Don’t go out under any circumstances and don’t give anyone any definite information. If Gabby wants to see you he’ll tell you where you can contact him.”
That frightened him again. The thought of walking into Gabby’s clutches didn’t appeal to him at all.
“Tell him to phone me.”
“I thought you wanted to see him.”
“I do, but I’m going to be terribly busy. Now that it’s established that George is dead, the police will be here, and—”
“I thought you wanted to see Gabby.”
“I do, I do, but I have other things.”
“Shall I tell Gabby you’re too busy to see him?”
“No! No! I didn’t mean it that way.”
“It sounded that way.”
“Just put yourself in my position, Lam.”
“I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do that,” I told him, and got up and walked out while he was mopping his forehead.
The typist was batting the keys at the typewriter. She didn’t even look up.
Chapter Fifteen
Mrs. George Tustin Bishop surveyed me wearily.
“You again,” she said.
“That’s right.”
There was a tired half-smile about her lips. “The bad penny.”
I shook my head. “The Boy Scout. I did my good turn yesterday. I’m doing another one today.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
“Purely disinterested, I suppose?” There was a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
“Wrong again.”
She said, “Look, Mr. Lam, I’ve been up all night. I’ve been interrogated over and over again. I’ve had to view my husband’s — body. My physician wanted to give me a hypodermic and put me out of circulation. I told him I’d tough it through. You can’t tell what they’d do while I was asleep — But I’m tired, terribly, terribly tired.”
I said, “I think I can help you. There’s no harm in trying. Your husband wasn’t a mining man at all.”
“Don’t be silly. He had half a dozen mining corporations, all kinds of claims and locations, and—”
“And,” I said, “he used them as a mask so that he could report his income without telling where the income came from.”
“Where did it come from, then?”
“A place in San Francisco they call The Green Door.”
“What’s that?”
“A gambling place.”
“Sit down,” she invited.
I sat down.
She took a seat opposite me.
I said, “Hartley L. Channing is planning on taking over.”
“He’s always seemed very nice,” she said.
“Look, Irene,” I told her, “you’ve been around. You were a strip-teaser and burlesque queen. You should know what the score is by this time.”
“You’ve been losing a little sleep yourself, I see.”
“I’ve been getting around.”
“Who gave you the dirt?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Perhaps I wouldn’t.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “we have other things to talk about. How do you stand financially?”
“My, but you move right in, don’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“And why should I tell you how I’m fixed financially?”
“Because I’m probably the only one who’s going to shoot square with you — if I can do myself some good by doing it — but one thing, Irene, I wouldn’t double-cross you.”
“No,” she said musingly, “I don’t think you would.
What’s your first name?”
“Donald.”
“All right, Donald. When you stand up in front of a bunch of morons and take your clothes off four and five times a night, you get awfully damned tired of it. George came along and fell for me like a ton of bricks. At first I didn’t think there was anything to it on a permanent basis, and then I realized that he really wanted to play for keeps. So I played it that way.
“His wife tried to take him to the cleaners, and I could see that he was terribly afraid of being hooked for alimony. I told him that I wanted to give him some real assurance I wasn’t playing that sort of a game. I suggested a premarital agreement. He liked the idea.”
“Then what?”
“Then he had his attorney draw up an agreement.”
“What was in it?”
“A complete property settlement. He gave me a substantial consideration so that I—”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars as my sole and separate property.”
“And what did you agree in return?”
“That it covered temporary alimony, attorney’s fees, permanent alimony — everything — a complete property settlement.”
“But in the event of his death?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never looked it over from that viewpoint, but as I remember it he had a right to dispose of his property by will any way that he wanted.”
“Did he leave a will?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where would it be if he left it?”
“In the hands of his attorney.”
“Did he have anyone else to leave his property to?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Did he keep on carrying a torch after it became legal?”
“Yes, I saw to that.”
“You must be clever.”
“Don’t make any mistake about me, Donald, I am. Perhaps not the way you think, but I know my way around. I can take my clothes off so it brings them right up out of the chairs and packs them in the aisles. And, believe me, there’s an art to it. If you don’t believe it, just watch some green kid stand up and strip and then watch a real, good, artistic stripper do the same thing.”
“Now,” I said, “we’ll get back to the first question. How are you fixed financially?”
She said, “He took out an insurance policy, and I hung on to my ten thousand dollars.”
“How much of it?”
“Pretty nearly all of it.”
“Your clothes and things?”
“George bought them. George encouraged me to save the ten thousand. He wanted me to have it intact as nearly as possible.”
I said, “By the time the smoke clears away you’ll probably find that your husband’s business affairs were all tangled up in a knot, that the only thing he really had was The Green Door, that The Green Door furnished the money to pay for everything. Did you ever hear of a gambling business going through probate?”
“No.”
“You probably never will.”
“So what?”
I said, “Your husband was very careful to arrange things so that his personal connection with The Green Door couldn’t be proven. He had his affairs in the hands of an accountant who thinks in terms of the first person singular.
“Your husband probably had some money salted away in a safety-deposit box. Perhaps Hartley Channing knows where it is. You may find a safety-deposit box full of cash and you may not, but in view of your past a lot of questions are going to be asked — a whole lot of questions — and that insurance is going to be embarrassing.”
“I know,” she said wearily. “That’s why I don’t want to go to sleep for a while. I want to get the answers to some of those questions.”
I said, “You have a hillside lot here.”
She nodded.
“You’ve been filling in a swale over there with crushed rock.”
“Yes. George wanted to make a tennis court there and he wanted to use a lot of crushed rock so we’d have good drainage underneath.”
“Let’s go take a look at your husband’s things in the garage.”
“Why?”
“I think we might find a gold pan there.”
“Oh, sure. George had a couple of sleeping bags and a gold pan or two, and a mortar and pestle that he used for crushing ore, and some kind of a blowtorch for testing, and things of that sort. He kept them in a closet in the garage, a sort of special locker.”