The Bigger They Come

Chapter 2

The secretary was banging away on the typewriter when I opened the door of the office which said ‘B. L. Cool — Confidential Investigations.’

‘Hello,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Is — er — what is she, Mrs. or Miss?’

‘Mrs.’

‘Is she in?’

‘No.’

‘What,’ I asked, ‘do I call you besides “say”?’

‘Miss Brand.’

I said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Brand. I’m Donald Lam. Mrs. Cool hired me to fill the position mentioned in the ad.’

She went on typing.

‘Since I’m going to work here,’ I went on, ‘I expect we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other. You don’t like me, and I don’t think I’m going to like you. You can let it go at that if you want to.’

She stopped typing to turn over a page on her shorthand book. She looked up at me and said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and dropped her fingers back to the keyboard.

I walked over and sat down.

‘Anything for me to do except wait?’ I asked after a few minutes.

She shook her head.

‘Mrs. Cool told me to be back here by eleven.’

‘You’re here,’ she said, and went on clacking away at the typewriter.

I took a package of cigarettes from my pocket. I’d been without smokes for a week, not because I wanted to, but because I had to.

The door of the outer office opened. Mrs. Cool came barging into the room with a trim-looking chestnut-haired trick a step behind her.

I sized up my new boss as she walked across the office, and revised my first estimate of her weight by adding twenty pounds. She evidently didn’t believe in confining herself to tight clothes. She wiggled and jiggled around inside her loose apparel like a cylinder of currant jelly on a plate. But she wasn’t wheezy, and she didn’t waddle. She walked with a smooth, easy rhythm. It wasn’t a stride. You weren’t conscious of her legs at all. She flowed past like a river.

I looked at the girl behind her, and the girl looked at me.

She was trim-ankled, slender, and seemed to have her body and mind on frightened tiptoes. I had the impression that if I’d yell ‘Boo!’ at the top of my voice, she’d be out of the office in two bounds. She had deep brown eyes, sun-tanned skin — or powder — and clothes which were cut to show her figure and did. It was a figure worth showing.

Elsie Brand kept right on typing.

Mrs. Cool held open the door of her private office. ‘Go right on in, Miss Hunter,’ she said, and then, looking at me, went on in the same tone of voice, almost as part of the same sentence, ‘I’m going to want you in five minutes. Wait.’

The door closed.

I made myself as comfortable as possible and waited.

After a while, the telephone on Elsie Brand’s desk buzzed. She stopped typing, picked up the receiver, said, ‘Very well,’ dropped the receiver back into place, and nodded at me. ‘Go on in,’ she said. She was back pounding the keys of the typewriter before I’d got out of the chair.

I opened the door to the private office. Mrs. Cool was overflowing the big swivel chair as she sat hunched up against the desk, her elbows leaning on it. As I opened the door, she was saying, ‘—no, dearie, I don’t give a damn now how much you lie. We find out the truth sooner or later anyway; and the longer it takes to find out the truth, the more time we get paid for — this is Donald Lam. Mr. Lam, Miss Hunter. Mr. Lam hasn’t been with me long, but he has the qualifications. He’ll work on your case. I’ll supervise what he does.’

I bowed to the girl. She smiled at me in a preoccupied way. She seemed to be hesitating over some important decision.

Mrs. Cool, perfectly at ease, continued to hold down the desk with her elbows. She had that motionless immobility which characterizes the very fat. Thin people are constantly making jerky motions to alleviate the nervous pressure which possesses them. Mrs. Cool didn’t have a fidget in her system. When she sat down, she was placed. She had the majesty of a snowcapped mountain, the assurance of a steam roller.

‘Sit down, Donald,’ she said.

I sat down, taking a professional interest in Miss Hunter’s profile — long, straight nose, fine chin, smooth, delicately shaped forehead, framed by glossy waves of chestnut hair. Her mind was occupied with some thought which drained all of her attention away from her present surroundings.

Mrs. Cool said to me, ‘You read the newspapers, Donald?’

I nodded.

‘You’ve read about Morgan Birks?’

‘A little,’ I said, fascinated by Miss Hunter’s abstraction. ‘Wasn’t he the one who was indicted by the grand jury in that slot-machine scandal?’

‘There wasn’t any scandal about it,’ Mrs. Cool said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. ‘They had a lot of illegal slot-machines placed where they’d do the most good and naturally there was a pay-off to the police department. Morgan did the paying. The grand jury didn’t indict him. They can’t get enough evidence to indict him. They subpoenaed him as a witness. He didn’t show up. They’re trying to find him. There’s some sort of a warrant out for him. That’s all. If they get him they can do something about the police department. If they don’t get him they can’t. Why the hell anybody wants to call it a scandal is more than I know. It’s just ordinary, routine business.’

‘I was quoting the newspapers,’ I said.

‘Don’t do it, Donald. It’s a bad habit.’

‘What about Morgan Birks?’ I asked, noticing that Miss Hunter was still very much occupied with her own thoughts.

‘Morgan Birks has a wife,’ Mrs. Cool said. ‘Her name is— is—’ She said to Miss Hunter, ‘Let’s have those papers, dearie,’ and had to ask the second time before Miss Hunter suddenly snapped to attention, opened her purse, took out some folded, legal-looking documents, and handed them across the desk. Mrs. Cool picked up the papers and calmly resumed her conversation at the point where she’d interrupted herself.

‘—Sandra Birks. Sandra Birks wants a divorce. She’s been figuring on it for some time. Morgan played into her hands by getting mixed up in this grand jury business. It’s a swell time to get a divorce except for one thing. She can’t find him to serve the papers.’

‘He’s classed as a fugitive from justice?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know how much justice there is about it,’ she said, ‘but he’s sure as hell a fugitive from something. He can’t be found.’

‘What am I to do?’ I asked.

‘Find him,’ she said, and slid the papers across the desk to me.

I picked up the papers. There was an original summons in the case Birks versus Birks, and a copy of the summons to which was attached a copy of the plaintiff’s complaint.

Mrs. Cool said, ‘You don’t have to be an officer to serve a summons. Any citizen of the United States over the age of twenty-one years and not a party to the action can make the service. Find Birks, serve him. When you make the service, you hand him the copy of the summons and the complaint. You show him the original summons, then you come back here and make an affidavit.’

‘How do I go about finding him?’ I asked.

Miss Hunter said suddenly, ‘I think I can help you.’

‘And when I’ve found him,’ I asked Mrs. Cool, ‘will he resent—?’

Miss Hunter interrupted quickly, ‘And I know he will. That’s the thing I’m afraid of. Mr. Lam might get hurt. Morgan is—’

Mrs. Cool interposed a calm, matter-of-fact, ‘My God, Donald, that’s your headache. What the hell do you want us to do? Go along with you so you can hide behind our petticoats when you poke the summons out at him?’

I made up my mind she was going to fire me sooner or later anyhow. It might as well be now. ‘I was asking,’ I said, ‘for information.’

‘Well, you got your information.’

‘I don’t think I did,’ I told her, ‘and in case you’re interested, I don’t like the way it was given.’

She didn’t even turn her eyes toward me. ‘I’m not interested,’ she said, and lifted the lid from the cigarette case on her desk. ‘Want to smoke, Miss Hunter — what the hell’s your first name, dearie? I don’t go much for last names.’

‘Alma.’

‘Want to smoke, Alma?’

‘No, thank you. Not right now.’

Mrs. Cool picked up a match, scraped it explosively against the underside of the desk, held it to the cigarette, and said, ‘As I was saying, Donald, you’ll find Birks and serve the summons on him. Alma’s going to help you find him — oh yes, you’ll want to know where Alma fits into the picture. She’s a friend of the wife — or is it a relative, dearie?’

‘No, just a friend,’ Alma Hunter said. ‘Sandra and I roomed together before she got married.’

‘How long ago was that?’ Mrs. Cool asked.

‘Two years.’

‘Where are you living now?’

‘With Sandra. She has an apartment with two bedrooms. I’m staying with her, and her brother is coming out from the East — you see, Morgan just packed up and left, and—’

‘You know Morgan, of course?’ Mrs. Cool interrupted.

‘No,’ Alma Hunter said a little too quickly. ‘I never approved of — well, of the idea. Through Sandra, I knew things about him — I think I’d prefer not to go into that if you don’t mind.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Mrs. Cool said. ‘If you’re referring to facts which don’t enter into the case, they’re none of my damn business. If they do, I’d a lot rather find them out for myself, at so many dollars a day, than have you tell me about them. Write your own ticket, dearie.’

I saw the glint of a smile in Alma Hunter’s eyes.

‘And don’t mind me when I cuss,’ Mrs. Cool went on, ‘because I like profanity, loose clothes, and loose talk. I want to be comfortable. Nature intended me to be fat. I put in ten years eating salads, drinking skimmed milk, and toying with dry toast. I wore girdles that pinched my waist, form-building brassières, and spent half of my time standing on bathroom scales.

‘And what the hell did I do it for? Just to get a husband!’

‘You got one?’ Alma Hunter asked, her eyes showing her interest.

‘Yes.’

Miss Hunter was discreetly silent. Mrs. Cool resented the implications of her silence. ‘It wasn’t that way at all,’ she said. ‘But hell, this isn’t the time for a dissertation on my private life.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Miss Hunter said. ‘Really, Mrs. Cool, I didn’t mean to be prying. I was just terribly interested. I’m — well, I have problems of my own — I don’t like to hear people talk cynically about marriage. I think that when a woman really works to make a success of marriage, she can make the home so attractive that the husband wants to be there all the time. After two―’

‘And why the hell should a woman do that for any man?’ Bertha Cool interrupted in a calm, level voice. ‘My God, men don’t own the world.’

‘But it’s a woman’s place in life,’ Alma Hunter said. ‘It’s part of the biological structure.’

Bertha Cool looked over the tops of her glasses. ‘If you want to talk biological urges,’ she said, ‘talk with Donald. He knows all about the courtship of microbes.’

‘Men aren’t microbes,’ Alma Hunter said.

Bertha Cool sighed, and the sigh rippled the loose flesh of her stomach and breasts into jelly-like action. ‘Now listen,’ she said, ‘my marriage is the one thing on earth I am touchy about. Some day Donald’s going to hear from someone all about what a bitch I was and how I treated my husband. I’ll probably tell him the whole story myself, but I’ll be damned careful I do it after office hours — unless I do it on your time, dearie — but for God’s sake don’t get married with the idea of putting a man upon a pedestal and yourself down on your hands and knees, scraping cobwebs out of the corner. You keep on doing that, and some day a cute little trick will look up at your husband with big blue eyes, and you’ll find that you’re in the place you made for yourself, just a damn floor scraper with rough hands, sharp features, and calloused knees — I know what you’re thinking, that your husband won’t be like that, but all husbands are like that:

‘But, Mrs. Cool—’

‘All right, if you want to go into details, listen to what happened in my case. And you listen, too, Donald. It’ll do you good.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference to me,’ I said. ‘For all I care, you could have—’

‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m your boss. Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking.’ She turned back to Alma Hunter and said, ‘You get that idea about husbands out of your head, or you’ll be unhappy as long as you live. My husband was an average specimen — as husbands go, and that’s not very far. I kept on my diet until the glamour wore off, then I commenced to look across the breakfast table at him and wonder what the hell I was getting in return for what I was giving. He could eat peaches and cream, in a big bowl of oatmeal swimming in butter, ham and eggs, coffee with thick cream, with two teaspoonfuls of sugar, and never put on a pound. He ate breakfasts like that right in front of my face. I sat across the table from him with my stomach begging me on its bended knees for just one spoonful of oatmeal, and I broke off dry toast and nibbled at little pieces of it so one piece would last through my husband’s breakfast.

‘And then the day came when he told me he had to be away in Chicago on business. I was suspicious and hired a detective to shadow him. He took his secretary and went down to Atlantic City. I got the report by telephone on Monday morning just as we were sitting down to breakfast.’

Alma Hunter’s eyes were sparkling.

‘You divorced him?’ she asked.

‘Divorced, hell!’ Mrs. Cool said. ‘Why should I divorce the worm? He was my meal ticket. I just said, “God damn you; Henry Cool, if you’re going to take that peroxided hussy down to Atlantic City over weekends and make me like it, I’m going to eat what I please and make you like it.” So I dished myself out a big bowl of oatmeal, put so much butter on it that it was simply swimming, poured on thick whipping cream, put lots of sugar on top of that, and scraped the bowl clean before my husband had got up his nerve enough to try and lie to me.’

‘Then what?’ Alma asked.

‘Oh,’ she said airily, ‘he kept on lying, and I kept on eating. After that, we worked out a pretty good basis of companionship. He kept on supporting me, and I kept on eating. He kept on playing around with the peroxide secretary until she tried to blackmail him. Well, of course I couldn’t stand for that, so I went down and gave the little bitch a piece of my mind, and sent her on her way with her ears pinned back. And then I picked him a secretary.

‘One who offered no possible temptation, I suppose,’ Alma Hunter said, with a smile.

‘Not at all,’ Mrs. Cool said. ‘I was getting pretty fat by that time, and decided Henry should have a break. I picked him a good-looking little trick that I’d known for three years. I had enough on her so she didn’t dare to blackmail him. And I swear to you, dearie, I don’t know to this day whether Henry ever made her or not — but of course he did. I know that she liked to play around, and Henry just couldn’t keep his hands off a woman. But she was a damn good secretary; and Henry seemed happy; and I ate anything I wanted. It was a wonderful arrangement — until Henry died.’

She blinked her eyes, and I couldn’t be certain whether it was a gesture or if there were tears glinting in the corners. Abruptly she was back to business. ‘You want a summons served. I’ll serve it. Now what the hell more is there to talk about?’

‘Nothing,’ Alma Hunter said, ‘except the matter of fees.’

‘This Sandra Birks has money?’

‘She’s not wealthy, but she has—’

‘Make me a check for a hundred and fifty dollars,’ Mrs. Cool interrupted. ‘Make it out to Bertha Cool. I’ll send it down to the bank. If the check’s any good we’ll find Morgan Birks. When we find him, we’ll serve him. If we find him tomorrow, it costs you a hundred and fifty bucks. If it takes more than seven days, it costs you twenty dollars a day for every extra day we put in. No matter what happens, you get no refunds. Frankly, if we can’t find him in seven days, I don’t think we can ever find him. No use you throwing good money after bad. I’m telling you now.’

‘But you’ve got to find him,’ Alma Hunter said. ‘It’s — it’s imperative.’

‘Listen, dearie. The whole police force is trying to find him. I’m not saying we can’t. I’m not saying we can. I’m just telling you how you can keep costs down.’

‘But the police force doesn’t have Sandra helping them. Sandra can—’

‘Do you mean that Sandra knows where he is?’

‘No, but her brother does.’

‘Who’s her brother?’

‘His name’s Thorns, B. Lee Thorns. He’s going to help Sandra. She’s at the train, meeting him. He knows who Morgan’s girl friend is. You should be able to locate him through the girl friend.’

Bertha Cool said, ‘All right. As soon as you get the money, we start.’

Alma Hunter raised her purse. ‘I’ll give you cash right now.’

‘How’d you happen to come to me?’

‘Sandra’s lawyer said you’d get results, that you took cases that the other detective agencies wouldn’t touch-divorce cases and things of that sort, and—’

‘Who in hell is he?’ Bertha Cool interrupted. ‘I forgot to look at his name. Donald, hand me those papers — no, never mind, just read me the name of the lawyer.’

I looked down at the bottom of the jacket. ‘Sydney Coltas,’ I said. ‘He has his office in the Temple Building.’

‘Never heard of him,’ Mrs. Cool said. ‘But he seems to know me. Sure I do anything — divorces, politics — anything. My idea of ethics in this business is cash and carry.’

Alma Hunter said, ‘You did some work for a friend of his once.’

Bertha Cool said, ‘Well, don’t get me wrong, dearie. I’m not going to serve your summons. I don’t go wandering around the highways and byways with papers in my hand. I hire people to do my leg work. Donald Lam is one of my legs.’

The phone rang. She frowned and said, ‘I wish somebody’d invent a muzzle for the telephone so the damn thing wouldn’t always ring in the middle of a sentence. Hello — hello, what is it? Yes, what do you want, Elsie?... All right, I’ll put her on.’

She pushed the telephone over to the corner of the desk, and said, ‘It’s a call for you, Alma. A woman’s on the line. Says it’s an emergency.’

Alma Hunter walked swiftly around the desk, picked up the telephone, put the receiver to her ear, gulped once, and said, ‘Hello.’

The receiver rattled into noise. I saw Alma Hunter’s face twist in a spasm of expression. She said, ‘For God’s sake,’ and listened some more, then asked, ‘Where are you now?... Yes... And you’re going home from there... Well, I’ll meet you there. I’ll come right away, just as quick as r can... Yes, she’s assigning a detective to work on the case — no — no, not herself... No, she doesn’t go out by herself. She’s — she’s hardly—’

Bertha Cool said, ‘Don’t be bashful. Tell her I’m fat.’

‘She’s — well, she’s fat,’ Alma Hunter said. ‘No, not that. Fat. F-a-t... Yes, that’s right... No, he’s a young man. All right, I’ll bring him with me. How soon? All right — hold the phone a minute.’

She looked up from the telephone and asked me, ‘Can you go with me right away? That is, can Mrs. Cool let you start right now?’

It was Bertha Cool who answered. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you can do anything you want to with him, dearie. Put him on a collar and lead him around with a leash, for all I care. You’ve rented him. He’s yours.’

‘Yes, I’ll bring him,’ Alma Hunter said into the telephone, and hung up. She looked at Mrs. Cool. Her voice had just the suspicion of a quaver.

‘That was Sandra,’ she announced. ‘She met her brother at the train, and someone ran into her automobile. Her brother was thrown through the windshield. She’s at the emergency hospital. She says her brother knows all about the girl Morgan has been going with, but for some reason he doesn’t want to tell. She says we’ll have to put pressure on him.’

Bertha Cool said, ‘Go ahead. Donald will know how to bring pressure to bear. He’ll figure it out. Handle it any way you want. Only remember, if we find him tomorrow, it costs you a hundred and fifty bucks just the same.’

‘I understand,’ Miss Hunter said, ‘and I’ll pay you now, if you please.’

‘I please,’ Bertha Cool said calmly.

Alma Hunter opened her purse, took out bills, and started counting them. While she was doing that, I glanced through the allegations of the divorce complaint. After all, those things are largely a matter of form, the allegation of the residence, of the marriage, the statistical statement necessary for the state bureau, the setting up of the cause of action, and the allegations on which alimony is predicted.

I skimmed through the unessential parts to concentrate on the paragraph dealing with the cause for divorce. It was cruelty. Her husband had hit and slapped her, had on one occasion pushed her out of an automobile when she was a little slow in getting to the sidewalk, had called her ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ in the presence of witnesses, all of which had caused her great and grievous mental suffering and physical anguish.

I looked up, to find Bertha Cool staring at me with gray eyes in which the pupils had contracted until they were black pinpoints. The currency lay uncounted on the blotter in front of her.

‘Aren’t you going to count it?’ Alma Hunter asked.

‘No,’ Mrs. Cool said. She scooped the money into a drawer, picked up the telephone, and said to Elsie Brand, ‘When Alma Hunter goes out, give her a receipt made to Sandra Birks for one hundred and fifty dollars.’

She hung up the telephone and said to Alma Hunter, ‘That’s all.’

Alma Hunter got up and looked at me. I left the office with her. Elsie Brand had a receipt ready. She tore it from the receipt book, handed it to Alma Hunter, and turned back to her typewriter.

Alma Hunter looked across at me as we gained the corridor and started down toward the elevator. ‘I want to talk with you,’ she said.

I nodded.

‘And please understand me. I know how you’re feeling. After what Mrs Cool said about having rented you, you feel like a gigolo or a poodle dog or something.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Sandra told me the doctor would be patching her brother up for almost an hour, and not to come until he was finished.’

‘And you decided to kill that hour talking to me?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

The light over the elevator shaft glowed red. ‘Is it too early for lunch?’ she asked.

I thought of my twenty-five-cent breakfast and followed her into the elevator.

‘No,’ I said.