouts from the secretarial agencies and they’ve been pretty bad. The last time she had to hire anyone, jobs were scarce and competent people would put up with anything in order to get work. Now the situation is reversed and the girls who came in have been drawing good salaries without being especially competent. I saw their work. It was pretty bad.”

  I said, “Well, I’ll go see what’s on her mind.”

  “Donald, if you go in there now, you’re almost certain to have a fight with her. She’s seething.”

  I said, “Suits me. It’s time a few changes were made around here anyway.”

  “Donald, please don’t. You’re doing it for me, aren’t you?”

  “Not particularly. Bertha’s been making you do the work of two girls long enough. Most of that stuff she sends out to be typed is the bunk anyway.”

  “It’s part of her office system,” Elsie said. “She has the idea that if people open the door of the outer office and find me sitting here reading a magazine or something, it looks as though the agency wasn’t busy and creates a bad impression. She wants me to be typing away like mad whenever anyone opens the door.”

  I said, “It’s time a lot of that was changed,” and crossed over to open the door to Bertha’s office.

  Bertha was sitting at her desk, her chin down on her chest, breathing deeply in sullen silence. She looked up as the door opened, saw me, and swift color flooded her face. She threw up her head, sucked in a quick breath, started to say something, and changed her mind.

  I walked over and sat down in the client’s chair.

  Bertha remained sullen and silent for ten or fifteen seconds. Then sudde
nly her chair gave a high-pitched squeak as she whirled around, leaned forward, and screamed at me, “Who the hell do you think you are?

  I lit a cigarette.

  “I’m getting sick of it! I’m willing to put up with a lot from you, but now you’ve gone completely nuts. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  I exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, “Girls like Elsie Brand should draw about twice the salary we’re paying nowadays. Most of them do and they’re darned hard to find at that. There’s no sense in about ninety percent of the work she does. You simply throw it at her so she can keep pounding away at the typewriter to impress any client who happens to wander in.”

  “And what if I do?” Bertha shouted. “We pay her wages. She doesn’t have to work here if she doesn’t want to. When she draws her wages she’s supposed to give us her time during office hours. Eight hours a day. Every damned minute. Sixty minutes times eight—four hundred and eighty minutes, and I want every damned second of it. We pay for her time. It’s ours.”

  I shook my head. You don’t hire people that way any more. Besides, you don’t have anything to say about Elsie. She’s going to be my secretary from now on. You put a new girl in there and start throwing work at her, just so she’ll be pounding the keyboard when a client comes in, and see what happens.”

  “See what happens?” Bertha yelled. “I can’t get one who can even pound a keyboard. They hunt and peck and tap away at the typewriter as though they were afraid the keyboard was a steel trap that was going to catch their dainty little fingers if they—Oh, the hell with it! I’m going to run my own office the way I want to.”

  I said, “If you want to dissolve the partnership, there’s no need in screaming about it.”

  Bertha’s face flushed again, then lost color. She clenched her hands, breathed deeply. Then with an effort said, “Donald, darling, you know Bertha is very, very fond of you. But you just don’t have any business sense. You’re a brainy little devil when it comes to being smart and slick and getting at the guts of a case, but when it comes to running an office, you don’t know a thing and when it comes to spending money, you’re just absolutely crazy. You throw money around as though it didn’t have any value at all. And with women, Donald, you just haven’t a lick of sense. They smile at you and you are like so much putty. You haven’t any sales resistance. You’re a pushover. You’re paying Elsie Brand right now twice as much as I ever paid her.”

  I said, “We should double her salary again.” Bertha clamped her lips in a thin line and glared at me.

  The telephone rang. Bertha composed herself with some difficulty, picked up the receiver, and said, “Yes, hello... yes... oh, I see....Well, of course we’re both very busy and Mr. Lam is...No, no, not too busy. He’s finishing up an assignment that—you know, a big case. He’s just getting it wound up and as soon as he gets finished with that, he’ll have some time....Yes, right away....Well, I’ll see if I can reach him. Can I call you back?...What’s that number? Oh, yes, thank you.”

  Bertha made a note of a number on a pad of paper, said, “I’ll call you back in a few minutes,” and hung up the phone.

  She turned around to beam at me. “You little devil, she said. “I don’t know how you do it. It’s something you have, some way with women. You always get the women. They go nuts over you.”

  “Who is it now?”

  “Shirley Bruce, Donald. She wants you to come over to her apartment right away. She has a very important job for us. She says she understood we’re high-priced but that we get results, and she’s sorry if she failed to appreciate you when she first met you. She’s just as sweet now as she can be.”

  I pinched out the cigarette and started for the door. “You’re going, Donald?”

  I nodded.

  Bertha’s face had smiles all over it. “That’s the way I like to see you, Donald—filled with a desire to get new business. You go right ahead and don’t worry about the office end of things. Bertha will have them all fixed up for you. There’ll be a private office for you, and Elsie Brand will be your private secretary. Don’t worry about any of the little details, lover.”

  Elsie Brand in the outer office heard the last part of Bertha’s speech. She watched me with eyes that looked like golf balls as I nonchalantly crossed the outer office and pulled the door shut behind me, with Bertha cooing and beaming from the door of the private office.

  From a drugstore pay station at the corner I called Shirley Bruce.

  “This is Donald Lam of Cool and Lam,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Oh, yes, I do. I wonder if you could come out to my apartment.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you can get here.”

  “Could you come to the office?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve promised some people that I’d be home all day and I can’t get in touch with them to cancel the appointment. It’s rather important. You see, I’m quite willing to pay you for your time. In fact, I want to—how do you express it?—hire you. No, I guess retain you is the word—”

  She laughed nervously.

  I hung onto the line and didn’t say anything.

  “You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wanted to retain you for something—something rather important. I don’t like to explain it to you over the telephone but I thought that under the circumstances, since there was no question about—well, you know, you’d be working for me and you could come out here.”

  I said, “I can’t make it before sometime this afternoon.”

  “Oh!” There was disappointment in her voice.

  “Will it keep that long?” I asked.

  “Why, yes, I guess so if—if it has to.”

  “When’s your appointment, morning or afternoon?”

  “It’s just a blanket appointment for all day. I told a friend I’d be in all day today.”

  I said, “Well, I’ll get in sometime this afternoon. I’ll telephone you and give you plenty of notice before I come up, so I won’t call while he’s there.”

  “While she’s here,” Shirley Bruce corrected, archly.

  “I see. Well, all right. I’ll give you a buzz.”

  I hung up and called the Acme Welding and Fender Works. The girl who answered the telephone had an uncertain voice and sounded dumb.

  “Put Robert Hockley on the line,” I said.

  “Why, I can’t. He isn’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who is this?”

  “The press.”

  “I didn’t get the name.”

  “Not a name,” I said. “This is the press. The press wants him, wants to interview him. Get him. Where is he?”

  “Why—he went to the passport office.”

  “The passport office?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “To pick up his passport. They telephoned him that it’s ready. I—you might be able to call him there.”

  “Where’s he going?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she said coldly. “You may call Mr. Hockley at the passport office, if you wish.”

  I listened to the click at the other end of the line and hung up the receiver.

  I went out, got in the agency car, and went to the hospital where Mrs. Grafton had been taken. I didn’t have much trouble getting hold of the record. She had been suffering from copper sulphate poisoning. An intern didn’t want to talk about the case but he would talk about copper-sulphate poisoning.

  “Copper sulphate,” the intern said in the tone of a man who has just finished brushing up on a subject, “is rarely used as a poison in cases of homicide, although it is, nevertheless, an active poison. However, as it causes prompt nausea it is difficult to tell exactly what constitutes a fatal dose because so much of it is rejected by the stomach.”

  I nodded to show that I was impressed by his learning. “In fact,” the intern went on, “in doses of five grains, copper sulphate is a prompt and act
ive emetic. It is the best known antidote for phosphorus poisoning because not only does it act as an emetic, ridding the stomach of phosphorus, but through chemical action with the remaining phosphorus tends to act as an antidote.”

  “Was there phosphorus poisoning here?” I asked.

  “No, no, you misunderstand me. This was a case of poisoning right enough. In fact, the candy had been thoroughly tampered with. Copper sulphate was found in virtually every piece in the box.”

  “Then if five grains is a proper dose to produce nausea, it can’t be fatal.”

  “Well,” he said, “the authorities are not entirely in accord. Webster in his book on legal medicine and toxicology quotes Von Hasselt as stating that eight grains is a fatal dose. Gonzales, Vance, and Helpern fix the fatal dose as being highly variable. The United States Dispensatory indicates a dosage of five grains as a prompt and active emetic, repeated in fifteen minutes if necessary, but not oftener than once.”

  “Very interesting,” I said. “What’s happened to the patient?”

  He grinned. “Apparently she got rid of the poison almost as soon as it was ingested. When she arrived here she was suffering from hysteria and that was about all.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Discharged. Personally, I don’t think she got more poison than would be administered as an emetic. Wait a minute, I’m not going to talk about the patient. I’m just telling you something about copper sulphate.”

  “What’s it used for?” I asked. “Anything in particular?”

  “Oh, it’s used in calico printing and in the manufacture of pigments. It is of considerable value in water purification. It’s also used in copperplating.”

  “Not difficult to get hold of?”

  “Not especially, no.”

  “Why should anyone use it to poison candy?” I asked. He looked at me and shook his head. “Be damned if I know.”

  I let it go at that and drove the agency car up to police headquarters.

  Captain Frank Sellers was at his desk. He’d have been glad to see me if he hadn’t thought my visit indicated I wanted something and that the best bet for him was to play the cards close to his chest and be cagey. We’d known him pretty well when he’d been a sergeant on Homicide, and I’d thought he’d been in love with Bertha Cool for a while. She was just hard enough to appeal to him.