I said, “I didn’t give you as a character reference to anybody that I know of. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m busy. We have a living to make and we can’t make it just sitting around listening to people making threats.”
I walked out of Bertha Cool’s office, hurried across the reception room down to my private office and opened the door.
Elsie Brand jerked her thumb toward the inner office and said, “In there.” And then added, “Boy-oh-boy! This one is a knockout!”
I handed Elsie a key.
“What’s this?” she said.
“The key to the men’s washroom down the hall,” I said. “Take her down there, get inside and bolt the door.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why down there? Why not to the ladies’ room? Why not—?”
“Down there,” I said. “Get started.”
I opened the door to the inner office and walked in.
Hazel Downer was sitting with her knees crossed, facing the door. The pose had been carefully studied with just the proper amount of cheesecake and then perhaps because she’d been afraid I wouldn’t take sufficient notice she had added a little to the visible nylon. It looked great.
I said, “Hello, Hazel. I’m Donald Lam and you’re in a jam. This is Elsie Brand, my secretary. She’s taking you down the hall. Go with her and wait.”
I turned to Elsie. “I’ll give you my code knock on the door.”
“Come along, Hazel,” Elsie said.
“Where is this place?” Hazel asked, somewhat suspiciously.
“It’s the washroom,” Elsie said.
“Well, what do you know!” Hazel said, and got up off the chair, holding her chest out, and accompanied Elsie out of the office without looking back to see if I was watching her hips.
She didn’t have to. She was dressed so it would have been an impossibility not to have watched.
I sat down in my office swivel chair and started doodling on paper.
It was about a minute and a half before the door was jerked open by Sergeant Sellers. Bertha was looking apprehensively over his shoulder.
“Where’s your man?” Sellers asked.
“What man?”
“Your client.”
“Oh,” I said, “it didn’t amount to anything. It was a guy with a small collection job.”
“Donald,” Bertha said, “you can’t turn down all those small jobs. I’ve told you time and time again that there’s money in those small things.”
“Not in this one,” I said. “The bill was only a hundred and twenty-five dollars and he didn’t know where the debtor was living. We’d have to find the debtor first and then we’d have to collect.”
“Well, we could have at least looked into it,” Bertha said. “You can get those things on a fifty percent commission and—”
“He told me twenty-five was his limit, so I told him to beat it.”
Bertha heaved a sigh. “Can you imagine the way these bastards want to chisel these days?”
Sellers looked around the office. “Where’s your secretary?”
I jerked my head. “Down the hall, I guess. Why? You want her?”
“No,” Sellers said, “I’m just checking.”
He jerked the soggy cigar out of his mouth and dumped it in my ash tray. I let it stay there because the odor of moist tobacco served somewhat to kill the perfume which had emanated from Hazel Downer. Sellers’ nose was too paralyzed with the cigar odor for him to notice, but I thought Bertha had given a suspicious sniff when Sellers had first jerked the door open.
“All right, Frank,” Bertha Cool said. “You know we won’t try to cut any corners.”
“I know you won’t,” Sellers said, “but I’m not so sure about Pint Size here.”
I said, “Look, Sergeant, if there’s fifty grand in it, why don’t you encourage her to come and see us and see what she has to say? We might be able to help you.”
“You might and again you might not,” Sellers said. “If you ever tied up with her she’d be your client and you’d be representing her interests.”
“All right. What are her interests?” I asked.
“To get away with the fifty G’s.”
I shook my head and said, “Not if it’s hot. We could help her make a deal with the police. Perhaps the armored car outfit would give us five G’s as a reward. Then you’d be off the spot and she could be in the clear.”
Sellers said, “When I need your help I’ll ask for it.”
“All right, keep your shirt on,” I told him.
“What was an armored truck doing with a hundred one-thousand dollar bills?” I asked.
Sellers said, “The stuff had been ordered by the Merchants’ Manufacturers and Seamans’ National. They tell us the order came from a depositor and won’t go any further than that. We think it was a big bookmaking concern, but we can’t prove it. Anyhow, the money was in the truck, and now it’s gone... You got any ideas?”
“None you’d want,” I said. “Or are you asking for help now?”
“Go to hell,” Sellers said, and walked out.
Bertha waited until the door had closed, then said, “Don’t try to handle Sergeant Sellers that way, Donald. You deliberately made him mad.”
“So what?” I said. “Here we are fooling around with fifty grand in money and Sergeant Sellers is in a spot. Suppose we can solve his problem, recover fifty G’s for the insurance company and cut ourselves a piece of cake.”
Bertha’s eyes glittered greedily for a minute, then she shook her head apprehensively. “We can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’d nail us to the cross, that’s why.”
“For what?”
“For compounding a felony, being an accessory after the fact, and—”
“You’re going to tell me about the law?” I asked.
“You’re damn right,” she said. “I’m telling you about the law.”
I said, “I know a little law myself, Bertha. Suppose Sellers is barking up the wrong tree. Suppose this man Baxley had just been trying to date this jane, but suppose she knows something about him. Suppose if we treated her nice she could give us a clue?”
Bertha thought it over, then shook her head, but this time the shake wasn’t quite so emphatic.
“Sergeant Sellers can’t tell us what to do and what not to do,” I said. “He’s got a theory, that’s all. What has he got to tie it to? Nothing except a telephone number.”
“With the whole damn Police Department back of him,” Bertha said. “When you get to tangling with those boys they can be tough.”
“I don’t intend to tangle with them,” I said.
“Well, what do you intend to do?”
“Run my own business in my own way,” I told her.
Bertha slammed out of the office.
I waited two minutes, then opened the door and stepped out to the hall.
Sergeant Sellers was standing by the elevators.
“What’s the matter, Sergeant?” I asked. “The elevators on strike?”
“No,” he said, “I’m just keeping an eye on you, wise guy. There’s a gleam in your eye I don’t like. Where you headed?”
“Down to the john,” I said, jangling my keys. “You want to come?”
“Go to hell,” he told me.
I walked down the corridor. Sergeant Sellers followed me with his eyes.
I pretended to be inserting a key in the door while I tapped my code signal on the panels. I heard the bolt move on the inside. The door opened a bit and Elsie Brand’s frightened voice said, “Donald?”
I said, “Okay, baby, stand back,” and pushed my way into the room, closed the door behind me and shot the bolt.