Chapter Two

 

Ernie’s defection from the office didn’t prevent me from pursuing my honest employment to the best of my ability, however. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of it to do at the time.

I’d tried to drum up business a few weeks earlier by placing an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, but Ernie had been furious with me for doing so. Which made no sense, since the ad had worked. Why, even Mrs. Persephone Chalmers had hired him as a result of that ad, darn it.

Hmm. Maybe the ad hadn’t been such a great idea, after all.

At any rate, Ernie was out gallivanting with a client, and I was left with nothing to do. Although the advertisement had helped secure a few new paying customers, it hadn’t garnered us enough work to keep me busy eight hours a day, five days a week. Therefore, I dusted off my desk and polished the brass plaque declaring my name to be Miss Allcutt, and washed the windows using my very own packet of Bon Ami. I’d bought the Bon Ami because Mrs. Biddle, Chloe’s housekeeper, used it at Chloe’s house. Then, although they didn’t really need it, I straightened and dusted the pictures on the wall—pictures I’d added to the formerly colorless office myself, I might add—and repositioned the rug I’d also bought.

After I’d done all those things, I sat with my folded hands resting upon my desk, wishing I’d brought a book to read. Failing that, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to work on my novel, so that’s what I was doing when Phil Bigelow, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department and Ernie’s best friend, pushed open the office door. I looked up and was happy to see a friend.

“Good morning, Phil.” He’d told me to call him Phil, so I did. I wasn’t taking a liberty.

He removed his hat and smiled at me. “’Morning, Mercy. Is Ernie here?”

“Why no, he isn’t.”

Phil frowned, took out his pocket watch and scowled at it, which seemed puzzling behavior on his part, since he and Ernie were great friends. “He told me to meet him here at nine.”

I glanced at the clock on my desk—which I’d also purchased in Chinatown, and which looked like a little Chinese pagoda. “It’s not quite nine yet.” Not quite nine, Ernie was nowhere to be seen, and I had nothing to do. Was this any way to run a business? I’d have rolled my eyes, but I didn’t do things like that except in front of Ernie, who didn’t count.

“Well, hell. Sorry, Mercy. But this is important. I’ll just wait for him then, if that’s all right with you.”

“Certainly. Have a seat.” I gestured to one of the chairs in front of my desk. “Are you and Ernie working on an interesting case together?”

“You know I can’t tell you about ongoing police matters,” he said sternly, the rat.

Exasperated, I said, “I know that, but . . . but you can tell me about recently closed cases, can’t you? Even if they didn’t involve Ernie? I’m not asking for state secrets, for pity’s sake.”

With a grin, Phil said, “All right, then. Over the weekend we nabbed two burglars who’d been working along Sunset, breaking into houses and stealing jewelry and so forth. Last week we picked up a bunco artist who’d been trying to gyp a rich lady out of her inheritance. Evidently, this isn’t the first time he’d tried that. We discovered he’s wanted in New York and New Jersey, as well as Salt Lake City.”

“Salt Lake City?”

“Yup.”

“Isn’t Salt Lake City full of Mormons? I thought they were all proper and law-abiding citizens.”

“They probably are, but this guy definitely isn’t.”

“Ah. I see.”

“And now,” Phil continued, “I’m working on a case I can’t discuss.” He took another gander at his watch. “And Ernie’s supposed to be helping with it.”

“He is?”

“Yes.”

Hmm. I wondered if this case Phil couldn’t talk about had anything to do with Mrs. Persephone Chalmers, who seemed like a shady character to me. I was trying to think of a sneaky way to find out when Phil again hauled out his watch and gave it a black frown. “Damn it—sorry, Mercy. But Ernie swore he’d be here at nine. It’s important.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “I’m sorry,” and then wished I hadn’t. Heck, it wasn’t my fault Ernie was late to keep his appointments. I was punctuality itself. “It’s only just nine, Phil. Take it easy. I’m sure he’ll be here shortly.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No. That is to say, I didn’t speak to him directly. But he left a note for me with Lulu downstairs.”

“Huh.”

Phil and Lulu weren’t fond of each other, although for my money Lulu had more reason to dislike Phil than Phil had to dislike Lulu. He’d arrested Lulu’s brother Rupert on a charge of murder, for heaven’s sake, and the poor boy hadn’t done it. Anybody but an idiot could have seen Rupert didn’t have the brains to concoct a scheme like the one that had been perpetrated. Not that Rupert wasn’t a bright lad, but he was rather innocent, and had come to the big city directly from a small town in Oklahoma, not that Oklahoma probably doesn’t grow crooks, too, but . . . Oh, never mind.

It occurred to me to tell Phil what Ernie’s note said, but I didn’t, hoping he’d leak some more information about his current, mysterious case.

Phil transferred his frown to me. “Well? What did the note say?”

I thought about telling him that the note had been for me and not him, but that would have been disingenuous. If Ernie hadn’t wanted Phil to know where he was, he wouldn’t have left a note at all. I’m sure he wouldn’t have done it for my sake alone. Which didn’t make me feel very important, as you can well imagine. With a hearty sigh, I fished the crumpled note out of the wastepaper basket where I’d tossed it and smoothed it out on my desk.

Phil read it. “Aw, hell.” He looked up quickly. “Sorry, Mercy.”

I wished he’d quit apologizing every time he said a hell or a damn. Ernie swore in my presence all the time. I was practically inured to swearing by that time. “It’s all right. But why don’t you like it?”

“That woman is trouble,” Phil grumbled.

I perked up. “Ha! I knew it!”

Phil looked at me oddly, and I think I blushed. At any rate, my face got hot.

“I mean, how interesting,” I said feebly.

“Well,” Phil said after another few seconds. “When Ernie gets back, tell him to ’phone me.”

“I will.” In fact, I pulled over one of my very professional-looking message pads and wrote the message on it. By that time in my career as a P.I.’s secretary, I’d already memorized Phil’s Los Angeles Police Department telephone number.

He stood. “Thanks, Mercy. I’d better be going now.” He glared into space for a moment or two. “Drat Ernie Templeton.” And he marched out the door, slapping his hat on his head.

I concurred with him about my dratted employer, actually, although it would have been disloyal to say so. I only sighed and wished I had something to do.

It wasn’t until about ten-thirty that I began to worry about my wayward boss. Granted, his note hadn’t been specific as to time, but it wasn’t like Ernie to disappear like this or miss a specific appointment. He’d never vanished before in the almost three months I’d worked for him, and he’d never been late for an appointment. Of course, I supposed there was always the possibility that he was making mad, passionate love to Mrs. Persephone Chalmers, but I doubted it. Or maybe I just didn’t want that scenario to be the truth.

I went out to lunch that day with Lulu. We dined, if it can be called that, at a little delicatessen down the street from the Figueroa Building.

“Where’d Ernie go?” Lulu asked at one point.

“He’s consulting with a client,” said I, trying to manhandle a rather hefty corned-beef sandwich into submission. Corned-beef sandwiches were another aspect of my new life that I liked a lot. Mother would pitch a fit if anyone so much as hinted at enjoying corned beef, which only proves one more time how snobbishness can get in the way of a fulfilling life. Or a filling one, anyhow.

“All morning? Must be a mighty pretty client.” Lulu giggled.

I didn’t.

Nevertheless, at about two-thirty that afternoon when, Ernie-less and bored to tears, and after vetoing the notion of visiting the Los Angeles Public Library to check out a novel or two as not being work-related, I decided to do a little detecting of my own. First I called the Los Angeles Police Department and asked to speak to Detective Bigelow.

“Bigelow,” came Phil’s voice, sounding gruffer than usual. I deduced from his tone that he was not in a good mood.

“Good afternoon, Phil. This is Mercy. Have you heard from Ernie?”

“No, damn it—sorry, Mercy. The son of a . . . um, as I told you earlier, we had an appointment at nine this morning, and I haven’t heard from him yet. Have you?”

Poor Phil sounded quite annoyed. I didn’t blame him, but my mind was uneasy. While Ernie was a casual individual, he wasn’t generally this casual. Not about his business, at least. “No. I haven’t heard a word from him. I don’t like his continued absence or this unusual silence, Phil. Do you think something might have happened to him?”

“Happened to him?” Phil snapped. “What the devil could happen to him with the Chalmers woman?”

“You’re the one who said she’s trouble,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t mean trouble trouble,” said Phil, not clearing up the matter one little bit in my mind. “Anyhow, what kind of trouble do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know, but don’t you think this behavior is unlike him?”

A largish pause on Phil’s end of the wire ensued before Phil said, “I don’t know, Mercy. Maybe he’s . . . um . . .”

I knew what he was thinking. Men. That’s all they ever think about, according to Chloe. I wouldn’t know from personal experience.

I huffed, but had to admit Phil might have something there, even if I didn’t want to believe it. I said, “Perhaps,” with as much dignity as I could, and bade Phil good day.

Nuts. I didn’t buy Phil’s theory. Not that he’d voiced it, but I knew what it was. He thought Ernie had decided upon a spot of dalliance with the lovely Mrs. Chalmers. Of course, the fact that I’d thought the same thing didn’t cheer me up any. However, I determined I needed to find Ernie. And if he were dallying with Mrs. Chalmers without having had the courtesy to keep his appointment with Phil or tell me when he’d be returning to the office so that I could pass the information on to clients who called—not that we had any—I was also going to give him a big, fat piece of my mind.

After thumbing through the client files, I telephoned Mrs. Chalmers’ home. No answer. Then, truly annoyed and not a little bit worried, I wrote down Mrs. Chalmers’ address and telephoned for a taxicab to pick me up in front of the Figueroa Building. The salary Ernie paid me didn’t run to taxicabs, but I figured Great-Aunt Agatha wouldn’t have minded. She’d been quite a good old girl, in spite of belonging to my family, which was probably why my mother had disliked her.

Mrs. Chalmers—and her husband if she had one, I suppose—lived on Wilton Place, near Second Street, in Los Angeles. As the cabbie drove me there, I decided it was a very pretty neighborhood, with big houses and awfully pretty yards. I think that, during my first few months in Los Angeles, the landscaping impressed me more than just about anything else in my new home. I suppose it’s easier to have lovely lawns, fabulous rose bushes, and all sorts of other flowers when the weather never freezes as it does in Boston. Chloe and Harvey had a gorgeous yard, and, although Chloe complained occasionally about not having a swimming pool—swimming pools were de rigueur amongst the Hollywood set, I had discovered early in my stay here—I didn’t miss it one little bit. I preferred the wonderful rose garden.

Naturally, neither Chloe nor Harvey worked in the garden. They had a staff of professional gardeners to do the work, but Mrs. Biddle, their housekeeper, made good use of the flowers therefrom.

The taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of a large white house with a massive porch and a huge double door. The cabbie opened the door for me. I asked him to wait, and I walked up a long paved pathway lined with gardenia bushes whose sweet, cloying fragrance nearly knocked me over. I climbed the short flight of stairs to the porch, crossed the porch to the gigantic doors, and twisted the doorbell. I heard the noise it made, and I waited.

And I waited.

And waited.

Frowning—where on earth could Ernie and Mrs. Chalmers have gone, and if they’d gone somewhere, why hadn’t Ernie called me or touched base with Phil?—I decided to take a chance and grabbed the doorknob. It turned easily. Then I hesitated. Did I really want to waltz into someone else’s home without having been invited?

Squaring my shoulders, I told myself firmly that I did indeed want to do that, because my boss might be in trouble. In fact, didn’t I feel a little tingle up my spine? After thinking about it for a second or three, I decided I didn’t.

Nevertheless, I gingerly shoved the door open and walked inside the house. Could this action of mine be called breaking and entering? I wasn’t sure, and I also wasn’t sure if the fact that I hadn’t actually broken anything would count if somebody found me there. Oh, well.

The door opened onto a foyer-type room, kind of like the one in Chloe’s house, only Chloe’s house has lovely tiles on the floor, and this was polished wood covered with a pretty Oriental rug. The rug looked like a Bukhara to me, although I’m certainly no expert on Oriental rugs.

Because I was still nervous, I cleared my throat and said, “Good afternoon?” in a questioning sort of voice.

No answer. Perhaps that was because I’d almost whispered the words. After taking a deep breath for courage, I repeated my greeting, more loudly this time: “Good afternoon!”

Still no answer.

Well, pooh. Now what?

Although my nerves were jangling like the bells on a Christmas sleigh, I decided it would be cowardly on my part not to finish what I’d started now that I had officially entered the house uninvited, so I set out to look for my boss. And, of course, Mrs. Chalmers.

I didn’t know the layout of the house, but having been born and reared in a place remarkably like this one, I didn’t have any trouble finding my way around. No one was in the breakfast room. No one was in the kitchen. No one was in the butler’s pantry or the dining room. Speaking of butlers, didn’t Mrs. Chalmers have any servants? In a place as big as this? I figured that a maid would probably pop up when I was searching a bedroom and screech, so I stopped and said, again loudly, “Good afternoon! Is anyone home?”

Still no answer. My nerves had begun to jump about like the Mexican jumping beans I’d seen people sell on the streets of Los Angeles, but I doggedly decided to pursue my goal. By that time, I was truly worried about my feckless boss.

Retracing my steps, I returned to the morning room and began my search in the opposite direction. There was nothing in the office but a piano and a desk. A library off the office appeared as though Mr. Chalmers, if he existed, used it as a refuge. It seemed definitely a masculine room, with leather sofas and chairs and so forth. From the library, a huge withdrawing room, furnished to the teeth with expensive pieces, opened onto a vast hallway leading to a staircase.

It was there, at the foot of the stairs, that I saw something more frightening even than having walked uninvited into someone else’s house: a lumpy bundle of filmy cloth. Not that a bundle of filmy cloth is horrible in and of itself, but this particular bundle was light and frothy and diaphanous. And it enclosed a body. Even before I tiptoed over to see for sure, I knew the body was that of Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.

Once I determined for certain that it was she, I think I screamed, although I’m not sure. If I did, I’m ashamed of myself. After all, I aspire to the position of assistant to a private investigator. Someone in that capacity has no business screaming at the sight of bodies. Still and all, this was only the second dead person I’d encountered in my entire life who wasn’t properly laid out and made up and in a coffin. The funeral director in Boston had actually made Great-Aunt Agatha look a good deal better in death than she ever had in life.

Not so Mrs. Persephone Chalmers.

Lest you think I added to my list of failures by running away from my duty as well as screaming, let me assure you that I did not. In actual fact, I mentally braced myself—hard—and knelt beside Mrs. Chalmers’ body. I checked the pulse in her neck. There wasn’t one. I checked the pulse in her wrist. Again, there wasn’t one. And then I saw the blood-caked back of her head and leaped up and away from the corpse. Since I was kneeling at the time of my leap, I ended up in an undignified position on my rump with my legs spread out before me. From that position, I could see the entirety of the late Mrs. Chalmers, and I have to say that every bit of my former envy of the woman vanished. All I saw from this angle was a poor, seemingly silly, woman who had died before her time, and violently at that. I don’t believe she was much older than thirty, and while thirty sounded kind of old to me, at twenty-one, it wasn’t really. Heck, Ernie was almost thirty.

The smack on my rump seemed to loosen the parts of my brain that had been frozen in horror, and they began working again. If Mrs. Chalmers was dead at the foot of the stairs in her house, and if Ernie had come to her house to visit her before nine o’clock this morning, where in the world could he be now, at . . . well, I wasn’t sure what time it was. Maybe three or three-thirty? I decided I needed to get myself one of those new wrist-watches Chloe and I saw at the Broadway Department Store.

Could Ernie, too, be . . . ?

No. I didn’t want even to think of such a thing. Not Ernie. Not the man who’d given me my very first job. Not the man whom I’d come to . . . like a lot.

But where the heck was he?

Steeling my nerves—they needed a whole lot of steeling that day—I rose to my feet, tiptoed around the recumbent Mrs. Chalmers, and silently padded up the stairs, keeping my eyes and ears pricked. While I was no expert on the various causes of death available to a person, it sure looked to me as if someone had given Mrs. Chalmers a wicked bash on the head before she’d fallen—or, more likely, been hurled—down those very same steps. I allowed myself a couple of peeks at the carpet runner on the stairs, but it, too, was patterned in an intricate Oriental pattern, so I couldn’t tell if any of the reddish splotches of color might have been made by blood. If they were, they’d fallen in a remarkably regular pattern.

Boy, what I didn’t know about the art of criminal investigation could fill a book! Actually, it probably did. Maybe more than one. Perhaps I should visit the Los Angeles Public Library again soon, and this time my visit would be work-related.

But my insufficient knowledge of criminal investigation was neither here nor there. As I’ve already mentioned, as I climbed those stairs, I listened hard, trying to detect any movement in the upstairs part of the house. I’d already ascertained there was no one in the downstairs. No one alive, at any rate.

Silence as deep as that ought to be outlawed, because it’s terribly nerve-wracking. To be fair, I suppose my nerves would have been wracked even more drastically if a criminal had hurtled out of a room and hollered at me or, worse, grabbed me. Still and all, I had the creeps and the willies and the heebie-jeebies as I reached the top of the stairs and looked both ways down the hall where the stairway ended.

Nothing.

I glanced down the staircase. Mrs. Chalmers was still there. Oh, goody.

So I headed down the hallway to my right, determined to snoop until I’d found my boss. Or not found him. I hoped for the former result.

I suppose it’s considered good housekeeping to shut all the doors in a house when no one’s in the rooms behind them, but it’s really, really intimidating to open one closed door after another in a house where you suspect a murder has recently been committed. I say recently because of the relative warmth of Mrs. Chalmers’ body when I checked various parts of her for a pulse. Of course, the September heat might account for some of that warmth, but I still didn’t believe she’d been dead for too awfully long. The notion made me shudder, and I did a bit more nerve-steeling.

My gasp when I opened the last door at the end of that infinitely long corridor might have awakened the dead, although I later learned that Mrs. Chalmers hadn’t stirred in spite of it.

“Ernie!” I regret to say I squealed the name.

Ernie, who looked as if he might be dead, too, didn’t stir. Sprawled across a big bed covered with a crimson brocade throw, he lay on his stomach with his head turned to one side—the side toward me—only his eyes were closed. Oh, good Lord, he couldn’t be dead! Could he? Not Ernie!

My hand pressed to my thundering heart and with, I’m sorry to report, tears in my eyes, I hesitatingly approached the bed. As I did, I noticed something rather odd about Ernie that I hadn’t at first taken in: he was bound and gagged. I’d read books in which people had been bound and gagged, but I’d never seen anyone who had been. He also seemed to be out cold. I peered closely at him, praying he still breathed. When one of those eyes of his opened, I darned near screamed again.

“Grmph!” said Ernie.

“What?” said I.

“Grmph!” he repeated, with more emphasis this time.

I decided it might be a good idea to get the gag out of Ernie’s mouth before I attempted further communication with him. So I did. Doing so wasn’t easy. Whoever had tied the knot had been quite thorough. I didn’t have a knife with me, so I had to work the knot free with my fingers, and by the time I finally succeeded, two of my fingernails had broken and Ernie’s temper wasn’t at its best.

“God damned son of a bitch!” were the first words out of his mouth. Then he clutched his head and groaned.

While rather shocked at his language, I decided I’d better not call him to task for it. I could tell he was in a foul mood. Anyhow, I supposed he deserved to swear a little, given the circumstances.

Rather, I did my level best to untie the bonds holding his wrists together. “Darn it, these are too tight.” I was surprised, in fact, that his hands hadn’t swollen and turned blue from lack of circulation.

“Use the pocket knife in my back pocket,” he suggested in a surly voice.

Undaunted by his mood, I gingerly reached into his back pocket where, sure enough, I found one of those knives with all sorts of blades, screwdrivers, and bottle openers and things attached to them. Handy tools, those. Then, trying my very best not to draw blood, I slit the rope binding Ernie’s hands. I only slipped once or twice, to wicked grumbles from my boss. Once his hands were free, Ernie flapped them in the air, I presume to get the circulation back. Then he said, “I’ll cut the rest of them myself. If I let you do it, you’ll probably slit one of my veins.”

Although I didn’t appreciate his comment, his suggestion was fine with me, so I handed him the knife with only one small “hmph.” As he sawed at the rope binding his feet, swearing softly the while, I cleared my throat and said, “What happened, Ernie?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“If you don’t know, who does?” I asked. By that time, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind myself. Here I’d risked life and limb—or at the very least, arrest and imprisonment—to find this man, and all he could do was swear at me. I was not amused.

“Dammit, Mercy, what are you doing here? What the hell time is it?”

“Stop cursing at me, Ernest Templeton, darn you! I came looking for you when you didn’t return to the office by two-thirty this afternoon—with, I might add, not a telephone call or a note to tell me when you’d be back. What did you expect me to tell any clients who called?”

“Huh,” said Ernie. “I suppose there were thousands of those.”

I scowled at him and didn’t rise to his bait. “And I came here because you said you’d be here! And I don’t know what time it is. When I left the office, it was early afternoon. Why don’t you look at a clock if you want to know what time it is? Or your own pocket watch?” I turned, intending to leave my irritating employer to his own devices.

Then I remembered the body at the foot of the stairs and stopped in my tracks. I did not, however, turn around to face Ernie. What I was attempting to do as I stood there was think of another way out of that stupid house.

“Listen, Mercy, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“So am I.” I still didn’t turn around. Maybe there was a back staircase. Servants were supposed to use back staircases. At our family home in Boston, Chloe and I used to think it was fun to ride up and down the dumbwaiter, but I was littler then. These days I probably wouldn’t fit in the dumbwaiter, even if I could find it in this mansion. No. There simply had to be another set of stairs somewhere.

“Mercy, please. Don’t you have any idea what time it is? I don’t remember anything since this morning. God, is it really afternoon already?”

Very well, since he sounded repentant, I turned. Still glaring, I said, “Really? You truly don’t remember anything since morning? I left the office to look for you at about two-thirty.”

I think he’d have rolled his eyes if he’d felt better. “Good God. Two-thirty? Really? I don’t remember a thing. Is it honestly two-thirty in the afternoon?” He shook his head, but I could tell he instantly regretted the gesture. “But it can’t be that late. I was supposed to meet Phil at nine.”

“I know. He came by the office. When I called him this afternoon, he said he hadn’t heard from you, and he wasn’t very happy about it, either.”

Ernie shook his head again, then grasped it between both of his hands and let out a moan of pain. I began to suspect he’d either overindulged in spirituous liquor, been bashed over the head himself, or had been drugged somehow or other. The latter, while bizarre, seemed a trifle more logical than the first two choices, since Ernie hadn’t, to my knowledge, a taste for alcohol. He did take the occasional sip from a flask every now and then, which had shocked me until I found out he carried apple cider in the silly thing. I also hadn’t noticed any kind of wound or bump on his head.

Because I’m a compassionate person when not being hollered at for no good reason, I returned to the bed. “Do you have a headache?”

“Yes. My head hurts like hell, my mouth is as dry as the Sahara Desert, and I feel like I’ve been run over by a trolley car. Damn, I need a powder and some water.”

“You were drugged,” I said.

He squinted at me unpleasantly. “Now who in the name of God would drug me?”

“Probably the same person who killed Mrs. Chalmers,” I said before thinking the matter through.

Ernie stared at me as if it were I and not he who’d been drugged. “What did you say?”

Realizing that what I’d just said had probably shocked Ernie a good deal, I sighed and explained. “I found Mrs. Chalmers dead at the foot of that staircase out there. I think she was hit on the head and then pushed down the stairs. Unless she fell and knocked her head on something along her way downstairs, although it didn’t look like that to me, since the back of her head looked . . . well, as if it had been bashed. Not,” I admitted reluctantly, “that I’m an expert at things like that.”

“She’s dead?” Again Ernie shook his head. Again he clutched it as if it hurt when he did that.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

I pressed my lips together, exasperated. “Yes, I’m sure! Why do you think I roamed through this huge, blasted, empty house looking for you? I found the front door unlocked, nobody else in the entire house, her dead at the foot of the stairs, and you nowhere. So I climbed the stairs—worrying the entire time, mind you, that some revolting criminal would leap out at me—and I found you tied up in here.” I looked around the room and added drily, “Mrs. Chalmers’ bedchamber, I presume.”

He looked around the room, too. “I don’t know what the hell room this is. It looks like something out of the Reign of Terror with all that damned red.”

“Ernest Templeton, if you don’t stop swearing at me—”

“I’m not swearing at you, for God’s sake. I feel like I’ve been kicked in the head by a mule, and you can’t think of anything better to do than criticize my language. Have some mercy, Mercy.”

“Your language is deplorable,” I said because I felt I should.

“I know it. It always has been. You should be used to it by this time.” He groaned and struggled to stand. “Oh, God, my head hurts!”

I pinched my lips together into a tight line, but sympathy got the better of me. “Here. Lean on me if it’ll help.”

“Thanks, Mercy.”

“You’re welcome. I suppose there’s a telephone in this house somewhere. I imagine we should call the—”

A piercing scream interrupted my suggestion, and I feared it was too late for us to be the bearers of the news of Mrs. Chalmers’ death to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Cringing—from pain, I presume—Ernie said, “Shit.”

Ever efficient, I said, “I’d better go see who’s here and explain what happened. Not that I know what happened.” I looked up at my wobbly boss. “Can you walk on your own?”

Through gritted teeth, Ernie said, “Yes.”

“Hold on to the door frame until you get your feet balanced sufficiently under you.”

Ernie grunted.

Leaving him to his own devices, I ran out of the room, down the hall, and stopped at the head of the staircase. There below me huddled the reason the house had been empty when I arrived. Two women, clutching each other and with faces streaming with tears, stared down at the dead body of Mrs. Persephone Chalmers. The housekeeper and maid, I presumed. Unless one of them was the cook. Or the crook.

But that was silly. Neither of those two women looked threatening to me, although I’d been fooled before, much to my chagrin.

Anyhow, the situation, as you can fully imagine, was terribly awkward. The poor things appeared to be already distressed, and I was sure that finding two strangers in the house where their employer lay dead wasn’t going to make them feel much better. However, I’d been bred to handle difficult situations among servants with aplomb, so I cleared my throat.

Both women gasped and looked up the staircase to where I stood. They, not having been bred under the same circumstances as I, screeched again.