Up for Grabs

Chapter 1

Elsie Brand, my secretary, jumped up from her chair as I opened the door.

“Donald,” she said, “Bertha’s having kittens!”

“Again?”

“She’s really running a temperature this time.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“A new contact. The man is a big executive and won’t wait. They have to talk with you.”

“Give her a ring,” I said. “Tell her I’m here.”

“No, no, you’re to go in just as soon as you come. She’s given me instructions.”

“Who is this executive? Do you know?”

“He’s very distinguished looking,” she said. “Looks like a banker or a very rich broker.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go take a look.”

I walked out of my office, crossed the main reception room to the door which said: B. COOL — PRIVATE.

The “B” stood for Bertha, and Bertha stood for 165 pounds of belligerency, diamond-hard eyes, a figure that had sagged into a cylinder, bulldog jaw, and a face that ran somewhat to jowls unless she held her chin up and sucked her cheeks in, which she did whenever she wanted to look really impressive.

Bertha Cool’s eyes glittered at me. “Well, it’s about time you got here! Where have you been?”

“Working on a case,” I said.

“Shake hands with Mr. Breckinridge,” she said. “He’s been waiting nearly twenty minutes.”

“How are you, Mr. Breckinridge?” I said.

The guy stood up. He was tall, slim-waisted, grizzled, forty-five or so, with a close-cropped gray mustache and quizzical gray eyes. He was a little over six feet, which put him a good six inches above me, and from the tan on his face, running uniformly up his forehead, it was a cinch he was a golf addict.

Bertha said, “Mr. Breckinridge is the head of the All Purpose Insurance Company. He’s looking for a private detective who can do a highly specialized job. He thinks you are the man for the job.”

Breckinridge smiled a toothy flash of instant cordiality. “I had a pretty good lead on you before I came over here, Lam. I’ve looked you up rather carefully.”

I didn’t say anything.

Bertha Cool’s chair creaked under her weight. She said to Breckinridge, “You want to tell him or shall I?”

“I’ll tell him,” Breckinridge said.

“Okay,” Bertha said in a voice which indicated she thought she could do it better but was yielding to an important client as a matter of courtesy.

Breckinridge said, “Have one of my cards, Lam.”

He gave me a handsomely embossed card which showed that his first name was Homer; that he was the president and general manager of the All Purpose Insurance Company.

Breckinridge said, “We need someone who differs from the average for our work. Most clients want a private detective who is on the beefy side. We need someone who is young, alert, and accustomed to using brains instead of brawn. We have steady, lucrative work for such a man.”

“Donald’s your man,” Bertha said, the chair creaking again as she turned toward Breckinridge.

“I think so,” Breckinridge said.

“Now, wait a minute,” Bertha said, suddenly suspicious, “you aren’t trying to hire him away from the partnership?”

“No, no,” Breckinridge said, “that’s precisely why I’m here, but I am convinced we’re going to have quite a bit of work for Mr. Lam.”

“Fifty bucks a day and expenses — take all you want,” Bertha said. “Those are our rates.”

“Fair enough,” Breckinridge said. “We’ll pay sixty.”

“What’s the pitch?” I asked.

Breckinridge said, somewhat unctuously, “Standards of honesty in this country seem to be undergoing a steady deterioration, a progressive disintegration.”

No one said anything to that.

“In the insurance business,” Breckinridge went on, “we find we are dealing more and more frequently with chiselers, malingerers, people who magnify their injuries beyond all reason.

“And,” he went on, warming to his subject, “we find an increasing number of attorneys who have made a careful study of how to influence susceptible jurors so that physical pain and suffering have now been distorted out of all proportion to reality.

“Let a man have a simple backache, and an attorney stands up in front of the jurors and tells them there are twenty-four hours in a day, that there are sixty minutes in each hour, and sixty seconds in each minute, that his client is suffering agonizing pain every second of every minute of every hour.”

Bertha said dryly, “We know all the rackets up here — and have worked out procedures to cope with most of them.”

“Pardon me,” Breckinridge apologized. “I forgot for the moment that I was dealing with professionals and not amateurs.

“Very well, here’s the situation in a nutshell. We are now dealing with a man whom we are satisfied is a malingerer. He was involved in an automobile accident and, confidentially, we are going to have to admit liability. Our client has told us he was in the wrong and the evidence will so show.

“The malingerer, a man named Helmann Bruno, resides in Dallas, Texas. He claims a whiplash injury and he has sufficient knowledge to report all the symptoms that go with a whiplash injury of the cervical vertebrae.

“Now, of course, I don’t need to explain to you that this is one of the most prolific fields of malingering we have. You can’t take an X-ray of a headache. You can’t deny that, in genuine cases of whiplash injury, the pain may be severe and the injury may be deep-seated and long-lasting.

“On the other hand, you can’t find any outward manifestations which can be shown on X rays which conclusively indicate whiplash when they are present, and conclusively indicate malingering when they are absent.”

“Just how serious is a whiplash injury?” Bertha asked. “I have heard they can do a lot of damage.”

“They can,” Breckinridge admitted. “Of course, you get a whiplash injury when the head is violently thrown back causing severe damage to the nerves in the neck.

“These injuries usually take place when a person is setting in an automobile and someone hits from behind, pushing the automobile forward before the occupant can tighten his neck muscles sufficiently to keep the head from being thrown back, with perhaps resulting damage to the cervical vertebrae, the cranial nerves and—”

Bertha made an impatient gesture by way of interruption. “We know all about how whiplash injuries occur,” she said, “but what I wanted to find out was how they were regarded by insurance people and just what could happen once a whiplash injury has been established.”

Breckinridge sighed and said, “From an insurance standpoint, Mrs. Cool, once a whiplash injury has been established, almost anything can happen.”

Breckinridge turned to me and said, “This is where you come in, Lam.”

I said, “Don’t you fellows have a pretty good system for exposing malingerers?”

“Of course we do, and you are going to be part of it.”

I dropped into a chair and settled back.

Breckinridge said, “When one of these malingerers gets in front of a jury, he’s sick; he’s oh, so sick; he moans and groans; he looks wan and pathetic; his eloquent attorney draws charts, and a jury awards lots of damages on the theory that, after all, the insurance company charges ample premiums for its policies and can well afford the liability.

“Experience has shown, however, that even in the worst of these cases, after we make a settlement with the injured, there is nearly always a remarkable recovery; particularly, with nervous injuries. In some instances the recovery is simply miraculous. People who have the sworn testimony of doctors that they are permanently injured go out on a camping trip within twenty-four hours after the settlement is made or take an excursion on a boat, where they become the life of the party.

“Now, of course, this rat race is not entirely one-sided. We have worked out a technique of our own. We trap these people into a situation where it is to their advantage to become active and alert, then we get motion pictures of them. In court, after a man has testified that he can hardly lift his hands as high as his shoulders, that he can only walk by taking short, faltering steps, we show pictures of him diving off a springboard, playing tennis, and swinging golf clubs.

“Now obviously, that takes some doing and, strangely enough, juries don’t like it.”

“What do you mean they don’t like it?” Bertha asked.

“They feel we’ve been spying on the guy, intruding on his privacy— Good heavens, why shouldn’t we intrude on his privacy or do anything else that is required under the circumstances?”

“But the juries don’t like it?” I reminded him.

He stroked the angle of his chin, let the tips of his fingers smooth his stubby mustache and said, “They don’t like the entrapment.”

There was a moment of silence.

“You don’t mean you’ve given up taking these motion pictures?” I asked.

“Not at all. Not at all,” he said. “We’ve simply decided to change the approach so that we appear to a little better advantage in front of a jury.

“Now, that is where you come in, Lam.

“To take the pictures, we usually have had a camper body mounted on a pickup, or a van with apertures cut in the sides. We trap a man into playing golf, for instance, and have a concealed camera where we can get pictures of him making practice swings, and things like that.

“Then when he says he can’t use his arms without pain, we show motion pictures of him whipping a golf club in an arc.

“Well, the jurors don’t like it. They feel we’ve trapped the fellow. They’ll cut their verdicts down all right, but they are left with a feeling of antagonism toward the insurance carrier.

“So now we have worked out certain refinements which we feel will improve our public relations.”

“Go ahead,” Bertha said.

“Well now, for instance, we’ll start with Helmann Bruno,” Breckinridge said. “He’s married but has no children. He has his own business, a manufacturer’s agency, which keeps him on the road quite a bit of the time.

“So we laid a trap for Mr. Helmann Bruno, because our adjuster sized him up as a phoney right from the start.”

“What did you do?” Bertha asked.

“This, of course, is confidential,” Breckinridge said.

Bertha’s diamonds glittered as she swept her hand in an inclusive circular gesture. “Within the four walls of the office,” she promised.

“Well,” Breckinridge said, “we had some circulars printed about a so-called contest. The contest is so absurdly easy a man can’t resist taking a fling. He is supposed to tell in fifty words or less why he likes a certain product. We send a printed business envelope and a blank so that all the man has to do when he receives our letter is sit there for a moment, write fifty words, stick the message in the envelope and the envelope in the mail. He can’t possibly lose anything and he stands a chance of winning all sorts of glittering prizes.”

“Who pays for this contest and who judges it?” Bertha asked.

Breckinridge grinned. “The contest has a very limited mailing list, Mrs. Cool. Actually, we send it out only to persons who are making false claims against the company and every one of those persons who replies wins a prize.”

Bertha’s eyebrows came up.

“The prize which the man wins,” Breckinridge said, “will always be the same. We’ll send him to the Butte Valley Guest Ranch at Tucson, Arizona.”

“Why this particular dude ranch?” I asked.

“Because the hostess, Dolores Ferrol, is under retainer from us; because the routine is such that a person who doesn’t go horseback riding is very much out of things during the morning, and if he doesn’t swim, play golf or volleyball in the afternoon, he’s not going to enjoy himself.

“The ‘dudes’ return from a morning horseback ride tired and dusty; the swimming pool is cool and inviting; lunch is served by the pool.

“Now then, we had originally planned to have our detectives all ready to entice this malingerer into the communal activities.

“Jurors won’t like that. We’d have to put our man on the stand and ask him his name and his occupation and he’d say he was in our employ as a detective and then go on and tell what had happened and show motion pictures of the guy doing high dives, playing golf and riding horseback.

“Then the attorney for the plaintiff would take him on cross-examination and some of those attorneys are remarkably clever. They couldn’t talk much about their client because the photographs would show that we had the deadwood on him, but they’d start talking about the witness. They’d say, ‘You are in the employ of the All Purpose Insurance Company?’

“ ‘That’s right.’

“ ‘And you went down there with the deliberate intention of luring this plaintiff into all sorts of physical activities so that he could be photographed?’

“ ‘Yes, sir.’

“‘And the insurance company paid all your expenses and paid you a salary to boot. And you expect they’re going to keep on paying you a salary as long as your services are satisfactory?’

“ ‘Yes, sir.’

“ ‘And you went down there intending to lure this plaintiff into a trap before you had ever seen him?’

“ ‘That’s right.’

“ ‘You didn’t know the nature and extent of his injuries. You didn’t know how much pain it caused him to try and be a good fellow. You deliberately prodded him into all of these athletic activities. You professed a friendship for him. You had no consideration whatever for the pain and anguish which tortured his injured body. Your only purpose was to get the photographs which you could show this jury. Isn’t that right?’ ”

Breckinridge threw out his hands. “Well, of course that sinks the plaintiff’s case as far as really big judgments against us are concerned, but the sympathies of the jurors are with the plaintiff still. They feel that we played dirty pool. The jurors give him a sort of consolation prize. We don’t like that feeling; it’s bad public relations. We want to educate jurors so they’ll feel that the malingerer is a dirty, chiseling crook.

“Now then, Lam, that’s where you come in. Helmann Bruno has already fallen for this contest business. He sent in fifty words and we advised him by wire — using the name of the dummy corporation that conducts the contest, of course — that he had won a two-week, all-expense trip to the Butte Valley Guest Ranch.”

“What about his wife?” I asked.

Breckinridge laughed. “He didn’t say anything about his wife and we didn’t — the malingerer never does. The chiseler always leaves his wife at home.

“If a guy would write in and say, ‘It’s all right, boys, I’ve won a prize for two weeks free at this dude ranch, but I’m a married man; now, can I have my wife with me and cut the time to one week?’ We’d say, ‘Sure’ and we’d make a settlement with him right then, because that guy wouldn’t be a chiseler. But the married men who decide they’re going to make some excuse to their wives about being away on business, and instead go to this expensive dude ranch without their wives, are the chiselers. They’re the malingerers. They’re the cheap, petty crooks. They’re the philanderers.

“Now then, Lam, we want you to go to the Butte Valley Guest Ranch. Dolores Ferrol will take you under her wing just as soon as you get there. She’ll see that you have every opportunity to enjoy yourself and get everything you want.

“As far as expenses are concerned, the sky’s the limit. Spend anything that you think is necessary in order to get results.

“Now, the first thing you’ll need is a feminine inspiration.”

“I can take someone with me?” I asked hopefully.

“Definitely not,” Breckinridge said. “That’s where we’ve made our mistakes before. We’ve had a couple go there, and the plaintiff’s attorneys have put them on the defensive right away.”

“How come?” Bertha asked.

“Well, if they’re married,” Breckinridge said, “the counsel takes the witnesses on cross-examination and says, in effect, ‘You deliberately used your wife as bait in order to get this guy in the position you wanted him, didn’t you?’

“And if they aren’t married, the attorney says, ‘Oh, you were there for two weeks with a woman who was not your wife. You had separate sleeping quarters, of course — or did you?’

“If the guy says, yes, they had separate sleeping quarters, then the attorney says, sneeringly, ‘You went there together, you stayed there together, you returned home together, and you slept at opposite ends of the dude ranch, did you? Just how far were your rooms separated? As much as a hundred yards? As much as fifty yards?’ And then he’ll make some sneering remark like ‘A sprinter can cover fifty yards in five seconds. How long did it take you?’

“No, we want the detective to keep in the background just as much as possible. You’ll get acquainted with some unattached girl who’s there, and then see that the malingerer is included in the group and he’s given just enough of an element of rivalry so the malingerer wants to start showing off. He shows how strong he is, how masculine he is, how athletic he is.”

“And that’s all recorded in motion pictures?” I asked.

“That’s recorded in motion pictures,” Breckinridge said.

“When we shoot those pictures, we keep the detective in the background as much as possible. We emphasize that the young woman was one who was there spending her vacation and that this, malingerer was trying to show off in front of her. The jurors won’t mind that. They’ll get a kick out of it. They won’t feel that it’s such a frame-up.

“Of course, it may come out on cross-examination that you were in our employ, but only as an observer. You didn’t bait any traps. You were only watching. Moreover, if we’re at all lucky we won’t use you at all. We’ll keep you off the stand and rely on the testimony of others, the ones whose names you’ll furnish.”

“How about the girl?” I asked.

“Well,” Breckinridge said, “we’ll keep her in the background as much as possible. We use a long focal-length lens and we narrow the field so the jurors just get a glimpse of the girl and then we have this fellow showing off. If we can get a girl somewhere in her twenties and have a man ten to fifteen years older, trying to make the grade — well, the jurors just say to themselves, ‘Why that old fuddy-duddy, who does he think he’s fooling?’ ”

“You’ve had success with that technique?”

“We’re just starting with it, Lam, but we know juror psychology. This variation will work like a charm. If we’re lucky we can keep you in the background. You’ll never have to take the witness stand.

“This approach will break the hearts of the plaintiff’s attorneys Who handle these cases on a contingency basis and figure that they can spellbind a jury into bringing in a verdict for ten or fifteen thousand dollars as consolation prizes even in cases where the proof goes against them.”

“You’d better tell me the facts about this Helmann Bruno case,” I said.

“I’ve told you, Lam, we’ve got to admit liability, although of course the plaintiff doesn’t know it, and his attorney doesn’t know it as yet. In fact he may not even have a lawyer yet.

“Foley Chester, our insured, has an importing business here. He travels rather extensively, part of the time by air, part of the time by automobile. He had a trip to make to Texas and drove to El Paso and transacted some business that he had there and he then drove on to Dallas. While he was in Dallas, he was driving along in a string of traffic, things seemed to be going along all right, he took his eyes off the road ahead momentarily, because an article in a shop window interested him, and when he glanced back he saw that the car ahead of him had stopped and he was right on top of it. He slammed on his brakes but hit the automobile.

“Now the point is, the cars were hardly damaged at all. The bumpers absorbed the shock, but this Helmann Bruno claims that his head snapped back, that he had a peculiar dizzy feeling but didn’t think too much of it.

“Chester and Bruno exchanged addresses, and Bruno said he didn’t think he was hurt but he thought he should see a doctor, and Chester told him, by all means, to see a doctor.

“Then Chester went on, the damned fool, to tell him that he was very sorry, that he’d taken his eyes off the road for just a second.

“Well, of course, we’ve claimed that Bruno brought his car to a stop without giving an adequate stop signal, that he stopped suddenly and without good cause, and all that. But the fact remains that we don’t know whether he gave a stop signal or not. His brake lights were working and, for all Chester can tell us, the guy had been stopped as much as a hundred feet ahead of him. Chester was looking to one side and just kept driving along. He plowed right into Bruno — one of those things that sometimes happens.”

“And what about the injuries?”

“Well, for a couple of days nothing happened, then Bruno changed doctors. The first doctor said he didn’t think there was anything wrong, but the second doctor was a different breed of cat. He found everything wrong. He diagnosed a whiplash injury and put the guy to bed, hired private nurses around the clock, administered sedatives, and all of that stuff.

“By this time, Bruno was educated and was complaining of headaches and dizziness, loss of appetite and all the rest of it.”

“Did he actually lose his appetite?”

Breckinridge shrugged his shoulders and said, “A man would miss a lot of meals for fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand?” I asked.

“That’s what he says he’s going to sue us for.”

“What’ll he settle for?”

“Oh, he’d probably settle for ten, but the point is, Lam, we aren’t going to pay it. We used to settle these cases but making settlements in cases of this sort is simply an invitation to every lawyer in the country to come rushing in with a so-called whiplash injury case every time anybody scratches paint on a client’s car.”

“All right,” I said, “just what do you want me to do?”

“Pack your bags, take a plane to Tucson, go to the Butte Valley Guest Ranch, put yourself in the hands of Dolores Ferrol. She’ll see that you meet Bruno when he arrives, and she’ll see that you meet some cute little thing that’s either on the make or just spending a two-week vacation and would like to have somebody pay her attention.

“You bring Bruno into the party and make just enough of a play for the girl so it establishes a rivalry.

“That’s why we want a detective who is — I mean who isn’t— Well, we don’t want one who is too big and strong and husky, physically. We want one who is personable and has the ability to make women like him, but one who isn’t exactly athletic.”

“You can’t hurt his feelings,” Bertha said. “You want a little cuss, brainy but little.”

“No, no,” Breckinridge said hastily, “not little but just— Well, we don’t want a big coarse, beefy individual, because the malingerer will try to emphasize the qualities he has that his potential rival doesn’t have. If he can’t match brains with him, he’ll move over into the field of brawn.

“That’s where we come in.”

“How long do I stay?” I asked. “Do I leave when you get the pictures?”

“No,” Breckinridge said, “you stay a full three weeks. Bruno will be staying two weeks. You get there first, and you stay after he leaves. You get everything you can on him. We want to find out all we can about his character, his background, his likes and dislikes.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll do it on one condition.”

“What do you mean, one condition?” Bertha Cool snapped. “He’s paying our rates.”

“What’s the condition?” Breckinridge asked.

“I’m not going to make a play for some girl and then put her in an embarrassing position. If I can handle things so it appears Bruno is just showing off generally, that’s one thing, but I’m not going to let some girl have her name get dragged into court.”

“I don’t think I like that,” Breckinridge said.

“Neither do I,” Bertha chimed in.

“Then go get another detective,” I told Breckinridge.

Breckinridge’s face flushed. “We can’t get anybody else. Most of the private detectives run to beef and when we use our own men we antagonize the jurors.”

Bertha glowered at me.

It was a good time to keep silent. I kept silent.

“Okay,” Breckinridge said at length, “you win, but I want you to do a good job of it. There’s a lot of future work along these lines, and our company isn’t a bad company to work for.

“We’ve decided that it’s bad public relations to have our own detectives making a setup of this sort. For the reasons I’ve pointed out, jurors don’t like that. But if we hire an outside detective on a regular basis, the jurors won’t mind it as much, and if we can keep this detective in the background, the jurors won’t mind it at all. It’s when the detective is on our payroll and makes his living doing this sort of thing that the jurors don’t like it.

“And using a regular female operative is bad. I don’t mind telling you in strict confidence that in the last two cases the cross-examining attorney was able to establish that the pair had been more intimate than the necessities of the situation called for.

“The attorney for the plaintiff quit talking about his client and bore down on our detective furtively slipping through the shadows between the cabins, and then asked him if he got paid time and a half for overtime. It brought down the house.

“We don’t want any more cases like that.”

“When do I start?” I asked.

“This afternoon,” he said. “Get established at this dude ranch. You phone them telling them the plane you’re taking and they’ll meet you.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll pack up my bags and get a reservation on the earliest plane.”

Breckinridge said, “I have already made financial arrangements with Mrs. Cool and left her my check.”

I saw him to the door and bowed him out.

When I came back, Bertha was beaming. “This is the kind of work that’s respectable, safe and conservative,” she said. “We can make money on this sort of stuff.”

“Haven’t we been making money?” I asked.

“We’ve made money,” Bertha admitted, “but we’ve done it skating on thin ice over the brink of Niagara Falls blindfolded. From now on this agency is going to be employed by established corporations, well-heeled insurance companies. The expenses will be paid by the clients as they are incurred. We won’t be gambling a cent.

“Here’s a whole new portfolio of legitimate insurance business and it’s up for grabs. Let’s be damned certain we’re the ones who grab it and hang on to it.”