“I could smack the bumper of an automobile with my handbag, spin away from the car, fall to the ground, roll over and just about any spectator would swear the automobile had crashed into me.”
“Even if the automobile wasn’t moving?”
“I specialized in moving automobiles,” she said. “I’d get in a crosswalk. I’d park my car so that it was a little difficult to see around it and about one car out of ten would cut around my car and go through the crosswalk. I’d size up the car, and naturally I only picked the more expensive makes.”
“And then?”
“Then,” she said, “I’d have a friend standing by who’d phone for an ambulance before anyone thought to telephone for the police. The ambulance service gets there, picks me up and whisks me away. My friend sees to it that the accident is reported. My address is given. An officer usually comes to check my statement.
“If the party who hits me stops, and there’s a report of the accident, I can usually make a deal with an insurance company. If the party who hits me drives away and makes a hit-and-run out of it, we trace the party and get a whale of a settlement because he’s so vulnerable. He’s mixed up in a hit-and-run and he has to pay through the nose. I use different names each time.”
“And Colton Essex knew all about this?”
“I told you he was on the other side of one of my cases. He smelled a pretty big rat, and by the time we got done I had to take a much smaller settlement than is usually the case. He’s a good lawyer.”
“So then, what happened this time?”
“On this particular night,” she said, “my telephone rang. It was Essex. He told me to be at a certain intersection within ten minutes and to put on my act. He said there’d be a settlement of ten grand and I could keep half of it. You couldn’t ask for anything better than that.”
“Did he tell you what car to pick?”
“Bless you, yes. He told me to pick his car.”
“His car?” I exclaimed.
“That’s right. He said he’d blink the headlights just before he came to the intersection. I was to put on a good act for the benefit of any bystanders, and he would make a clean getaway, but he warned me not to stage the accident until he blinked his headlights. He wanted a clear field for a getaway.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.
She said, “It was funny, wasn’t it?”
“And you were there, and he blinked his headlights?” I asked.
“Bless you,” she said, “he went through that intersection ten times before the coast was clear and he blinked his headlights and I strutted my stuff and he speeded up to get away from there; went screaming around the corner, and that was it.”
“What about the dress you were wearing?”
“He came to the house afterwards, took some pliers and tore a little piece out of the dress.”
“And then?” I asked.
“Then he told me to wait and that, in the course of time, a man would call on me to make a settlement.
“About forty-eight hours later, he called me and said that the man who was coming to call on me would be pretty clever; that he was rather young, slight in build, but quick-thinking and brainy and I wasn’t to try and embellish anything, just act dumb. He said you’d put on some sort of an act, but there’d be ten grand in it and I could keep half of it.”
“And the other half?”
“I turned it over to the attorney.”
I sat there thinking that over.
“Now then,” she said, “what are you going to do? Are you going to get rough with me about that five grand? I’m telling you, it’s the first decent job I’ve had for six months. These damned insurance companies have modus operandi files on people who fake injuries and you have to keep thinking up something new all the time. In fact, it’s getting so that I very seldom press charges any more against people who stop.”
“What happens when that occurs?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, “they stop and ask me how badly I’m hurt, and my friend says he’s called an ambulance and they give me a card and tell me they’re insured and to get in touch with them; that they’re reporting the accident to their insurance company, and ask me for my name. Under those circumstances, I usually give them a phony name and address, and they never hear any more about it.
“The people who try to get away, the hit-and-run people — and I’m pretty damned good at sizing up the people who have been drinking — in fact, sometimes my friends help me pick the sucker.”
“How?”
“Oh, he goes into a club or saloon, finds the people who are drinking pretty heavy; goes out to the parking station, gets the license number of their automobile and the address from the registration slip so that he knows which direction the guy will be heading when he leaves the bar, and I plant myself at a nearby intersection.
“Of course, that way we miss lots of them, but when we get them, we get them good. You know how it is, a man has been in a bar drinking for an hour and a half, comes out, gets in his car and hits a pedestrian at a cross-walk. He stops if he has to, but if there’s any chance for a getaway he steps on it and is long gone.
“Of course, we pick the right times when there isn’t much traffic and it’s a virtual invitation to an alcoholic driver to step on it and get out of the way.”
“How many jobs have you done for Essex?” I asked.
“Bless your soul, this is the only one, and it was a nice clean job.”
“Who’s the girl who was supposed to have been driving the car, Phyllis Dawson or Eldon? Do you know anything about her?”
“Not a thing. Of course, she wasn’t driving any car that I had anything to do with. Colton Essex was driving that car. It was his own car.”
“Did you dent it up any?”
“No, I just put my hand on the fender, did a double spin, a flip and a roll.”
“Your friend was in on this?”
“No, Essex specifically told me to handle it alone. He said to let the bystanders call the ambulance and if I reported it to the police, I was to report that I was badly shaken up.
“Of course,” she went on, “I’ve got all the symptoms down pat. The symptoms of concussion, spinal injury, nerve damage, lack of co-ordination, terrific headaches, backaches, double vision; all that sort of thing.”
“You’ve been coached on the proper symptoms?” I asked.
“And how,” she said.
I got up and started pacing the floor. “This is the damnedest thing,” I told her.
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Now, you look like a nice boy, Donald, and you were awfully nice to me — what are you going to do about all this?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Going to turn me in?”
“No,” I told her, “not now, anyway. I want to find out what’s back of it.”
Her eyes glittered. “I’ll bet you’re thinking what I am.”
“What?”
“There’s money back of it. You take a big-time lawyer like Colton Essex, and he isn’t going to get mixed up in monkey business for peanuts. You take a man who’s willing to face a hit-and-run rap, pay ten grand, and I only have to kick back half of it, and he’s heeled.
“Of course, where I fell down was in letting myself get found. The stipulation was that I was to be hard to find and if anybody located me, I was on my own. Nobody would admit anything, and of course, with my record, I’d wind up behind bars. Nobody would take my word on a stack of Bibles. I guess Essex figured that but, even so, there’s money involved here. I can smell it.
“When you’ve been in the racket the way I have, Donald, you get so you can just smell money, and I’d like to make a deal with you.”
I shook my head. “No deal.”
Her face showed disappointment. “After the way I’ve out the cards on the table with you, that’s not very fair.”