Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 6, May 1963

C.O.D. to a Corpse by Tighe Jarratt

“I am a licensed private eye,” Chip pointed out. “You are an evil eye,” Aunt Tilly corrected.

There were seven messages to phone Aunt Tilly when Chip Stack checked his answering service. Imperative. Aunt Tilly spoke with the authority of a million dollars and the boss of the Stack clan.

Chip snapped a cigarette into his deceptively amiable face and considered that Aunt. Tilly carried her gold-headed cane not from infirmity, but to wallop hell out of any purse snatcher or mugger foolish enough to disregard the glint of her bird-bright eyes. She knew her nephew without illusions, disapproved of him entirely, and had once characterized him a renegade to the human race. Aside from that, she liked him.

But not seven phone calls worth. This was trouble. Chip took a neat drink for fortification, expanded his breath, and intrepidly dialed her number, feeling much like a soldier charging a flame throwing tank with his bayonet.

“Chip Stack,” she greeted him. “How long since your deeply lamented Uncle Arthur was laid at rest?”

“Why,” he grunted with surprise, and flicked a glance at the calendar. “It was three weeks ago last Monday — twenty-three days. Is something desecrating his memory?”

“Racketeers,” she sniffed. “Cheap ones, too, and how he loathed the type! Unless it was you?”

“I appreciate the suspicion,” he said dryly. “Has somebody a bequest, or dug up the story of how he made his first fifty thousand?”

“Somebody,” she stated, “used his departure to swindle me out of fifteen dollars and forty-two cents.”

“Why, forty-two cents?” Chip asked.

“Special handling. It was a Parcel Post — C.O.D.”

“Oh, one of those,” he muttered. “They sent him a letter that they’d picked up an unclaimed package addressed to him and thought it might be important. And you wrote back to send it immediately?”

“It’s passing strange that you know the details so intimately,” she crackled.

“Well,” he grinned, “it’s a pretty old con game. They used to send C.O.D.’s directly to the obituary list, but the Federals stepped on that. Now they have to get a written order, but the departed person’s relatives usually ask for delivery if the sum involved is not too great. It still turns out expensive for a pair of cheap slippers or a ten cent pen.”

“I must say, you are well informed,” she commented. “I suppose you’d call on the Fifth Amendment if I asked you to do something about it?”

He said cautiously, “I don’t mind the nuisance of trailing them down, but the case will be dismissed, even if I get them into court.”

“Who said anything about court?” she barked. “I’m simply sure that if common swindlers can think of a trick that foul, you’ll think of something more so, and I want them whamied.”

“I am a licensed private eye,” he pointed out.

“You’re an evil eye,” she corrected. “And I want these tricksters chastised.”

Aunt Tilly hung up, sharply, before he could remonstrate. So that was that! She had stated what she wanted, and when a million dollar aunt said she wanted something done, you did it. The question was — what? He should have lured an idea out of her. She had a very lively imagination herself, as she must have had to hook his departed, skinflint uncle.

He mixed another drink, picked up the evening paper and stretched out on the couch to check the day’s obituaries. If it had been a three dollar C.O.D. involved, his job would have been relatively easy. The con artists would have sent out a form letter to the entire list of departed.

But if they were working the fifteen dollar bracket, they had to make their sucker list selective. A workman’s family might be more sentimental about his passing than more substantial folk. But it would think twice about parting with fifteen dollars for some unknown doodad that he’d supposedly ordered. A fifteen dollar swindle would be among the upper crust.

It was a loathesome but safe racket for the swindlers, of course. C.O.D.’s cannot be opened for inspection before the C.O.D. charge is paid. Even when hooked with a ten cent pen or some other trivial item, few people in grief and mourning would do anything about it. Even if they grew incensed, there was little that they could do legally. The delivery had been ordered by some member of the family in writing, and the original letter from the swindlers had stated that the contents of the package was not known.

Occasionally, the feather merchants hit the eighty and ninety dollar brackets, just short of grand larceny. But fifteen dollars was a smarter sum. More suckers bit, fewer made trouble, and ten or twenty of those deals a day provided a nice profit for the time it took to write the original letters.

But — it was one helluva sum from Chip Stack’s standpoint. It meant looking up the addresses of the day’s deceased in various ways to select those living in more expensive sections of the city. Many of the more elite were not listed in the phone book. He had to search them through the Social Register or Poor’s list of executives, and in one case, a church director’s manual.

“The things I do for my country!” Stack growled as he faced the task. But then, there was almost nothing that he would not do for million dollar Aunt Tilly.

He completed his list and sat there frowning at it. Something ghoulish about preying off the dead. Personally, he preferred the living, such as well rounded, mink-stealing, strawberry blondes.

The swindlers were easy enough to figure. They would probably wait three days after an obit to pull their racket. That would bring their letter of inquiry to the family on the fourth or fifth day, after the worst of the grief had subsided. It would probably bear some faked letterhead such as — The National Unclaimed Package Recovery Service. They’d have a mail address somewhere, which they’d change every few weeks as a routine precaution against some old style citizen whose outrage might burst his due regard for the laws that protect crooks and creeps.

On the fourth day, Stack took his preferred list from the file and began to phone. The first two calls were answered by butlers. All mail addressed to the deceased was being forwarded to the estate lawyers they, said, so that eliminated them. The next call was answered by the very cool and aloof voice of a social secretary.

She was not at all impressed that he identified himself as Detective Stack. Her tone implied that, there could not possibly be anything for a detective to phone about, and even if there were, he should await a period of decent mourning. As far as the deceased’s mail was concerned, she could scarcely see that it was any of his business whether or not there had been any C.O.D’s. But as a matter of fact, there had been a letter from a reclaiming service.

She had the letter at hand, and so could read him the usual glib explanation. It was addressed to the deceased. It stated that the Service had located a package mis-addressed to the deceased, contents unknown, but the charge amounted to $14.50, plus postage. If the merchandise was still desired, the Service would forward it for the sum involved upon written authorization.

“Naturally, the family will accept it,” the secretary informed Stack coolly. “Although it is strange that it would be a C.O.D.”

Then she recollected that Stack had said he was a detective. “There isn’t something peculiar about it?”

“Well, to this extent. We think it is an item worth about ten cents. However, with your cooperation, we’d like to have you send for it.”

The cool voice snapped indignantly, “Why, the very idea! Pay fourteen dollars and fifty cents for a ten cent item?”

Stack winced, but had to make the gesture. “I will be happy to reimburse you.”

“Oh!” the voice murmured less icily. “Very well, as soon as I receive your money order, I will instruct this company to send it. I will let you know when it arrives.”

“Perfect,” Stack said and hung up with a sour face. She hadn’t even suggested a personal check. Money order, she’d said. There was something about rich people and money — they stuck together like fly paper.

He got out his American Express checks and mailed the requisite amount, wondering what the cool secretary would say if, handling costs ran eight cents over. Then he re-examined the pen that his Aunt Tilly had been swindled for. Just a ten cent piece of junk, the kind of ballpoint that was sold by the hundred at any surplus mail order house.

He recalled that the first cheap ones had been made out of WW II surplus ballbearings and tubing, and supposed that the practice might still be existent. Some of the small, fringe manufacturers would find a way to make something out of a pig’s squeal, if it showed a ten cent profit on a gross.

Five days later, the social secretary was considerate enough to phone. She sounded a little more cordial. “You were right. It’s a cheap pen that Mr. Satterlee never would have ordered. Shall I mail it to you?”

“If it’s convenient, I’ll stop by for it,” he said. “There’s a little urgency to catch the birds before they’ve flown.”

That was a lie, but in spite of her chill, she had a throaty quality to her voice that promised warmth. He thought that he ought to get something for his fifteen bucks more than a ten cent pen. Come to think of it, he was a worse sucker than the victims the swindlers conned.

He was also out of luck. The secretary was big as a house. She was Mrs. Satterlee’s secretary, and of course, no society dowager would have an employee better looking than herself. However, she was rather curious and jolly and invited him to lunch on the Satterlee charge account.

The luncheon check was twenty-six dollars, and she left a five dollar tip, so Stack figured that theoretically, he came out fifty cents the winner.

She’d kept the original letter and C.O.D. wrapper, providing an address on Broadway that was a warren for phoney song publishers, bookies, pimps, dubious agents, a uranium stock company, and other assorted con artists.

The office was closed when Chip Stack got there, and the elevator man knew nothing, until a five spot jogged his memory. The tenant had been in that morning, he recalled, and gone out with an arm load of small wrapped packages. He examined the package Chip showed him. They were all like that, he nodded, some mail order business, he guessed.

Back at home, Stack found the usual impatient messages from Aunt Tilly. “What are you going to do about those foul racketeers?” she demanded. “You wouldn’t be stalling until you find a way to cut in on them?”

“Now, Aunt Tilly,” he remonstrated. “I’m as driven as the innocent snow.”

“I know what you’re driven by,” she declared tartly.

“Patience,” he grinned. “I’m just getting the case in hand. I think we’re going to hang, draw and quarter these weasels very shortly.”

“We?” she repeated with sparking interest. Aunt Tilly was a born conspirator. “It is real dirty — dirty enough to make them feel it?”

“It will slap them where it hurts,” he promised. “Now listen closely. I am sending over your pen, which seems to have been manufactured out of military surplus tubing. As a matter of fact, it contains platinum and is worth a good deal more than you paid for it.”

“But it can’t be! Those swindlers would never pay more than a penny for a dime pen—”

“But they don’t know it,” her nephew cut in. “Now what I want you to do is send this pen down to your old pal Senator Gilfoyle with an indignant letter demanding to know why the taxpayer’s money is being wasted on platinum tubing that gets sold for a song as surplus.”

She giggled. “That fussbudget will be roaring for a dozen investigations. But how am I supposed to know it is platinum?”

“Tell him how you got it. Tell him you consider it such an outrage upon your dearly departed’s memory that you had the pen investigated.”

“And then?”

“Just sit tight.”

“I’ll be squirming like a maiden,” she said, and laughed.

Stack hung up and regarded the pen he meant to send to his aunt. Its filler contained platinum, all right, and he’d paid thirty-five bucks to have the tube made up. And now he was going to have to lay out twenty more to get a sneak thief he knew to rob the swindler’s office of their pen supply.

The robbery was easy enough. Who’d bother to lock up cheap merchandise like that? The thief was miffed however because there’d been less than five hundred pens and they were so cheesy that he’d only been able to get four dollars for the lot from a fence who unloaded his stuff to be peddled through the downtown bars.

Chip Stack chuckled when the thief phoned his grumbling report. “You’ll be wishing you’d kept a few of those in a few days,” he told him. “You might make a damned good deal with those swindlers to buy ’em back, and no questions asked.”

Forty-eight hours later, Senator Gilfoyle loosed his thunder. He told the press that possibly “millions” of the taxpayer’s money had been thrown away through the negligent handling of surplus, using the platinum pen as an example. He hinted darkly that he meant to investigate atomic waste and subversive efforts to bankrupt the country. He quoted an unnamed “expert’s” opinion that the platinum tubing might contain a hundred dollars worth of platinum, and confidential information that enough tubing for ten or twenty thousand such pens, retailing at a dime apiece, had slipped through Surplus.

The papers headlined it into the usual sensational story. Surplus was a sure-fire whipping boy because it was so complex that rarely could anything be proven or disproven. Chip Stack read the stories with mischievous humor and took a taxi to the office building of the swindlers. By the simple process of sitting on the firescape of the floor above, he had no difficulty learning their reaction to the newspaper stories.

They hit their small, one-room office like twin cyclones, turning the place topsy turvy to find any pens that had escaped the strange theft which they were just beginning to understand. Somebody had gotten onto the error before the senator and trailed the pens to them and looted them of a veritable fortune.

The two partners screamed at each other and howled. The only way that they could recaptured any of their lost “profits” was to contact the people they had already swindled and try to con them over again.

Chip Stack left his firescape perch with a grin and stopped at the phones in the lobby below to make contact with the sneak thief who’d taken Chip at his word earlier in the week and retrieved a handfull of the purloined ball points. His second call was to Mrs. Satterleee’s secretary.

“Of course,” she said, “I saw the Washington story but I thought it was probably overstated.”

“A little,” he said. “But the swindlers don’t know anything about that—”

“And of course they’ll try to get their pens back.” She laughed. She was way ahead of him. “You’re a very clever gentlemen, Mr. Stack. I won’t speak with those gangsters if they call, so I won’t upset your tea party.”

Chip thought that he deserved a drink and so awarded himself, then went across town to Aunt Tilly’s to find her reading the papers avidly.

“That idiot Gilfoyle never could contain his enthusiasm,” she said. “A hundred dollars worth of platinum indeed! Why, an imbecile would know from the weight of it — and come to think of it, Chip, that pen you had me send Gilfoyle felt considerably heavier than the one I gave you.”

“Well, there might have been a little difference,” he admitted. “I had several of them. Maybe I got mixed.”

She fastened her bird bright eyes upon him. “Now what happens?”

“That we have to wait and see,” he grunted. He extracted the Satterlee pen and her own original from his pocket and laid them on a table. “I think you know Mrs. H. T. S. Satterlee. If the matter crops up, you might say that you were up there to express condolences and picked up this pen at her house.”

“You think I’ll hear from these thieves, then?”

“Like the tax collector,” he said.

She clucked good humoredly and tapped her cane with anticipation. “Just let me get my claws in them!” she declared.

The phone rang and she picked it up herself without waiting for the maid. “Why, the senator certainly got in touch with you quickly!” she said with an air of surprise that would have fooled Stack himself. “I haven’t even had time to find the pens since I spoke with him, but of course, I will since he needs them for investigation—”

Chip could hear a gritty male voice repeat, “Pens? But you only have one. That is, we understand you only—”

“Oh no! I have one that Mrs. Satterlee’s poor husband sent for just before he passed away. He was a great friend of my husband’s and I suppose they both heard about the mistake and were curious. They were both interested in metals, you know — but I don’t suppose you do. Did you say you were with the Treasury?”

The speaker’s cough exploded over the phone. He hastened to deny that, making some vague reference to just “Investigation.”

“Well,” Aunt Tilly said, “I don’t suppose you can tell those things, but it’s clear that the senator had you phone, and it was certainly generous of him to allow me fifty dollars a pen, when it’s really a patriotic duty—”

The speaker made a sound that conveyed extreme pain. He said nothing had been said about that to him.

“But it must have been mentioned!” she said steadfastly. “He said that he was having a hundred of them picked up in the city and they’d all be paid for at the same rate in cash.”

“A hundred of them?” the speaker choked. Then he switched his tune. “But I think I can explain. You see, we’re not picking them up. The manufacturer is — as it was apparently a mistake clean through.”

“And of course,” Aunt Tilly said with an older woman’s understanding, “the manufacturer will pay, and that is really patriotic of him to try to make restitution at his own expense. When shall I expect him, Mr. — did you say, Wolf?”

He made uncertain sounds. He wanted to talk price again, but Stack guessed that he was worried an official investigator might already be on the trail and cutting them out.

“Oh really,” Aunt Tilly interrupted, “if there’s no money involved, it would be as easy for me to just mail them to Washington, wouldn’t it?”

There was a fresh burst of rapid talk. Chip could imagine the swindler sweating. He finally said that he’d send the manufacturer’s representative right over.

Aunt Tilly hung up and giggled and smoothed her skirts. She said, “That last one really choked him! They hate to see a dollar get away, don’t they? But won’t they notice the weight?”

“I don’t think they’ll take time to notice anything except grab and run,” Chip said. “They’ll think a Washington man is already breathing down their necks and they’ll try to beat him to every pen they can grab.”

Aunt Tilly freshened a cup of tea and had just finished it when her maid announced the manufacturer’s agent. Stack vanished into an adjoining room and Aunt Tilly gave her most winsome smile as the racketeer came in.

“The nation can be proud of business men like you,” she greeted him. “This really wasn’t your fault, and yet you’re willing to take all this trouble and expense just to retrieve two pens.”

He gave a fat faced, pallid smile. “We are really pretty rushed. I hope that you’ve located the pens?”

“Oh yes,” she said. She picked them up and compared them. “I suppose I should have noticed that they’re heavier than my other ball pens.”

He laid a hundred dollar bill on the table and extended a pudgy hand. Aunt Tilly placed them in his hand with force.

“You see, they are heavier,” she murmured brightly. “But won’t you sit down and have a cup of tea? I think another of the senator’s men will be here shortly.”

The swindler gulped and made excuses and rushed out stuffing the pens into his pocket. Aunt Tilly whacked her knee and laughed like Tugboat Annie.

Her nephew came forth regarding her suspiciously. “Just where did you learn to push a light weight when you want it to feel heavier?” Chip inquired.

“Oh that,” she sniffed. “Well, I do read detective magazines.”

Her agile mind had been caught by another thought. She was ticking on her fingers. She said thoughtfully, “You know, if those pens were worth a hundred dollars and he picks up a hundred, it would be quite a nice day’s work, Chip.”

“Five thousand dollars,” he said. “Likewise, if he picks up a hundred, even at twenty-five dollars average, he’ll be out a nice month’s profits.”

“I’m sure poor Arthur will rest much easier now,” she said. “He did so hate to be bested.” She picked up the hundred dollar bill and held it to him. “I’ll just take fifteen dollars and forty-two cents, Chip, and I think I’ll put you back in my will.”