Up for Grabs

Chapter 11

From a telephone booth I called the Butte Valley Guest Ranch and asked to talk to Dolores Ferrol.

It took me a minute to get her on the phone. I could hear music and laughter.

“Hello, Dolores,” I said. “Donald Lam talking. What did you find out about Melita Doon?”

“Why, Donald, I talked with your secretary this afternoon and—”

“That’s all right,” I said, “I told her to call you. But, what about Melita?”

“The strangest thing happened,” she said. “Melita got a telephone call sometime before noon. I don’t know exactly when it was, but it came in while I was out on the morning ride.”

“And what happened?”

“She packed up in a hurry, said her mother was worse, that she had to leave. By the time I returned from the horseback ride, he was gone. It was that fast.”

“That’s fine,” I told her.

“Donald,” she said, “people have been asking questions about you.”

“That’s all right,” I told her. “Let them ask. I’m just checking up.”

“Don’t stay away too long,” she said, in the seductive voice of the professional.

“I won’t,” I told her and hung up.

It was nearly seven o’clock when I checked in at the office to put the camera back in the closet and see if there were any notes on my desk.

There was a light in Bertha’s office.

She evidently heard me come in and jerked the door open.

“My God,” she stormed, “trying to keep in touch with you is giving me ulcers from my Adam’s apple down. Why in hell don’t you tell me where you’re going?”

“Because I didn’t want anyone to know.”

“By anyone, I presume you mean Frank Sellers.”

“That was part of it.”

“Well, Frank Sellers knew all right. He called me up and said if you didn’t keep your nose out of that murder case he was going to throw you in the can and keep you there until the case was settled.”

“Frank is impulsive,” I said.

“Also he was mad as hell.”

“He gets mad,” I said. “It’s a weakness in an investigator.”

“Homer Breckinridge is anxious to see you,” Bertha said. “He’s been calling every half hour— Here he is now, I guess,” she interpolated, as the phone rang sharply.

She picked up the phone and instantly her voice changed to honey and syrup.

“Yes, Mr. Breckinridge, he just this minute came in the door. I was going to tell him to call you — he hasn’t been in here ten seconds... yes, I’ll put him on the phone.”

She handed me the telephone. Breckinridge said, “Hello, Donald?”

“That’s right.”

“There’s hell to pay.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I guess I outsmarted myself.”

“How come?”

“It seems that this man, Bruno, was a lot smarter than we gave him credit for being.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it seems that Alexis Melvin is in on the case.”

“Who’s he?”

“Alexis Bott Melvin is a whiplash injury specialist who is hated and feared by every insurance company in the West.”

“He’s that good?” I asked.

“He’s that bad,” Breckinridge said.

“And what has he done?”

“He’s moved in on the case.

“Now, I can’t tell whether Bruno was wise all along or whether Melvin was the one that got wise and has been giving us lots of rope so we would hang ourselves good and hard.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I can’t very well explain it to you over the telephone. I would like to talk with you tonight, but I can’t leave my house at the moment.”

“Do you want me to come out there?”

“If you could, Donald, it would be a big help.”

He hesitated a moment, then went on, “I am alone at the moment. My wife may come in while we are here. In the event she does, I think it would be best to be vague about details. There are some things about this business that she doesn’t understand.”

“I understand,” I told him.

“Thank you, Donald. You’ve shown great tact. You understand that it is necessary in this business to work with female operators just the same as it is necessary in your business, but it is always difficult to explain these matters to a woman.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said. “I’ll be out in about an hour. There’s one matter I have to take care of first. I can’t make it before that, but you don’t need to worry, you can trust my discretion.”

His voice showed relief. “Thank you, Donald. Thank you ever so much.”

I hung up. Bertha was watching me with shrewd, glittering eyes.

“What have you done to that man?”

“Why?”

“You’ve hypnotized him. He was pretty much put out earlier in the day but then he got some phone calls from an agent somewhere. It looks as though they’ve caught him with his hand in the cookie jar and he’s certainly yelling for help now. He wants to talk with you and he says it’s so confidential he can’t even tell me what it is he wants to talk with you about. He says you’ll understand but that it would take too much explanation for me to get the picture.”

I grinned at her and said, “Perhaps things will right after all.”

Bertha said, “That secretary of yours said there was a note under your blotter that you should read as soon as you came in.”

“Important?” I asked.

“She probably thinks it’s important. She thinks anything you do is important. She left word with the switchboard operator to let her know immediately if you called in.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll take a look under my blotter, see what it’s all about and then run out to see Breckinridge.”

“And then what?”

“Then I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll see how things are shaping up.”

“Did we get all the dope on that little nurse you wanted?” Bertha Cool asked.

“Not quite,” I said. “I talked with her boy friend this morning and then I talked with her roommate.”

“What did you find out?”

“She’s been accused of stealing X-ray photographs that show injuries and presumably peddling them out to persons who are malingering.”

“Don’t those X-ray photographs have key numbers on them that show where they came from?”

“Sure,” I said, “but they can get around that. They copy the part of the X-ray picture that shows the injury, then they superimpose another plate with a key number and patient’s name on it, and it would take an expert to find anything wrong.

“If someone has his suspicions aroused and is specifically looking for something of the sort, it might be possible to detect the fake, but the average insurance adjuster having an attorney dig an X-ray photograph out of the files and seeing the name of the patient and all of that, is pretty much inclined to take it for granted, and if the X-ray photograph shows a real injury, the agent will settle on that kind of a basis.”

“And you think this nurse has been pulling out photographs?”

“The hospital seems to think so,” I said. “Apparently they’d like to get rid of her but they don’t want to make an out-and-out accusation. On the other hand, the whole trouble may be due to a supervisor who doesn’t like her and is trying to get rid of her.

“That’s where you come in and what we’re going to be doing during the next hour. We’re going out to the Bulwin Apartments and you’re going to talk with the roommate, a girl named Josephine Edgar.”

“You’ve already talked with her?” Bertha asked.

“I’ve already talked with her,” I said, “but I didn’t get anyplace. She has lots of this and that and these and those and she stood close to me and moved her body a little bit, and when I accused her of using sex, said she hadn’t used sex... yet.”

Bertha sighed and said, “That’s the effect you have on all of them.”

I shook my head, “Not that much of an effect,” I said. She was too impressionable, too fast. She pulled that sex stuff too fast and it was early in the morning.”

“So what do I do?” Bertha asked.

“You,” I said, “take her to pieces and I’ll see what makes her tick.”

Bertha heaved herself up out of the squeaking chair, said, “Let me powder my nose first, and I’ll be with you.”

She waddled over to the door and down the hall.

I walked into my office, pulled up the blotter on my desk and found the note from Elsie. It was written so that no one else would know what it meant. It said:

I folded the note, put it in my pocket and waited for Bertha.