Chapter VI
I
Nothing happened for four days.
The days weren’t so bad because I was busy, but the nights were really something.
On the fifth morning I got a letter from Gilda.
She was now in Los Angeles, she wrote, staying in a rooming house, and she was looking for a job without success so far. She said the insurance company was in contact with Macklin and they were sending out a representative to look at the set. The representative would arrive on Saturday morning — that was tomorrow — and would I be at Blue Jay cabin at eleven o’clock to show him the set? She said she had left the key of the cabin under the mat.
I was at Blue Jay cabin the following morning at eleven sharp.
A couple of minutes later, I heard a car coming, and I went out onto the verandah. My heart was thumping uneasily, the back of my mouth was dry and I had a cold empty sensation in my stomach.
A sleek Packard convertible drifted up the drive and came to rest by my truck.
At the wheel was a broad-shouldered, dark man around thirty-two or three with a deeply tanned, ugly but humorous face. He got out of the car as if the effect was too much for him. He sauntered up the verandah steps.
“Are you Mr Regan?”
“Yes.”
He held out his hand.
“Glad to know you, Mr Regan. I’m Steve Harmas of the National Fidelity. You know about this business? Mrs Delaney’s attorney said you would show me the set that caused the accident.”
Well, at least he was calling it an accident.
I led him into the lounge.
“That’s it,” I said, nodding to where the set stood.
He glanced at the set indifferently, then sat down, waving me to a chair.
“This claim has caused a lot of writhing in our snake-pit,” he said. “There’s an uproar going on that you could hear from here if you listened that carefully.”
I said, “Why? What’s the uproar about?”
“Our claims department is run by a guy named Maddox,” Harmas said. “He has a hornet in his chapeau. Whenever a claim comes in, he examines it the way you would examine an egg that has been laid a couple of years ago. He doesn’t even wait to break the shell to be convinced it’s bad. Every claim we get is treated the same way. During the year, we have something like twenty to thirty thousand claims. Two per cent, probably less, are wrong ‘uns, and Maddox has found them to be wrong long before any of our super dicks have had a chance to investigate. He works by instinct, and up to now he’s been right every time.” He looked sleepily at me and grinned. “Come the day when he’s wrong! Boy! Won’t I cram it down his throat!”
I sat there, listening, keeping my face expressionless.
“This claim,” Harmas went on. “Maddox thinks it’s a wrong “un. I have orders to check on it.”
“What’s wrong with the claim then?” I asked.
“The way Maddox figures it is this: since we started to sell coverage for TV sets we have issued some twenty thousand policies. Our records show that during that period we have never had to pay out on the personal accident clause.” He grinned. “Between you and me, the boys who work out the risks on this particular coverage have put that clause in about personal risk to catch a sale. We don’t reckon to pay out on it.”
“It looks as if you’ll have to pay out on this one,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“You could be right. All the same, I can see it from Maddox’s angle. Suddenly we have a twenty-thousand to one chance dropped in our laps. That would be all right if the other circumstances are normal, but they aren’t. The policy is only five days old, and the guy who took it out is buried before the policy is even delivered, and he’s buried without a post mortem. Well, that would make even a mad insurance agent point like a gun dog. What it did to Maddox was nobody’s business.”
“Putting it that way, it doesn’t sound all that on the level,” I said.
Harmas laughed.
“According to Maddox that would be one of the world’s great understatements. You should have heard him on the telephone. Boy! Did he burn up that wire!” He got to his feet and went over to the set. He opened the cabinet and peered at the tape recorder and the turntable.
“Some set. You certainly know your business, Mr Regan.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You were the one who found the body?”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah. I read the coroner’s report. The sound control lead came adrift and Delaney tried to fix it and touched two terminals and that was that Check?”
“That’s how it happened.”
He squatted down on his heels and peered into the works of the set.
“Which terminals did he touch?”
I joined him and showed him the terminals.
“He worked with an uninsulated screwdriver?”
“Yes. I found it by his side.”
Harmas straightened up.
“He was paralysed from the waist down? That’s right, isn’t it? He went around in that wheel chair?” and he jerked his thumb to where the wheel chair stood.
“Yes.”
“Pretty rough on his wife. From what I hear, she’s quite a dish.” He made curves with his hands. “All the right things in — the right places.”
I didn’t say anything, but I was very alert now.
“You’ve met her?” he went on.
“Yes.”
“Would you say they got on well together?”
“What’s that to do with this setup?” I couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice. “I have a whale of a lot to do. Mrs Delaney asked me to show you the set. Well, you’ve seen it. I’ve got to get going.”
He went back to the lounging chair and sank into it.
“Take it easy,” he said. “I don’t expect you to waste your time listening to my hot air for nothing. You built this set and you found the guy and you know the background of the district. What do you say if we pay you ten bucks a day as a retainer for technical advice?”
I hesitated, but I realized if I refused, he might get someone else. Whereas if I agreed, I’d be right in on the investigation and I could watch which way it was going.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Ten bucks a day then.”
He took out two tens, screwed them into a ball and flicked them into my lap.
“Would you know if they got on well together?” he repeated.
“As far as I know they got on all right,” I said, “but I didn’t see much of them together.”
I wondered if he would ever find out that I had taken Gilda to the Italian restaurant. With any luck, he wouldn’t dig that deep.
He stared at the TV set for a long moment, frowning, then he said, “Do me a favour. Put the back on the set.”
“Why, sure.”
I went over to the set and put the back on, fixing the screws and tightening them.
Harmas watched me, frowning.
“Would you sit in the wheelchair?”
I stiffened, my heart beginning to thump.
“What’s the idea?”
“I’m a lazy cuss,” he said, grinning. “When I can pay a guy to do my work for me, I always reckon it’s money worth spent.”
I went over to the wheelchair and sat in it. It gave me a creepy feeling, knowing Delaney had spent four years of his life in this chair.
“Will you wheel yourself up to the set and take the back off, remaining in the chair the way Delaney would have had to remain in it?”
It wasn’t until I had taken out the two top fixing screws that the nickel dropped.
Seated as I was, I suddenly saw it was impossible for me to reach the two bottom screws!
As I couldn’t reach these two screws, it followed that it would have been impossible for Delaney to have removed the back of the set.