Kept Women Can’t Quit

Chapter 1

The sign that was painted on the frosted glass of the corridor door read COOL & LAM. Down below that appeared the names, B. COOL — DONALD LAM and the single word, ENTER.

There was nothing about the sign on the door to indicate that B. Cool was a woman, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of greedy-eyed suspicion. Bertha Cool’s shape and toughness was that of a spool of barbed wire ready for shipment f.o.b. factory.

I pushed open the door, nodded to the receptionist, walked over to the door marked DONALD LAM — PRIVATE and opened it.

Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up from the scrapbook she was working on.

“Good morning, Donald.”

I looked over her shoulder at the stuff she was pasting in the scrapbook. It was the fifth volume of unsolved cases which might at some time give us a chance to make a profit. The chances on most of these cases were one in ten thousand, but I always felt that any good detective agency should know what was cooking in the crime world.

The dress Elsie was wearing had a square cut at the throat and, as she leaned forward pasting in the clipping, I found my eyes drawn down to the line of her neck.

She felt my gaze, glanced up, laughed nervously and shifted her position. “Oh, you!” she said.

I looked at the piece she had been pasting in the scrapbook: the story of an audacious theft of a cool hundred thousand bucks from an armored car. It had been done so smoothly that no one knew how it had been done, where it had been done, or when it had been done. Police thought it might have been done at a drive-in restaurant called the Full Dinner Pail.

An intelligent fourteen-year-old boy had seen the armored truck parked at the roadside restaurant, and had noticed that a sedan was parked immediately behind the truck. A red-headed man about twenty-five was fitting a jack under the left front wheel of that sedan. The thing that was odd about it was that this witness swore the car didn’t have a flat tire on the left front wheel, although the man was going through all the motions of changing a tire.

The money had been in a rear compartment. It took two keys to open that compartment. One of the keys was in the hands of the driver, the other was in the pocket of the armed guard. The locks couldn’t be picked.

There were always two men riding the armored trucks: the driver and the guard. They had stopped for coffee at this place, but they had carefully followed the routine of having one man remain inside the cab while the other went in and got coffee and doughnuts. Then that man came out, took his turn sitting in the cab, and the other man went in. The coffee break was a technical violation of the rules but it was a violation that the company habitually overlooked as long as one man remained in the cab of the truck.

Elsie Brand looked up at me and said, “Sergeant Sellers is closeted with Bertha Cool.”

“Social, sexual or business?” I asked.

“I think it’s business,” she said. “I heard something over the radio when I was driving in this morning. Sellers and his partner have been working on a case and there’s a rumor that fifty thousand dollars of money that was recovered is missing.”

“This case?” I asked, nodding toward the clippings she had just pasted in the scrapbook.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. And then added “Bertha doesn’t take me into her confidence, you know.”

She changed her position slightly. The front of the dress flared out a bit and she said, “Donald, stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“It wasn’t made to be viewed from that angle.”

“It’s not an angle,” I said, “it’s a curve. And if it wasn’t made to be viewed, why was it made so beautiful?”

She put her hand up, pushed the dress in and said, “Get your mind on business. I have an idea that Sergeant Sellers—”

She was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

She picked up the instrument, said, “Donald Lam’s secretary,” then looked at me and arched her eyebrows.

I nodded.

“Yes, Mrs. Cool,” she said. “He just came in. I’ll tell him.”

I heard Bertha’s voice, sounding raucous and metallic as it came through the receiver, saying, “Put him on. I’ll tell him myself.”

Elsie Brand handed me the telephone. I said, “Hello, Bertha. What’s new?”

“Get in here!” Bertha snapped.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Hell’s to pay,” she said, and hung up.

I handed the telephone back to Elsie, said, “The fried eggs must have disagreed with her this morning.” I walked out of my office, across the reception room and through the door marked B. COOL — PRIVATE.

Big Bertha Cool sat in her squeaky swivel chair behind the desk. Her eyes and her diamonds were both glittering.

Police Sergeant Frank Sellers, worrying an unlit cigar like a nervous dog chewing on a rubber ball, sat in the client’s chair, his jaw thrust forward as though he expected to take a punch or to give one.

“Good morning, folks,” I said, making with a cheerful greeting.

Bertha said to me, “Good morning my eye! What the hell have you been up to?”

Frank Sellers jerked the cigar out with the first two fingers of his right hand and said, “Look here, Pint Size, if you’re pulling a fast one on us, so help me God I’ll break you into pieces until you look like a jigsaw puzzle. And I promise you that after I’ve done that no one is ever going to be able to put you back together again.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Hazel Downer,” Sellers said.

I waited for him to go on but he didn’t go on.

“Don’t play it innocent,” Sellers said, transferring the soggy cigar to his left hand as he fished in his side coat pocket with his right hand and pulled out a square of paper on which had been written in feminine handwriting “Cool and Lam,” with the office address and the telephone number.

I thought for a moment there was a faint odor of heady perfume about it, but when I raised it to my nose the fresh smell of damp tobacco from Sergeant Sellers’ fingers overcame the scent of perfume.

“Well?” Sellers asked.

“Well, what?” I wanted to know.

Bertha said, “You can gamble one thing, Frank. If she’s young, attractive and full of curves and has had any contact with this agency, Donald is the one she saw.”

Sellers nodded, reached for the slip of paper, put it back in his pocket, shoved the cold, soggy cigar back into his mouth, chewed on it for a minute, frowned at me ominously and said, “She’s young and full of curves — Hazel Downer, Pint Size. You tell me about her.”

I shook my head.

“You mean you haven’t been in touch with her?” he asked in surprise.

“Never heard of her in my life,” I said.

“All right. Now look,” Sellers said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve already told Bertha. It’s confidential. If I read it in the paper I’ll know where it came from. Yesterday an armored truck reported a loss of a cool hundred thousand bucks a neat one hundred G’s, all in thousand-dollar bills.

“We got a clue from a young Eagle Scout. I’m not going to tell you how we got it or how we ran it down, but it pointed to a two-time loser, a red-headed sonofabitch named Herbert Baxley, and for your information, I’m damned apt to choke him with my two hands — I would, if I thought I could get away with it.”

“What about Baxley?” I asked.

“We picked him up,” Sellers said. “He was going places and doing things, so we tagged along. We had a pretty good description but we still weren’t sure. My partner and I were ready to close in on him but we wanted to let him lead us around a little bit before we made the pinch.

“This guy had been eating at the Full Dinner Pail. That’s a drive-in where they have some of the most curvaceous cuties in town. When the weather’s hot they come out in shorts that leave nothing whatever to the imagination. When the weather’s cool they have slacks and sweaters that fit them like the skin on a sausage and leave but little to the imagination.

“They do lots of business — too damn much business. We’re going to look into the place on a morals charge one of these days and we may knock It over. But the point is that quite a few regular customers’ drop in there for coffee breaks. That was where this armored truck had been pulling in almost every day for the last month while the two drivers took turns drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and getting an eyeful. There’s both curb and counter service.

“We have reason to believe that’s where someone got into the back door of the armored truck with a set of duplicate keys and grabbed the hundred G’s.

“Anyhow, while we’re tailing this character Baxley, he goes into the joint and orders some hamburgers to take out. He ordered two hamburgers, one with everything, one with everything except onions. They gave them to him in a paper bag. Then he went out to his car and waited for this dame he was to meet to show up.

“She didn’t show. He looked at his watch several times and was mad. After a while he ate both hamburgers — the two of them, you understand, the one with onions and the one without. Then he threw the napkin and the paper bag in the garbage, wiped his hands, got back in his car and drove off down the street. It’s a cinch some dame was to join him and they were going places with those two hamburgers. The dame didn’t want onions. He did. He wouldn’t have ordered one with and one without if he’d been intending to eat both of them. So the way we look at it something must have made this dame suspicious and she stood him up.

“Anyhow, we tailed along behind Baxley. He left this drive-in and went to a service station where there was a telephone booth. He parked his car and went into the booth. We carry a pretty damned good pair of binoculars for situations of that sort and I focused the binoculars on the telephone and was able to pick up the number he was dialing. It was Columbine 6-9403.

“I didn’t want to miss that number he was calling, so we may have been parked a little closer than we should have. The guy was just starting to talk on the phone when he happened to look over his shoulder right square into the binoculars I was holding on him. I still don’t know whether he saw us or not but I made the sort of blunder that’s mighty easy to make. Those were nine-power binoculars and sharp as a tack. We were seventy-five feet away in a parked automobile, but when he looked up and looked right in my eyes as I was looking through those binoculars it looked just the way it would look if a guy eight feet away had looked up and suddenly seen me. I yelled to my partner, ‘Okay, he’s made us. After him!’

“We boiled out of the car. Well, if he hadn’t seen us before, he sure as hell saw us then. He tore out of the booth, leaving the receiver dangling, and jumped into his car. Before he could get it started we had our guns on him and he didn’t dare to make a play for It, so he stuck his hands up in the air.

“We frisked him and found a gun, and we also found keys to his apartment, his address and all of that stuff, and by the time we worked him over he admitted he was a two-time loser.

“My partner drove the squad car behind us. I got in his car, put the cuffs on him and drove. We didn’t want to take a chance on leaving anything unsearched, so before we booked him we stopped by his apartment. We found a locked suitcase. I picked the lock and there were fifty G’s inside, a cool fifty thousand bucks, exactly one half of the loot. I took the damned apartment to pieces and I couldn’t find any more.

“So we took this guy and the fifty G’s down to Headquarters and what do you think the sonofabitch said after we got there?”

“That you’d gone south with fifty G’s,” I said.

Sellers chewed on the cigar, then took it out of his mouth as though he didn’t like the taste of it and nodded moodily. “That’s exactly what he said. What’s more, the Colter-Craig Casualty Company, that handles the insurance on everything shipped in the armored truck of the Specie and Securities Transfer Company, sort of halfway believe the sonofabitch. It was a damn good thing for him he waited to say it until he got to Headquarters or he wouldn’t be as smart-looking as he is now.

“All right, you know what that means and I know what it means. It means that he had a partner who was in on the thing with him and he split the swag two ways. Then he blew the whistle on us when we only found half of it.

“Okay, we had an answer of our own for that. We went out and started looking for the partner. Naturally the first clue we had was this telephone number, Columbine 6-9403.

“That’s a private phone. It’s in Apartment Seven A at the Laramie Apartments. It’s a high-class dump. The owner of Apartment Seven A is a cute trick named Hazel Downer. Hazel Downer has lots of this and that and these and those. By the time we got there she was packing up, getting ready to take a run-out powder. We nailed her before she could get anywhere. She claims that Herbert Baxley had been making passes at her but that she wouldn’t have any and that from time to time he’d called her; that he’d found out her telephone number somehow but that she’d never given it to him.

“Now then, we finally got a warrant and frisked her place, and I mean we really frisked it. All we found was this thing in her purse, that slip of paper with the name ‘Cool and Lam’ written on it.

“Now, the way I put two and two together, Hazel Downer was in on this thing with Herbert Baxley. She had managed to get hold of the keys to the armored car, had duplicates made and Baxley pulled the job.”

“She worked at the Full Dinner Pail?” I asked.

“No, she didn’t,” Sergeant Sellers said. “If she had, she’d have been in the can right now. But she’d been a car hop once, she’d been a secretary for a while, and then she had suddenly become fairly affluent. For the last few months she’s been living in this swank apartment and she hasn’t been working. We can’t find out where the man is that’s paying the bills. All we know is his name, Standley Downer. She’s posing as his wife. My best guess is she’s just a pickup. Somehow she managed to get word to this Downer guy, or someone tipped him off and he’s crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in after him.

“We can’t get a single damn thing on this Hazel Downer except that Baxley was calling her up from a phone booth. Well, we can’t hold her on that and if she got really nasty about it she could probably raise hell over the search-warrant business. I signed that affidavit myself. I was so damn certain we’d find the other half of the loot cached in her apartment that I stuck my neck way, way out. Either she or Standley Downer is Baxley’s partner but we’re going to have a hell of a time proving it — now.

“Now then, Pint Size, I’m just going to tell you that this girl is hotter than a stove lid. If you so much as give her the time of day we’ll have your license and—”

Bertha Cool’s telephone jangled.

Bertha ignored it for a couple of rings but the bell had thrown Sellers off his stride and he looked up, waiting for Bertha to answer it.

Bertha picked up the telephone, said, “Hello,” then frowned and said, “He’s busy now, Elsie. It can wait, can’t it?”

Bertha listened for a moment, hesitated, then said, “Well, all right, I’ll put him on.”

Bertha turned to me. “Elsie says it’s something important.”

I picked up the telephone and Elsie Brand, talking in a very low voice so that what she said couldn’t be picked up by anyone else in the room, said, “There’s a Mrs. Hazel Downer here to see you, Donald. She looks like a million dollars and she says It s Important and highly confidential.”

I said, “He’ll have to wait until I—”

“It’s a her,” Elsie interrupted.

“I said he’ll just have to wait. I’m in an important conference in Bertha’s office.” I hung up the phone.

Bertha’s greedy little eyes snapped. “If he’s a good client, don’t take any chance on losing him, Donald,” she said. “Sergeant Sellers only wanted to find out whether this Hazel Downer had been in touch with us. He’s said everything he wanted to say.”

Sergeant Sellers took the cigar out of his mouth, looked around and said, “Why the hell don’t you keep spittoons in this joint, Bertha?”

He deposited the remains of the soggy, chewed-up cigar in Bertha’s ash tray.

“We don’t keep spittoons,” Bertha said. “This is a high-class place. Take that goddam thing out of here. It stinks up the office. I don t like it... All right, Donald, Sergeant Sellers has told you what he wanted to say. Go ahead and do whatever it is this man wants done.”

I said to Sellers, “He ordered two sandwiches, one with onions, one without?”

“That’s right.”

“And then ate them both?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then he must have become suspicious after he’d ordered the sandwiches and before they were delivered to him.”

“He wasn’t suspicious,” Sellers exploded. “It was the jane who was to join him. She stood him up. That’s why he ate both sandwiches.”

I said, “Then why not phone her from the drive-in? Why would he leave the place and then stop to telephone?”

Sellers said, “He wanted to find out why she hadn’t joined him. He didn’t know he was being tailed.”

“But he did see the binoculars?” I asked.

“I thought he did.”

“And went into a panic?”

“I ranked it,” Sellers admitted. “I sprung the trap too soon. He may not have seen the binoculars, but he seemed to be looking right into my eyes.”

I said, “Perhaps you missed something, Sergeant. I don t think he’d have let you watch him telephone if—”

Sergeant Sellers interrupted me. “Now look,” he warned, “you’re one damn smart customer. I’m not underestimating you one bit. My neck’s stuck out on this thing but I don’t need your help, and I don’t want your hindrance. Just lay off — understand?”

Bertha said, “You don’t need to talk to Donald like that, Frank.”

“The hell I don’t,” Sellers said. “This guy is too damned clever to suit me. He’s smart. He’s too damned smart. He thinks he’s even smarter.”

I said, “I didn’t give you as a character reference to anybody that I know of. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m busy. We have a living to make and we can’t make it just sitting around listening to people making threats.”

I walked out of Bertha Cool’s office, hurried across the reception room down to my private office and opened the door.

Elsie Brand jerked her thumb toward the inner office and said, “In there.” And then added, “Boy-oh-boy! This one is a knockout!”

I handed Elsie a key.

“What’s this?” she said.

“The key to the men’s washroom down the hall,” I said. “Take her down there, get inside and bolt the door.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why down there? Why not to the ladies’ room? Why not—?”

“Down there,” I said. “Get started.”

I opened the door to the inner office and walked in.

Hazel Downer was sitting with her knees crossed, facing the door. The pose had been carefully studied with just the proper amount of cheesecake and then perhaps because she’d been afraid I wouldn’t take sufficient notice she had added a little to the visible nylon. It looked great.

I said, “Hello, Hazel. I’m Donald Lam and you’re in a jam. This is Elsie Brand, my secretary. She’s taking you down the hall. Go with her and wait.”

I turned to Elsie. “I’ll give you my code knock on the door.”

“Come along, Hazel,” Elsie said.

“Where is this place?” Hazel asked, somewhat suspiciously.

“It’s the washroom,” Elsie said.

“Well, what do you know!” Hazel said, and got up off the chair, holding her chest out, and accompanied Elsie out of the office without looking back to see if I was watching her hips.

She didn’t have to. She was dressed so it would have been an impossibility not to have watched.

I sat down in my office swivel chair and started doodling on paper.

It was about a minute and a half before the door was jerked open by Sergeant Sellers. Bertha was looking apprehensively over his shoulder.

“Where’s your man?” Sellers asked.

“What man?”

“Your client.”

“Oh,” I said, “it didn’t amount to anything. It was a guy with a small collection job.”

“Donald,” Bertha said, “you can’t turn down all those small jobs. I’ve told you time and time again that there’s money in those small things.”

“Not in this one,” I said. “The bill was only a hundred and twenty-five dollars and he didn’t know where the debtor was living. We’d have to find the debtor first and then we’d have to collect.”

“Well, we could have at least looked into it,” Bertha said. “You can get those things on a fifty percent commission and—”

“He told me twenty-five was his limit, so I told him to beat it.”

Bertha heaved a sigh. “Can you imagine the way these bastards want to chisel these days?”

Sellers looked around the office. “Where’s your secretary?”

I jerked my head. “Down the hall, I guess. Why? You want her?”

“No,” Sellers said, “I’m just checking.”

He jerked the soggy cigar out of his mouth and dumped it in my ash tray. I let it stay there because the odor of moist tobacco served somewhat to kill the perfume which had emanated from Hazel Downer. Sellers’ nose was too paralyzed with the cigar odor for him to notice, but I thought Bertha had given a suspicious sniff when Sellers had first jerked the door open.

“All right, Frank,” Bertha Cool said. “You know we won’t try to cut any corners.”

“I know you won’t,” Sellers said, “but I’m not so sure about Pint Size here.”

I said, “Look, Sergeant, if there’s fifty grand in it, why don’t you encourage her to come and see us and see what she has to say? We might be able to help you.”

“You might and again you might not,” Sellers said. “If you ever tied up with her she’d be your client and you’d be representing her interests.”

“All right. What are her interests?” I asked.

“To get away with the fifty G’s.”

I shook my head and said, “Not if it’s hot. We could help her make a deal with the police. Perhaps the armored car outfit would give us five G’s as a reward. Then you’d be off the spot and she could be in the clear.”

Sellers said, “When I need your help I’ll ask for it.”

“All right, keep your shirt on,” I told him.

“What was an armored truck doing with a hundred one-thousand dollar bills?” I asked.

Sellers said, “The stuff had been ordered by the Merchants’ Manufacturers and Seamans’ National. They tell us the order came from a depositor and won’t go any further than that. We think it was a big bookmaking concern, but we can’t prove it. Anyhow, the money was in the truck, and now it’s gone... You got any ideas?”

“None you’d want,” I said. “Or are you asking for help now?”

“Go to hell,” Sellers said, and walked out.

Bertha waited until the door had closed, then said, “Don’t try to handle Sergeant Sellers that way, Donald. You deliberately made him mad.”

“So what?” I said. “Here we are fooling around with fifty grand in money and Sergeant Sellers is in a spot. Suppose we can solve his problem, recover fifty G’s for the insurance company and cut ourselves a piece of cake.”

Bertha’s eyes glittered greedily for a minute, then she shook her head apprehensively. “We can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’d nail us to the cross, that’s why.”

“For what?”

“For compounding a felony, being an accessory after the fact, and—”

“You’re going to tell me about the law?” I asked.

“You’re damn right,” she said. “I’m telling you about the law.”

I said, “I know a little law myself, Bertha. Suppose Sellers is barking up the wrong tree. Suppose this man Baxley had just been trying to date this jane, but suppose she knows something about him. Suppose if we treated her nice she could give us a clue?”

Bertha thought it over, then shook her head, but this time the shake wasn’t quite so emphatic.

“Sergeant Sellers can’t tell us what to do and what not to do,” I said. “He’s got a theory, that’s all. What has he got to tie it to? Nothing except a telephone number.”

“With the whole damn Police Department back of him,” Bertha said. “When you get to tangling with those boys they can be tough.”

“I don’t intend to tangle with them,” I said.

“Well, what do you intend to do?”

“Run my own business in my own way,” I told her.

Bertha slammed out of the office.

I waited two minutes, then opened the door and stepped out to the hall.

Sergeant Sellers was standing by the elevators.

“What’s the matter, Sergeant?” I asked. “The elevators on strike?”

“No,” he said, “I’m just keeping an eye on you, wise guy. There’s a gleam in your eye I don’t like. Where you headed?”

“Down to the john,” I said, jangling my keys. “You want to come?”

“Go to hell,” he told me.

I walked down the corridor. Sergeant Sellers followed me with his eyes.

I pretended to be inserting a key in the door while I tapped my code signal on the panels. I heard the bolt move on the inside. The door opened a bit and Elsie Brand’s frightened voice said, “Donald?”

I said, “Okay, baby, stand back,” and pushed my way into the room, closed the door behind me and shot the bolt.

“Well, I like this,” Hazel Downer said.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“The fixtures.”

“I didn’t have time to change them,” I said. “Now look, you’re hotter than a stove lid. Sergeant Sellers of the Police Department is waiting out there in the hall.”

“That so-and-so!” Hazel Downer said. “What right has he got to start pushing me around? I haven’t done anything.”

Elsie Brand looked at me with wide eyes.

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

She looked me over. “I want some service but I don’t want it here — and I don’t know whether you can give it to me.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not the sort of man I expected.”

“What kind did you expect?”

“A big-shouldered, two-fisted fighter,” she said.

“Mr. Lam fights with his brains,” Elsie told her, rushing to my defense.

Hazel Downer looked around at the “fixtures” and said, “So it seems.”

“All right,” I told her. “There’s no harm done. I’m walking out. I’ll decoy Frank Sellers down to the sidewalk, then you girls get out of here. You go back to the office, Elsie. Hazel can take care of herself. When you get to the street, Hazel, Frank Sellers will be there waiting for you. You’re going to see a lot of Frank Sellers.”

Hazel Downer looked frightened. “I don’t know anything about his fifty grand,” she said. “This Baxley was a torpedo that was on the make. I don’t even know how he got my telephone number.”

I stretched and yawned. “Why tell me? You don’t like me, remember?”

Her eyes sized me up. “Maybe I could like you — under other circumstances and in a different environment.”

“This is the environment we’re forced to use at the moment. What did you want?”

“I wanted you to find a man.”

“Who?”

“Standley Downer.”

“And who’s Standley Downer?”

“He’s the so-and-so who skipped out with my dough.”

“Any relative?”

“I said yes to the guy.”

“Where?”

“In front of an altar.”

“Then what?”

“I thought you were smart,” she said.

“He means with the money,” Elsie said.

“That’s what I meant,” Hazel said.

“Where did you get the money?” I asked.

“From an uncle.”

“How much?”

“Sixty grand.”

“After taxes?”

“After taxes and attorneys’ fees. That was net to me.”

“Any way of proving it?”

“Of course. There are court records.”

“They’ll be checked,” I told her.

She bit her lip.

“All right,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“There aren’t any court records. My uncle was what they call a, rugged individualist. He did business on a cash basis. He cheated on the income tax. He had sixty grand salted away in a safety deposit box. When he knew it was the end of the road for him he sent for me.”

“Now then,” I said, “all you need to tell me is that he had this sixty grand in thousand-dollar bills and that he gave it all to you.”

“That’s exactly what happened.”

“And you didn’t dare to deposit it in a bank because the income-tax people would want to know where all the money came from, so you hid it someplace and then you married Standley Downer and Downer wondered where your money was coming from’ and you wouldn’t tell him so he got smart and finally found where you had hidden it and took the boodle and departed.”

“That’s right.”

“So,” I said, “you want me to find him. Now, if you’re lying and this money represents your share of the fruits of the robbery of that armored truck I’d go to prison as being an accessory after the fact and be there for probably fifteen years. On the other hand, if your story is true and I found the money I’d be accessory after the fact to income-tax evasion and would probably get off with about five years. No, thank you, I don’t want any of it.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll come clean.”

“Go ahead.”

“You find my husband and the money and then I’ll prove I have the title.”

I said, “When I find Standley Downer, what’s going to keep him from telling us to go chase ourselves?”

“I am.”

“How?”

“I have something on him.”

“This fits into a beautiful picture—” I said, “blackmail, cheating the income tax and compounding a felony. I don’t like it.”

“You get fifty bucks a day and a bonus depending on what I get back.”

“How big a bonus?”

“That depends on how long it takes.”

“Twenty percent.”

“All right, twenty percent.”

Elsie Brand looked at me pleadingly. Her eyes were begging me not to have anything to do with it.

“We’d need a retainer,” I said.

“How much?”

“A thousand.”

“Are you crazy? I haven’t got it.”

“What do you have?”

“Five hundred is every cent I have.”

“Where?”

She put a foot on one of the fixtures, elevated her skirt and took a plastic envelope from the top of her stocking. She pulled back the flap of the envelope. There were five one-hundred-dollar bills inside.

“Have any trouble changing it?” I asked.

“Changing what?”

“The thousand-dollar bill.”

“Go to hell,” she said. “Do you want this, or don’t you?”

I said, “Let me tell you something, sister. If you’re mixed up in that armored car business I’m going to turn you in. If you’re lying I’ll sell you down the river. If you’re telling me the truth, I’m going to find Standley Downer.”

“Fair enough,” she said, “you find him and then we’ll talk turkey, but you’ll have to find him before he’s spent it all.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“A week.”

“You got a picture?”

She opened her purse, took out a wallet, extracted a picture, handed it to me.

“What color hair?”

“Dark.”

“Eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Weight?”

“A hundred and seventy.”

“Height?”

“Six feet, even.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Disposition?”

“It varies.”

“Emotional?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been married before?” I asked.

“If it’s any of your business, yes.”

“How many times?”

“Twice.”

“Had he been married before?”

“Once.”

“You’re quite a dish,” I said, looking her over.

She said, “Am I really?” She ran her hands over her curves. “Why,” she said in exaggerated surprise, “thank you for telling me, Mr. Lam. I hadn’t noticed.”

I said, “We don’t have time for wisecracks or sarcasm. You’re a dish.”

“All right, I’m a dish, so what?”

“Your husband didn’t leave you unless he had something especially attractive. Who was it?”

“Wasn’t the dough enough?”

I shook my head. “Quit stalling. Who’s the other girl?”

“Evelyn Ellis.”

“Now then,” I said, “if you tell me Evelyn works at the Full Dinner Pail, I’ll have heard everything.”

“But she does,” she said. “That’s where my husband met her.”

I put the five hundred dollars in my pocket. “Okay,” I said, “this is where I came in.”

Elsie Brand grabbed my arm. “Please don’t, Donald.”

I said, “It’s an occupational hazard, Elsie.”

Hazel Downer was immediately suspicious. “What’s a hazard? What are you two signaling about?”

I said, “Never mind that. Describe Evelyn.”

“Red-head, wide innocent-looking blue eyes, twenty-three, a hundred and seventeen pounds; thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six.”

“What’s she got you haven’t got?”

“She didn’t ask me to be present when my husband was taking inventory.”

“You seem to be pretty familiar with the dimensions.”

“Why not? She had everything published when she was Miss American Hardware at the Hardware Dealers’ Convention last year.”

“What was she doing in hardware?”

“She wasn’t in hardware. She was a bookkeeper for an importing company.”

“What was she doing as a car hop?”

“That was after the hardware. She was looking for impressionable men who had, or could get, money. She found Standley. She’s retired now.”

“You have any idea where they are now?”

“If I did I wouldn’t be paying you.”

“What am I to do if and when I find them?”

“Just tell me.”

I turned to Elsie. “After I leave, wait three minutes,” I said. “Open the door a crack to see if anyone’s in the corridor. If the coast is clear, go back to the office. If Bertha wants to know anything, act like a clam.”

I swung back to face Hazel Downer. “You follow Elsie out,” I said. “Take the elevator to the main floor. Go down the block to the big department store. The ladies’ room has two entrances. Go in one and out the other. Be sure you aren’t followed.

“Every day at noon leave your apartment. Try not to be followed. Go to a pay phone booth and call Elsie in my office. Make your voice as harsh as you can. Say this is Abigail Smythe and tell Elsie to be sure the last name is spelled with a y and an e and where is the deadbeat you married I’m supposed to be locating for you.

“Elsie will tell you where to meet me if I have anything new. When you dial the number, be sure no one is watching.

“You got all that straight?”

She nodded.

I opened the door and walked out.

Sergeant Sellers was halfway down the corridor coming toward me.

“It takes you a long time,” he said.

“Bertha’s time,” I pointed out. “That’s the only way I can get even with her. Thank you for your interest in what I do.”

“Where you going now?”

“Out.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Sure thing. Come along.”

He rode down in the elevator with me.

“I wouldn’t want you to get any ideas,” he said. “Remember, smart guy, I’m going to bust this case wide open. Do you get me? I’m going to bust it wide open.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“I don’t need any help.”

“I know,” I told him. “In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as fail.”

“What the hell’s a lexicon?” he asked.

“A Greek dictionary,” I told him.

“Someday,” he told me, “you’re going to get hurt.”

“I’ve already been hurt.”

“Worse,” he said.

I saw him looking at the cigar stand.

“Come on down the block with me,” I said. “There’s a good-looking blonde at the cigar counter down there. I’m going to shake dice with her for the cigars. I’ll give you a couple.”

“You and your women,” he said.

“You and your cigars,” I told him.

He walked along with me. I stuck the house for cigars. I gave him half. I hated to contribute them but I couldn’t afford to have him see Hazel Downer when she left the building. Sometimes you have to give the other guy the breaks.