A. Fair: Shills Can't Cash Chips

I walked across the reception room of COOL & LAM, INVESTIGATORS, opened the door of my private office. Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up with an expression I had come to know.

“What is it, Elsie?” I asked. “Good or bad?”

“What?”

“What you wanted to tell me.”

“How did you know I had something to tell you?”

“The expression on your face.”

“Don’t I have any secrets from you?” she asked.

I smiled at her. She became flustered and said, “If you had time, Donald, to step down the hall with me, I... I wanted to show you something.”

“I have the time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We left my office, walked across the reception room, down the hall, and Elsie led the way to the storage closets, took a key, unlocked the door of closet number eight and switched on the light.

These storage closets were in a dead windowless space in the building, and our closet had been used as a catchall for old junk that should have been thrown away. Now it had been neatly segregated into shelves, and the shelves were lined with scrapbooks.

“What the heck!” I said.

Elsie was looking at me, her eyes filled with pride. “I’ve been wanting to surprise you,” she said.

“You’ve surprised me. Now tell me about it.”

“Well,” she said, “you’ve been having me cut out all of those crime clippings and it’s been a job trying to find some way of filing them.”

“I didn’t want you to file them,” I said, “just to keep them handy so I could put my hand on the more recent ones.”

“Well,” she said, “you can always find anything you want now. For instance, here’s Volume A. That is crimes of violence. Numbers one to one hundred are murders for motives of jealousy. Numbers one hundred to two hundred are murders committed in connection with armed robberies. There are ten divisions in all.

“Now I’ve got a cross-index system over here of weapons. Murders with guns, murders with knives, murders with poison.

“Then this next volume, Volume B, is the robbery book. Volume C is larceny. D is—”

Bertha Cool’s harsh, rasping voice behind us said, “What in hell goes on here?”

Elsie Brand gave a little gasp.

I turned to face my indignant partner, her eyes diamond-hard, glittering, her face dark with anger.

“My reference library,” I said.

“What in hell do you want with a reference library?”

“I want to refer to it.”

Bertha snorted. “They told me you and Elsie were lolligagging down the hall. I wondered what you two were up to...”

Bertha grabbed one of the volumes, looked through it and said to Elsie, “So that’s what you’ve been doing with all of your time!”

Elsie started to say something but I moved in between her and Bertha Cool. “That’s what she’s been doing with her spare time,” I said. “And in case you’ve forgotten it, having the information available on outstanding, unsolved crimes has enabled us to co-operate with the police and get us out of a couple of rather tight spots.”

“You’re always getting in tight spots,” Bertha flared. “Then you squeak out by the skin of your eyeteeth and—”

“And leave our bank account in better shape than it was when we started,” I told her, getting mad. “Now, if you have any complaints, go back to your office, make them in the form of a written memo and hand them to Elsie. We’ll file them in our complaint department, which, in case you are interested, is the wastebasket.”

“Now Donald,” Bertha said, “don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“You’re getting mad.”

“Getting mad!” I said. “I am mad.”

“Now Donald, don’t be difficult. I was looking for you for a particular reason and I was impatient when no one answered the phone in your office.”

“Well, Elsie was showing me the new filing system.”

Bertha said, “It looks like hell when I have a client in my office and want to bring in my partner to introduce him and can’t get an answer on the telephone. No secretary, no partner, no nothing — so I come to hunt you up. Here’s a client sitting in the office, impatient as hell, and you folks smooching down here in the storage closet.”

“We weren’t smooching,” I said.

“You could have been,” Bertha said, “for all I knew. The way you two look at each other—”

“Now look,” I told Bertha, “if you have a client who’s impatiently waiting in your office, we’d better go take care of him. If you want to comment about our personal relations, you can put that in the form of a memo which—”

“All right, all right,” Bertha said irritably. “Come on... Elsie, you close up this damned closet. Donald, let’s go talk with our client. This is the kind of work we want. This is respectable work.”

Bertha turned and started waddling down the corridor, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of bulldog tenacity, hair-trigger temper, greediness and shrewd observation; an explosive combination of characteristics that were rendered somewhat less obnoxious by an underlying loyalty when the chips were down.

At that, our partnership would probably have split up long ago if it hadn’t been so profitable. Money in the bank represented the most persuasive argument in Bertha’s life, and when it came to at showdown where the dissolution of the partnership was threatened, Bertha could always manage to control her irascible temper.

As I caught up with Bertha she said, “This is an insurance company. They’ve had their eye on us for a while. It’s the kind of business that there’s money in, Donald, not this wild-eyed sharpshooting you’ve been doing.”

“We’ve made money out of sharpshooting,” I reminded her. “Lots of it.”

“Too damned much,” Bertha said. “It scares me. We take too many risks. This job Hawley has for us is just the first of many.”

“All right,” I said. “Who’s Hawley?”

Bertha paused in front of the door to the outer office, briefing me momentarily before she turned the knob.

“Lamont Hawley,” she said, “is head of the Claims Department of Consolidated Interinsurance. He’ll tell you all about it. Now Donald, be nice to him. This is the sort of stuff we need.”

“What’s in it for us?” I asked.

“A hundred a day and expenses, with a guarantee of ten days as a minimum, and we furnish whatever operatives are required to cover the job.”

“How many operatives can we furnish at that price?”

“One,” she said, her eyes boring into mine. “You. And be damned certain that that’s all we need!”

Bertha jerked the door open and barged across the reception room and opened the door of her private office.

The man who got up as we entered was tall, spare-built, shrewd-eyed and long-featured. He was a typical detail man in the higher brackets. He could co-ordinate facts, figures and people and come up with the answers.

“My partner, Donald Lam,” Bertha Cool said. “Donald, this is Lamont Hawley, Consolidated Interinsurance.”

Hawley shook hands. His long fingers wrapped around my hand. His lip smile was a meaningless concession to the conventions. His eyes didn’t smile.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Lam,” he said.

“Good, bad or indifferent?”

“Good. Very good, indeed. You have created quite an impression. I had expected a... a larger man.”

“Don’t bother to beat around the bush,” Bertha Cool said, heaving her bulk into the squeaky swivel chair behind her desk. “Everybody gets fooled by Donald. He’s young and little but the punk has brains.