A. Fair - Shills Can't Cash Chips

I gave the car everything it had.

A boulevard stop loomed ahead. I shot through it as fast as the car would go, negotiated a turn with screaming tires, hit a straightaway and my headlights picked up another boulevard stop ahead. This time it was a main thoroughfare. I could see headlights approaching as I came to the white line but I pressed my hand on the horn button and shot through.

There was a brief hundredth of a second when headlights were glaring into my eyes from the left-hand side at a distance of not over thirty feet. Then I squeezed on by and was out in the clear.

That gave me time enough to execute a U-turn, slow the car and come driving sedately back.

I was just at the thoroughfare intersection when the car that had been following me roared across the main thoroughfare, also ignoring the boulevard stop, and shot on past me.

The driver was too busy with what he was doing to notice cars that were coming toward him and he never even slowed down as he shot past. I don’t think he ever saw anything except my headlights.

I eased out into the main boulevard and joined the stream of traffic.

I headed on the main road to Los Angeles and as soon as I found a service station that had a telephone booth, called Bertha at her apartment.

Bertha’s voice was irascible. “What is it this time?” she asked, “and why the hell don’t you make reports and let me know what you’re doing? Our client has been wondering if you’ve discovered anything and I have to pull that old stuff about making progress and being too busy at the moment to make a written report.”

“All right,” I said, “it wasn’t stuff. I was making progress and I was too busy to make a report. Now I’ve got to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“About progress.”

“I’m in bed.”

“Well, get up,” I told her. “You shouldn’t go to bed this early anyway.”

“Dammit to hell, Donald Lam!” she screamed in the telephone. “You know I go to bed early and read myself to sleep. I—”

“Read yourself awake,” I told her. “I’ll be there in less than half an hour.”

Bertha Cool opened the door of her apartment as soon as I rang. She had on pajamas and her hair was in curlers. She was mad.

“Now will you tell me what this is all about?” she demanded as I entered the apartment and took a chair. “Why in hell can’t you go to the office, tap this stuff out on a typewriter and have it so I can show it to the client in the morning?

“Or, the way that damned secretary of yours looks at you with those puppy-love eyes of hers, she’d probably welcome the opportunity to have you get her out of bed and start dictating. Or you might not have to get—”

I interrupted. “This thing is too hot for anything like that, Bertha.”

“What’s hot about it?”

“I’ve been made.”

“By whom?”

“The Ace High Detective Agency.”

“What the hell are they doing cutting in on our case?”

“They’re not cutting in on our case. They’ve got a case of their own. They were hired to keep Doris Ashley under surveillance and to check on everything she did.

“So when I showed up on the scene and started watching her car, the Ace High operative picked me up and reported to the client, whoever the client was, on long-distance telephone.”

“Somebody here?” Bertha Cool asked, her eyes narrowing.

“I said long distance, Bertha. This is a dial operation now from Colinda. Here, take a look at this.”

I handed Bertha the Ace High report.

“Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said when she had finished reading. “Do you suppose, Donald, that Lamont Hawley had another agency working on the case and— How did you get this, Donald?”

I told her what had happened.

“Then Hawley must be double-crossing us.”

“How else would the Ace High have been on the job?” I asked.

Bertha Cool’s greedy little eyes started snapping. “That’s it, Donald,” she said. “That’s what happened. The s.o.b. got two detective agencies, the Ace High and ours, and played one against the other. The Ace High people had been on the job for several days and hadn’t got results, so someone told the Consolidated Interinsurance people about you and how you could handle women and that explains why they terminated the employment of the Ace High people as soon as they found out you had made a personal contact with Doris Ashley.”

“Whatever the reason,” I told her, “let’s have a showdown on this thing. I don’t like being played for a sucker. I don’t like to have a client give me only part of the facts.

“Let’s get Lamont Hawley in the office and hand it to him straight from the shoulder.”

Bertha said, “That’s the spirit, Donald!”

She suddenly started blinking her eyes. “Wait a minute, Donald. We don’t have anything to support our claim except this report of the Ace High people, and of course Hawley is going to want to know how we got hold of that and—”

“Don’t tell him how we found out,” I said. “Let him wonder.”

Bertha thought that over, then suddenly her face wreathed in smiles.

“I’d just like to see that s.o.b.’s face, Donald. Here he is trying to play one detective agency against the other. He’s had the Ace High people trying to make a contact. They get nowhere. We come in, make a contact first rattle out of the box and then the next thing he knows we find out all about the other detective agency and his instructions to them. That’s going to curl his hair!”

“All right,” I told Bertha. “Now the question arises, where did that report come from?”

“You told me you got it out of Holgate’s office.”

“All right, how did Holgate get it?”

“He— Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said, and lapsed into silence.

“He got it from some woman,” I said, “who came to the office. And shortly after that someone got into the office and a general fight started. Holgate and the woman were mixed up in it or else the man who came in and started the fight had a woman with him.”

“How do you know?”

I told her about the shoe.

“She’d have gone back and got that shoe,” Bertha said. “A woman can’t walk with high heels on one foot and nothing on the other.”

“Perhaps she kicked off the other shoe,” I said, “and went in her stocking feet.”

“She could have,” Bertha said, “if for some reason she felt it was dangerous to go back to get the other shoe. All right, what happened then? There was a fight. Who won?”

“The intruder won.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he just about wrecked the office looking for something.”

“This report?” Bertha asked.

“This report, hell,” I said. “This report was left there and there’s a damned good chance this report was taken there by the intruder, whoever he was.”

“How do you figure that out?”

I said, “The intruder came to the office. He started talking with Holgate. Then he pulled this report out of his pocket and handed it to Holgate for him to look over. That probably started the fight. The office was pretty well wrecked. This girl was in on it because she hit someone over the head with her purse and bent the frame on the purse, at the same time spilling the contents of the purse to the floor.

“When she left, she left the purse because it was bent and wouldn’t close, but took the things she wanted to take with her and probably wrapped them in a towel.”

“Why a towel?”

“There was a lavatory off the office and there weren’t any towels on the rack, but there was one towel that had been jerked to the floor.”

“Well,” Bertha said, “they can’t tie any of that in with us.”