Charlie Chan - Walk Softly, Strangler Part 6

"As you wish," replied Chan, thinking that here, indeed, was a fine specimen of a Woman's Lib leader born, perhaps, a decade or two too early. At the moment, Claudia was showing her age via the bags under her eyes and the heavy lines etched around her mouth.

"One thing more," he said, "if you can."

"If I can," she replied.

"I would like the address and phone number of the Heinemanns. I have yet to bore them with my questions."

"Touche," said the agent, rising from the couch with just a hint of a list to starboard.

While she went to her office to write down the information, Chan took the liberty of calling Gil Roberts, and was rewarded with the irritating buzz of a busy signal.

He hung up as Claudia returned bearing a piece of notepaper as well as a newly refilled highball. He said, "May I continue to use the phone, Ms Haynes? Local calls only."

"You may call Timbuktu if you wish," she replied, handing him the paper with the Heinemann information. "My phone bills, as an agent, are astronomical anyway."

Chan dialed the Hollywood Detective Bureau, identified himself, inquired if there was still a patrolman on watch at the hilltop residence of Gil Roberts. Frowning, he hung up, dialed operator and asked for a cut-in on the busy Roberts line to be informed that it was off the hook.

For a long moment, Chan stood lost in thought while Claudia regarded him curiously. Then he dialed the number of the producer and his wife that Claudia had just given him. Rosina Heinemann's ear-piercing shrill uttered a loud h.e.l.lo in his left ear.

"Inspector Chan," he told her. "I apologize for such a late call but it is most important."

"It's okay," she said. "Harold and I haven't been able to sleep since Mei T'ang was killed. What's on your mind, Inspector?"

He glanced at Claudia, saw that she was watching him and listening, narrow eyed. He said, "I'd like to pay you a visit, please."

"When?"

"Right now, if I may. Believe me, Mrs. Heinemann, but it is most important."

"Well, I don't know," said the producer's wife. "It's awfully late."

"Please forgive my insistence," said Chan. "It's urgent."

She gave in, saying, "Well, since Harold and I are still awake, I guess it's okay. But you'd better hurry. We just took a pill."

"I'll be there directly, and thanks," he said. "Just stay awake till I get there."

He hung up, turned to Claudia, said, "How do I get there?"

She said, "From here, the best route is to take Cahuenga to Berry Drive There's a short cut through the Outpost, but you'll never find it unless you've been there before." She rose again, said, "I'll get you a map."

She brought a road map back with her, spreading it out on the coffee table. Using a ball-point, she traced the intricate convolutions of the hillroads that would take him to the desired address. Chan studied it, memorized its curves, then paused to look at a spot on the chart just south and west of the indicated address.

He said, "I believe I'm confused. Is this where I must go?"

Claudia crowded close to him to look. Her scent a heavy jasmine, was unfamiliar to his nostrils. She redirected the pen to its previous spot, said, "That's not where the Heinemanns live. That's Gil Roberts' house. It may look close but it's about a quarter mile straight up from Harold and Rosy's."

"Sorry," Chan said, masking the excitement that rose within him. "I'd better get going."

"You'll never find it if you can't read the map better than that, Inspector," said Claudia, moving toward the door. "I'll drive you there. I'll be ready in about ten minutes."

She was back in less than five, wearing slacks and a grey sweater with an incongruous pastel mink stole slung over her shoulders. Chan, who had moved away from the telephone, regarded her with respect. He needed only one more piece in the puzzle to lock it up, and that piece could wait until morning.

Claudia said, pulling keys from the gold-mounted clutch-bag she was carrying, "Let's put 'he show on the road, Inspector."

XIII.

CLAUDIA HAYNES took off from the underground garage beneath the House of Wu like a skyrocket, spinning her tiny yellow Porsche around curves and up grades with a speed that would have had Chan's insides up in his throat had he not quickly sensed that the agent was one of those rare drivers of either s.e.x whose reflexes match her impulse for speed.

As they shot up the Outpost's corkscrews toward Mulholland Drive, Chan wondered if she were testing his nerve as; a strong willed woman seeking any means of a.s.serting her superiority - or was she pushed by some less obvious, less inner-directed motivation?

It was in part to discover this and other facets of Claudia Haynes that had prompted Chan so readily to accept her offer to be his chauffeur - plus the good and sufficient reason that she would probably get him to his destination much more rapidly than he could hope to do himself.

Chan also wondered if he would have arrived at the solution to the mystery of the strangling of Mei T'ang any more quickly if he had got around to talking to the Heinemanns earlier. Probably not, he decided... and there was still going to be a great deal to seek out and sort out once the strangler was safely under lock and key.

Merely thinking of those viselike fingers made his own throat ache where they had gripped it that afternoon. His brush with death had been closer than he liked to think about. Had the killer not been interrupted...

"Hold onto your hat, Charlie," said Claudia as she half-skidded the sports car over what looked like the rim of eternity. "Here we go again."

They followed a staggering series of a.s.s-curves at what seemed to Chan like a ninety degree drop, so steep that with each swerve of the front wheels he feared the rear of the Porsche would leave the rough pavement to somersault them a.r.s.e over teakettle down the hill. Then, taking an abrupt left turn, Claudia powered the Porsche up to a briefer series of curves, swung right and skidded to a sudden halt on a well graded turnaround in front of a pair of bolted garage doors.

They were in a hillside recess, the night sky above them virtually shut out by the foliage of overhanging trees. Save for the faint glow of a distant street light - again, Chan thought, recalling the similar dim situation at Hiu Sai's deserted Santa Monica establishment - they were in a virtual enclosure of darkness.

The hillside rose to their left. To their right, barely visible stone steps led to a bal.u.s.traded terrace that ran the length of a house that seemed embedded in the hill itself. No light shone in any of the windows.

Claudia's finger closed, claw-like, on Chan's right bicep. In a stage whisper, she said, "I don't like it. You just talked to them, didn't you?"

"I talked to Mrs. Heinemann," said the detective inspector, his own voice low.

"Something must have happened," said the agent.

"Maybe nothing has happened," said Chan.

She stared at him in the darkness for a long moment, then whispered. "I can do without riddles, thank you. I'm going to take a look."

"You'd be wiser to wait here," he said, but it was too late. Claudia had already slipped out of the car and was making her way toward the bal.u.s.trade that led to the front door of the house. From the fact that her footfalls were silent, he judged that she was wearing soft-soled slippers. Was it luck - or forethought? At the moment, Chan was not sure.

Three times already in this case, Chan had been caught with his guard down - once by the unseen a.s.sailant who had robbed him of the jeweled fly in Mei T'ang's bathroom, once by the strangler outside of Gil Roberts' hilltop house who had all but killed him, once by the Santa Monica police in Hiu Sai's workroom.

Three times was more than enough. He had no intention of being caught off-guard again...

The crux of the entire case, he was convinced, was the strange treasure of ancient Chinese jewels and jadecraft that had been stolen from the murdered actress' "laboratory" and replaced with shoddy subst.i.tutes. Taken from the falling Republic of Nationalist China at the time of the Communist takeover, Mei T'ang had purchased the jewels honestly enough for an as yet unlisted sum of money.

The cultural representatives of the People's Republic currently in Los Angeles were willing to pay a large sum for their recovery and return to the land of their creation, according to his friend Hei Wei Chinn. They had virtually concluded a deal with whoever had managed the slow theft and replacement of the objets d'art.

Mei T'ang's poor eyesight, plus the screen-star vanity that forbade her wearing gla.s.ses for so long, had rendered both the theft and the subst.i.tution relatively simple for the thief. The murdered star had allowed no one in the treasure room - her "laboratory" so called - save certain trusted individuals, and these only in her own presence. Otherwise, the bizarre chamber was kept under lock and key.

It occurred to Chan, as he quickly reviewed the basis of the case, that the old adage anent the Crusaders' wives' chast.i.ty girdles that has come down as, "Love laughs at locksmiths," would be more applicable as "l.u.s.t laughs at locksmiths." l.u.s.t for loot as well as for romantic fulfillment.

Certainly, someone close to Mei T'ang had arranged access to the treasure chamber during the late star's absence, had had the unique and priceless gems tri-di photographed, returned them and done the subst.i.tutions one by one. The slow theft had been scheduled to coincide with the visit of the cultural mission from the People's Republic - or had it been the other way around?

At the moment, Chan considered this immaterial.

It had been Mei T'ang's misfortune to visit the oculist and have herself fitted to gla.s.ses just before the deal was complete. Whether the jeweled fly had been knocked or jarred free of its tiny slots on the surface of the jade ginseng root, while being brought back from the photographer, or when its subst.i.tution with the imitation ginseng root occurred, was also immaterial at this point.

Newly keen of vision, the erstwhile actress had discovered it on the eve of her reception - and this had led directly to her discovery of how she had been victimized. It had also led directly to her murder, in a form so dramatic that it hinted more at extemporal desperation than at the careful planning that had been a feature of the treasure thefts.

The importance of the jeweled fly to the thief was self-evident. It remained the only concrete evidence that Mei T'ang's treasure, purchased under the counter, had ever actually existed - or that it had remained in her possession right up to the time of her death.

Small wonder the thief, who was also almost certainly the killer, had run the appalling risks attendant upon a.s.sailing Chan with the lavender towel in his victim's bathroom. It had been vital that the tiny gem be recovered lest the whole crime be unveiled before the loot was paid for.

The problem a.s.sailing Chan was - who could have known he had it? The answer, of course, was - whoever had spied on him via the silent bathroom door. This, all of it, was the corpus delicti, the body of the crime.

Now it was time to bring the party or parties responsible into camp and into court where justice due would be meted out. Apparently it was up to him to see that this was done.

His eyesight now fully attuned to the tree-shaded darkness, Chan followed Claudia's progress as she slithered, a darker exclamation point against the deep shadow of the house itself, along the facade toward the front door. There, she apparently found the door unlocked, for she vanished within the house, seeming to flow through it.

"Interesting," murmured Chan. He remained where he was, waiting for some visible or at least audible reaction to the agent's entry. But there was none.

Chan decided it was time for him to get into the action now that Claudia had committed herself. Moving with the greatest of care to avoid making any noise since, unlike the agent, he was not wearing soft-soled shoes, he avoided the bal.u.s.trade steps that led to the front door. Instead, he worked his way along the side wall, hoping to find some sort of opening between the garage and the house, with the steep hillside immediately at its back. Chan was quite certain there had to be a rear entry, if only for delivery of groceries to such a sizable house on a hill.

He found it, a wooden lattice gate that led to a path barely a yard wide between the rear wall of the house and the concrete revetment against the hillside to prevent landslides following spring rains. More important, at the end of this apparently blind alley, just short of the other end of the house, he found a concrete stairway leading steeply upward toward the scarp of the hill.

The light was better here than in the tree shaded front of the house. Chan could even see a narrow oblong section of night sky, complete with stars and scudding cotton clouds. He paused, checking his bearings, making sure of a return route should he need one in a hurry. To his right, a ground floor rear window was open. He waited, just short of it, for some sound or other sign of life inside the house. But there was none.

Chan wondered what Claudia Haynes was doing in there and if she was alone. If she was not, she had to be engaged in some sort of stalking game he very definitely wanted no part of.

Not unless he was sure he was the stalker. Chan had been stalked enough in the last thirty-six hours!

With continuing, practiced care against involuntary noisemaking, Chan bent low to slip past the open window and went on to the concrete staircase at the end of the alleyway. When he reached their top, he discovered that less than two feet separated him from the roof of the producer's hillside mansion.

It was almost a flat roof, slanted enough to let rainwater flow off it into drains in the pa.s.sageway at the rear of the house he had just traversed. About a dozen feet in from either end rose a ma.s.sive chimney of light brick to a height of eight feet or more.

Chan hesitated. Since there was such easy external access to the roof, he doubted that there would be an internal opening. Hence, if he opted to use it and the cover of its chimneys while awaiting the imminent detonation he expected, he would be cut off from immediate and perhaps vital partic.i.p.ation in whatever occurred inside the house.

At that moment, he heard the snap of a branch or large twig somewhere in the impenetrable brush tangle of the hillside above. At least one question was answered for the detective inspector - he had arrived ahead of the expected invaders. He would also be in plain view when the invaders drew nearer.

His decision taken from him, Chan leapt nimbly and silently for the roof and moved quickly to the far side of the nearer of the big brick chimneys.

It took Chan less than a second to discover that he was not alone in his cover, when he felt the muzzle of a revolver shoved into the small of his back and a voice whispered, "Hands at the nape of your neck, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d - and shut up!"

This time, although apparently caught offguard, Chan was physically and psychologically prepared for any sort of unexpected attack. He had little time even for the highly specialized disciplines of defense and counterattack without any weapon save his mind, spirit and body, that were a part of his lifelong conditioning.

But so unskilled was the attack that he scarcely needed such disciplines. Instead, falling to his hands and knees, he kicked upward with unerring savage accuracy at the elbow of the arm that held the gun. Its owner let out a hiss of anguish and the hand-weapon, a small automatic, described a slow parabola against the sky. Rising to his knees, Chan caught the weapon before it could clatter to the roof and pushed both his attacker and himself back behind the cover of the chimney and its shadows.

He whispered, "Mr. Heinemann, I hope I didn't hurt you."

"Charlie Chan!" the producer gasped. "What the h.e.l.l? I sure wasn't expecting you to be here at"

The rest of his speech was abruptly cut off when Chan clapped a hand over his mouth and whispered, nodding toward the steep hillside, "Company coming."

XIV.

HAD ANNIE WORN black-face or a dark mask, it is doubtful that either of the men on the roof would have seen her at all. Clad in a dark jumpsuit, she was virtually invisible as she emerged from the nightswept hillside behind her at the top of the revetment and moved silently down the steps to the rear of the house.

There was a low whistle from below them, followed by a soft call, "Hey! It's me - Annie!"

Then came the sound of a door being unlocked and a sudden indirect glow as the lights went on, followed by a trio of voices in words of greeting all of them feminine, all of them as easily recognizable to Chan as they were to his companion.

Claudia's husky contralto said, "How did you manage to leave Gil?"

"Unconscious," said Annie.

"You're sure he's out of the picture?', Claudia asked. "I've known him to make a fast recovery when I thought he was pa.s.sed out cold."

"A little laudanum can be a girl's best friend," Annie replied. Then, "What about the son of heaven? I thought you told me over the phone you were driving him here."

For the first time, Rosina Heinemann's shrill rasp made itself heard. "Harold's taking care of him."

"But Harold's a p.u.s.s.ycat!" cried the girl. "After all, Charlie Chan has a reputation for knowing how to handle himself."

"Harold has his little surprises," said his wife. "He won a raft of combat medals in World War Two."

"Just the same, let's cheek it out," said Annie. "I don't want Chan running for the police at this stage of the game."

"The child's right," said Claudia. "Let's check it out. Where do we look?"

"Harold's on the roof," said Mrs. Heinemann. "We'd have heard some noise if anything had gone wrong. Claudia, why didn't you bring him inside with you?"

"I thought he'd follow," the agent replied. "He started to, but I lost him. Merde!" said Claudia. "Come on. We can't settle anything until we're sure."

The voices faded and there were sounds of movement two stories below. Heinemann looked at the detective inspector, said, "We've got less than fifteen seconds. Do you think you can trust me to make it look good?"

Chan said, "No, but it looks as if I'll have to."

He pulled the clip from the automatic, emptied it, put the bullets in a jacket pocket. Then he unloaded the cylinder, tossed that bullet up onto the hillside and replaced the empty clip before returning it to the producer. By the time the women appeared at the top of the concrete steps, he made a convincing captive with his hands clasped at the back of his neck and Heinemann standing behind him, covering his back with the automatic.

"Nice work, Harold," said Claudia. "Sorry, Chan, but you were making things uncomfortable and we have a lot to do."

"What shall I do with him?" Harold asked.