Crows cant count, p.1
Crows Can't Count, page 1
part #10 of Cool and Lam Series
Crows Can’t Count
a Cool and Lam Mystery
by
Erle Stanley Gardner
(as A. A. Fair)
“Lam couldn't be better and Bertha Cool gracefully supplies backstage obbligato of screams and objurgations. Plot excellent; track fast. Verdict: A-1”—The Saturday Review
Murder comes in many sizes. If you are a detective your job is to wrap it up, in a neat bundle. Sometimes you do. But, sometimes, you run out of string. This was one of those times. Donald Lam knew there was one person with the key to a murder, a man named Murindo. Then Lam heard this: “Murindo is dead. In little pieces, he is dead.”
In other words—murder by dynamite! This was a new bundle—but, after the explosion, there was nothing left to wrap up...
Arsenical Press
First published by William Morrow and Co., 1946
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-927551-14-1
Contents
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4
Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16
Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20
Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24
Chapter 25 Chapter 26
CHAPTER ONE
THE MAN who sat across the desk from Bertha Cool looked as though he didn’t like the smell of the office. He had the attitude of a rich man on a slumming expedition.
Bertha was beaming at me as I stood in the doorway. The man looked at me, apparently prepared to see something he wasn’t going to like and saw no reason to change his mind.
Bertha was all sweetness, a sure sign that the fee hadn’t as yet been fixed.
“Mr. Sharples, this is my partner, Donald Lam. Whatever he lacks in brawn he makes up in brain. Donald, Mr. Harry Sharples. He’s a mining man from South America. He wants us to do something for him.”
Bertha readjusted her heavy weight comfortably in the battered swivel-chair, which creaked its protest. Her face continued to beam, but her eyes flashed me a message which said the going was getting pretty rough for her and she needed help.
I sat down.
Sharples looked at me and said, “I don’t like it.” I didn’t say anything.
“When you come right down to it, it makes me feel like a Peeping Tom,” Sharples went on. His voice didn’t hold any genuine regret. It was the same tone a man uses when he says, “I don’t like to take the last piece of pie on the plate,” and then promptly scoops it up.
Bertha started to say something. I checked her with a glance.
For a while, silence held. Bertha couldn’t stand it. She sucked in a quick breath and despite my frown, blurted, “After all, that’s what we’re here for.”
“What you’re here for, yes,” Sharples said, and there wasn’t any attempt to keep the contempt out of his voice. “I’m thinking of myself.”
“Exactly,” I said.
That caused him to jerk his head in my direction as though it had been pulled around with a string. He saw only an expression of courteous interest—the expression of one waiting for a business visitor to get down to brass tacks.
Another period of silence was broken only by the squeak...creak...sque-e-e-e-e-k of Bertha’s chair as she fidgeted.
Sharples didn’t look at her any more—he kept looking at me. He said, “I have explained to your partner, Mrs. Cool. I’ll give you the highlights. I am one of two trustees under the will of Cora Hendricks, deceased. The property is left to Robert L. Cameron and myself as trustees, for the benefit of Shirley Bruce and Robert Hockley. It’s what is known as a spendthrift trust. Are you familiar with them?”
“Yes,” I said.
Bertha interposed again. “Donald studied law and was admitted to the bar.”
“Why didn’t he practice law, then?” Sharples asked. Bertha started to say something, then coughed.
I said, “I had an idea there was a loophole in the law by which a man could commit a murder and get away with it.”
“You mean the corpus delicti?” Sharples asked contemptuously.
“Nothing as crude as that,” I said. “This was really an artistic job. The Board of Governors didn’t like it.”
Sharples looked me over. “Would it work?” he asked.
“It works.”
His voice showed curiosity and a certain measure of respect. “I’ll have to let you tell me about it some time.”
I shook my head. “I made that mistake once. That’s what the Board of Governors didn’t like.”
He was silent for a while, sizing me up. Then he went on explaining, “Under the provisions of the trust, the trustees have the sole discretion as to how much money shall be given the beneficiaries until the trust terminates, which it does when the youngest of the beneficiaries is twenty-five years old. At that time the trust funds remaining are to be divided, share and share alike.”
He stopped talking and for a moment no one said anything.
“It puts us in a position of great responsibility,” Sharples said unctuously.
“How much is the trust?” Bertha asked, her little shrewd eyes glittering with eager cupidity.
Sharples didn’t even turn his head. “I don’t think that need enter into it,” he said over one shoulder.
Bertha’s chair squeaked a startled, high-pitched note. “Where do we come in?” I asked Sharples.
“I want you to do something for me.”
“What?”
Sharples shifted his position. “I don’t like to do it,” he repeated, waiting for my reassurance.
I didn’t say anything.
The chair gave a rather tentative squeak as Bertha leaned forward. I caught her gaze and held it. She settled back in the chair.
Harry Sharples said, “I’ll have to tell you something about the parties involved in order to enable you to understand the position in which I find myself.
“Cora Hendricks was a wealthy woman. She died without leaving any close relatives. Shirley Bruce was the daughter of a dead cousin. Cora Hendricks took her to raise when Shirley’s mother died, only a few months, as it happened, before Miss Hendricks herself passed on. Robert Hockley is not related to her at all. He is the son of a very close friend. His father died a year or so before Miss Hendricks’ death.”
Sharples cleared his throat importantly. “Robert Hockley,” he went on, as though passing a final judgment, “is a young man of rather uncertain habits. He’s wild. More than that, he’s obstinate, non-co-operative, suspicious and irritating. I think deliberately so.”
“A gambler?”
“Definitely.”
“That’s takes money,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“You give it to him?”
“We definitely do not, Mr. Lam! We hold Robert Hockley down to a very limited amount of money. In fact, considering the size of the trust, what we give him is hardly more than a nominal allowance.”
“How about Miss Bruce?”
Sharples’ face softened. “Miss Bruce,” he said, “is the exact opposite. A very reserved, dignified, charming, beautiful young woman with a fully developed sense of financial responsibility.”
“Blonde or brunette?”
“Brunette. Why?”
“I was just wondering.”
He leveled bushy eyebrows at me and I returned his gaze with poker-faced tranquility.
Sharples said, “Her complexion is unimportant.” He went on, “We would like very much to be more generous with Robert Hockley. It pains us to deprive him of so large a portion of the income from the trust fund.”
“And,” I said, “because it takes a lot of money for him to carry on his activities, he promptly proceeds to gamble with every cent he can get his hands on. Is that right?”
Sharples put his finger-tips together and chose his words with great care. “Robert Hockley is a peculiar combination. When we refused to give him what he thought was an adequate allowance, he borrowed money and established a little business of his own—a car-fender repair works with headlight plating on the side.”
“The business going all right?”
“No one knows. I have tried to find out and can’t. However, I doubt very much if he’s going to succeed. He isn’t the type. He’s anti-social, morose.”
“Did he get out of the call up?”
“Yes. He was rejected because of some minor ailment. I was disappointed. It would have simplified our problem if he had been inducted, and the discipline would have been a splendid thing for that young man, a very splendid thing.”
I said, “He might have been killed.”
Sharples didn’t like the way I said that. He turned to Bertha Cool. “I don’t know what has caused me to take this step,” he said irritably.
Bertha beamed at him. “Using private investigators is like going to a Turkish bath. If a man hasn’t ever done it before, he feels terribly embarrassed, but after he’s done it a time or two, and realizes the benefits he gets—”
Her nodding smile left the rest of the sentence for Sharples to figure out for himself.
Sharples said, “I need information which I simply must have. I am powerless to get it myself.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Bertha crooned.
Sharples said, “Shirley Bruce is also a problem—of a different sort. You see, under the provisions of the trust we are empowered to give to
“One hundred and twenty thousand a year more,” I said.
“Oh, I didn’t mean those figures literally, Mr. Lam. I merely meant them by way of illustration.”
“That’s the way I meant them,” I said.
“Well, anyway, you’ve got the principle of the thing.” I nodded.
“Now Shirley Bruce is a strong-minded young lady, a young woman of principle, a woman with definite convictions. She refuses to take one penny more than Robert is given. You can see why that puts us in an embarrassing position.”
“You mean she turns down money?” Bertha asked incredulously.
“Exactly.”
“I don’t get it,” Bertha said.
“Neither do I,” Sharples admitted, “but that is her attitude. She evidently doesn’t wish to be more favored than the other beneficiary. She feels that the trust should be distributed equally—that while we have the right, under the trust, to vary the incomes, the underlying theory of the trust is that eventually it is to be share and share alike.”
“When?”
“When the youngest of the beneficiaries reaches the age of twenty-five, or when the trust terminates otherwise.”
“So when Hockley becomes twenty-five you’ll have to give him half of whatever trust funds are left?”
“No. It’s when Shirley becomes twenty-five. Robert Hockley is three years older. He’ll be twenty-eight when the trust terminates—three years from now. At the termination of the trust, we can either give him a full half of the trust or, in our discretion, we can buy him an annuity, payable monthly, with the half that would be coming to him.”
“So the more money that is left in the trust, the more there is to distribute when the trust terminates.”
“Naturally.”
“But when it’s distributed, it has to be distributed on a fifty-fifty basis. Is that right?”
“That’s right, except that we can either distribute the money in cash or buy annuities.”
“You have no other option?”
“No.”
“But during the pendency of the trust you can make an unequal distribution?”
“Exactly.”
“What is it you want?”
Sharples said, “It’s very difficult for me to give you an adequate picture of Shirley Bruce. She is a very strong-minded young woman.”
“So you said before.”
He said, abruptly, “Are you familiar with Benjamin Nuttall?”
“You mean the jeweler?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know him. I’ve heard of his place.”
“Isn’t he frightfully expensive?” Bertha asked.
“He deals in expensive things,” Sharples said. “He specializes to some extent in emeralds. Now it happens that a large part of the estate that Cora Hendricks left was in Colombian mining properties and—Do you know anything about emeralds?”
He was looking at Bertha at the time. She shook her head.
“Well,” Sharples said, “emeralds are a virtual monopoly of the Colombian government. The best emeralds in the world are produced exclusively there and the Colombian government controls the entire market. It dictates how many are to be mined, how many are to be cut and how many are to be sold. And no one knows exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Emeralds are mined, cut and sold. No one knows what factors enter into the decisions. Obviously, that’s a secret of the greatest importance. A speculator who could learn certain facts would be in a very advantageous position.”
“What do you mean?” Bertha asked, greed in her eyes.
“Well,” Sharples explained, “for instance, there hasn’t been any emerald mining for some time now. The government will tell you it isn’t necessary. They’ll tell you they have enough on hand to supply the market temporarily. In fact, if you have a good pull, they’ll admit you to the vaults and show you the emeralds. They’d tell you that collection represented the entire stock of emeralds—that they intend to mine some more when the costs of mining go down, but that now conditions aren’t particularly advantageous and all that.”
“Well?” Bertha asked.
“Well,” Sharples said, “you just don’t know whether that’s all the stock of emeralds or not. You can’t ever tell. You’re dealing with something big, something that’s entrenched. It’s like trading with an enormous private business—only, in addition to that, you have the absolute power of the state to contend with. It’s very trying at times.”
“Then do I understand that some of the Hendricks estate consisted of emerald-bearing.”
“Definitely not,” Sharples snapped. “You’re jumping at conclusions, young man, and they’re erroneous. The mining properties under our control and management are hydraulic gold-mining properties, far removed from the emerald belt. But it is because of my contacts in Colombia that I have grown to know something about the emerald market.”
“What does this have to do with Nuttall?” I asked.
He said, “Every once in a while I get down to Colombia and—well, I have connections there, of course. And my co-trustee, Robert Cameron, goes back and forth a lot. He has influential connections there. Occasionally I pick up a little something myself, sometimes from Cameron. Bits of information you know—chitchat, local gossip that could be picked up only in Colombia. And because Nuttall specializes in emeralds, he’s naturally much interested.”
“You pass on to him whatever information you’ve picked up?”
“Not all of it,” Sharples said hastily. “Some of it is confidential, but he—well, the stuff that isn’t confidential, the bits of gossip here and there, I pass on. We’re rather close—in a way. But he’s canny and reserved—shrewd as the devil. He has to be.”
“Do you have some business association with Nuttall?”
“Definitely not. Our association is purely friendly.”
“What is it you want?”
He cleared his throat. “A couple of days ago I was talking with Nuttall. Naturally, the subject of conversation turned to emeralds. Nuttall usually sees that it does. He told me he’d recently acquired for sale an interesting emerald pendant. He was going to have the stones reset, the pendant redesigned. The stones were unusually flawless and deep in color.”
Sharples crossed his legs, cleared his throat.
“Go on,” Bertha said, almost breathlessly.
“Nuttall showed it to me,” Sharples went on. “It was a pendant I’d seen before—although I hadn’t seen it for some time. I’d have known it anywhere. It had been the property of Cora Hendricks and was one of the specific articles she had given to Shirley Bruce.”
“Nuttall had this piece for repair and redesigning, or for sale?”
“For sale. The redesigning and the new setting were his own idea.”
“And so?”
“And so,” Sharples said, “I want to find out why Shirley took that in there and pawned it. If she needs money, I want to know how much and why.”
“Why not ask her?”
“I can’t do it. If she didn’t come to me and tell me of her own accord—well, I just can’t do it, that’s all. And then there’s one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone may have used—well—er—pressure to get this pendant from her.”
“Blackmail?”
“Oh, definitely not that, Mr. Lam! Blackmail’s an ugly word. I much prefer to think of it merely as pressure.”
“In my dictionary it amounts to the same thing.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Just what do you want us to do?” Bertha asked.
“One,” he said, “try to find out who took it in to Nuttall. I don’t think you’ll be able to get anywhere with that—these big jewelers protect their customers too carefully. Two, find out what’s making it necessary for Shirley to raise funds and how much she needs.”
“How will I contact Miss Bruce?” I asked.
“I’ll introduce you,” Sharples said.
“How will I contact Nuttall?”
“I’m damned if I know the answer to that one. I’m afraid there isn’t any.”
Bertha asked cautiously, “Could I go to Nuttall’s place, tell him that I was interested in an emerald pendant of a certain type and—”
