“Josh will be furious that I never told him about the first letter,” she said.
“He’ll get over it,” Harbor told her. “He might not if he found it out from some other source.”
We let her stew the matter over without further help from either of us. Finally she said in a small voice, “All right, if you both think it’s best. I’ll tell Josh as soon as he comes home.”
The decision made me feel better. A month previously I might have accepted the case on any basis she wanted. But temporarily I wasn’t doing anything at all which might offend, or even irritate the police.
I said, “Now let’s define exactly what you want to engage me for. Just as a bodyguard to keep constant watch over Mrs. Wolfendon, or as an investigator to track down David Carr and get him salted away?”
This brought on some discussion between her and Harbor. They finally decided they wanted some of both. The mansion was virtually impregnable, being equipped with burglar-proof screens in all windows and inside bolts on all doors. In addition it had a burglar alarm system. To top all this, everybody in the place, with the exception of a housekeeper and a maid who slept in, owned a gun and knew how to use it. Harbor said that pending apprehension of David Carr, he, Joshua Wolfendon and Mrs. Wolfendon would all sleep with pistols under their pillows.
It was therefore unnecessary for me to furnish bodyguard protection except when Marie Wolfendon wanted to leave the house. They decided that the rest of the time I could devote to trying to track down David Carr.
I said, “Will you give me a description of David Carr, please.”
“He’s just my age,” she said. “Twenty-five. He’s about six feet tall and weighs about a hundred sixty pounds. He’s rather thinly built, and stoops slightly. He has strawberry-blonde hair, worn long, and blue eyes. Of course this description is four years old, and he may have changed since then.”
“Got a picture of him?” I asked.
She shook her head.
2
As my client had no plans to leave the house any more that day, I arranged to show the next morning, and departed with the two letters. I took them straight to Miami Beach police headquarters.
I found Lieutenant Sam Curry going over reports in his cubbyhole of an office. At the moment I wasn’t in any better favor with the Miami Beach police than I was in the city, and I didn’t expect a friendly reception. I didn’t get one.
He looked up and growled, “What do you want?”
I handed him the two letters and told him about my conference with Marie Wolfendon and George Harbor. He thawed a little, but not much.
“What’s your angle?” he asked.
“Angle?”
“You don’t expect me to believe you’re interested in this for a mere body guarding fee, do you? Not after that smelly jewelry insurance deal you pulled. Or the equally smelly divorce evidences you have a habit of rigging.”
“Believe what you please,” I told him. “There’s no angle, and I’ve given you everything I know.”
Apparently he decided to believe me, with reservations. He rubbed a large hand over his crew-cut and scowled. “Got a description of this joker?” he asked.
I passed on the description Mrs. Wolfendon had given me, and forestalled his next question by telling him no pictures were available.
“We’ll send a man out to interview her,” he said. “Put out a want on David Carr. Stake out the Wolfendon home. Any other suggestions?”
“Might check with the Washington, Missouri, police,” I said. “He has folks there. Possibly they have his Miami address.”
“Yeah,” Curry said. “We’ll try it for size. Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Just that Mrs. Wolfendon wants her letters back. She wants to show them to her husband.”
The lieutenant frowned, but he let me have them back. However, he admonished me to hang onto them, as they’d be needed as evidence when and if David Carr was picked up.
3
The next morning I arrived at the Wolfendon home at nine sharp. The maid showed me into a dinette where Joshua Wolfendon and his wife were having breakfast. George Harbor wasn’t present.
Joshua Wolfendon was bronzed and still muscular at fifty, with a full head of graying hair and a relatively unlined face. He seemed a little petulant about being brought into his wife’s confidence at such a late date, but otherwise he was pleasant enough.
“Sit down, Mr. Stander,” he said after introductions. “Had breakfast?”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just take coffee.”
He told the maid to bring me some coffee.
I gathered from the ensuing conversation that Marie had told him the whole story when he returned from a yacht race the previous afternoon. Apparently it upset him, but he had gotten over it, as George Harbor had predicted he would.
I learned that a police officer had interviewed Mrs. Wolfendon shortly after her husband had arrived home, and she had repeated the same story she told me. The officer had told them that the house would be kept under surveillance, and suggested that Mrs. Wolfendon go out as little as possible, even when accompanied by me as a bodyguard.
Wolfendon asked if I still had the letters, and I showed them to him. He scowled at the reference to himself as a notorious and ancient playboy, but made no comment. When he handed them back, I put them in my pocket.
“I think the arrangements you made with my wife yesterday are adequate, Stander,” he said. “With George and me in the house, there’s no point in your staying here nights. My room is right across the hall from Marie’s, and I could get to her in seconds if she yelled. I’m a dead shot with a pistol. As a matter of fact, Marie is, too. Taught her myself. And all of us will keep pistols in our rooms for the time being. Not that I think we’ll need them. It would take a professional burglar to get in this house.”
A phone bell sounded. Without getting up, Marie reached across to lift an extension phone from a wall nook near the table.
“Wolfendon residence,” she said.
Her husband and I could clearly hear the low-toned voice of the caller. “Marie?”
“Yes.”
“David, honey.”
Marie drew in her breath in a gasp.
“I’m coming to get you, Marie,” the voice droned on. “Not this minute, but soon. Don’t think you can escape by staying in that prison you live in. I can break any lock ever invented, and short any burglar alarm system there is. And don’t think the police you have around your house will protect you. I saw them there. I walked right past them an hour ago. I’ll walk right past them again when I come for you. Expect me.”
A click sounded and Marie slowly hung up the phone. “My God!” she said. “He really means to kill me.”
Before either Wolfendon or I could say anything, George Harbor burst into the kitchen. “I heard it,” he said excitedly. “Marie, I picked up the extension in my office at the same time you answered.”
Then he saw me and gave me a nervous nod of recognition. He turned to Wolfendon. “This Carr must be a maniac, Josh. Could you hear what he said?”
Wolfendon said, “I heard it.”
“Maybe he is a lock expert. Maybe he does know how to short the burglar alarm system. And maybe he could walk past the police. I think we’d better reconsider and have Stander move in here. There’s plenty of room.”
Wolfendon looked at me and I shrugged. He looked at his wife and she said in a low voice, “I think I’d feel safer. If David did manage to break in somehow, there’d be nobody to stop him until he got to the top of the stairs. Mr. Stander could sleep in the downstairs bedroom and act as a sort of first line of defense.”