A Serious Investigation

Book 34: Jesse Falkenstein

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

As always, Jesse Falkenstein and Sergeant Clock have a score of cases on their hands, but Jesse is mainly interested in the murder of Margaret Brandon, a trance medium. He was her lawyer and liked her, and someone had gone to great efforts to make her death seem accidental. But with so many suspects - the egocentric writer, the young lout, the nephew in line for an inheritance - both Falkenstein and Clock are at their wit's end until their old acquaintance Mr Walker sends his comments from Hawaii - which might be just what they need to get a lead . . . 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“You know I never ask you to help with the dishes,” said Nell.

“Well, I just thought—” said Jesse meekly.

“Honestly,” said Nell, turning on the hot water and reaching for the bottle of detergent under the sink, “men. All alike. I’m fine—you know I’m
fine.”

“Um,” said Jesse, grinning at her from the kitchen door. She looked fine, his darling Nell, her dark hair never cut, in its accustomed big chignon at the nape of her neck, her cotton
housedress crisp and neat, her too wide mouth smiling. Nell was, he was aware, pleased with herself these days. After all the laboratory tests at the beginning of this year, and all the tedious
temperature-takings and vitamin shots and so on, Nell had—as she summed it up—finally made it, and as of two weeks ago was officially about six weeks’ pregnant. And feeling, as
she pointed out, fine.

She whisked around now to the stove, with a scoured frying pan in one hand, and Jesse said, “Look out for—”

“Yes,” said Nell. Athelstane, the huge mastiff, sat square in the middle of the kitchen. Athelstane liked to be as close as possible to the Two Important Humans. “At least
I’m not as apt to fall over him as I would be if he were a Chihuahua. Go and read the paper, darling.”

“Expect,” said Jesse, “you’d ask me to help soon enough by the time we have got four. As you keep threatening.”

Nell laughed. “I’ll start the girls young. I’m a great believer in discipline. The boys too, of course,” she added hopefully. “I never could see any reason
why—”

“Um,” said Jesse again, balancing his lank length against the door frame. “Hostages to fortune. Girls. So you start worrying.”

“That awful thing,” said Nell, catching his thought as she often did. They were both silent a moment. The afternoon news at four o’clock of this sleepy-hot September
Sunday had had more to report about missing little Michele Friar, six, of Hollywood. Some children playing up in Barnsdall Park this morning had found her. Dead and beaten, and pending autopsy, it
was presumed, raped.

“Big cities—” said Nell.

“With all the lunatics,” said Jesse with a sigh.

“Don’t fuss.”

“Not. Can’t I watch my wife wash the dishes?”

“Did you leave our Edgar’s postcard on the desk? I want to write him.”

Jesse grinned again; old Mr. Walters had been as pleased at the news as if he had been expecting another grandchild himself. He’d been hauled off to a holiday in Honolulu by his son and
daughter-in-law three weeks ago, and the couple of postcards the Falkensteins had had complained bitterly about all the fancy rum drinks they shoved on you. “It’s on the—”
The phone rang down the hall. “I’ll get it.”

Athelstane, who was intensely interested in the telephone, hurried down the hall ahead of him and sat on his feet, pressing close to hear the mysterious voices.

“Jesse?”

“Well, Andrew. What’s new with you?”

“A homicide,” said Sergeant Andrew Clock of Central headquarters, L.A.P.D. “Not unusual. But it seems it’s one of your clients who’s got herself taken off, and I
just thought you might have a few answers for me.”

“A client of— Who?”

“One Mrs. Margaret Brandon,” said Clock. “Do you know—”

Jesse felt tiny shock, and then a strange little pain. Margaret Brandon. You went here and there in life and ran across a lot of people, good, bad, and indifferent. And some of them meant more
than the others. A few of them. And it was strange he should feel this shock of sorrow: she was nobody of his, he had known her but not intimately—as a lawyer and as a friend, for Margaret
Brandon had known very few people who were not her friends.

“Jesse? You get that? Did you—”

“Yes,” he said. “I was just— Murdered? Margaret Brandon? About the last— Oh, damn it to hell, I liked the woman, Andrew. What happened,
for—”

“I don’t know much yet, she’s just been found. About an hour ago. I’m just turning the lab crew loose here. You did know her? Not just the casual client? Know any of her
friends, family?”

“Well, what she’d told me, yes. What happened to her? Last woman in the world to—everybody liked her, Andrew.” Jesse shoved at Athelstane, who was pressing hard against
his side.

“Apparently,” said Clock, “somebody didn’t. Look, we’ve just got on it, I don’t know much to tell you. It was set up to look like an accident, but I
don’t—”

“Much more likely,” said Jesse. But he frowned at the phone: Sergeant Andrew Clock was not a man to jump to conclusions.

“Well, from what the interns said— We’ll see what the autopsy report gives us, but it looks to me— Listen, you can maybe give us this and that. I’ve got some
witnesses here I’ll be getting statements from, and if you could come into the office—”

“I’ll come now,” said Jesse abruptly. “There. I’m her executor for one thing. Don’t suppose you’ll find the nephew much help, what she told me about
him.”

“Oh, there’s a nephew?” said Clock.

“Only blood relative. You haven’t said what happened to her.”

“Looked as if she had a fall in the tub and drowned. Only looked. She’s had a crack over the head and her throat’s marked. Odds are it was set up.”

“Oh,” said Jesse. Clock had been a cop for better than thirteen years, and he was a smart cop. “You’re at her apartment?”

“For a while yet. Echo Park Avenue. You know the address? O.K., if you want to come down— Her executor? I don’t suppose there was much money, neighborhood like this.”

“You suppose wrong,” said Jesse gently. “I’ll be there.” He put the phone down and stood up.

Nell, attracted by his first exclamation, had come down from the kitchen to follow his side of the conversation. “That Mrs. Brandon?” she said now. “The medium? How
funny.”

“Damn it, I liked her,” said Jesse. “I feel like hell about it—know she’s gone. Like that. A nice woman, Nell.”

“You always said so. But of course she’s not gone, you know,” said Nell gravely. “And she’d be the first to tell you so.”

Jesse smiled. “So she would be. . . . I probably won’t be very late.”

On his way through Hollywood, tangled in the inevitable traffic, he thought about that, and he remembered the last time he had seen her. She was sixty-two but she didn’t
look it, a little slender brisk woman who’d once been very pretty and had kept some of her looks and a great deal of her youth in spirit; she had, he had once thought, young eyes—eyes
that held eternal merriment and intelligence, fine dark eyes. She always dressed smartly, and that day she had been wearing violet and a good many garnets—a big old-fashioned sunburst brooch,
three rings, drop earrings, a large garnet cross. She had come in to sign another codicil to her will.

“I always try to remember to be grateful, Mr. Falkenstein—” he remembered her saying that—“for this ability I have, and never to misuse it. Anything like this which
promises us greater knowledge, you know—with careful study—must never be used for material gain. I am convinced it would leave me if I used it selfishly. We had some most interesting
results at the latest sitting, but oh dear, I wish I didn’t find it so tiring.”

She hadn’t, then, looked tired. She had talked animatedly about some researcher from some institute or other, and about the cross-correspondence they were getting, with two other mediums
in England and France.

Of course, Jesse thought, turning off Hyperion onto Glendale Boulevard, cross-correspondence was a piece of evidence the most determined skeptic couldn’t laugh off or explain. He
hadn’t known what she was talking about when she first mentioned it. And if anybody had asked him what he thought about mediums before he’d met her—the trance bit and so
on—

Added to his education, maybe she had, all right. A nice woman. With a queer ability, and once you read all the evidence, as a reasonable human being you couldn’t deny its validity. And
the evidence certainly opened up wider vistas, you could say. . . . And ever since that rather desperate little affair a few months back, hunting around for the evidence to prove the fantastic
frame on Andrew—really, since reading some of the evidence in print which Margaret Brandon had pressed on him— Jesse wasn’t, you could say, much of a skeptic. That one vital
important clue to point out the framer, coming from the psychometrist who held Andrew’s cigarette lighter a minute and plucked the name out of thin air.

Things happened. Funny-peculiar things.

Margaret Brandon dead. Possibly murdered. Jesse began to feel a queer sort of anger about that. She had been a person—a way to put it—on the side of life, and she shouldn’t be
dead.

And for all he knew, she was hovering over his head right now denying that she was. Or over Andrew’s head, he thought.

And very probably she wasn’t. No. By all the evidence. But legally, thought Jesse, she was dead, and if somebody had made her that way, by God, Andrew had better find out who,
or—

She had been, in one sense at least, a very unmaterialistic person. Oddly—when she always dressed well—and all the bits and pieces of jewelry—places hadn’t meant much to
her, and she had stayed on, in the old, rather shabby apartment on Echo Park Avenue, downtown. She had lived there for more than twenty-five years.

“I’d have liked to have had a proper house,” she’d told him, “outside L.A. somewhere, when I took Alex. Not a very good environment for a child, down there. Of
course he was fifteen, not a baby. Ella and George lived in Pasadena, you know—but of course the house wasn’t paid for. And there wasn’t the money then. Just what I was
earning—not enough for a house.”

She had worked as a salesclerk at Bullock’s for nearly thirty years.

She had stayed on in the old apartment on Echo Park Avenue. When the money came, Alex was away on his own and it didn’t matter.

There was an ambulance in front of the apartment house now, and a few curious pedestrians gawking at it. Jesse, grateful for a single parking slot along this crowded narrow street, spotted
Clock’s newish Pontiac parked up the street. As he got out of the Ford, the interns came out of the narrow front door with the stretcher. The body was covered and only an anonymous
bundle.

He turned his back on the closing ambulance doors and went up the steep worn steps. An old red-brick apartment house, forty or more years old, it was; this had once been a quietly good,
middle-class neighborhood, but in the last twenty years had been getting shabbier every year.

“I like it because it’s near the park,” she had said. “I find it’s so restful to watch the lake, you know— I often pop across to sit there. And the swans.
They’re such graceful creatures—but, my, aren’t they arrogant!” And she’d laughed.

He’d never been here before. The apartment door marked MANAGERESS was open, no one visible inside. There was a wall of locked mailboxes, set flush into the wall,
with name slots: he searched it. Mrs. Margaret Brandon, apartment twenty-two. About ten apartments to a floor, four floors; old thin carpeting on the stairs. Jesse started up. He heard voices above
him on the second floor.

There were people in the corridor there, down about the middle of the long narrow hallway. He saw Clock first: Sergeant Clock of Homicide, big and wide-shouldered, his suit a little rumpled this
late in the day; he was fingering his prognathous Neanderthal jaw in familiar gesture.

And how come Andrew had come out on it?—he was on days this month, Jesse thought. He glanced at his watch: five to seven. They’d had dinner early as usual on Sundays— Nell
liked a long evening. If the body had been found much before six, Andrew would have still been in the office, of course.

“I never heard a thing,” a woman was saying aggrievedly. She wasn’t protesting about it; she sounded woolly and disappointed. “A thing like that
happening and I never heard—right across the hall—why, I knew Mis’ Brandon for years, and to think of her—” She was a fat elderly woman with thin white hair and jowls.
She was only one of the little crowd outside the open door of apartment twenty-two.

A man and two women stood a little apart: the man was smoking a cigarette and at the moment looking around for somewhere to dispose of it. Finally, with a pained expression, he carefully pinched
it out and dropped it. He was a man about forty with a thin, keen-looking face, receding dark hair, black-rimmed glasses; he might be anything from a lawyer to a minister. One of the women was
dressed exceedingly smartly in a sleeveless white linen sheath and a white hat; she was very tanned and her many strands of multicolor necklace and bracelet were gay, but her face looked drawn and
shocked. Not a young woman. The other one was: young, very plain, very thrilled and interested.

Another man, little man in a dressing gown; several other women. For pretty sure, apartment neighbors.

“You’d think I’d have heard something,” said the woolly-voiced woman.

Jesse touched Clock’s arm, and Clock turned. He was looking harassed. Beyond the door of apartment twenty-two, several lab men were at work, dusting for prints, prowling around
generally.

“Jesse,” said Clock. “All right, all of you, we’ll want to talk with you individually later, but right now we’d be obliged if you’d just stay in your own
apartments, please. Mr. DeWitt—” he turned to the recent smoker—“I’m sorry to have to ask you to wait like this, but I’ll want a formal statement from you, and
Miss Duffy, and Mrs. Neyland. At headquarters. If you don’t mind—”

The keen-faced man nodded quietly. “Anything,” said the older woman. “Anything we can do. I can’t seem to believe it. Margaret. I can’t—”

“Pete!” said Clock, and the round-faced, snub-nosed Detective Petrovsky popped out of apartment twenty-two like an amiable jack-in-the-box. “Suppose you take my car and ferry
these people back to the office, start to take the statements. Jesse can drive me back. O.K.? We’ll leave it to the lab boys for the time being.”

Petrovsky nodded, took the car keys, and herded the three witnesses toward the stairs. Clock took Jesse’s arm and turned him after them, but Jesse went back to glance into the apartment
living room.

It was marked by her personality, he thought. The bright neatness of it: the catholic interests displayed. Old but polished furniture: the gorgeous-colored landscape on one wall, a reproduction
Renoir, he thought. The tall carved teak figure of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, on top of the bookshelves. Bookshelves crammed full. The primitive-hued serape across the back of the couch.
And—

“Come on,” said Clock.

Jesse cocked his head at the room. Margaret Brandon had been a trance-medium; and the room was arranged for a sitting. They didn’t say “séance” any longer, much less the
older term, “dark circle.” A sitting. There was a table in the center of the room, a rectangular fruitwood dinette table that obviously would be pushed against the left-hand wall
normally, and around it there were chairs pushed casually back as their occupants had risen and left them. Eight chairs.

“So?” he said to Clock.

“So what?” said Clock. “Oh—” following his glance—“there was some kind of séance here last night, sure. By what I’ve got so far. Come on. I
don’t suppose this is anything very mysterious or complicated—homicides seldom are—but on the other hand there is this and that about it—” he rubbed his jaw. They
started down the stairs. “What did you mean by that last crack on the phone? Money? And she was living here? How come?”

“Nice little piece of money,” said Jesse. “Call it somewhere around a million. In gilt-edged stock. Preferred.”

“For the love of God!” said Clock. “These places rent for seventy per.”

“Yes,” said Jesse. “She said it was a comfortable apartment and she was used to it. She liked being near the park. She liked the lake—and the swans. She worked at
Bullock’s till about six years back when she got left the money. By one Mrs. Gertrude Morgan, who didn’t have any family and was—um—impressed with Mrs. Brandon’s
abilities as a medium.”

“My God,” said Clock. “A medium. Trances and the dear departed.”

Jesse glanced sideways at him. “Very nice woman, Andrew,” he said mildly. “And a real medium. Oh, yes. Read some of the evidence sometime, just for fun. Might find it
interesting. Feeling kind of sad and upset about her, if you want to know, and I’d like to know what happened here.”

“So would I,” said Clock heavily. “Hell, it could have been an accident, but I don’t think so. Set up to look like that, I think. As to what
happened—” They got into the Ford, Clock pulled out his cigarettes and proffered the pack, shoved in the dashboard lighter. “All we know so far is this. What this DeWitt says,
they had some kind of gathering here last night—séance or whatever—and the Duffy girl who’s his secretary took it all down on tape, and she transcribed the record this
morning and they were supposed to meet the Brandon woman here at two o’clock to discuss it. And—”

“Who’s DeWitt?”

“He said something about some institute. Research of some sort. All right. He and the secretary land here, no answer to the bell. They think it’s funny because Mrs. Brandon was
always, they say, punctual. But it’s no go, so after a while they go away and evidently the secretary calls a. . .