Erle Gardner: Beware the Curves

The fact remained I was mad.

I thought of how Bertha had described me as a brainy little bastard. I thought of how our phony client with the poetic features, the dreamy eyes and the long, sensitive fingers, was going to look at me when someone sent him a clipping from the Citrus Grove paper.

To hell with him! I’d have the thing all finished before the paper came out. He’d wanted information. I’d give it to him.

I drove back to the city and telephoned Elsie Brand, my private secretary.

“Hi, Elsie. Bertha in?”

“Yes.”

“Restless?”

“Somewhat.”

“Belligerent?”

“No.”

“Did you see a client we had yesterday, a man by the name of Ansel?”

“No.”

“He called yesterday afternoon about three o’clock. He’s to be back at the same time today. Now get this: At exactly a quarter to three I’ll be over at the bar across the street. The bartender knows me. Give me a ring there the minute this fellow comes in. Don’t tell Bertha that you’ve been in touch with me or that you know anything at all about me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I hung up and went to the public library.

There is a master index published, giving the names of all authors who have appeared during each year in any of the major periodicals published in the United States.

Thirty minutes after I arrived at the library I knew that our client John Dittmar Ansel had never had anything published in any of the first-string magazines in the United States, either under the name of John Ansel or the name of John Dittmar. I also knew that he had never published any book either of fiction or nonfiction.

I had a friend in the morgue of one of the Los Angeles papers. I went there and got the envelope containing clippings dealing with the murder of Karl Carver Endicott. The Los Angeles papers had given it a pretty good play, setting forth the facts as well as they were known, which wasn’t too well.

I got to the bar in time to watch a couple of innings in a baseball game before Elsie’s call came through letting me know that Ansel was at the office and that Bertha had been tearing her hair trying to locate me. I waited until one more batter had fanned out.

As I walked through the office door, the switchboard operator said, “Bertha’s frantically trying to get you.”

I looked at my watch, raised my eyebrows and said, “I’ll go on in.”

I walked across the reception office and opened the door of Bertha’s private office before the girl at the switchboard had had time to plug in the phone and ring.

Ansel was sitting very erect in the chair, his long legs crossed at the knees. There was a look of reproachful martyrdom on his face.

Bertha Cool batted her eyes at me. Her face was about two shades darker than usual.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

I nodded toward Ansel and said, “Working on our client’s case. Why?”

“I couldn’t locate you.”

“I was out.”

“So it seems. You were to have a report for Mr. Ansel.”

“I have it.”

Ansel raised his dark eyebrows. “Indeed,” he murmured.

I went over and shook hands with him. I slid one hip over on the corner of Bertha’s desk and said, “I have everything you wanted.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “You mean you’ve got him located?”

“I know his name,” I said. “The man you want is Karl Carver Endicott. He lives at Citrus Grove. He married Elizabeth Flanders six years ago.”

I quit talking.

He sat forward on the edge of the chair waiting for me to go on.

I lit a cigarette.

The seconds of silence became significant. Bertha started to say something, then realized the silence on my part was deliberate and clamped her lips shut in a thin, straight line. Ansel shifted his position, looked up at me, looked down at the carpet, looked up at me again.

I kept on smoking.

“Well?” Ansel asked, finally.

“That’s it,” I said, acting surprised. “That’s the information you wanted. The name of the man is Karl Carver Endicott. The residence address was Citrus Grove, not right in the city, but outside of the city at an orange grove ranch called the Whippoorwill.”

“The Whippoorwill,” Ansel repeated vaguely.

I smiled. “That’s right. The Whippoorwill.”

I went on smoking. Ansel sat in the chair fidgeting. “Well,” I said to Bertha, “I’ll be on my way. I’m doing some work on that Russett case, and—”

“But how about me?” Ansel asked.

I turned to look at him in surprise.

“What about your”

“About my case.”

“It’s finished. It’s solved. You wanted the name of good old Karl that you met in Paris. Wanted to know who he was. I got the name for you.”

“Well, where is he now?” he asked.

“Good heavens!” I said, “that wasn’t what you wanted us to find out. I don’t know where he is now.”

He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “I’d like very much to find out.”

“That may be quite a job,” I said.

“Good heavens! Why?” Bertha blurted. “A man like that wouldn’t have moved away without leaving a forwarding address.”

“It depends on where he went,” I told her significantly.

Bertha caught the look in my eyes and became silent.

“Well, of course, I’d like to know,” Ansel said. “I could... I hadn’t anticipated that you’d get just the name.”

“That was all you asked for.”

“Perhaps I didn’t make my wants clearly understood,” he said.

“Perhaps you didn’t.”

“Well,” Bertha snapped impatiently. “Why the hell do you want to fool around with private detectives after you have the man’s name and address? Go into a telephone booth. Give him a ring. Drop him a letter. Send him a telegram. Write him a card.”

“That’s right, Ansel,” I said. “You wanted to get in touch with good old Karl whom you met in Paris. He had an idea for a story, remember?”

He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Surely you must have found out something about him while you were getting his name.”

“Oh, of course,” I told him, “but that was just incidental and on the side. What we were supposed to find out was the man’s name. You wanted his name. We gave you his name.”

“I repeat,” Ansel said, “perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly.”

“You can say that again,” I told him. “In case you’re interested in the murder, you expressed yourself very, very incompletely.”

“I’m not interested in the murder,” he said. “I merely wanted...” His voice suddenly trailed away into dismayed silence.

I grinned at him. “How did you know there’d been a murder, Ansel?”

He tried to answer that question and couldn’t. His mouth went through the motions of making sound but gave it up as a bad job.

I could hear Bertha Cool’s chair creak as she suddenly came to life behind the desk and leaned forward, scenting financial gain the way a bird dog scents a covey of quail.

“In case you are interested in learning about the murder, Ansel,” I told him, “you made several very important mistakes. One of them is that you neglected to tell me the principal suspect was described as a tall, rather slender man with dark hair, dark eyes, and long artistic fingers. A taxi driver is supposed to be able to identify that man.

“And you made the mistake of not telling me what I was up against so I could have covered my back trail. As it was, I went out in the open without making any attempt to cover up and by this time the authorities know that the firm of Cool and Lam is interested in the Karl Endicott case. Since the police have nasty, skeptical minds, they wouldn’t believe that my interest in the case was purely for the purpose of locating quote good old Karl unquote who gave you an idea for quote a story unquote while you were in Paris. They would naturally think that we were interested in some angle of the murder, and, within a very short time, the police are going to want to know why we are interested.