"Charlie Chan - 7311 - Walk Softly Strangler" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chan Charlie)

WALK SOFTLY, STRANGLER
by Robert Hart Davis

CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE, November 1973.

She was lovely, she was famous, and very dead when Chan found her. A jeweled fly led the Honolulu detective into the web of deceit and violence that surrounded the mysterious House of Wu and its surprised guests...


I

MEI T'ANG WU'S face was as impassive as a mask of pale gold. Only the slight narrowing of her eyelids and a tautness at the corners of her lotus blossom lips revealed the fury that lurked behind it. Even her low pitched, faintly husky voice was under rigid control.
"Ah-Nah," she said to the younger, slighter, less beautiful woman confronting her, "how did this find its way to the carpet?"
"This" was a tiny insect of intricately wrought gold with diamond eyes and wings of transparent amber set in threadlike gold frames. It lay in the palm of her outstretched left hand, barely covering the span between the heart and life lines upon that velvetlike surface.
There was tension in the younger woman's voice as she replied, "It was not there when I vacuumed the room this morning."
"Obviously. If it had been, the vacuum would have picked it up. I should not have found it... or found this."
She opened the palm of her right hand and unfolded the fine linen handkerchief upon it. Within its folds lay what looked like a ginseng root, marvelously ugly and intricate to the final whisker, its surface dotted twice, once with what looked to be a replica of the golden fly in her left hand, the other a gauzy dragonfly of like expensive elements.
Ah-Nah's dismay became confusion. She said, "I don't understand."
The aging screen star thrust both hands toward Ah-Nah, said, "Take a closer look."
Ah-Nah did so, a scowl on her pretty Sino-American face revealing nearsightedness as well as concentration. After a long, silent moment, she straightened up, her eyes wide, and said, "This is a copy. Very good, too."
"But not good enough," said the former film star. "What was jade is alabaster - soapstone. What was gold, what were diamonds, are - who knows?"
"But who -" Ah-Nah began, then stopped in utter dismay.
"Never mind for now, Ah-Nah. Let us examine the contents of the other jars."
The room in which the two women stood was as fantastic as the dragon patterns of solid gold thread woven into the richly embroidered antique mandarin robe that sheathed Mei T'ang's slim, still elegant body from throat to heels. She was more than seventy years old - how much more was a carefully kept secret - and looked not a day older than thirty-eight. She moved with the sinuous ease and grace of a well conditioned young woman of twenty-eight.
Surrounding them, atop richly lacquered ebony cabinets, stood a long row of old-fashioned apothecaries' jars each two feet high and half as much in diameter, looking oddly out of place against the costly Chinese cloud tapestries that covered most of the walls, leaving room only for two large casement windows to the north plus the two doors.
At the bottom of each jar lay a different form of plant or animal life, enduring endlessly without preservative since each was, or had been, a masterpiece of the jeweler's art, each exotic vegetable or root adorned with some form of insect life reproduced in mineral and metal on the base of perfectly selected and carved jade. Here were small carp with ruby eyes, scales lustrous with the rich red hue of Shansi gold, dried frogs of clouded green jade, glittering coiled snakes of jet and silver with more golden flies on their outstretched tongues.
The collection, as both women knew, was insured for more than a million dollars and this was a mere token estimate of its actual cash value in the present day collectors' market - it was, at any rate, beyond value if only because it was unique and therefore irreplaceable, unmatchable. Or it had been before it was debased by substitution.
Now all of the originals were gone... enough to represent a theft far surpassing the value of any of the celebrated Brinks' armored truck robberies of years gone by. Ah-Nah made notes as her mistress took inventory of each of the hundred or more objects that reposed in the bottoms of the large jars.
Only once, toward the end of the chore, did Ah-Nah speak. Then it was to say, "Your company - the guests will be arriving soon."
With a quick, impatient angry gesture - the first visible evidence of the rage that burned within her Mei T'ang said, "Keep them in the conservatory. Give me the list - we have done enough. Now I must talk to the thief."
When the woman had silently departed, her mistress stood briefly in thought. Then, with a deep breath that lifted the small, still firm breasts beneath the brocaded mandarin jacket, she glided to the ebony table that stood in room center, lifted the telephone handset from its top and began to dial a number.
Behind her, the second dark door opened silently and her dialing was interrupted by a gently mocking voice that said, "There is no need to call, loved one. I am here. I must confess to welcoming this confrontation, now that it has come. I never dreamed it would take you so long to find me out."
Before Mei T'ang could reply, the silken steel-hard fingers were around her throat and her breathing was abruptly cut off. Nor did she breathe again in this world.


II

DR. ERIC Svorenssen, D.D.S., lifted his foot from the pedal, thus halting the deadly drone of the dental drill, and stood back, beaming proudly at the patient in the chair. Beneath the pale straw thatch of his thinning hair, his face resembled an inverted russet pear set atop the larger inverted pear of his body, an erstwhile athlete quite happily gone to seed via enjoyment of the good things of middle life.
He said, "That should do it for now, Charlie. We'll have the abutment inlay ready when you come back Thursday. It wasn't so bad, was it?"
Chan said, "Mouth feel like boxing glove but unable to hit back at tormentor."
Dr. Svorenssen flicked the tip of his bulbous nose with a thumbnail, said, "Come on Charlie. You speak better English than I do. Save the Confucius Say bit for your admiring public."
He turned away.
Chan said, rubbing his jaw with thumb and forefinger and feeling as if there were nothing there, "Not speak good English with face full of Novocain. Tongue fill mouth to point of detonation."
Removing his white jacket, for this was his final appointment of the afternoon, Dr. Svorenssen said, "If I hadn't used Novocain, you'd feel a lot worse."
"Perhaps - but cure sometimes worse than sickness."
The need for new bridgework was part of the reason for the presence in Los Angeles of the veteran Inspector of the Honolulu Detective Bureau. The other part being the first American showing of some spectacular samples of pre-Confucian Chinese art unearthed by the busy archeologists of Mao Tse-tung's Peoples' Government.
Chan had found, over a period of more than two decades, that Eric Svorenssen, while not possessed of the most delicate of dental touches, did work that lasted. If his technique was "shoot 'em full of Novocain and then blast," it worked. Once a Svorenssen bridge was in, it stayed in. He was knowledgeable, thorough, and remarkably more skillful than his battering ram methods suggested.
Donning a resplendent sports jacket in a vivid Saxony gun club check while his pretty little Swedish assistant helped Chan into his light pongee coat, Dr. Svorenssen said, "Let me give you a lift to the hotel, Charlie."
"Too much trouble," said Chan. "Out of your way."
Eric Svorenssen lived in one of the pale pink towers of Park La Brea, less than four blocks from his office in the Desmond Tower, overlooking that stretch of Wilshire Boulevard called the "Miracle Mile" for reasons unknown save to the developers who hung the title upon it. Chan had taken a small suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt, a good two miles to the north-northeast.