A. Fair - Spill the Jackpot

Later that morning I got a lead.

A retail-credit association member had delivered groceries to a Mrs. Sidney Jannix in an apartment on California Street.

I went out to the place, parked the jalopy, climbed stairs, and pressed a buzzer.

The woman who opened the door was Corla Burke.

“May I come in?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“A friend of Helen Framley.”

She frowned at me. For a moment, there was quick alarm in her eyes. “How did you find me?”

“That,” I said, “is something of a story. Do I tell it out here, or inside?”

“Inside,” she said, and held the door open so I could come in.

I sat down by the window. Corla Burke, seated across from me where the light etched expression on her face, played into my hands by opening the conversation. “I, simply couldn’t have taken advantage of Miss Framley’s offer,” she said. “I wrote and told her so.”

I adopted an attitude of being somewhat aggrieved.

“I don’t see why.”

“It wouldn’t have been fair.”

“I think it would have been a lot better than what you did do.”

I could see that shot struck home. She said, “I didn’t know, of course, what— Well, I couldn’t, look into the future myself,” and she laughed nervously.

“Miss Framley felt she tried to do the square thing by you and that you hadn’t been — well, suppose we say appreciative.”

“I’m sorry. How did you happen to come here?”

“Why, this was the logical place to look for you.”

“Why did you want to find me?”

“I thought perhaps something could be done to straighten things out.”

“No, not now.”

“I still think so.”

“I’m afraid you’re overly optimistic. Please thank Miss Framley for me and tell her that I certainly don’t want her to think I was ungrateful, and I guess — well, I guess that’s about all there is to tell her.”

I glanced around, saw that a suitcase was open, that folded garments were placed on a table and on two of the chairs. On a small table in the corner by the window was a woman’s hat, gloves, and purse. A stamped envelope lay on the corner of this table.

“Mind if I smoke?”

“Certainly not. I’ll have one—”

I gave her a cigarette, held a match, managed to move so that I was at the edge of the table as I reached for an ash tray, and then grabbed for the letter.

She saw what was happening and flung herself at the table. I got my hands on the letter first. She clawed at it. I said, “If it isn’t postmarked Las Vegas I’m not interested. If it is, I’m going to read it.”

She redoubled her efforts, grabbed at my arm. I pushed her away. I managed to avoid her, pulled the sheet of paper out from the envelope.

It was a hasty scrawl and read:

Donald Lam a private detective is on the job. -He’s contacted Helen Framley. Helen’s boy friend, man by the name of Beegan, was murdered last night. You aren’t safe in Reno. Hunt a deep hole somewhere else.

The letter was signed simply with the initials “A. W.”

I said, “Let’s be frank with each other and save time. I’m Lam. Arthur Whitewell hired me to find you — and saw that Philip knew all about it, of course. Now suppose you tell me your story.”

She just stared at me, all of the fight had left her. She looked trapped and beaten.

I said, “I have a theory. I can outline it if it would help start the ball rolling.”

She still didn’t say anything, simply stood looking at me as though I was what was left behind after a cyclone.

I said, “I think Arthur Whitewell didn’t want his son to marry you. He thought Philip could make a more advantageous marriage. But Philip was very much in love with you, and Whitewell is something of a psychologist. He knew that, after all, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Philip was inexperienced and callow in some ways, but very much of a man in others. His father had never fully understood him, but he did realize there was a gap he had never been able to bridge. He knew that any attempt to come between you two would bring about a permanent estrangement. And then something happened to play right into his hands. He had the opportunity he’d been looking for. He manipulated things in such a way that you simply stepped out of the picture and left Philip to recuperate as best he could.

“And then,” I said, “Philip took it so much worse than his father had anticipated that something had to be done. It wasn’t just an ordinary heartbreak. Philip is sentimental, sensitive, in his feelings and perceptions. He’s never learned that people sometimes can’t be taken at their face value. It was all too much for him.”

She was crying now, crying quietly. She didn’t try to say anything. She couldn’t have talked.

I walked over to the window, looking down on a drab back yard which was pretty well filled with a litter of old boxes. A clothesline sagged dispiritedly between two poles. Little puddles reflected sunlight. A child’s tin pail and shovel were standing on a pile of damp sand. I kept my back turned to the room so that she could have her cry out and regain her composure without feeling I was watching.

It was several minutes before she had herself sufficiently under control to speak. “Do you think that Mr. Whitewell expected you would find me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is that he employed us to find you.”

“But he stipulated with me that I must arrange my disappearance so that I could never be found. That was one of the things he insisted on.”

“Exactly.”

“Then hiring you would be just a gesture to pacify Philip?”

“That’s it.”

I could see she was clinging to a straw of hope. “But it costs real money to hire a good detective, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And you must be good — skillful?”

It was her party. If she wanted to kid herself along, it was okay with me. I said, “We think we’re good.”

“Can’t you tell me something that would give me a clue as to how Mr. Whitewell really feels now?”

“Not until after you’ve told me what happened. Then I can put things together and perhaps find an answer.”

“But you seemed to know. You knew all about Helen Framley.”

“No, just that she’d written you a letter. I had to surmise what was in it.”

“What did you think was in it?”

“I thought it was a trap.”

“Set by this Helen Framley?”

“I don’t think Helen Framley ever wrote the letter.”

“But she must have.”

“Suppose you tell me everything you know, and let me draw my own conclusions.”

She said, “I suppose you know what caused me to leave.”

“Sid Jannix?”

She nodded.

“Tell me about him first.”

She said, “I was a little fool when I was a kid. I always had a savage streak in me. I liked fighting and fighters. I never cared much for baseball games, but loved football. Sidney was in school with me. He was on the football team. Then the school took up boxing, and Sidney was the best in our school. He became something of a hero. The boxing died out because there was too much parental opposition, but Sidney was the idol of every boy in school. And I guess he became the school bully. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was our last year in high school.

“Well, I kept up with Sidney, and my family didn’t like rt. Sidney took up professional fighting, and adopted the attitude that he was something of a martyr, and I— Well, when Sidney was making enough to support me, I ran away with him and we were married.” She shrugged wearily, then added, “Of course it was a ghastly, terrible mistake.”

She paused for a minute as though trying to find some way of detouring what lay ahead, then she plunged once more into the recital.