“Actually, I didn’t, Perry. I had rented a car and the only place that I could park it where I could be sure of watching the front door of the house was in a position where I had to park with my car pointed away from town.
“While I was sitting there trying to find some good excuse for ringing the doorbell so I could see who came to the door without betraying myself, a taxicab swung around the corner, pulled up in front of the house and stopped. The front door opened. A man whom I suppose was Steven Barlow and this blonde I’d been shadowing came out on the porch. She kissed him good-by, hurried down and jumped in the cab and the cab took off uptown. The man stood in the doorway watching the cab until it was out of sight. If I had tried to make a U-turn and follow, it would have been a dead giveaway, and since you had told me that if she was visiting Steven Barlow to forget about it, I just decided to call it a day.”
Mason nodded. “That’s right. I’m glad you played it that way.”
“But,” Drake said, “I ran into her again about eleven o’clock. She was in one of the casinos playing roulette and having quite a run of luck. By that time she’d changed into a clinging cocktail gown.”
“Did she spot you this time?” Mason asked.
“Not me,” Drake said. “I kept at the other end of the casino, but I was where I could watch her out of the corner of my eye. I was at one of the crap tables, and, believe me, Perry, that’s the way to win money.”
“What is?”
“Standing and watching somebody. I stood in one position and just kept putting a stack of five silver dollars down and leaving them there until somebody would either rake them in or pay me money. After a while, I bought chips and got to putting down twenty-dollar chips.”
“Did anyone notice you were spotting the girl?”
“No one. But here’s a laugh for you. Some of them thought I had a new system of playing craps by putting the money down without looking at the table and keeping my head turned, so pretty quick half of the people at the table were putting money down and keeping their heads turned away.”
“Did it work for them?”
“Not worth a damn,” Drake said. “I had all the luck at the table.”
“But you think this girl had spotted you when she ran out and jumped in the cab?”
“I’m hanged if I know, Perry. She’s the impulsive sort. She does everything on impulse. Now, last night when she got in that car and drove out of the parking lot I’m satisfied she had some other destination in mind. But about the time she got to Hollywood she suddenly had a different idea. She took a look at her wristwatch, spun the car into a turn on La Brea and started crowding traffic for all she was worth.”
“Then you think her visit to Barlow was impromptu?”
Drake nodded. “Who was this babe, by the way, Perry?”
“Glamis Barlow. She’s the daughter of—”
“Glamis!” Drake exclaimed. “Good heavens! Why didn’t I realize it!”
“You have something on her?” Mason asked.
“Lots of things,” Drake said. “I got this story from a source I can trust. It’s been kept hushed up and not a breath of it got in the papers. But here’s what happened — I should have taken a tumble when you told me to look up Steven A. Barlow in Las Vegas, but, of course, I didn’t have this information at that time. It was lying on my desk here.
“Here’s the story and it’s one for the book: Nancy Adair was living in Greenwich Village in New York as a freelance, uninhibited artist. She was taking a fling at that time at story writing as well as her art work. I guess her stories weren’t bad at that. She was making a living.
“If you knew Greenwich Village at that time, you get the atmosphere. There was a young writer there, John Yerman Hassell, who was going to write the great American novel and was going to take the world apart. He was about seven or eight years older than Nancy. He was from Texas, had an uncle down there who died and left him acres of dust.
“Hassell and Nancy had an affair and Nancy became pregnant. She wanted Hassell to marry her and Hassell, I guess, was a little disagreeable about the whole situation. He pointed out to her that they were both emancipated, that they didn’t believe in the conventions, that they were living their own lives, that they were geniuses, that, as such, they must be uninhibited, that Nancy had got herself into trouble and she could damn well get herself out of trouble.”
“So what happened?”
“Nancy stuck around for about three months, then suddenly disappeared. And I mean she disappeared completely. She disappeared so completely that later on, when oil was developed on Hassell’s property and he became a multimillionaire, when he had a change of heart and looked back on his affair with Nancy and realized that he really was in love with her, when he spent thousands of dollars on private detectives, he couldn’t even get a trace of her. He put ads in the papers, did everything he could.”
“Why the sudden change of heart?” Mason asked.
“I guess he’d learned more about women in the meantime,” Drake said. “This Nancy is quite a character.”
“So I’ve heard,” Mason said.
“Well, to get back to the story,” Drake said, “Nancy took steps to cover up. She changed her name, came to Los Angeles, had her child and a few weeks later met Steve Barlow.
“Barlow lived in San Francisco. He was rather unconventional himself and Nancy appealed to him. They were married and moved up north someplace. Barlow was speculating in real estate and he turned a nice deal up there and he and Nancy went to live in Portland, Oregon. He made another deal in some timberland there and they moved to Bend, Oregon. After a while they split up. Later on, Nancy married Gilman.”
“How much of all this does Glamis know?” Mason asked.
“Not a bit of it,” Drake said. “She thinks Steve Barlow is her real father and I guess Steve is tremendously attached to her. I didn’t know he was living in Las Vegas or I’d have put two and two together. The last I heard of him he was in Bend, Oregon, but I do know that when they split up the divorce decree provided that Steve Barlow had the right to visit his daughter at all reasonable and seasonable times.”
“Now, what about Hassell?” Mason asked.
“Six years ago Hassell died. He had never married. He left an estate running into big money and he left a cool three million after all taxes to any person who could prove he or she was the child that had been born out of wedlock to Nancy Adair, formerly of New York, and he fixed the approximate date of birth and tied it all up in the will with legal strings.
“Nancy had washed her hands of him when he had refused to stand by her when she got into trouble, but the papers were full of the strange provision in the will, so Nancy quietly went to the heirs and told them she was going to file a claim on behalf of Glamis.
“The heirs were a brother and sister, and there was lots of money in the estate. They told Nancy to hold off while they made a check. And I guess they really made a check. That’s where I got my information. One of the investigators who was employed by the brother and sister told my operative the whole story a couple of years ago, and when my operative found I wanted a check on Nancy Gilman he remembered about it and went back and got the details.
“It seems that Nancy was able to show rent receipts showing she’d been living at the apartment in Greenwich Village which was mentioned in Hassell’s will. She couldn’t prove anything by a birth certificate because she’d used an assumed name when she had the child, but there was something a lot better than that. It seems that there was such a marked family resemblance that as soon as the brother and sister saw Glamis they decided she was it. They offered a million and a half for settlement and finally made a settlement of around two million bucks after all taxes had been paid. There was a proviso in the settlement that the matter should be kept secret so that Glamis wouldn’t be given the stigma of being illegitimate. By that time, Glamis was growing up and Nancy wanted her to have all the breaks.”