Cut Thin to Win

Chapter 9

Frank Sellers was a square cop. He was also opinionated, bigoted, not too quick on the uptake, suspicious of any glib talker, and possessed of a bulldog tenacity.

Sellers had the jump on me when it came to finding Mrs. Harvey W. Chester.

I knew that by this time every directory in the city had been searched; every Chester had been contacted, questions had been asked about whether they had a relative named Harvey Chester or knew of a widow, a Mrs. Harvey Chester.

In short, all the ordinary avenues had been plugged.

If I tried to follow the ordinary trails, I’d be trailing along behind, following a beaten path that had been flattened by the feet of a whole bunch of cops.

I had to find some angle of approach which the police officers hadn’t thought of as yet.

Mrs. Chester had received ten thousand bucks. She had had an ambulance call and pick her up. She had gone to the airport. She had been placed aboard a plane for Denver.

When she arrived in Denver, a wheelchair was waiting for her. A solicitous gentleman had taken over and wheeled her to a car. She had vanished completely from that instant. The stewardess who had helped her said she was full of dope.

It was a cinch Sellers had been in touch with the Denver police and every attempt was being made to locate Mrs. Chester at that end.

The plane had made one intermediate stop at Las Vegas.

There was no possibility a wheelchair case could have disembarked at Las Vegas without the stewardess knowing it.

There was one other possibility.

The woman who arrived at the Los Angeles airport by ambulance didn’t necessarily have to be the same one who had got off the plane at Denver. A wheelchair could have been ordered for a Mrs. Harvey W. Chester; and an entirely different Mrs. Harvey W. Chester could have purchased a ticket, switched places on the plane before it took off and while the stewardesses were busy checking incoming passengers.

The woman who boarded the plane could have got off at Las Vegas, having switched her through ticket to a woman who had boarded the plane at the same time that she did.

This would, of course, mean there had been a complete flimflam, but those things have been encountered, particularly in automobile accident cases.

The thing that bothered me was how Frank Sellers could have been so hot on the trail as soon as the money had been paid. It meant there had been a tip-off, probably by an anonymous telephone call, and the way I sized the situation up that telephone call must have been made by Mrs. Harvey W. Chester, by Phyllis, Phyllis’ father, a jealous boy friend, or an attorney who was playing a pretty smart game.

This time when I flew to Las Vegas I didn’t make the mistake of using the agency air travel card. I dug down in my pocket and paid the fare in cash.

Once on the ground I relied on taxicabs, but I was careful to register at a hotel under my own name.

I started covering the gambling joints.

Las Vegas, Nevada, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day proposition. Night and day the air-conditioned casinos are busy with the rattle of chips, the whir of the slot machines, the voice of the barker announcing that such-and-such a machine has just hit a jackpot, the sound of the ivory ball on the roulette wheel.

Hundreds, thousands of people were going about the business of winning or losing money with grim-faced intensity. I looked the places over. I seldom saw a smile or heard laughter. Persons stood shoulder to shoulder, grim, tense, unsmiling.

Looking for a single face in this aggregation of tourist gambling devotees and curiosity seekers was almost like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

However, someone has said that good police work is ninety per cent legwork and ten per cent head work. That may or may not be true, but I didn’t have any alternative. I had to start sifting through Las Vegas.

At that, luck was with me. I went into the Blue Dome Casino, after having spent two hours going from place to place scanning the tense faces of the so-called pleasure seekers, and there she was, big as life, standing in front of a twenty-five-cent slot machine and working the handle like mad.

I moved up behind her.

The man who was playing the machine on her right finally gave up, and Mrs. Chester took over both machines, putting in quarters and jerking down the handles just as fast as she could feed coins into the machine.

I said, “I’m glad to see that you’ve made such a complete recovery, Mrs. Chester.”

She whirled around to face me, her eyes got big, her jaw dropped.

“For God’s sake,” she said.

“Having any luck?” I asked.

She showed me a bag full of quarters. “Winnings,” she said.

“Why did you blow the whistle?” I asked.

“Me blow the whistle! Are you nuts?”

I said, “Somebody did. Right at the moment, you’re badly wanted. The cops in Los Angeles and Denver are looking for you. They haven’t tried Las Vegas yet, but they will.”

“Oh, my God,” she said.

I just stood there.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said, “before somebody spots me.”

We walked out.

“Got a car?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m holed up in a little cottage up here, a string of cottages that they rent to people who are here for the six-weeks’ residence necessary to get a divorce. The rents are higher than a frightened cat’s back, but one has complete privacy.”

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

We went to the motel-type bungalow in a taxicab. Neither of us said anything in front of the driver, but I could see she was sizing me up. She was cautious and she was scared stiff.

The little bungalow was a regular heartbreak house, drab on the outside, furnished with the bare necessities on the inside, a threadbare carpet, overstuffed chairs that looked fairly inviting but were uncomfortable once you sat down.

Six weeks of living in a place of that sort would drive a woman nuts.

Of course, the women who lived there weren’t supposed to stay in the house. They would unpack their suitcases, hang their clothes in the closets which were just beginning to get a slight smell of mildew, and then go out into the casinos and on long weekend parties.

Usually the women had boy friends who had more or less actively participated in the bust-up of the marriage. Sometime during the six-week period, these boy friends would get lonely and come flying in to Las Vegas.

If they didn’t have boy friends, it was very easy to acquire some. Usually it was the wife who had to qualify for the six-weeks’ residence and get the divorce. The husband was too busy making a living for the “family”.

We settled down in the living room, so-called, and Mrs. Chester gave me a rather vague smile. “Well,” she said, “what do you want?”

I said, “You knew I was coming to call on you before I arrived, didn’t you?”

She thought that over for several seconds, then nodded.

“You knew my name?”

“You had been described to me.”

“By whom?”

“Do you have to know that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I can tell you that.”

“That,” I said, “might be just too bad,” and then added after a moment, “for you.”

“I had no business getting mixed into this,” she said. “I had retired.”

“It’s a little late to think of that now, isn’t it?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” she said.

I remained silent.

After a while, she said, “What do you want to know?”

“Who engineered the deal?”

“The attorney.”

“Colton Essex?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your connection with him?”

“I hadn’t had any until this came up.”

“But you’d known him before?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He’d been on the other side of one of my cases.”

“What do you mean, the other side?”

“He represented the defendant.”

“An insurance company?”

“An insurance company and an owner together, yes.”

“And what happened?”

“The case was settled for a very small amount.”

“What kind of a case was it?”

“One of my usual cases,” she said. And then added after a moment, “I’m a professional tumbler. That is, I used to be before I got a little old and a little heavy, but I’m still good.

“I could smack the bumper of an automobile with my handbag, spin away from the car, fall to the ground, roll over and just about any spectator would swear the automobile had crashed into me.”

“Even if the automobile wasn’t moving?”

“I specialized in moving automobiles,” she said. “I’d get in a crosswalk. I’d park my car so that it was a little difficult to see around it and about one car out of ten would cut around my car and go through the crosswalk. I’d size up the car, and naturally I only picked the more expensive makes.”

“And then?”

“Then,” she said, “I’d have a friend standing by who’d phone for an ambulance before anyone thought to telephone for the police. The ambulance service gets there, picks me up and whisks me away. My friend sees to it that the accident is reported. My address is given. An officer usually comes to check my statement.

“If the party who hits me stops, and there’s a report of the accident, I can usually make a deal with an insurance company. If the party who hits me drives away and makes a hit-and-run out of it, we trace the party and get a whale of a settlement because he’s so vulnerable. He’s mixed up in a hit-and-run and he has to pay through the nose. I use different names each time.”

“And Colton Essex knew all about this?”

“I told you he was on the other side of one of my cases. He smelled a pretty big rat, and by the time we got done I had to take a much smaller settlement than is usually the case. He’s a good lawyer.”

“So then, what happened this time?”

“On this particular night,” she said, “my telephone rang. It was Essex. He told me to be at a certain intersection within ten minutes and to put on my act. He said there’d be a settlement of ten grand and I could keep half of it. You couldn’t ask for anything better than that.”

“Did he tell you what car to pick?”

“Bless you, yes. He told me to pick his car.”

“His car?” I exclaimed.

“That’s right. He said he’d blink the headlights just before he came to the intersection. I was to put on a good act for the benefit of any bystanders, and he would make a clean getaway, but he warned me not to stage the accident until he blinked his headlights. He wanted a clear field for a getaway.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

She said, “It was funny, wasn’t it?”

“And you were there, and he blinked his headlights?” I asked.

“Bless you,” she said, “he went through that intersection ten times before the coast was clear and he blinked his headlights and I strutted my stuff and he speeded up to get away from there; went screaming around the corner, and that was it.”

“What about the dress you were wearing?”

“He came to the house afterwards, took some pliers and tore a little piece out of the dress.”

“And then?” I asked.

“Then he told me to wait and that, in the course of time, a man would call on me to make a settlement.

“About forty-eight hours later, he called me and said that the man who was coming to call on me would be pretty clever; that he was rather young, slight in build, but quick-thinking and brainy and I wasn’t to try and embellish anything, just act dumb. He said you’d put on some sort of an act, but there’d be ten grand in it and I could keep half of it.”

“And the other half?”

“I turned it over to the attorney.”

I sat there thinking that over.

“Now then,” she said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to get rough with me about that five grand? I’m telling you, it’s the first decent job I’ve had for six months. These damned insurance companies have modus operandi files on people who fake injuries and you have to keep thinking up something new all the time. In fact, it’s getting so that I very seldom press charges any more against people who stop.”

“What happens when that occurs?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “they stop and ask me how badly I’m hurt, and my friend says he’s called an ambulance and they give me a card and tell me they’re insured and to get in touch with them; that they’re reporting the accident to their insurance company, and ask me for my name. Under those circumstances, I usually give them a phony name and address, and they never hear any more about it.

“The people who try to get away, the hit-and-run people — and I’m pretty damned good at sizing up the people who have been drinking — in fact, sometimes my friends help me pick the sucker.”

“How?”

“Oh, he goes into a club or saloon, finds the people who are drinking pretty heavy; goes out to the parking station, gets the license number of their automobile and the address from the registration slip so that he knows which direction the guy will be heading when he leaves the bar, and I plant myself at a nearby intersection.

“Of course, that way we miss lots of them, but when we get them, we get them good. You know how it is, a man has been in a bar drinking for an hour and a half, comes out, gets in his car and hits a pedestrian at a cross-walk. He stops if he has to, but if there’s any chance for a getaway he steps on it and is long gone.

“Of course, we pick the right times when there isn’t much traffic and it’s a virtual invitation to an alcoholic driver to step on it and get out of the way.”

“How many jobs have you done for Essex?” I asked.

“Bless your soul, this is the only one, and it was a nice clean job.”

“Who’s the girl who was supposed to have been driving the car, Phyllis Dawson or Eldon? Do you know anything about her?”

“Not a thing. Of course, she wasn’t driving any car that I had anything to do with. Colton Essex was driving that car. It was his own car.”

“Did you dent it up any?”

“No, I just put my hand on the fender, did a double spin, a flip and a roll.”

“Your friend was in on this?”

“No, Essex specifically told me to handle it alone. He said to let the bystanders call the ambulance and if I reported it to the police, I was to report that I was badly shaken up.

“Of course,” she went on, “I’ve got all the symptoms down pat. The symptoms of concussion, spinal injury, nerve damage, lack of co-ordination, terrific headaches, backaches, double vision; all that sort of thing.”

“You’ve been coached on the proper symptoms?” I asked.

“And how,” she said.

I got up and started pacing the floor. “This is the damnedest thing,” I told her.

“Isn’t it?” she said. “Now, you look like a nice boy, Donald, and you were awfully nice to me — what are you going to do about all this?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“Going to turn me in?”

“No,” I told her, “not now, anyway. I want to find out what’s back of it.”

Her eyes glittered. “I’ll bet you’re thinking what I am.”

“What?”

“There’s money back of it. You take a big-time lawyer like Colton Essex, and he isn’t going to get mixed up in monkey business for peanuts. You take a man who’s willing to face a hit-and-run rap, pay ten grand, and I only have to kick back half of it, and he’s heeled.

“Of course, where I fell down was in letting myself get found. The stipulation was that I was to be hard to find and if anybody located me, I was on my own. Nobody would admit anything, and of course, with my record, I’d wind up behind bars. Nobody would take my word on a stack of Bibles. I guess Essex figured that but, even so, there’s money involved here. I can smell it.

“When you’ve been in the racket the way I have, Donald, you get so you can just smell money, and I’d like to make a deal with you.”

I shook my head. “No deal.”

Her face showed disappointment. “After the way I’ve out the cards on the table with you, that’s not very fair.”

“You put the cards on the table with me because you had to,” I told her. “I’ve found you. All I have to do is report where you are to the police and your happy days are over.”

She sighed. “I guess you’ve got the whip hand,” she said, “and I know what that means.”

“What?”

“You’re going after all that money alone — and damn me, I think you’re smart enough to get it.”

“How are you doing over here?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” she said. “Of course, you can’t hit this thing steady and come out ahead. You’re fighting a mathematical percentage.

“Whenever I’ve made a killing I set aside ten per cent of the take, and I come over here and play with it. If I win, I take my winnings and get out. If I lose, when I come to the end of the ten per cent, I’m long gone — that’s the only way to beat the game. I can win everything that’s on the table if I get lucky, but they can’t win over ten per cent of my take from me no matter how lucky they get.”

“That’s smart,” I told her.

“When you’re dealing with a mathematical percentage, you have to work out a smart deal of your own,” she said.

“Where do you go when you leave here?” I asked.

She just smiled.

I said, “Come on, come clean, or I step over to that phone and call the police. I’m in the saddle now and I have to know.”

“You going to make it tough for me?”

“If I was making it tough for you, I’d have made it tough a long time ago,” I told her.

“I go to Salt Lake City. I have a daughter living there.”

“Married?”

“Widowed.”

“Children?”

“No, she has a little place that she keeps up. She always has room for me.”

“Do you pay her anything?”

“I don’t need to. She has a good job. I don’t ask her for anything and she doesn’t ask any questions.”

“She has ideas?”

Mrs. Chester chuckled and said, “You know, she looks at me at times rather enviously. I think she thinks I’m a scarlet woman; that I’m living some kind of an immoral life.”

“But she doesn’t suspect what it really is?”

Mrs. Chester shook her head.

“Give me the daughter’s address.”

She took a piece of paper and wrote out the address.

“What’s the daughter’s name?”

“Eileen Adams.”

“She has a telephone?”

“Yes. You want the number?”

“Put it on the memo,” I said.

She said, “I’m putting myself in your power.”

“I put you in my power,” I told her. “Remember I can blow the whistle on you at any time I want to.”

“You going to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at me wistfully. “I’m an awfully good campaigner,” she said. “I know what you’re after. You’re smelling the money and you’re going to get your fingers on it. If you’d work with me, we’d get twice as much and we could make a fair division.”

“Why did you think I wanted your address?”

“So you could — Hell I don’t know. Why did you?”

“I may want to work with you,” I told her.

Her face lit up. “Donald,” she said, “you’re a good boy. You’re an awfully smart boy. I knew the minute you walked into the house with that magazine racket of yours that you were awfully damned good.”

“We’ll let it go at that,” I told her. “Be sure to keep in touch with your daughter so that I can reach you at any time. But remember one thing, I’m not making any deal with you; I’m only investigating a fraud case.”

“What kind of fraud?”

“A fraudulent accident.”

“There’s nothing more there to investigate,” she said. “You know it all already.”

“I sure wish I did,” I told her. “How are you coming on your ten per cent this time?”

Her face lit up again. “Donald, I’m way ahead. I’m fifteen hundred to the good right now.”

“On two-bit slot machines?” I asked.

“Heavens, no,” she said. “I plunge on roulette; then when my luck starts going sour, I cash in my chips and go to the dime machines. If I don’t do so good there, I wait for a day and go back and try all over again. If I start perking up on the dime machines, I try the quarter machines until I’ve hit two or three jackpots and feel that my luck is back, and then I go to the roulette table again.

“You can’t work out any kind of a mathematical system that can win at this racket because the mathematics are against you, but you can work out a rhythm system of hitting the line when you’re hot and drawing in your horns when you’re cold, and it pays off — believe me, Las Vegas doesn’t owe me any money.”

“What do you do with it?” I asked. “You got it in a bank somewhere?”

She grinned and said, “Somewhere, and that’s what you can beat your brains out on, Donald. No matter what kind of threats you use, I’m not going to tell you anything about that.”

“Keep it there,” I told her. “Good luck to you in Las Vegas and don’t go broke. Can the police get a line on your Salt Lake hideout?”

“Not a whisper of a chance,” she said. “I’ll use three air lines, two buses and five names getting there.”

“Get started now, then,” I told her, got up and walked to the door. “Want to ride the taxi back uptown?” I asked.

“Not tonight,” she said. “I think my luck has had a jolt. I’m going to be hard to find.”

“Okay,” I told her, “I’ll pay the taxi. Have luck!”

I got in the taxi and drove back to the airport.