Cut Thin to Win

Chapter 2

Automobile injury cases, these days, are a dime a dozen. They are seldom worthy of a separate place in the news. They are lumped together.

John Doe gets killed in an intersection. It isn’t even worthy of a separate news item. Joe Doakes, driving home at three o’clock in the morning, “loses control” of his car and wraps it around a telephone pole. Joe is killed and Jane Whosis, a female companion, aged twenty-three, of 7918 Whatsis Street, is seriously injured.

A station wagon jumps over the dividing line on the freeway, careers out of control in the wrong lane, smacks another car head on, kills two people, scatters children all over the freeway, and some newspaper rewrite man bundles up the whole list of accidents, gives them one headline; then in four or five short paragraphs, disposes of the whole business.

The accident I thought I wanted was buried in a newspaper five days earlier. A Mrs. Harvey W. Chester had been in a pedestrian crossing. She was struck down, the victim of a hit-and-run driver.

The police learned that a small piece had been torn from the skirt she was wearing, so they felt that identification of the car and apprehension of the driver would be only a matter of time, inasmuch as there was one other clue which the police were not disclosing.

Mrs. Harvey W. Chester was forty-eight years old and resided at 2367-A Doorman Avenue. Her injuries were listed as “serious.”

The account then went on to describe a head-on collision and the apprehension of a stolen car, after a chase which at times reached the speed of one hundred and five miles an hour.

When the car had finally been forced to a halt, the driver had calmly stepped out and smilingly informed the police that since he was a juvenile they couldn’t lay a finger on him.

Such accidents as resulted in smashed automobiles, minor injuries, etc., were not newsworthy enough to be included.

It was all part of the pattern of life in a big city.

I purchased a bunch of magazines at the newsstand, put them under my arm, got the agency jalopy, and drove out to Doorman Avenue.

I parked the car two blocks away from the house I wanted. I called at three houses and asked each woman who came to the door if she would like to subscribe to magazines.

In all three instances my reception was somewhat less than cordial.

Having established the proper foundation, I went to 2367.

It was one of the deep lots left over from an earlier era of planning and building. The house in front, which was 2367, was a huge, old-fashioned affair, rambling, filled with waste space; a wide cement walk led around to 2367-A, which was a toy-sized bungalow in the back lot.

I climbed a couple of steps to a miniature porch and rang the doorbell.

A woman’s voice called out, “Who is it?”

“A man who has something for you,” I said.

“Come in,” the tired voice said. “You’ll have to open the door yourself.”

I opened the door and walked in.

A rather slender woman with high cheekbones and tired eyes was propped up in a wheelchair with her right ankle and her right forearm in bandages; a blanket was folded across her lap and the left leg. The right leg was protruding out through a fold in the blanket.

“Hello,” she said.

“Well, hello,” I greeted her. “You look as if you’d been in an accident.”

“Hit-and-run,” she said.

“That’s too bad,” I told her, spreading out the magazines.

“What do you want, young man? When I told you to come in. I thought you were someone else.”

“Who?”

“Just someone else.”

“I’m selling magazines,” I said. “Subscriptions to magazines.”

“I’m not interested.”

I said, “You should be, if you don’t mind my saying so, because quite apparently you’re laid up with nothing much to do.”

“I have my radio.”

“Don’t you get awfully tired of listening to disk jockeys, conversational patter and the same old type of commercial?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Subscriptions to these magazines would help you.”

“What do you have?”

I handed her six of the magazines that I had picked up.

“These cover a wide field,” I said. “They’re educational. They tell you things about the house, about the world in general, about the political situation. They’re really essential to a person who wants to keep up with the world.”

“Tell me some more about them.”

She handed me one magazine. “Tell me about the contents of this one.”

“That,” I said, “is a magazine of general woman’s interest. It gives you tips on the home, on menus for high-protein, low-calorie meals. It tells you how to plan a house with the different areas in mind, how to take advantage of a view.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s the stuff in this issue of the magazine you have with you, but what are the editors going to publish? What’s going to come out in the later issues?”

“Articles along the same general line,” I said. “The magazine has an established pattern and a reputation to live up to.”

“By whom will these articles be written?”

“The outstanding writers on the subject in the country.”

“Name one.”

“I can’t give you the names of the writers who are going to appear. All I can tell you is that it’s edited with an up-to-the-minute recognition of the problems of the modern housewife.”

“Humph,” she said. “What’s the next one?”

“That,” I said “specializes on homes. It tells you—”

“What’s the next issue going to be like?”

“Very similar to this one.”

“What’s in the Christmas issue?” she asked.

“The editor has gone in for a touching collection of human interest stories that—”

“By whom?” she asked. “Who are the writers?”

“The leading writers in the field.”

“Don’t you know anything other than that?”

“Well, I feel that that’s enough.”

“Who are the leading writers in the field?”

“Just look at the table of contents in this magazine,” I said, “and you’ll get the names.”

I started to open the magazine.

“Young man,” she said, “you’re a liar,”

I stopped and looked up at her.

“They told me about you,” she said. “You’re the man I was expecting after all.”

“Who told you about me?”

“Friends. They said a man representing the insurance company would call on me when I least expected it; that he’d start talking about something else and then lead the subject around to my injuries and try making a settlement.”

“I’m not interested in making a settlement,” I said. “I’m here to sell magazines.”

“Let me see one of your subscription blanks.”

“I don’t have them with me this morning. I am at present taking orders; then I report them to the office and the follow-up man who does the legwork and the detail work comes down with the actual subscriptions.”

“Phooey,” she said. “How much?”

“How much for what?”

“For a settlement.”

I said, “I’m not representing any insurance company. I’m not representing anyone who is interested in a settlement.”

“All right,” she said, “never mind whom you’re representing. How much?”

I said, “I tell you what I could do. I know a friend who sometimes speculates in personal injury cases. He buys up the claims for cash and gets an assignment and then he brings suit. He recovers, of course, a lot more money than he’s paid the person who was injured. Everyone has to make a profit.”

“Who is this person?” she asked.

“I’m not at liberty to give you his name, but if you’re interested in some form of a cash settlement, I might be able to get you in touch with him.”

“He’d pay me money and take over my claim and prosecute it and be entitled to everything he got out of it?”

“That’s right. It might not be that simple. There’s a little trouble with assignment of claims of this nature. You’d probably have to sign an instrument that, for value received, you agreed to turn over to him all of the money that you received as the result of a lawsuit; that he would finance the lawsuit and provide you with an attorney; that he could make any kind of a settlement he wanted; that he could let the matter drop at any time he wanted; that you would be guided by his wishes in the matter; that he would be substituted in your shoes and, in the event of any recovery in your name, you would turn over all the monies to him. In other words, he’d buy you out — lock, stock and barrel.”

“For how much?”

“That depends. How serious are you injuries?”

“I hurt all over.”

“How many broken bones?”

She said, “I know darned well that bone in my leg is broken, but the doctors tell me it isn’t. The X rays don’t show it, but I can tell from the way it feels.

“I wouldn’t go through this again for thousands of dollars. I can hardly move. I’m so sore.”

I said, “Sometimes this man that I know of makes quite a profit on these injuries; and sometimes, after he looks into them, he finds that he’s on the losing side of the case and he just backs away and lets the whole thing drop. If he decided to do that in this case, you’d have to sign a release if he told you to.”

“But that would be after he’d put up the money?”

“Yes.”

“I’d sign,” she said.

“Tell me about the facts in the case.”

“Well— Look here, young man, you’re not fooling me a bit. You’re from the insurance company and what you want is a release, but you’re trying to make it sound like a speculative investment so you can get it for less money than you would pay otherwise... You know all about the facts as much as I do, or maybe more.”

I smiled at her and said, “You’re rather shrewd and very, very suspicious, Mrs. Chester.”

“Do you blame me?”

“No,” I said, and then added, “it probably doesn’t make any difference. You have a figure in your mind that you’d be willing to accept as a cash settlement. In that way, you’d have the money in cash right now and you could move out of these cramped quarters, go to a nursing home or a hotel where you could get good service and be a lot more comfortable.”

“What I’d like to do,” she said, “would be to buy a television set with one of those remote control devices so you can turn it on and change stations.”

“I am quite satisfied that could be arranged — provided, of course, you didn’t want too much.”

“You’re still clinging to this story of yours about knowing somebody that wants to just buy my claim on a speculative basis?”

“That’s right. That’s the story. That’s all anybody would be doing.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars,” she said.

I smiled and shook my head, then added, “You haven’t even told me the facts of the case yet.”

“It was hit-and-run,” she said. “I was in an intersection minding my own business and this car came swooping around the corner and down the street. Some young woman was driving it. I didn’t get a good look at her.”

“Do you know the make of the car?”

“No.”

I said, “Of course, my man would have to take a chance on being able to find the car.”

“That’s going to be easy.”

“What makes you think so?”

“The police told me that one of the hardest crimes to get away with these days was a hit-and-run; that they have so many scientific gadgets that they’re able to spot the car usually within twenty-four hours.”

“How long has it been since the accident?”

“Five or six days, almost a week. I haven’t figured it up exactly. Let’s see, it was—”

“But it’s been over forty-eight hours?”

“Certainly. I said it had been — let’s see, I believe it’s five days. This is the sixth day.”

“And the police haven’t uncovered anyone yet?” I said. “Every day that passes by without uncovering the culprit makes it that much harder, and makes your claim worth that much less.”

Her eyes were shrewd. “Open that closet door, young man, and hand me that dress.”

I opened the door, handed her the dress that was just inside.

She spread out the dress, showed me where a small segment had been torn from the cloth. “That piece was ripped out when the car hit me,” she said. “Police tell me some fibers from that dress are bound to be clinging to some part of the undercarriage of a car with a dented fender. They’ll find it.”

The cloth in the dress was the same as the piece Dawson had shown me.

I said, “That may be true, but if they do uncover the driver of the car, it may be that he or she just doesn’t have a dime, and no insurance—”

“Phooey,” she said, “that was one of those high-class cars — the kind that go like a rocket, and I know this woman had insurance because you’re here. You’re representing the insurance company.”

I shook my head.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll make you a proposition — a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. If your man wants to give me ten thousand dollars in cold hard cash right now — right this minute — I’ll assign my claim.”

“Then what would you do?” I asked.

“What would you want me to do?”

I said, “it might be that this man would prefer to make a settlement out of court that no one knew anything about. In that case, he wouldn’t want to have the police working too hard on the case.”

“I’ll get out,” she said. “I’ll be hard to find. I’ll fix it so the police can’t trace me; but it has to be ten thousand dollars in cash, and I have to have it within the next twelve hours.”

I smiled and shook my head. “That’s impossible,” I said. “It might take me that long to even locate the man I have in mind and then it might turn out that he isn’t interested in a deal of this sort. All I know is that occasionally he’s made deals like this, and some of them have paid off. Sometimes he collects ten for one; sometimes he gets stuck for the amount of his initial investment.”

“Well, if he’s up on his toes, he isn’t going to get stuck for anything on this one,” she said. “They should be able to locate the car. The police really should have done so long ago, and once they locate it they can get a big payoff.

“I wasn’t born yesterday. This kind of a deal isn’t like a deal where somebody runs into you and stops the car and gives you hospital treatment and every aid. This is a case where a person ran into me, knocked me down, then speeded off and left me lying there. That’s a crime. The woman who was driving that car could go to prison. Once you find her, she’d pay off... and you’re representing her. I know that just as well as I’m sitting here. I should make my figure fifty thousand dollars.”

I laughed and said, “Go ahead, make it fifty thousand dollars if you want to, and I’ll walk right out that door and you’ll never see me again — unless you happen to want to subscribe to these magazines, and then the subscription department will take over.”

“All right,” she said. “I happen to want the money. I’m taking a chance. Ten thousand dollars in cash within twenty-four hours.

“And I’ll live up to my bargain. I’ll sign any kind of papers you want and I’ll be hard to find as far as the police are concerned. I’ll let that young woman get off scot free.”

I shook my head and said, “We couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“That would be conspiring to compound a felony,” I said.

“Well, suppose I just didn’t say anything about it?”

“That,” I said, “would be perfectly legal, just so we didn’t have any understanding along those lines.”

She smiled at me, a wise, knowing smile. Then she looked at her watch and said, “Well, young man, if you’re going to get action within twenty-four hours, you’d better get started.”

“You don’t want these magazines?” I asked.

She laughed at me.

I said, “I’ll try and get in touch with my party and, in the event he’s interested, I’ll let you know.”

I gently closed the screen door, backed off the porch and walked the two blocks to where I had parked the agency jalopy. I drove another six blocks to a telephone station, rang up Elsie Brand and said, “Send a wire to Clayton Dawson as follows: ‘IS IT WORTH TEN GRAND IMMEDIATE CASH? MUST CLOSE DEAL WITHIN TWELVE HOURS.’ ”

“How do I sign it?” she asked.

“You don’t sign it,” I said, “and you don’t charge it to our account. You go down to the nearest telegraph office, pay for it in cash, and leave a fictitious address.”