Bertha glowered at me and was just starting to say something when Elsie Brand fitted her latchkey to the door, opened it and then seemed surprised as she saw Bertha and me there.
“Oh, hello! I’m not interrupting, am I?”
Bertha said angrily, “Damn it, do we always have to hold our conferences here in the outer office? What the hell do we have a private office for?”
Elsie Brand said, “Sorry,” in an impersonal tone of voice and crossed over to her typewriter.
Bertha turned to me, “We got interrupted,” she said, sudden anger in her eyes. “Where the hell did you sleep last night? Frank Sellers said you...”
She broke off as the outer door opened.
The man who entered was a broad-shouldered competent individual who at the moment looked as awkwardly self-conscious as a man at the ribbon counter of a department store. “Mrs. Cool?” he asked.
Bertha nodded.
“Mr. Lam?”
I got to my feet.
“My name,” he said, “is Ellery Crail.”
Bertha flashed me a glance, said hastily, “Come in. We were just on the point of going out — that’s how you happened to catch us in the outer office. But we’ll postpone it.”
“I’m sorry to interfere,” Crail apologized, “but I’m exceedingly busy and...”
“Come in,” Bertha said, “come right in.”
We filed into the private office. Bertha seated herself behind the desk, indicated a chair for me on her right, seated Crail in the big comfortable clients’ chair.
Crail cleared his throat. “In a way,” he said, “I’m not consulting you in your professional capacity.”
“No?” Bertha asked, her personality withdrawing itself behind a hard shell of incipient hostility. “Then what do you want?”
Crail said, “You were, I believe, a witness to an automobile accident yesterday.”
“Oh, that!” Bertha said.
“For reasons of my own,” Crail went on, “I would like very much to have that case settled out of court, have the matter compromised and dropped.”
Bertha pricked up her ears. Shrewd calculation glittered in her eyes. “Just how,” she asked, “did you propose to go about it?”
Crail said, “I don’t want to approach the attorneys on either side, but it occurred to me that you, being a professional woman, might be in a position to arrange for a cash settlement so that the entire matter would be dropped.”
“May I ask what’s your interest in it?” I inquired.
Crail said, “That’s a question I’d prefer not to answer.”
I said, “One of the parties to the accident wrote down the license numbers of the cars that were near by.”
Crail changed position in the big chair. “Then you know the answer.”
“What,” Bertha demanded, “would be in it for me — for us?”
“I could,” Crail said, “arrange to give you five hundred dollars if you could settle the matter for twenty-five hundred. That would make a total expenditure on my part of three thousand dollars.”
“In other words,” Bertha said eagerly, “you’ll pay three thousand dollars to settle the case, and anything we can get between the amount of the settlement and three thousand dollars will...”
“I didn’t say that,” Crail interrupted with dignity. “I said that I would be willing to pay you five hundred dollars to effect a settlement up to an amount of twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Suppose we get a settlement for two thousand dollars?”
“Your fee would be five hundred.”
“The same as if we settled for twenty-five hundred?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t give us very much of an incentive to get a lower settlement.”
“Exactly,” Crail said. “I am making my proposition in the manner in which I have outlined it for a very definite reason. I don’t want you to try and increase your own compensation at the expense of delaying a settlement. I want this thing cleaned up at once.”
Bertha said, “Now let’s get this straight. All that you want us to do is settle this lawsuit over the automobile accident? That’s absolutely everything?”
“That’s all, yes. What else would there be?”
“I’m just getting it straight,” Bertha said, “so that it won’t interfere with any other work that we might have here in the office.”
“I see no reason why it should, Mrs. Cool. My proposition is very simple.”
Bertha said, “We’d want a retainer. At least a couple of hundred in advance.”
Crail reached in his pocket for his checkbook, unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen, then thought better of it, put the cap back on the pen, the pen back in his pocket, folded the checkbook, drew out a wallet and counted out two hundred dollars in tens and twenties.
Bertha scribbled a receipt which Crail folded, tucked in his wallet and then got to his feet smiling inclusively. He shook hands with Bertha and me and went out.
Bertha’s eyes glittered up into mine. “Well, lover, it’s working out all right. Two hundred bucks here and two hundred bucks there, and the first thing you know, we’ll have a real case out of it.”
I said, “Why do you suppose he wants the case settled, Bertha?”
Bertha’s eyebrows came up. “Why for the simple reason that he doesn’t want anyone to know his wife was following Stanberry.”
I said, “Somehow, in Mrs. Crail’s position, I’d hardly confide in a husband.”
“Well, what you’d do, and what she’s done, are two different things.”
“Perhaps, but I’m beginning to wonder if this case doesn’t have another angle we haven’t considered.”
Bertha said irritably, “That’s the devil of it with you, Donald. You keep arguing against established facts. Now you’re going out with Bertha and get a nice lunch so that you won’t get all run down like you were yesterday night.”
“I had a late breakfast,” I said.
“The hell you did! Say, where were you last night? I...”
The telephone made sound. Bertha glared at me for a minute, then snatched up the receiver.
I heard Elsie Brand’s voice saying, “Esther Witson is here.”
“Oh my God!” Bertha said. “I forgot she was coming. Send her in.”
Bertha slammed back the receiver and said to me, “Now if we could get two hundred dollars out of her, we’d really be getting somewhere.”
13
Esther Witson came barging in, her face filled with toothful smiles. A couple of steps behind her, a pudgy man about two-thirds bald beamed amiably at us behind horned-rimmed glasses. He had bluish-green eyes, an appearance of beefy solidarity and a manner which was consciously dynamic. It was as though he’d been reading books on how to impress people and had remembered just about all he had read. A short red mustache, ragged and stiff as a bottle brush, separated his nose from a thick upper lip. His thick fingers clutched the handle of a brief case.
“My lawyer, Mr. Mysgart, John Carver Mysgart. He’s handled my legal interests for years,” Esther Witson said.
Mysgart bowed so that the light from Bertha’s window reflected from the shiny expanse of his bald dome.
“This is Mrs. Cool,” Esther Witson went on, “and this is Mr. Lam.”
Mysgart shook hands. He was, he announced, very pleased to meet us both.
“Won’t you be seated?” Bertha asked.
Esther Witson said, “They’ve served papers on me. I brought my lawyer along because I wanted him to explain the legal aspects of the situation.”
She turned to Mysgart and beamed at him.
Mysgart cleared his throat. The amiable expression instantly left his face as he marshaled his features into the judicial. He said, in tones of deep solemnity, “This is a legal outrage, Mrs. Cool. It is unfortunate that the legal profession is besmirched by such a firm as Cosgate & Glimson.”