A. Fair - Spill the Jackpot

Whitewell completely ignored her. He said to me, “I suppose you’d also resort to a little blackmail?”

“About what?”

“Threatening to tell Philip unless you get the sort of settlement you want.”

I said, “I’m reporting to Bertha Cool. She runs the agency any way she wants to. I don’t have anything to say about that. However, if you’re going to play ostrich and try sticking your head in the sand, you might remember that the police here in Las Vegas are going to be mildly interested.”

“What business is it of theirs?”

“You forget the murder.”

“You mean this mess is all going to come out in connection with the murder?”

“It might.”

He frowned at me, and said, “By the time I unscramble that enigmatic ‘remark, young man, I suppose I’ll find a hook in it. That has all the earmarks of being the opening gun in a campaign of shakedown.”

I lit a cigarette.

Bertha said, “You’d better come down to earth and realize you aren’t done with us yet. You’re going to need representation to keep this murder rap off your shoulders.”

“Off my shoulders!” Whitewell exclaimed.

Bertha’s eyes glittered at him, hard and greedy. “You’re damn tootin’,” she said. “Don’t forget that girl who saw you.”

Whitewell began to smile, a slow grin of amused triumph. “Well,” he said, “isn’t it going to be interesting to see what happens. Corla Burke has lost her memory. She doesn’t know anything that happened from the time she finished taking dictation on the day of her disappearance. The next thing she remembers is when Philip walks into the hospital and says, ‘Corla,’ and the emotional shock suddenly brings back her memory. Rather a nice little master of ceremonies, aren’t you, Lam?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Spill the rest of it.”

“All right, I will. Corla Burke was an adventuress. She’d been married before, and she was concealing that marriage from my son. She’d trapped my son into a love affair. She was going to marry him. Then a few days before the ceremony, her husband makes a very inopportune appearance. Immediately Corla Burke disappears. Shortly thereafter, her husband is murdered. As soon as he has shuffled this mortal coil so that she becomes a widow and therefore perfectly eligible to make an immediate marriage, a private detective finds her in a hospital, suffering from amnesia. And I won’t insult your intelligence by intimating there’s any chance she won’t be promptly cured as soon as she sees my son, and I hope that you won’t insult my intelligence by trying to make me swallow it as a genuine performance. But the point is, she was the one who had a motive for murdering Sidney Jannix. She wanted him out of the way. She had every reason to know that he could be located through Helen Framley. That’s something for you to consider, Lam.”

“Why?”

“Because if she doesn’t know where she has been during the intervening time, she can’t deny that she was in Las Vegas. She can’t deny that she killed him.”

“So what?”

“So,” he said, “you have a plane here. We are getting a plane. If you started now, you could get back to Reno ahead of us. If Corla Burke isn’t there in the hospital when we arrive, so far as I’m concerned, there won’t be any temptation to associate her with the murder of her husband.”

I said, “No soap.”

Bertha Cool said, “What the hell do you take us for anyway?”

Whitewell made a little gesture with his hands. “All right, I’ll approach it another way. Philip is my only child, my only living close relative. I realize that he is introspective, that he’s abnormally sensitive, that he’s inclined to brood. I know that his happiness doesn’t depend entirely on himself. He’s a young man who will be greatly influenced by his environment. That means that his marriage is going to be terribly important — getting just the right woman is going to mean a lot.

“Can’t you give me credit for having some intelligence? Can’t you realize that I know Philip better than any other person on earth? Don’t you understand that his happiness is the primary consideration with me, that if I thought he could be happy with Corla Burke, I would move heaven and earth to bring the two together? Can’t you realize that the only reason I didn’t want him to marry Corla was that I knew she wasn’t the woman for him? I knew the match was unsuitable. I knew that it was but the prelude to tragedy. She wouldn’t stay with him. She isn’t his type. She’d break his heart. Some persons can marry more than once. Some persons can’t. Philip is one who can’t.”

I asked, “How is your son going to feel toward her when he finds she’s been married before?”

He grinned. “What you’re leading up to is how is he going to find it out? I can’t say anything. That would be a giveaway. She won’t say anything because she’s had this very convenient loss of memory. Of course, it will come out after marriage, but that will be afterwards. Oh, I’ll hand it to you, Lam. You’re clever all right. It would have been a neat little checkmate. But it isn’t a mate.”

I saw the glitter in his eyes. “Don’t forget that I can be absolutely ruthless when anyone crosses me. You either have her out of the way by the time Philip gets to Reno or she’ll be arrested for murder, and then the whole thing will come out — and once she’s pulled this amnesia business, she’s licked.”

I yawned.

He stood glaring down at me. “Damn you, you insolent little terrier, I mean it.”

I reached in my pocket.

He crossed the room, picked up the telephone, and said to us, “I’m calling police headquarters.”

I pulled out the letter I’d taken from Corla Burke’s Reno apartment.

Whitewell took one look at that envelope and dropped the telephone as though it had been hot. I said, “I inquired for mail at Reno. I thought there might be a letter for her. There was.”

He became very still.

“That was a breach of the postal laws. They can raise hell with you for that.”

I went on calmly, “I notice Paul Endicott seemed very anxious to mail your letter about the option. It’s fortunate you accepted it. Evidently he’s quite familiar with your business.”

Bertha said, “Donald, what the hell are you talking about?”

I said, “Suppose Philip takes it right on the chin and still loves her, regardless of how many times she’s been married? You’re a man who likes your family, Mr. Whitewell. You’re going to be pretty lonesome without Philip, and it’s going to be quite a blow to you to be estranged from your own grandchildren.”

If I’d given him Louie Hazen’s one-two shift in the solar plexus, I couldn’t have given him more of a jolt.

“If I were in your shoes,” I went on, “I’d have considered the amnesia as just about the best break I’d had in ten years.”

He said with conviction, “When he finds out how she’s deceived him, he’ll walk out on her. It will hurt for a while, but he’ll walk out.”

I said, “You’re wrong. He won’t find out. Personally, I’m going to get something to eat. I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.”

I walked out and left him alone with Bertha.

I strolled down the street to a bar, got a toothpick, and came back to Bertha Cool’s room. She was alone. “Where’s Whitewell?” I asked.

“Gone to get some things together. You really shouldn’t have handled him that way, lover. You’ve always had a chip on your shoulder with him.”

“I gave him a break with that amnesia business, and he was too dumb to realize it,” I said.

“No, not dumb. Just confident that Philip will do exactly what he expects him to do.”