1957 - The Guilty Are Afraid (5 page)

The door opened immediately. An old man, four inches over six foot, thin and upright, wearing the traditional clothes of a Hollywood butler, stood aside with a slight bow and let me walk into a hall big enough to garage six Eldorado Seville Cadillacs.

“Mr. Brandon?”

I said he was right.

“Will you come this way, please?”

I was led across the hall, out into the sunshine that blazed down on a patio, through french doors and along a passage to a room containing fifteen lounging chairs, a carpet so thick and soft it made me think I was walking in snow, and a couple of Picasso paintings on the wall. Six weary-looking businessmen, clutching despatch cases sat in some of the chairs. They stared at me with that numbed indifference that told me they had been waiting so long they had not only lost their sense of time, but also their sense of feeling.

“Mr. Creedy will see you before long,” the butler said and went away as quietly and as smoothly as if he had been riding on wheels.

I sat down, balanced my hat on my knees and stared up at the ceiling.

After the others had gaped at me long enough to satisfy their curiosity, they went back into a coma again. At three minutes past three, the door jerked open and a youngish man, tall, thin, with one of those high-executive chins and a crew cut, wearing a black coat, grey whipcord trousers and a black tie came as far as the doorway.

The six businessmen all straightened up, clutching at their despatch cases and pointed the way a setter points when he sights game.

His cold, unfriendly eyes ran over them and stopped at me.

“Mr. Brandon?”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Creedy will see you now.”

As I got to my feet, one of the men said, “You’ll pardon me, Mr. Hammerschult, but I have been waiting since twelve o’clock. You said I would be the next to see Mr. Creedy.”

Hammerschult gave him a bleak stare.

“Did I? Mr. Creedy thinks otherwise,” he said. “Mr. Creedy won’t be free now until four o’clock. This way,” he went on to me, and, leading the way down the passage, he took me into a smallish lobby, through two doors, both lined with green baize, to another massive door of solid polished mahogany.

He rapped, opened the door, looked in, said, “Brandon’s here, sir.”

Then he stood aside and waved me in.

II

T
he room reminded me of the pictures I had seen of Mussolini’s famous office. It was sixty feet long if it was an inch. Placed at the far end between two vast windows, with a fine view of the sea and the right arm of Thor Bay, was a desk big enough to play billiards on.

The rest of the room was pretty bare apart from a few lounging chairs, a couple of suits of armour and two heavy, dark oil paintings that could or could not be original Rembrandts.

Behind the desk sat a small, frail-looking man, his horn glasses pushed up and resting on his forehead. Apart from a fringe of grey hair, he was bald and his skull looked bony and hard. He had a pinched, tight face: small features and a very small, tight mouth. It wasn’t until I encountered the full force that dwelt in his eyes that I realized I was in the presence of a big man.

He gave me the full treatment, and I felt as if I were under X-rays and that he could count the vertebra of my spine.

He let me walk the length of the room and he kept the searchlight of his gaze on me. I found I was sweating slightly by the time I reached his desk. He leaned back in his chair and eyed me over the way you would eye a bluebottle fly that has fallen in your soup.

There was a long pause, then he said in a curiously soft, effeminate voice, “What do you want?”

By then, and by his reasoning, I should have been completely softened up and ready to fall on my hands and knees and rap my forehead on the floor. Okay, I admit I was slightly softened, but not as soft as he would want.

“My name’s Brandon,” I said, “of the Star Inquiry Agency of San Francisco. You hired my partner four days ago.”

The thin, small face was as deadpan as the back of a bus.

“What makes you imagine I would do that?” he asked.

From that I knew he wasn’t sure of his ground, and he was going to probe first before he took the hoods off his big artillery.

“We keep a record of all our clients, Mr. Creedy,” I said untruthfully. “Sheppey, before he left our office, recorded that you hired him.”

“Who would Sheppey be?”

“My partner and the man you hired, Mr. Creedy.”

He placed his elbows on his desk and his fingertips together. He rested his pointed, bony chin on the arch thus formed.

“I must hire twenty or thirty people a week to do various unimportant jobs for me,” he said. “I don’t recall any man named Sheppey. Where do you come in on this? What do you want?”

“Sheppey was murdered this morning,” I said, meeting his hard, penetrating gaze. “I thought you might want me to finish the job he was working on.”

He tapped his chin with his fingertips.

“And what job would that be?”

Here it was: the dead-end. I knew sooner or later it might come to that, but I had hoped I might flush him out of his cover by bluff: it hadn’t worked.

“You’d know more about that than I do.”

He sat back in his chair, drummed on the desk for about four seconds, his face still dead pan, but I knew his mind was busy. Then he reached out a bony finger and pressed a button. A door to the right of the desk opened immediately and Hammerschult appeared. He appeared so quickly he had to be waiting just outside the door for the summons.

“Hertz,” Creedy said without looking at him.

“At once, sir,” Hammerschult said and went away.

Creedy continued to drum on his desk. He kept his eyes lowered.

We waited in silence for perhaps forty-five seconds, then a rap sounded on the door. It opened, and a short, thickset man came in. His right ear was bent and crushed into his head. At some time in his career someone must have hit him either with a brick or possibly a sledgehammer: no fist could have caused that amount of damage. His nose was boneless and spread over his face. His eyes were small, and had that wild light in them you might see in the eyes of an angry and vicious orangutan. Black hairs sprouted over the top of his collar. He wore a pair of fawn flannel trousers, a white sports coat and one of those razzle-dazzle, hand-painted ties. He moved up to the desk silently and swiftly. He was as light on his feet as any ballet dancer.

Creedy pointed his chin at me.

“Look at this man, Hertz,” he said. “I want you to remember him. It may be I will want you to take care of him. It’s unlikely, but he may be a bigger fool than he looks. Just make certain you will know him again.”

Hertz turned and stared at me. His cruel little eyes moved over my face, his own smashed-up, ruined face was expressionless.

“I’ll know him again, boss,” he said, his voice husky and soft.

Creedy waved him away and he went out, closing the door silently behind him.

There was a pause, then I said, “What is he supposed to do to me—turn me into butter?”

Creedy took off his glasses, pulled out a white silk handkerchief and began to polish the lenses, staring at me.

“I don’t like inquiry agents,” he said. “They seem to me to be shabby little men who have tendencies to become blackmailers. I haven’t hired your Mr. Sheppey nor would it cross my mind to do so. I would advise you to get out of this city immediately. A man in my position is often annoyed by people like you. It saves time and irritation to bring Hertz on to the scene. He is an extraordinary character. He is under the impression that he is in my debt. I can say to him this man is annoying me and he makes it his business to persuade the man to stop annoying me. I have never inquired how he does it, but I have never known him to fail. That is the position, Mr. Brandon. I don’t know your Mr. Sheppey. I didn’t hire him. I don’t wish to have anything to do with you. You may go now unless you wish to say something that might be of value.”

I smiled at him. I had got over his searchlight gaze, the big room and the awe-inspiring atmosphere. I was more angry now than I had ever been before in my life, and that is saying a lot.

“Yes, I have something to say,” I said, resting my hands on his desk and staring him in the face. “First, Mr. Creedy, I thought you would be smarter than you are. I didn’t know for certain that you had hired Sheppey, now I do. It so happened Sheppey wrote your name down on his blotter: that was the only clue I had to work on. I thought it was possible someone had mentioned your name to him and while he was talking to this someone he had doodled your name in the rather senseless way he had. Now I know different. When I called this afternoon, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t see me. A man with your money doesn’t grant an interview to a small-time inquiry agent unless he either wants to employ him or else he has something on his mind that is keeping him awake at nights. By giving me priority over six important-looking businessmen, one who has been waiting three hours, told me the thing on your mind was not only keeping you awake nights, but was giving you inward jitters in no mean way. You obviously couldn’t wait three minutes to hear just how much I knew. When you found out how little I knew, you called in your tame gorilla and waved him in my face. You hoped I’d be so scared that I would rush back to my hotel, pack my bag and get the hell out of here. Not very smart, Mr. Creedy. You should know by now that some men don’t scare easily. I happen to be one of them.”

He leaned back in his chair, his expressionless face telling me nothing, his bony fingers still busy with his handkerchief and glasses.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Not quite. I am now sure that you hired Sheppey. While he was working for you, he turned up something that someone didn’t like so he got killed. For all I know you hold the clue that could lead the police to his killer, but not unnaturally you don’t wish to be involved in a murder case. You know if you did become involved you would have to come out with the reason why you hired Sheppey. From my experience, when a millionaire takes the trouble to hire an agent who lives three hundred miles from the millionaire’s home ground, the millionaire is asking him to dig into something pretty smelly that he wouldn’t want the local agents to know about. Sheppey is dead. He was a good friend of mine. If the police can’t find his killer, then maybe I can. Anyway, Mr. Hertz or no Mr. Hertz, Mr. Creedy or no Mr. Creedy, I’m going to have a damn good try.” I straightened, pushing myself away from his desk. “That’s all. Don’t bother to call your flunkey, I can find my own way out.”

I turned and started down the long room towards the door.

Creedy said in his soft, effeminate voice, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Mr. Brandon.”

I kept on, reached the door, opened it and tramped into the lobby where the butler was waiting. As he conducted me to the exit, Creedy’s last words banged around inside my skull like demented ping-pong balls.

III

I
t took me forty minutes to get back to my hotel. For one thing I was in no hurry, and for another the afternoon traffic was heavy.

I was satisfied now that Creedy had hired Sheppey, but I still didn’t know if Sheppey had been murdered because of something he had turned up while working for Creedy or because he had been fooling around with some cutthroat’s girl. I mentally cursed his weakness for women. It made the job of finding his killer that more difficult.

I was glad now I had made a drinking date with Tim Fulton. Very often, a dissatisfied employee could give away some useful information, and that was something I needed badly.

As I pulled up outside the hotel, I saw a prowl car parked a few yards ahead of me. I got out of the Buick. The door of the prowl car swung open and Candy appeared. He came towards me, moving heavily, his jaw working as he chewed.

“Captain Katchen wants to talk to you,” he said, when he was within a yard of me. “Let’s go.”

“Suppose I don’t want to talk to him?” I asked, smiling at him.

“Let’s go,” he repeated. “I can take you in smooth or rough—please yourself.”

“Did he say what he wanted?” I asked, moving with him to the prowl car.

“If I needed proof that you were a stranger in this town, that dopey remark would have clinched it,” Candy said, sliding his bulk into the back seat.

There was a uniformed cop at the wheel. He turned to look me over.

I got in beside Candy and the car took off as if it were answering a four-alarm fire call.

“You mean the Captain doesn’t tell his subordinates why he wants anything, only that he wants it?”

“Now you’re being bright,” Candy said. “If you don’t want to come out of headquarters a permanent cripple, you’ll watch your step, speak only when you’re spoken to, answer all the questions quickly and truthfully, and generally behave as if you were in church.”

“Which would suggest that the Captain has a hasty temper.”

Candy smiled sourly.

“I think that’s a fair statement. I’d say Captain Katchen is a little quick tempered, wouldn’t you, Joe?”

Joe, the driver, spat out of the window. I “No more than a bear with a boil on its ass,” he said.

Candy laughed.

“Joe talks like that all the time, except when the Captain’s around, then he never says a word, do you, Joe?”

Joe spat out of the window again.

“I like my food. I’ve only eight good teeth in my mouth as it is.”

“See? A comedian.” Candy took out a cigarette and lit it. “So watch out. Don’t go sounding off.”

“Have you found the killer yet?” I asked.

“Not yet, but we will. In the past ten years we have had five homicides in this town, and we haven’t found one killer yet. We must break that record sometime and this could be the time. What do you think, Joe?”

“It depends,” Joe said cautiously. “It’s not as if we haven’t the men because we have: good, bright, clever detectives who know a clue when they see it, but there’s a bottleneck of bad luck somewhere. I wouldn’t bet my salary we’ll find the killer, but we might.”

“There you are,” Candy said, smiling at me. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Like Joe says, he wouldn’t bet his salary, but we could crack it.”