The Main Death and This King Business (5 page)

A thin, pasty-faced maid opened the Gungens' door and took me into a sitting room on the second floor, where Mrs. Gungen put down a copy of
The Sun Also Rises
and waved a cigarette at a nearby chair. She was very much the expensive doll this afternoon in a Persian orange dress, sitting with one foot tucked under her in a brocaded chair.

Looking at her while I lighted a cigarette, remembering my first interview with her and her husband, and my second one with him, I decided to chuck the tale-of-woe I had spent my ride building.

“You've a maid—Rose Rubury,” I began. “I don't want her to hear what's said.”

She said, “Very well,” without the least sign of surprise, added, “Excuse me a moment,” and left her chair and the room.

Presently she was back, sitting down with both feet tucked under her now.

“She will be away for at least half an hour.”

“That will be long enough. This Rose is friendly with an ex-convict named Weel.”

The doll face frowned, and the plump painted lips pressed themselves together. I waited, giving her time to say something. She didn't say it. I took Weel's and Dahl's pictures out and held them out to her.

“The thin-faced one is your Rose's friend. The other's a pal of his—also a crook.”

She took the photographs with a tiny hand that was as steady as mine, and looked at them carefully. Her mouth became smaller and tighter, her brown eyes darker. Then, slowly, her face cleared, she murmured, “Oh, yes,” and returned the pictures to me.

“When I told your husband about it”—I spoke deliberately—“he said, ‘She's my wife's maid,' and laughed.”

Enid Gungen said nothing.

“Well?” I asked. “What did he mean by that?”

“How should I know?” she sighed.

“You know your handkerchief was found with Main's empty wallet.” I dropped this in a by-the-way tone, pretending to be chiefly occupied putting cigarette ash in a jasper tray that was carved in the form of a lidless coffin.

“Oh, yes,” she said wearily, “I've been told that.”

“How do you think it happened?”

“I can't imagine.”

“I can,” I said, “but I'd rather know positively. Mrs. Gungen, it would save a lot of time if we could talk plain language.”

“Why not?” she asked listlessly. “You are in my husband's confidence, have his permission to question me. If it happens to be humiliating to me—well, after all, I am only his wife. And it is hardly likely that any new indignities either of you can devise will be worse than those to which I have already submitted.”

I grunted at this theatrical speech and went ahead.

“Mrs. Gungen, I'm only interested in learning who robbed and killed Main. Anything that points in that direction is valuable to me, but only in so far as it points in that direction. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Certainly,” she said. “I understand you are in my husband's employ.”

That got us nowhere. I tried again:

“What impression do you suppose I got the other evening, when I was here?”

“I can't imagine.”

“Please try.”

“Doubtless”—she smiled faintly—“you got the impression that my husband thought I had been Jeffrey's mistress.”

“Well?”

“Are you”—her dimples showed; she seemed amused—“asking me if I really was his mistress?”

“No—though of course I'd like to know.”

“Naturally you would,” she said pleasantly.

“What impression did you get that evening?” I asked.

“I?” She wrinkled her forehead. “Oh, that my husband had hired you to prove that I had been Jeffrey's mistress.” She repeated the word mistress as if she liked the shape of it in her mouth.

“You were wrong.”

“Knowing my husband, I find that hard to believe.”

“Knowing myself, I'm sure of it,” I insisted. “There's no uncertainty about it between your husband and me, Mrs. Gungen. It is understood that my job is to find who stole and killed—nothing else.”

“Really?” It was a polite ending of an argument of which she had grown tired.

“You're tying my hands,” I complained, standing up, pretending I wasn't watching her carefully. “I can't do anything now but grab this Rose Rubury and the two men and see what I can squeeze out of them. You said the girl would be back in half an hour?”

She looked at me steadily with her round brown eyes.

“She should be back in a few minutes. You're going to question her?”

“But not here,” I informed her. “I'll take her down to the Hall of Justice and have the men picked up. Can I use your phone?”

“Certainly. It's in the next room.” She crossed to open the door for me.

I called Davenport 20 and asked for the detective bureau.

Mrs. Gungen, standing in the sitting room, said, so softly I could barely hear it:

“Wait.”

Holding the phone, I turned to look through the door at her. She was pinching her red mouth between thumb and finger, frowning. I didn't put down the phone until she took the hand from her mouth and held it out toward me. Then I went back into the sitting-room.

I was on top. I kept my mouth shut. It was up to her to make the plunge. She studied my face for a minute or more before she began:

“I won't pretend I trust you.” She spoke hesitantly, half as if to herself. “You're working for my husband, and even the money would not interest him so much as whatever I had done. It's a choice of evils—certain on the one hand, more than probable on the other.”

She stopped talking and rubbed her hands together. Her round eyes were becoming indecisive. If she wasn't helped along she was going to balk.

“There's only the two of us,” I urged her. “You can deny everything afterward. It's my word against yours. If you don't tell me—I know now I can get it from the others. Your calling me from the phone lets me know that. You think I'll tell your husband everything. Well, if I have to fry it out of the others, he'll probably read it all in the papers. Your one chance is to trust me. It's not as slim a chance as you think. Anyway, it's up to you.”

A half-minute of silence.

“Suppose,” she whispered, “I should pay you to—”

“What for? If I'm going to tell your husband, I could take your money and still tell him, couldn't I?”

Her red mouth curved, her dimples appeared and her eyes brightened.

“That is reassuring,” she said. “I shall tell you. Jeffrey came back from Los Angeles early so we could have the day together in a little apartment we kept. In the afternoon two men came in—with a key. They had revolvers. They robbed Jeffrey of the money. That was what they had come for. They seemed to know all about it and about us. They called us by name, and taunted us with threats of the story they would tell if we had them arrested.

“We couldn't do anything after they had gone. It was a ridiculously hopeless plight they had put us in. There wasn't anything we could do—since we couldn't possibly replace the money. Jeffrey couldn't even pretend he had lost it or had been robbed of it while he was alone. His secret early return to San Francisco would have been sure to throw suspicion on him. Jeffrey lost his head. He wanted me to run away with him. Then he wanted to go to my husband and tell him the truth. I wouldn't permit either course—they were equally foolish.

“We left the apartment, separating, a little after seven. We weren't, the truth is, on the best of terms by then. He wasn't—now that we were in trouble—as— No, I shouldn't say that.”

She stopped and stood looking at me with a placid doll's face that seemed to have got rid of all its troubles by simply passing them to me.

“The pictures I showed you are the two men?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“This maid of yours knew about you and Main? Knew about the apartment? Knew about his trip to Los Angeles and his plan to return early with the cash?”

“I can't say she did. But she certainly could have learned most of it by spying and eavesdropping and looking through my—I had a note from Jeffrey telling me about the Los Angeles trip, making the appointment for Sunday morning. Perhaps she could have seen it. I'm careless.”

“I'm going now,” I said. “Sit tight till you hear from me. And don't scare up the maid.”

“Remember, I've told you nothing,” she reminded me as she followed me to the sitting-room door.

From the Gungen house I went direct to the Mars Hotel. Mickey Linehan was sitting behind a newspaper in a corner of the lobby.

“They in?” I asked him.

“Yep.”

“Let's go up and see them.”

Mickey rattled his knuckles on door number 410. A metallic voice asked: “Who's there?”

“Package,” Mickey replied in what was meant for a boy's voice.

A slender man with a pointed chin opened the door. I gave him a card. He didn't invite us into the room, but he didn't try to keep us out when we walked in.

“You're Weel?” I addressed him while Mickey closed the door behind us, and then, not waiting for him to say yes, I turned to the broad-faced man sitting on the bed. “And you're Dahl?”

Weel spoke to Dahl, in a casual, metallic voice:

“A couple of gum-shoes.”

The man on the bed looked at us and grinned.

I was in a hurry.

“I want the dough you took from Main,” I announced.

They sneered together, as if they had been practicing.

I brought out my gun.

Weel laughed harshly.

“Get your hat, Bunky,” he chuckled. “We're being taken into custody.”

“You've got the wrong idea,” I explained. “This isn't a pinch. It's a stick-up. Up go the hands!”

Dahl's hands went up quick. Weel hesitated until Mickey prodded him in the ribs with the nose of a .38-special.

“Frisk 'em,” I ordered Mickey.

He went through Weel's clothes, taking a gun, some papers, some loose money, and a money-belt that was fat. Then he did the same for Dahl.

“Count it,” I told him.

Mickey emptied the belts, spit on his fingers and went to work.

“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and sixty-two cents,” he reported when he was through.

With the hand that didn't hold my gun, I felt in my pocket for the slip on which I had written the numbers of the hundred-dollar bills Main had got from Ogilvie. I held the slip out to Mickey.

“See if the hundreds check against this.”

He took the slip, looked, said, “They do.”

“Good—pouch the money and the guns and see if you can turn up any more in the room.”

Coughing Ben Weel had got his breath by now.

“Look here!” he protested. “You can't pull this, fellow! Where do you think you are? You can't get away with this!”

“I can try,” I assured him. “I suppose you're going to yell,
Police
! Like hell you are! The only squawk you've got coming is at your own dumbness in thinking because your squeeze on the woman was tight enough to keep her from having you copped, you didn't have to worry about anything. I'm playing the same game you played with her and Main—only mine's better, because you can't get tough afterward without facing stir. Now shut up!”

“No more jack,” Mickey said. “Nothing but four postage stamps.”

“Take 'em along,” I told him. “That's practically eight cents. Now we'll go.”

“Hey, leave us a couple of bucks,” Weel begged.

“Didn't I tell you to shut up?” I snarled at him, backing to the door, which Mickey was opening.

The hall was empty. Mickey stood in it, holding his gun on Weel and Dahl while I backed out of the room and switched the key from the inside to the outside. Then I slammed the door, twisted the key, pocketed it, and we went downstairs and out of the hotel.

Mickey's car was around the corner. In it, we transferred our spoils—except the guns—from his pockets to mine. Then he got out and went back to the Agency. I turned the car toward the building in which Jeffrey Main had been killed.

Mrs. Main was a tall girl of less than twenty-five, with curled brown hair, heavily-lashed gray-blue eyes, and a warm, full-featured face. Her ample body was dressed in black from throat to feet.

She read my card, nodded at my explanation that Gungen had employed me to look into her husband's death, and took me into a gray and white living room.

“This is the room?” I asked.

“Yes.” She had a pleasant, slightly husky voice.

I crossed to the window and looked down on the grocer's roof, and on the half of the back street that was visible. I was still in a hurry.

“Mrs. Main,” I said as I turned, trying to soften the abruptness of my words by keeping my voice low, “after your husband was dead, you threw the gun out the window. Then you stuck the handkerchief to the corner of the wallet and threw that. Being lighter than the gun, it didn't go all the way to the alley, but fell on the roof. Why did you put the handkerchief—?”

Without a sound she fainted.

I caught her before she reached the floor, carried her to a sofa, found Cologne and smelling salts, applied them.

“Do you know whose handkerchief it was?” I asked when she was awake and sitting up.

She shook her head from left to right.

“Then why did you take that trouble?”

“It was in his pocket. I didn't know what else to do with it. I thought the police would ask about it. I didn't want anything to start them asking questions.”

“Why did you tell the robbery story?”

No answer.

“The insurance?” I suggested.

She jerked up her head, cried defiantly:

“Yes! He had gone through his own money and mine. And then he had to—to do a thing like that. He—”

I interrupted her complaint: