Fallen Angels (4 page)

After thumbing through the client files, I
telephoned Mrs. Chalmers’ home. No answer. Then, truly annoyed and
not a little bit worried, I wrote down Mrs. Chalmers’ address and
telephoned for a taxicab to pick me up in front of the Figueroa
Building. The salary Ernie paid me didn’t run to taxicabs, but I
figured Great-Aunt Agatha wouldn’t have minded. She’d been quite a
good old girl, in spite of belonging to my family, which was
probably why my mother had disliked her.

Mrs. Chalmers—and her husband if she
had one, I suppose—lived on Wilton Place, near Second Street, in
Los Angeles. As the cabbie drove me there, I decided it was a very
pretty neighborhood, with big houses and awfully pretty yards. I
think that, during my first few months in Los Angeles, the
landscaping impressed me more than just about anything else in my
new home. I suppose it’s easier to have lovely lawns, fabulous rose
bushes, and all sorts of other flowers when the weather never
freezes as it does in Boston. Chloe and Harvey had a gorgeous yard,
and, although Chloe complained occasionally about not having a
swimming pool—swimming pools were
de
rigueur
amongst the Hollywood set, I had discovered
early in my stay here—I didn’t miss it one little bit. I preferred
the wonderful rose garden.

Naturally, neither Chloe nor Harvey worked in
the garden. They had a staff of professional gardeners to do the
work, but Mrs. Biddle, their housekeeper, made good use of the
flowers therefrom.

The taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of
a large white house with a massive porch and a huge double door.
The cabbie opened the door for me. I asked him to wait, and I
walked up a long paved pathway lined with gardenia bushes whose
sweet, cloying fragrance nearly knocked me over. I climbed the
short flight of stairs to the porch, crossed the porch to the
gigantic doors, and twisted the doorbell. I heard the noise it
made, and I waited.

And I waited.

And waited.

Frowning—where on earth could Ernie and Mrs.
Chalmers have gone, and if they’d gone somewhere, why hadn’t Ernie
called me or touched base with Phil?—I decided to take a chance and
grabbed the doorknob. It turned easily. Then I hesitated. Did I
really want to waltz into someone else’s home without having been
invited?

Squaring my shoulders, I told myself firmly
that I did indeed want to do that, because my boss might be in
trouble. In fact, didn’t I feel a little tingle up my spine? After
thinking about it for a second or three, I decided I didn’t.

Nevertheless, I gingerly shoved the door open
and walked inside the house. Could this action of mine be called
breaking and entering? I wasn’t sure, and I also wasn’t sure if the
fact that I hadn’t actually broken anything would count if somebody
found me there. Oh, well.

The door opened onto a foyer-type room, kind
of like the one in Chloe’s house, only Chloe’s house has lovely
tiles on the floor, and this was polished wood covered with a
pretty Oriental rug. The rug looked like a Bukhara to me, although
I’m certainly no expert on Oriental rugs.

Because I was still nervous, I cleared my
throat and said, “Good afternoon?” in a questioning sort of
voice.

No answer. Perhaps that was because I’d
almost whispered the words. After taking a deep breath for courage,
I repeated my greeting, more loudly this time: “Good
afternoon!”

Still no answer.

Well, pooh. Now what?

Although my nerves were jangling like the
bells on a Christmas sleigh, I decided it would be cowardly on my
part not to finish what I’d started now that I had officially
entered the house uninvited, so I set out to look for my boss. And,
of course, Mrs. Chalmers.

I didn’t know the layout of the house, but
having been born and reared in a place remarkably like this one, I
didn’t have any trouble finding my way around. No one was in the
breakfast room. No one was in the kitchen. No one was in the
butler’s pantry or the dining room. Speaking of butlers, didn’t
Mrs. Chalmers have any servants? In a place as big as this? I
figured that a maid would probably pop up when I was searching a
bedroom and screech, so I stopped and said, again loudly, “Good
afternoon! Is anyone home?”

Still no answer. My nerves had begun to jump
about like the Mexican jumping beans I’d seen people sell on the
streets of Los Angeles, but I doggedly decided to pursue my goal.
By that time, I was truly worried about my feckless boss.

Retracing my steps, I returned to the morning
room and began my search in the opposite direction. There was
nothing in the office but a piano and a desk. A library off the
office appeared as though Mr. Chalmers, if he existed, used it as a
refuge. It seemed definitely a masculine room, with leather sofas
and chairs and so forth. From the library, a huge withdrawing room,
furnished to the teeth with expensive pieces, opened onto a vast
hallway leading to a staircase.

It was there, at the foot of the stairs, that
I saw something more frightening even than having walked uninvited
into someone else’s house: a lumpy bundle of filmy cloth. Not that
a bundle of filmy cloth is horrible in and of itself, but this
particular bundle was light and frothy and diaphanous. And it
enclosed a body. Even before I tiptoed over to see for sure, I knew
the body was that of Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.

Once I determined for certain that it was
she, I think I screamed, although I’m not sure. If I did, I’m
ashamed of myself. After all, I aspire to the position of assistant
to a private investigator. Someone in that capacity has no business
screaming at the sight of bodies. Still and all, this was only the
second dead person I’d encountered in my entire life who wasn’t
properly laid out and made up and in a coffin. The funeral director
in Boston had actually made Great-Aunt Agatha look a good deal
better in death than she ever had in life.

Not so Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.

Lest you think I added to my list of failures
by running away from my duty as well as screaming, let me assure
you that I did not. In actual fact, I mentally braced
myself—hard—and knelt beside Mrs. Chalmers’ body. I checked the
pulse in her neck. There wasn’t one. I checked the pulse in her
wrist. Again, there wasn’t one. And then I saw the blood-caked back
of her head and leaped up and away from the corpse. Since I was
kneeling at the time of my leap, I ended up in an undignified
position on my rump with my legs spread out before me. From that
position, I could see the entirety of the late Mrs. Chalmers, and I
have to say that every bit of my former envy of the woman vanished.
All I saw from this angle was a poor, seemingly silly, woman who
had died before her time, and violently at that. I don’t believe
she was much older than thirty, and while thirty sounded kind of
old to me, at twenty-one, it wasn’t really. Heck, Ernie was almost
thirty.

The smack on my rump seemed to loosen the
parts of my brain that had been frozen in horror, and they began
working again. If Mrs. Chalmers was dead at the foot of the stairs
in her house, and if Ernie had come to her house to visit her
before nine o’clock this morning, where in the world could he be
now, at . . . well, I wasn’t sure what time it was. Maybe three or
three-thirty? I decided I needed to get myself one of those new
wrist-watches Chloe and I saw at the Broadway Department Store.

Could Ernie, too, be . . . ?

No. I didn’t want even to think of such a
thing. Not Ernie. Not the man who’d given me my very first job. Not
the man whom I’d come to . . . like a lot.

But where the heck was he?

Steeling my nerves—they needed a whole lot of
steeling that day—I rose to my feet, tiptoed around the recumbent
Mrs. Chalmers, and silently padded up the stairs, keeping my eyes
and ears pricked. While I was no expert on the various causes of
death available to a person, it sure looked to me as if someone had
given Mrs. Chalmers a wicked bash on the head before she’d
fallen—or, more likely, been hurled—down those very same steps. I
allowed myself a couple of peeks at the carpet runner on the
stairs, but it, too, was patterned in an intricate Oriental
pattern, so I couldn’t tell if any of the reddish splotches of
color might have been made by blood. If they were, they’d fallen in
a remarkably regular pattern.

Boy, what I didn’t know about the art
of criminal investigation could fill a book! Actually, it probably
did. Maybe more than one. Perhaps I should visit the Los Angeles
Public Library again soon, and this time my visit
would
be work-related.

But my insufficient knowledge of criminal
investigation was neither here nor there. As I’ve already
mentioned, as I climbed those stairs, I listened hard, trying to
detect any movement in the upstairs part of the house. I’d already
ascertained there was no one in the downstairs. No one alive, at
any rate.

Silence as deep as that ought to be outlawed,
because it’s terribly nerve-wracking. To be fair, I suppose my
nerves would have been wracked even more drastically if a criminal
had hurtled out of a room and hollered at me or, worse, grabbed me.
Still and all, I had the creeps and the willies and the
heebie-jeebies as I reached the top of the stairs and looked both
ways down the hall where the stairway ended.

Nothing.

I glanced down the staircase. Mrs. Chalmers
was still there. Oh, goody.

So I headed down the hallway to my right,
determined to snoop until I’d found my boss. Or not found him. I
hoped for the former result.

I suppose it’s considered good
housekeeping to shut all the doors in a house when no one’s in the
rooms behind them, but it’s really, really intimidating to open one
closed door after another in a house where you suspect a murder has
recently been committed. I say
recently
because of the relative warmth of Mrs.
Chalmers’ body when I checked various parts of her for a pulse. Of
course, the September heat might account for some of that warmth,
but I still didn’t believe she’d been dead for too awfully long.
The notion made me shudder, and I did a bit more
nerve-steeling.

My gasp when I opened the last door at the
end of that infinitely long corridor might have awakened the dead,
although I later learned that Mrs. Chalmers hadn’t stirred in spite
of it.

“Ernie
!” I
regret to say I squealed the name.

Ernie, who looked as if he might be dead,
too, didn’t stir. Sprawled across a big bed covered with a crimson
brocade throw, he lay on his stomach with his head turned to one
side—the side toward me—only his eyes were closed. Oh, good Lord,
he couldn’t be dead! Could he? Not Ernie!

My hand pressed to my thundering heart and
with, I’m sorry to report, tears in my eyes, I hesitatingly
approached the bed. As I did, I noticed something rather odd about
Ernie that I hadn’t at first taken in: he was bound and gagged. I’d
read books in which people had been bound and gagged, but I’d never
seen anyone who had been. He also seemed to be out cold. I peered
closely at him, praying he still breathed. When one of those eyes
of his opened, I darned near screamed again.

“Grmph!” said Ernie.

“What?” said I.

“Grmph
!” he
repeated, with more emphasis this time.

I decided it might be a good idea to get the
gag out of Ernie’s mouth before I attempted further communication
with him. So I did. Doing so wasn’t easy. Whoever had tied the knot
had been quite thorough. I didn’t have a knife with me, so I had to
work the knot free with my fingers, and by the time I finally
succeeded, two of my fingernails had broken and Ernie’s temper
wasn’t at its best.

“God damned son of a bitch!” were the first
words out of his mouth. Then he clutched his head and groaned.

While rather shocked at his language, I
decided I’d better not call him to task for it. I could tell he was
in a foul mood. Anyhow, I supposed he deserved to swear a little,
given the circumstances.

Rather, I did my level best to untie the
bonds holding his wrists together. “Darn it, these are too tight.”
I was surprised, in fact, that his hands hadn’t swollen and turned
blue from lack of circulation.

“Use the pocket knife in my back pocket,” he
suggested in a surly voice.

Undaunted by his mood, I gingerly reached
into his back pocket where, sure enough, I found one of those
knives with all sorts of blades, screwdrivers, and bottle openers
and things attached to them. Handy tools, those. Then, trying my
very best not to draw blood, I slit the rope binding Ernie’s hands.
I only slipped once or twice, to wicked grumbles from my boss. Once
his hands were free, Ernie flapped them in the air, I presume to
get the circulation back. Then he said, “I’ll cut the rest of them
myself. If I let you do it, you’ll probably slit one of my
veins.”

Although I didn’t appreciate his comment, his
suggestion was fine with me, so I handed him the knife with only
one small “hmph.” As he sawed at the rope binding his feet,
swearing softly the while, I cleared my throat and said, “What
happened, Ernie?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“If you don’t know, who does?” I asked. By
that time, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind myself. Here I’d
risked life and limb—or at the very least, arrest and
imprisonment—to find this man, and all he could do was swear at me.
I was not amused.

“Dammit, Mercy, what are you doing here? What
the hell time is it?”

“Stop cursing at me, Ernest Templeton, darn
you! I came looking for you when you didn’t return to the office by
two-thirty this afternoon—with, I might add, not a telephone call
or a note to tell me when you’d be back. What did you expect me to
tell any clients who called?”