“He will someday,” Sellers said, “but right now I’m interested in finding out whether you have a recording of that conversation.”

  “We have a recording.”

  “Let’s listen.”

  “You can listen,” Patton said, “if you get tough about it. Lam can’t listen. We don’t have to turn the records of our employment over to a competitive agency, particularly when that man figures in the case and—”

  “You’re right,” Sellers said. “I’m going to get tough about it. And I’m beginning to do a little thinking on my own.

  “Donald, you can just toddle along. I know where to get you whenever I want you. Don’t try to pull any fast ones. Don’t try to leave town.”

  Patton’s face lit up. “You mean he’s a suspect?”

  “I mean he’s a suspect,” Sellers said, “and before I get done prowling through your records, there’s just a chance little Pint Size here is going to find himself mixed up in that murder worse than ever.”

  Patton became downright cordial. “If you’ll step right this way, Sergeant,” he said, “I’ll dig out the records of the conversation. For your information, the whole conversation was recorded. That is, we phoned a report on Donald Lam entering the picture and immediately were ordered to discontinue our surveillance and close up the case, to send a final report to Oscar Bowman, care of General Delivery, Colinda and to keep the credit, whatever it might be.…It’s all recorded on tape.”

  Sellers took the cigar out of his mouth. “Get lost, Pint Size,” he said to me. “I’ll get in touch with you when I want you—and that may be pretty damned soon. If you’ve got any business you want to wind up, you’d better wind it up.”

  I took a taxi to the offices of Cool & Lam, went up in the elevator, pushed my way through the big glass door into the reception room, nodded to the girl at the switchboard and said, “Don’t bother to tell Bertha I’m here for a minute. I want to—”

  “But she wanted to know in case you came in, Mr. Lam. She wanted you just as soon as you arrived.”

  “All right,” I said. “Tell her I’m on my way in.”

  I walked through the door marked B. COOL—PRIVATE. Bertha was just hanging up the phone.

  “All right, Donald,” she said. “What happened?”

  I said, “They jerked the rug out from under me. The bottom fell out.”

  “What happened to all this theory of yours?”

  “Out the window. Down the drain,” I said. “It was nice while it lasted.”

  “It’s no good?”

  “No good.”

  “Where does that leave you?”

  “Behind the eight ball.”

  “What’s Sellers doing?”

  “Getting an earful from the Ace High Detective Agency.”

  “An earful or an eyeful?”

  “Both. They have some recorded telephone conversations he’s listening to. Whoever it was hired them got in a panic as soon as it appeared another detective agency was interested and ordered the investigation stopped and the case closed out.”

  “Why?”

  “That,” I said, “is what I’ve got to figure out.”

  “You’ve been figuring out too damned much,” Bertha said. “You got a theory and tried to sell Sellers on it and when the theory busted it leaves you behind the eight ball. If you’d just sat tight and told him it was up to the police to prove their case, it wouldn’t have looked so bad for you.

  “How in hell do they figure you could have picked up Holgate’s body and shoved it into the trunk of the agency automobile?”

  “They figure I might have had an accomplice,” I said. “Those things do happen.”

  “Phooey!” Bertha said. “It would take an accomplice that was strong as an ox and—Who the hell would be so involved as to get mixed up in murder with you?”

  I looked her straight in the eyes. “You.”

  “Me!” Bertha screamed.

  “You,” I said.

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  I said, “I’m talking about police thinking. After they get done manufacturing a case against me and looking for an accomplice that would stand by me in a murder, someone who was sufficiently interested to go all the way in the thing, they’ll start thinking about you.”

  “Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said.

  “They may do just that,” I told her.

  Bertha said, “How do you know this Mrs. Troy isn’t lying? She may—”

  “She is lying,” I said. “They’ve got the party who killed those two people at the bus stop. It wasn’t Holgate at all. Mrs. Troy made a mistaken identification. She didn’t identify a man, she identified a mustache and some western clothes.”

  Bertha’s diamonds glittered as her pudgy fingers started drumming on the top of the desk.

  “Of all the damned cases!” she said.

  That gave me a grin. I said, “This is one that you picked, remember? You wanted one of the nice, quiet, respectable kind of cases. You were tired of the spectacular hairbreadth escape cases that I dreamed up.”

  “Where’s Sellers now?” she asked.

  “At the Ace High.”

  “You get the hell down to your office,” she said, “and you let me talk with Sellers. If he comes messing in here with any of his accomplice theories, I’ll pin his ears back, but good.”

  “Remember,” I told her, “that anything you say may be used against you.”

  I looked back as I went out the door. She was sitting there with her mouth open, so damned mad she was temporarily speechless.

  Elsie Brand was waiting for me in my office. “Did it pan out, Donald?” she asked eagerly.

  I shook my head. “It didn’t pan out,” I said, “and dammit, it should have. Everything would have fitted in nicely but—”

  “Why didn’t it pan out? I thought—”

  “It didn’t pan out because a fellow by the name of Swanton had his conscience bothering him and the minute the police pointed a finger at him, he started confessing all over the place.”

  “You mean to the murder?”

  “No, no. To the hit-and-run. You can cross that off your books now. That’s solved.”

  “Oh, Donald,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Her eyes were sympathetic. She seemed almost on the point of tears.

  I said, “Well, there’s no use wasting sympathy at this point, Elsie. We’ve just got to start thinking constructively.”

  “Can I help?” she asked, her voice showing that she wanted to help, that she desperately wanted to help.

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “Of course, Donald, you asked for the hit-and-run accidents on the evening of the thirteenth and as soon as I told you about that one in the bus stop you grabbed on it, but actually there were two and—”

  I looked at her for a moment, then suddenly jerked her up out of the chair, put my arms around her and started dancing around the office.

  “Donald!” she exclaimed. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Sweetheart,” I said, “I love you. I—”

  “Oh, Donald!”

  “Why in hell didn’t you take a chair and club me over the head when you saw me pulling a bonehead like that?”

  “A bonehead like what?”

  “Taking one case and not asking if there were any more. Quick, Elsie, what’s the other one?”

  “This one was written up as kind of a gag,” she said. “It doesn’t amount to much but it was a hit-and-run and—”

  “Where is it, where is it?” I asked. “Come on, quick. Give.”

  She said, “This, of all things, is the chief of police of Colinda. Someone sideswiped his car, knocked it into the ditch and then kept right on going.”

  “The chief of police of Colinda,” I said. “How nice. What’s his name?”

  “Let’s see,” she said. “It’s a funny name for a police officer. I’ll look it up. It’s more like the name of a movie star. It’s—Wait a minute, it’s Montague A. Dale. You understand, Donald, it wasn’t his private car, it was the city’s car, the one they furnish the chief and—well, it seems that the thing happened so suddenly Chief Dale was busy trying to keep his car from upsetting and didn’t get a good look at the car that went past other than it was a big car, and I believe he said he thought it was a Buick. But he didn’t get the license number, and the city council was inclined to be a little sarcastic about—”

  “Darling,” I said, “never mind any more. Did that happen on the thirteenth?”

  “On the thirteenth,” she said.

  “And at what time?”

  “At five-thirty.”

  I pulled her to me and kissed her. “Elsie,” I said, “you’re a dear. You’re a lifesaver. You’re the sweetest thing ever invented. You’re a combination of molasses, sugar, saccharin and honey. If anybody wants me, tell them to go to hell.”

  I went tearing out of the office.

  13

  I got in touch with Montague Dale just as he was closing up his office for the evening, and he wasn’t in too good a mood.

  “It’ll have to be brief, Lam,” he said when I gave him my card. “I’m late now. I’ve been working in connection with that Holgate case, and my wife is having some friends in for cocktails and dinner. I’m late and you know what happens when a man’s late for an outfit of that sort.

  “Moreover, I understand from the sheriff’s office and the Los Angeles police that you’re mixed up in this Holgate case in a big way and I guess it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say can be used against you. Now, I don’t have any personal hard feelings. Thank heavens, the Holgate case is out of my jurisdiction because it’s beyond the city limits of Colinda. It’s in the hands of the sheriff and the metropolitan police in Los Angeles. On account of the conditions under which the body was found—apparently nobody knows just where the guy was murdered.

  “Now then, what’s on your mind?”

  I said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Holgate case—at least, not directly.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  I said, “Your car was sideswiped a while back and you were run into the ditch and—”

  His face suddenly purpled. He said, “Now look, Lam, I’ve discussed that all I want to, and there’s no need trying to needle me.…”

  “I think I can perhaps help you solve that accident,” I said.

  He stared at me. “You think you can find who did it?”

  “I think you can find who did it,” I said. “I give you a clue.”

  His face suddenly relaxed. He went over to his office desk, picked up the phone, dialed a number and said, “Hello, darling. An emergency has just come up.…Yes, yes, I know.…You carry on. I may be just a little bit late.…All right, honey, that’s the way it goes.”

  He hung up the telephone, gestured toward a chair and said, “Sit down, Lam. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Now tell me about it.”

  I said, “I’m going to put the cards right on the table with you, Chief.”

  “That’s the best way to do. Go ahead.”

  I said, “I have an idea about what happened on the thirteenth of August. I’ve tried to sell that idea to the Los Angeles police. Sergeant Sellers investigated it with me and we thought we’d struck pay dirt. Then the thing blew up in our faces and he’s off me. He’s off the whole theory.”

  “Well, if it blew up in his face, you can’t blame him.”

  I said, “Only one phase of it did. We got hold of the wrong phase. We took the wrong turn in the road.”

  “All right, what’s the right turn in the road?”

  “You are.”

  He said, “Don’t talk in circles, Lam. Put it on the table.”

  I said, “All right. Holgate had an automobile accident on the thirteenth of August. He reported to the insurance company that he had collided with the rear of an automobile driven by Vivian Deshler who lives at the Miramar Apartments and that the accident was his fault. The front end of his car was caved in, not so bad that he couldn’t drive it, but nevertheless caved in, and the injuries to Vivian Deshler’s car were rather slight.”

  Chief Dale’s eyes narrowed. “Go on,” he said.

  I said, “Vivian Deshler said she had sustained a whiplash injury and made a claim against the insurance company. From the way the claim was prepared the insurance company felt there was a professional hand somewhere in the background.”

  “A shrewd lawyer?”

  “Could have been.”

  “Go on, Lam.”

  “Well, the funny thing is that there were no witnesses to the accident, that the front end of Holgate’s automobile was pretty badly caved in, but the back of Vivian Deshler’s car, which was a light car and should have been the one that sustained the most damage, was only slightly injured.

  “There were some other things about the accident that began to look a little peculiar. Then I found out that Holgate’s car apparently was in good condition at four-thirty on the afternoon of the thirteenth; yet the accident was supposed to have taken place about three-thirty. I guess there’s no question that Vivian Deshler’s automobile was damaged by three-thirty in the afternoon. Doris Ashley, her friend, saw the car at that time and the tail end had been crumpled—not too bad but enough to notice.”

  “Go on,” Dale said.

  I said, “The records show that nobody said anything about any accident taking place at the location given in Colinda until the next day.

  “Now then, under all the circumstances it occurred to me that perhaps Holgate had been mixed up in a hit-and-run accident that happened sometime in the evening, that he was in a quandary as to what to do; that he told his girlfriend, Vivian Deshler, about it, and Vivian Deshler said, ‘Well, my car was damaged this afternoon. Why don’t we claim that the damage to your car was done when it hit my car and report it as an automobile accident?’

  “‘That would account for the damages to your car. You could take it right in and have it fixed. You could report an accident to the insurance company. They’d have an appraiser come and take a look at your car and then the claim agent would come and talk with me and I’d tell him my story. That would account for the damages to your car and let you out of the hit-and-run deal.’”

  A smile began to spread across the chief’s face. “You got anything that’ll support this except theory?” he asked.

  I said, “I think we can get quite a bit. If Holgate’s car wasn’t smashed at four-thirty in the afternoon, if Vivian Deshler’s car was smashed at three-thirty, that’s pretty damned good evidence that the report of the accident was a fake.”

  “Would Holgate get murdered on account of it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think that Holgate contemplated the fact that his girlfriend, Vivian Deshler, was going to put in a whopping big claim against the insurance company for a whiplash injury. I think that the minute that happened, Holgate realized he was involved in a criminal conspiracy, in obtaining money under false pretenses, that he could go to prison, and that he’d got himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. I think perhaps Holgate began to get cold feet and wanted to get out.

  “I think that when Holgate realized the insurance company wasn’t satisfied with the explanation he had made about how the accident occurred, he became terribly apprehensive, and since a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, the people who were mixed in it with him—”

  “You mean Vivian Deshler murdered him in order to keep him from blabbing?”

  “I don’t know who murdered him,” I said. “The murder may have no connection with the hit-and-run accident. On the other hand, it may all be tied in together.

  “What I’m doing is tying up loose ends, and what you’re interested in is getting this hit-and-run accident solved.”

  “Am I interested in it!” he said. “That’s the understatement of the year. That damned hit-and-run may cost me my job if I can’t solve it.”

  “Mind telling me about it?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “I was driving along the street going home when I saw this car coming behind me and I didn’t like the way it was driving. It didn’t occur to me that the man was drunk but I thought it was reckless driving. I pulled off to the side of the road and just as the man came up I held out my arm for him to stop. I was going to flag him down, take a look at his license, throw a scare into him and maybe give him a ticket.

  “Instead of doing what he should have done, he swerved the car directly toward me, smashed into the left rear of my car, pushed me clean over into the ditch. Then his car glanced off and away he went.

  “I was shoved off the road so far I thought I was going over. I was fighting the steering wheel for a matter of seconds. My left rear tire had blown out under the impact. I couldn’t chase him and under the circumstances I didn’t get any kind of a description.

  “It’s one of those things. No one could have secured a description, but because I’m chief of police and because I’m always yelling about keeping your presence of mind and getting a description of any car that acts suspicious—well, I don’t need to draw a lot of diagrams for you. Now that’s the situation.”

  “All right,” I said. “You’ve been anxious to solve it. You’ve got evidence.”

  “You’re damned right I’ve got evidence,” he said.

  “How much evidence?”

  “Quite a bit. When the car hit me it smashed the right headlight. We have part of the lens. Some of the paint came off and we have a piece of grill—the stuff was from a Buick. If we could ever have found the damned car we could have made a case all right. But we couldn’t find the car.”

  “You covered repair shops?”

  “Of course I covered repair shops. What the hell! I had every repair shop that did any work on a car, particularly a Buick of that model, make a detailed report to the police.”

  “All right,” I said, “then the accident was investigated.”

  “That’s right.”

  I said, “Let’s see if you have a report on work that was done on Holgate’s automobile.”

  He studied my face for a minute, then began to grin. “Lam,” he said, “there’s just a chance—just a chance, mind you, that you’re a lifesaver.