Erle Gardner - Turn on the Heat

Bertha Cool said, “Phooey! There’s no sense to it.”

“There were no photographs of her available,” I went on. “No one could check back on her appearance. What’s more, they didn’t get a chance. She went to the hotel. From all I can find out, that’s about the only place she went. She registered and put in an appearance so the hotel people would know her. She didn’t recognize any of her old friends. Why? Because she’d broken her glasses and couldn’t see a thing. She put off looking up any of her former friends on that account. She called on a lawyer — a perfectly strange lawyer, by the way — and arranged to have the old divorce case dismissed. She gave me an interview which she hoped would be published in the local press, and she heat it.

“Now get this. This is the significant high light of the whole business. When Dr. Lintig and his wife had their slip-up, the fly in the ointment was a young chap named Steve Dunton who was running the Blade . Steve Dunton was a dashing young gallant, somewhere in the middle thirties. He’s in the middle fifties now. He wears a green eyeshade, has put on weight, and chews tobacco.

“Now then, I told Mrs. Lintig that I was a reporter from the Blade . She didn’t even know the paper, and she never once asked me anything about Steve Dunton .”

“And what was Dunton doing all this time?” Bertha asked.

“He’d quit being a gay blade. He beat it and went fishing. He didn’t come back until she’d left.”

Bertha Cool said, “Pickle me for a herring, Donald. You may be right. If you are, it’s blackmail.”

“Bigger stake than that,” I said. “Dr. Lintig starts running for office on a reform ticket in a rich little city that’s honeycombed with graft. He’s too innocent and unsophisticated to know what the opposition would be certain to do — dig back in his past trying to find something sour.

“Naturally, the first thing they looked up was his professional standing. When they started digging into that, they found he’d changed his name from Lintig to Alftmont, so naturally they started looking up Dr. Lintig. They found that Lintig had been registered in Oakview. They went to Oakview and made an investigation. That was when the first man showed up on the job. That was about two months ago, a chap who gave the name of Cross. He was the one who made the original investigation.”

Bertha Cool nodded.

“That gave them everything they wanted right there,” I went on, “but they couldn’t be certain that Mrs. Lintig hadn’t died or secured a divorce. They could throw the old scandal in Dr. Alftmont’s teeth, but it had all the earmarks of mud-slinging for political purposes. What they wanted to do was to have Mrs. Lintig enter the picture. Then they could play it in either one of two ways. First, they could have her write to the doctor and tell him to withdraw from the campaign. Secondly, they could have her show up and make a statement to the newspapers — not in Santa Carlotta, but in Oakview.

“You can see what would happen then. By showing up in Oakview, it certainly wouldn’t look as though it was a case of political mud-slinging. The Oakview papers would publish the statement that she had located Dr. Lintig living under the name of Dr. Alftmont in Santa Carlotta and residing with the co-respondent in the divorce action as man and wife. The Oakview newspaper would telephone Santa Carlotta asking them to verify the tip before they ran it as news. Then Santa Carlotta would let the Oakview paper run it first, and then they’d publish it as an exchange item.”

“Then why didn’t she tell you that story when you contacted her there in the hotel, Donald?”

“Because she wasn’t ready,” I said. “She didn’t intend to tell the story at that time. That appearance was just for the purpose of laying the foundation. She wanted the people around the hotel to see her and get accustomed to regarding her as Mrs. Lintig.”

“Then you think she wasn’t Mrs. Lintig?”

I shook my head and said, “The Santa Carlotta police couldn’t find her. They found Flo Danzer who used to be Flo Mortinson who roomed with Amelia Sellar in San Francisco. Then they hit a brick wall. Flo knows what it is. They wouldn’t have taken the risk of planting another woman as a ringer unless they’d first decided there was no possibility of getting the real Mrs. Lintig.”

“But look here, lover,” Bertha said, “how did they know Steve Dunton would go fishing. He’d have exposed her.”

I said, “That’s one thing they didn’t know. They didn’t know it either because Mrs. Lintig never confessed it to Flo, or, what’s more likely, because Flo didn’t remember such details as names. She knew Mrs. Lintig had been playing around, and that’s all.”

Bertha Cool smoked for a while in thoughtful silence.

“Now then,” I said, “Dr. Alftmont got a letter recently which purported to come from his wife. He says it’s her handwriting. I examined that last letter, and it looks like a forgery to me.”

Bertha Cool’s face lit. “Well, shucks,” she said, “there’s nothing to it, lover. All we need to do is to prove that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor.”

“What good will that do?”

“It’ll put Alftmont in the clear, and that’s all we want.”

I said, “It would have a short time ago. It won’t now. They’re after Alftmont on a murder charge now. Unless we can find some way of beating it, the case is going to break by tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

Bertha Cool said, “Look, lover. You can do anything with Marian. You can make her look Alftmont square in the face and say that he wasn’t the man who came out of that room.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I said, “The other people know all about Alftmont. By this time, they’ve traced him to Los Angeles. They know damn well he was the man who was in that room. They’re just waiting to spring the identificaion on him. They’ve told the D.A. here they think the case has a Santa Carlotta angle. He’s asked them to lay off until he can get Marian Dunton’s mind firmly convinced that the man she saw was coming out of apartment 309 and not out of either of the adjoining apartments. They’re ready to shoot now.

“They flash a photograph of Dr. Alftmont on Marian Dunton, and she refuses to identify it. What happens? They give her a regular, old-time third-degree gruelling. She can’t stand up to that. No girl her age could unless she’d had a lot more experience and a lot more hard knocks than Marian has.

“Marian gets hysterical. She blurts out the whole story or enough of it so they can fill in all the gaps. They find out that we’ve been acting as official host and hostess while she’s been in the city. They don’t bother about asking for an explanation or trying to take your licence away. They simply arrest both of us as accessories after the fact, accuse us of trying to bribe and browbeat a prosecution witness, charge us with subornation of perjury, with trying to square a murder rap for Alftmont — and we’re all in jail together.”

Bertha Cool’s eyes showed that she appreciated the logic of my remark, but didn’t like the word picture I’d painted. After a minute, she said, “Cripes, lover, let’s get out of it. We’ve done everything we could. We can allege that Mrs. Lintig is an impostor and challenge them to prove it. That will clear our skirts.”

I said, “It may clear our skirts, but it won’t be getting results for our client.”

“I’d rather not get results for our client than spend the next twenty years in the women’s penitentiary at Tehachapi.”

I said, “What we want to do is to keep out of jail, give our client a break, and let him get elected mayor of Santa Carlotta. What you want is business. With the mayor of Santa Carlotta plugging for you, you’ve got an asset that’s worth a lot of money.”