A Fair: Cut Thin to Win

I opened the door, handed her the dress that was just inside.

She spread out the dress, showed me where a small segment had been torn from the cloth. “That piece was ripped out when the car hit me,” she said. “Police tell me some fibers from that dress are bound to be clinging to some part of the undercarriage of a car with a dented fender. They’ll find it.”

The cloth in the dress was the same as the piece Dawson had shown me.

I said, “That may be true, but if they do uncover the driver of the car, it may be that he or she just doesn’t have a dime, and no insurance—”

“Phooey,” she said, “that was one of those high-class cars — the kind that go like a rocket, and I know this woman had insurance because you’re here. You’re representing the insurance company.”

I shook my head.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll make you a proposition — a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. If your man wants to give me ten thousand dollars in cold hard cash right now — right this minute — I’ll assign my claim.”

“Then what would you do?” I asked.

“What would you want me to do?”

I said, “it might be that this man would prefer to make a settlement out of court that no one knew anything about. In that case, he wouldn’t want to have the police working too hard on the case.”

“I’ll get out,” she said. “I’ll be hard to find. I’ll fix it so the police can’t trace me; but it has to be ten thousand dollars in cash, and I have to have it within the next twelve hours.”

I smiled and shook my head. “That’s impossible,” I said. “It might take me that long to even locate the man I have in mind and then it might turn out that he isn’t interested in a deal of this sort. All I know is that occasionally he’s made deals like this, and some of them have paid off. Sometimes he collects ten for one; sometimes he gets stuck for the amount of his initial investment.”

“Well, if he’s up on his toes, he isn’t going to get stuck for anything on this one,” she said. “They should be able to locate the car. The police really should have done so long ago, and once they locate it they can get a big payoff.

“I wasn’t born yesterday. This kind of a deal isn’t like a deal where somebody runs into you and stops the car and gives you hospital treatment and every aid. This is a case where a person ran into me, knocked me down, then speeded off and left me lying there. That’s a crime. The woman who was driving that car could go to prison. Once you find her, she’d pay off... and you’re representing her. I know that just as well as I’m sitting here. I should make my figure fifty thousand dollars.”

I laughed and said, “Go ahead, make it fifty thousand dollars if you want to, and I’ll walk right out that door and you’ll never see me again — unless you happen to want to subscribe to these magazines, and then the subscription department will take over.”

“All right,” she said. “I happen to want the money. I’m taking a chance. Ten thousand dollars in cash within twenty-four hours.

“And I’ll live up to my bargain. I’ll sign any kind of papers you want and I’ll be hard to find as far as the police are concerned. I’ll let that young woman get off scot free.”

I shook my head and said, “We couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“That would be conspiring to compound a felony,” I said.

“Well, suppose I just didn’t say anything about it?”

“That,” I said, “would be perfectly legal, just so we didn’t have any understanding along those lines.”

She smiled at me, a wise, knowing smile. Then she looked at her watch and said, “Well, young man, if you’re going to get action within twenty-four hours, you’d better get started.”

“You don’t want these magazines?” I asked.

She laughed at me.

I said, “I’ll try and get in touch with my party and, in the event he’s interested, I’ll let you know.”

I gently closed the screen door, backed off the porch and walked the two blocks to where I had parked the agency jalopy. I drove another six blocks to a telephone station, rang up Elsie Brand and said, “Send a wire to Clayton Dawson as follows: ‘IS IT WORTH TEN GRAND IMMEDIATE CASH? MUST CLOSE DEAL WITHIN TWELVE HOURS.’ ”

“How do I sign it?” she asked.

“You don’t sign it,” I said, “and you don’t charge it to our account. You go down to the nearest telegraph office, pay for it in cash, and leave a fictitious address.”

I had my answer within two hours, sent from Denver, Colorado, straight wire:

I got to the Parkridge Apartments within thirty minutes after receiving the wire and rang the bell on 609.

Phyllis Eldon was a dish.

If there was any resemblance to her father, I failed to see it. She was a ravishing honey-blond beauty with big, innocent-appearing blue eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion and apparently all of the standard parts in the deluxe model.

“I’m Donald Lam,” I told her.

She said, “I’ve been expecting you. You want ten grand, don’t you?”

“I do.”

She said, “Sit down, please. What do you want — Scotch or bourbon?”

“Neither, at the moment. I’m working.”

“My, but you’re abstemious. I’m working, myself, but I’m going to have some Scotch and soda.”

“Double it,” I told her.

She went over to the bar.

It was a nice apartment, all dolled up with fancy gadgets and an air of loud luxury.

She got a couple of crystal glasses, splashed in Scotch, ice, squirted in soda, and brought it over.

“Here’s how,” she said.

“How,” I told her.

“I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m a very wicked woman?”

“Are you?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose my father told you a lot of stories about me.”

“Trying to pump me?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but I just consider myself a human being, and I’d like to have you look at me the same way.”

I looked her over and said, “I’m looking at you — and I think you’re human.”

She laughed at that and said, “I see you can twist words around to suit yourself.”

She raised her glass and looked at me over the rim. I bowed to her and we drank.

I could see she was sizing me up.

“My dad says that you’re a very high-grade detective.”

“That wasn’t the way he reacted when he first met me,” I said.

“He was disappointed. He thought you’d be a bigger man.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t accommodate him.”

“You look all right to me,” she said. “I think you’d be very competent — in a clinch.”

Her eyes met mine over the top of the liquor glass and she smiled.

Abruptly her expression changed. “Just what’s the pitch, Donald?”

I said, “Mrs. Harvey W. Chester was injured six days ago in a hit-and-run accident. She was struck down in a pedestrian crossing. She has no idea of who hit her except it was a car driven by a girl.”

“Go on,” she said.

I said, “I asked her about the extent of her injuries and about a settlement.”

“Donald, could you settle a case like that without compounding a felony?”

I brushed the question aside and said, “I told her that I knew a person who liked to buy up claims such as hers; that sometimes he bought them up and was able to find the culprit and settle for a very large sum and make a handsome profit; and sometimes he couldn’t find the persons responsible and, as a result, had to let the whole thing drop. And, of course, in cases of that sort, he lost out.”