“Eight o’clock?”
“Yeah. Is that too early?”
“Heavens, yes. She doesn’t get in until ten-forty-five. Come to the apartment at eight-thirty, Donald. I’ll have some coffee on and we can have coffee here. Then we can go to the airport and see if the plane’s on time, have a little breakfast and then meet her when she comes in.”
“You have yourself a breakfast date,” I told her. “You’re sure it’s too late for me to see you tonight?”
“Yes, Donald. Some other night perhaps.”
“Some other night for sure,” I said, and hung up.
I rang Bertha Cool.
“Donald, Bertha,” I said. “What’s new?”
“Where are you?”
“Perkins Hotel, Colinda.”
“I got hold of a night number for Lamont Hawley,” she said, “and I gave him a going over. The guy’s completely flabbergasted. He had absolutely no idea any other detective agency was on the job. He swears he didn’t try to play one against the other, that all of his dealings with us were on the up and up.
“He seemed tremendously concerned and told me I should tell you to watch your step, that there were things in this case he couldn’t understand.”
“That,” I said, “is an understatement.”
“He said that he only got us on the job when he felt that there was, as he expressed it, more to it than met the eye.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I told him plenty,” Bertha said grimly. “I told him that if he knew there was more to it than met the eye, he wasn’t playing fair with us when he got me to fix the fees and that he was going to have to increase the ante.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He never batted an eyelash,” Bertha said. “He told me he’d add another thousand dollars to our fees because he hadn’t been, as he expressed it, entirely frank.”
“With no more trouble than that, he added another thousand bucks to the ante?”
“What the hell do you mean, with no more trouble than that?” Bertha said angrily. “You should have heard what I told the s.o.b. I went to town.”
“Did he ask you how you knew another detective agency was on the job?”
“I told him we’d seen the reports,” Bertha said.
“And naturally he wanted to know how you had seen them?”
“Sure.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that was none of his business, that we didn’t have to explain our methods to anyone; that we were hired to get results, that we’d pass on information but how we got that information was our own affair.”
“Well,” I told her, “I’m supposed to be here in Colinda tonight but confidentially I’m going home and spend the night in my apartment. I want to get a good night’s sleep.”
“You don’t think you’d get it there?”
“I feel there might be interruptions,” I said, “and I want to gain a little time before I have to cope with those interruptions. Also I have an idea I can use a little sleep because it may be the last sleep I’ll get for a while.”
“All right,” Bertha said, “I’m going to bed myself. I was waiting for your call. You’ve been long enough. What the hell have you been doing?”
“Working on the case.”
“I’ll bet you had some cutie helping you,” Bertha said.
“Why, Bertha!” I exclaimed. “How you talk!” and hung up before she could get in another dig.
I left the hotel, drove the car back to my apartment where I had a private garage, put the car in the garage, closed the door, went up and went to bed.
It was one thing to tell Bertha I was going to have a good night’s rest. It was another thing to try and get it.
It was after three o’clock in the morning before I finally got to sleep. The damned case simply didn’t make sense, no matter how I looked at it.
Holgate and some woman had been having a conference when somebody broke in. There must have been two of those somebodies. Holgate was a big, powerful man. He and a woman between them could have subdued any single individual — unless, of course, that man had a gun, and if he had had a gun there wouldn’t have been the evidences of a fight all over the place. Someone would have got shot.
I tossed around in bed, first on one side, then on the other, trying to get to sleep.
I woke up at six feeling just a little more tired than when I had gone to bed and a hell of a lot more frustrated.
Chapter Eight
I showered, shaved, had three cups of strong, black coffee, got in the agency heap and drove to the Perkins Hotel.
There was a message in the box to call Lorraine Robbins at the Miramar Apartments.
I hesitated a moment whether to call her that early but finally decided that as a working girl, she’d be up.
I put through the call and she answered almost instantly.
“Donald?”
“That’s right.”
“Look, Donald, I’m worried about Mr. Holgate.”
“It’s too early to do any worrying yet, Lorraine. Does he have some appointments this morning?”
“Yes, he has some appointments with important customers.”
“Well,” I said, “wait until you see if he keeps those appointments. For all we know, he may be in his apartment sleeping off a convivial evening.”
“He isn’t,” she said. ‘“He isn’t anywhere.”
“What do you mean, anywhere, and how do you know he isn’t in his apartment? Perhaps he isn’t answering the phone.”
“I’ve been up to his apartment, Donald. The bed hasn’t been slept in.”
“How did you get in?”
“The manager knows me. I told him that I had some important papers that I had to deliver and asked if he’d open up the apartment for me.”
“What would you have done if you’d found Holgate with some beautiful babe?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I had a definite feeling he wasn’t with any beautiful babe. I knew what I’d find.”
“What did you find?”
“The bed hadn’t been slept in. No one was there — and of course I wasn’t foolish enough to go into the bedroom while the manager was there. Mr. Holgate has a very fine three-room apartment.”
“Everything seemed to be in order? Any indication the place had been ransacked?”
“No. Everything was in order.”
“All right,” I said, “when I left you last night, did you go right to bed?”
“Why?”
“I want to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know what advice to give you. You are asking me whether you should notify the police. It could be very embarrassing to your boss if the police should be notified and it turned out he was simply on a social engagement.”
“All right, Donald, I’ll be frank with you. There was one place where I thought he might be, one apartment.”
“And you got the young lady up out of—”
“Don’t be silly, I was looking for his car. If he’d been there, his car would have been parked near the apartment house. I went out and covered the place thoroughly. His car wasn’t there.”
“Then what?”
“I called his apartment two or three times during the night and of course got no answer. I’m worried.”
I said, “Wait until those appointments come up. If he doesn’t keep the appointments, and they’re important ones, you’ll know that the police had better be notified.”
“Well,” she said somewhat reluctantly, “the first appointment is at ten o’clock. I don’t like to wait until then but... well, I guess it is the best thing to do.
“Are you going to be around here today, Donald?”
“I’ll be in and out. I’ll keep in touch with you. You’ll be at the office?”