Erle Gardner: Beware the Curves

“Probably,” I said. “However, you never can tell about the police. They’re pretty damn smart.”

“They sure are,” Bertha agreed. “Do you know the cabdriver’s first name?”

“An unusual name.”

“What was it?”

I pulled out a notebook. “Drude. D-r-u-d-e. Drude Nickerson,” I said.

A smile twisted the corners of Bertha’s mouth. “Someday, Donald,” she said, “you’ll admit that while you have brains when it comes to solving a case, Bertha has brains when it comes to raking in the cash.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Bertha opened the drawer in her desk and pulled out five new, unfolded, one-hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A retainer,” she said.

“For what?”

“For information that we’ve got already.”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you get the information about the murder?”

I said, “When I knew we’d been suckered into a deal we probably didn’t want, I ran through the newspapers in order to find out what we might be up against.”

“Well, you’ve got the information,” Bertha said. “Take a look at this.”

She handed me a newspaper clipping which had been cut from the obituary column of one of the papers.

I read it. “Nickerson, Drude, beloved husband of Maria Nickerson. Killed in automobile accident near Susanville, California. Private funeral, Susanville Undertaking Parlors. No flowers.”

“How nice!” I said. “What does that have to do with the five-hundred-dollar retainer?”

“We’re to find out if this dead guy is the same Nickerson who drove the cab to the Endicott house. We get five hundred bucks more when we’ve finished the investigation, and we get a reasonable allowance for expenses. Go to it, Donald!”

“You shouldn’t have taken it, Bertha.”

“What the hell do you mean, I shouldn’t have taken it?” Bertha screamed. “There’s five hundred perfectly good legal bucks. We can use that lettuce on our income tax. Don’t tell me we don’t want it.”

“It’s loaded with dynamite.”

“All right,” Bertha said, “it’s loaded with dynamite. So what? All the man wants is an answer to one simple question: whether Drude Nickerson is the cabdriver.”

I looked at my watch. “Well,” I said, “let’s hope we still have time.”

“Time for what?” Bertha snapped.

“Time to investigate the murder of William Desmond Taylor,” I said. “You may remember that case. It was in 1921. One of the most famous of the unsolved Hollywood murders.”

For once I had Bertha off first base.

“One or the other of us is completely nuts,” she yelled. I opened the door.

“Come back here!” Bertha was screaming at the top of her voice. “Come back here, you little runt, and—”

The closing outer door of the office shut off the noise. I made time to the public library and started digging into the files of the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

The death of William Desmond Taylor was a Hollywood classic.

Taylor had been a famous Hollywood director, back in the days of the silent pictures.

When, early one morning in 1921, William Desmond Taylor’s butler and general handy man opened the door of the unit in the bungalow court where Taylor was living and found him lying dead on the floor, it started a chain of events which had unexpected repercussions.

It was found that William Desmond Taylor was not William Desmond Taylor at all, but one William Deane Tanner who had mysteriously disappeared from New York some years before. The biographical data which surrounded the famous motion-picture director was as fictitious as the plots he had concocted in the silent days of the pictures.

Stories circulated around Hollywood and found their way into the newspapers about a mysterious woman’s silk nightie which, according to rumor, the butler found neatly folded in an upstairs bureau drawer. The butler very carefully refolded the nightie in a certain manner only to find that, at regular intervals, the sheer silken garment would have been carefully refolded in an entirely different pattern.

The names of motion-picture actresses, famous names of the day, flitted in and out of the case with bizarre statements, explanations, comments and rumors, fully in keeping with the exaggerated gestures of the silent pictures.

In those days, it is to be remembered, an actor dashing in pursuit of someone who was only two jumps ahead would run to a corner of the set, come to a dead stop, invariably look in the wrong direction, shade his eyes with his hand in order to signify that he was looking, then tum in the opposite direction, again shade his eyes, stab his finger in a pointing gesture to indicate unmistakably that his quarry was “going that-a-way” and then from a standing start resume the pursuit until the next corner of the set was reached when the pantomime would be repeated.

The investigation of the murder of William Desmond Taylor followed a similar pattern.

I made copious notes.

When the library closed, I knocked off for the night, with two shorthand books filled with notes.

Wednesday morning I went once more to the newspaper files in the morgue.

Bertha Cool was just going out to lunch as I came in.

“You’ve been to Susanville?” she asked.

“I’m going.”

“Going?” she said. “My God! You’re supposed to have been on your way long ago. Our client rang up and I told him you were already up there.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“What the hell have you been doing?” Bertha blazed at me.

“Getting some insurance,” I said.

“Insurance?“

I nodded.

“For what?”

“To keep us from losing our license,” I told her.

“When are you starting?” Bertha asked, too exasperated to ask for particulars.

“Now,” I told her. “I take a plane to Reno; then I’m renting a car at Reno and driving to Susanville.”

Bertha glared at me angrily. “When will you get to Susanville?”

“It all depends,” I told her.

She said, “Our client is on pins and needles. He’s telephoned twice. He wanted to know if you’d taken off. I told him you had.”

“That’s fine. As long as he feels we’re on the job, he’ll be satisfied.”

Bertha’s face darkened. “Why the hell do you need to take out insurance when we’re working on a dead open-and-shut case?”

“Because it’s dead open-and-shut.”

“What do you mean?”

I said, “The police would like to clean up the Endicott murder. They have one witness, a taxi driver by the name of Drude Nickerson. He’s their case. All of a sudden the obituary column reports the death of Drude Nickerson up in Susanville. It’s private. No flowers. You’d naturally think the body would be shipped back to Citrus Grove and that the funeral would be held there.”

Bertha blinked that over.

“I’ll be seeing you,” I told her, and started for the door.

“Pickle me for a beet!” Bertha said under her breath as I opened the door.

It was late afternoon when I pulled in to Susanville. I located myself in a motel and registered under my true name, giving the address of the agency.

I looked up the Susanville Undertaking Parlors.

“You have a body here — Nickerson?” I asked.

The man at the desk sized me up carefully, then made a show of looking through some records and a card index.

“That’s right.”

“Can you give me his first name?”

“Drude,” he said. “D-r-u-d-e.”

“Know anything about the man’s background or anything?”

“It was a coroner’s case,” he said. “Injuries on the highway.”