Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (7 page)

“Why didn’t he invite your boyfriend here?” Dessault’s name had not been on the guest list.

“He didn’t like Richie,” she said. “Didn’t understand him or his poetry.”

Score one for Kenneth.

I said, “You get your money that night?”

“Damn right.”

“So he was in good spirits.”

“Sure he was,” Dessault said. “Kind that come out of a bottle.”

Melanie snickered. I didn’t say anything.

The girl said, “I told you, he’d got this snuff box. One of a kind or something, worth a lot of money. Crap like that made him happy.”

“Did he say where he got the box?”

“No.”

“Do you know anybody who speaks with a Latin accent?”

The abrupt shift in questions seemed to confuse her, throw her off balance. “Latin? You mean Mexican?”

“Mexican, South American—like that.”

Dessault had come away from the wall again and was scowling at me. “How come you want to know that? What does that have to do with anything?”

I ignored him. “Well?” I asked Melanie. “Anybody?”

“No,” she said. “The only person I know with an accent is Alex Ozimas.”

“Who’s he?”

“Filipino fag. He and Kenneth had some business deals.”

“What kind of business?”

“Who knows? I never asked.”

“I thought your father didn’t like homosexuals.”

“He didn’t. But he’d do business with anybody. Alex was at the house a couple of times while I was there. He was there that night, come to think of it.”

“The night Kenneth died?”

“Yeah.”

“His name isn’t on the guest list.”

“Well, he was just leaving when I got there.”

“What time was that?”

“After five. Five-thirty, about.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No.”

“Your father mention him?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know why he was there.”

“No.”

“You have any idea where he lives?”

“In the city someplace, I think.”

“Anything else you can tell me about him?”

“No.”

Dessault punched out his cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray and moved up to stand alongside the girl. He put one hand on the back of her neck, began to rub it, and she shivered visibly and leaned against him. She had it bad, all right. But then, maybe he was what she deserved.

He said, “Listen, we’ve had about enough of this. We’ve got things to do. Haven’t we, Mel?”

She looked up at him; but with the cockeye, it seemed as if she were still looking at me. “Yes,” she said.
“Lots
of things to do.”

“So why don’t you just get out of here,” he said to me. “Right now.”

I could have pushed it; I felt like pushing it. These two had put me in a foul mood. But I had run out of questions to ask, and besides, the atmosphere of the place was oppressive and I was as sick of them as they were of me.

“Okay,” I said. “But maybe I’ll be back.”

“You’ll talk to yourself if you do. You won’t get in.”

There was nothing more to say. I put my back to them and went to the door. But Dessault followed me, so that when I turned coming out on deck, he was about two feet away.

I couldn’t resist the impulse; I said, “ ‘Gold in the hills and valleys of my mind, the big gold rush.’ That’s real good stuff, Richie. Ferlinghetti would love it.”

“Fuck you,” he said, like the poet he wasn’t, and for the second time in twenty minutes he shut the door in my face.

Back in the car, I used my new mobile phone to call Directory Assistance. No listing for Alex Ozimas or anybody named Ozimas. I called the office, to ask Eberhardt to check our copy of the reverse directory of city addresses—but all I got was the answering machine. So then I rang up the Hall of Justice, to see if Ben Klein was familiar with Ozimas—and he was out, too, and there wasn’t anybody else around who knew anything about the Purcell case.

I made a U-turn and drove across the Fourth Street drawbridge and uptown to Union Square, where I deposited the car in the underground garage. Powell Street was jammed with tourists, as it almost always was these days: there are several good hotels along its length and it contains the main cable car line between downtown and Fisherman’s Wharf. I made my way up to Post Street, and along there until I found the Summerhayes Gallery—one of dozens of art galleries of different types in the area.

It didn’t look like much from outside, just a narrow storefront with drapery covering its one window and discreet gold lettering on the glass; but you only needed one good look around the interior to know that this was a high-class place. The floor was parquet, polished to a high gloss, and there was nothing on it except half a dozen Plexiglas cubes, a couple of the smaller ones on pedestals, and glass-fronted and -topped display cases along two walls. The other wall, on my right, had a closed door in its middle. The only decoration was a big tapestry—Turkish, maybe —that hung above the display case directly opposite the entrance. There weren’t any paintings in sight; it was not that kind of gallery. There weren’t any people in sight, either, but I doubted if I would be allowed to remain alone for very long. A little tinkly bell had announced my arrival.

I wandered a little, looking at what was in the cubes and display cases. Antique boxes, some enameled and some bejeweled and some fashioned of mother-of-pearl. Carved ivory flower arrangements. Exotic paperweights made out of crystal, ivory, intricate patterned glass. Porcelain eggs. A small selection of snuff bottles and boxes, all of curious design, some that looked hand-painted and some that had scenes engraved on their surfaces. Much of the stuff appeared to be Oriental or Far Eastern in origin, with China being the predominant supplier.

I was peering at something I took to be an incense burner—a big bronze elephant that seemed to have a camel’s hump on its back and that also seemed to be trying to goose itself with its trunk —when the woman’s voice said, “May I help you?” about two feet away.

It made me jump a little because I hadn’t heard her approach; she walked softly for a big woman. And big she was: a fiftyish gray-blonde at least six feet tall, with wide hips and a substantial chest encased in a cream-colored designer suit and a mauve blouse. She was smiling politely, but there was a wariness in her gray eyes. I was not the sort of person she was used to seeing in here.

I said, “Yes, thanks. I’d like to see Eldon Summerhayes.”

“I am Mrs. Summerhayes,” she said. She had a faint accent—Scandinavian, I thought, maybe Norwegian. “My husband is busy at the moment. Is there something I can do?”

“Well, yes and no. I’d prefer to talk to both of you at the same time, if you wouldn’t mind. It’s about the Purcell family tragedies.”

Her nostrils pinched a little and the smile went away. She said, “Are you a policeman?”

“Not exactly. A private investigator.”

“I see. For whom are you investigating?”

“Tom Washburn.”

“I’m afraid I don’t … oh. Leonard’s friend.”

“Yes.”

“But why do you come to us?”

“You were at Kenneth’s party the night of the accident,” I said. “Mr. Washburn believes there’s some sort of connection between Kenneth’s death and Leonard’s murder.”

She sighed the way she walked: so softly you could barely hear her. “I’ll speak to my husband,” she said. “Please wait here.”

I watched her move off toward the inner door and disappear through it. When nothing happened after about thirty seconds I took another look at the bronze incense burner. Definitely trying to goose himself, I thought. But the hump was what really intrigued me. Why would an elephant have a hump? What artist in his right mind would give an elephant a hump? Well, I thought then, there’s your answer. The artist wasn’t in his right mind; like most artists in one way or another, he was screwy. But the hump still bothered me. It was one of life’s little mysteries, and I don’t like unsolved mysteries, little or otherwise.

I was looking over at the inner door when it opened again, after a good three minutes. Mrs. Summerhayes appeared and gestured to me, not without some evident reluctance. I went over there, and she backed up and let me walk into a smallish office with two desks set facing each other in its center. The office would have been larger except that a good-sized vault took up most of one wall—a Mosler, one of the best and most expensive.

The man standing behind the far desk, between it and the vault, was somewhere between fifty-five and sixty, ruddy-faced and white-maned. The ambassadorial type. He wore a pin-striped suit, a bow tie, and a scarab ring on his right hand that was so oversized it caught my attention immediately. He looked sleek and well-fed and self-assured and on the snooty side. I thought that I was not going to like him very much.

He said as the woman closed the door, “I am Eldon Summerhayes.” He waited until I had introduced myself and then said, “May I see your identification, please,” making it sound like an order rather than a request.

Uh-huh, I thought. She’d forgot to ask for an ID, and he’d let her hear about it, too. I got my wallet out, opened it to the photostat of my investigator’s license, and handed it to him. He studied it carefully for about thirty seconds, as if he were examining one of the Dead Sea scrolls for authenticity. Then, with a vaguely martyred expression, he shut the wallet and gave it back to me.

“Very well,” he said. “I would ask you to sit down but as you can see, there are only two chairs.”

“I don’t mind standing.”

“Elisabeth tells me you’re working for Leonard’s … friend, Washburn.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. Leonard’s murder was unfortunate, but I don’t see how it could possibly have anything to do with poor Kenneth’s accident.”

A man is murdered, a man dies in agony crawling through his own blood, and it’s “unfortunate.” I was not going to like Summerhayes one damned bit, I decided.

I said, “So you’re convinced that Kenneth couldn’t have met with foul play.”

“Of course we’re convinced. We have told everything we know to the authorities—several times, I might add.”

“I understand he wasn’t very well liked. Are you one of those who disliked him, Mr. Summerhayes?”

He scowled at me. “I find that question impertinent.”

Impertinent, yet. I said, “Were you a personal friend of his? Or was your relationship business-oriented?”

“He was a very good customer of ours.”

“Antique snuff containers?”

“Among other items, yes.”

“Did you sell him the one he was showing off at the party?”

“The Hainelin? No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No. He wouldn’t say.”

“Did he say how much he paid for it?”

“Twenty-five thousand,” Summerhayes said. His voice had a pinched quality to it that might have come from jealousy or resentment.

“I’ve been told it was worth fifty thousand.”

“Roughly, yes. If he actually paid twenty-five thousand, it was a bargain.”

“You think he might have paid more?”

“It’s possible. Kenneth was prone to exaggeration.”

“Uh-huh. You said the box was a … what was it? Hainelin?”

“That’s correct. From the early eighteen hundreds.”

“Made out of gold?”

“Yes. With a bas-relief of a Napoleonic battle scene on its hinged side. Napoleon at Toulon.”

“Is that what made it so valuable?”

“The fact that it was one of a kind, yes. Plus its age, its fine condition, and of course the fact that it was originated by Hainelin —a master craftsman of the period.”

“Kenneth show it to you before that day?”

“No,” he said. “I gathered he’d only received it that same afternoon.”

I remembered what Melanie had told me about Alex Ozimas—that he’d just been leaving the Purcell house when she arrived between five and five-thirty. “Do you know a man named Ozimas, a business acquaintance of Kenneth’s?”

“Ozimas? What nationality is that?”

“Filipino.”

“I’m not familiar with the name,” Summerhayes said. “I’m sure I never met a Filipino in connection with Kenneth.”

There was something in his tone that made me doubt he was telling the truth. I glanced over at where Elizabeth Summerhayes was standing stiffly in front of the door. “Is the name familiar to you, Mrs. Summerhayes?”

She blinked once, as if I’d startled her, glanced at her husband, and said, “No. No, it isn’t.”

Summerhayes was frowning at me. I asked him, “You just deal in snuff containers? Or do you collect them, too?”

“I sell them. Strictly.”

“So the Hainelin box had no special appeal for you.”

His frown got darker. “Just what do you mean to imply?”

“What do you think I meant to imply?”

He didn’t answer that. Just looked at me in the same dark and disapproving way.

I said, “The two other collectors at the party—George Collins and Margaret Prine. What can you tell me about them?”

“Collins owns several businesses in the South Bay—restaurant supplies and catering services. He has been a serious collector of Oriental and European miniatures for several years.”

“One of your customers?”

“Occasionally, yes.”

“And the Prine woman?”

“Yes, we’ve sold to her, too.”

“I meant, who is she?”

“Leland Prine’s widow,” Summerhayes said, as if I should know who Leland Prine had been. “He began collecting snuff containers while in the foreign service in Shanghai in the thirties; Margaret has carried on with the collection since his death. If anything, she is an even more avid enthusiast than he was.”

“How avid was her interest in the Hainelin box?”

“My God, man, do you suspect
her
of murdering Kenneth? The woman is seventy-one and frail. Don’t be absurd.”

“Asking questions that seem absurd is part of my job.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure. And I suppose you suspect me as well. Or Elisabeth.”

“I don’t suspect anyone of anything. I’m just asking questions, like I said.”

“If any of us wanted a Hainelin box, or any other rare and valuable miniature, we would not have to resort to murder to obtain it. We are all quite well-to-do, thank you.”

“All right. So you agree that the Hainelin went into the sea with Kenneth?”

“Of course I agree. It wasn’t found on his body or anywhere in the house or on the grounds; there is no other possible explanation.”

There were at least two other possible explanations, but I saw no point in mentioning them. Summerhayes would only have scoffed. He was an ace scoffer, Eldon was.

He said, “A tragedy, a genuine tragedy. A great loss.”

“You mean the box?”

“I do. It was an irreplaceable work of art….” He shook his head. “A great loss,” he said again.

He was something, this bird. He didn’t much give a damn that two men were dead, but he got all sad-eyed and mournful over an antique snuff box.

“Let’s talk about Leonard Purcell,” I said. “How well did you know him?”

“Hardly at all.”

I looked over at the wife. “Mrs. Summerhayes?”

Before she could answer he said testily, “I spoke for Elisabeth as well. How could she possibly have known Leonard any better than I?”

I kept my eyes on her, but she wasn’t having any; she shifted position and did some concentrated staring at the open-toed sandals she was wearing. He had her buffaloed good. Or did he? There was something about her, a suggestion of strength and will held in check, that made me wonder if he really dominated her or if she only let him think he did.

“The night of the party,” I said, “what was Leonard’s mood?”

“Festive,” he said. “It was a festive occasion. At least it was supposed to be.”

“Lots of liquor?”

“Champagne, mostly.”

“Did anybody get drunk?”

“Only Kenneth. The rest of us are civilized people.”

“Meaning Kenneth wasn’t?”

“At times he could be. At other times … no.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Shortly before nine-thirty.”

“What was he doing?”

“Showing off his collection to Margaret Prine.”

“Mrs. Summerhayes? When did you last see him?”

“At the same time,” she said. “My husband and I were together.”

“The entire evening,” he added pointedly. “We weren’t out of each other’s sight.”