Lydia Read online

  “Why’d they take it so hard?” I wanted to know. “It was insured.”

  “Underinsured. You said so yourself.”

  “Did they finger anyone?”

  “No.”

  “I still would like to know about Sarbine’s finances. Who do you think pinched it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m a cop. I don’t think. Maybe you pinched it yourself, Harvey. What do you stand to clear if you turn it up?”

  “You got a lot of faith in me, Lieutenant.”

  “Faith, hell,” Rothschild snapped. “Don’t I know goddamn well what you’re going to do? You’ll sneak around with your stinking offer of immunity from prosecution and maybe throw in ten grand to sweeten it. I understand, Mr. Snodgrass, your wife always liked pretty things. These things happen. Now if you will just turn over the beads to me, the whole matter will be forgotten, and here’s ten grand to buy your wife some little pretty in Tiffany’s. Dry her tears with it. These things happen in the best of families.”

  “Lieutenant, you know damn well my company would not do anything illegal.”

  “Your company would cut a widow’s throat to save five dollars, Harvey. But let me tell you this”—he pushed his dead cigar under my face—“this time, if you subvert justice and deal in stolen goods, so help me God, I am going to nail you!”

  “All right, Lieutenant, nail me! I’m a lousy fence! You got a stinking city job, you’re underpaid, and you got to take it out on someone. Have fun.”

  He stared at me moodily for a moment or two, and then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Harvey.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You sore?”

  “Oh, the hell with it. I’m sore at myself. I’m sore at a stupid and senseless world where some rich broad can get bored with a necklace that would feed an army of starving kids for six months, and where some other rich broad can lift it for kicks. The whole thing stinks and I don’t smell any nicer.”

  “It’s a living,” Rothschild shrugged. He was on the other side of the argument now.

  “Sure, Lieutenant, it’s a living. Do you mind if I talk to some of the parties concerned?”

  “You’re on your own, Harvey. Talk to any of them—we got no suspects or a lot of suspects, depending on how you look at it. Anyway, we’re not making any arrests, not until something turns up. Talk to all of them if you want to—that is, all except David Gorman.”

  “Why not Gorman?”

  “Because you might find it difficult. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Early this morning,” Rothschild said. “He stepped out of his house, started to cross the street, and a car ripped down and knocked him over.”

  “Did you get the driver?”

  Rothschild shook his head.

  “What do you think? Was it murder?”

  “Ask around a little, and then you tell me, Harvey.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BACK IN MY OFFICE, I went to Mazie Gilman, a friend and supporter in the research department, and asked her to draw a file for me on David Gorman. She agreed, with the provision that I return the favor, and I asked her how?

  “When you get the necklace, Harvey, I want you to sneak it in here and let me wear it once before Hunter gets his hot hands on it.”

  “If I get it.”

  “You’ll get it,” she nodded wisely.

  “And if you wear it for three minutes, Mazie, what kind of symbolic effect does it have?”

  “Symbolic effect?”

  “I mean, what does it do for you?”

  She shook her head and told me that it was no use explaining because I wouldn’t understand, but that she would try to have some kind of file for me by closing time. Then I went into my own office, said hello to Hopkins, who was on his way out to lunch, and put through a long-distance call to the chief of police in Huntingdon, Texas. My first problem on the call was with Galveston Information, and getting no satisfaction there, I was connected with the section supervisor. I told her who I was and what I wanted, and she asked me to hang up and promised to call me back in a few minutes. I waited until her call came, and then she said to me, in that wonderful, contained voice of a professional Telephone Company employee,

  “I am sorry, Mr. Krim, but we are unable to complete your call.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there is no number listed for a police office in Huntingdon.”

  “Mayor’s office? City clerk? Town council?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Krim. Huntingdon is a very small town, less than two hundred population, and it was very hard hit by the hurricane. Practically the entire town was demolished, and since then, the only telephone connection is with the emergency relief headquarters, the temporary school and a single service station and repair shop.”

  I thanked her, hung up and thought about it for a while, and my respect for Lydia Anderson rose. It was interesting that both Homer Clapp, the doorman, and Lieutenant Rothschild should have considered her to be stupid. Then I called my Aunt Evelyn Bodin, a widow who lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania, who is the only existing relative that I communicate with, and who loves the theater. She was attached in some manner to the local theater at New Hope, and she had put money into half a dozen Broadway productions. On the theory that there was some community among those foolish enough to invest in plays, I asked her what she knew of Mark Sarbine.

  “Harvey, are you currently wasting your already wasted life on that ridiculous necklace?”

  “Why is it ridiculous?”

  “Anything that costs that much is ridiculous. Yes, I know something about Mark Sarbine. He’s a louse.”

  “That’s not very specific.”

  “It certainly is, but I can be more specific. Why don’t you drive down for dinner tomorrow, and I’ll fill you in. I never see you any more. I am a lonely and neglected old lady—”

  “The hell you are! Suppose I did drive down tomorrow—could I bring someone with me?”

  “A girl?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That’s a new description—sort of a girl. Well, you just come down and bring anyone you please. I’ll expect you about six.”

  After that I walked to Park Avenue, and walking there, I turned over in my mind the circumstances of the circle of death and tragedy that already surrounded the Sarbine necklace. Richard Cotter a suicide, his daughter plunging to her death uselessly and hideously in a bottomless pond, David Gorman, an old man of seventy-one, stepping out of his house and off the curb, and being run down and destroyed—none of it clearly and absolutely the product of the necklace, but none of it clearly separated from the necklace. The curse of such gems—and that they are cursed is a belief as old as mankind—is hardly mysterious; it’s the curse of what they represent, the curse of enormous wealth locked into bits of crystallized carbon, the curse of greed and guilt and much the same kind of sick hope that sent me after it now, with a finder’s fee of fifty thousand dollars at the end of the search.

  And still I went after it and moved along my own path in my own direction, and right now it led back to 626 Park Avenue, where Homer Clapp grinned to let me know his soul was still mine for the price of twenty dollars. He started a discussion with me about his GI insurance, and what did I think of it? I told him that as far as I knew, it was excellent insurance, but as far as I knew was not very far, since I did not sell insurance but only prowled around looking for what had already been insured and stolen, and that our company did not insure lives, only property. I wanted to know whether he had any way of ringing an apartment.

  “Right there,” he said, pointing to a metal board set into the wall of the vestibule. “That’s how we announce people.”

  “Don’t announce me. Who’s up there now?”

  “The maid. Today is cook’s day out.”

  “And tomorrow is maid’s day off?”

  “That’s right. Today the Sarbines eat out. It could b
e they don’t even come home.”

  “All right. I want to go up there and talk to the maid. If either of the Sarbines return, can you buzz three times on the announcer?”

  “Right. But it’s going to be a ball talking to that cooky Lydia. She got an accent you can cut with a knife.”

  “I like a southern accent,” I said.

  He took me into the house and introduced me to the elevator operator, and on the way up to the twelfth floor, where the Sarbines had their eight-room apartment, I bought silence from the elevator operator for five dollars. Short of Christmas time, I was the most lucrative source of revenue that had hit that house in a long time.

  I rang the bell, and Lydia Anderson opened the door. She was a dark-haired girl with a pair of striking blue eyes, deep, rich blue eyes. She was about five feet and six inches tall, quite slim, but with a tight, hard body, and rather good-looking, a thin, straight nose, broad cheekbones and a wide mouth. She wore her dark-brown hair short, cut freely and unevenly, and she was wearing a cotton dress—and she was barefoot. As she stood in front of the door, the toes of one foot curled over the other; it was a definitive gesture. She slouched and her face was slack. The first impression was immediate and unmistakable; she appeared to be stupid and there was every indication of subnormal intelligence.

  I will not try to reproduce her accent, except in the first few words she said to me, which sounded something like this, “What cane ah do fuh yu, suh? This heah Mist Sahbine place, but he ain’ tu home.”

  “I know that,” I smiled. “It’s you I want to talk to. You are Lydia Anderson.”

  “Yes, sir.” She was not surprised or disturbed or anxious. She just stared at me sort of indifferently, and then apologized for being barefoot. “Gives me a sort of free and easy feeling, and don’t do no harm, long as no one’s here.”

  “Of course not,” I agreed. I was trying to estimate her age. Certainly in her twenties—but she managed to appear both young and old at once. “If you feel comfortable, why shouldn’t you?”

  She smiled foolishly, and I got out my credentials and showed them to her. She became very uncomfortable as she looked at them.

  “You have nothing to be afraid of, Miss Anderson,” I assured her.

  “It ain’t that, mister,” she replied in her atrocious accent. “I ain’t feared, I’m just shamed. I can’t read.”

  “Really, Miss Anderson?”

  “Nobody call me that, mister. They mostly just call me Lydia.”

  “Then I’ll call you Lydia.”

  She nodded.

  “As for these credentials—they’re honest. I’m an insurance investigator, and I work for the company that insured Mr. Sarbine’s necklace. My job is to help the police recover the property that has been stolen and sometimes to attempt to recover it without either the help or interference of the police. In other words, my main interest is in the necklace, not in the thief—”

  She hung on my words, as if she had difficulty understanding them or getting the import of what I said. I asked her whether she understood me, and she nodded.

  “Do I speak too fast, Lydia?” I smiled.

  “No, sir. Oh, no.”

  “At the same time, Lydia, the police understand the problem the company faces whenever anything of great value is stolen, and they recognize the right of private investigators to make their own inquiries—”

  She stared at me stupidly.

  “I mean that I would like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “You hungry, mister?” she said suddenly. “I was just fixing to make myself something. I be mighty proud to offer you something.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, Lydia. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any lunch. It seems that I just forgot about it.”

  “Then you just come along, sir,” she said, in Deep South.

  She led me through a foyer, where a decorator had arranged about five thousand dollars of French eighteenth-century furniture in front of blue-and-white-and-gold walls and on an Aubusson rug, through a pantry and into the kitchen, which was about the size of the two-room apartment on East Fifty-third Street that I call home. It contained a long, black stove with a copper hood, work tables, electric mixing machines and a large stainless-steel sink. The vast refrigerator was in the pantry, along with another sink and a dishwashing machine. In the center of the kitchen, there was a good—sized table with a butcher-block surface. Shining pots hung from the walls.

  “Sit yourself, please,” she said, pointing to the table.

  I sat down, observing that in a kitchen like this one, you could feed an army.

  “Ain’t that the truth? Now cook’s away, and I’m a poor hand at vittles. But I can fix you some eggs and toast.”

  “That would be fine, Lydia.”

  She put a pan on the stove to heat, dropped a chunk of butter into it, broke four eggs into a bowl, and mixed them. She moved easily and expertly, doing her work well and organizing the steps of putting lunch together intelligently. She was an interesting woman, this Lydia, no question about that. She put out plates and silver, and asked me whether I wanted milk or coffee?

  “Coffee, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ain’t fresh made. Morning’s coffee.”

  “That’s all right. I like warmed-over coffee.”

  “Do you now, sir? Back home, the coffee grinds just never left the pot—it was a sure enough holiday thing when a pinch of fresh stuff was dropped in the pot.”

  Meanwhile she had popped toast into the toaster and was scrambling the eggs in the bubbling butter. She didn’t scramble them with a rotary motion either, but turned and piled them gently and firmly toward the middle of the pan.

  “Back home would be Huntingdon?”

  She glanced at me, the mouth slack but the eyes glowing under their deep, restless blue.

  “How come you know that?”

  “Got it from the police. I guess back home, it’s pretty much fatback and grits?”

  “More likely pinto beans than grits, mister. When we was lucky enough to get either of them. I never in all my born days fed so good like I been feeding here. Just never, no, sir. And I never had me no job as good as this one. Know what they pay me?”

  The eggs were ready, and she divided them between us. She buttered my toast for me, but went to the refrigerator for a plate of lard and larded hers from a great lump. I didn’t question her action and she didn’t see any reason to explain, but it made sense that a girl brought up in poverty in the South would be more used to lard on her bread than butter. Or did it? I tried to remember the relationship of the price of lard to the price of margarine, but I don’t know that I had ever bought either. Anyway, a poor family in the South would render their own lard.

  “What do they pay you, Lydia?”

  “Sixty dollars a week—and it ain’t hard work. All I want to eat.” We were both eating now. “Real nice people—yes, sir.”

  “I’m sure. Who do you think stole the necklace, Lydia?”

  She stared stupidly and smiled.

  “You understand what I’m asking you?”

  “Oh yes, sir. I just couldn’t never say who. They was real fine folk here. They wouldn’t steal no necklace.”

  “Would you, Lydia?”

  “Me?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Lord almighty—no, sir.”

  “You work hard here, Lydia?”

  She shook her head, the slack mouth smiling.

  “I like your cooking, Lydia,” I said. “It’s not a simple thing to make eggs taste like this. People think it’s the easiest thing in the world to scramble eggs, but it isn’t. I don’t know what makes a good cook or a rotten cook. Five years ago, I married a girl who couldn’t cook worth a damn, but that wasn’t what loused up the marriage. It was twenty other things, most of them on my part, so after three months we called it a day and got divorced, and I’ve been paying her fifty dollars a week ever since. She’s been dating an acto
r. Hell, he works maybe five, six weeks a year, so they can’t get married. They got to have my fifty a week to live. You know, sometimes it makes me sore as hell and I get to thinking about that fifty dollars until it burns in my gut. But only sometimes. Mostly, I feel kind of stupidly good about it. It’s the only point in my whole existence that has any kind of sense or purpose attached to it. The rest is pointless. There are times at night when I can’t sleep, and I begin to think about who I am. And then I begin to wonder if I am, because there’s no sense of identity or personality or anything else, only a guy who makes his living from day to day. That’s what’s so rotten about it—day to day. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  She stared at me blankly and then reminded me, “Your eggs are getting cold, mister. You can’t properly enjoy them when they’re cold.”

  “I’m trying to explain myself, Lydia. It’s important—to myself anyway, and it could just bore the hell out of you, but it’s still important to me. When I find that necklace, there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar fee in it—yes, fifty thousand dollars, twenty per cent of the insured value. Maybe I have to make deals along the way and pay out some of that fifty thousand dollars, but there’s still enough left. I’m trapped. Maybe every human being on this earth is trapped in more or less the same way, but I can’t help every human being. I’m in a prison, and I got to buy my way out, and I’m going to find that necklace. But I don’t want you to be hurt along the way.”

  “Why, mister?” she asked me. “I can’t make head or tail of all that stuff, but why don’t you want me to be hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied slowly. “Everyone attempts to erect a structure of his own personality, and mine is the image of a cocky, cynical wiseguy. It’s my defense, just as right now your own defense is the image of a stupid girl from the South. I don’t know what I feel about you or whether I feel anything in particular about you, but I don’t want you to be hurt. That’s a kind of need I have right now.”

  “You ate right good, mister—so you just better go along now.”