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

Briefly, out of long habit, he speculated as to which of them, man or woman, had originally done what to the other and which had paid the heaviest penalty, might still be paying it. Then he dismissed the thoughts as none of his business and therefore unworthy of his time.
As the decades moved past him with increasing rapidity; Chan found himself getting more and more wary of wasting what his mind, if not his body, told him was an ever-decreasing margin of life.
He dismissed that thought as being miserly and even less worthy than the one that had prompted it. As in many other observations on the mystery of living, Chan's three principal mentors - Confucius, Lao T'se and Li Tai Po, were agreed that the hoarding of anything is the most useless of human instincts, since by its very nature it prevents the miser from enjoying what he saves.
Still, there was a current between tall man and ravaged lady, he thought, as they at last left the Toonerville lift...
... to emerge in a glassed roof garden of an infinite variety of Chinese blooms, shrubs and dwarf trees, set in hydroponic beds of purest quartz pebbles whose liquid nutrients made the atmosphere as richly humid as the flowers made it rich in scent. On the graveled walks of the conservatory and in a rectangular center area, groups of men and women conversed, smoked and sipped drinks of various hues.
Opposite the elevator door, which had creaked shut behind them, was a bar of ebony with gleaming silver fittings, being served by a young Asian in a close fitting, bright red, high collared jacket.
What used to be called a Sun Yat Sen jacket, Chan thought ruefully, before it became revived as a Mao - inevitably he was reminded of the old French aphorism to the effect that, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Somewhere in the middle distance, he could hear the shrillness of the fat henna-head's voice reminding her husband that their doctor had warned him never to take more than two cocktails.
Hell hath no fury like a wife unchecked, he thought, deciding the paraphrase had some merit.
A young Chinese-American woman, her face bland and pleasant within its border of closely bound black hair, her slender body graceful within its sheath of black watered silk, approached them and greeted Dr. Svorenssen warmly before turning to Chan.
She bowed, said, "Inspector Chan, I am Ah-Nah, Madame Wu's companion. She wishes to see you before she receives her other guests. I'm so glad you could come."
She spoke softly, swiftly, both as if she did not wish to be overheard and as if she wished to waste a minimum of time on the rituals of formality. Chan looked down at her, liked what he saw, then turned to his friend.
"Go ahead, Charlie," said Svorenssen. "If Mei T'ang wants to see you first, she will. Meanwhile, I'll try to keep the bar from falling over."
As the former film star's companion preceded him along a path that led to a Chinese blue wall pierced by an ornate closed door of red lacquer and gold, Chan saw that, for all her grace, she moved with the tautness of tension. Thus far, he concluded, Mei T'ang's little party had not proved to be exactly a relaxed and relaxing occasion.
Having opened the ornate door and ushered Chan inside Ah-Nah left him there. The room he found himself in was long, low-ceilinged and twilight dim. Off-white-walls were hung with priceless tapestries and lined, here and there, with almost equally rare low cabinets, brightly carved and painted on an ivory lacquer base.
His hostess sat on a sort of throne chair on a small dais at the far end of the room, her hands planted firmly around the ends of the knobs. She wore a richly brocaded mandarin robe whose wealth of gold threading seemed to flicker with light even in the half-dark room. As Chan drew slowly close to her, she made no sign of greeting. Shadowed by some angle of the dim indirect lighting, her face was inscrutable.
As he came closer, it seemed to Chan that Mei T'ang was still a very beautiful woman - until he got close enough to see that she was a very dead one.


IV

CHAN STOOD perfectly still, staring at the body of his hostess. His first thought, there in the dim light, was that she must have been dead long enough for rigor mortis to have set in. In the soft warmth of the room's temperature, however, this would require a matter of hours since her demise. But it seemed unlikely that, with a party to prepare for, the former screen star would have placed herself on her lacquered throne so early, or that her absence would not have been noticed and her body discovered long before the guests began arriving.
He took two steps forward and peered more closely at the corpse. From the discoloration of her face, he had no doubt that she had been strangled. Also, this close but quick examination revealed that she had not been dead as long as Chan first thought. Extending a tentative forefinger, he touched the exquisite fabric of the mandarin coat that covered her once famous body from throat to heels.
Although the surface of the silk itself was sleek and soft, he could feel the stiff sizing beneath. And the embroidery, intricately laced with real gold thread, was firm and heavy. It was the robe, rather than rigor mortis, that was holding he, body upright and in place.
First message from the corpse, he thought. Mei T'ang Wu had been quite freshly killed. It occurred to him that she would not be able to enjoy the inevitable notoriety that must follow so sensational a demise - not at least on an' earthly plane.
Stepping backward, he regarded the body as a whole, for the first time noted the pair of black gloves that lay in its lap. Whose - the murderer's gloves or those of the victim? Discovery would have to await the arrival of the police.
Chan glanced around the room, saw the small ivory plastic telephone resting on one of the priceless cabinets that lined the lower walls. He crossed to it, paused for moment to clear his thought; before picking up the handset. Then he punched Central Police Headquarters and asked to speak to Captain Pat Jarvis. It took less than two minutes to get Jarvis on the line, two minutes during which the room's silence grew increasingly oppressive.
"Who is it?" harked the captain's voice.
"Charlie Chan at your service."
"For Christ's sake!" said Jarvis. "I thought you were tending your ladybugs in Hawaii. Are you in town on holiday or working?"
Chan explained precisely where he was and what he was doing. Jarvis said, "Jesus!" Then, "Stand by, I'd better take this one myself. Mei T'ang Wu? My God, I must have seen a dozen of her pictures. Can you play watchdog till I get there?"
"Can watch body but not guests," said Chan.
"Do just that, Charlie. Stand by."
Chan hung up. His feelings at this moment were curiously mixed. In his long and illustrious career as a police detective, he had been forced to deal repeatedly with every variety of those human failings that are labeled crimes by the law he served. Save on the rare occasions when it could be justified, he considered murder one of the three most evil types of felony.
The snuffing out of another human life to him was unforgivable unless the slayer was forced to kill in self defense. The other two categories he found most loathsome were kidnapping and blackmail because of the continuing unhappiness they inevitably caused not only their victims but those most closely associated with slayer and slain.
All in all, however, murder was the worst...
To Chan, there was nothing romantic about murder. It was dirty and all too often meant interminable toil before a murderer was brought to justice. Not infrequently, Chan had wondered, after dealing with a most atrocious killing, if the very filth whose cleansing was his job had not rubbed off on his own psyche. He who digs in dirt seldom keeps clean fingernails.
Though Chan tried to force himself to feel disgust a faint thrill of excitement tugged at his nerve ends, made taut the muscles of his stomach. Here were i a body, dead, strangled, and a killer at large. It was with difficulty that Chan reminded himself he was not a Los Angeles detective but a mere vacationer from Honolulu, that his proper role in this affair must be that of discoverer of the crime and thus only a witness for the prosecution.
The tautness in his nerve ends persisted, causing him to shrug and sigh and, from long habit, to look carefully about the exotic room in which he stood face to face with the corpse of Mei T'ang Wu. From long experience, he knew that, if corpses had messages to give the experienced investigator, so, more often than not, did the immediate environment in which they were found.
Moving softly, silently and with deceptive swiftness, Chan took a look around. He left the gloves on the dead woman's lap alone. It was not his job in any way to touch the body. The reading of whatever further messages it might convey was up to the trained scientists of the coroner's office and the police scientific crime analysts.
He examined the soft, priceless carpet that filled the room almost from wall to wall and on which the late film star's throne rested. As he moved, something bright was reflected in the dim light, something that winked up at him out of the deep pile of the carpet slightly to the left of the throne. He moved toward it, bent down, drawn by another sparkling highlight, picked it up.
It was a golden house fly with diamond eyes and tiny wings of transparent white jade framed in golden wire that retraced each tiny segment of the insect's flight appendages. A magnificent work of the jeweler's art, one that, even there in the carefully arranged artificial twilight, bore the unmistakable stamp of having been manufactured in the land of his ancestors.
He was still peering at it, entranced, when his concentration was shattered by a knock at the door.
Chan moved to answer it but, as he did so, the knock sounded again - from behind him. It had come from the far side of a less conspicuous portal, set in the wall opposite the elaborate entrance through which he had come - a door Chan had taken for that of a closet.
He took it for granted that it was the police that were knocking and again was wrong. Even his brief vacation, he decided, had made him careless as he was all but engulfed by an invasion of a half-dozen men and women in starched and spotless white uniforms, pushing before them a pair of portable steel tables on wheels, tables laden with an assortment of covered steel food containers, cutlery, plates and paper napkins.
An immense black man rendered over seven feet tall by an enormous chef's hat said, "Jason Hollywood Catering - do we set up in here?"
For once, the veteran detective inspector was nonplused. Taking his silence for assent, the chief said, "Lay it out, team," and the room became as busy as the celebrated Walt Disney version of Santa's workshop under the unseeing eyes of the corpse, while the redolence of fine cooking filled the death chamber.
To Chan's relief, at that moment the burly shoulders of Captain Patrick Jerome Jarvis blocked the doorway through which the caterers had just erupted, backed by a pair of uniformed policemen. He, too, looked in speechless dismay at the unwanted activity, then spotted Charlie Chan and came over to him.
"For Chrissakes," he said, "who ordered the food?"
"Not unworthy self," said Chan. "Comestibles precede coppers by gnat's eyelash."
Captain Jarvis's sunbronzed countenance contracted in a wince; He said, "If that came from Confucius, I'll eat my Borsalino, feather and all."