A Fair - Cut Thin to Win

This would, of course, mean there had been a complete flimflam, but those things have been encountered, particularly in automobile accident cases.

The thing that bothered me was how Frank Sellers could have been so hot on the trail as soon as the money had been paid. It meant there had been a tip-off, probably by an anonymous telephone call, and the way I sized the situation up that telephone call must have been made by Mrs. Harvey W. Chester, by Phyllis, Phyllis’ father, a jealous boy friend, or an attorney who was playing a pretty smart game.

This time when I flew to Las Vegas I didn’t make the mistake of using the agency air travel card. I dug down in my pocket and paid the fare in cash.

Once on the ground I relied on taxicabs, but I was careful to register at a hotel under my own name.

I started covering the gambling joints.

Las Vegas, Nevada, is a twenty-four-hour-a-day proposition. Night and day the air-conditioned casinos are busy with the rattle of chips, the whir of the slot machines, the voice of the barker announcing that such-and-such a machine has just hit a jackpot, the sound of the ivory ball on the roulette wheel.

Hundreds, thousands of people were going about the business of winning or losing money with grim-faced intensity. I looked the places over. I seldom saw a smile or heard laughter. Persons stood shoulder to shoulder, grim, tense, unsmiling.

Looking for a single face in this aggregation of tourist gambling devotees and curiosity seekers was almost like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

However, someone has said that good police work is ninety per cent legwork and ten per cent head work. That may or may not be true, but I didn’t have any alternative. I had to start sifting through Las Vegas.

At that, luck was with me. I went into the Blue Dome Casino, after having spent two hours going from place to place scanning the tense faces of the so-called pleasure seekers, and there she was, big as life, standing in front of a twenty-five-cent slot machine and working the handle like mad.

I moved up behind her.

The man who was playing the machine on her right finally gave up, and Mrs. Chester took over both machines, putting in quarters and jerking down the handles just as fast as she could feed coins into the machine.

I said, “I’m glad to see that you’ve made such a complete recovery, Mrs. Chester.”

She whirled around to face me, her eyes got big, her jaw dropped.

“For God’s sake,” she said.

“Having any luck?” I asked.

She showed me a bag full of quarters. “Winnings,” she said.

“Why did you blow the whistle?” I asked.

“ Me blow the whistle! Are you nuts?”

I said, “Somebody did. Right at the moment, you’re badly wanted. The cops in Los Angeles and Denver are looking for you. They haven’t tried Las Vegas yet, but they will.”

“Oh, my God,” she said.

I just stood there.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said, “before somebody spots me.”

We walked out.

“Got a car?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m holed up in a little cottage up here, a string of cottages that they rent to people who are here for the six-weeks’ residence necessary to get a divorce. The rents are higher than a frightened cat’s back, but one has complete privacy.”

“Let’s take a look,” I said.

We went to the motel-type bungalow in a taxicab. Neither of us said anything in front of the driver, but I could see she was sizing me up. She was cautious and she was scared stiff.

The little bungalow was a regular heartbreak house, drab on the outside, furnished with the bare necessities on the inside, a threadbare carpet, overstuffed chairs that looked fairly inviting but were uncomfortable once you sat down.

Six weeks of living in a place of that sort would drive a woman nuts.

Of course, the women who lived there weren’t supposed to stay in the house. They would unpack their suitcases, hang their clothes in the closets which were just beginning to get a slight smell of mildew, and then go out into the casinos and on long weekend parties.

Usually the women had boy friends who had more or less actively participated in the bust-up of the marriage. Sometime during the six-week period, these boy friends would get lonely and come flying in to Las Vegas.

If they didn’t have boy friends, it was very easy to acquire some. Usually it was the wife who had to qualify for the six-weeks’ residence and get the divorce. The husband was too busy making a living for the “family”.

We settled down in the living room, so-called, and Mrs. Chester gave me a rather vague smile. “Well,” she said, “what do you want?”

I said, “You knew I was coming to call on you before I arrived, didn’t you?”

She thought that over for several seconds, then nodded.

“You knew my name?”

“You had been described to me.”

“By whom?”

“Do you have to know that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I can tell you that.”

“That,” I said, “might be just too bad,” and then added after a moment, “for you.”

“I had no business getting mixed into this,” she said. “I had retired.”

“It’s a little late to think of that now, isn’t it?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” she said.

I remained silent.

After a while, she said, “What do you want to know?”

“Who engineered the deal?”

“The attorney.”

“Colton Essex?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your connection with him?”

“I hadn’t had any until this came up.”

“But you’d known him before?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He’d been on the other side of one of my cases.”

“What do you mean, the other side?”

“He represented the defendant.”

“An insurance company?”

“An insurance company and an owner together, yes.”

“And what happened?”

“The case was settled for a very small amount.”

“What kind of a case was it?”

“One of my usual cases,” she said. And then added after a moment, “I’m a professional tumbler. That is, I used to be before I got a little old and a little heavy, but I’m still good.

“I could smack the bumper of an automobile with my handbag, spin away from the car, fall to the ground, roll over and just about any spectator would swear the automobile had crashed into me.”

“Even if the automobile wasn’t moving?”

“I specialized in moving automobiles,” she said. “I’d get in a crosswalk. I’d park my car so that it was a little difficult to see around it and about one car out of ten would cut around my car and go through the crosswalk. I’d size up the car, and naturally I only picked the more expensive makes.”

“And then?”

“Then,” she said, “I’d have a friend standing by who’d phone for an ambulance before anyone thought to telephone for the police. The ambulance service gets there, picks me up and whisks me away. My friend sees to it that the accident is reported. My address is given. An officer usually comes to check my statement.

“If the party who hits me stops, and there’s a report of the accident, I can usually make a deal with an insurance company. If the party who hits me drives away and makes a hit-and-run out of it, we trace the party and get a whale of a settlement because he’s so vulnerable. He’s mixed up in a hit-and-run and he has to pay through the nose. I use different names each time.”

“And Colton Essex knew all about this?”

“I told you he was on the other side of one of my cases. He smelled a pretty big rat, and by the time we got done I had to take a much smaller settlement than is usually the case. He’s a good lawyer.”