“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Two things. First I want you to recover those pictures. Second, I want you to find evidence that Gerald Ketterer is actually behind the gambling rackets.”
“The second part sounds like a big order.”
“It is,” the fat man agreed. “But without it, the first is useless. Public sentiment is so in favor of Ketterer, only a complete expose could turn it back to Cash at this point. And election is four days off. You’ll have to work fast.”
I eyed him quizzically. “Frankly, I don’t think I could accomplish much in that time, but I’m willing to try. Incidently, Mr. Margrove, just what is your interest in all this?”
“Public service,” he said simply.
I nodded understandingly. The fat man was doing his good deed for the day. But while not as lofty as my client’s, I have a few principles too, and I don’t believe in by-passing them even when dealing with unselfish servants of the public.
I said, “I’ll undertake the job with one understanding, Mr. Margrove. I make it a rule when I’m hired to recover anything used for the purpose of blackmail, that if I get my hands on it, I turn it over to the person being blackmailed, regardless of who hires me.”
“I’ll see that His Honor gets it,” Mar-grove said.
I shook my head. “No sir. I hand it to the mayor personally. I know you are above suspicion and go to church every Sunday, but once I stole some letters from a blackmailer, turned them over to a friend of the person being blackmailed, and the friend went into the blackmail business.”
He started to frown, then turned it into a chuckle. “All right, Mr. Moon. If it will make you feel better, I have no objection. I will, however, expect you to turn over to me any evidence you find connecting Gerald Ketterer to the gambling ring.”
I rose and punched out my cigar. “It’s a deal. And since time is short, I may as well start right now. You can make out a retainer check while I get my hat. Four days at twenty-five dollars a day comes to a hundred dollars.”
When I returned from the bedroom, he was waving the check back and forth to dry it. As I thrust it in my wallet, he heaved to his feet and waddled toward the door. With his hand on the knob he turned back again.
“I know nothing of the detective business, Mr. Moon, and don’t presume to tell you your own job, but I suppose you plan to search Gerald Ketterer’s home and his office?”
“Possibly,” I said in a non-committal tone, not feeling it necessary to confess illegal entry even to a client.
“Then I’ll save you a little time. Ketterer is a bachelor and lives alone in suite 620 of the Plaza Apartments. His office is on the twelfth floor of the Rand Building. The office closes at five p.m., so it would seem the best time to examine his apartment would be in the daytime, and the best time for the office between five and six, after which the elevators stop running.”
I said, “You should have been a detective yourself.”
“I just happen to know his habits,” he said. “I do my investment business with Ketterer.”
Chapter Three
Crusader’s Confession
Refusing my fat client’s offer of a ride in his chauffeur-driven car, I separated from him at the curb and walked to the public garage up the street where I kept the car the government had given me in exchange for my leg. It was an automatic drive specially equipped for left-legged driving, having the brake pedal left of the steering column instead of right.
I was nearly to the Plaza Apartments when I developed an intuitive feeling that I was being tailed. While waiting for a light to change, I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught sight of a blue coupe two cars back. I had not been watching for a tail, but subconsciously I was aware of having seen the same coupe in the mirror every time I looked.
When I drove into the Plaza’s parking lot, the coupe went on by and I got a look at the driver. He had the square scrubbed-looking face and crew haircut of a college athlete, and looked to be about college age. I wondered why I was becoming jittery and imagining college boys were tailing me.
Since it was after four, I had no intention of trying to enter Ketterer’s apartment that day and taking a chance he might knock off work early. I merely wanted to case the place. I rode a self-service elevator to the sixth floor, located suite 620 and rode the elevator down again.
From a drug store across from the parking lot, I phoned Jackie Morgan at the bed-bug haven he called home.
My association with Jackie originated years before in a saloon brawl. Two drunken heavyweights had been using his hundred and twenty pound frame for a punching bag, and I reduced the odds by banging their heads together. My motive in interfering had been interest in fair play rather than concern for his welfare, for at the time I didn’t even know him. But he never forgot it, and still considered his debt unpaid.
At sixty Jackie Morgan was a retired safe-cracker who had paid his debt to society with ten years of his life and now lived on an annuity left by a deceased brother. No police anywhere wanted him, but he got some kind of a kick out of maintaining contact with the underworld, and lived in a criminals’ hideout, where he seemed to be accepted as a harmless eccentric. I frequently called on his diversified talents, the most valuable of which was an almost supernatural ability with locks.
I told him to bring his kit and meet me at the magazine rack of the drug store in the Rand Building.
I couldn’t find a parking place near the Rand Building, and finally left my car on a public lot two blocks away. As I walked past the drug store where I had told Jackie Morgan to meet me, I glanced through the window and saw he had not yet arrived. But I did see another familiar figure.
Coming out of a phone booth was the same square-headed college boy I had imagined was tailing me. As I watched, he left the store, climbed into the blue coupe parked at the curb and drove away. If he was tailing me, he would have stuck around, I reasoned, and decided it was coincidence.
Across from the main entrance of the Rand Building I found a post to lean against from which I could both watch for Jackie to arrive and for Gerald Ketterer to leave. I had never met Ketterer, but since he had entered the mayoralty race his picture had been plastered on political posters all over town, and I felt sure I could spot him.
I started my vigil at twenty-five after four. At a quarter of five a taxi dropped three men at the entrance of the Rand Building. I knew all three casually, and if Gerald Ketterer really was king-pin of the gambling racket, these three must have been calling on him for a meeting of some kind, for they were the three biggest gamblers in town.
Dan Ironbaltz, the biggest of the three, both in size and underworld importance, ostensibly ran a high-class eatery called the Penguin Club. There was nothing on the police blotter about him, for I had had occasion to check, but it was common knowledge in the underworld that the Penguin Club was an expensive and profitless front, and the income which kept him in cars and champagne came from his job as straw-boss of the bookshops. He was a huge, ugly man with coarse features and heavy eyebrows which met over his nose to form one solid line. His arms were long and hairy, and hung motionless in front of him when he walked in his slightly thrust-forward position, so that he resembled nothing so much as a gorilla in hand-tailored clothes.
James Goodrich was the smallest of the three physically, but probably second in criminal importance. It was rumored that if you owned a tavern and wanted some extra revenue to help pay the rent, Goodrich could arrange to have a slot-machine installed if you guaranteed him half the take. It was also rumored that if you installed a machine on your own hook, without Jimmy Goodrich’s permission, cops called and took it away the first night. He was a little thin-faced man with a beak nose and an expression like a weasel with a stomach-ache.