A Fair: Cut Thin to Win

“Sure, a wheelchair was there,” Sellers said. “She was met by private parties in a private automobile and she vanished into thin air.

“Before she left Los Angeles, she did a little talking, however, and she showed a friend a whole wad of hundred-dollar bills. She paid her rent with a hundred-dollar bill. So help me, she even used a hundred-dollar bill to pay off the ambulance.”

“What happened to her baggage?”

“Not a damned piece of baggage, except a little handbag.”

“What’s left in the house?”

“Nothing, somebody came and cleaned it out. Don’t be so damned innocent. I’m just letting you know what we have on you.”

“Why does it have to be me?”

“Because you parked your car a couple of blocks away from the house and made a pass of selling magazine subscriptions.

“One woman saw you park your car, get out with the magazines, and then you went to the door and solicited her. She didn’t think you looked like a magazine salesman, didn’t think your heart was in it, and thought you were casing the joint. So she took the license number of your automobile and phoned it in, asking us to check with the Better Business Bureau.

“Well, those calls are a dime a dozen, but we made the check. Then, when we went out to interview Mrs. Chester and found she’d been masterminded out of existence. I started checking back on things and Communications happened to remember that call.

“I went out and made a door-to-door canvass, personally. I found where you pulled the magazine racket on two other houses and then went to the Chester bungalow in back.

“That was your introduction, all right, the magazine racket. From then on, you played it by ear and you evidently made a pretty damned good job of selling.

“Now then, I’m putting it on the line. I’m not going to penalize Bertha on this thing, because we don’t have so much trouble with Bertha. But every damned time you get hold of a case, you start cutting corners, and this time I’m going to have your license.”

Sellers lurched to his feet. “Think it over,” he said. “Give us the name of your client and let us clean up that hit-and-run case or lose your license.”

“And if I give you the name of the client?”

“You’ve still got a rap for compounding a felony; but, if you’ll clip your wings a little bit and not try to fly quite so high, you can probably square that with the D.A.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Okay, Pint Size, you’re a smart little operator and you’re like all these brainy little bastards that get smart. You just get too damned smart.

“We’ve got a hit-and-run charge and we want to clean it up, and we’ve got a few clues pointing in the right direction. We may be able to clean it up without any help from you, but that’s no skin off your nose. Either you come through with the full story on this, or you lose your license.”

“How long have I got?” I asked

“Just long enough to make up your mind,” Sellers said. “Not more than twenty-four hours.”

Sellers rolled the cigar around from one side of his mouth to the other, glowered at me, said, “You’ve given me a helping hand once or twice after you’ve made me walk over hot coals for a mile or two, and you’ve always been fair about giving me the publicity. That much I appreciate.

“But get this straight.” And Sellers reached out and grabbed my necktie and pulled me close to him. “Get this straight, you little bastard, I’m a cop! I’m the law! I’m enforcing the law. I respect the law, and I don’t like guys that cut corners with the law! And in case you don’t know it, that means Donald Lam!”

Sellers pushed me backward into the chair, let go of my necktie and stomped out.

Elsie Brand looked at me, on the verge of tears. “Did you do it, Donald?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell the name of your client?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll have to tell him, Donald.”

“Does Bertha know anything about this?”

“I don’t think so. Sellers came stomping right in here.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’m out for the day, Elsie. If anybody wants me, you don’t know where I am and,” I told her with a smile, “that’s going to be the understatement of the week.”

“Donald, will you please be careful?”

“It’s too late to be careful now,” I told her. “Better send to the drugstore, order a package of tranquilizers and deliver them to Bertha.”

I was fortunate in catching a through jet plane to Denver.

The hostess probably thought I was the most surly passenger the line had ever carried. They tried to make things nice for me but ‘I sat there trying to fit pieces of the puzzle together.

We glided over the orange groves of California, gathering altitude; rocketed across the desert; crossed the chain of lakes formed by the Colorado River, and on into the Rocky Mountains.

The scenery was breathtaking, stupendously beautiful, but I sat frowning contemplation and I still couldn’t put the puzzle together.

I arrived in Denver, went to a phone booth and looked up the Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company.

There was no listing.

I called Information and asked for a number. There was no number.

I looked at the richly embossed card Clayton Dawson had given me and called the telephone number which was given on the card as the number of the executive offices.

A well-modulated feminine voice answered the telephone simply repeating the number I had called.

I said, “Are these the offices of the Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company?”

“Yes, they are,” she said.

“I would like to talk with Clayton Dawson, assistant to the president.”

“Just a moment,” she said.

There was silence for a moment; then the voice again, crisply efficient, “No, he’s not in at the moment. May I take a message, please?”

“When do you expect him in?”

“I’m not able to give out that information. May I ask who’s calling?”

“Just an old friend of his,” I said. “Purely a social matter. Forget it,” and hung up before she could ask more questions.

I called a cab and gave the driver the address on the card.

The office building was there all right; the right floor was there; the room which had been given on the card as presidential headquarters was there but it said HELEN LOOMIS, Public Stenographer; down below appeared, ANSWERING SERVICE, in parentheses; and over on the right was a string of names on the ground glass, mostly mining companies. The name of Dawson Re-Debenture Discount Security Company didn’t appear there.

I walked in.

It was a two-room affair, a reception room and an inner office marked Private, which could probably be used by any one of the subtenants if he had to have a place for a private conference.

The woman who sat at the reception desk, with an electric typewriter over on the side, was an individual who had pounded out a lot of words in her lifetime. She had washed-out, weary eyes, but she had taken a lot of care of her personal appearance and could have been anywhere from fifty to sixty-five. Her manner was crisply capable.

She was typical of hundreds of thousands of women who had started out as stenographers, became secretaries, married and left the job; then, after a while, these women were widowed and had to go back to work, only to find that the good jobs were no longer available for those who were older and a little “rusty” with their shorthand. But this woman had probably finally secured work by sheer merit and determination, worked herself up, then reached an age where someone decided she was no longer sufficiently decorative and had sent her off to the secretarial junk pile.