Up for Grabs

Chapter 9

It was hard to get Bertha to betray surprise but when I walked announced into her office, she showed surprise, consternation and anger.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked

“I flubbed the job,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I ranked it.”

“Don’t use that damned underworld slang with me” she said. “Rank is a word safe-crackers use when they’ve used too much nitro and blown the safe all to hell.”

“That’s the point” I said, “I’ve used too much nitro. I’ve blown things all to hell.”

“What happened?”

I said “Breckinridge wanted to settle. I talked him out of it. I told him I thought Bruno was a phony. Now the price has gone up, due to circumstances I couldn’t anticipate.”

“And Breckinridge blames you.”

“Breckinridge is disappointed.”

“Damn it, Donald” she said “that’s the worst of you. You’re a brainy little cuss but you’re too damned conceited. You have squeezed through many situations by sheer luck and mental agility that you think the world is your oyster.”

“The world isn’t my oyster,” I said. “The world is pretty grim at the moment. If Breckinridge calls up and asks where I am, you don’t know.”

“I can’t tell him that,” Bertha said. “I—”

“The hell you can’t,” I told her. “If you don’t know, that’s what you’ll have to tell him.”

“What are you doing in the office?” she asked.

“I came to get our camera,” I said. “I want to take some photographs of the scene of an accident.”

“You mean you’re going all the way back to Texas? Why, the scene of that accident is nothing. As I understand it, it was just a plain street, that’s all there is to it and the accident is long gone and over with.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to photograph the accident,” I said, “I said I wanted to photograph the scene of the accident.”

I walked out; went to my office and met Elsie Brand’s troubled gaze.

“How was she, Donald?”

“She’s a little flabbergasted at the moment. She’ll snap out of it pretty quick and get on the warpath. I’m on my way, wish me luck.”

Elsie Brand smiled with her lips and her eyes. “Luck, Donald,” she said tenderly.

I grabbed a camera and some films, went out and drove to the Bulwin Apartments and rang the bell on 283.

A remarkably good-looking, cool-eyed young woman about twenty-eight or twenty-nine opened the door and surveyed me with frank interest.

“Well, hello!” she said. “We don’t ordinarily get salesmen of your type. Don’t tell me you’re working your way through college getting subscriptions to magazines?”

Her smile was challenging.

“What sort do you usually get?” I asked, matching her informality of banter.

“Older men who have lost the security of jobs and have to take up door-to-door peddling on a commission basis. I feel sorry for them but if I bought all the stuff they have to peddle I’d be broke flatter than I am now, and that’s plenty flat.”

“May I come in?” I asked.

“You want to?”

“Yes.”

“Come on.”

She opened the door invitingly.

It was a much larger apartment than I had anticipated. There was a comfortable well-furnished sitting room, two doors at each side, both opening into bedrooms; a kitchen in the back. Apparently each bedroom had a bath.

“Want to sit down before you start your sales pitch?” she asked.

“Do I have to start a sales pitch?”

Her eyes were cool and smiling. “All men have a sales pitch,” she said.

“I’m not selling,” I told her. “I’m trying to get information.”

“About what?”

“About a person, a Melita Doon, a nurse who is supposed to be living here. Is she home?”

“I’m Miss Doon,” she said. “I’ll answer any questions you have. What are you looking for?”

I said, “The description I have indicates that Miss Doon is entirely different. I would gather that you are Josephine Edgar, her roommate.”

She laughed and said, “Well, it was a good attempt. I was trying to protect Melita as much as possible. I thought if I could answers the questions it would save her a lot of bother.

“What’s it all about?”

“Just a routine check,” I said.

“How come?”

“I want to find out something about her, her background, credit rating.”

“What’s your name?”

“I have a number,” I said. “835.”

Her eyes suddenly became hard and cautious. “What governmental department are you in?” she asked.

I said, “Circumstances make it inexpedient for me to identify myself, other than the fact that I am 835.”

“Are you, or are you not, in a governmental service? Now, Buster, I’m asking that question to put you right on the spot, because I’m going to do a little investigating of my own.”

“I am not in the governmental services,” I said.

“You’re an investigator?”

“Yes.”

“A private detective?”

“Yes.”

She extended her hand. “Give.”

“What?”

“Your credentials.”

I shook my head and said, “I’ll just be known as 835, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” she said. “You want to find out something about Melita. Your only way of finding out is to put your cards on the table and to be frank — otherwise I walk over to that telephone, put through a long-distance call to Melita Doon and tell her that private detectives are on her trail.”

“You may do that anyway,” I told her.

“I may,” she said, “but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

I took out my wallet and showed her my credentials.

“Donald Lam,” she said. “That’s a nice name. What do you want to know, Donald?”

I said, “Specifically, I’m interested in finding out about the trouble Melita had at the hospital. Was it her fault?”

“Was it her fault?” she echoed, her voice rising in a crescendo of emotion. “It was the fault of that damned Howard hussy, the hatchet-faced superintendent who has been doing nothing but making trouble for Melita ever since she came on the job.

“And now she’s gone so far as to accuse Melita of stealing X-ray photographs and she’s just about forced the kid into a nervous breakdown.”

“What about the X-rays?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t have dared to do anything like that if it hadn’t been for the walkout,” Josephine said. “The walkout triggered the whole situation. It gave that Howard woman just the opportunity she wanted.

“Of course, the walkout was partially Melita’s fault, but only partially. We all have walkouts from time to time — that is, most of us do. I’ve had one and I know other nurses who have had them.

“And I’ll tell you this, Donald Lam, we don’t have a walkout if the front office is on the job. When the patient comes to the receptionist, the receptionist should be able to segregate the legitimate ones from the deadbeats and the goldbrickers. If they d do a good job, we wouldn’t be bothered with walkouts.

“But what happens?

“Some goldbrickers with a smooth line of gab — usually a woman — peddles a hard luck story, makes promises and gets admitted. Then if it’s a surgical case she can’t be bothered too much and she pretends she’s not doing so well when actually she’s getting along all right.

“However, I’ve had walkouts get up and leave after surgery when it was actually dangerous for them to go. Well, I say I’ve had walkouts; I mean the one walkout I had. It was a surgical case and she left the day she was given bathroom privileges.”

“But what about the X-rays?” I asked.

“Nothing to it,” Josephine said. “She had the walkout, all right, but the X-rays she had nothing to do with. They were simply films that were missing from the files.

“And there again it’s always someone else’s fault. The person in charge of the X-ray department is supposed to get some sort of a record when X-ray films are taken from the files, but it just happens that in this instance the little nitwit who has charge of the X-ray department is a particular friend of this Howard woman and no one would try to hold her responsible for anything oh dear no! She’s the teacher’s pet.

“No one would ever accuse that girl of letting a doctor take out a bunch of X-rays without signing up. No one would ever accuse her of putting X-rays in the wrong envelopes after some doctor had had them out looking at them, or taking them up to a room to show them to the patient.

“So it’s Melita who gets the thing in the neck, and I’m just downright mad about it.”

“Going to do anything about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’d like to go down there and snatch that Howard woman baldheaded.”

“You don’t work in the same hospital?”

“I’m on special,” she said.

“Night or day?”

She shrugged her shoulders and said “Any time.”

“Keep you pretty busy?” I asked.

“Off and on,” she said vaguely.

“Melita has a sick mother?”

“I’ll say she does. She’s keeping her mother in a nursing home and it’s bleeding the girl white, but it’s the only thing that can be done and Melita just works her head off.

“Of course, she gets some professional courtesies from doctors, but her mother had to have an operation and. Melita had to put up money. That’s one of the reasons that this hatchet-faced superintendent tried to lower the boom on Melita. She knew Melita was up against it for money.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess that covers all I need to know. Thanks a lot.”

I got up to go.

Josephine came over to stand close to me. “Donald,” she said, “what are you really after?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who’s interested enough to ask you to make a checkup on Melita?”

“It’s just a routine checkup,” I said.

“Who’s your client?”

“Heavens,” I said, “I don’t handle the business end of the office, my partner does that. I get out on the firing line and make the investigations.”

“You could be working for that Howard woman for all you know?”

“I could be, for all you know,” I told her.

She pouted and said, “You’re not being a bit nice, Donald.”

She moved even closer. “Donald, tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what?”

“Who your client is, and why this investigation?”

I said, “You’re trying to get me to betray my solemn obligations and you’re using sex in order to get me to do it.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “I haven’t used it yet,” she said.

I said, “You’re weakening my wall of resolution, woman.”

She put her hands on my shoulders, pushed her body close to mine. “Donald, tell me, is Melita going to get into any trouble?”

“Why should she get into any trouble if she hasn’t been doing anything wrong?” I asked.

“I just don’t trust that Howard woman. I have a feeling that there’s something going on in that hospital, that the Howard woman is mixed up in something pretty deep and she s trying to use Melita as a patsy.”

“Well,” I told her, “I’m making a fair investigation.”

“Donald, will you do one thing?”

“What?”

“Will you let me know what you find out when you finished?”

“Perhaps.”

“Donald, I mean it. I’d be... very grateful... very, very grateful, Donald.”

“I’ll see,” I promised, and with that, left the apartment.

Josephine stood in the door watching me down the corridor. When I was at the elevator she blew me a kiss, then stepped back into the apartment and gently closed the door.

I telephoned the office and got Elsie Brand.

“Elsie,” I said, “call Dolores Ferrol at the Butte Valley Guy Ranch and ask her if Melita Doon had a long-distance call which came in between now and the time you talk with Dolores on the telephone.

“You can catch her at two o’clock. It’ll be right after the lunch hour and just before the people go to siesta. She has a little free time then.

“Tell Dolores who you are, and tell her that you’re calling at my request, that I’ll be seeing her shortly, and tell her to keep the inquiry confidential.”

“Okay,” Elsie said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m headed for Tehachapi right now,” I told her. “I’ll be back sometime late this afternoon.”