“Then why do you say in your letter that
I’ll
have to give you the name of the corporation?”
“To keep my hands clean,” he said. “You’ll write me a letter giving me the name of the corporation. I’ll simply act as your attorney, following your instructions. Understand, Mr. Lam, I’m going to keep in the clear—at all times.”
“When do you give me the name of the corporation?”
“When you have paid me one thousand dollars.”
“Your letter says fifty.”
He beamed at me through his glasses. “It does, doesn’t it? Makes it sound so much better, too. Your receipt will he for fifty, young man. Your payment will be one thousand bucks.”
“And after that?”
“After that,” he said, “you’ll pay me ten per cent of the take.”
“How will you be protected on that?”
“Never fear.” He chuckled. “I’ll be protected.”
The secretary came in with the letter. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose with the tip of his forefinger, and his glittering black eyes read the letter carefully. He took a fountain pen, signed the letter, and handed it to the secretary. “Give it to Mr. Lam,” he said. “Do you have the fee available, Mr. Lam?”
“Not right at the present moment—not the amount you mentioned.”
“When will you have it?”
“Probably within a day or two.”
“Come in any time. I’ll be glad to see you.”
He got up and wrapped long, cold fingers around my hand. “I thought,” he said, “you were more familiar with the routine procedure in such cases. You seemed to be when you came to the office.”
“I was,” I told him, “but I always hate to tell a lawyer the law. I’d rather have
him
tell
me
the law.”
He nodded and grinned. “A very smart young man, Mr. Lam. Now, Miss Sykes, if you’ll bring in that file in the Case of Helman versus Helman, I’ll dictate an answer and cross-complaint. When Mr. Lam comes in to pay his fee, I’ll see him personally, and give him a receipt. Good morning, Mr. Lam.”
“Good-by,” I said, and walked out. The secretary waited until I had gone through the door before going after the file of Helman versus Helman.
I went down to the agency office. Bertha Cool was in. Elsie Brand was at her secretarial desk, hammering away at the typewriter.
“Anybody in with the boss?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I walked across to the door that was marked
Private
and pushed it open.
Bertha Cool shoved an account book hurriedly into the cash drawer of the desk, slammed the drawer shut, and locked it. “Where did you go?” she asked.
“I tailed along for a while, saw her into a movie, and came back to look for you.”
“A movie?”
I nodded.
Bertha Cool’s little glittering eyes surveyed me thoughtfully. “How’s the job?” she asked.
“Still going.”
“You’ve managed to keep her from saying anything?”
I nodded, and she asked, “How did you do it?”
“Just kidding her along,” I said. “I think she likes to have me around.”
Bertha Cool sighed. “Donald, you have the damnedest way with women. What do you do to make them fall for you?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She looked me over again and said, “It may be at that. All the competition is trying to appear big and masculine, and you sit back as though you weren’t interested. Sometimes I think you bring out the mother complex in us.”
I said, “Nix on that us stuff. This is business.”
She gave a throaty chuckle, and said, “Whenever you try to get hard with me, lover, I know that you’re after money.”
“And whenever you start handing me the soft soap, I know you’re trying to kid me out of it.”
“How much do you want?”
“Plenty.”
“I haven’t got it.”
“You’d better have it, then.”
“Donald, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you fifty times that you can’t just come in here and hold me up for a lot of expense money. You’re careless, Donald. You’re extravagant. Mind you, I don’t think you pad the swindle sheet, but you just don’t have any perspective in money matters. All you can see is what you want to accomplish.”
I said, casually, “It’s a nice piece of business. I’d hate to see you lose it.”
“She knows you’re a detective now?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t lose it, then.”
“No?” I asked.
“Not if you play your part.”
“I can’t play my part unless I have a roll.”
“Good heavens, listen to the man. What do you think I his agency is, made of money?”
I said, “Officers were out last night—early this morning.”
“Officers?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was sleeping through most of it, but it seems that Robert Tindle—that’s the stepson—had a man working with him by the name of Ringold—or did you read the paper?”
“Ringold? Jed Ringold?” she asked, her voice seeming to jump down my throat.
“That’s the one.”
She kept looking at me for a long time, then she said, “Donald, you’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Falling for a woman. Listen, lover, some day that’s going to get you in an awful jam. You’re young and innocent and susceptible. Women are shrewd and designing. You can’t trust them. I don’t mean all women, but I mean the kind of women who try to use you.”
I said, “No one’s trying to use me.”
She said, “I should have known better. I thought it was too damned improbable at the time.”
“What was?”
“That a girl like Alta Ashbury with a lot of money, swell looks, and a lot of men chasing after her would fall for you. It’s the other way around. You’ve fallen for her, and she’s using you as a cover-up. Went to a movie! Movie, my eye! At eleven o’clock at night.”
I didn’t say anything.
She picked up the newspaper and checked through it before she found the address. “Murdered within a couple of blocks of the place where she parked her car—you tailing along behind—officers out at the house at three o’clock in the morning. She knows you’re a detective—and we still have the job.”
Bertha Cool threw back her head and laughed—hard, mirthless laughter.
I said, “I’m going to need three hundred dollars.”
“Well, you can’t have it.”
I shrugged my shoulders, got up, and started for the door.
“Donald, wait.”
I stood at the door looking at her.
“Don’t you understand, Donald? Bertha doesn’t want in be harsh with you, but—”
“Do you,” I asked, “want me to tell you
all
about it?” She looked at me as though her ears hadn’t been working right, and said, “Of course.”
I said, “Better think it over for twenty-four hours, and then let me know.”
All of a sudden her face twitched. She opened her purse, look a key from it, unlocked the cash drawer, opened an inner compartment with another key, took out six fifty-dollar bills, and gave them to me. “Remember, Donald,” she said, “this is expense money. Don’t squander it.”
I didn’t bother to answer her but walked across the office, folding the fifty-dollar bills. Elsie Brand looked up from the typewriter, saw the roll of fifties, and pursed her lips into a silent whistle, but her fingers didn’t quit hammering away at the keyboard.
Going out to Ashbury’s place in a taxicab, I read the morning newspaper. Ringold had been identified as an ex-convict, a former gambler, and, at the time of his death, had been employed by “an influential corporation.” The officials of the corporation had expressed surprise when they had been told of the man’s record. Although his employment had been in a minor capacity, the corporation had used great care in the selection of its employees, and it was assumed that Ringold’s references had been forged. The officials of the corporation were making a checkup.
Police were completely mystified as to the motive for the laying, and the manner in which the murder had been consummated. Approximately fifteen minutes before the killing, a young man with quiet manners and agreeable personality had asked for a room where he could spend a lew hours of undisturbed slumber. Walter Markham, the night clerk at the hotel, was emphatic in his statements that the man had made no effort to get room four-twenty-one, beyond mentioning that he preferred an odd number.
He had been assigned to room four-twenty-one, had gone up, hung a “Please Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and apparently had immediately proceeded to pry off the molding strip which ran along the edge of the door that communicated with room four-nineteen—the room occupied by Ringold. With the molding off, the man had been able to twist the bolt on one side, and, by use of a chisel, pry back the bolt on the other. The communicating door opened into an alcove formed by one wall of room four-nineteen and the door of the bathroom which went with room four-nineteen. It was assumed that Ringold, hearing some noise at the door, had become suspicious and decided to investigate. He had been shot three times. Death had been instantaneous. The murderer had made no attempt either to leave by the room he had rented or to rob his victim. Apparently, he had pocketed the gun, calmly stepped over the body, walked to the corridor, and stood in the doorway masquerading as a guest who had been aroused by the sound of the shots. No one had seen him leave the hotel.
That the crime had been deliberate and premeditated was indicated by the fact that once ensconced in four twenty-one, the man had bored a hole in the panel of the door so that he could make certain of the identity of his intended victim before opening the door.
Esther Clarde at the cigar stand had remembered that a very personable young man had followed a mysterious woman into the hotel. She described him as being about twenty-seven years of age, with clean-cut, finely chiseled features, an engaging voice, and lots of personality. He was about five feet six in height, and weighed about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.
The clerk, on the other hand, remembered him as being shifty-eyed and nervous in manner, emaciated, and looking like a dope fiend.
I paid off the taxi in front of Ashbury’s house and went in. Mrs. Ashbury was reclining on a divan in the library. The butler said she wanted to see me.
She looked at me with appealing eyes. “Mr. Lam,
please
don’t go away. I want you to be here in order to protect Robert.”
“From what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It seems to me there’s something sinister about this. I think Robert’s in danger. I’m his mother. I have a mother’s intuition. You’re a trained wrestler with muscles of steel. They say that you’ve taken the biggest and best of the Japanese jujitsu wrestlers and tossed them around as though they’d been dolls. Please keep your eye on Robert.”
I said, “You can count on me,” and went off to find Alta. I found her in the solarium. She was seated on the chaise longue. She moved over and made room for me to sit beside her. I said, “All right, tell me.”
She clamped her lips and shook her head.
“What did Ringold have on you?”
“Nothing.”
“I suppose,” I said, “the three ten-thousand-dollar checks were made for a charitable donation. Perhaps he was a collector for the Community Chest.”
I saw the dismay come into her eyes. “The
three
checks?”
I nodded.
“How did you know?”
“I’m a detective. It’s my business to find out.”
“All right,” she said with a flash of temper, “find out why I paid them, then.”
“I will,” I promised, and started to get up.
She caught my sleeve and pulled me back. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Leave me.”
“Come down to earth, then.”
She drew up her feet and hugged her knees, her heels resting on the edge of the cushion. “Donald,” she said, “tell me what you’ve been doing, how you found out about well, you know.”
I shook my head. “You don’t want to know anything about me.”
“Why?”
“It wouldn’t be healthy.”
“Then why do you want to know about me?”
“So I can help you.”
“You’ve done enough already.”
“I haven’t even started yet.”
“Donald, there’s nothing you can do.”
“What did Ringold have on you?”
“Nothing, I tell you.”
I kept my eyes on her. She fidgeted uneasily. After a while, I said, “Somehow you never impressed me as being the sort who would lie. Somehow I gathered the impression that you hated liars.”
“I do,” she said.
I kept quiet.
“It’s none of your business,” she went on after a while.
I said, “Some day the cops are going to ask me questions. If I know what not to tell them, I won’t give anything away, but if I don’t know what not to tell them, I may say the wrong thing. Then they’ll start in on you.”
She sat silent for several seconds, then she said, “I got in an awful scrape.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It probably isn’t what you think it is.”
“I’m not even thinking.”
She said, “I took a cruise last summer down to the South Seas. There was a man on the boat. I liked him very much, and— Well, you know how it is.”
I said, “Lots of young women have taken cruises to the South Seas, found lots of men whom they liked very much, and still didn’t pay thirty thousand dollars after they got home.”
“This man was married.”
“What did his wife say?”
“I didn’t ever know her. He wrote me. His letters were —they were love letters.”
I said, “I don’t know how much time we have. The more you waste, the less we have left.”
“I wasn’t really in love with him. It was a cruise flirtation. The moonlight got me, I guess.”
“Your first one?”
“Of course not. I’ve taken cruises. That’s why girls sail on cruises. Sometimes you meet a man whom you really love— That is, I suppose you do. Girls have. They’ve married and lived happily ever after.”
“But you haven’t?”
“No.”
“But you played around?”
“Well, you try to show yourself a good time. You can tell after the first two or three days if there’s anyone on hoard for whom you’re apt to care a lot. Usually you find someone who’s attractive enough for a flirtation. But you’re not flirting with
him.
You’re flirting with romance.”