Erle Gardner: Turn on the Heat

“Never mind. I’d rather play it the other way.”

“What other way?”

“You find out what you can from me, and I’ll find out what I can from you. Up to a certain point, I’ll help you. If I should come to the city and look for a job, you do anything you can for me.”

“I can’t do very much.”

“I understand. You do what you can. Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to be here long?”

“I don’t know. It depends.”

“Perhaps something might turn up. In case it should, where could I reach you?”

I took a card that had only my name on it, and wrote the name of the building and the number of the room in which Bertha Cool had her office. I said, “A letter sent to me there will be delivered.”

She studied the card for a minute, tucked it in her purse, and smiled at me. I helped her on with her coat and took her home in the agency car. She lived in a two-storey frame building that needed paint. There was no sign in front intimating that it was a rooming-house, so I figured she was living with a private family. I didn’t bother too much about it because I knew I could find out all about her any time I wanted to. As she herself had said, the people in that town knew more about her business than she did.

I could tell from the way she acted she hoped I wasn’t going to try to kiss her good night, and I didn’t.

I got back to the hotel a little before midnight. A cigar made the night clerk communicative. After a while I checked through the register and found the signatures of Miller Cross and Evaline Dell. I figured the addresses were phony, but made a surreptitious note of them just on general principles while the clerk was busy at the switchboard.

When he came back to the desk, we chatted for a while, and he mentioned that Miss Dell had arrived by train, that her trunk had been damaged, and she’d secured affidavits from the hotel porter and the transfer man. He hadn’t heard whether the claim had ever been settled.

I found I could send a wire from the telephone booth, and sent one to Bertha Cool:

Making slow progress. Get complete information on claim against Southern Pacific Railroad Company for damaged trunk shipped to Oakview about three weeks ago. Claim may have been made under name of Evaline Dell. Can I pay twenty-five bucks to party giving helpful information?

I hung up the telephone and went up to my room. I tried my key, and it didn’t work. While I was trying to figure that out, the door was jerked open from the inside, and a big man, whose figure loomed against the light seeping in from the window, said, “Come on in, Lam.”

He switched on the lights as I stood there on the threshold, looking up at him.

He was around six feet and weighed over two hundred. He wasn’t thin, and he wasn’t fat. He was broad across the shoulders, and the hand which shot out and grabbed my necktie was a big, battered paw. “I said, ‘Come on in,’ ” he observed and jerked.

I shot on into the room. He gave a swing with his shoulders, and I went spinning across the carpet to crash down on the bed. He kicked the door shut, and said, “That’s better.”

He was between me and the door — between me and the telephone. From what I’d seen of the service the night clerk gave at the hotel switchboard, I figured it would take at least thirty seconds to get any action on the telephone. Nor could I picture this guy standing idly by while I tried to telephone the police.

I straightened my necktie, pulled down the edges of my collar, and said, “What do you want?”

“That’s better,” he said, drawing up a chair and sitting down, keeping between me and the door.

He grinned, and I didn’t like his grin. I didn’t like anything about him. He was beefy and assured and acted as though he owned the town and the hotel.

“What,” I asked, “do you want?”

“I want you to get the hell out of here.”

“Why?”

“The climate,” he said. “It’s bad for little pipsqueaks like you.”

“It hasn’t disagreed with me so far,” I said.

“No, but it will. It’s the malaria, you know. Mosquitoes buzz around at night. They bite you, and the first thing you know you feel sick.”

“Where should I go,” I asked, “to avoid the insects ?”

His face darkened. He said, “No more of that, pint-size.”

I fished a cigarette out of my pocket, and lit it. He watched me put the match up to the cigarette and laughed when he saw that my hand was shaking.

I shook the match out, inhaled a lungful of smoke, and said, “Go ahead. It’s your party.”

He said, “I’ve said it. There’s your bag. Pack it. I’m here to escort you down to your car.”

“Suppose I don’t want to be escorted?”

He said amiably, but significantly, “If you left now, you could leave under your own power.”

“And if I waited?”

“You might have an accident.”

“I don’t have accidents. My friends know that.”

“You might walk in your sleep and fall out of the window. Your friends could back track on that and never get any place.”

“I could start yelling,” I said. “Someone would hear me.”

“Sure, they would.”

“And notify the police.”

“That’s right.”

“Then what would happen?”

“I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t, either.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll try it,” and let out a yell: “Help! Pol—”

He came out of the chair like a cat. I saw him looming over me, and put everything I had in a right to his stomach.

It never connected.

Something hit the side of my head, seemed to pull my neck loose, and the lights went out. When I came to, I was in the agency heap rolling along pavement. My head hurt, and my jaw was so sore I could hardly move it. The big man was sitting at the wheel, and when I moved, he looked over at me, and said, “Hell, what a heap! Why doesn’t your damned agency give you decent transportation?”

I put my head out of the window so the cool night air would help clear my head. The big man kept a heavy foot on the throttle, and Bertha Cool’s car, rattling its protest, swayed from side to side along the road.

It was a mountain road, winding and twisting up a canyon. After a while it came out on a level place with pine trees standing in dark silhouettes against the starlit sky. The big man slowed down the car, apparently looking for a side road.

I watched my chance and lurched across the seat. I grabbed the steering-wheel with both hands and jerked. I couldn’t turn the wheel, although the car swerved to one side of the road and then back to the other as he exerted pressure to counteract mine. He snapped up his elbow without taking his hand off the wheel, and it caught me on the point of my sore jaw, making me loosen my grip. Something like a pile driver caught me on the back of the neck, and the next I remembered I was lying fiat on my back in the dark trying to figure where I was.

I put events into some sort of hazy sequence after a while, and groped in my pocket for matches. I found one and lit it. I was inside a log cabin, lying flat on dry pine needles. I sat up on the bunk, which was covered with old, dried pine boughs, and struck another match. I found a candle and lit it, then looked at my watch. It was quarter past three.

The cabin evidently hadn’t been used for a while. It was dirty and smelled musty. The windows were boarded up. Rats had been rummaging around the place, dragging stale bread crusts out of a cupboard. A spider, hanging in a big cobweb, seemed to be staring ominously at me. Dried pine needles from the branches on my bunk had got in my hair and, as I stood up, worked down my neck.

I felt as though I’d been run over by a steam roller.