He hung up. “He’s getting right on it.”
“Decent of you not to let the help down,” sneered Joe Peel.
“A man’s got to keep up a front.”
“Sure, sure. You owe me a week’s pay right now, but I’ll bet you’ve paid your club dues.”
“If it’s any satisfaction to you, I haven’t. As a matter of fact...” Beagle hesitated, then shrugged. “Pinky’s got my IOU right now for a little matter of six hundred.”
“He trust you for six hundred?”
“He’d trust me for six thousand.” Beagle coughed. “I hope.” Then he drew a deep breath. “But the club won’t. I’ve got to get some money by the end of the week. That thousand dollars—”
“What thousand?”
“The thousand from Linda Meadows. I’d counted on that...”
The phone rang and he scooped it up. “Yes? Pinky, old man... What...?” He listened. “You’re sure...? All right, Pinky, just as I thought Thanks — I’ll leave right now.”
He slammed the receiver back on the hook and looked at Joe Peel angrily. “What’re you trying to pull, Joe? There wasn’t any dead man...”
Joe stared at Beagle. “I know a dead man when I see one.”
“If he was dead he got well awfully quick. They got a call from the Hillcrest Towers all right. Anonymous. But when they got there the apartment was empty. False alarm.”
“That’s screwy, Otis. I tell you Dave Corey was dead when I left — and it couldn’t have been more than a minute before the cops got in.”
“A minute’s long enough for a man to pick himself up and walk out.”
“Dave Corey didn’t pick himself up.”
“All I know is what Pinky told me. A false alarm. That’s good enough for me. Pinky’s waiting for me now. They need a fourth for bridge. I’ve got to run.”
Swinging his cane, Otis Beagle left the office. Joe Peel scowled at the door a moment, then his eyes flitted to the other side of the desk. Beagle had forgotten to take along the sheet of paper on which he’d been typing when Peel had come in. He reached across and scooped up the letter.
He read, aloud:
“Dear Pen Paclass="underline" — Your description in Heart Throbs is entrancing. All my life I have dreamed of a girl like you...”
Angrily, Peel crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket. He got up and headed for the door, but before he reached it the door swung open and a girl came into the office.
A blonde. A honey blonde about five feet four and a figure... Joe Peels mouth fell open and his tongue came out and moistened his lips.
He said weakly, “Hello.”
She smiled, and Joe’s temperature went up about three degrees.
“Hello. This is a detective agency, isn’t it?”
“Just the best detective agency in town,” drooled Joe.
“And you, ah, locate missing persons?”
Joe pointed to the lettering on the door. “Know what a beagle is, miss? A hunting dog, the best hunting dog that ever had four legs and a tail. It can find, uh, anything. That’s us, the Beagle Detective Agency...”
“Oh, is that why you call it the Beagle Agency? I thought Beagle might have been your name.”
“Uh-uh, my name’s Peel, Joe Peel.” Peel swallowed hard. “As a matter of fact, I do have a man here named Beagle, Otis Beagle. I took him into the agency just because of his name. But don’t worry about him, he doesn’t do much around here. I do all the work...”
He stepped quickly around the desk and brought forward Beagle’s swivel chair. He pulled it up near his own chair. “Won’t you have a seat?”
“Thank you.” The girl seated herself, revealing legs that caused Joe Peel to blink. “I really don’t know if I can afford your rates—”
“You can afford it,” Peel said earnestly.
“How much would you charge to find a missing person?”
“That depends. You can find some people in a half hour, some you can’t find in six months. How long has this person been missing?”
“A week.”
“Well, then lets say it’ll take a week to find him.”
“It’s not a him.”
Joe brightened. “That’s better. It’s easier to find females. Mmm, a week at, say fifty dollars a day—”
“Oh, I couldn’t afford that.”
“How much can you afford?”
“A... a hundred dollars, at the most.”
“A hundred...” Joe swallowed hard. “For you, miss, a hundred dollars—”
“And you guarantee to find her? I mean, if you don’t, I get my money back?”
Joe groaned inwardly. He thought of his last week’s pay and he thought of the dollar and forty cents in his pocket. And he also thought of the phrase she’d just said, “Money back.”
“Yes, we find her or your money back.”
“Very well.” The client fished in her alligator skin purse and brought out two twenties and a ten. “Here’s fifty dollars as a... what do you call it, retainer?”
“Retainer.” Peel took the fifty dollars and stowed them away.
“Now, if you’ll give me a receipt...”
Peel grimaced, then reached across the desk and picked up a letterhead. He wrote down the date and added aloud, “Received $50.00 on account from...?” He looked inquiringly at the girl.
“Linda Meadows.”
Peel scribbled the “L” before he reacted. “Linda Meadows!”
She spelled it. “M-e-a-d-o-w-s, Meadows.”
Peel stared at the girl, then at the sheet of paper. Finally he wrote, saying the words aloud, “Linda Meadows.”
The girl who gave her name as Linda Meadows continued, “...for locating Susan Sawyer. An additional $50.00 is to be paid when assignment is completed satisfactorily, but if the Beagle Detective Agency does not locate Susan Sawyer within seven days from date, the $50.00 retainer is to be refunded.”
Joe wrote it all out. “Sure you’re not a lawyer?”
“I once worked in a lawyer’s office,” she replied. “We had a lot of business from people who didn’t write things out. Will you sign that now, please?”
Joe scrawled his name on the document and Linda Meadows took it from him, folded it and put it away in her purse.
“Now,” she said brightly, “you will want the details.”
“Oh, sure,” Joe Peel said. “Tell me all about Linda Meadows.”
“You mean Susan Sawyer. I’m Linda Meadows. Susan was my roommate. That is, we shared an apartment at the Hillcrest Towers.”
The thing to do, of course, was to give her back the fifty dollars. But Peel had worked too long for Otis Beagle. Beagle never gave back anything.
Peel said, “What did this Susan Sawyer do for a living?”
“She received money from home.”
“Where was her home?”
Linda Meadows frowned. “This may sound strange, but I don’t know. Iowa, but the town I couldn’t tell you. Susan was, well, a little on the mysterious side. I suppose she got mail, but I never saw it. The mail came after I went to work. She never talked much about her past.”
“How long did you live together?”
“Six months, almost seven.”
“How did you meet her?”
Linda hesitated. “Do I have to tell you?”
“It might make my job easier.”
“It was at a... a sort of a dance. We had lunch the next day and then she came over to my apartment one evening — if you can call the place where I lived then an apartment. She told me of her place at the Hillcrest Towers and said that the rent was a little high for one person, but for two... well, my share came to about what I was paying for the dump. So I moved in with her. We got along well, but we didn’t double-date or anything like that.”
“She had boy friends?”