Beware the Curves

Chapter 3

As I walked through the office door, the switchboard operator said, “Bertha’s frantically trying to get you.”

I looked at my watch, raised my eyebrows and said, “I’ll go on in.”

I walked across the reception office and opened the door of Bertha’s private office before the girl at the switchboard had had time to plug in the phone and ring.

Ansel was sitting very erect in the chair, his long legs crossed at the knees. There was a look of reproachful martyrdom on his face.

Bertha Cool batted her eyes at me. Her face was about two shades darker than usual.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

I nodded toward Ansel and said, “Working on our client’s case. Why?”

“I couldn’t locate you.”

“I was out.”

“So it seems. You were to have a report for Mr. Ansel.”

“I have it.”

Ansel raised his dark eyebrows. “Indeed,” he murmured.

I went over and shook hands with him. I slid one hip over on the corner of Bertha’s desk and said, “I have everything you wanted.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “You mean you’ve got him located?”

“I know his name,” I said. “The man you want is Karl Carver Endicott. He lives at Citrus Grove. He married Elizabeth Flanders six years ago.”

I quit talking.

He sat forward on the edge of the chair waiting for me to go on.

I lit a cigarette.

The seconds of silence became significant. Bertha started to say something, then realized the silence on my part was deliberate and clamped her lips shut in a thin, straight line. Ansel shifted his position, looked up at me, looked down at the carpet, looked up at me again.

I kept on smoking.

“Well?” Ansel asked, finally.

“That’s it,” I said, acting surprised. “That’s the information you wanted. The name of the man is Karl Carver Endicott. The residence address was Citrus Grove, not right in the city, but outside of the city at an orange grove ranch called the Whippoorwill.”

“The Whippoorwill,” Ansel repeated vaguely.

I smiled. “That’s right. The Whippoorwill.”

I went on smoking. Ansel sat in the chair fidgeting. “Well,” I said to Bertha, “I’ll be on my way. I’m doing some work on that Russett case, and—”

“But how about me?” Ansel asked.

I turned to look at him in surprise.

“What about your”

“About my case.”

“It’s finished. It’s solved. You wanted the name of good old Karl that you met in Paris. Wanted to know who he was. I got the name for you.”

“Well, where is he now?” he asked.

“Good heavens!” I said, “that wasn’t what you wanted us to find out. I don’t know where he is now.”

He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “I’d like very much to find out.”

“That may be quite a job,” I said.

“Good heavens! Why?” Bertha blurted. “A man like that wouldn’t have moved away without leaving a forwarding address.”

“It depends on where he went,” I told her significantly.

Bertha caught the look in my eyes and became silent.

“Well, of course, I’d like to know,” Ansel said. “I could... I hadn’t anticipated that you’d get just the name.”

“That was all you asked for.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make my wants clearly understood,” he said.

“Perhaps you didn’t.”

“Well,” Bertha snapped impatiently. “Why the hell do you want to fool around with private detectives after you have the man’s name and address? Go into a telephone booth. Give him a ring. Drop him a letter. Send him a telegram. Write him a card.”

“That’s right, Ansel,” I said. “You wanted to get in touch with good old Karl whom you met in Paris. He had an idea for a story, remember?”

He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Surely you must have found out something about him while you were getting his name.”

“Oh, of course,” I told him, “but that was just incidental and on the side. What we were supposed to find out was the man’s name. You wanted his name. We gave you his name.”

“I repeat,” Ansel said, “perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly.”

“You can say that again,” I told him. “In case you’re interested in the murder, you expressed yourself very, very incompletely.”

“I’m not interested in the murder,” he said. “I merely wanted...” His voice suddenly trailed away into dismayed silence.

I grinned at him. “How did you know there’d been a murder, Ansel?”

He tried to answer that question and couldn’t. His mouth went through the motions of making sound but gave it up as a bad job.

I could hear Bertha Cool’s chair creak as she suddenly came to life behind the desk and leaned forward, scenting financial gain the way a bird dog scents a covey of quail.

“In case you are interested in learning about the murder, Ansel,” I told him, “you made several very important mistakes. One of them is that you neglected to tell me the principal suspect was described as a tall, rather slender man with dark hair, dark eyes, and long artistic fingers. A taxi driver is supposed to be able to identify that man.

“And you made the mistake of not telling me what I was up against so I could have covered my back trail. As it was, I went out in the open without making any attempt to cover up and by this time the authorities know that the firm of Cool and Lam is interested in the Karl Endicott case. Since the police have nasty, skeptical minds, they wouldn’t believe that my interest in the case was purely for the purpose of locating quote good old Karl unquote who gave you an idea for quote a story unquote while you were in Paris. They would naturally think that we were interested in some angle of the murder, and, within a very short time, the police are going to want to know why we are interested.

“The third mistake you made was in not giving us an address where you could be reached so that when I found out what we were up against I could have warned you and told you not to come to the office.

“However, since all those mistakes have been made you’ll have to take your chances. Next time you employ detectives tell them what you want. In the meantime, give us fifty bucks.”

“But... but...” Ansel said, sputtering like a cold motorcycle motor, “you’re jumping at conclusions.”

“Detectives sometimes do that,” I told him.

He squirmed around in the chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, at length.

“Well,” I said, “we’ve done our job. We got you the information you said you wanted. We’re not mind readers. Give my partner the fifty bucks you owe us.”

I started for the door.

“Hey, wait a minute!” Bertha said. “Where are you going?”

“Out!” I told her.

Ansel sat there looking very much nonplused.

I walked out of the office, went down to the parking lot, got in the agency heap, started the motor and waited.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before Ansel came out. He looked over his shoulder apprehensively a couple of times, but seemed reassured when he found no one appeared to be taking any interest in him.

As it turned out he had his car parked in the same parking lot where we kept ours. I had a good look as he drove out. It was a serviceable, nondescript Chevy, four years old, and the license number was AWY 421.

I followed him for a ways. He played it about half-smart. After he got out to where there wasn’t so much traffic, he started cutting figure eights around four-block squares, obviously looking in his rear view mirror to see if anyone was taking an interest in what he was doing.

I quit following him, drove on down the main boulevard half a mile, parked on a side street and waited.

He must have gone through a lot of complicated maneuvers to shake off any pursuit, because it was a good twenty minutes before I saw his car sailing along down the main boulevard.

By that time he had convinced himself no one was following him, and it was a cinch to drop in behind him.

I trailed him to a bungalow out on Betward Drive.

He parked the car and I curbed the agency heap half a block down the street.

I saw him get out and enter the bungalow.

When he hadn’t come out after thirty minutes, I drove back to the office.

The girls had gone home. Bertha was sitting there alone waiting.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Out.”

“What’s the idea of getting up and leaving a client in the middle of a conference?”

“We found out everything we agreed to find out for him.”

“So what?” Bertha said. “If you were half as brainy as you’re supposed to be, you’d have realized that merely because we’d finished one job is no sign he wouldn’t give us another.”

“I felt certain he was going to offer us another,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked.

“He wants us to find out if it’s safe for him to come back.”

“What do you mean, safe for him to come back?”

I said, “A cabdriver by the name of Nickerson took a fare out to Endicott’s house the night of the murder. Nickerson described the fare as being a tall, slender man with dark eyes, a man in his late twenties, who was carrying a brief case. Shortly before he got to the Endicott house, he opened the brief case, took out a gun and put it in his hip pocket. The taxi driver thought it was a stick-up. He was watching in the rearview mirror. It wasn’t a stick-up. The fare kept on going to the Endicott ranch, paid off the cab, gave the driver a dollar tip and walked up to the front door. The cabdriver went on about his business. Next day he told the police.”

“Nickerson, eh?” Bertha asked.

I nodded.

“The only witness?”

“He’s the only one the police ever said anything about. There was a banker in the living room, a chap named Hale. He had a business appointment with Endicott.”

“What happened?” Bertha asked.

“It was a night when the servants were all gone. Endicott had gone through a marital crisis with his wife a short time before and his wife had packed up a suitcase, taken her car and driven away. Fortunately for her the wife stopped at a gasoline station in Citrus Grove. It was a station where she had a charge account and she had the car filled up with gas and checked for oil. The attendant remembers the time because he was just closing up the place when she drove in.

“Hale said the doorbell rang. Endicott excused himself and went to the door. Hale heard some man engage in a brief conversation with Endicott, then he heard steps in the hallway, heard voices, and after a minute or so the sound of a shot from upstairs.

“Hale ran upstairs and it took him a moment to locate Endicott who was in an upstairs bedroom. Endicott was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He was stone dead. A .38 bullet had smashed into the back of his head.”

Bertha’s little, greedy eyes were glittering with intense concentration.

“What about the cabdriver?” she asked.

“The cabdriver knows that the man reached the house a minute or so before nine o’clock, because he went off duty at nine. He was seven minutes late turning in his cab at the station. The witness Hale places the shooting at exactly nine o’clock, and the service station man at Citrus Grove says Mrs. Endicott drove in, then left his station at exactly nine o’clock. He was just closing up.

“Mrs. Endicott drove to San Diego. No one knew where she was. Later on, she told police she knew nothing about the murder until the next morning when she heard it on the radio. She returned for the funeral. Endicott left no will. His wife inherited everything. There were no other heirs.

“After a few months Mrs. Endicott settled down in the Whippoorwill, the Endicott home. She seldom goes out and is reported to be living the life of a recluse.

“Hale has told intimate friends that shortly before the murder Endicott had confided in him his wife had left him for good, that Endicott was pretty well broken up and exceedingly nervous.

“The police have the idea Endicott was paying blackmail to someone and that the person who killed him may have been the blackmailer.”

“How come?” Bertha asked.

“Endicott had drawn twenty thousand dollars in cash that morning. It was the third time he had drawn large amounts in cash within a period of three months. The other times he had drawn ten thousand. He had told Hale he was expecting a visitor who would take only a few moments.”

“Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha Cool said. “Ten grand a month! That’s some blackmail!”

“That’s some blackmail,” I agreed.

Bertha thought things over.

“Did you let him sell you a bill of goods or are we in the clear?” I asked her.

“What the hell do you mean, ‘a bill of goods’?” Bertha asked.

I said, “He matches the description of the guy described by the taxi driver, the one who called on Endicott a few minutes before the shot was fired. Police think this guy was the blackmailer and that Endicott issued some sort of an ultimatum that he was through paying.”

“Well?” Bertha asked.

I said, “What would you do if you were a blackmailer, Bertha? Suppose you had a sucker who was good for ten grand a month. Would you kill him?”

“Hell, no!” Bertha said. “I’d take out life insurance on him, and hire a bodyguard to keep him under observation and see he didn’t walk in front of any streetcars.”

“Exactly,” I told her.

Bertha thought things over. “Then if it wasn’t for that taxi driver they wouldn’t have any case at all.”

“Probably,” I said. “However, you never can tell about the police. They’re pretty damn smart.”

“They sure are,” Bertha agreed. “Do you know the cabdriver’s first name?”

“An unusual name.”

“What was it?”

I pulled out a notebook. “Drude. D-r-u-d-e. Drude Nickerson,” I said.

A smile twisted the corners of Bertha’s mouth. “Someday, Donald,” she said, “you’ll admit that while you have brains when it comes to solving a case, Bertha has brains when it comes to raking in the cash.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Bertha opened the drawer in her desk and pulled out five new, unfolded, one-hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A retainer,” she said.

“For what?”

“For information that we’ve got already.”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you get the information about the murder?”

I said, “When I knew we’d been suckered into a deal we probably didn’t want, I ran through the newspapers in order to find out what we might be up against.”

“Well, you’ve got the information,” Bertha said. “Take a look at this.”

She handed me a newspaper clipping which had been cut from the obituary column of one of the papers.

I read it. “Nickerson, Drude, beloved husband of Maria Nickerson. Killed in automobile accident near Susanville, California. Private funeral, Susanville Undertaking Parlors. No flowers.”

“How nice!” I said. “What does that have to do with the five-hundred-dollar retainer?”

“We’re to find out if this dead guy is the same Nickerson who drove the cab to the Endicott house. We get five hundred bucks more when we’ve finished the investigation, and we get a reasonable allowance for expenses. Go to it, Donald!”

“You shouldn’t have taken it, Bertha.”

“What the hell do you mean, I shouldn’t have taken it?” Bertha screamed. “There’s five hundred perfectly good legal bucks. We can use that lettuce on our income tax. Don’t tell me we don’t want it.”

“It’s loaded with dynamite.”

“All right,” Bertha said, “it’s loaded with dynamite. So what? All the man wants is an answer to one simple question: whether Drude Nickerson is the cabdriver.”

I looked at my watch. “Well,” I said, “let’s hope we still have time.”

“Time for what?” Bertha snapped.

“Time to investigate the murder of William Desmond Taylor,” I said. “You may remember that case. It was in 1921. One of the most famous of the unsolved Hollywood murders.”

For once I had Bertha off first base.

“One or the other of us is completely nuts,” she yelled. I opened the door.

“Come back here!” Bertha was screaming at the top of her voice. “Come back here, you little runt, and—”

The closing outer door of the office shut off the noise. I made time to the public library and started digging into the files of the murder of William Desmond Taylor.