The High Window Read Free

handkerchief about and grunted.
    “Why were you curious, Mrs. Murdock?” I asked, just to be saying something.
    “If the man was a dealer of any repute, he would know that the coin was not for sale. My husband, Jasper Murdock, provided in his will that no part of his collection might be sold, loaned or hypothecated during my lifetime. Nor removed from this house, except in case of damage to the house necessitating removal, and then only by action of the trustees. My husband—” she smiled grimly—“seemed to feel that I ought to have taken more interest in his little pieces of metal while he was alive.”
    It was a nice day outside, the sun shining, the flowers blooming, the birds singing. Cars went by on the street with a distant comfortable sound. In the dim room with the hardfaced woman and the winy smell everything seemed a little unreal. I tossed my foot up and down over my knee and waited.
    “I spoke to Mr. Morningstar. His full name is Elisha Morningstar and he has offices in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street in downtown Los Angeles. I told him the Murdock collection was not for sale, never had been, and, so far as I was concerned, never would be, and that I was surprised that he didn’t know that. He hemmed and hawed and then asked me if he might examine the coin. I said certainly not. He thanked me rather dryly and hung up. He sounded like an old man. So I went upstairs to examine the coin myself, something I had not done in a year. It was gone from its place in one of the locked fireproof cases.”
    I said nothing. She refilled her glass and played a tattoo with her thick fingers on the arm of the chaise longue. “What I thought then you can probably guess.”
    I said: “The part about Mr. Morningstar, maybe. Somebody had offered the coin to him for sale and he had known or suspected where it came from. The coin must be very rare.”
    “What they call a mint specimen is very rare indeed. Yes, I had the same idea.”
    “How would it be stolen?” I asked.
    “By anyone in this house, very easily. The keys are in my bag, and my bag lies around here and there. It would be a very simple matter to get hold of the keys long enough to unlock a door and a cabinet and then return the keys. Difficult for an outsider, but anybody in the house could have stolen it.”
    “I see. How do you establish that your daughter-in-law took it, Mrs. Murdock?”
    “I don’t—in a strictly evidential sense. But I’m quite sure of it. The servants are three women who have been here many, many years—long before I married Mr. Murdock, which was only seven years ago. The gardener never comes in the house. I have no chauffeur, because either my son or my secretary drives me. My son didn’t take it, first because he is not the kind of fool that steals from his mother, and secondly, if he had taken it, he could easily have prevented me from speaking to the coin dealer, Morningstar. Miss Davis—ridiculous. Just not the type at all. Too mousy. No, Mr. Marlowe, Linda is the sort of lady who might do it just for spite, if nothing else. And you know what these night club people are.”
    “All sorts of people—like the rest of us,” I said. “No signs of a burglar, I suppose? It would take a pretty smooth worker to lift just one valuable coin, so there wouldn’t be. Maybe I had better look the room over, though.”
    She pushed her jaw at me and muscles in her neck made hard lumps. “I have just told you, Mr. Marlowe, that Mrs. Leslie Murdock, my daughter-in-law, took the Brasher Doubloon.”
    I stared at her and she stared back. Her eyes were as hard as the bricks in her front walk. I shrugged the stare off and said:
    “Assuming that is so, Mrs. Murdock, just what do you want done?”
    “In the first place I want the coin back. In the second place I want an uncontested divorce for my son. And I don’t intend to buy it. I daresay you know how these things are arranged.”
    She finished the current instalment of port and