Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Rave Reviews for

  Erle Stanley GARDNER!

  “The best selling author of the century…a master storyteller.”

  —New York Times

  “Gardner is humorous, astute, curious, inventive—who can top him? No one has yet.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Erle Stanley Gardner is probably the most widely read of all…authors…His success…undoubtedly lies in the real-life quality of his characters and their problems…”

  —The Atlantic

  “A remarkable discovery…fans will rejoice at another dose of Gardner’s unexcelled mastery of pace and an unexpected new taste of his duo’s cyanide chemistry.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One of the best selling writers of all time, and certainly one of the best-selling mystery authors ever.”

  —Thrilling Detective

  “A treat that no mystery fan will want to miss.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “Zing, zest and zow are the Gardner hallmark. He will keep you reading at a gallop until The End.”

  —Dorothy B. Hughes, Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster

  I went to the door, opened it wide and was about to enter the room when I heard steps in the outer office.

  I ran to the window and looked out. There was a car parked just behind mine. I couldn’t see it too clearly but it was a big shiny car.

  I pushed aside the curtains on the open window, eased myself over the sill and dropped to the ground. I started walking toward my car, then thought better of it and sprinted.

  I jumped in the car, started the motor and eased into motion as noiselessly as possible.

  Someone yelled.

  I could see a man’s frame silhouetted against the light in the room, standing in the open window from which I had made my departure.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled. “Come back here! Stop where you are!”

  I stepped on the throttle.

  I had a blurred glimpse of the man climbing through the window and running across the lawn toward his car. Then I skidded into a turn at the end of the driveway, hit the paved road and pushed down the foot throttle.

  I had gone about half a mile before I picked up the headlights in my rearview mirror.

  I gave the car everything it had…

  OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS BY ERLE STANLEY GARDNER:

  THE COUNT OF 9

  THE KNIFE SLIPPED

  TOP OF THE HEAP

  TURN ON THE HEAT

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

  JOYLAND by Stephen King

  THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain

  BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller

  THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal

  QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  SINNER MAN by Lawrence Block

  SNATCH by Gregory Mcdonald

  THE LAST STAND by Mickey Spillane

  UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH by Charles Willeford

  A BLOODY BUSINESS by Dylan Struzan

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY by Joyce Carol Oates

  BLOOD SUGAR by Daniel Kraus

  DOUBLE FEATURE by Donald E. Westlake

  ARE SNAKES NECESSARY? by Brian de Palma and Susan Lehman

  LEAVE US A REVIEW

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  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-145)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: October 2020

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  Copyright © 1961 by Erle Stanley Gardner

  Cover painting copyright © 2020 by Laurel Blechman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-1-78565-6361

  E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-6378

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  SHILLS CAN’T CASH CHIPS

  1

  I walked across the reception room of COOL & LAM, INVESTIGATORS, opened the door of my private office. Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up with an expression I had come to know.

  “What is it, Elsie?” I asked. “Good or bad?”

  “What?”

  “What you wanted to tell me.”

  “How did you know I had something to tell you?”

  “The expression on your face.”

  “Don’t I have any secrets from you?” she asked.

  I smiled at her. She became flustered and said, “If you had time, Donald, to step down the hall with me, I…I wanted to show you something.”

  “I have the time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We left my office, walked across the reception room, down the hall, and Elsie led the way to the storage closets, took a key, unlocked the door of closet number eight and switched on the light.

  These storage closets were in a dead windowless space in the building, and our closet had been used as a catchall for old junk that should have been thrown away. Now it had been neatly segregated into shelves, and the shelves were lined with scrap-books.

  “What the heck!” I said.

  Elsie was looking at me, her eyes filled with pride. “I’ve been wanting to surprise you,” she said.

  “You’ve surprised me. Now tell me about it.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve been having me cut out all of those crime clippings and it’s been a job trying to find some way of filing them.”

  “I didn’t want you to file them,” I said, “just to keep them handy so I could put my hand on the more recent ones.”

  “Well,” she said, “you can always find anything you want now. For instance, here’s Volume A. That is crimes of violence. Numbers one to one hundred are murders for motives of jealousy. Numbers one hundred to two hundred are murders committed in connection with armed robberies. There are ten divisions in all.

  “Now I’ve got a cross-index system over here of weapons. Murders with guns, murders with knives, murders with poison.

  “Then this next volume, Volume B, is the robbery book. Volume C is larceny. D is—”

  Bertha Cool’s harsh, rasping voice behind us said, “What in hell goes on here?”

  Elsie Brand gave a little gasp.

  I turned to face my indignant partner, her eyes diamond-hard, glittering, her face dark with anger.

  “My reference library,” I said.

  “What in hell do you want with a reference library?”

  “I want to refer to it.”

  Bertha snorted. “They told me you and Elsie were lolligagging down the hall. I wondered what you two were up to.…”

  Bertha grabbed one of the volumes, looked through it and said to Elsie, “So that’s what you’ve been doing with all of your time!”

  Elsie started to say something but I moved in between her and Bertha Cool. “That’s what she’s been doing with her spare time,” I said. “And in case you’ve forgotten it, having the information available on outstanding, unsolved crimes has enabled us to cooperate with the police and get us out of a couple of rather tight spots.”

  “You’re always getting in tight spots,” Bertha flared. “Then you squeak out by the skin of your eyeteeth and—”

  “And leave our bank account in better shape than it was when we started,” I told her, getting mad. “Now if you have any complaints, go back to your office, make them in the form of a written memo and hand them to Elsie. We’ll file them in our complaint department, which, in case you are interested, is the wastebasket.”

  “Now Donald,” Bertha said, “don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re getting mad.”

  “Getting mad!” I said. “I am mad.”

  “Now Donald, don’t be difficult. I was looking for you for a particular reason and I was impatient when no one answered the phone in your office.”

  “Well, Elsie was showing me the new filing system.�
�

  Bertha said, “It looks like hell when I have a client in my office and want to bring in my partner to introduce him and can’t get an answer on the telephone. No secretary, no partner, no nothing—so I come to hunt you up. Here’s a client sitting in the office, impatient as hell, and you folks smooching down here in the storage closet.”

  “We weren’t smooching,” I said.

  “You could have been,” Bertha said, “for all I knew. The way you two look at each other—”

  “Now look,” I told Bertha, “if you have a client who’s impatiently waiting in your office, we’d better go take care of him. If you want to comment about our personal relations, you can put that in the form of a memo which—”

  “All right, all right,” Bertha said irritably. “Come on.…Elsie, you close up this damned closet. Donald, let’s go talk with our client. This is the kind of work we want. This is respectable work.”

  Bertha turned and started waddling down the corridor, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of bulldog tenacity, hair-trigger temper, greediness and shrewd observation; an explosive combination of characteristics that were rendered somewhat less obnoxious by an underlying loyalty when the chips were down.

  At that, our partnership would probably have split up long ago if it hadn’t been so profitable. Money in the bank represented the most persuasive argument in Bertha’s life, and when it came to a showdown where the dissolution of the partnership was threatened, Bertha could always manage to control her irascible temper.

  As I caught up with Bertha she said, “This is an insurance company. They’ve had their eye on us for a while. It’s the kind of business that there’s money in, Donald, not this wild-eyed sharpshooting you’ve been doing.”

  “We’ve made money out of sharpshooting,” I reminded her. “Lots of it.”

  “Too damned much,” Bertha said. “It scares me. We take too many risks. This job Hawley has for us is just the first of many.”

  “All right,” I said. “Who’s Hawley?”

  Bertha paused in front of the door to the outer office, briefing me momentarily before she turned the knob.

  “Lamont Hawley,” she said, “is head of the Claims Department of Consolidated Interinsurance. He’ll tell you all about it. Now Donald, be nice to him. This is the sort of stuff we need.”

  “What’s in it for us?” I asked.

  “A hundred a day and expenses, with a guarantee of ten days as a minimum, and we furnish whatever operatives are required to cover the job.”

  “How many operatives can we furnish at that price?”

  “One,” she said, her eyes boring into mine. “You. And be damned certain that that’s all we need!”

  Bertha jerked the door open and barged across the reception room and opened the door of her private office.

  The man who got up as we entered was tall, sparebuilt, shrewd-eyed and long-featured. He was a typical detail man in the higher brackets. He could coordinate facts, figures and people and come up with the answers.

  “My partner, Donald Lam,” Bertha Cool said. “Donald, this is Lamont Hawley, Consolidated Interinsurance.”

  Hawley shook hands. His long fingers wrapped around my hand. His lip smile was a meaningless concession to the conventions. His eyes didn’t smile.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Lam,” he said.

  “Good, bad or indifferent?”

  “Good. Very good, indeed. You have created quite an impression. I had expected a…a larger man.”

  “Don’t bother to beat around the bush,” Bertha Cool said, heaving her bulk into the squeaky swivel chair behind her desk. “Everybody gets fooled by Donald. He’s young and little but the bastard has brains.

  “Now, I’ve told Donald what the deal is and it’s okay. I handle the financial end of the business. He supervises the outdoor work. You go ahead and tell Donald about the case.”

  Hawley kept looking me over as though a little reluctant to accept me at face value, but at length seated himself, took a filing jacket from his briefcase, put the filing jacket on his knee and then didn’t refer to it but rattled off the facts and figures from memory.

  “Carter J. Holgate, a real estate sharpshooter,” he said. “A money-maker with a horror of being stuck for damages in an accident, carries unlimited public liability insurance with us. On August thirteenth, was driving north in the city of Colinda, when he came to a traffic signal.

  “He has admitted to us that he was tired and that he may have been inattentive. He had been following a light car through the city. They approached a traffic intersection at Seventh and Main Streets. The signal light changed to red, the car ahead of Holgate stopped, Holgate says very abruptly, but we can’t establish this by any other evidence.

  “Holgate smashed into the rear of the car ahead. That car was driven by Vivian Deshler, Apartment six-nineteen Miramar Apartments, Colinda, California; age, twenty-six, blond, five feet four; weight, a hundred and twelve; apparently a divorcee living on a lump-sum property alimony settlement that is about used up. Her car was a fast sports job, but low and light.

  “She claims a whiplash injury to the neck.

  “Of course you know a whiplash injury is an insurance company’s nightmare. There’s no question on earth but what they can be exceedingly serious and that the symptoms can be delayed for some time. On the other hand, there’s virtually no way of checking. A person says, I’ve got a headache, how are you going to prove she doesn’t have a headache? You can’t do it.

  “There’s no question at all about the liability of our insured. He was road-weary and tells us confidentially he’d hoped he could get around the string of traffic ahead. He’d speeded up to make it around, found out he couldn’t, had swung back into line going much faster than the traffic and just failed to see the red light at the intersection ahead. His reaction time was slowed down so that he crashed into the rear end of the car in front of him, and of course it would have to be a light car.”

  “All right,” I said, “where do we come in on this?”

  “In injuries of this sort,” Hawley said, “we try to find out something about the background of the injured person. We like to find out who they are, where they came from, what they’re doing, and we are particularly concerned with trying to find out how their day-to-day activities fit into the picture of serious injuries.

  “In other words, a young, attractive woman gets on the stand and shows lots of nylon to the jury. She smiles at them and then begins to describe her symptoms. Her voice shows that she’s suffering, her smile indicates she’s bravely bearing up as she faces the prospects of ruined life. She tells about the headaches, about the periods of sleeplessness, about her increasing nervousness, and all the rest of it.

  “Now, quite obviously, if we can take her on cross-examination and say, ‘Well now, let’s take a typical day in your life, Miss Deshler. Let’s take September nineteenth of the present year, for instance. You complain of sleeplessness, yet you didn’t bring in the newspaper and milk on your doorstep until ten-fifteen. Then at eleven-ten you left your apartment and went to the beach. You were surf swimming during the afternoon. In the evening you and your escort went to a dance. You drove from the dance up on the ocean highway, parked where you could look out over the ocean and were there for two hours and a half. Then your escort drove you home, went into your apartment and was there for an hour and forty minutes.’

  “Then we show motion pictures of her in a tight-fitting bathing suit running along the beach, turning her head and laughing invitingly at her escort. We show her in the surf. We show her on the beach displaying her figure to advantage.

  “By the time we get done showing the motion pictures and cross-examining the young woman, the jurors feel her life hasn’t been unduly circumscribed. Her activities haven’t been interfered with too greatly.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said, “do you want me to start dogging this girl around, getting motion pictures of her when she goes to the beach, finding out what time she opens the apartment door to get the newspaper, watching her boyfriend—”

  “No, no,” Hawley interrupted. “That’s highly specialized work. We have our own methods of getting that information and we have our own trick cameras with telephoto lenses. Also, Mr. Lam, you want to remember the way I approached the subject.

  “Notice that I say that on cross-examination we say, ‘Now, Miss Deshler, let’s take a typical day of your life,’ and then we pull out the list of things that happened on that particular day.