I nodded. I had made it my business to know something about everyone in San Luis Beach who had more than a five-figure income. Brett had a big place a few miles outside the city limits; the last big estate on Ocean Rise where the millionaires hide out. Ocean Rise is a twisting boulevard, lined on either side by palm trees and tropical flowering shrubs, and cut in the foothills that surround the city’s outskirts. The houses up there are set back in their own grounds and screened by twelve-foot walls. You needed money to live on that boulevard: plenty of money. Brett had money all right; as much as he could use. He had a yacht, three cars, five gardeners and a yen for fresh young blondes. When he wasn’t throwing parties, getting drunk or necking blondes he was making a pile of jack out of two oil companies and a string of chain stores that stretched from San Francisco to New York.
“After Miss Rux had given her performance, Brett invited her to join the party,” Gorman went on. “During the evening, he showed her and his guests some of his valuable antiques. It seems he had recently acquired a Cellini dagger. He opened the wall safe to show it to his guests. Miss Rux was sitting close to the safe, and as he spun the dial operating the lock, she memorized the combination without realizing what she was doing. She has, I may say, a remarkably retentive memory. The dagger made a great impression on her. She tells me it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.”
So far I couldn’t figure where I came into any of this. I wanted a drink. I wanted to go to bed. But I was broke and stuck with Fatso and had to make the best of it. I began to think about his diamond again.
“Later, when the guests had retired, Brett showed Miss Rux to her room. It had been arranged for her to stop over at Brett’s place for the night as the party was expected to go on to the small hours of the morning. Alone with her, Brett reverted to type. He probably thought she would be an easy conquest. She repulsed him.”
“What did she expect?” I asked irritably. “When a dame entertains in a G-string the writing goes up on the wall.”
He ignored the interruption and went on: “Brett became angry and there was a struggle. He lost his temper, and anything might have happened had not two of his guests come in to see what the noise was about. Brett was viciously angry, and threatened Miss Rux. He told her he would get even with her for making him look a fool before his friends. He was in an ugly mood and he frightened her. There was no doubt he meant what he said.”
I shifted in my chair. For all I cared he could have kicked her humpbacked. A frail who takes off her clothes before a bunch of goggle-eyed drunks gets no sympathy from me.
“When she finally fell asleep she had a dream,” Gorman went on, then paused. He pulled out a gold cigarette-case, opened it and laid it on the desk. “I see you would like to smoke, Mr. Jackson.”
I thanked him. He certainly had his finger on my pulse. If there was one thing I wanted more than a drink it was a smoke.
“Do her dreams figure in this too?” I asked, dropping the match on the floor to keep other matches company.
“She dreamed she went downstairs, opened the safe, took the case containing the dagger, and in its place left her powder compact.”
A tingle ran up my spine into the roots of my hair. I didn’t move. The dead-pan expression I had hitched to my face didn’t change, but an alarm bell began to ring in my mind.
“She woke immediately after the dream. It was six o’clock. She decided to leave before Brett was up. She packed hurriedly and left. No one saw her leave. It wasn’t until late this afternoon when she was unpacking that she found at the bottom of the bag the Cellini dagger.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and yearned for a drink. The alarm bell kept ringing in my mind.
“And I bet she couldn’t find her compact,” I said to show him I was right on his heels.
He regarded me gravely.
“That is correct, Mr. Jackson. She realized immediately what had happened. Whenever she is worried or has something on her mind she walks in her sleep. She took the Cellini dagger in her sleep. The dream wasn’t a dream at all. It actually happened.”
He had taken a little time to get around to it, but now the body was on the table. We looked at each other. I could have said a number of things, but none of them would have got me anywhere. It was still his party, so I pulled at my nose and grunted. He could make what he liked of that.
“Why didn’t she turn the dagger over to the police and tell them what had happened?” I asked. “They would have fixed it with Brett.”
“It wasn’t as easy as that. Brett had threatened her. He’s an unpleasant character when he’s angry. Miss Rux felt he might bring a charge against her.”
“Not if she handed it over to the police. That’d kick the bottom out of the charge.”
Gorman puffed out more breath at me. His thin lips drooped.
“Brett’s point might be that after stealing the dagger Miss Rux had discovered she couldn’t sell it. The obvious thing for her to do then would be to hand it over to the police and invent this story of sleep-walking.”
“But the compact would support the sleep-walking tale. She wouldn’t leave that in his safe unless she was screwy or did walk in her sleep.”
“But suppose Brett denied the compact was left in the safe in order to get even with her?”
I stubbed out the cigarette regretfully. It was the best smoke I’d had in days.
“Why couldn’t she raise money on the dagger if it’s as valuable as you say?”
“For the obvious reason: it is unique. There were only two gold daggers made by Cellini in existence. One of them is in the Uffizi, and the other belongs to Brett. There’s not a dealer in the world who doesn’t know by now that Brett owns the dagger. It would be impossible to sell it unless Brett personally handled the deal.”
“Okay, then let Brett bring a charge. If she flashes her G-string at the jury, she’ll beat the rap. It’s a cinch they’d never convict her.”
He even had an answer for that one.
“Miss Rux can’t afford the publicity. If Brett brought a charge it would be impossible to keep the case out of the papers. It would ruin her career.”
I gave up.
“So what’s happening? Is Brett bringing a charge?” Gorman smiled.
“Now we come to the point, Mr. Jackson. Brett left for San Francisco early this morning. He returns the day after tomorrow. He thinks the dagger is still in his safe.”
I knew what was coming, but I wanted him to tell me. I said, “So what do we do?”
At least, that produced some action. He fished from his inside pocket a roll of money big enough to choke a horse. He peeled off ten one-hundred-dollar-bills and laid them fan-shape on the desk. They were new and crisp, and I could almost smell the ink on them. I had already guessed he was in the chips, but I hadn’t expected him to be as well heeled as this. I hitched my chair forward and took a closer look at the notes. There was nothing wrong with them except they were on his side of the desk and not on mine.
“I want to hire your services, Mr. Jackson,” he said, lowering his voice. “Would that fee interest you?”
I said it would in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own, and ran an unsteady hand over my hair to make sure I hadn’t lost the top of my head. The sight of those iron men had sent my blood pressure up like a jet-propelled rocket.
From another pocket he produced a red leather case. He opened it and pushed it towards me. I blinked at the glittering gold dagger that lay on a white satin bed. It was about a foot long, covered with complicated engravings of flowers and animals, and there was an emerald the size of a walnut let into the top of the hilt. It was a nice thing if you like pretty toys: I don’t.
“This is the Cellini dagger,” Gorman said, and there was honey in his voice now. “I want you to return it to Brett’s safe and bring away Miss Rux’s compact. I realize it is a little unethical, and you will have to act the role of a burglar, but you won’t be stealing anything, Mr. Jackson, and the fee is, I suggest, appropriate to the risks. The fee, Mr. Jackson, of a thousand dollars.”
I knew I shouldn’t touch this with a twenty-foot pole. The alarm bell kept ringing in my mind telling me this fat flesh-peddler was stringing me for a sucker. I was sure the whole lousy tale — the Cellini dagger, the stripper who walked in her sleep, the compact in the safe — was a tissue of lies a half-wit paralytic could have seen through. I should have told him to jump in a lake — into two, if one wasn’t big enough to hold him. I wish I had now. It would have saved me a lot of grief and being hunted for murder. But I wanted those ten iron men with a want that tore into my guts, and I thought I was smart enough to play it my way and keep out of trouble. If I hadn’t been broke or in a jam, if Redfern hadn’t been squeezing me, it might have been different. But why go on?
I said I’d do it.
CHAPTER TWO
NOW THAT he had me on the dotted line, Gorman wasn’t giving me a chance to change my mind. He wanted me out at his place right away. It didn’t matter about going bad” to my rooms to pick up any overnight stuff. I could borrow anything I wanted. He had a car outside, and it wouldn’t take long to get to his place, where there were drinks and food and quiet in which to talk things over. I could see he wasn’t going to let me out of his sight now or use a telephone or check his story or tell anyone he and I had made a deal. The promise of a drink decided me. I agreed to go along with him.
But before we started we had a little argument over the money. He wanted to pay by results, but I didn’t see it that way. Finally I squeezed two of the Cs out of him and persuaded him to agree to part with two more before I did the actual job. I would receive the balance when I handed over the compact.
Just to show him I didn’t trust him further than I could throw him, I put the two bills in an envelope with a note to my bank manager, and on the way down to the street level I dropped the envelope into the mail chute. At least, if he tried to double-cross me he wouldn’t get his paws again on those two bills.
An early-vintage Packard Straight Eight cluttered up the street outside the office. The only thing in its favour was its size. I had expected something black and glittering and streamlined to match the diamond, and this old jalopy came as a surprise.
I stood back while Gorman squeezed himself into the back seat. He didn’t get in the car: he put it on. I expected the four tyres to burst as he settled himself in, but they held. After making sure there was no room in there with him, I got in beside the driver.
We roared out of town, along Ocean Boulevard, into and over the foothills that surrounded the city in the shape of a horseshoe.
I couldn’t see much of the driver. He sat low behind the steering-wheel and had a chauffeur’s cap pulled down over his nose and he stared straight ahead. All the time we drove through the darkness he neither spoke nor looked at me.
We zigzagged through the foothills for a while, then turned off into a canyon and drove along a dirt road, bordered by thick scrub. I hadn’t been out this way before. Every so often we’d pass a house. There were no lights showing.
After a while I gave up trying to memorize the route and let my mind dwell on the two hundred bucks I’d mailed to the bank. At last I would have something to wave at the wolf when next he called at the office.
I wasn’t kidding myself what this job was about. I’d been hired to rob a safe. Never mind the elaborate build-up: the poor little stripper, scared of the big, bad millionaire, or the phoney dagger made by Mr. Cellini. I didn’t believe one word of that tall tale. Gorman wanted something that Brett had in the safe. Maybe it was a powder compact. I didn’t know, but whatever it was, he wanted it badly, and had come to me with this cooked-up yarn so as to have a back door to duck through in case I turned him down. He hadn’t the nerve to tell me he wanted me to rob Brett’s safe. But that’s what he was paying me to do. I had taken his money, but that didn’t mean I was going through with it. He said I was tricky and smooth. Maybe I am. I’d go along with him so far, but I wasn’t going to jump into anything without seeing where I was going to land. Anyway, that’s what I told myself, and at that time I believed it.
We were at the far end of the canyon now. It was damp down there and dark, and a thin white mist hung above the ground. The car head-lights bounced off the mist and it wasn’t easy to see what was ahead. Somewhere in the mist and darkness I could hear the frogs croaking. Through the misty windshield the moon looked like a dead man’s face and the stars like paste diamonds.
The car suddenly swung through a narrow gateway, up a steep driveway, screened on either side by a high, thick hedge. A moment later we turned a bend and I saw lighted windows hanging in space. It was too dark even to see the outline of the house and everything around us was quiet and still and breathless: it was as lonely out there as the condemned cell at San Quentin.
A light in a wrought-iron coach lantern sprang up over the front door as the car pulled up with a crunch of tyres on gravel.
The light shone down on two stone lions crouching one on either side of the porch. The front door was studded with brass-headed nails and looked strong enough to withstand a battering-ram.
The chauffeur ran around to the rear door and helped Gorman out. The light from the lantern fell on his face and I looked him over. There was something about his hooked nose and thick lips that struck a chord in my memory. I’d seen him somewhere before, but I couldn’t place him.
“Get the car away,” Gorman growled at him. “And let us have some sandwiches, and remember to wash your hands before you touch the bread.”
“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said and gave Gorman a look that should have dropped him in his tracks. It wasn’t hard to see he hated Gorman. I was glad to know that. When you’re playing it the way I had it figured out it’s a sound thing to know who is on whose side.
Gorman opened the front door, edged in his bulk and I followed. We entered a large hall; at the far end was a broad staircase leading to the upper rooms. On the left were double doors to a lounge.