“You wait here,” said Freddie and left the room. Peel picked himself up from the floor. Willie looked at him impassively. “Sorry I lost my temper,” he said. “We got a job to do and it makes me mad when somebody tries to make it tough.”
Peel made no reply. He crossed to the cot, sat down, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at his face. Then he heard steps out in the barn and Freddie reentered. He was followed by Charlton Temple.
17
“Mr. Peel,” said Temple smoothly, “how are you?”
“Lousy,” snapped Peel.
“Still irascible, eh?” Temple shook his head. “All this could have been avoided if you’d played ball with me this morning.”
He crossed to the chair and seated himself, crossed his legs. “Well, shall we get on with it?”
“The man I pointed out to you is Seymour Case,” Peel said sullenly.
“Of course he is,” declared Temple. “But that isn’t the point I want to discuss right now.” He sighed lightly. “Shall we begin at the beginning?”
“What beginning?”
“This morning you said that the girl who called herself Susan Sawyer and her accomplice, one David Corey, shook you down for five hundred dollars. That wasn’t the truth, was it?”
“Who says it wasn’t?”
“Please, Mr. Peel, I trust you won’t be unreasonable. You work for a private detective agency. If you did call on the beautiful Miss Sawyer it wasn’t because of romantic reasons. Was it, Mr. Peel?”
“I’m only an employee,” snapped Peel. “Ask Otis Beagle. He’s the man I work for.”
“A scoundrel, Mr. Peel, an unmitigated scoundrel. You cannot believe a word he says. That’s why I’m asking you.” He hesitated. “I’m asking you nice.”
“I’m not in a nice mood,” Peel said. “Your strong-arm boys robbed me of every nickel I had in the world.”
Temple looked at Willie and Freddie. “Is that true?”
“What’s wrong with that?” demanded Freddie.
“Is it customary?”
“It is,” replied Willie firmly. “And before we go any further, you haven’t paid us yet. We’ve done the job and we want our money.”
Temple shook his head. “I’ll pay you when we get through with the job.”
“We done the job,” said Willie. “We snatched the guy for you and here he is. He’s your responsibility now.”
Temple looked from Willie to Freddie. “I see.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out his wallet. Holding it high he extracted two hundred-dollar bills. He handed one each to Willie and Freddie.
“Okay, mister,” said Willie, “he’s all yours.”
Temple rose in alarm. “You’re not going to leave me here with him alone?”
“The deal was to snatch him for you, that’s all,” said Willie. “Anything else we do is extra.”
“Mannie will hear of this,” Temple said bitterly.
“Mannie’s a businessman,” retorted Freddie. “He said it was a small, easy snatch job, nothing else. That’s what we agreed to do and we done it.”
“But you can’t quit now. I... I don’t carry a revolver. Besides” — Temple frowned — “I... I think I may need you to make him talk.”
“Now, that,” said Willie, “is a horse with other feathers. A snatch job is one thing, rough stuff is another. Fifty bucks extra apiece, and we make him talk. We make him say anything you want him to say.”
“You work too cheap,” cried Peel.
Temple extracted two fifty-dollar bills and paid them out to Willie and Freddie. Freddie promptly slapped Peel with the palm of his hand, not a savage blow, but hard enough to sting.
“Tell the man what he wants to know,” Freddie said.
Willie brushed Freddie aside and hit Peel a hard blow in the stomach with his fist. “Just a sample,” he said.
Peel, gasping in agony, cried, “Ask the questions.”
Temple nodded pleasantly. “That’s better. Now — why did you call on Susan Sawyer in the first place?”
“Beagle’s idea,” Peel said quickly. “He joined the Lonely Hearts Club and answered Susan’s ad in the club paper.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Temple, frowning. “Beagle’s not the type of man who would have to join a Lonely Hearts Club...”
“But he did!” exclaimed Peel.
Temple gestured to the two thugs. Peel leaped back. “Wait a minute,” he cried desperately. “I’ll tell you the whole thing. Beagle joined the club, but not to... to meet women. The agency hadn’t had a client in a month and Beagle... well, Beagle joined the club for that reason. He... he thought he could get a client.”
“How? How could he get a client just by joining a club? He’d have to know that someone wanted a detective.”
“No, he wouldn’t. You don’t know Beagle. He... he makes clients. He figured that people who joined outfits like the Lonely Hearts Club had guilty consciences, then he’d begin to work on them — make anonymous phone calls, shadow them and let them see that they were being shadowed. Stuff like that.”
“Hey,” exclaimed Willie, “that’s interesting. This Beagle must be quite a lad.”
“He is,” said Charlton Temple. But he still frowned. “But that still doesn’t explain how he happened to stumble onto Susan Sawyer. There are hundreds of ads in that club paper, Heart Throbs. Unless he wrote to every single advertiser he’d hardly stumble onto Susan’s ad—”
“Have you read her ad?” asked Peel. “ ‘Beautiful girl, worth $50,000, wants to meet exciting man.’ An ad like that was a natural for Beagle. It sounded phony to him and Beagle was looking for a phony.”
“Mmm,” said Temple. “You have something there.” He nodded. “Susan answered his letter and then you went to see her. Why you?”
“That’s the way Beagle operates. He does the scheming and I do the dirty work. I was supposed to soften up Susan and then Beagle would follow through and sell her a bill of goods. Only... well, it didn’t work. I’d hardly got in to see Susan when Dave Corey broke in. He clipped me one and when I came to, well, he was on the floor, dead.”
“His body was found on Mulholland Drive!”
“Sure, after I left, the... the murderer took him out there and dumped him.” Peel looked steadily at Charlton Temple. “Isn’t that what you did?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” cried Temple. “I did not kill him. Would I be here asking you questions if I had?”
“Would you have gone to Beagles office, if you hadn’t?” Peel shot at him. “In fact, how would you ever have heard of Otis Beagle?”
Temple was suddenly disconcerted. “I... I found his name in the phone directory.”
“There are twenty detectives listed in the phone directory. You didn’t pick Beagle by accident...”
“Now, wait a minute,” exclaimed Temple. “I’m asking the questions, not you.”
“All right, I’ll give you the answers. Otis Beagle didn’t get an answer from Susan Sawyer. He got it from Linda Meadows.”
Temple crossed to the cot and seated himself. For a moment he looked steadily at Peel, then he nodded slowly.
“Go ahead.”
“That’s all. Susan Sawyer was using her roommate’s name in her little racket.” He paused. “Or was she?”
“This David Corey,” said Temple. “He had an apartment on the floor above that of the two girls?”
“Sure,” said Peel. “He had to be handy... Isn’t that the way you used to work it?”
Temple smiled thinly. “Something like that. Since you brought up the name of Linda Meadows, what do you know about her?”
“I know she was Susan’s roommate and I know she’s the secretary of Seymour Case, who uses the name of Thaddeus Smallwood.”