1949 - You're Lonely When You Dead by James Hadley Chase Page B

weather to show the clerk what nice manners I had, and went slowly down the stone steps into the afternoon sunshine.
    I sat in my car for a while exercising my brain. The more I thought about my discovery the happier I became. It looked as if the drag-hook I had thrown out into the unknown depths had caught something big. The cream-and-blue Rolls belonged to the Cerfs. 235 Beechwood Avenue belonged to Natalie Cerf, and both were being used by a guard, employed by Cerf to lounge at the main entrance and kick callers in the neck. And in his spare time this guard went around looking like a million dollars, and kept his cigarettes in a gold combined case and lighter that must have set him back at least a couple of months’ salary.
    Maybe all this hadn’t anything to do with Dana’s killing, but the setup interested me. Kruger had told me that Mills had been broke when he first came to Orchid City. Well, since those days he had certainly got on. Blackmail is one of the short cuts to wealth and seemed to offer the most satisfactory explanation of his sudden opulence. Maybe he was blackmailing the whole Cerf Family. He had every opportunity of finding out if Anita was a kleptomaniac. Why was he using Natalie’s house unless he had something on her?
    Keep at it, Malloy, I said to myself, you’re doing fine.
    Take it one step farther. You’ve made up your mind to drag Mills into this mess, so go ahead and drag him in.
    So I began to reason like this: if Mills is a blackmailer, couldn’t he be the guy who shot Dana? It was guesswork, but the kind of guesswork that suited my present mood.
    Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to watch that bright boy take a walk to the gas chamber.
    I then decided I had spent enough time on Comrade Mills, anyway for the immediate present, and conscious that my visit to George Barclay’s place would now be something of an anti-climax, I drove over to Wiltshire Avenue, a nice, quiet, snobby road, screened on either side by high box hedges that concealed the houses lurking behind them. Barclay’s house stood at the far end of the circular cul-de-sac, facing me as I drove down the long, shady avenue.
    I pulled up outside the iron-studded oak tree gate, got out of the car and looked to right and left to see if anyone was watching me. No one was. The road was as quiet and as lonely as a pauper’s grave, but a lot more decorative.
    The latch of the oak gate yielded to pressure and the gate swung open. I peered around into a large, well-kept garden.
    About fifty yards ahead of me, facing a lawn that looked like a billiard table to end all billiard tables, was the house. It was a two-storey, chalet-style, brick-and-wood building, nice if you like phoney imitations of Swiss architecture. A flight of wooden steps ran up the side of the house to a verandah, and on the roof four fat, white doves balanced on the overhang and regarded me with their heads on one side as if they were hoping to hear me yodel.
    The afternoon sun was hot, and no breeze penetrated the thicket of Tung blossom trees that surrounded the garden. I sweated a little. Nothing moved: even the doves looked as if they were holding their breath.
    Mounting the steps to the front door, I dug my thumb into the bellpush and waited. Nothing happened, and I rang again. But, this afternoon, no one was at home.
    The house wasn’t particularly difficult to break into, and I wondered how much time I had before Barclay returned. I decided a quick look around might pay dividends, but not with my car at the gate to advertise that Prowler Malloy was inside and up to no good.
    Reluctantly I went down the steps, along the garden path and out through the gateway to my car. I drove rapidly to the end of the Avenue, parked under a beech tree, removed the registration card from the steering post, and walked back to Barclay’s house.
    The doves were still there to watch me mount the steps to the front door. I rang the bell again, but there was