Charlie Chan - Walk Softly, Strangler Part 7

There was a brief, whispering huddle - then Rosina said. "Put him in the garage and tie him up in one of the cars. Then start the motor running."

They stood aside as Harold pushed him down the concrete steps and watched by the glow of the lights in the house as the producer marched him along the narrow back pa.s.sage to the trellis gate that led to the garage area of the estate.

Heinemann said, "Open Sesame," in front of the garage door, which rose in response to the sound of his voice to reveal a dark cavern with the rear elevations of a large Cadillac and a Country Squire station wagon.

Chan glanced quickly over his shoulder to see if they were being watched, saw that Annie was standing on the bal.u.s.traded terrace with the other two women behind her.

"They don't seem to trust one another too well," Chan said as the door closed silently behind them after Heinemann had switched on the garage lights.

"That's putting it mildly," said the producer. He lowered the gun, added, "Sorry to have to play such a performance with you, Charlie Chan. I know all about you, of course."

"That is more than humble self know," intoned the detective inspector.

"At least I've read almost everything that's been printed about you over the years. And your performance in disarming me up there on the roof more than lives up to advance notices."

"Then you're not going to tie me up and leave me to the tender mercies of the soothing carbon monoxide?" Chan asked.

"And let those three furies have your murder hanging over me?" the producer countered, slipping the unloaded automatic into the waistband of his well cut slacks. "Rosy's got enough on me already - never mind what - or I'd never have gone along with this c.o.c.kamamie scheme in the first place."

"Perhaps trouble with the Internal Revenue?" said Chan.

"Perhaps," said Heinemann. "At any rate, it's bad enough to justify cutting a few corners."

"But not enough to risk a murder rap," said Chan.

"No way," the producer replied.

Heinemann went to the big Cadillac - and got the motor going with the windows rolled halfway down. Then he did the same with the Country Squire.

"Between the two of them," he said, "they should do the job on a bound man in a garage this size. Let me go out first and see if anyone's still watching."

Chan didn't like it. He had a hunch that, once the garage door was closed, it would open only to its master's (or mistress's) voice pattern. But he could shut the motors off so there was no danger of asphyxiation. He simply had no desire le, be trapped.

It was a chance he had to take. So Chan took it. If his relief when the garage door went up again in a few moments failed to show on his inscrutable face, it was none the less real. He got out the instant the producer switched off the garage lights and the two of them made their way silently along the pa.s.sage behind the house to the open rear window.

Claudia was striding the carpet, smoking a cigarette in her long holder as usual, sounding off to the others. She said, "... interest from now on lies in reviving the picture and exploiting it for every cent we can make. Otherwise, this whole effort is up the spout. I don't think any of us want that, or can afford it. So what I propose is -"

Annie interrupted her to ask Rosina Heinemann, "What about the fellow who made the fakes?"

"He's on his way to Brazil by now. He called le, tell me Chan was coming to see him, so I told him to burn the photos and take off. He's been well paid and he has no desire to be pulled in as accessory to a murder. He's got a record for fraud as long as your arm."

"One thing about a life of crime," said Annie over the rim of a highball. "You do meet such a nice level of people."

"Merde!" said Claudia impatiently. "What I want to see is some money. Without it, we're nowhere. We already spent a small fortune as it is - with no return."

Rosina shrilled, "Harold's meeting the Red China culture guy tomorrow - today, I mean, for the payoff."

"By rights," said Annie, "it's my money. After all, I'm mother's chief legatee."

"Honey," said Claudia hoa.r.s.ely, "until the murder of your mother is solved, you've got about as much chance of inheriting a piece of toilet paper as you have of cas.h.i.+ng in. That's one little trap the law lays for matricides - or any kind of murderer."

"Don't look at me that way," said Annie angrily. "You seem to think I killed mother."

"Didn't you, darling?" The agent's voice cut like a surgeon's scalpel.

There was a moment of thick silence in the room. Somewhere, on the hillside above them a cicada began strumming its jew's harp incessantly, to be joined by a swelling chorus of like-minded members of the species. But their tedious sound was insufficient to drown out the retort of the suddenly furious girl.

"You know perfectly well I didn't strangle Mei T'ang," she cried, "since you did it yourself. I saw you slipping into the elevator in the conservatory as I was greeting the guests."

"I wasn't even inside the apartment proper. I left my cigarette holder in my own pad and went back to get it. That's when Gil Roberts rang my bell and I came back up with him."

"Gil!" cried Rosina Heinemann "1 never thought he had the guts to kill a fly unless the script demanded it."

"He didn't do it," said the girl. "I had to take the next elevator down to take care of somebody's parking problem and met him coming in."

XV.

CHARLIE CHAN had increasingly suspected that the alibi Annie and her new-found father had given one another that afternoon, while he was in the girl's house, was a phony. He was quite sure it was the tall actor who had half-strangled him and pulled him from his car unconscious.

After all, the empty garage indicated that Roberts, or the girl, or both of them had been out somewhere while he poked around their hillside place and found it empty. Now he wondered why he had been attacked at all and why, in the circ.u.mstances, the attack had not been carried through to a finish.

If, in fact, Gil Roberts was not the murderer, then only one real possibility remained. And here, again, was a hitch. Vividly, Chan remembered the Heinemanns standing in the ground floor hallway of the House of Wu, awaiting the return of the interminable elevator to take them aloft. They had been waiting where they were for some little time, for he had not seen them enter the building as he and Doc Svorenssen came up the walk.

He had not seen them - and he would have remembered Rosina Heinemann's flaming hennaed hairdo had he seen it - because the producer and his wife had not been outside the building. They had come downstairs, probably by the service elevator, and were making their official re-entry as guests at the party.

Only then did it occur to Chan that he was in far greater danger than he had supposed. Evidently Heinemann had not carried out his wife's instructions to put him out of the way for keeps because he hoped one of the women could be neatly framed for the murder he had already committed himself - that of Mei T'ang. But now such a possibility was vanis.h.i.+ng in front of his eyes.

On a sound level between the zum-zumming of the cicadas and the voices of the women in the room, Chan heard the low growl of a barely touched police car siren. When he dialed them on the alternate line in Claudia's apartment, while she called Rosina to set up the meeting as she dressed, he had asked them to be on hand at two-thirty. That hour was gone, but not by much according to the phosph.o.r.escent dial on his Bulova.

There was something else nagging the periphery of his consciousness faint, all too familiar, scent of some sort of cologne or toilet water, an odor with a lilac base. At first, as they watched and listened at the window, Chan had been reasonably sure that it came from within the room, wafted through the open window by a current of air.

But, some moments before, Harold Heinemann had moved warily around the detective inspector and was standing wide of the window at his left side. Unquestionably, since what breeze there was came from the direction of the producer, he had to be the user of the scent - hence Chan's towel attacker in Mei T'ang's guest bathroom.

As far as Chan was concerned, this put the seal on the case. This and the conversation of the women in the late night talk he had so carefully arranged while making its partic.i.p.ants believe they had arranged it themselves.

It was time to make his move - and he made it none too early. Apparently forgetting the gun was unloaded, the producer was in the act of pulling it from his waistband as Chan swung toward him in an explosion of frenetic activity that belied the placidity of his normal movements.

He stamped a heel down hard on Heinemann's left foot, hooked one of his own arms through his opponent's right elbow, jamming his gun hand, and drove his free elbow with rare precision, full into Heinemann's solar plexus, doubling him up without an ounce of air left in his lungs.

He was holding the producer thus, doubled over, when a patrolman came through the lattice-worked gate and along the pa.s.sage and shone a flashlight on the little tableau.

Chan said, "You can take his gun, officer. It is not loaded."

It was then that Charlie Chan was caught with his guard down for the fourth time since his involvement in the Mei T'ang murder began. As he removed the automatic from Heinemann's nerveless fingers, the officer's forefinger became caught in the guard and accidentally pressed the trigger.

The pistol detonated with a blast all the more startling because it was totally unexpected, causing both Chan and the officer to duck low as the bullet ricocheted angrily from wall to wall between house and revetment, finally to whine away to silence.

"Okay, Charlie," said Doc Svorenssen, removing the spit inhalator and the cotton wadding from his mouth, "that will do it."

"Mouth dry as camel's tail," said Chan, working his lips and tongue furiously to regain lost feeling. Outside, the view of the Miracle Mile from the dentist's window consisted mostly of smog. His new bridge felt tight, but he knew that would pa.s.s.

"Tell me, Charlie," said Svorenssen, untying his white ap.r.o.n behind him, "if you had known Harold Heinemann had reloaded his popgun with a spare clip, would you have been quite so nonchalant about the whole thing?"

Chan took his time answering. Once again, he reviewed the entire case. Heinemann was the murderer, of course, abetted by sweet Rosina of the hideously shrill voice - though which of the two had actually suggested the conspiracy that ended in Mei T'ang's murder would probably never have been known by anyone save the two princ.i.p.als.

The producer's career had been slipping but his life style had not. Hence, his tangle with the Internal Revenue Service and the State of California Franchise Tax Board. If Heinemann did not come up with a six-figure sum by June 1 5th, he was inevitably due to take crippling penalties, perhaps a prison term, for fraudulent returns.

At first, the picture Claudia and Mei T'ang wanted him to produce seemed like manna from heaven. He had had no other offers in two years and needed work - and the pay it would bring - desperately. However, most of his fee was to come out of subsequent profits, and it quickly developed that Mei T'ang's promise to finance the film, at least in part, was not to be fulfilled - and without the star's backing, in this case, no one else could be obtained.

It was out of this background that the conspiracy to steal her priceless collection of one-of-a-kind Chinese antique imperial baubles, replace them with imitations and peddle the originals to the Red Chinese cultural mission was born.

As Chan had suspected, the deal was all but completed when the erstwhile star determined to sacrifice her vanity at long length and be fitted for spectacles. Mei T'ang was motivated by her need to read the proposed script herself, an act that had further steeled her determination to have nothing to do with the film's financing.

Then she had discovered the jeweled fly and summoned Heinemann for a showdown, knowing him to have been the only person who could have had opportunity actually to commit the thefts over so long a period. Result - her own murder.

Mrs. Heinemann, morally at least as guilty as her husband, had summoned the caterers in a well designed move to impede immediate police investigation with confusion. She had used Jason Catering herself many times while entertaining at her hillside house and was well aware of the stand-by system and near-instantaneous response by which the outfit operated so successfully in Hollywood.

This strident lady with hennaed hair was sufficiently involved as an accomplice in the actual crimes to find a prison term awaiting her - not as long as that of her husband but one which would probably use up what remained of her natural life.

Actual owners.h.i.+p of the fabulous treasure whose subst.i.tution was the immediate cause of the murder would remain with its purchasers - the Bureau of Culture of the Chinese People's Republic. After all, they had paid for it and, if the deal was tainted, there was heavy pressure from certain high American government circles to prevent any effort intended to halt its return to the land where it was created.

The others involved in the conspiracy, drawn into it by less directly felonious motives, would probably get off more lightly. Gil Roberts, it appeared, was not involved at all - for the fortunate reason none of the other members of the conspiracy had felt able to trust him.

As for his attack on Chan, Roberts had ruefully explained, "h.e.l.l, I was afraid it was the murderer after Annie. She told me her life was in danger. When I heard a car start where no car was supposed to be as I was coming back, I blocked the driveway with my heap and yanked you out of yours by the throat. When I saw it was you, I d.a.m.n near pa.s.sed out."

A pause, then, "What do you suppose will happen to Annie? I guess in a way it's my fault."

"As I understand it, her mother never gave you the chance," said Chan, thereby lifting the fallen star's spirits immeasurably According to the Hollywood trade papers which Chan had examined that very afternoon in his dentist's reception room, Roberts alone of the lethal little group had emerged professionally unscathed. According to a page-five news squib, the tall actor had been cast in two television series segments and had the inside track for a second lead in an upcoming feature film.

Chan's thoughts returned to the here and now. Doc Svorenssen, wearing one of his patented ultra-loud sports jackets - this one in a plaid the like of which the Highlands never saw - grinned at Chan amiably, his blue eyes alight.

Putting an arm around his friend's shoulders, the dentist said, "Hey, Charlie, since this is your last night on the mainland, how'd you like to come to a party with me?"

"I'd love to," said Chan, "but I'm taking a six P.M. plane to Honolulu right now. If you'd care to come along, I'll take you to nice party in Honolulu. Chop, chop."

"Okay - but at least let me drive you to the airport," said Svorenssen, an offer that Chan was glad to accept.

En route, Svorenssen said, "Hey you didn't answer my question."

"Which question?"

"Whether you'd have been quite so nonchalant about taking Heinemann if you'd known he'd reloaded his gun?"

"Cholly," said Chan, "a.s.sert better part of valor, - take the Fifth..."

THE END.