Crows Can't Count Read online

  “And then you settled down to managing the mines?”

  “Not immediately. Bob Cameron and I both returned to the States to probate the estate. We didn’t get back to South America for a year. Travel wasn’t as simple then as it is now. You could have floored us when we realized the extent of the Hendricks estate. That trusteeship certainly surprised us.

  “We were just a couple of young adventurers. Cora was older than either of us—a dried-up old maid, but shrewd, as smart as they make ‘em, but secretive. She’d never talk about her business affairs. You know I sometimes wondered about that baby. I guess it was all right, but it could have been hers. She loved it as much as—but there’s no use going into that. Shirley Bruce would suffer quite a shock if she felt—you know, her parentage—all that. Damn it, I’m thinking out loud, talking like a garrulous old woman. You’ll keep all this under your hat, Lam. Damned if I wouldn’t break your neck if you did anything to hurt Shirley.”

  “You checked up on the cousin angle—Shirley’s parents?”

  “To tell you the truth, we didn’t. Cora showed up with the baby and the story of her cousin’s death. She’d been gone a year. I remember Bob and I sort of thought—oh, well, that’s neither here nor there. Cora told us the child was Shirley Bruce, that a cousin about whom she was rather vague—I believe it was a second cousin—I wonder if someone is bothering Shirley about that. Can’t imagine her needing money and not coming to me.”

  “What about Cameron? Anything I should know about him before we have this interview?”

  “I don’t think so. Hang it all, Lam, I really don’t know as there’s any need for you to be present. Perhaps Bob and I should merely have a heart-to-heart talk.”

  I said, “Just as you wish. Of course, he may wonder how you happened to know about his having the pendant.” “Yes, that’s right,” Sharples said. “I think since you’re into it this far, you’d better go all the way.”

  “Anything you say.”

  Sharples said, “Pretend you’re with some jewelry association that makes a routine investigation when articles of a certain type are offered for sale. Fix it up any way you want to. You’re ingenious and you can make it sound convincing. But don’t let him get the idea I hired you.”

  “I’ll have to stick my neck out.”

  “Well, stick it out. That’s what I’m paying you for. Incidentally, if you want to make a big hit with Bob Cameron, pay a little attention to Pancho.”

  “Who’s Pancho? A dog?”

  “No. A crow.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t for the life of me see why Bob wants to make a pet of a crow. The bird is mischievous, dirty, impudent, noisy. However, I try to like him for Bob’s sake.

  “Well, here we are, Mr. Lam. I must confess I feel like the devil, spying on my associate this way. But this thing has to be cleared up. It’s a disagreeable duty and something we have to do.”

  The place was white stucco with red tile, green lawn, and trimmed shrubs. A three-car garage was in back. A man needed money to keep up a place like that.

  Sharples jumped out of the car, walked up the front steps, made a perfunctory motion of jabbing the doorbell with his thumb, and a half second later tried the door. It opened and Sharples stood politely to one side for me to enter.

  I said, “You’d better go first. I’m a stranger.”

  “That’s right. A good point,” Sharples said. “He’ll be upstairs in his penthouse—spends most of his time up there. He has a hole under the gables so his damn crow can come and go as he wants. Right up those stairs, Lam.”

  “He isn’t married?”

  “No. He lives here by himself with just an old housekeeper—a Colombian woman who’s been with him for years. A damn big place for a bachelor. Maria can’t be in—Oh, Maria! Hello, Maria! Anybody here?”

  The house jeered back empty echoes.

  “She’s shopping,” Sharples said. “All right, up we go.”

  Sharples walked ahead of me.

  A voice called out in a raucous, jeering jibe, “Thief! Thief! Liar!”

  That voice breaking the almost sepulchral silence of the house caused Sharples to jump.

  “That damn crow!” Sharples said, after he had regained his composure. “Should have his head cut off! He’s one hell of a pet!”

  We came to the top of the stairs. Sharples went on ahead through an open door and into a penthouse.

  I heard the flapping of wings and a hoarse, croaking cackle. The black body of a crow flew briefly past the door and then was out of my sight, but I could hear the sound of heavy wings and that peculiarly nasty chuckle.

  Sharples took a step in the room and then recoiled.

  “My God!” he said.

  I stepped to his side. I could see the feet of a man and part of the legs. Sharples moved to one side and I saw the whole body.

  The body of the man I had seen leaving Jarratt’s office lay sprawled on the floor. Red rivulets oozing from the back had formed in a pool on the carpet. The left hand held the combined receiver and transmitter of a telephone and the dial part dangled between the table and the floor.

  “Good God!” Sharples said again.

  His face was white to the lips and as I looked at him those pale lips began to twist and tremble. He sensed their trembling and tried to tighten them so as to regain some semblance of control, but his mouth continued to twitch and twist.

  “Is that Cameron?” I asked.

  Sharples started out of the door. He got as far as the stairs, then sat down abruptly on the top step.

  “That’s Cameron,” he said. “See if there’s something to drink in the house, Lam—I—I’m—afraid I’m going to be sick.”

  I said. “Put your head down between your knees. Hold it there. It’ll get some blood back in your brain. Don’t faint.”

  Sharples put his head down as I told him. I heard him suck in a deep breath and a sobbing catch rattled in his throat as he inhaled.

  I went back to stand in the door of the murder room.

  The man had evidently been sitting at a long desk table when death had overtaken him. He’d fallen to the floor, dragging the telephone with him. The receiver, of course, could have been planted in his hand after the killing. A couple of letters lay on the table. The swivel chair in which Cameron had evidently been sitting had been tipped over and was lying partially on its side.

  The crow had returned to the room. He sat on the chandelier, cocked his head slightly on one side, and regarded me with black, beady, impudent eyes.

  “Thief,” he said.

  “Liar,” I retorted.

  He half spread his wings and gave that peculiar, hoarse-throated chuckle.

  Over in a corner of the room hung a steel cage, a huge affair big enough for an eagle. The door of the cage was swung open and wired back.

  Something on the table caught my gaze, glittering with the dull gleam of gold. I stepped over to look at it. It was a pendant, apparently identical with the one which Sharples had sketched for me, but there weren’t any emeralds in it. The settings had been pried open and there wasn’t a stone anywhere in the pendant.

  I noticed an automatic pistol—a .22—lying on the table. On the floor the light glinted from an empty cartridge case. I bent over to smell of the muzzle of the gun. It had been fired quite recently.

  I saw the gleam of deep green—a green so intense and deep that it was like looking into an imprisoned pool of water over a coral reef. The gleam came from a large emerald of about the most perfect coloring I had ever seen.

  A pair of light, pigskin gloves lay on the table. I gathered they would have fitted the hands of the dead man. He had been wearing gloves when he had emerged from Jarratt’s office and these looked like the gloves.

  The cause of death was quite apparent. A dagger had been thrust in the man’s back just above the left shoulder blade and down into the heart. The dagger wasn’t there.

  I walked out to where Sharples
was still sitting on the top step.

  He rocked back and forth, moaning.

  “What shall I do?” he asked me, as I put a hand on his shoulder.

  I said, “You have two alternatives.”

  His eyes were dull as he stared up at me. His face looked as if the flesh had lost its resiliency. If I had poked my finger in it anywhere, the indentation would have been visible for seconds. There was no more elasticity to his face than there is in a pan of bread dough.

  I said, “You either report the murder to the police or you get out of here and don’t report it. If all this guff about your great sorrow is an act you’re putting on, you’d better take a powder. If his death means nothing to you except the loss of a friend, you report it.”

  He hesitated, then said, “How about you? Aren’t you required by law to report something of this sort?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’d—er—take a chance?”

  “Not me. I’d phone in a report, but I wouldn’t feel I had to give them my name or the name of the person with me.”

  He checked his agitation as easily as a man slips out of an overcoat. For a few seconds he was the cold, thoughtful businessman.

  “Won’t they interrogate me, anyway?”

  “Probably.”

  “And ask where I was when the crime was committed?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  He said, “Okay, we report it. I guess I’d better clear out now and not let my fingerprints get scattered around that room any more than they are now.”

  “Than they are now?”

  “Well, I don’t know—I may have touched something.”

  “Too bad for you if you did.”

  He scowled at me.

  I said, “There’s a drugstore down the street. We can phone from there.”

  “And you’ll remember I’ve been with you the last hour, Lam?”

  “The last twenty minutes,” I said.

  “But before that I was with Mrs. Cool.”

  “Bertha does her own remembering,” I said. “We’re independent that way.”

  Chapter Five:—SHARPLES CROWDS HIS LUCK

  SERGEANT SAM BUDA WAS NICE ABOUT IT. I knew he’d look up Sharples’s record with a magnifying glass after he left us. But right at the moment he was very courteous and very affable.

  Sharples told his story. He was a business associate of Bob Cameron. He had wanted to see him upon a matter of some importance and had taken me along because I was working with him on—er—ah—another matter. I noticed Sergeant Buda take in the hesitation but he didn’t say anything.

  Buda flicked an eye over in my direction, met the expressionless mask on my face, and turned back to Sharples. Right at the moment he was most interested in Sharples. He knew all about me and could put his finger on me any time he wanted to.

  “You’ve known him for some time?” Buda asked about Cameron.

  “For years.”

  “Know his friends?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “His enemies?”

  “He hasn’t any.”

  Buda jerked his head toward the body. “He had one about an hour and a half ago.”

  Sharples didn’t have any answer for that, probably because there wasn’t any.

  “Who’s his housekeeper?”

  “Maria Gonzales.”

  “How long has she been with him?”

  “For years.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, eight or ten.”

  “She do all the work?”

  “She sends out the washing and sometimes gets help by the day. She’s the only steady employee.”

  “Then he can’t have entertained much.”

  “No. I don’t think he ever entertained—well, hardly ever.”

  “Where’s this Maria Gonzales now?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she’s out doing shopping, or—well, just out.”

  Buda’s eyes twinkled. “Elementary my dear Sharples,” he said.

  Sharples said nothing.

  “How long’s he had the crow?” Buda asked abruptly.

  “Three years.”

  “The crow talks?”

  “Some words, yes.”

  “Cameron split the crow’s tongue?”

  “No, he didn’t. As a matter of fact, you get better results with a crow if you don’t split the tongue, although there’s a popular belief to the contrary.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bob told me.”

  “Where did he get this crow?”

  “Found him in a field just when the crow was getting ready to fly. Picked him up, took him home, started feeding him, became attached to him, and kept him—made a pet out of him. You can see where he had a circular hole cut just below the gable so the crow could fly in and out.”

  “Where does he go when he flies out?”

  “Not far. I believe there’s a girl who has another cage for him, a Dona Grafton. She’s the daughter of one of the men on the mine. Cameron knows her well. You see, he did most of the running back and forth to South America and knows the people there at the mine better than I do.”

  “What does that have to do with the crow?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You wanted to know where the crow went when he was flying around.”

  “Where’s the crow now?”

  “I don’t know. He was here when we came in. He flew out and then flew back in again, then he left when he heard you coming. He’s probably over at this Grafton girl’s now.”

  “Know the address?”

  “No.”

  “Cameron sweet on her?”

  “No. Cameron didn’t get around much. He wasn’t exactly young anymore.”

  “How much older than you?”

  “Three years.”

  “You get around, don’t you?”

  “Not in that way. That is, I don’t go philandering about.”

  “Not any?”

  “Hardly any.”

  “Cameron had some girl friends?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t want to think on that.”

  “What did you want to see him about?”

  Sharples met that one without even batting an eyelash. “Some investments for the trust in the administration of which Cameron is jointly interested with me.”

  Buda reached in a pocket and made something of a flourish of producing the pendant. “Know anything about this?” he asked.

  Sharples eyed it with perfect composure. “Nothing,” he said.

  I lit a cigarette so Buda wouldn’t start asking me questions. After a while Buda said to Sharples. “You might give me a list of some of the people with whom Cameron might have been doing business.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sharples promised.

  “And,” Buda said with a careless indifference altogether too studied, “I guess that’s about all. Be sure to check back on your recollection and if you think of anything you’ve missed, get in touch with me. Make out that list of people, mark after each name what connection the person had with Cameron, and then you can go.”

  “How about me?” I asked.

  Buda regarded me steadily. “You can go any time,” he said at length. “I know where I can reach you.”

  “Not now, not now, not now,” Sharples said hastily to me. “I want you to stay, Lam. I feel that I have need for—” He coughed, cleared his throat, and didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Help in making out that list,” Buda said cryptically, and left the room.

  Maria Gonzales came in as Sharples completed his list. She was thin, dark, somewhere around fifty and, apparently, had some difficulty understanding what it was all about.

  She carried a big shopping-bag of groceries—a bag which must have weighed nearly fifteen pounds. Policemen had picked her up at the front door and rushed her up to the penthouse for Sergeant Buda’s atte
ntion.

  When she seemed to have difficulty getting through her head exactly what had happened, Sharples put down his pen and launched into loquacious Spanish.

  I glanced at the policeman guarding the door. If I had been Sam Buda, I wouldn’t have liked two of the witnesses talking in a language no others present could understand.

  If the policeman knew Spanish, nothing in his face indicated it. He looked at his watch a couple of times, as though wondering when he was going to have a chance to eat. He stretched, yawned and lit a cigarette.

  All the time Sharples and Maria Gonzales were going like a house afire, jabbering away in Spanish, swapping enough words to have covered the career of Robert Cameron from the time he was born until he died.

  Then abruptly Maria Gonzales sniffled and began to cry. She took a handkerchief from her purse and choked back sobs. Midway in her paroxysm of grief, she thought of something else, put down her handkerchief, raised tear-filled eyes to Sharples, and broke into three-hundred-word-a-minute Spanish.

  Whatever it was she’d thought of, Sharples didn’t want to talk about it. He held up his left hand and gestured as though pushing the idea away from him. He spat out a crisp command.

  You don’t have to understand Spanish to know an emphatic no when you hear it.

  After that the woman went on with her quiet sobbing and Sharples finished filling out his list.

  “What do I do with this?” he asked me.

  I indicated the policeman at the door and said, “Hand it to him. Tell him Buda wants it.”

  Sharples did as I told him.

  I said, “Okay, I guess that’s all,” and walked toward the door.

  Sharples looked back for a signal from the policeman. That person waved a hand, indicating we were free as the air.

  Halfway to the stairs, Sharples thought of something and turned back toward the housekeeper.

  “Better not,” I warned him in an undertone. “You’ve crowded your luck already. You turn back and start jabbering with her in Spanish and even a dumb cop will get an idea.”

  Sharples assumed an attitude of righteous indignation, “What the hell do you mean by that crack?” he demanded.

  “Simply that you’d better keep moving, now that you’ve started,” I said.

  “I don’t like what that implies,” Sharples told me. But he kept on moving down the stairs, through the house, and out into the street.