Traps Need Fresh Bait

Chapter 14

“What did you do with the money, Daphne?” I asked when Sellers had taken Katherine Elliott to headquarters. “It was in my purse. She took it.”

“No, no — not the three hundred — the forty thousand.”

She said, “When I was getting ready to leave the apartment, I didn’t want to leave it there, and I didn’t know what to do, so I took it down to the station, put it in one of the lockers, took the key to the locker, put it in an envelope and mailed it to you at your office, Special Delivery. It should be there by this time.”

“We’ll just keep that as an ace in the hole,” I said. “Come on. We’re going to the office.”

“All three of us,” Bertha said.

Barney Adams was sitting in Bertha Cool’s private office when we got there. He looked from Bertha Cool to me. He slowly shook his head.

“A friend at headquarters has just tipped me off,” he said. “How the hell you did it is more than I know.”

“But we did it,” Bertha said.

“You did it,” Adams admitted.

“What’s all this hooey about your Continental Divide Insurance and Indemnity?” Bertha asked.

“I’m sorry,” Adams said. “Actually, I represent the League of Civic Supervision.

“We had a tip that there was some crooked work going on in bidding and that Katherine Elliott was the go-between. While we were trying to investigate, we saw this ad in the paper and decided to start our investigation there.

“I felt certain that any good private detective would see an opportunity to be selected as the patsy and would, apparently, fall for the three hundred-dollar bait in order to find out what it was all about.

“I had cultivated Katherine Elliott by letting her think that I was a fly-by-night broker who wanted to rent some of her offices, and I’d established a pretty good contact there. We became friendly.

“Through her I found out that Donald Lam had appeared and had been turned down. Naturally I was somewhat bitter. I thought that Donald should have done better than that. I thought he would either have had someone who was less sophisticated play the patsy or that he would have been able to appear as more of a rural character.”

“Donald would have done all right,” Bertha said, “if it hadn’t been for this Daphne Creston showing up. She was made to order for what they wanted.”

“Yes,” Adams said, “that’s where I jumped at a wrong conclusion. I decided that Donald had appeared too sophisticated for the job and had been turned down. I was trying to find out the real identity of Rodney Harper. It never occurred to me he was connected with a big contracting firm or that Finchley was letting a competitor have an inside track on the bids. We did know that Lathrop, Lucas and Manly had been getting more than their fair share of contracts, that their bids had been just a few dollars under the lowest bidder; and we thought there might be something wrong, but we couldn’t put our finger on it.”

“Well, you’ve got your finger on it now,” Bertha told him.

“I’ll say,” Adams admitted.

“Next time,” I told him, “you’d do a lot better not to mix into the case yourself. I laid a trap for Katherine Elliott, and who should walk into it but you.”

“You mean that lunch engagement?”

“I mean that lunch engagement,” I said.

“It wasn’t lunch. I just met her for cocktails, and then I looked around and found that just by chance your secretary was having a pre-lunch cocktail in the bar. She hadn’t seen me yet, and I didn’t want her to see me, so I told Katherine I’d get in touch with her later on, to wait two or three minutes, pay the check and go back to her office.

“Then I ducked into the men’s room and waited there for nearly half an hour before I came out. When I came out your secretary had finished her cocktail and was gone.”

I said, “I was laying a trap for Katherine Elliott. I wanted her to lead me to someone. She put through a telephone call and evidently spilled what she had to say over the telephone, which was to the effect that I wasn’t a prospective patsy at all but was getting very, very close to things they wanted to keep under cover. And then you had to come blundering along and walk into the trap.”

“I really owe you an apology for that,” Adams admitted.

“Apology, hell!” Bertha said. “We don’t want you to owe us an apology. Get out your checkbook!”

Adams heaved a sigh. “You are,” he said, “living up to your reputations — both of you.” But he opened his brief case and took out his checkbook.