Even the Butler Was Poor by Ron Goulart

snatched the envelope free of his grasp. She walked over to a thick black floor lamp.
    "Helen, this all could be very—"
    "Relax, Joe." She unfastened the clasp and slid out the cut up sheets of proofs and a glassine envelope of negatives. After scanning a few of the shots, she laughed. "Bingo."

Chapter 14
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    B en was kissed by H.J. soundly, on the mouth, seconds after he came through the doorway from the garage into the kitchen. "Yes?" he asked when it was over.
    "Welcome home—wait till you see the pictures." She caught hold of his arm, tugging him into the hall leading to the living room. "Oh, and don't have a fit."
    "What might I have a fit about? Is Joe here yet?"
    "He's in the living room. But I meant because of the burglars."
    He halted on the threshold. "We were visited by burglars?"
    "I'm afraid so."
    Sankowitz bounced up off the sofa. "Ben, I think you've got to call the cops in. What you're into is not a simple, fun-filled treasure hunt. These guys—"
    "Were you here, H.J., when it happened?"
    "Only for a brief while, Ben." She took his attaché case away from him, guided him to an armchair. "I cleaned up just about all the traces of—"
    "Christ, they dumped every book I own—"
    "I haven't gotten around to the books yet."
    "This is very scary stuff," said Sankowitz. "These guys broke in, they trashed your house and. . . If they'd caught Helen they might have done her serious damage."
    "I didn't get caught, though. And once they left, I—"
    "What did you do?" Ben put his hand on her shoulder. "How'd you avoid them?"
    "I was upstairs taking a nap. I heard them breaking in down here, lucky for me, and went right out a window. I slid down the roof and headed into the piney woods."
    "Damn it, Helen Joanne, you could have been murdered. Or broken your neck."
    "But I escaped, I survived," she pointed out, hugging herself and smiling.
    "So far you've survived, but that's sure no guarantee that—"
    "Ben, please. I really am not in the mood for one of your avuncular lectures just now." Walking over to the coffee table, she bent and gathered up the contact prints. "Hush up for a minute and take a look at these, will you."
    "Make it a quick look," advised Sankowitz, sitting uneasily back down. "Then rush all these pictures over to the law."
    Ben took the cut up proof sheet. "You really think. . . Holy shit!"
    H.J. laughed and said, "Impressive, huh?"
    The first shot showed two men carrying the body of a portly gray-haired man out the rear door of a colonial mansion. The man at the head end of the probable corpse was Barry Kathkart, looking nowhere near as amiable as he did when playing My Man Chumley. At the foot end, obviously struggling with the heavy body, was Lea Beaujack.
    "Beaujack and Kathkart," murmured Ben as he slowly scanned the rest of the sequence.
    The pictures, taken at night and probably with some kind of zoom lens, showed the actor and the advertising executive lugging the body of the gray-haired man out of the mansion, down along a stretch of white graveled drive and then depositing it in the trunk of a Mercedes. In the final three shots you could make out a very unhappy Trinity Winters and a lean, sour-faced older man standing by and watching as the corpse was being stuffed into the trunk.
    Perching on the arm of Ben's chair and crossing her legs, H.J. said, "I can identify everybody but the dead man and that old coot next to Trinity."
    Ben said, "Actually we're not sure the guy they're lugging around is dead."
    "Oh, so? You usually don't rush somebody to the emergency room in the trunk of your car."
    "You're right," he agreed. "The fellow next to Trinity is Arthur Moon."
    She pressed her hands together, smiling. "The CEO of Lenzer, Moon & Lombard?"
    "That Arthur Moon, yes."
    Sankowitz said, "You know, there's something familiar about the old gent they're carting off." He came over to take some of the photos away from Ben.
    "Do you know him?"
    The cartoonist's forehead