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“That was done. The corporation was permitted to endorse a note, which was signed by George Tustin Bishop, with the understanding that every penny of the proceeds would go into the treasury of the corporation.”

“How much was the note?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then a peculiar thing happened. Something about the name appealed to the investing public. I understand the solicitation was by mail, but the public reacted very favorably. The records indicate that some fifty percent of the treasury stock was sold to the public under the conditions laid down by the commissioner of corporations.”

“That was a departure from the usual pattern of the Bishop corporations?”

“Yes, sir. Very much so.”

“And then what happened?”

“Then,” Billings said, “Bishop flatly refused to meet the note. He drew out every cent of money he had in our bank and stated he had no funds with which to meet that note, and that we would necessarily call upon the corporation as an endorser to make good the amount of the loan.”

“What had happened to the money in the treasury of the corporation?”

“It had been spent for development work. Now, then, Mr. Lam, I dislike very much to go into this because it is something that would ruin us if it became public.”

“What?”

“The bank made a very extensive investigation through certain channels which are open to a bank, which would not be open to the general public, and concerning which I do not want to make any statements.”

“All right, what was the result of the investigations?”

“Ore was being shipped from the Skyhook mine and sent in flat cars to the George T. Bishop Smelting Corporation.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then comes the incredible part of the whole thing,” Billings said. “The ore was being smashed up into fine particles and used to grade roads, for earth fills, and used as ballast.”

“Ore was shipped down out of the mountains, smashed up, and then transported by freight to wind up as mere crushed rock?”

“Exactly.”

I said, “There must be a mistake somewhere.”

“There is no mistake. We have found that the same procedure was followed in virtually every one of the mines where any development work was done. Ore was shipped down to the smelting and refining company, and by the smelting and refining company was converted into road ballast.”

“In other words, Bishop was a swindler.”

“I’m not making that as a flat accusation. Certainly there is something going on that is definitely far from the normal development of a business venture.”

“What would the smelting company pay for this ore which it converted into road ballast?”

“Various amounts,” Billings said, “until the mining corporation had received enough to repay the loan which it had made; then the mining company became inactive, there were no further shipments of ore, the loan was paid, and the company was virtually dissolved, with nearly all of the stockholders exercising the option which had been given them by the commissioner of corporations to withdraw the amount of money which had been put in for their stock and had been held in escrow for a period of a year.”

“You went to the commissioner of corporations, of course?”

“No, sir. I did not.”

“Why?”

“Because the bank was involved in the transaction to a certain extent. Perhaps we should have exercised a closer scrutiny over the affairs of these corporations, but because Mr. Bishop customarily kept a very large balance in our bank, and because his various accounts were quite active, we took him at face value.”

“But when you found out — then what?”

“We asked for an explanation from Mr. Bishop.”

“Did you let him know what you had found out?”

“We found out a lot of this after — well, too late. But Bishop knew we were making the investigation.”

“You had found out some of this before Tuesday?”

“Yes. By last Tuesday we knew enough to put us very much on guard, to make us rather suspicious.”

“And you had asked Bishop to meet with you and explain matters?”

“Yes.”

“You had asked him to meet with you when?”

Billings coughed.

“When?”

“On Tuesday night.”

“Where?”

“At my house.”

“All right. Now let’s go back to the boat. Your son found Bishop’s body on the boat. What did he do?”

“He realized that fortuitously no one knew he was aboard the yacht.”

“What time was all this?”

“It was well after dark.”

“So what did he do?”

“He undressed. You see, we each of us have a stateroom on the yacht and each stateroom has a closet containing a lot of clothes. Therefore my son was able to divest himself of his entire wearing-apparel without creating any attention.”

“Then what?”

“Then he put on a pair of bathing trunks, put the key to the automobile in the pocket of his bathing trunks, locked up the yacht, slipped over the side, and swam out into the channel. Then, swimming quietly, he rounded the premises of the yacht club and managed to gain one of the bathing beaches, where he came ashore, apparently a man who had merely been out for an evening swim. He walked boldly past the few people who were, for the most part, sitting in parked automobiles looking out over the water, and went to the place where he had left his car. He used the key to turn on the ignition. He came home, took a shower, dried out his wet bathing-suit, and put on his clothes.”

“Then what?”

“I had been out at a business conference and unfortunately he had to wait for me to come home.”

“Go on.”

“It was almost eleven o’clock when I arrived.”

“So what did you do?”

“My son told me what had happened. I warned him that he had made a very poor decision, that he should have notified the police immediately.”

“I presume then that you called the police?”

“Not the police. I decided to let the caretaker at the yacht club discover the body.”

“So what did you do?”

“I called the caretaker and asked him to go aboard my yacht and get a briefcase which was in the main cabin and send it to me by taxicab.”

“What happened?”

“I presumed, of course, that when he went to the main cabin he would find the body and report to the police.”

“He didn’t do so?”

“The body wasn’t there.”

“How do you know?”

“The night watchman sent me the briefcase by taxicab, just as I had instructed him. That caused me grave concern. I questioned my son very carefully to see if there was any chance he had been aboard another yacht, or if he had imagined any of the things he had found. Then the next morning I personally went down and boarded the yacht and made an inspection.”

“What did you find?”

“There was no indication that there had ever been a body in the cabin of the yacht. No one was there. Things were just as I had left them.”

“How did the night watchman get aboard the yacht?”

“He has a key. It is not mandatory that owners leave extra keys in the safe at the yacht club, but the management prefers to have them do so. Then, in case of fire, or in case of any urgent necessity, the caretakers can get aboard the yachts and move them.”

“Then what happened?”

“My son was worried because we didn’t know just what had happened. He decided it would be a good plan for him to have an alibi for Tuesday night.”

“You had one?”

“Oh, yes. I was in conference with a business associate. One of the directors of the bank.”

“Give me his name and address.”

“Surely, Mr. Lam, you don’t doubt my—”

“I’m not doubting. I’m investigating. What’s his name and address?”

“Waldo W. Jefferson. He’s one of the directors of the bank. He has offices in the bank building.”

“How about guests that go aboard yachts?” I asked. “Are they registered?”

“No, just the owner registers, but the number of guests is noted. That is, the registration will show that the owner boarded the yacht, that he had two guests, three guests, four guests, or whatever the case might have been.”

I said, “All right, let’s go down to the yacht. You can register me as a guest.”

“But I have already gone through the yacht carefully, Mr. Lam. There’s no evidence there that—”

“Perhaps no evidence that you can see, but if the body of a dead man was once aboard your yacht and the police have any reason to suspect that such was the case, you’re apt to find there’s a lot of evidence they’ll uncover which you never knew existed.”

An expression of smug satisfaction flitted across his face. “There is nothing, Mr. Lam.”

“Perhaps.”

“Just what do you expect to find, Mr. Lam? What do you want to look for?”

I said, “I once attended one of Frances G. Lee’s seminars on homicide investigation.”

“I dare say you have proper professional qualifications, Mr. Lam. I fail to see why we should discuss them at this time, however.”

I went on as though there had been no interruption. “They called for a volunteer to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves. They had a test tube of human blood. They put blood smears on his hands and arms.”

“There have been no blood smears on my hands or arms,” he said with dignity.

“And then,” I said, “they told him to go wash the blood off, to use soap and water, to scrub, to do everything he could to get rid of the bloodstains.”

“Well, it washed right off, didn’t it?”

“Sure.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“They went on with the class.”

“You mean they simply had him put the blood on and then wash it off?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t see your point, Lam.”

“Then the next day they asked him if he’d taken a bath, and he said he had. They asked him if he’d scrubbed his hands and arms particularly well — devoting an unusual amount of attention to them — and he admitted that he had, that he felt they might be going to play some trick on him so he’d made a good job of it.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing.”

“Lam, what are you getting at?”

“The next day they did the same thing,” I said.

“He’d taken another bath?”

“Yes.”

“And scrubbed his hands and arms?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Lam, I don’t see what you’re getting at. You’re creating a divergence and—”

“And then,” I said, “they rolled up his sleeves, put on a reagent, and every place where the blood had touched his arms there was a dark-blue stain.”

John Carver Billings sat as perfectly quiet as a mouse on a pantry shelf when a door opens. I could see him digesting that information and he didn’t like it.

Abruptly he straightened in his chair, said in that calm, precise, close-clipped banker’s voice of his, “Very well, Mr. Lam, we will now go to the yacht.”

Chapter Thirteen

Floating palaces of teakwood and mahogany, glistening with varnish, dotted with polished brass, rocked quietly at their moorings, waiting patiently for the weekends when their owners would take them out for a few hours’ recreation on the waters of the bay, or, perhaps in the case of the more venturesome, out into the pounding whitecaps beyond the heads and through to the long rollers of the surging ocean.

Some of them were so large they would require a crew to operate them; others were of a modern construction with controls so ingeniously arranged that one man could, in case of necessity, handle the boat.

It was as Billings had told me. The yacht club was virtually inaccessible to any but members. The high, steelmeshed fence was surmounted with an inclined barrier of heavy barbed wire, and at the gate there was a balanced platform. When we stepped on that a buzzer sounded, and the night gateman who was on duty gave Billings a respectful “Good evening, sir,” and handed him a book. Billings wrote his name, and, in a separate column next to the name, added the information, One guest. The watchman checked the time.

He wanted to say something else, but Billings cut him off with a curt “Some other time, Bob,” and piloted me down the long inclined ramp to the floats where we could hear the gentle lap of water and see the shimmering reflection of lights.

Our feet on the float gave back booming echoes from the water below. There was a grim, eerie atmosphere clinging to the place. Neither one of us said anything.

We came to a trim white hull surmounted by teakwood and brass. The upper cabin had square windows of heavy plate glass. There was a line of conventional round ports on the lower level.

“This is it,” Billings said. “Please keep on the mat and don’t step on the deck with those shoes. I’ll open up the cabin.”

We climbed aboard. Billings fitted a key to a padlock. A sliding panel opened up a companionway where rubber treads were bound with glistening brass. A light switch flooded a cabin into brilliance.

“It was here,” Billings said.

I soaked up the luxurious atmosphere of the cabin. It fairly reeked with money.

My feet moved over the carpet. I might have been walking on thick moss in a virgin forest. The color scheme of that cabin had been carefully carried out even to the last thread. Expensive draperies masked the interior of the cabin from the curious outer world. Chairs, books, a fine radio — every creature comfort that could possibly be packed into the confines of a yacht’s cabin.

“Where was the body?” I asked.

“As nearly as I can gather from what my son told me, it was lying here. You see, there isn’t the faintest stain in the carpet.” I got down on my hands and knees.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “There isn’t the faintest stain in the carpet.”

I kept crawling around. I saw that Billings was getting irritated.

“Not even the faintest stain in the carpet,” I agreed with him at length.

“You could have taken my word for that,” he said.

“There isn’t any stain in the carpet,” I went on, “because the carpet is brand new and has only recently been installed.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” he demanded. “This carpet has been here ever since—”

I shook my head and moved one of the chairs about an inch. The place where the legs of the chair had made an indentation in the deep carpet were plainly visible.

“The carpet,” I said, “has been here ever since the chair was placed there.”

“This is a very fine carpet. It returns to its original position very rapidly. You will find that—”

“I know,” I said, “but it’s impossible to completely elim- inate the marks of the chairs. You’ll notice this same thing about every one of the chairs. What’s more, you’ll notice there’s a photograph of you sitting in the cabin, reading.” I indicated a framed photograph. “You can’t tell the color of the carpet from that picture, but you certainly can see the pattern. It isn’t this one.”

There was dismay on his face as he looked at the picture.

I walked around the cabin, looking in the dark corners, running my fingers around inaccessible places.

“You’ll notice right here, Mr. Billings, there’s a very faint smear here where something has been wiped with what evidently was a damp rag and — Wait a minute, what’s this?”

“What?”

“Over here in the corner, about two feet up,” I said.

“I hadn’t noticed it,” he told me, bending down.

“I’m satisfied you haven’t, but you’d better notice it now.”

“What is it?”

I said, “It’s a small, round hole with a very peculiar dark ring around the outer perimeter. It’s about the size of a thirty-eight-caliber bullet, and there’s a very, very faint reddish-brown streak here which looks as though it might be a piece of animal tissue which was adhering to the bullet and which was carried partially into the hole made by the bullet.”

John Carver Billings looked at me in silence.

“And now,” I went on casually, “if, as you said, you had an appointment with Bishop for Tuesday night at your house, how did it happen you went over to spend the evening with Mr. Waldo W. Jefferson? How did you know Mr. Bishop wasn’t going to be able to keep his appointment at your house?”

Billings looked as though I’d thrown a bucket of cold salt water in his face. He gave one gasp, then simply stood there, jaw sagging.

And in that instant I became conscious of sound.

It was a peculiar pounding sound, as though made by many feet. Very plainly the hum of voices became audible, voices which seemed to be right outside the yacht, but which were muffled by the walls of the cabin so that they registered only as undertones of rumbling conversation in heavy masculine voices.

John Carver Billings climbed the steps and slid back the hatch. “Who are you?” a voice asked.

Before Billings had a chance to answer, I heard the voice of the gateman saying, “That’s Mr. Billings, sir. John Carver Billings. He came aboard just a few moments before you arrived.”

“Going some place, buddy?” a heavy voice asked.

“Mr. John Carver Billings, the banker,” the watchman’s voice said.

The heavy voice said, “Oh.” The tone was deferential.

Steps moved on. The watchman remained behind to explain. “There’s been a bit of trouble, sir. I wanted to tell you about it but you didn’t have the time to listen. There seems to have been a body found aboard the Effie A. The night watchman was attracted by a very evident disagreeable odor. The owner of the boat, you know, is away on a vacation. It seems that someone forced the lock and — I’m afraid it’s going to make for a nasty bit of publicity, sir, but there was nothing the club could do except notify the police.”

“I see,” Billings said. “The owner of the boat isn’t here?”

“No, sir. He’s on a trip to Europe. The boat’s been closed up and—”

“No one’s borrowed it?”

“No, sir. No one.”

John Carver Billings said impatiently, “Well, go ahead, don’t let me interfere. See that the police are given every assistance.” He slammed the sliding panel shut and came back down to the cabin.

His skin was the color of stale library paste. He avoided my eyes.

I said, “I’m going to have to do a lot of work and I’m going to have to do it fast. I want some money.”

He pulled a wallet from his pocket, opened it, and started taking out hundred-dollar bills.

I said, “Your son stopped payment of a check that was given the partnership in Los Angeles, and—”

“I’m very, very sorry about that. That’s a matter which will be rectified at once, Mr. Lam. I’ll instruct the bank to—”

“Don’t instruct the bank to do anything,” I said. “Payment of the check was stopped. Let it stay that way. But you can add five hundred dollars to what you’re giving me as expense money.”

“Expense money?”

“That’s right. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of expenses. You can add the five hundred dollars onto the other.”

He merely nodded and kept on dishing out folding money.

Looking at the size of the wallet I knew then that he’d carefully prepared for just such an emergency. This was getaway money, and there was a terrific wad of it. That, the bullet hole in the yacht, and the new carpet told me just about all I needed to know.

Chapter Fourteen

I’d once done a favor for this broker, a favor he couldn’t very well forget, so when I called him at eight o’clock in the morning he was eager to see that my business received top priority.

I said, “I have thirteen hundred and fifty dollars in cash.”

“Yes, Lam.”

“I want you to invest three hundred and fifty dollars in stock of the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate.”

“Never heard of it, Lam.”

“Find out about it, hear about it. Locate the stock. I want it. I want it fast.”

“Yes. And the other thousand dollars?”

“The three hundred and fifty dollars,” I said, “goes in the name of Elsie Brand. I want one thousand dollars invested in the same stock and that will be in the name of Cool and Lam, a copartnership. I want you to locate that stock, and I want you to buy it the first thing this morning, and—”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m looking through a card index now — Wait a minute, here it is. That was one of those mail-order promotion things, Lam. It may take a little while to find out who the stockholders are, and—”

“There isn’t that much time,” I said. “It cleared through the corporation commission. The stock had to be placed in escrow for a year, during which time the purchasers of stock could back out if they wanted to, and during the year certain development work had to be made, otherwise the sales were invalid at the option of the purchaser.”

“Well?”

I said, “Get in touch with the escrow holder. Say that you’re in a position to offer his clients a reasonable profit, and that you’re looking for information. Don’t tell him who for or what. Tell him you can get that information either the easy way or the hard way. Then start working on the long-distance telephone and buy up stock.”

“How high shall I go?”

“Up to twice the par value. If you can’t get it for that, quit. And remember, there’s a note of the corporation that’s outstanding. The bank hasn’t done anything about it because Bishop was on that note. Now he’s dead, they’ll have to do something about it. The escrow holder should know that. The stockholders should know it. If they don’t, see that they do.”

“All right,” he promised. “I’ll get busy.”

“Real busy,” I insisted.

“Right now.”

I went back to the morning newspapers. They featured the story in big headlines.

Mining Man’s Body Found on Millionaire’s Yacht.

It was a natural, and the crime reporters really went to town on it.

Erickson B. Payne, the bachelor millionaire owner of the yacht, was on a vacation in Europe. There could be no question but that he had been out of the United States for the past four weeks, and, aside from the one duplicate key which was kept in the safe at the yacht club, there were no keys to his yacht. However, the police investigation disclosed that the padlock on the boat had evidently been smashed, and a new padlock had then been placed on the yacht so that the night watchman, in making his rounds, would not notice anything unusual.

Police acted on the theory that the mining man had been murdered at some other point and the body had then been transported to the yacht club, but how the body could have reached the yacht club was a major mystery.

I read the accounts for the third time while I waited in the office of Hartley L. Channing.

It was a nice office, with his name on the frosted glass, Hartley L. Channing, Accounting. There was a nice receptionist who looked cool and comfortable, but very cute, with a peaches-and-cream complexion and wide, blue eyes.

She had been reading a magazine when I entered the office. It was a magazine that was concealed in a desk drawer which she closed, and when I announced I would wait for Mr. Channing, she wearily opened another drawer, pulled out paper, which she ratcheted in the machine, and started a laborious job of copy work, clacking the keys of the typewriter with mechanical precision but without any particular enthusiasm.

It had been five minutes past nine when I entered the place and the girl typed steadily for fifteen minutes.

Hartley Channing came in promptly at nine-twenty.

“Hello,” he said to me. “What can I do for you?”

“My name’s Lam. I want to talk about some tax work.”

“Very well. Come on in.”

He ushered me into his private office.

The clacking of the typewriter stopped as soon as I had crossed the threshold.

“Sit down, Lam. What can I do for you?”

He was a breezy individual, well dressed, well groomed, with fingernails that had been manicured within the last couple of days, an expensive hand-painted cravat, a fine tailor-made suit of imported worsted, and shoes that looked as though they could have been custom-made.

I said, “You handled Mr. Bishop’s work, didn’t you?”

His eyes instantly slipped colorless curtains between us. “Yes,” he said, and volunteered no more information.

“Too bad about him.”

“I understand there’s some mystery.”

“Seen the morning papers?”

“No,” he said, and I knew right then he was lying. “I’ve been busy on another matter and—”

“There isn’t any mystery about him any more.”

“What do you mean?”

“The body was found aboard a yacht in one of the yacht clubs.”

“He’s dead, then?”

“Yes.”

“His death is definitely established?”

“Yes.”

“How did he die?”

“Two bullet wounds. One bullet in the body and one bullet which went entirely through the head.”

“Too bad. I’m very sorry to hear it. However, you had some matters you wanted to consult me about?”

“A tax matter.”

“What’s the nature of it, Mr. Lam?”

“I want to know how much you know about the flimflam that Bishop was running.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“If you kept his books and tax affairs you know exactly what I mean.”

“I don’t like your attitude, Mr. Lam. May I ask if this is official?”

“It’s not official. It’s personal and friendly.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a detective from Los Angeles, a private detective.”

“I don’t think I have anything to discuss with you, Lam.”

I said, “Look, buddy, the chips are down. Now let’s quit fooling around with this thing. You’re mixed up in it. I want to know how deep.”

“I am quite certain I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lam, and I don’t like the way you talk. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I said, “Bishop had a lot of activities. He was smart. He decided he’d report the income but he wouldn’t divulge the source of that income. So he engaged in a lot of mining activities that were a complete hoax.”

“Bishop never swindled a man in his life.”

“Of course he didn’t. He was too careful for that. If he’d done that he’d have been arrested, complaint would have been made to the corporation commissioner, and he’d have been out of business. He didn’t swindle anyone. He simply swapped dollars with himself. He had a lot of companies and he reported income to those companies and then he juggled funds and stock around so that nobody could tell just who was doing what. However, he was very careful to keep his nose clean on actually reporting the income. The thing he didn’t want to report was the source of the income. Now, looking at it from my standpoint, there’s just one answer to that.”

Channing picked up a pencil and began to fiddle with it nervously. “I am quite certain that I don’t care to discuss Mr. Bishop’s affairs with anyone who isn’t directly interested, or fully authorized.”

I said, “You’re going to discuss them with me and then you’re going to discuss them with the police. You may not know it, buddy, but you’re in a jam.”

“You’ve intimated that several times, Lam, and I’ve told you that I don’t like it. I keep liking it less all the time.” He pushed back his chair and got to his feet.

He was a big, athletic-looking chap, a little heavy around the waist, but there was also a lot of weight in his shoulders.

“Get out,” he said, “and stay out.”

I said, “Bishop was planning a fast move. He wouldn’t have planned it without consulting with you, and as I size you up you wouldn’t have gone along on a business of this sort on a salary basis. I think you have a finger in the pie.”

“All right,” he said, “here’s the end of the line for you. You’re going to get hurt now.”

He came round the desk.

I sat perfectly still.

“Get going,” he said, and grabbed me by the coat collar with his left hand.

“Up.”

He jabbed a thumb under my chin.

He’d been around, that boy. He knew the exact nerve centers where a jabbing thumb would bring a man up out of a chair.

I got up out of the chair fast. He spun me around toward the door.

“You’ve asked for this,” he said. “Now you’re going to take your medicine like a little man.”

He swung me out at arm’s length and reached for the knob of the entrance door.

The knob made noise, and immediately on the other side of the door I heard the keys start rattling once more on the typewriter.

I said, “You may have an alibi on Bishop’s murder. You may not. But that doesn’t mean you have one on Maurine Auburn, and Gabby Garvanza isn’t going to be easy. When I tell him—”

The hand dropped away from the doorknob as though the arm had wilted.

For a long moment he stood there, absolutely motionless, watching me with cold, blue eyes that held no more emotion than the keys on an adding-machine. Then he let go of me, walked completely around the desk, settled himself, picked up the pencil again, and said, “Sit down, Mister Lam.”

I said, “If you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, start talking.”

“You can tell Gabby that I don’t know a thing about Maurine, and that’s the honest truth.”

I said, “It isn’t healthy to get in Gabby’s way.”

“I’m not in his way.”

He shot out his cuff nervously, picked up the pencil, twisted it in his fingers, then reached for his handkerchief, blew his nose, wiped his forehead, put his handkerchief back in his pocket, and cleared his throat.

I said, “Start talking.”

“I know nothing about Maurine.”

“Can you make a judge believe that?”

“To hell with a judge. What does he have to do with it?”

I smiled at him, a gloating smile of cold triumph. “If you get in Gabby’s way and he can frame you for a murder, he’s going to do it, and let the state take care of you, and you know that as well as I do.”

The guy’s coat retained its tailor-made lines, but the body inside of the coat had shrunk and slumped. The coat looked two sizes too large.

“Now, look,” he said, “you’re working for Gabby Garvanza and—”

“I didn’t tell you for whom I was working,” I interrupted.

I saw his eyes widen. There was an expression of incipient relief.

“But,” I said, “I now have some information Gabby Garvanza is going to want. And I want to know about Bishop. Now start talking.”

That did it. The crack about Gabby framing a murder on him had taken all the starch out of his spine and he was too terror-stricken to think clearly, to even try to figure out my real interest. He had hypnotized himself into static terror.

He said, “All I know about is the bookkeeping. We fixed it so that every bit of income Bishop had came from those mining companies.”

“And the mining companies?” I asked.

“Among their various activities,” he said, “they operated The Green Door. There was nothing in their charters that said they couldn’t. No reason why a company can’t operate anything it wants.

“Now, I can tell you this much. When Gabby Garvanza wanted to move into San Francisco, some of the fellows decided they would make it tough for him, but that wasn’t Bishop’s idea. Bishop and I wanted to play ball with him all along. If he could furnish the protection we were willing to pay for that protection. We didn’t care where the money went to or who got it. All we wanted was the commodity.

We were willing to buy it from the one who could give us the best service.

“Now, that’s the truth, Mr. Lam. I never did buck Gabby and neither did Bishop.”

I said, “How well did you know Maurine?”

“You know how well I knew her — at least Gabby does. I introduced Maurine to him. I knew her well. Bishop knew her damn well.”

“And what about Mrs. Bishop?” I asked.

“Irene keeps out of the business.”

I said, “I want her background.”

“Don’t you know?”

“No.”

He tried to get control of himself and almost made it.

“If you’re in with Gabby Garvanza there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“And a lot I do. I have some very interesting information for Gabby. Now tell me about Irene.”

For some reason the guy was scared half to death of Gabby. My walking in and asking him about Maurine had jarred him right down to the shoelaces.

He said, “Irene was in burlesque. She was a striptease artist. Bishop went out on a party with her one night and they clicked. He fell for her like a ton of bricks and she — Well, she played her cards smart as hell.”

“Was it a legal wedding?”

“Legal? You’re damn right it was legal. Irene saw to that. She had the smartest lawyer in town handle the whole thing. She insisted on a legal marriage. He had to buy his wife out. Irene may look dumb but she’s smart.”

“Who killed Maurine Auburn?”

“I swear that I don’t know, Lam. I tell you honestly I don’t know. I was absolutely, utterly shocked by it. I — I liked her.”

“Who killed Bishop?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. Put yourself in my place. I don’t know where I stand. For all I know someone may be trying to put the finger on me. That’s not a nice feeling.

“You can tell Gabby that I want to see him. I’ve been trying to reach him. He can help me.”

I sneered at him.

He mopped his face again.

“What’s going to happen to The Green Door now?”

“There’ll be no opposition as far as I’m concerned to anything Gabby wants to do. Provided, of course, he can fix it up with the others, and — Well, I guess he can.”

“What do you know about John Carver Billings?”

“Billings is all right. He’s the banker. We use him occasionally. He doesn’t ask any questions just so we keep a good balance in his bank.”

“Does he know any questions to ask?”

“I don’t think so. George had a stranglehold on him because of the boy.”

“What’s all this business about wanting him to foreclose on the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate?”

“Now, there,” Channing said, “you’ve got me. I told George a hundred times that that was the most foolish thing he could do. It was apt to result in an investigation. It might even ruin the entire business structure.”

“He didn’t listen to you?”

“No. He wanted that foreclosure filed. He said he didn’t give a damn what happened, he wanted the foreclosure filed. Tell Gabby I’d like to talk with him — any time.”

“How about the widow?”

He laughed. “What does she have to do with it?”

“She might have a great deal.”

Channing said, “Make no mistake about this, Mr. Lam. You can tell Gabby Garvanza I am taking over The Green Door.”

“What will Irene get out of it?”

“Irene,” he said, “will share in the estate. She was a damn good burlesque stripper. She had what it takes and she gave what she had, but she’s small potatoes. She got hers and now she’s out of it. As of tonight I’m taking over.”

Some of his assurance began to come back.

“And the corporations?”

“The corporations will be all washed up in a smother of figures.”

I said, “Stay right here until two o’clock in the afternoon.

Don’t go out under any circumstances and don’t give anyone any definite information. If Gabby wants to see you he’ll tell you where you can contact him.”

That frightened him again. The thought of walking into Gabby’s clutches didn’t appeal to him at all.

“Tell him to phone me.”

“I thought you wanted to see him.”

“I do, but I’m going to be terribly busy. Now that it’s established that George is dead, the police will be here, and—”

“I thought you wanted to see Gabby.”

“I do, I do, but I have other things.”

“Shall I tell Gabby you’re too busy to see him?”

“No! No! I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It sounded that way.”

“Just put yourself in my position, Lam.”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do that,” I told him, and got up and walked out while he was mopping his forehead.

The typist was batting the keys at the typewriter. She didn’t even look up.

Chapter Fifteen

Mrs. George Tustin Bishop surveyed me wearily.

“You again,” she said.

“That’s right.”

There was a tired half-smile about her lips. “The bad penny.”

I shook my head. “The Boy Scout. I did my good turn yesterday. I’m doing another one today.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Purely disinterested, I suppose?” There was a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

“Wrong again.”

She said, “Look, Mr. Lam, I’ve been up all night. I’ve been interrogated over and over again. I’ve had to view my husband’s — body. My physician wanted to give me a hypodermic and put me out of circulation. I told him I’d tough it through. You can’t tell what they’d do while I was asleep — But I’m tired, terribly, terribly tired.”

I said, “I think I can help you. There’s no harm in trying. Your husband wasn’t a mining man at all.”

“Don’t be silly. He had half a dozen mining corporations, all kinds of claims and locations, and—”

“And,” I said, “he used them as a mask so that he could report his income without telling where the income came from.”

“Where did it come from, then?”

“A place in San Francisco they call The Green Door.”

“What’s that?”

“A gambling place.”

“Sit down,” she invited.

I sat down.

She took a seat opposite me.

I said, “Hartley L. Channing is planning on taking over.”

“He’s always seemed very nice,” she said.

“Look, Irene,” I told her, “you’ve been around. You were a strip-teaser and burlesque queen. You should know what the score is by this time.”

“You’ve been losing a little sleep yourself, I see.”

“I’ve been getting around.”

“Who gave you the dirt?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Perhaps I wouldn’t.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “we have other things to talk about. How do you stand financially?”

“My, but you move right in, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“And why should I tell you how I’m fixed financially?”

“Because I’m probably the only one who’s going to shoot square with you — if I can do myself some good by doing it — but one thing, Irene, I wouldn’t double-cross you.”

“No,” she said musingly, “I don’t think you would.

What’s your first name?”

“Donald.”

“All right, Donald. When you stand up in front of a bunch of morons and take your clothes off four and five times a night, you get awfully damned tired of it. George came along and fell for me like a ton of bricks. At first I didn’t think there was anything to it on a permanent basis, and then I realized that he really wanted to play for keeps. So I played it that way.

“His wife tried to take him to the cleaners, and I could see that he was terribly afraid of being hooked for alimony. I told him that I wanted to give him some real assurance I wasn’t playing that sort of a game. I suggested a premarital agreement. He liked the idea.”

“Then what?”

“Then he had his attorney draw up an agreement.”

“What was in it?”

“A complete property settlement. He gave me a substantial consideration so that I—”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars as my sole and separate property.”

“And what did you agree in return?”

“That it covered temporary alimony, attorney’s fees, permanent alimony — everything — a complete property settlement.”

“But in the event of his death?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never looked it over from that viewpoint, but as I remember it he had a right to dispose of his property by will any way that he wanted.”

“Did he leave a will?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where would it be if he left it?”

“In the hands of his attorney.”

“Did he have anyone else to leave his property to?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Did he keep on carrying a torch after it became legal?”

“Yes, I saw to that.”

“You must be clever.”

“Don’t make any mistake about me, Donald, I am. Perhaps not the way you think, but I know my way around. I can take my clothes off so it brings them right up out of the chairs and packs them in the aisles. And, believe me, there’s an art to it. If you don’t believe it, just watch some green kid stand up and strip and then watch a real, good, artistic stripper do the same thing.”

“Now,” I said, “we’ll get back to the first question. How are you fixed financially?”

She said, “He took out an insurance policy, and I hung on to my ten thousand dollars.”

“How much of it?”

“Pretty nearly all of it.”

“Your clothes and things?”

“George bought them. George encouraged me to save the ten thousand. He wanted me to have it intact as nearly as possible.”

I said, “By the time the smoke clears away you’ll probably find that your husband’s business affairs were all tangled up in a knot, that the only thing he really had was The Green Door, that The Green Door furnished the money to pay for everything. Did you ever hear of a gambling business going through probate?”

“No.”

“You probably never will.”

“So what?”

I said, “Your husband was very careful to arrange things so that his personal connection with The Green Door couldn’t be proven. He had his affairs in the hands of an accountant who thinks in terms of the first person singular.

“Your husband probably had some money salted away in a safety-deposit box. Perhaps Hartley Channing knows where it is. You may find a safety-deposit box full of cash and you may not, but in view of your past a lot of questions are going to be asked — a whole lot of questions — and that insurance is going to be embarrassing.”

“I know,” she said wearily. “That’s why I don’t want to go to sleep for a while. I want to get the answers to some of those questions.”

I said, “You have a hillside lot here.”

She nodded.

“You’ve been filling in a swale over there with crushed rock.”

“Yes. George wanted to make a tennis court there and he wanted to use a lot of crushed rock so we’d have good drainage underneath.”

“Let’s go take a look at your husband’s things in the garage.”

“Why?”

“I think we might find a gold pan there.”

“Oh, sure. George had a couple of sleeping bags and a gold pan or two, and a mortar and pestle that he used for crushing ore, and some kind of a blowtorch for testing, and things of that sort. He kept them in a closet in the garage, a sort of special locker.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

“Why?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I’m not.”

I said, “I’m trying to give you a break, Irene.”

“In return for what?”

“Perhaps nothing.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve known men for a long time. They all want something. What is it you want?”

“I might be able to cut myself a piece of cake.”

“Where would that leave me?”

“With the rest of the cake.”

She looked me over for a minute, then said, “I suppose there’s as much of an art to being a detective as there is to being a strip-tease artist; and it probably takes a little more equipment — in different places. Come on, Donald.”

She led the way down the stairs into the garage and opened a door.

There was quite an assortment of junk inside.

I selected a mortar and pestle and a gold pan.

I said, “It’s going to attract attention if I am seen out there with you. Take this bucket and go out to where they’ve been dumping the crushed rock, pick up a few samples of the crushed rock here and there. Just try to get a pretty good cross section of the type of rock that’s been dumped in there. Get all the different colors you can find. If there are any tints in the rock I want to get a sample of each color.”

She looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then took the pail and walked out across the yard, skirted the swimming pool, went over to the back of the lot where trucks had been driving in and dumping crushed rock, and started picking up fragments here and there.

By the time she came in I had my little workshop fixed up. I started pounding up bits of rock in the mortar, pounding with the pestle until I had them reduced to a fine powder.

“Can you tell me what the idea of this is?”

“I’m mining.”

“Do you,” she asked, “expect to find the crushed rock that is delivered by a gravel company filled with diamonds?”

“Not exactly,” I told her. “I think we’ll hit gold. I certainly hope we do. If we don’t, I’ve put myself out on a limb.”

There was a galvanized washtub over in a corner of the garage. I filled it with water, perched myself on the end of a box and went to work panning.

She leaned over my shoulder and watched me.

The surface material was quickly washed away and we got down to a deposit of black sand in the bottom of the gold pan.

That took pretty careful manipulation if I wasn’t going to lose the values, and, working on that small a scale, just the difference of a color or two of gold might make a lot of difference in the value of a mine.

Then, of course, there was the chance that even if values were there they wouldn’t be “free-milling.” However, I thought I could tell something of what we had just by looking at the way the stuff panned out.

Gold is a beautiful metal, but no jeweler has ever been able to make gold as beautiful as when it is first seen in a gold pan nestling in a bed of black sand.

I spun the water around in the gold pan, and as the black sand washed away there was a long, wedge-shaped streamer of gold at the upper end of the little delta.

I had been expecting gold but not that much. It seemed as though the rock must have been a third black sand and a third gold.

Behind me I could hear Irene’s startled exclamation.

“That’s one thing about washing out gold in a gold pan. If you have ten cents’ worth it looks like two million dollars’ worth.”

“Donald!” she exclaimed, then, after a moment, she half whispered, “Donald!”

I gave the gold pan a twist and dumped a whole bunch of gold down into the tub, washed out the pan and put it away.

“Donald, aren’t you going to save that gold?”

“It would just make trouble.”

I drained the water off the tailings in the tub, dumped the tailings back in the bucket, and said, “Throw those out in the yard, Irene.”

She took the bucket out and dumped it, came back and stood looking at me, with a curiously thoughtful expression on her tired face.

I said, “Take your ten thousand dollars and buy stock in the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate.”

“But that’s my husband’s company.”

“Sure it is. That’s the last one. That’s where this rock came from.”

“How do you know, Donald? There are five or six companies.”

“It had to come from there,” I said, “because he was trying to get the bank to foreclose a loan.”

“But why would he want to do that?”

“So he could write an optimistic letter to the stockholders telling them that while the company was in temporary financial trouble due to the fact that the bank was insisting on payment of a note, the stockholders should not be discouraged, that there probably were good values in the mine and they should hang on to their stock.”

“Well?” she asked.

“The effect of that,” I said, “would be to cause a panic on the part of the stockholders. Every one of them would want his money back. Every one that had purchased stock would be ready to throw the stuff on the market for what he could get.”

“Can you tell me what this is all about?” she asked.

“Sure. People have certain habits of thought. If money is made by a mining company, people think it must come from a mine. If a check is received from a smelting company, the assumption is that it came from smelting ore out of rock.

“Your husband ran a smelting company. It paid him money in nice tinted checks. He owned mining companies that turned ore over to the smelting company.

“It never occurred to anyone that the ore was merely crushed rock and that the smelting company owned a profitable gambling house.”

She studied me. “Then I should buy stock in the smelting company?”

“In the mining company, Irene. The smelting company’s assets are being taken over by muscle men. Gambling houses don’t go through probate.”

“But how would I go about getting the stock; that is, knowing where to buy it?”

I said, “I have an idea your husband had already done some work along those lines. Let’s go take a look.”

We didn’t have to look far. In George Bishop’s desk was the rough draft of a letter to stockholders telling them not to lose faith in the company but that if they’d hang on through the period of financial adversity which was just ahead, they’d come out on top of the heap. The bank was bringing suit on a promissory note which had been signed to raise capital, but the mine was looking better and better and people who hung on could be almost certain of making a substantial profit, perhaps a hundred and fifty percent of their original investment, perhaps more.

It was a cleverly worded letter.

We found the list of addresses to which the letter was to be sent, together with the number of shares of stock owned by each individual.

“Want to take a chance?” I asked. “There seems to have been about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock sold. It probably can be bought in for around fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But you’ll find that your husband kept controlling interest in the company. If you’re going to inherit his property you won’t have to buy anything. If not, you’d better invest this separate property of yours.”

“I think I’m going to inherit,” she said.

I prowled around the desk.

There were half a dozen or so heavy green cards, finely engraved with an elaborate pattern of curved lines.

They were passes to The Green Door, made out in blank, bearing the signature of Hartley L. Channing.

She looked at them in silence.

I slipped the whole bunch in my pocket. “These might come in handy,” I told her.

She said nothing.

“Do you have an alibi for Tuesday night?” I asked her abruptly.

“Nothing — Nothing I care to use.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She hesitated.

“Do you?”

“Not in the way you mean. I made up my mind I’d play fair with George when I married him.”

“Wasn’t it rather lonely, what with him being away so much of the time?”

She looked me in the eyes. “Donald,” she said, “I’m a strip-teaser; I’m an exhibitionist. Once that gets in your blood it’s hard to get it out.

“I had the most supreme contempt for the individuals in the audiences, but the group of contemptible individuals became an entity, an audience. I loved to hear the roars of applause come up out of the darkened theater and crash against the backdrop in a wave of sound.

“I knew what they were applauding. It wasn’t my acting, it was my body. They were trying to get me to take more off than the law allowed. They’d stamp and pound and applaud and go nuts.”

“Didn’t they know you couldn’t take any more off than you had without going to jail?”

“That’s just the point, Donald. They knew it but my acting was good enough so I could make them forget it. A good strip-teaser can appear to be almost undecided, as though she’s just about ready to take a chance this once just to please this one particular audience. She stands there as though debating the thing within her own mind, and, of course, that spurs the audience on to the wildest applause — I tell you it’s an art, standing there looking like that.”

“And you miss it?”

“Donald, I miss it terribly.”

“What does all that have to do with where you were Tuesday night?”

“A lot.”

“Go on,” I said.

She said, “I knew George was leaving. I have some friends in burlesque here, some of the old gang — Well, after George left I went up to the theater, put on a mask, and did a strip tease as the ‘Masked Mystery.’ I loved it — so did the management. The audience went wild. I have a perfect alibi if I dare to use it — several hundred witnesses.”

“You were masked. They couldn’t see your face.”

“They couldn’t, but a dozen performers knew that I was the ‘Masked Mystery’ and the audience knew I was there — two shows.”

“Ever done that before?”

“You mean since I married George?”

“Yes.”

“No. This was the first time.”

I said, “It’s not so good, Irene. It looks too much as if you had been manufacturing an alibi while a boyfriend did the dirty work. As an alibi it’s just too darn good.”

“I know,” she admitted. “I’d thought of that. I wondered if you would.”

“The police will,” I told her. “That’s the main point.

What have you told the police?”

“I’ve told them I was home and in bed.”

I said, “You’ve been up all night?”

“Yes.”

“And haven’t had much sleep for the last few days?”

“No.”

I said, “Get hold of your physician. Tell him you’re nervous and jumpy. Tell him you want to go to sleep and stay asleep for about twenty-four hours. If they ask you questions and you don’t have the right answers, you’ll be arrested.”

“I know.”

I said, “All right. You can’t talk while you’re asleep, and if when you wake up you overlook something, you can always claim it was the aftereffect of the drug that gave you hallucinations. And with your figure there isn’t a juror in the world who won’t give you all the breaks.

“But if you haven’t been drugged, you won’t sleep, and then the wrong answers will be easier to make and harder to explain.

“So give me that list of stockholders and as much money as you want to put into stock in that company, and I’ll see if I can’t add to your personal fortunes.”

“And what will you get out of it for yourself?”

I looked her straight in the eyes. “Fifty percent of the net profit.”

“Now,” she said with a sigh, “I can trust you.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know what you wanted before,” she said, “and I get terribly distrustful of men until I know what they want.”

Chapter Sixteen

The San Francisco papers put out extras when John Carver Billings and his son were arrested.

One of the papers even went so far as to spread red ink above the banner: Banker Arrested for Bishop Murder.

The evidence that police had unearthed was circumstantial and deadly.

Police felt certain that Bishop had not been killed on the yacht where his body had been discovered.

A fingerprint expert had found prints on one of the brass fixtures. The prints were those of bloody fingers and they were the prints of three of John Carver Billings’s fingers on his right hand.

The padlock on the boat had been smashed and a new padlock had been placed on the boat. Police made a routine search of every hardware store in the neighborhood and found a storekeeper who remembered selling the padlock on Wednesday afternoon. Police showed him a photograph of John Carver Billings and the storekeeper made what the police described as an “instantaneous and positive identification.”

Police divers recovered a .38 revolver at the bottom of the bay, directly beneath the banker’s yacht. The numbers on the revolver showed that it had been sold to John Carver Billings for “protection” under a police permit. Ballistics experts proved that the bullet which was found in the body of George Tustin Bishop had been fired from this gun.

One bullet had gone entirely through the body and that bullet had been found by police embedded in a hole in a corner of the main cabin of the Billings yacht, the Billingboy. Police took up the carpet in the main cabin and found traces of bloodstains on the floor, despite the fact that every effort had been made to remove the bloodstains. Chemicals, however, used by the police disclosed definite bloodstains on the floor of that cabin.

The carpet which had been laid in the main cabin was new carpet, and that carpet had been bought by John Carver Billings on Thursday morning. Finally, making a search of the garage of the rich banker, police uncovered the original carpet which had been on the floor in the main cabin. It was bloodstained and there were hairs on the carpet. Microscopic examination showed that those hairs were identical in color, diameter, texture, and appearance with hairs from the head of George Tustin Bishop. A police expert swore positively they were Bishop’s hairs.

Police as yet had been unable to find a motive for the murder, but it was known there had been a sharp difference of opinion between Bishop and the banker over financial affairs in connection with the operation of a mining company which had borrowed money at Billings’s bank.

When questioned, both Billings and his son had offered alibis and the police had broken down both alibis. That of the junior Billings had been laboriously built up at considerable expense. The older Billings had stated he had been in conference with one of the bank’s directors, a Waldo W. Jefferson, on Tuesday night, when the murder had apparently taken place. However, Jefferson, under police grilling, finally broke down and admitted that John Carver Billings had asked him as a personal favor to swear that they had been in conference Tuesday evening in order to provide him with an alibi in case it should be needed.

Billings had explained to Jefferson that there were certain private reasons why he had to have an alibi for Tuesday night, and Jefferson had such implicit confidence in the integrity of the bank president that he thought only some marital private affair was involved. He had therefore agreed to furnish the alibi. Murder had been a different proposition, and he had speedily weakened when confronted by police with the evidence they had gathered.

I went down to the yacht club.

There must have been fully three hundred morbid spectators milling around, peering through the meshed screen fences, walking aimlessly around on the outside, looking at the yachts from different angles.

Police cars came and went. Technical men were doing stuff aboard the yachts, searching for fingerprints, dusting with various powders.

Every once in a while some amateur photographer would try to crash the gates and an important-looking guard would ask for his pass. If the fellow didn’t have any, the guard would nod to a police officer who then came up and chased the guy away fast.

I stood around for an hour or two until I felt I was developing falling arches. Finally, when one of the officers relieved the club watchman and he went to get a cup of coffee, I fell into step beside him.

“I’d like some information,” I said, “and I’m a man who doesn’t want something for nothing.”

He flashed me an appraising sidelong glance. “The police told me to give out no information.”

“Oh, this isn’t about the murder,” I said, laughing. “I wouldn’t ask you about that. This is something else.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to find out something about one of the boats.”

“Which one?”

“Now there,” I told him, “you have the reason I’m coming to you. I don’t know which boat it was except that it had the insignia of this yacht club on it, and it was out cruising last Tuesday afternoon, a week ago. Now, my guess is that there aren’t many yachts go out for a cruise in the afternoon in the middle of the week.”

“You’d guess wrong,” he said grinning. “On Wednesday afternoon there are lots of them.”

“How about Monday?”

“Hardly any.”

“Tuesday?”

“Oh, a few.”

I said, “Do you keep any records of the yachts that go out?”

“No, we don’t.”

“You do, however, keep a record of the men who go through the gates?”

“That’s right.”

“Then by checking on the men who went through the gates last Tuesday afternoon, you could probably tell me something about what yachts were out?”

“The police have taken those records. They’ve taken the whole book as evidence. I’ve had to start another book.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It doesn’t make any difference except I don’t have any records I can refer to.”

“Tuesday afternoon,” I said, and took twenty dollars from my pocket.

“I’d like the twenty,” he said, “but I can’t help you.”

“Why?”

“My books are gone — the law took ‘em.”

“What’s your name?”

“Danby.”

“Perhaps you could make some dough anyway.”

“How?”

“What time do you get off today?”

“Six at night.”

“I could meet you and you could take a ride with me, sit in my car, and point out someone to me.”

“Who?”

“A man you know. I don’t know his name. I want to find out who he is. I’d give you twenty now. There’d be more later.”

Danby gave the matter thoughtful consideration.

“In the meantime,” I said, “I’d like to know a few things about your duties.”

“What?”

“You can’t be on duty every minute of the time,” I said. “There are times when you have your back turned. There are times when you’re out of the place, when you—”

“Look,” he interrupted. “You talk just like the cops. There ain’t no one going to get aboard one of those yachts without the man at the gate knowing it. If we leave that little cabin, even for thirty seconds, we throw a barrier gate inside of the first one and pull a switch which makes a bell ring on every float whenever someone steps on the platform. The members absolutely insist that no one except a member in good standing is permitted on the mooring. The club had a lot of trouble in a divorce case. The wife wanted to get some evidence. That was a couple of years ago. Detectives sneaked in and raided a yacht. It was quite a scandal. Since then the members have fixed things so no one who ain’t a member can get into that yacht club, no one, no time.”

“Doesn’t it inconvenience the members sometimes when you’re not there and—”

“I’m pretty nearly always right there. That’s my business to be there. If anything happens and I have to go away, I throw that barrier gate down into place and it’s locked. Whenever a member comes and sees that barrier gate locked he knows I’m out somewhere on the float. He also knows that the minute he pushes a foot down on that platform he rings a bell that’ll tell me he’s there. He knows I’m not going to keep him waiting, so he just steps into my little cabin. I don’t think any of them have ever had to wait more than two minutes. I’m right up there on the job. That’s my business. That’s what I’m paid for.”

I handed him the twenty dollars. “I’ll be waiting at six o’clock tonight, Danby. Just step right into my car.”

He looked at both sides of the twenty-dollar bill as though afraid it might be a counterfeit, then stalked into the restaurant without a word of thanks.

I went up and saw my broker.

“How you coming with the mining stock?” I asked.

“I’m buying it — scads of it, cheap. Lam, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“Why?”

“The stuff’s no good. It’s a mail-order promotion in the first place. In the second place the mine has been losing money on every carload of ore mined. In the third place it’s indebted to the bank on a big loan. In the fourth place the mainspring of the whole thing was this guy, Bishop, and he’s kicked the bucket.

“If you were trying to find the worst investment on earth you couldn’t have picked a more likely prospect.”

I grinned.

“That tells me all I want to know,” he said. “Would it be all right if I picked up a few shares for my personal account?”

“Don’t put the price up,” I warned.

“Hell’s bells, Lam, you couldn’t put in enough money to jack up the price of that stock if you used a steam shovel.”

“You getting a lot?”

“Lots of it.”

“Keep getting the stuff,” I said, and walked out.

At the appointed time I went to pick up Danby.

He wasn’t too glad to see me.

“The cops may not like this at all,” he said.

“The cops aren’t paying you money.”

“Cops have a way of getting mean when they don’t like things.”

I said, “Here’s fifty dollars. How much unpleasantness would that account for?”

His eyes were greedy and shrewd. “All but ten dollars’ worth,” he said.

I added another ten, and he slowly pocketed the money.

“What do you want to do?”

I said, “We’re going places.”

“What sort of places?”

“Where we can sit in an automobile.”

“And then what do we do?”

“If you see anyone you know you tell me.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

We drove rapidly out Van Ness Avenue, crossed Market Street, took the road to Daly City, and I slowed down as we came to the address of The Green Door.

It was an interesting enough place, pretty well disguised, all things considered.

Years ago San Francisco went in for a certain type of flat — a series of storerooms for little businesses on the ground floor, then two stories of flats above it, all with conventional bow windows and a type of architecture which is so typically San Franciscan that it can be recognized anywhere.

The Green Door was in one of these buildings.

On one side was a neighborhood grocery, a place with a small stock, that had a few neighborhood clients and carried charge accounts. The credit feature was the only way such a one-man business could compete with the big cashand- carry markets where buying is on a mass basis, selling is for spot cash, and there is no trouble with bookkeeping, deadbeats, or failures.

On the other side was a dry-cleaning establishment. In between the two was The Green Door, a plain, unpretentious place which had its door painted a distinctive shade of green.

I cruised around and looked the place over.

Apparently patrons had been requested to park their cars half a block away. Taxicabs could pull up in front of the door, but three big, high-powered automobile jobs I saw scattered around the neighborhood were parked in unostentatious places. The street in front of The Green Door and on the other side had a few broken-down automobiles quite evidently belonging to the tenants who lived in the district.

The two stories of flats above The Green Door were just like any other flats in the neighborhood. One of them had a For Rent sign in the window, but the name of the real estate agency on that sign had been defunct for ten years. The others had various types of lace curtains, window shades, some of them with flowers in the window, but all giving the general outward impression of flats that were tenanted by people with different individualities and temperaments, having in common a low income and a desire for cheap rents.

This appearance, of course, was only a stage setting, a false front which was presented to the street. It was an artistic job.

Usually places running with police protection don’t have to bother about an elaborate camouflage, just something that will be a sop to the public, a camouflage for the payoff which permits it to operate — just enough to keep the amateur detective from being able to spot the place in case he happens to live in the neighborhood.

In the case of The Green Door it looked as though a pretty clever attempt had been made at covering up, which might or might not indicate an absence of police protection.

The stores on each side of The Green Door were, of course, places that enjoyed a remarkably low rental. It therefore stood to reason that the managers had been given to understand that the one great virtue which a small businessman could hope to attain was to learn to mind his own damn business.

We parked the car where we could see The Green Door and settled down to wait.

It was a long wait.

Danby asked questions at first. I let him think that the person I wanted to case would be coming to the grocery store.

Fog came drifting in over the hills. The white streamers were pushed along by a smart sea breeze. I felt the peculiar tang of fresh stimulation which is so characteristic of San Francisco air, particularly when the fog comes rolling in.

A taxicab pulled up in front of The Green Door; two men got out, pushed the door open, and went in.

There seemed to be no guard of any sort and the door apparently was kept unlocked.

“Know either one of them?” I asked Danby.

“Never saw them before, neither one of them. They didn’t go to the grocery store. They went up in the apartments.”

“So they did,” I agreed.

We waited.

An expensive car containing a man and a woman swung around the corner, found a parking-place, and the man and woman came strolling back.

I left Danby sitting there, walked down to a hot-dog stand at the corner, and got a couple of sandwiches.

Danby was getting impatient.

“How long is this apt to last?” he inquired.

“Until midnight.”

“Now wait a minute! I hadn’t bargained for anything like that.”

I said, “You did plenty of bargaining.”

“I know, but I hadn’t thought it was going to be like this.”

“What did you think you’d be doing?”

“Well, I thought I’d have a chance to walk around and—”

“Get out and walk,” I invited.

He didn’t like the idea of that, either.

“You mean keep walking up and down the street until midnight?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I’ll sit right here.”

We didn’t say anything more for a while. Another taxi drove up; then a group of four men, who had evidently left their car parked on another street, came walking casually along, one of them looked rather sharply inside the car at the two of us sitting there; then they crossed over the street to The Green Door.

I didn’t like that. Whoever was operating The Green Door had probably spotted us by this time and sent a delegation to look us over.

I looked over at Danby and wondered what he’d say if he realized that his fee might also include compensation for a damned good working-over.

He was a grouchy guy who had taken my money and then wished he hadn’t assumed any obligation.

“This is going to be bad,” he said. “If the club finds out, I’ll have a hard time explaining—”

“So what?” I asked. “Where is the club going to find someone else who has your experience, someone else who knows all of the people and all of the ropes? And what if it does? When it finds out what he wants in the line of wages it’ll get a terrific jolt. I’ll bet it doesn’t know how wages have gone up. It’s probably keeping you on at the same old wages.”

“No, the club has given me a couple of raises.”

“How much?”

“One fifteen percent and one ten percent.”

“Over how long a time?”

“Five years.”

I made my laugh mirthless and sarcastic. Danby began to meditate on whether he was underpaid and abused. I saw he liked the thought. I liked it, too. It kept his mind occupied.

I looked at my wrist watch. It was nine-fifteen.

A car drove up and parked. It was a club coupe, about three years old, but a good make and it looked well cared for. The man, who didn’t seem to give a damn whether he left the car parked right in front of The Green Door or not, jumped out and looked up and down the street, then entered through the green door.

Danby said, “That’s Horace B. Catlin. If he sees me here he—”

“You drive a car?” I interrupted.

“Sure.”

“This fellow is a member of the yacht club?”

“That’s right.”

I said, “Wait here for an hour. If I’m not back inside of an hour, drive the car to this address, ask for the man in charge, and tell him the entire story of what we’ve been doing this evening.”

He took the card which had the address and looked at it curiously.

“Let’s see,” he said, “that’s down there. Let me see—

I’m trying to get the cross street.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Put the card in your pocket. Be sure to ask for the man who’s in charge and then tell him the story. It’s a quarter past nine. If I’m not out of here by ten-fifteen go tell your story.”

I slid out of the car, tossed my hat over on the seat, walked bareheaded across the street, and, just before I got to the entrance to The Green Door, looked over my shoulder.

Danby was sitting there studying the card.

I hoped he wouldn’t realize that the address was that of police headquarters until he got there.

I turned the knob and pushed the green door open.

It swung back on well-oiled hinges and I stepped into a little hallway. A flight of worn board stairs, uncarpeted, echoing and splintered, stretched up to another door.

I started to raise my hand to knock on the door, then realized it wasn’t necessary. I’d gone through a beam of invisible light and a little shutter slid open in the door. A pair of eyes regarded me through a small window of plate glass which must have been an inch thick.

“Got a card?” a voice asked, which evidently came through a microphone and wires.

I produced one of the cards I had picked up at Bishop’s place. I had written my name in the blank line.

The eyes on the other side of the plate glass regarded the card, the voice through the loud-speaker said impatiently, “Well, shove it through the crack.”

It was then I noticed for the first time the very narrow slit in the thick door.

I pushed the card into the narrow opening.

There was a period of complete silence, then I heard an electric mechanism pulling bolts back. The heavy door rumbled to one side, running on rollers on a steel rail. The heavy rumbling and the vibration of the stairs as the door moved showed the reason for the microphone and the amplification of the voice. That door must have been as heavy as the door of a vault. Looking curiously around me, I suddenly realized that the stairs were the only bits of wood in the entire entranceway. I had gone through the green door and entered a steel inspection room. A raiding party of police equipped with picks and sledge hammers couldn’t have done more than dent the defenses.

“Well,” the voice said impatiently, “go on in.”

I noticed that the voice had said “go in” instead of “come in,” so I wasn’t too surprised to find on entering that the guard was no longer standing by the door. He had stepped into a steel, bulletproof closet on one side of the door. I could see the closet, but I couldn’t see him. He probably had a revolver covering me.

I walked over the sunken steel rail on which the door had slid, and entered a completely new world. My feet were in a soft, thick carpet which felt like moss in a forest. The hallway glowed with the soft effect of indirect lighting. There was that atmosphere of casual, easy wealth, which is so necessary to a high-class gambling place. It’s designed to put the customer on the defensive right at the start, to make him feel that he’s associating with wealth and standing.

There’s enough of the social climber in most people so that they fall for this stuff and consider it a privilege to be admitted to a place that specializes in taking their money. They’d walk out the worse for wear financially, but still with a certain deferential restraint. It’s an atmosphere that cuts down on beefs and scenes, and makes even the thought of rigged wheels and marked cards seem a social sacrilege.

That atmosphere is a business investment and doesn’t cost as much as one would think. It takes a few props. One is the paintings in heavy frames, carefully illuminated by shaded frame lamps. If the customer doesn’t appreciate them he shamefacedly considers it’s due to his own artistic ignorance. Actually the paintings are twenty-dollar copies in fifty-dollar frames, illuminated by ten-dollar lights.

The customer who can appreciate the price of the frame better than the worth of the painting, thinks they must be old masters. Otherwise why all the frame and illumination on the painting?

The other props are even more simple — Carpets with rich colors and sponge rubber underneath, and the artistic use of color in the draperies. In the soft, indirect lighting it looks like a million dollars. By daylight it would stink.

I entered rooms containing exactly what I had expected to find.

The first room was nothing but a conventional cocktail lounge. It had tables, cushioned stools, a bar, love seats, dim lighting, and the all but inaudible strains of organ music.

Two or three couples were at the tables. A party of three stags were at the far end of the bar with money scattered in front of them, two bottles of champagne, and all of the external evidence of celebrating a huge financial success.

I wondered whether they were also part of the props.

A coldly courteous individual handed me the card which I had left with the doorman downstairs.

“May I ask exactly what it was you were looking for, Mr. Lam?”

“Exactly what you have here,” I said.

The cold eyes softened a bit. “May I ask where you got your card? Who vouched for you when you got it?”

I said, “The card’s properly signed.”

“I know, but sometimes signed cards are given to various sources for distribution.”

I said, “This was given me by the owner.”

He looked a little surprised then, turned it over, and said, “You know Mr. Channing personally then?”

“That’s right.”

“Then the situation is entirely different,” he said. “Just go right on in, Mr. Lam.”

Before I could move, and as though he had been struck with an afterthought, he said apologetically, “I am afraid I’m going to have to comply with the regulations and ask to look at your driving license and make sure you’re the person described on the card.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and flipped open my wallet, showing him my driving license.

“From Los Angeles, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s probably why I don’t place you. You’re going to be up here for a while, Mr. Lam?”

“Not long. I want a little action while I’m here. I am familiar with Al’s place down in Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” he said. “How is Al?”

“I don’t know him personally,” I said, “just the place. I know the manager there—”

I stopped abruptly as though I had caught myself just in time to keep from using a name.

“Well?” he asked.

I smiled. “If you know the man I mean, you know his name. If you don’t know the man I mean, there’s no point in mentioning his name.”

He laughed. “Did you wish to make any arrangements for credit, for having checks cashed, or anything, Mr. Lam?”

“I think I have enough cash to see me through.”

“If you’d like to make any credit arrangements—”

“I’ll do that when I run out of cash. I’ll run in and see Channing personally in case that happens.”

“Go on in, Mr. Lam.”

He indicated a door at the far end of the room, around the end of the bar.

I walked around the bar, pushed open the door, and once more found myself in a hallway. At one end was a door marked His and at the other end a door marked Hers.

An attendant stood in the hallway.

A buzzer made sounds. Three quick distinct buzzes.

The white-coated attendant, without a word, pulled on a lever and a concealed door slid back.

I entered the gambling rooms. There wasn’t much of a crowd at the moment. Probably the heavy spenders would come later, after the dinner and theater hours.

Here again the atmosphere of synthetic luxury was carried out. There were the usual roulette and crap tables, a couple of twenty-one games, and a poker game.

From the fact that some six or eight of the persons present at the tables were dressed for the evening and were wagering rather large stakes with that impeccable hauteur which is the sucker’s idea of the well-bred, upper class gambler, I knew they were the stooges who are employed to keep the place from seeming too lonely during the early evening, and to encourage play during the later hours.

Horace B. Catlin wasn’t among those present.

If there had been anything depressing to the club about the news of George Tustin Bishop’s death, there was no outward indication. Play went on with the smooth decorum of an exclusive club where men were gentlemen and the loss of a few hundred dollars was merely one of life’s amusing incidents to be dismissed with a well-bred shrug of the shoulders.

Later on, when the play became more spirited, some of the stooges would lose large sums with a patronizing smile, then begin to rake in great sacks of chips with a sophisticated lift of the eyebrow to indicate a complete control of the emotions.

The suckers who didn’t stand a chance of winning a dime would be tempted to ape their “well-bred” neighbors at the table, and they, too, would shrug off their losses with a patronizing smile, wait in vain for “luck” to turn, and then go outside really to beef.

There are, of course, a few square gambling houses in the United States. Somehow I had the impression The Green Door wasn’t one of those few.

I watched for a while, then went over and bought a twenty-dollar stack of chips. The man who presided over the wheel flashed a diamond as his well-manicured, skillful fingers slid the chips out to me in a careless ges- ture. His entire attitude seemed to say that the place was broad-minded, and if a piker wanted to get a stack of chips for twenty dollars, it was quite all right with the management. They were running a democratic house.

I bet five dollars on red and the wheel came black. I doubled my bet on red. Red came up and paid off. I put two dollars on number three and number thirty came up. I put another two dollars on number three and number seven came up.

Again I put two dollars on number three and number three came up. The man in charge of the game paid off and honored me with a quizzical glance. Some of the other people began to size me up.

I left two dollars on the three and played two dollars on the twenty.

The twenty came up, and the man in charge once more slid out a stack of chips.

He also paused to adjust his tie.

I put two dollars on the five.

There was a nervous feminine laugh. I saw the flash of bare shoulder as an arm reached across so that the flesh all but brushed my cheek. A young vision said, “I hope you don’t think I’m forward, but with luck like yours I’m not going to pass up a chance to ride along.”

“Not at all,” I said politely, and looked her over.

She was blond, with a cute, upturned nose, a rosebud mouth, and a figure which could well have won prizes in any bathing-beauty parade.

She smiled up at me with just the right amount of cordiality and then almost instantly became somewhat coldly aloof, as though suddenly realizing that, after all, she didn’t know who I was and our acquaintanceship had stemmed from the fact that we happened to be standing at a roulette table together.

The wheel spun, the ball clattered, and number seven came up.

I put two dollars on number ten. The blonde put two dollars right on top of mine.

The wheel spun and we lost.

I put two dollars on number twenty-seven. The blonde hesitated a moment, then put a dollar bet on the top of mine.

The wheel spun, the ball clattered, and number twelve came.

I heard the blonde sigh. I put two dollars on number seven and a dollar on number three.

The blonde hesitated, then, as though trying bravely to conceal the fact that this was her last dollar, she put a chip on number three, right on top of mine.

The ball spun around and popped into a pocket. The blonde saw it before I did. She gave a startled squeal and grabbed my arm in an ecstasy of enthusiasm that she couldn’t quite control.

“We’ve done it!” she cried. “We’ve done it! We’ve won!”

The man at the wheel gave her a fatherly glance of dignified, quiet amusement and paid us off.

We bet together three or four times more, then we won again.

I was beginning to get a fair-sized pile of chips.

The blonde nervously took a cigarette case from a black bag and tapped the cigarette on the side of the polished silver. She inserted it in her mouth, and I snapped a match into flame.

She leaned forward for the light.

I could see the long curling eyelashes, the mischievous glint of saucy hazel eyes, as she looked me over with demure interest.

“Thank you,” she said, and then after a moment added, “for everything.”

“Don’t thank me,” I told her.

“Lots of people wouldn’t like to have me — well, share their luck.” Her glance was of the type to inspire a man to say that it would be a pleasure to share everything he had with her on a permanent basis.

I merely smiled.

Her hand rested on mine for an instant as she moved her pile of chips an inch or two along the side of the table.

Abruptly she said, “It means so much, so very, very much to me, and I was down to my last dollar.”

We lost three or four more bets, then I put five dollars on a number. She suddenly felt lucky and put ten dollars above my five.

The number paid off.

Her scream of delight was almost instantly suppressed as though she was afraid she might be put out, but she looked up at me and her eyes were dancing. Once more her hand was on my arm, the fingers digging in through the coat. “Oh,” she said, and then after a moment, “Oh!”

The man at the wheel paid off my bet, seemed to frown with annoyance as he paid off the blonde’s bet. It was a sizable bunch of chips.

She leaned against me. I could feel her tremble.

“I’ve got to go where I can sit down,” she said. “Please — Please, what can I do about my — about my chips?”

“Cash them in, if you wish,” the dealer said carelessly, “and then you can buy in again when you get ready to play.”

“Oh, I — Very well.”

Her weight was heavy against me as though her knees were getting ready to buckle.

“Please,” she said in a half-whisper, “can you help me over to a chair?”

I gave a quick glance at my stack of chips and at hers.

The man at the wheel caught my eye and nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, with the gesture of one who disdains to consider money of any great importance.

I took the girl’s arm and helped her out to a table at the bar.

A waiter hovered over us solicitously as soon as we were seated.

“The occasion,” I said, “would seem to call for celebration. Would you care for champagne?”

“Oh, I’d love it. I have to have — something. Oh, it means so much! Would you — Could you—”

“Certainly,” I said, “if you wish. I’ll see about getting your money for you. Do you know how much you had coming?”

She shook her head.

“Under those circumstances, I’m afraid you’d better attend to the financial transaction yourself.”

“Oh, it’s quite all right. I know you’re on the up-and-up. I — I wouldn’t have had a thing if it hadn’t been for you, Mr.—”

“Lam,” I said.

“I’m Miss Marvin,” she said, smiling. “My friends call me Diane.”

“My name’s Donald.”

“Donald, I’m just too absolutely, completely flabbergasted to get up and walk into that room. My legs just seem to turn to water. I — Well, I just wish you could see my knees.”

“It’s an idea,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, making a little slap at me. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

One of the assistant managers bent gravely over the table. “Did you people wish to cash in your chips,” he asked, “or would you prefer to have them brought to you here in the bar? You can use them to pay for anything in the house.”

“Let’s hang on to them,” she said instantly. “Could you — Well, could they be brought out here?”

“But certainly.”

He bowed, vanished, and a moment later came back with a plastic container in which my chips had been placed, and a polished wooden rack in which the girl’s chips were stacked.

“We took the liberty of changing some of these chips,” he said, “so they wouldn’t be so bulky. The blue chips represent twenty dollars each.”

“Those blue chips — twenty dollars for each one?”

“That’s right.”

Her fingers caressed the edges of the gold-embossed chips. “Each one,” she said in an awed half-whisper, “twenty dollars.”

The waiter brought champagne, popped the cork, spilled ice out of the glasses and filled them to the brim.

We touched glasses.

“Here’s luck,” I said.

“Here’s to you,” she countered. “You’re my luck.”

We sipped the champagne. Her eyes studied me. She said abruptly, “I’m betwixt and between.”

“What do you mean?”

She said, “I need money. I have just about half enough here. I’ll be frank with you. I was down to my last cent. I came up here and invested every cent I could scrape up to buy chips. I made up my mind I’d either get what I wanted or be completely broke, and then I’d—”

Her voice trailed away into a significant silence.

“Then you’d what, my dear?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I hadn’t gone that far. Either sell myself or kill myself, I guess.”

I said nothing.

She studied me thoughtfully. “What should I do? Should I quit now, play it safe and try to raise the rest of the money some other way, or should I go ahead and gamble?”

“On those matters,” I said, “I give no advice.”

“You’ve been my inspiration, my luck. You’ve brought me success. Everything was going bad for me. And then you came along.”

I said nothing.

Abruptly the floor manager glided up to the table. “Would you mind stepping into the office?” he asked Diane.

“Oh,” she said, her knuckles suddenly white as she pressed her fist against her lips. “What have I done now?”

The manager’s smile was reassuring. “Nothing,” he said. “Only I have been asked to invite you to step into the office, Miss Marvin, and the boss would like to see Mr. Lam, too.” ‘

I glanced at my watch. It was thirty-five minutes from the time I had entered the place. I still hadn’t seen anything of Horace B. Catlin.

Abruptly Diane Marvin pushed back the chair. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Probably something about my credit — about — I don’t know.”

The floor manager escorted us deferentially to a big door marked Private.

He swung the door open without touching it, apparently by putting weight on a concealed button.

“Right this way, please,” he said, standing aside.

I followed Diane into an office.

The floor manager didn’t come in. The door clicked shut behind us. I turned to look. There was no knob on the door.

There were comfortable chairs grouped in a half-circle around a table on which were glasses, a decanter, ice, and soda.

A plain door at the far end of the office opened and Hartley L. Channing said, “Right this way, please.”

We walked in.

Channing shook hands with both of us. “How are you, Lam?” he said.

“Fine,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything to Diane.

She walked on into the inner office and I followed.

This was a room fixed up both as a den and an office. There were a television set, a radio, phonograph, a safe, filing cabinet, a desk, and comfortable lounging chairs. There were bookcases, paneled walls, indirect lighting, and there wasn’t a window in the place. An air conditioning unit kept a stream of fresh air flowing in and out.

Channing turned to Diane and said, “You can lay off, Diane. He’s not a fish.”

She said indignantly, “Well, then, why the hell didn’t I get the signal? I—”

“Keep your shirt on,” he told her. “There’s been a mix-up.”

“I’ll say there’s been a mix-up! I had things coming along just fine and—”

“That’ll do,” he told her. “You can go now. Forget you’ve seen this man, that you’ve been here, forget everything.”

Without a word to me she got up and flounced out through the door.

I couldn’t tell whether she had the combinations so that she knew how to open the door which had no knob, or whether there was some secret connection at Channing’s desk by which he could open it.

Channing and I looked at each other across the desk.

“I’d like to see the card by which you got past the doorman, Lam.”

I smiled at him.

“Well?” he said, extending his hand. “I’m waiting.”

I said, “The card was good enough to get me in. Isn’t that good enough for you?”

“No.”

I made no move.

Channing frowned. “You certainly aren’t naïve enough to think I don’t control the situation here,” he said.

I said, “I certainly hope you aren’t naive enough to think I’d let you know what I’m thinking.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“It’s got me this far.”

“That may not prove to be entirely beneficial — for you.”

I stole a glance at my wrist watch. I had a little over nineteen minutes to go.

I said, “Perhaps you and I might talk without chasing each other around in circles, and really get somewhere.”

“I want to see that card.”

I said nothing.

I didn’t see Channing give the signal — probably a concealed button somewhere under the desk — but abruptly the door from the outer office opened and a man in a tuxedo stood quietly on the threshold.

“Mr. Lam,” Channing said, “had a card when he entered the place.”

The newcomer said nothing.

“He doesn’t wish to produce that card,” Channing said. “I’d like very much to look at it.”

The man moved forward, smiling serenely. “The card, Mr. Lam,” he said.

I made no move.

The man hesitated briefly by my chair.

Channing nodded.

The man reached forward and grabbed my wrist. I tried to jerk the arm free. I might as well have tried to pull against a steel cable.

Swift, efficient fingers did things to the wrist. The other hand hit against my elbow. My arm doubled around, flew up against my back, the wrist was doubled into a grip that pulled the tendons until it was all I could do to keep from screaming.

“The card,” Channing said.

I twisted my body, trying to ease the tension and the pain as much as possible.

“Of all the damn fools,” Channing said, and came over to search me.

I was powerless to make a move.

Channing’s hand shot into my inside pocket, came out with my wallet. He deftly extracted the card I had used in entering the place, started to put the wallet back, then thought better of it and took the wallet and the card over to his desk.

“That’s all, Bill,” he said.

The man in the tuxedo released the grip on my wrist.

I dropped back into the chair. My arm felt as though every tendon in it had been pulled out of place.

Channing started to tell Bill to go, then thought better of it. “Stick around, Bill,” he said.

Channing said, “Lam, I don’t like this. You sat around in front for several hours with a companion. The man is still down there waiting for you. I suppose if you don’t appear within a certain time he’s to come and get you or else call the police. Is that it?”

“You’re talking. I’m listening.”

“I suppose you feel that gives you a paid-up policy of life insurance.”

“I’ll run my business,” I said, “you run yours.”

He examined the card carefully.

“This is a genuine card,” he said. “It not only bears my signature but it has the little secret mark on it that you wouldn’t even know was there. It’s a genuine card. Where did you get it?”

“It was given to me.”

He shook his head. “Those cards aren’t obtained in that way.”

I said nothing.

He studied the card again, then looked over at me and I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes.

“Lam,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you how I know, but this is one of the cards that were given to George Bishop for distribution to a very select few.

“Ordinarily George kept his connection with this place completely secret, but for the few people whom he knew he could trust, he had some special cards. This is one of those cards. Now where did you get it?”

“It was given to me.”

“You know, Lam, there’s just a chance, just an outside chance that you’ve been over talking with Irene Bishop. I wouldn’t like that.”

I said nothing.

He picked up my wallet, started going through it, became motionless. “Well, I’m damned,” he said, half under his breath. “You’ve got four more cards — all given to George Bishop!”

I realized then how foolish I had been to keep this evidence on me. There undoubtedly was a secret mark on each of those cards.

For ten or fifteen seconds he sat there, saying nothing.

I stole another glance at my wrist watch. I had eleven minutes to go, then Danby would call the police if he followed instructions. I hoped he’d follow instructions. I didn’t care particularly about having the police butt in at this stage of the game, but I could see that things might be getting just a little out of hand.

Abruptly Channing said, “Bill, there’s a man waiting down there in the guy’s car. I had assumed he was just an errand boy carrying a life insurance policy for this guy, but I think we’d better make sure.”

“Yes?” Bill said.

“Go down and bring him in,” Channing said.

“Suppose he doesn’t want to come?”

“I told you to bring him in.”

Bill started moving for the door.

I knew I had to stall for ten and a half minutes.

“We might talk first,” I said.

“We might talk afterward,” Channing retorted.

I got up out of the chair, said, “I think I’m tired of being pushed around.”

I hoped that would bring Bill back to pull another judo grip on me and delay things for a while.

Bill looked questioningly at Channing.

Channing said, “Get going, Bill,” and pulled a .38 revolver out of the top drawer in the desk.

“I think,” he said, “I’m going to readjust a lot of opinions within the next few minutes. I’m readjusting some right now. So you really are a private detective. What the hell are you working on, and who the hell are you really working for?”

The door closed behind Bill. I knew I was sunk then. I should have cut the time limit down to thirty minutes, gone in and got out.

And really I didn’t want the police any more than Channing did. That probably was why I’d made it an extreme outside limit. I had really expected to go in there, get the information I wanted, and be out inside of half an hour. I’d have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for Diane Marvin. The fact that the man behind the roulette wheel had given her the signal to start playing me for a live one had given me a false sense of security.

Channing thought things over for a while, then tossed the wallet across the desk so it lit in my lap.

“Put it away,” he said. “I don’t want you to think we’d take anything by force here. You’ll find that everything’s in your wallet. I just wanted to look at it — and it’s a damned good thing I did.”

“Okay,” I said, “what do we do next?”

“We wait.”

I said, “I was having a bottle of champagne with your come-on out there. I suppose the champagne is still waiting. It—”

“Don’t mention it, Lam,” he said magnanimously, “there’ll be no charge. In fact, I’ll have it brought in here. I may want to use it for a christening.”

“What christening?”

“I think I’ll pour it all over you and christen you the heel of the week.”

“That won’t get you any place.”

“Shut up, I want to think.”

We were silent for a while, then a loudspeaker said, “Bill is at the door. He says to tell you he has a man with him.”

Channing said, “Tell him to take the guy into office number two and plug in the sound connection. Question him in there. You can help him with the questions. I want to find out who this guy is and what he’s doing around here.”

“I suppose,” Channing said, turning to me, “you have one of your agency men with you.”

I said nothing.

“You’re a communicative cuss, aren’t you?”

“My clients pay me to get information, not to give it.”

“Who are your clients, by the way?”

I grinned at him.

“I wonder,” he said softly, almost to himself, “if Irene is just a little smarter than we’ve been thinking she is.”

I still said nothing.

“If Irene wants to make any trouble,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “it would be a dirty, nasty mess — for her. She wouldn’t get anything out of it. Make no mistake, Lam, I’ve taken over here and that’s final. There isn’t the scratch of a pen that ties George Bishop into this thing. There isn’t anyone who can show this isn’t my business built with my money, and there isn’t any way of passing this thing on to George’s widow. She wouldn’t stand one chance in a million.”

He waited for a few minutes, then said, “I wish I knew whether you were working for her or not.”

Abruptly a light flashed. Channing reached over and tripped a switch. He said to me, “We can hear what goes on in the other room but they can’t hear what’s said in here.”

Almost instantly a voice said, “All right, buddy, let’s have it. What’s your name?”

“My name is Danby, and I didn’t want to come in here. I’m going to make charges against you. You can’t hustle me around like this. That’s kidnaping.”

“Danby, eh? What do you do?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Let’s take a look for a driving license.”

There was the sound of a brief scuffle and another voice said, “Okay, this is it. Frank Danby. Here’s his social security number and—”

“What’s the address on that driving license?”

“A yacht club.”

“Good Lord, I get it now,” Channing said, coming up out of the chair as though the thing had been wired.

He crossed the room, jerked the door open, and was out like a shot.

I got up and crossed over to the desk.

He’d taken the revolver with him.

I gave every drawer in the desk a quick frisking. There wasn’t another gun anywhere in the place. There was a box of .38 shells, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, and a can of tobacco. There were two packages of cigarettes, a box of cigars, some chewing gum, and a bottle of fountain-pen ink.

Aside from that .38-caliber gun it was a desk that the police could have prowled through any day in the week, and welcome.

Abruptly I heard Channing’s voice from the other room. “What’s the trouble?”

Danby’s voice, surly and defiant, said, “I’ve been kidnaped. Who are you?”

“Kidnaped!” Channing exclaimed.

“That’s what I said. This guy made me come in here with him. He had a gun in his pocket.”

Channing said, “What’s all this, Bill?”

Bill’s voice said, “No gun, just a lead pencil. For a gag I pushed the end of this lead pencil against the cloth of the coat pocket.”

“But what was the trouble?” Channing asked.

“No trouble except this guy has been sitting out front getting a line on everyone coming in. I figured he’s a stickup guy, waiting for some dough-heavy customer to come out. Then he’d follow and stick ‘em up.”

“That’s serious,” Channing said. “We’d better turn him in.”

“You’re nuts,” Danby growled, but his voice showed he was frightened. “You’ve got nothing on me. I was hired to come out to point out a guy.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, but when I recognized Mr. Catlin, this fellow left me and came on in.”

Channing’s booming laugh was good-natured. “Oh, shucks, that must have been Donald Lam.”

“That’s the guy,” Danby said. “His name is Lam. He told me if he didn’t get out inside of an hour to call a friend.”

Channing said, laughing, “That’s a shame. He left a message for you and I intended to deliver it, but I had no idea it was — Why, he said you were his chauffeur.”

“What did he say?”

“Lam found the man he wanted to see here and they went out the back way. He thought at first this fellow might make trouble and that’s why he told you about calling the friend. But there wasn’t any trouble and Lam left. Seems he’s a private detective. I didn’t know whether you knew. I’ve known Lam for ten years and he’s all right, straight as a string.”

“What was his trouble with Mr. Catlin?” Danby asked.

“No trouble with Catlin. Catlin was helping Lam. Catlin was to point out the guy Lam wanted. I should have notified you sooner, but I’ve been busy. Lam told me to tell you either to drive the car back to the yacht club, or to telephone for a taxicab, whichever you wanted to do. He left me five dollars to give you to pay for the cab. He’s been gone about twenty minutes.”

“Do I get the five-spot if I drive the car back to the yacht club or only if I take a taxi?” Danby asked.

I knew then I was sunk. There was no use waiting to hear any more. I started prowling, trying to find a way out.

I looked around the desk for buttons I could press that would unlatch the door. I tried to remember just what Channing had been doing before he streaked across the office.

Abruptly the door swung open. I felt certain I’d pressed the right button and was halfway across the office before I realized the door was being opened from the outside.

Bill was coming back in. Apparently Channing had given him a signal.

Bill grinned at me and said, “Sit down, Lam.”

I tried to duck around past him and grab the door before it closed.

Bill snaked out an arm, caught me by the back of the coat, spun me around, clamped his fingers around my sore wrist, and said, “Right in that chair, Lam.”

I hit him in the stomach with everything I had. Sheer surprise made him recoil. That and the force of the blow gave me freedom for a second. I threw myself against the door which had been slowly swinging shut.

Bill charged, but I had the door open and was out in the reception room, running across it with Bill in hot pursuit.

The door opened.

Bill yelled a warning. I flung myself into the opening just as Channing started in. I hit Channing as though he had been a line of scrimmage.

My momentum plowed him back, but I was slowed up enough for Bill’s long arm to reach out. His fingers grabbed the back of my coat collar.

Something hit me on the side of the head. A wave of blackness came up from my stomach. The bitter of nausea was in my mouth and my knees went limp.

I tried to hang onto the doorknob, turning around, jerking my head back as I did so.

I had a glimpse of Bill, his arm upraised, a blackjack looped around his wrist. There was no expression on his face. He even looked slightly bored.

Then the arm chopped down.

There was a blinding flash inside my brain and the floor smacked my face.

Chapter Seventeen

I had no idea what time it was when I regained consciousness. I was sprawled on a bed in a cheap, dingy bedroom equipped with an iron bedstead, a chair, a dresser, a washstand, and a wardrobe closet.

It was the sort of cheap furniture that could have been picked up at a secondhand store, completely different from the sumptuous, synthetic elegance of the gambling house — and yet a subconscious feeling existed that I was still within the confines of the gambling house.

Bill was sitting in a chair reading one of the so-called true detective magazines. The chair was almost directly beneath a single electric light hanging from a twisted green drop cord and covered with a green shade.

I moved my head and the room started rocking around as though it were a cabin on a boat in a heavy sea.

I felt sick.

Bill turned a page in the magazine, then looked over at me as a precautionary measure, saw my eyes were open, pushed a thick forefinger in between the pages of the magazine to mark his place, put the magazine down, and grinned. “How you feelin’, buddy?”

“Rotten.”

“You’ll feel better after a while.”

He got up out of the chair, picked a bottle from the dresser, unscrewed the top, and held it under my nose.

It was a smelling salt that did a great deal to revive me.

“Now, just take it easy,” Bill cautioned sympathetically. “You ain’t hurt bad. Just roughed up a bit. You’ll be all right.”

Gradually the throbbing left my head. The room steadied down and my head settled into a dull, constant ache with a sore spot above and back of my right ear that felt like a boil.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

Bill read a couple more interesting paragraphs in the magazine before he looked up to answer the question. “I’m not supposed to talk.”

“What are you supposed to do?”

“Keep you right here.”

I said, “That could be pretty serious, you know, in case I wanted to get up and walk out.”

“How come?”

“Kidnapping.”

He grinned. “Save your breath, buddy.”

I swung around to a sitting position on the bed.

Bill watched me with quizzical interest.

I slowly got up.

Bill put down the magazine. “Now, listen, Lam,” he said, “you’re a nice egg but you’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan. You’ve led with your chin and you should be smart enough to know that that’s going to make trouble.”

“What’s Channing planning to do?” I asked.

“I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet.”

“He’s got to let me go sometime.”

The smile left Bill’s face. “Don’t be too sure about that. You don’t know some of the things I know.”

“What?”

“I told you I’m not talking. Now, shut up. I’m going to read. I won’t talk, and I don’t want to listen.”

“You’re working for Channing, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Like your job?”

“I’m getting by all right.”

“Loyalty is a fine thing,” I said, “but self-preservation is the first law of nature. You’d better start thinking about yourself.”

He laughed a heavy, mirthless laugh. “Look who’s talking. You’re You should have done that before you ever came into the joint.”

I said, “Do you think I’m foolish enough to have gone into this place unless I knew what I was doing?”

I saw interest in his eyes. “You were probably just taking a big chance.”

I said, “Don’t kid yourself. You know what’s been going on in the background. Gabby Garvanza wanted to muscle in on the situation up here. Gabby Garvanza got put on the spot and stopped a lot of lead. The trouble was the fellow who did the job was a little nervous and the bullets weren’t put in the right places to do the job.

“Now Gabby Garvanza’s well and he’s up here in San Francisco. What do you suppose he came up here for?”

Bill closed the magazine.

I said, “The real owner of this joint was George Tustin Bishop. Channing was simply the front who handled the accounts and juggled the figures around.

“Maurine Auburn had been Bishop’s girlfriend. He threw her over when he divorced his wife and married Irene, the strip-tease artist. Bishop was getting rid of both his wife and his mistress at the same time. That’s how wrapped up he was in Irene. Maurine took up with Gabby Garvanza, but she’d always carried a torch for George Bishop.

“Maurine was supposed to be Gabby Garvanza’s girl. Someone tried to rub Gabby out. Maurine saw the whole thing. She wasn’t hurt. No bullets were fired in her direction. She didn’t say anything. Why?”

I could see Bill was thinking.

“The reason,” I said, “could have been because the gunman was someone she liked very much. That someone liked her so well he wouldn’t want her hurt. He knew she liked him enough so that he knew he could depend on her not to squeal.

“Then Gabby began to get well, and Gabby knew who had shot him. Gabby started planning to go to San Francisco and even scores.

“Maurine wanted to warn her friend. She wanted to make certain that the next attempt on Gabby’s life was going to hit the jackpot. You think back on that story the newspaper tells about how she walked out on the people who were with her — bodyguards that had been provided by Gabby to see that nothing happened to her.

“She pretended to get crocked, to pick up with some fellow whom she met by chance — Well, I did a little checking of my own. That fellow was an aviator. Maurine picked him up, all right, but they didn’t go out making whoopee together. They dashed out to the airport. The fellow she’d picked up cranked up his plane and made a blue streak to a field up north of San Francisco, where the plane let down and Maurine and George Bishop were scheduled to have a secret confab and lay plans so Gabby Garvanza would cuddle up on a nice cold slab in the morgue.

“Somebody was there waiting. Someone who felt that a lot of good could be accomplished by getting George Bishop out of the picture in such a manner that he would seem to have a perfect alibi.”

“Gabby Garvanza?” Bill asked.

I snorted derisively. “Gabby wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. Who was it who profited the most by Bishop’s death?”

Bill thought that over, then stirred restlessly. “I don’t like the chin music you’re making,” he said. “Even listening to it could get me into trouble.”

“Not listening to it could get you into a hell of a lot more trouble. How big a damn fool do you think Gabby is? Gabby Garvanza is in San Francisco right this minute. Hartley Channing pulled a pretty slick deal but he committed a murder.”

“John Billings killed Bishop,” Bill said.

I smiled and shook my head. “Bishop’s body was put aboard Billings’s yacht. That was done by someone who knew that once the body was found there people wouldn’t look any farther for the real criminal than young Billings. Billings thought he was smart. He sneaked the body over onto an adjoining yacht. What he didn’t realize was that Bishop had been killed with his gun and that the murderer had dropped the gun overboard from the stern of Billings’s yacht. It never occurred to Billings to think of that or to go down in the drink and take a look. But that was the first thought that occurred to the police. That’s why the diver working with an underwater metal locator found the gun in the first fifteen minutes. Gabby Garvanza knows these things. Now what do you think he’s going to do?”

“How do you know Gabby Garvanza knows them?”

I grinned at him and said, “Who the hell do you think hired me?”

Bill sat up straight in the chair. He studied me thoughtfully for a few moments, then gave a low whistle.

He tossed the magazine over onto a battered table and said, “What do you want, Lam? If I let you get away from me Channing would kill me before Gabby ever took over.”

I said, “Let me get to a phone.”

“That would be too hard.”

I said, “Lots of things are going to be hard. Don’t think for a minute Gabby Garvanza doesn’t know what’s going on here. You rub me out and the chances that you’ll live to see your next birthday are just about a million to one — and I don’t give a damn if your next birthday is the day after tomorrow.”

Bill’s forehead knitted into a frown.

I said, “The police will find the aviator who took Maurine up here within—”

“Shut up,” he blurted. “I want to think. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll keep your damned trap closed for the next five minutes.”

I eased back on the bed. The pillow propped under my neck took some of the soreness out of the aching head.

It wasn’t five minutes, not much over two minutes, when Bill said, “There’s a phone booth down at the end of the hall. Now, for the love of Mike don’t make any noise and don’t let anybody see you.”

I got up off the bed. Bill took my arm to steady me.

“Got any money?” Bill asked.

I ran my hand clown into my trousers pocket and encountered the small change. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” Bill told me. “You’re on your own. If anyone spots you I’m going to put a slug in your ribs and claim you were escaping.”

He opened the door, looked up and down the corridor, then nodded to me.

I eased my way down the hall and into the phone booth, closed the door, and tried to recall the number of Gabby’s hotel. The thought of having to look it up in the phone book was an agony to my aching eyes and I couldn’t take any chances with the delay.

I remembered the number, dropped a coin, and spun the dial on the telephone.

When the hotel answered I said, “George Granby, please.”

I could hear the connection being made. Realizing how much depended on Gabby being in and talking with me, I could feel my hand begin to shake and my knees quiver at the mere thought that he might not be there.

The man who answered the telephone was undoubtedly the bodyguard who had thrown me out.

“Put Gabby on,” I said.

“Who is this?”

“This,” I told him, “is Santa Claus and it’s Christmas. Get Gabby on fast or his stocking will be empty.”

I heard the guy say, “Some nut says he’s Santa Claus passing out information. You want to talk with the goof?”

I heard Gabby rumble something, and then the bodyguard said, “Go peddle your papers.”

I said, “This is Donald Lam, the private detective, whom you threw out a while back.”

“Oh-oh,” the man said.

I said, “I’ve completed my investigations up here. I told Gabby I might do him a good turn. Now I’m in a position to do it.”

“What way?”

“By giving him information about what I’ve uncovered.”

“We don’t give a damn what you found out. We know what we want to know.”

“You think you do,” I said. “You’d better know what I know and then you’ll know who killed Maurine Auburn and why. Ask Gabby if he’s interested.”

This time I couldn’t hear anything. The bodyguard was evidently holding his palm over the transmitter so I couldn’t, but after what seemed an interminable wait, and after Central had asked, “Are you waiting?” Gabby Garvanza’s voice said cautiously, “Start talking. Give me facts. To hell with what you think. Give me facts.”

“I told you I might be able to do you some good,” I said. “Now I’m—”

“Can the chatter. Give me facts.”

I said, “You’ve known Maurine for over a year. How many times in that year has she got drunk enough to start playing around with strangers? The business of getting boiled and walking out on the bodyguard was part of an act. The fellow she went out with was an aviator. He took her to San Francisco.”

“Any damn fool could put two and two together on that,” he said, “now that her body’s been found.”

I said, “All right, she went of her own accord, under her own power, on an errand she didn’t dare to tell you about and didn’t dare to let the bodyguard know about. The errand was that she wanted to keep a rendezvous with George Bishop.”

“That all?” Gabby asked.

“George Bishop shot you,” I said.

Silence at the other end of the line.

“Maurine put the finger on you.”

“You talk a lot,” Gabby said.

“You wanted facts. There they are.”

“You got proof — about Maurine?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Gabby rasped, “spill it.”

I said, “The man who killed both Bishop and Maurine was Hartley L. Channing. He wants to take over The Green Door. He knew that with Bishop out of the way and enough murder mixed up in the thing the police wouldn’t dare let you muscle in up here.”

“Where are you now?”

“Right now,” I said, “I’m being held prisoner by Channing. I think he intends to pour some nice wet concrete around me and clunk me in the deepest part of San Francisco Bay. I’d like like hell to have you do something about it before—”

“How did you get to the phone?”

I said, “I talked my guard into the idea that you were going to be the new boss.”

Once more there were four or five seconds of silence, then he said, “You’re a naïve son of a bitch.”

“I’m talking, ain’t I?”

“Sure, you’re talking,” he said, “and your guard was Bill. Right?”

I hesitated a moment, and in that moment realized why it had been so easy to sell Bill on letting me talk to Gabby.

“Right,” I said.

“All right,” he said, “let me talk to Bill.”

I left the receiver dangling and tiptoed back to the room.

“Your boss wants you on the line,” I told Bill.

Without a word he got up and walked out, leaving me sitting there on the bed.

I wanted to give it an artistic touch. I went over and picked up Bill’s magazine. When he came back I was deeply engrossed in reading one of the so-called true detective cases.

“Come on,” he said, “you’re going out.”

I slowly got up from the bed.

He looked at me curiously.

“How the hell did you know I was one of Gabby’s men?” he asked.

I didn’t answer that question. I’d made the only play I had to make and the fact that Lady Luck had dumped the jackpot into my lap was just her way of squaring up for the bum break she’d given me when Frank Danby spilled his guts to Hartley Channing and sold me down the river.

I tried to look modest.

“You might be a smart bastard,” Bill said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Chapter Eighteen

From my cheap hotel I called police headquarters and got Lieutenant Sheldon on the line.

“Donald Lam speaking,” I said.

“Son of a gun,” Sheldon said. “Where are you, Donald?”

I gave him the address of the hotel.

“What are you doing there?”

“I’ve been hiding out.”

“What from?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to break in on your time. I knew you were a busy man and I thought some of your boys were trying to take me up to see you.”

“You shouldn’t have been so considerate, Donald. I want to see you. I want to see you pretty damn bad. In fact, I’ve had the word out to pick you up wherever you happen to be, either here or when you showed up in your office at Los Angeles.”

“I’ll be glad to see you, Lieutenant.”

“Would you now?”

“I have the information you wanted,” I told him.

“What information?” he asked, suspiciously.

“About the hit-and-run driver.”

“Oh-oh,” he said.

“Moreover,” I told him, “I can tell you all about the Bishop murder and you can solve both cases. When you come up to see me you’d better have your new uniform on and you’d better come alone.”

“How come?”

“The newspapermen will want to take pictures.”

“You know, Lam,” he said, “there’s a lot about you I like, but you have one bad point.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know geography. You think this is Los Angeles.”

“No, I know where this is.”

“You think the kind of stuff that sells real estate in Los Angeles will get you by with the San Francisco police department.”

“What do you think sells the real estate in Los Angeles?” I asked.

“Meadow mayonnaise,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” I told him. “It’s the climate,” and hung up.

I didn’t have to wait much over ten minutes. He hadn’t put on a new uniform but he’d taken a chance that there might be some favorable publicity and had come alone.

I said, “On that hit-and-run business—”

“Oh, yes.”

“I have to protect the source of my information.”

“I don’t like that, Donald.”

“But,” I said, “if you get a confession, you don’t give a damn who gave me the information.”

“Not if I get a confession.”

I said, “Let’s go and get one and then I’ll tell you about the Bishop murder case.”

“Where are we going?”

I gave him the name and address of Harvey B. Ludlow.

“You know, if this is a bum steer, Donald,” he said, “you could be awfully slap-happy when you came into court on a blackmail charge.”

I said, “I called you, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I told you where to come, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Do I look that dumb?”

“No, you don’t look that dumb, but I get fooled every once in a while on you Los Angeles creeps.”

I didn’t say anything. It was better not to.

We made time in the lieutenant’s car.

“How about the Bishop murder?” he asked after a few minutes.

I said, “Let’s try the Ludlow business first. If that’s pay dirt then you’ll be more ready to listen, and if it isn’t pay dirt you wouldn’t have confidence in anything I said.”

“Donald,” he said, “if that isn’t pay dirt you aren’t even going to feel like talking.”

We went to the Ludlow residence. Ludlow was in bed.

It was pay dirt.

Harvey B. Ludlow, a fleshy, heavy-set, retired broker, started to shake like cold consommé on a plate when he saw the lieutenant’s badge. Before Sheldon had asked half a dozen questions Ludlow was blabbing it all out.

It didn’t even need the marks on Ludlow’s car by way of confirmation to clinch the case. Ludlow was just aching for an opportunity to spill everything he knew and get it off his chest.

He’d had four or five drinks and had been at a business conference. One of his associates had had his secretary at the conference taking notes, and Ludlow had said he’d take her home.

They stopped for a couple of cocktails, and Ludlow kept looking the secretary over with an appraising eye. She didn’t like her job, knew Ludlow had lots of dough, and looked right back at him.

Ludlow didn’t tell us that angle, but we could see the money angle was the only inducement from a girl’s viewpoint he could have had to offer.

By the time Ludlow started for home by way of the girl’s apartment, he was feeling the effects of the four or five cocktails, and a sudden surge of self-confidence which made him think he wasn’t such a bad-looking old coot after all. The girl was willing to listen to his quavering wolf howls.

That was the story.

Ludlow had wanted to protect his “good name.” He saw a chance to get away and he took that chance. He’d been terror-stricken ever since.

He was a prominent clubman and it was going to make enough of a scandal so Lieutenant Sheldon thought he’d better get his captain in on the deal. He got him up out of bed.

The newspaper photographers came out and took pictures of them inspecting Ludlow’s car with a microscope, took pictures of Ludlow’s wife with her arms around his neck, stating that she’d stand by him through thick and thin, that it had all been a lamentable misunderstanding.

Lieutenant Sheldon and the captain gave the newspaper reporters a great story about how they had carefully worked the thing out by a process of elimination, that they’d made a surreptitious examination of Ludlow’s car without his having the least idea that he was an object of police suspicion, that he had been under investigation for some three or four days. That was the way the police worked, quietly, efficiently, but with deadly precision.

It was a beautiful story.

No one even introduced me to the newspaper reporters.

After the pictures had been taken, the captain and Lieutenant Sheldon drove me back to police headquarters.

Sheldon had his arm around my shoulders when we went in. We were buddies. I could have squared all the parking tickets in San Francisco.

We went into the captain’s office.

Sheldon said, “I haven’t had a chance to explain to you about Donald Lam, Captain.”

“He gave you a tip on that Ludlow case?” the captain asked.

Sheldon looked at him reproachfully. “Hell, no,” he said. “I did that on my own, but I’ve been looking for Lam for quite a while.”

“Why, Lieutenant?”

“I think he knows something about the Bishop murder.”

The captain whistled.

“Mind if I take him in and talk to him for a while in my office, Captain? Would you mind waiting a few minutes longer?”

“Hell, no. Don’t you want me along?”

“I think I can do better if Donald and I just sit down and talk things over, sort of palsy-walsy. I don’t mind telling you, Captain, I think I know what happened in that case. I think I can go out and put my finger on the murderer right now.”

“Well, who is it?”

Lieutenant Sheldon shook his head. “Donald Lam has a couple of facts that I think will clinch the matter, at least I think he has. Give me half an hour with him and then I’ll tell you the whole story, and I hope I’ll have proof.”

The captain said, “You come right to me with it, Lieutenant. Don’t talk to anyone else. Just talk to Lam and then come right in to me. You understand?”

Lieutenant Sheldon met his eyes. “Of course I understand, Captain.”

“You’re doing a damn fine job,” the captain went on. “That’s the kind of an officer I like to have. You think it’ll be about half an hour?”

“About half an hour.”

“The chief will be interested in this,” the captain said.

Sheldon nodded, got up and took my arm. “Come on, Donald,” he said. “I think you have some information that’ll help. You may not know it’ll help but I’ve got a pretty good theory as to what happened. If I can get a couple of angles from you I think I’ll be ready to sew the case up. Be seeing you, Captain.”

Chapter Nineteen

I said to Lieutenant Sheldon, “We’re going to have to get John Carver Billings in here.”

“The kid?”

“No, the old man.”

He said, “They’ve got a high-power attorney. He’s instructed them not to talk, and—”

“We’re going to have to get him in here.”

He looked at me and said, “You know, Donald, I’ve stuck my neck way, way out on this thing, and if I have to go back to the captain in half an hour and tell him ‘No soap’ — Well, that’s going to be tough on me, and it’s going to be awfully damn tough on you.”

I said, “You’ve got half an hour, Lieutenant. I’ve shown you what I could do so far. You’ve got a nice story breaking in the papers tomorrow.”

“That’s water under the bridge. What have we got for follow-up?”

“That,” I said, “depends upon how much confidence you have in me.”

He picked up a telephone, dialed one of the interoffice exchanges, and said, “Get John Carver Billings in here — the old man. That’s right. Hurry it up. I don’t give a damn what his lawyer said; get him in here, now, quick, fast! Wake him up!”

He hung up.

“I’d like to know something about your theory, Donald.”

I said, “Listen to what I have to say to Billings. Have a stenographer ready to take down a confession.”

He said, “Donald, if you could crack this — it would be something.”

“It’s something.”

“You mean it’s Billings?”

I said, “The homicide squad has already got the dope on Billings.”

“A confession from him would be a feather in my cap.”

I said, “To hell with a feather, Lieutenant. I’m going to get a whole war bonnet for you, stuck with feathers all up and down the line. Billings didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”

There was genuine affection in Lieutenant Sheldon’s eyes. “Have a cigar, Donald,” he said. “These are damned good cigars.”

Ten minutes later, John Carver Billings was brought into the office. His lips were clamped in a thin line of firm determination. His eyes looked as though someone had turned out the light, but he was sitting tight.

There was surprise on his face when he saw me sitting there, then he said to Lieutenant Sheldon, “I have been instructed by my attorney to answer no questions except in the presence of my attorney and on the instructions of my attorney.”

He sat down.

I said, “Mr. Billings, I think there’s a chance to clean this thing up.”

He looked at me and recited, “I have been instructed by my attorney to answer no questions except in the presence of my attorney and on the advice of my attorney.”

I said, “Don’t answer any questions.”

“I have been instructed not to talk about anything.”

“Don’t talk,” I said. “Listen.”

He shut his mouth and closed his eyes as though trying to withdraw his personality from everything in the office and everything in connection with it.

I said to Lieutenant Sheldon, “Here’s what happened, Lieutenant. George Tustin Bishop owned The Green Door. You probably won’t want to know anything about it officially, but unofficially you know what that is.”

Sheldon said, “I thought a man named Channing was—”

“Channing,” I said, “was Bishop’s accountant when he started in. He moved in and cut himself a piece of cake when he found out what was going on.

“Bishop posed as a mining man. He didn’t want to fail to report his income but he didn’t want to report it as coming from a gambling place. Therefore he worked a lot of dummy corporations and he developed mines, shipped ore to smelting companies, got checks from smelting companies, and all of that. If anybody had ever taken the trouble to investigate, the whole thing would have been turned up, but no one took the trouble to investigate because the books were all regular on their face. It just never occurred to anyone that a smelting company would be willing to pay gold-ore prices for common dirt. And there was always one mine named ‘The Green Door.’ž”

“Go ahead,” Sheldon said.

I said, “Before Bishop got into the gambling business he’d been doing a little blackmailing on the side. I don’t know whether he’d blackmailed anyone other than Billings’s son, but he’d been coming down pretty hard on the boy. I don’t know just what he had on him. I haven’t gone that far, but I think before we get done Mr. Billings, here, will tell us what it was.”

Sheldon glanced inquiringly at Billings.

Billings was sitting there with his eyes tightly shut and his fists clenched, his mouth pushed together as though he were afraid some word might inadvertently spill out when he didn’t want it to. His face was the color of wet concrete.

I said, “After Bishop got into The Green Door he didn’t care so much about blackmail. That was penny-ante stuff. But, remember, Bishop had something on young Billings. He knew it and Channing probably knew it. Channing may not have known what it was.

“Anyway, Channing started moving in on the business and Bishop didn’t like that. Bishop became a little worried about Channing. He needed some dummy whom he could trust to carry on the business end of things, but Channing was rapidly getting himself in the position where Bishop couldn’t trust him and Bishop was about ready to see that Channing got put away where he couldn’t and wouldn’t talk.

“Then Gabby Garvanza decided he’d move in. Someone filled him full of lead and didn’t do a good job of it.”

“Know who it was?” Sheldon asked.

“Sure. It was George Bishop. He thought he’d done a good job of it at the time. When he read in the morning papers that Gabby would recover, he almost passed out. His widow will confirm that.”

The lieutenant nodded. “Go on, Lam.”

I said, “Bishop had been sweet on Maurine Auburn at one time. Channing had introduced Maurine to Gabby Garvanza, then Bishop married Irene, the strip-tease artist, and Maurine teamed up with Gabby; but Maurine kept carrying the torch for Bishop.

“Then Bishop and Gabby Garvanza got at cross-purposes. Bishop tried to put him out of the way and it was an amateurish job. Bishop was a gambler and a blackmailer but not a killer. He didn’t do a neat, workmanlike job.

“When Bishop partially recovered from the shock of finding that Gabby was still with us, he decided he had to make another pass at Gabby before Gabby got ready to move around.”

“Go ahead,” Sheldon said.

I said, “Bishop wanted Maurine to put Gabby on the spot where they’d be sure Gabby didn’t escape the next time, so it was all fixed up that Maurine was to get a little bit crocked and impulsive and fall for a handsome stranger. The stranger was in reality an aviator who was hired by Bishop but was really Channing’s man. It had to be that way. You can’t account for what happened on any other theory. Channing knew Bishop was getting restless; he decided he’d better beat Bishop to the punch. He also knew that gambling houses don’t go through probate.”

“Okay, tell me about the aviator,” he said.

“The aviator took instructions from Bishop, but reported to Channing. That aviator picked Maurine up and flew her right fast up to a field north of San Francisco where Bishop was waiting.

“The only trouble was Channing was waiting, too.

“Maurine climbed into the car with Bishop. Channing slipped up behind. There were two guns. The one that killed Maurine was an automatic. We haven’t traced that yet. The gun that killed Bishop was one that Channing had thoughtfully slipped out of the cabin of the Billings yacht. And a bullet hole with bloody tissue around it was thoughtfully left by the murderer as a clue.”

Sheldon broke in. “You mean Channing shot Bishop a second time on Billings’s yacht?”

“Yes, so it would lodge in the paneling of the cabin. A bullet hole with bloody tissue around it would be pretty damning evidence.

“In the meantime, Bishop had been trying to put a squeeze on Billings, not a money blackmail, but Bishop wanted a favor. It was a favor that Billings didn’t want to grant.”

“What favor?” Sheldon asked.

I said, “The pitcher that goes to the well too often gets broken. The salesman who keeps on ringing doorbells sooner or later is bound to get an order.”

“I don’t get you,” Sheldon said.

I said, “Bishop had been playing around with gold mines, shipping the dirt out and using it for ballast or dumping it in the bay. The last bunch of dirt he dumped on his lot in order to build up a terraced garden. It was pay dirt. It runs about three hundred dollars to the ton of freemilling ore. It isn’t rich enough so you can see the gold sticking out all over it, but the gold’s there. You break it up and pan out the gold and you really get a surprise.”

Lieutenant Sheldon thought that over.

I gave him a minute, then went on. “Bishop controlled the majority stock. Some of it had been sold to the public. Most of it was being held in escrow.

“You see, the way Bishop operated, he needed a successive string of corporations. He’d get permission to sell stock by having it held in escrow for a year. Then the corporation would go to mining.

“Before the year was out, a board of experts would appraise the mine as valueless and Bishop would send out this report, apparently unwillingly but under a directive of the corporation commission.

“Naturally the suckers would draw back their escrow stock money and the promoter would be left with his stock — and then, There’d always be a mine by that name. No income tax man ever went any deeper than that. It was a natural. And if there’d ever been a stink, Bishop could have shown he’d reported every cent of income from The Green Door as coming from The Green Door. No one could ask for more than that. If the income tax people thought it was from the mine, Bishop couldn’t be blamed for their mistake.”

“Okay, so then he struck pay dirt?”

“Exactly. And it was in a mining company where the name happened to appeal to the public. That made the background of this particular company entirely different.

“No mining experts could possibly report this mine as being ‘unprofitable.’

“Bishop wanted to get all that stock back and he wanted it back at prices that came nowhere near reflecting the true value, so he asked Billings to have the bank file suit against the corporation on the note that Bishop had signed with the corporation. Billings smelled a rat. He wouldn’t do it. But Bishop had this hold on Billings. He used that lever to get what he wanted.

“Channing knew the inside. When he decided to put Bishop out of the way, he wanted to be sure that the murder was pinned on Billings. If the police didn’t have any good clues, then Channing would be the most likely suspect.

“Horace B. Catlin is a man I don’t know much about. He’s a member of the yacht club. I presume he’s in financial difficulties. Anyway, he got hanging around The Green Door and probably got in pretty deep. Channing didn’t report that to Bishop. He held out so he could use Catlin for his own purpose.

“Tuesday evening Catlin discharged his obligation to Channing. He loaned Channing his yacht. Channing transferred Bishop’s body to Catlin’s yacht and moved Bishop’s automobile to a side road. An airplane took Maurine’s body down south, so it would appear to police that the torpedo who had tried to rub out Gabby Garvanza had shot Maurine so she couldn’t tell the police what she knew.

“The idea was to have her buried where the body would be found — after a while.

“But Bishop’s body was to be dumped right into Billings’s lap. That way police would never suspect Channing.

“The yacht club keeps a close watch on people who come in through the gate and people who go out through the gate, but it doesn’t pay any attenion to the people who come in by yacht and the people who go out by yacht. They’re all members in good standing who have already cleared through the gate. That’s all there was to it. Channing brought Catlin’s yacht into the club, then, after it got dark, he picked the lock on Billings’s boat, put Bishop’s body aboard, and pulled what turned out to be the slickest stunt of all — he dropped the gun, with which Bishop had been killed, overboard, knowing that Billings would never think to look for the gun in case he found the body. But Channing knew that the police would send a diver down to look for the weapon the first thing they did.”

“It’s a nice story,” Lieutenant Sheldon said.

I said, “Channing must have planned to have the body ‘discovered’ a day or two later, but Billings beat him to it. Billings and his dad went down to the yacht club for something. They just happened to get aboard with no one seeing them because the electric signal had been jammed, and Danby, the watchman, had his back turned to them and was talking on the telephone when they came in.

“When they found Bishop’s body they knew that they were up against it. They knew that once Bishop’s body was found there the scandal that he had used as a blackmail lever would come out, and they also knew they’d be accused of murder. So they tried to get rid of the evidence. They did a clumsy, bungling, amateurish job. They first had to get rid of the body. They managed to move it over to one of the adjoining yachts. In order to do that they had to smash the lock. They were afraid the watchman would notice the smashed lock, so they bought another lock. There was blood on the carpet. They took up the old carpet and put down new carpet. Everything they did put their heads that much farther into the noose.”

Lieutenant Sheldon’s face was suddenly grim.

“Okay, Donald, who hired you?”

“John Carver Billings.”

“The old man?”

“The kid.”

He said, “You son of a bitch,” with such concentrated venom in his voice that it made Bertha Cool’s epithets sound like love pats.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Trying to sell me a bill of goods like this,” he said. “You sleuthed out the Ludlow hit-and-run case so you could build up a credit, and then, after you had me sold, you came along with this cock-and-bull story.”

I said, “Wait a minute, Lieutenant.”

“Wait, hell! You’ve shot your wad, Donald. You tried to pull a fast one and I’m going to show you just what happens to slick bastards like you that try to—”

“Now shut up,” I said, “and forget you’re a damn cop. You have the captain waiting in there, and by this time the captain has probably given the chief a buzz and told him to stand by because he thinks he’s got a solution of the Bishop murder coming up. Now do you want to use your head or lose it?”

He winced at my reference to the captain and the chief. He was in one hell of a spot and he knew it.

“Donald,” he said, with such an intensity of hatred his voice was actually so low as to be all but inaudible, “for a double cross like this I could break every bone in your body.”

I said, “You’ve got one way of checking this story. You’ve got about twenty minutes left in which to do it. That’s to get Horace B. Catlin in here and—”

Lieutenant Sheldon spun the dial on the phone. A couple of uniformed men were in the office before one would have thought it was possible to get a connection. He said, “Keep these guys where nobody can see them. I don’t give a damn who it is. Don’t let anybody see them. Don’t let them talk with anyone in the department. Don’t let them talk with any lawyers. Don’t let them talk with anyone outside the department. Don’t let them get to a telephone. Sew them up. Keep them right here.”

Lieutenant Sheldon went out of the office like a jet plane taking off on a trial run.

Billings opened his eyes and looked at me. Slowly he reached out and shook hands with me.

He didn’t say a word.

I said, “Don’t tell them what it was Bishop had on your son, and—”

“Shut up,” one of the officers said. “The lieutenant said you weren’t to talk to anyone.”

“Well, that didn’t mean we couldn’t talk with each other.”

“That ain’t the way I understood it. Shut up.”

Billings started to say something. One of the cops moved over.

“You boys can get yourselves pretty badly hurt,” he said, “by sticking your necks out.”

We sat there in silence.

It was a long thirty minutes. I guessed I looked at my watch fifty times, but Billings just sat there motionless, wooden-faced.

Then Lieutenant Sheldon came in. His face looked like the face of a ten-year-old kid on Christmas morning. I looked at it and let out a long-drawn sigh of relief.

“Donald,” he said, “run over that line again so I can get the straight of it. The captain’s waiting and the chief is in his office. You two mugs get the hell out of here.”

The uniformed men withdrew.

I ran over it once more for Lieutenant Sheldon’s benefit.

“How did you spot Catlin?”

“I knew there must be some member of the yachting- club who was completely in the power of the man who was managing The Green Door. Such a man must be a plunger who had got in so deep he had to follow instructions.

“I simply got the caretaker at the yacht club to keep a watch on The Green Door. When a member of the club went in, I figured he was my man.

“I followed him in. When I realized he wasn’t playing at any of the tables but was undoubtedly closeted with the manager, I felt certain I had the answer I wanted.”

“Have a cigar,” Lieutenant Sheldon said to me. “Have another one. Here, Billings, have a cigar. We’re awfully sorry we had to inconvenience you, sir, but you understand how it is. You fellows wait here. Don’t try to go out. There’ll be a guard in the corridor. Just sit here and don’t talk to anybody. Donald, you’re smart enough to keep your mouth shut. See that Billings keeps his shut. Don’t see any reporters. Don’t try to use the phone. We may be able to do something for you guys.”

Lieutenant Sheldon spun the dial on the telephone and when he had an answer said, “I’m coming right up, Captain. Sorry to keep you waiting. There was one other angle I had to check on. I’ll be right in.”

He dashed out of the office.

I turned to Billings. “What was it Bishop had on your son?” I asked.

He said, “Honestly, Lam, I didn’t know until a week ago. I prefer not to discuss it.”

“You’d better tell me.”

“I’ll be damned if I do.”

I said, “Your son is a tall, rangy lad.”

He nodded.

“Play any basketball in college?”

“Yes.”

“He was on the college team?”

“Yes.”

I said, “Bishop was a gambler who made book on college games.”

The banker’s face suddenly twisted. He began to cry. It was something to watch, the spectacle of a hard man whose tear ducts had all dried up twisting his face into a contortion of grief.

I got up and went to a window, turning my back. A few minutes later, when the sobbing had stopped, I went back and sat down.

For a long while neither one of us said anything.

After a while I said, “When you tell your story to Sheldon tell him your boy was mixed up in a scandal over a girl.”

“That wouldn’t be a powerful enough motive,” Billings said. “I’ve been thinking of that.”

“Tell him the girl died as the result of a criminal operation.”

Billings thought that over for a moment, then nodded thoughtfully. “Donald,” he said, “if you can get the police to adopt your story as the official version of what happened, you’re going to be very handsomely rewarded, very handsomely rewarded.”

I’d been associating with Bertha long enough so I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “We would expect that, Mr. Billings. We don’t work for nothing, you know.”

“You don’t have to,” he said.

That covered all the conversation. There wasn’t anything more to be said.

We sat there and waited and waited.

After a couple of hours an officer came in with sandwiches and a pot of coffee. He said, “The lieutenant wanted me to tell you to make yourselves comfortable. He said not to do any talking.”

We had the coffee and sandwiches. About an hour later Lieutenant Sheldon came in, closed the door, pulled up his chair, and sat clown close to Billings.

“Mr. Billings,” he said, “you’re an important man in San Francisco, and we want you to know that the police recognize your importance. We try to give the important citizens a break whenever we can.”

“Thank you,” Billings said.

“Now, then, Bishop had something on your son. Would you mind telling us what it was?”

“It was over a girl,” Billings said.

Lieutenant Sheldon merely grinned.

“The girl had an operation and died.”

The grin came off Sheldon’s face. He thought that over for some little time.

“All right, Mr. Billings,” he said, “I think we can keep the blackmail angle out of it if you’ll co-operate with us.”

“If you’ll keep that angle out of it,” Billings said, “I’ll — I’ll do anything, anything in the world.”

“All right,” Sheldon said. “There’s only one thing you need to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Protect us in our efforts to protect you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t do any talking. These newspaper men are pretty damned smart. They’ll cross-examine you if you ever give them the ghost of a chance. They’ll question you and then check up on the answers. They’ll get you cornered and—”

“You don’t want me to give them anything, is that it?” Billings interrupted.

“For your own good,” the lieutenant hastened to interpose. “Mind you, we’re trying to give you a break. There’s only one possible way we can keep this blackmail angle out of it.”

“I’ll keep quiet,” Billings said.

“You see,” Sheldon said, beaming, “if you co-operate with the police, they’ll co-operate with you.”

I turned to Sheldon and said, “One thing you could do for me, Lieutenant.”

“Anything, Donald, anything you want. The whole damn city is yours. Just anything you want.”

I said, “In giving the story to the newspapers you could emphasize the fact that George Bishop had struck it rich in that mine.”

He looked at me and grinned. “Bless your soul, Donald,” he said. “The story is in print already. The rich gold mine is a smash hit. It’s dramatic. I’ve talked to so damn many reporters I’m hoarse. Now, Donald, you’ll That’s the way you want it, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

He came over and clapped his hand on my shoulder so that it all but knocked the breath out of me.

“Donald,” he said, “you’re a smart boy. You’re going places. Believe me, you haven’t done yourself a damn bit of harm on this case. Anything you want in San Francisco you can get, and that’s something that not many private agencies can say — particularly if they have headquarters in Los Angeles.”

He laughed at that one.

“How about me?” Billings asked. “And what about my boy? Are we free to—”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Sheldon said. “We’ve been so damned busy. We got your chauffeur up out of bed, Mr. Billings, and your limousine is waiting right out at the front door. Now, tere’ll be a lot of newspaper reporters taking flashlights when you get in the car. They’ll ask you a lot of questions. If you just say, ‘No comment,’ it will help a lot. We don’t want to get at cross-purposes. If you want to keep that blackmail angle out of the papers it would be a lot better to let me do all the talking.”

“There isn’t anything I want to talk about,” Billings said.

“Well, that’s all there is to it,” Sheldon said, and grabbed Billings’s hand in an ecstasy of cordiality.

He escorted Billings to the door, held it open, and then let his thick arm bar my exit.

He said, “You’d better let Mr. Billings go out alone, Donald. His son will join him down there at the car and there’ll be a lot of photographers. It might be better if you didn’t have your picture taken in the group. You know how it is. You fellows can work a lot better if people don’t know anything at all about you.”

“That’s me,” I told him, “a passion for anonymity.”

Sheldon said to Billings, “And you’d better see this fellow gets a damn good fee, Mr. Billings. Believe me, he’s been a lot of help to us in this case and a lot of help to you.”

“Don’t worry,” Billings said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

The door closed.

“Isn’t there a back way out of here?” I asked Sheldon.

He clapped me on the back so hard that I had a job catching my breath.

“Donald, it’s a pleasure to co-operate with a private detective who really knows his way around. Anything we can do for you at any time we’re only too glad to do, anything at all. Come on out, right this way.”

Daylight was just breaking as he eased me out through the ambulance entrance in the back. A police car took me to my hotel.

Chapter Twenty

I walked into the office.

The receptionist looked up, gave a start as though she’d seen a ghost, and put a finger over her lips, motioning for silence. She jerked her thumb toward Bertha Cool’s office.

I moved over to the desk. “What’s the matter? Bertha on the warpath?”

“Bertha wanted to be notified as soon as you came in.”

“Was that the way she expressed it?”

“Not exactly.”

“How did she express it?”

“Bertha said, ‘If that slimy little worm has nerve enough to stick his nose in the door, you call me and I’ll throw him out myself. The partnership’s dissolved.’ž”

“Nice of her,” I said. “Give her a ring. Tell her I just came in, and am in my private office.”

I moved over to my office door.

The gilt letters reading Donald Lam on the frosted glass had been crudely and violently scratched off. I figured Bertha had gone to work with the nearest safetyrazor blade, nicking it in the process.

Elsie Brand looked up at me with wide-eyed incredulity. “Donald,” she said, “don’t, don’t come here! Go see a lawyer and have him — My God, Donald, there’s going to be a scene.”

I took a cashier’s check from my pocket and said, “I wanted to repay the money you sent me, Elsie.”

“That’s all right, Donald, that’s all right. Don’t let Bertha know I sent it. Donald, what’s this? This is for thirteen — thirteen — Donald, this is for thirteen thousand dollars!”

“That’s right.”

“A cashier’s check,” she said.

“That’s right. Billings’s bank.”

“But what — But what—”

“I invested the money you sent in mining stock,” I said. “The Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate, a nice company. It looked like a good buy, and after we had the stock bought, it went up like a skyrocket. I sold out to a syndicate that’s taking over the whole mine.”

“Donald, you mean my three hundred and fifty — Donald, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, “Just cash the check and—”

It felt as though an earthquake were rocking the office building on its foundations. Somewhere in the outer office a chair tipped over, a desk was shoved to one side and slammed against the partition as though it had been hurled by some giant hand, the door almost ripped off its hinges, and Bertha Cool stood there on the threshold, her eyes glittering, her voice raised so that it was audible all over the office, and well out into the corridor.

“You double-crossing, pint-sized barnacle of frustration! You’ve got a crust to come in here. Why, you’ve got no more right here than a moth in a clothes closet. You little two-bit, skinny-necked, flat-chested, dimplewaisted, beetle-browed, double-crossing bastard—

“What a master mind you turned out to be!

“After Bertha had five hundred dollars safely tucked away you went up to San Francisco and stuck your peanut brain into the thing! You pushed your nose into the business and what happened? They stopped payment on that check! You and your big mouth! You and your master mind!

“Then you get our clients arrested for murder. Now we’re listed as blackmailers in San Francisco. And the police want you. There’s a pickup order out for you. Think of that! A pickup for a Los Angeles private detective, a partner of mine. I picked you out of the gutter. I took you in here and gave you a partnership. Why, you — Fry me for an oyster!”

She turned around and yelled over her shoulder to the girl at the telephone desk, “Get police headquarters on the line and tell them Donald Lam is waiting for his steel bracelets. Tell them the master mind of the whole damn detective profession is back here, waiting.”

She put her hands on her hips, her elbows thrust far out, her jaw pushed forward like a bulldog.

I said, “You’ll have to sign here, Bertha,” and scaled a card across the desk at her.

She didn’t even look down at the card. “Sign my fanny!” she said. “Before I sign anything for you it’ll take an order from the Supreme Court.

“And don’t think you’ve got a damn cent coming. You’ve raised enough hell with the business so that it’ll take every cent of assets to compensate for the damage. I’ve talked with my lawyer and he says I’m dead right. Go get yourself a lawyer and see how much good it does you.

“The personal things that were cleaned out of your desk are in that cardboard box in the corner. Now, get the hell out of here.”

I said, “You’d better sign that card, Bertha. It’s the new partnership bank account in San Francisco.”

“A partnership account? What the hell have you been doing? Signing checks? Damn you, Donald, you’ll go to prison. I stopped payment on any check bearing your signature. I cleaned out the partnership bank account and redeposited it in my individual name. I’ve dissolved the partnership. I picked you up out of the gutter and, so help me, I’m going to drop you back into the gutter.”

I said, “That’s all right. Then I’ll take over the San Francisco bank account. You keep the business here in Los Angeles if you want. You won’t need to bother about legal stuff. If the partnership was dissolved, the money I made up there then becomes my individual—”

“The money you made up there?”

“That’s right.”

She grabbed the card and looked at it, said, “Why, this is just a banking card in the San Francisco bank for signatures on the partnership account of Cool and Lam.”

“That’s right,” I said. “There was quite a bit of money up there so I decided we’d better have a San Francisco bank account. After all, we’re in good with the San Francisco police and they’re going to send us all the business they can. Anything we get with a San Francisco angle will be handled up there as though we were the mayor’s partners.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said.

“You knew the Bishop murder case was solved?”

“Was solved is right,” she said. “Don’t try to tell me you had anything to do with that. I read the newspapers. Of all the damned, botched-up messes. You stuck your neck out and got Billings mixed up in it and damn near ruined his reputation. My God, if Billings sues us for damages and—”

“He won’t,” I said. “He gave me a check for five thousand dollars.”

“For five thousand dollars?”

“That’s right. Previous to that time he’d given me a check for fifteen hundred dollars for expenses.”

“He gave you a check for fifteen hundred dollars for expenses?”

“That’s right.”

“Stew me for a clam!” Bertha said in an awed voice.

“From the way you describe it,” I said, “I gather that check was after the partnership had been dissolved.”

Bertha blinked her eyes at me. Suddenly she said, “How much is in the San Francisco bank?”

I said, “The five thousand dollars that I collected from Billings by way of a fee is there. In addition to that, the expense money he gave me I invested in mining stock.”

Bertha’s face became even more purple. “You took expense money and put it in — in — in mining stock? Why, you canary-brained, pint-sized bastard. I could take you — Why, damn you, that’s embezzlement. I could — Get the police! Get the police. I’m going to make a complaint myself,” she screamed over her shoulder.

“And then,” I went on, “I sold the stock at a neat little profit. We cleaned up something like forty thousand. My broker was able to corner just about all the outstanding stock in the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate. We haven’t got the bill for long-distance telephones yet. It’ll probably be several hundred dollars, but we got the stock and we made a cleanup. We—”

Bertha’s jaw was sagging as though I’d hit her in the face with a wet towel. “You — You what?”

“Of course, when I say I sold out at a profit, Bertha, you understand that’s before taxes. We’ll have to pay income tax on this. I didn’t think it was safe to hold it long enough to go for a capital gains. It was one of those stock deals where you want to get in fast and out fast. However, I did hang on to a small block of stock so that if it should go up much higher we could hang on and take a capital gains.”

Bertha grabbed up the white card with the banking imprint and the blank for signatures. She jerked a fountain pen out of Elsie Brand’s desk set, then suddenly remembered and stepped back into the outer office.

“What the hell are you doing?” she screamed at the girl at the reception desk. “Hang up that damned phone.”

Bertha plumped herself down in a chair and scrawled her signature just over mine on the banking card.

“Elsie, darling,” she said, “you send that right up to San Francisco, right away. Send it up to the bank.”

She looked up at me and took a deep breath. Her ragepurpled lips twisted into a grin.

“Donald, lover,” she said, “you do upset Bertha’s nerves terribly at times. You know Bertha’s irritable, and there are times when she doesn’t understand just what you’re doing. You ought to keep in closer touch with Bertha.

“Come into the office and tell me all about it, Donald, lover, and Elsie, you get that jerk of a sign painter and tell him to get Donald Lam’s name back on the door before noon. And get the things out of that cardboard box and have them all put back in Donald’s desk just like they were. I’ll hold you personally responsible if Donald is inconvenienced the least little bit.

“Now, Donald, you need a rest. You’ve been going day and night. How you stand it Bertha will never know.

“You come right into Bertha’s office, lover, and tell her all that happened. Come right on in, lover.”

Elsie Brand pushed a postcard across the desk toward me. “I thought you might like your mail before you went in, Mr. Lam,” she said.

I picked up the postcard. It was an airmail postcard from Havana, Cuba. It was addressed to me personally and it said:

Darling: Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

Millie.

The words, Wish you were here, had been heavily underscored.

Bertha Cool slipped an affectionate arm around me. “Come on in, you little bastard,” she said. “Tell Big Bertha all about that forty thousand bucks. You brainy little son of a bitch.”

Shamus Award Winner for

Best Original Paperback Novel of the Year

SONGS of INNOCENCE

by RICHARD ALEAS

Three years ago, detective John Blake solved a mystery that changed his life forever — and left a woman he loved dead. Now Blake is back, to investigate the apparent suicide of Dorothy Louise Burke, a beautiful college student with a double life. The secrets Blake uncovers could blow the lid off New York City’s sex trade... if they don’t kill him first.

Richard Aleas’ first novel, LITTLE GIRL LOST, was among the most celebrated crime novels of the year, nominated for both the Edgar and Shamus Awards. But nothing in John Blake’s first case could prepare you for the shocking conclusion of his second...

RAVES FOR SONGS OF INNOCENCE:

“An instant classic.”

— The Washington Post

“The best thing Hard Case is publishing right now.”

— The San Francisco Chronicle

“His powerful conclusion will drop jaws.”

— Publishers Weekly

“So sharp [it’ll] slice your finger as you flip the pages.”

— Playboy

Available now at your favorite bookstore. For more information, visit

www.HardCaseCrime.com