Crows Can't Count Page 4

  Chapter Six:—THE WAY OF A WARD

  OUT IN THE CAR, SHARPLES SAID, “Lam, I want to take you to Shirley Bruce’s apartment now. I want to be the first to tell her about Cameron. And I want to find out about that damned pendant.”

  “Okay by me,” I said. “You’re paying for the time.”

  I saw his hand tremble as he turned on the ignition. The gears clattered as he shifted into high. At the second intersection he went half through a red light, then backed up and slammed the bumper into the car behind.

  “Want me to drive?” I asked.

  “All right. I’m a little shaky.”

  I got out and walked around the car. Sharples slid over and I opened the door on the left and got in behind the steering-wheel. We drove out Western to a swank apartment district and Sharples told me where to stop. I asked him particularly if he’d like to have me go in with him. He would.

  Shirley Bruce didn’t see me at first. She gave a squeal of delight and ran for Sharples. He tried to be dignified, but she twined her arms around his neck, kicked one foot out behind her, and exclaimed, “Uncle Harry!” She had made a very complete, very thorough job of kissing him before he could get his lips free to say, “Miss Bruce, I’d like to present a—er—ah—friend of mine, Mr. Donald Lam.”

  She dropped back from Sharples, flushed and embarrassed for a minute, then gave me her hand and invited us to come in and sit down.

  She was a brunette with all the snap and fire of a black opal. Her figure would have done well on an art calendar. She had curves and eyes and legs. Right now she was being dutifully demure, but that didn’t mean anything. She had high cheekbones, a pert, turned-up nose, and a thick-lipped but small mouth. Expressions flitted across her face like cloud shadows on a mountain.

  Her handkerchief removed the lipstick from Sharples’s face. Her little finger, lipstick, and compact went to work on her own mouth, putting on the vivid crimson until her lips looked like red luscious strawberries waiting to be eaten. All the time she kept up a running fire of conversation.

  “It’s about time you showed up, Uncle Harry. Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve set eyes on you? What are you doing, trying to kill yourself with business? You work too hard. You need to play. And you promised to take me to Colombia soon. After all, there’s no need to slave all the time. Why can’t we—why, what’s the matter? You look as though—tell me, is anything wrong?”

  Sharples cleared his throat, fumbled around getting out his cigarette case. He looked helplessly at me.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Sharples nodded.

  I said, “We are bringing you some bad news, Miss Bruce.”

  The rigid little finger just applying finishing touches to the corner of her mouth became motionless. She didn’t turn her head, but her big black eyes rolled around to regard me over the top of the mirror in the compact. “Yes?” she asked inquiringly, still motionless.

  I said, “Robert Cameron was killed sometime early this afternoon.”

  The compact slipped from her hand, hit against her knee, spilled powder over the rug.

  Her gaze never left my face. “Killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who killed him?”

  I said, “So far, that’s anyone’s guess. When did you give him that pendant?”

  “What pendant?”

  “One that Cora Hendricks left you.”

  “You mean the emerald pendant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good heavens!” she said. “That.”

  Sharples’s eyes narrowed. “What about it?” he said. “You needed money, didn’t you, Shirley? And you went to Bob Cameron and asked him to sell that pendant. Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you accept—”

  The look on her face stopped him, a look of puzzled incredulity.

  “Need money?” she asked.

  “Yes. Didn’t you? Of course you did. You’d not have sold it unless—”

  “But I didn’t need money,” she said. “Frankly, I wanted something more modern. I asked Mr. Cameron to carry on the negotiations for me. I thought he could do a better job than I could. I wanted the thing traded in and—”

  “How long ago?” Sharples asked.

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Let me see, it must have been—”

  “Day before yesterday? Yesterday?” Sharples prompted.

  Her eyes grew round with surprise. “Either three or four months ago, Uncle Harry. It was—let me see, it’s been four months.”

  Sharples said, “Then after all that delay didn’t you—”

  “What delay?”

  Sharples looked at me. “What did Mr. Cameron do about the pendant?” I asked.”

  She said, “He sold it the way I asked. There was a man by the name of Jarratt who deals in such things. I don’t know just how—some sort of business arrangement by which things of that sort are picked up and exchanged. He offered me a fiat price, through Mr. Cameron, of course—”

  “How much?” Sharples interrupted.

  She flushed. “I’d rather not say—now. It was a good deal. Mr. Cameron thought it was about right and I took it. You see, Mr. Cameron had had it appraised by a couple of jewelers first.”

  “And what did you do with the money?”

  She held out her hand, showing him an enormous diamond ring. “I was tired of emeralds. After all, I’d seen so much of them. I got this ring and—well, the rest of it went in the bank.”

  Sharples looked at me, hopeless perplexity showing in his eyes.

  I flashed him a signal but he didn’t get it. After a while, when the silence became embarrassing, I said to Sharples, “Well, if you won’t ask a question, I’ll have to.” I turned to Shirley Bruce. “Was some of the money for Robert Hockley?”

  She flared into indignation. Two spots of quick color blazed on her cheeks. Her eyes were indignant lightning. “What right have you to ask such questions? That’s none of your business.”

  I looked at Sharples. He could carry on from there.

  He started to say something, but checked himself.

  The girl’s chin came up. Her shoulder turned on me. By that simple gesture she removed me from the discussion as effectively as though she’d pushed me bodily out into the corridor.

  “Oh, Uncle Harry, why did he have to die?” she asked. “He was so good, so nice, so thoughtful, so considerate of others, so—so generous. He was everything nice in a man.”

  Sharples merely nodded.

  Abruptly and impulsively she crossed over to him, sat on the arm of his chair, ran her hands through his hair in a gentle caressing gesture. Without warning she began to cry.

  The tears made havoc with the make-up on her face, but she didn’t care. Mascara mingling with tears made gray streaks down her cheeks until I was reminded of a window in a manufacturing district when the first raindrops collect soot and roll down the outside of the glass.

  “You take care of yourself, Uncle Harry,” she said chokingly. “You’re all I have left.”

  Looking at Harry Sharples’s face, one could see how that idea stabbed home.

  “Why do you say that, Shirley?” he asked.

  “Because I love you so and because—Oh, Harry, dear, I feel so alone in the world.”

  “Did Bob Cameron say anything to you?” he asked. “Anything that made you think he was apprehensive of danger?”

  She shook her tear-devastated countenance.

  “I don’t get it,” Sharples said. “I just don’t get it at all.”

  He put his arm around her waist, patted her hip reassuringly, then struggled to get up. “I must go, Shirley,” he said. “There’s much to be attended to and I must take Mr. Lam to his office. I promised I’d only stop in here for a minute.”

  She was gracious to me now. Her tears had dissolved the scorn. She placed a soft, pliant hand in mine and choked ou
t some polite comment. Her eyes caressed Harry Sharples. He kept backing up, mindful of the red lipstick of her mouth. I couldn’t help wondering if he was as indifferent to those thoroughgoing kisses when he called on his ward and didn’t have someone with him.

  Her eyes sought his just before she closed the door. “Don’t stay away, Harry. Come back just as soon as you can—please.”

  He promised and then we were moving down the corridor together.

  Abruptly I asked Sharples, “She definitely refuses to take anything from the trust fund which isn’t also given to Hockley?”

  “That’s right.”

  I kept thinking that over. If that were true, she didn’t have anything to gain by all this sultry show of affection for the trustees. If Hockley had been penalized in sharing in the trust funds because he was a gambler and a gay blade and Shirley Bruce had been cashing in because she was a nice, sweet girl, it would have been easy to have accounted for all that affection for her “uncle.”

  I said. “That apartment costs money.”

  He nodded.

  “Does she have any other source of income than what she gets from this trust?”

  He was too preoccupied to tell me it was none of my business. He said, “Of course she has. I don’t know just how much.”

  He was in the mood for answering questions and I was in the mood for asking them. “How much do you give her? What’s her allowance?”

  “About five hundred dollars a month.”

  “And Robert Hockley gets the same amount?”

  He nodded.

  “He should be able to do right well for himself.”

  “He should, but he’s a plunger. He has this fender-and-body business now. He’s gone to work—had to, I guess. He was in debt up to his neck. Work may rehabilitate him. I hope so.”

  “This income of Miss Bruce’s—she doesn’t work?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Investments?”

  “Yes. She’s shrewd—smart as a whip. Wonder where she got that idea something might happen to me. Damn it, I don’t like it. Don’t ever think this world is as quiet and as orderly as lots of people try to make you think. It’s ruthless, and when you start bucking a gover—I’ll drive you to your office, Lam. I don’t want to talk any more. Please don’t say anything for a while.”

  He drove me to the office. When he stopped the car, he broke his self-imposed silence. He said, “I’ll be in later to settle up and see where I stand.”

  “No need for that. I can tell you right now.”

  “Financially, I mean.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I’ll have a refund coming on my five-hundred-dollar retainer?”

  I said, “Don’t give it a moment’s thought.”

  He frowned.

  “It isn’t worth it,” I went on. “You should know Bertha by this time.”

  “You mean she’s grasping?”

  “Grasping,” I said, “is the present participle. In this case it’s the wrong tense. G-r-a-s-p-e-d is the word you want. Bertha was grasping until she got the five hundred bucks. Now she’s grasped, and Bertha doesn’t let loose.”

  He blinked at me as though the words meant nothing. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said almost absent-mindedly and drove away.

  Chapter Seven:—THIRTEEN MINUS FIVE

  ELSIE BRAND WAS TRYING TO TIP ME OFF as I entered the office. She kept her fingers on the keyboard rattling out words with a clatter-bang that made the typewriter sound like a pneumatic riveter. But her eyes narrowed into a warning gesture and she jerked her head toward the private office.

  I opened my coat and made a business of flashing a badge while I questioned her with my eyebrows.

  She nodded emphatically.

  I blew her a kiss by way of thanks, crossed over and opened the door. I stopped with every semblance of surprise as I saw Sergeant Buda sitting on the corner of Bertha’s desk.

  “Come on in,” Buda said. “This will give us a quorum.”

  I went in and closed the door.

  Buda started work on me the minute the latch clicked into place.

  “Who’s Sharples?”

  “A client.”

  “What did he want?”

  “To find out something about a matter which wasn’t connected with Robert Cameron.”

  “Then why did you go to see Cameron?”

  “After we got started, it looked as though Cameron might give us some information.”

  “What was it Sharples wanted investigated?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Any shenanigans after you got there and before you called the cops?”

  “No.”

  “Sharples says he was with you all the time.”

  “All the time from what?”

  “All the time from the moment he found out he was going to see Cameron.”

  “Is that his alibi?”

  “I didn’t say it was an alibi. Sharples seems to think it might be.”

  I said, “I picked him up here with Bertha about twenty minutes before we found Cameron.”

  Bertha said, “He was with me for ten minutes before Donald came in. Elsie Brand says he’d been waiting for me for twenty minutes.”

  “That, of course, is just an approximation,” Buda said. “You’re all guessing.”

  “If we’d known there was going to be a murder, we’d have timed him with a stop watch,” Bertha said. “You should have warned us.”

  “How long had he been dead?” I asked Buda.

  “The medical examiner says not very long. Make it an hour and a half before we got there and you’ll have an extreme time limit. Perhaps an hour would do it.”

  “That thirty minutes may make a helluva lot of difference,” I said, and then added, “to somebody.”

  Buda shrugged. “You know how doctors are.”

  We were silent for a minute, then Buda said, “I’d like to know a lot more about what you were doing in this case.”

  I said, “It’s simple. Harry Sharples is one of two trustees under the will of Cora Hendricks, deceased. Robert Cameron was the other trustee. Sharples paid us $500 to do a job for him. We did it.” I turned to Bertha suddenly and asked, “How about the check, Bertha? Is it cashed?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Donald. He hadn’t left the office good before I was paddling down to his bank with the check. It’s good as gold.”

  I said to Sergeant Buda, “There you are.”

  Buda scratched his head. “Know anything about the crow?”

  “A pet. Cameron had him for about three years. He talks. His tongue hasn’t been split. It’s better not to split the tongue despite a popular belief to the contrary.”

  Buda said, “There was a pendant, old-fashioned antique stuff. It has settings for thirteen fairly good-sized stones. There weren’t any stones in it.”

  I nodded.

  “Thirteen stones,” Buda said.

  I said, “What does the thirteen have to do with it?”

  Buda said, “In the crow’s cage we found six damn fine emeralds. There were two more on the table in the murder room.”

  “Where in the crow’s cage were the six stones?”

  “In a little box in the back of the cage under the little nest of sticks the crow had built in there.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “The crow must have been attracted by the bright glitter of the emeralds and flown down, picked them up one at a time, and put them in the nest.”

  Buda looked at me long and searchingly. “Six and two are eight,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “If there were emeralds in that pendant, there were thirteen stones in all.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which makes five missing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, go to hell,” Buda said irritably. “I’m trying to account for that pendant.”

  “Oh, I thought you had the pendant.”

  “I mean the stones.”

  “
Had the pendant been set with emeralds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s an antique?”

  “Sure, some sort of an heirloom. Wonder where Cameron got it.”

  I said, “He must have bought it—unless he inherited it.”

  Buda sighed.

  “Barring, of course, that he may have stolen it. I can’t think of any other means of acquisition, Sergeant.”

  Sergeant Buda looked at me long and searchingly. “You know, Lam, I’m going to check up on you. You have a good line of gab. Sometimes the boys down in the department feel that you don’t talk enough. They say you have a furtive, secretive disposition. You know, in your business that could be serious.”

  Buda smiled at us and walked out.

  Bertha heaved a sigh of relief. “Well, Donald, we’re five hundred bucks to the good, anyway.”

  “There’s more coming,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Sharples.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s scared to death.”

  “Of what?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Any ideas?”

  I said, “Under the trust agreement, whenever both trustees die the trust is terminated and the property that’s in the trust has to be distributed share and share alike.”

  “When both of the trustees die,” Bertha said.

  “That’s right.”

  Bertha thought that over. “I’m wondering just what will develop now when they audit the books of the trust fund. They’ll have to do that on the death of one trustee.”

  I said, “I’m going to check into that a little myself. I made a list of the stuff that went into the hands of the trustees at the inception of the trust.”

  “How much?” Bertha asked, her eyes suddenly eager.

  “Around eighty thousand bucks at the start. The last accounting showed around two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Then, of course,” Bertha said, “two people have had to get their living out of that trust—Shirley Bruce and—what’s the other one’s name?”

  “Robert Hockley.”

  “I wonder how much they got.”

  “Five hundred a month.”

  “Apiece?”

  “Yes.”