Shills cant cash chips, p.19
Shills Can't Cash Chips,
p.19
“All right,” he said. “I’ve fallen for it once. I’ll fall for it twice. I’m going back up.”
“Better take me with you,” I said.
He shook his head. “You may need a witness.”
He thought that over.
“Two witnesses,” Elsie said.
“You take shorthand?” Dale asked.
She nodded.
“All right, come on,” he said.
He unlocked the handcuff that was holding me to the steering wheel, hesitated a moment, then snapped the handcuff back on my wrist. “Remember,” he said, “you’re still under arrest. I’m investigating this damned story but I’m not buying it. Not yet. I’m window shopping.”
We started toward the entrance to the apartment house.
I stalled things along as much as I could but eventually we got into the elevator and got up to the sixth floor.
As we walked down the corridor I could hear sounds of banging and thumping.
A woman screamed.
“What’s that?” Chief Dale asked.
I made my last stall. “It came from that apartment over there,” I said.
“I thought it came from farther down the line,” Dale said.
“No, I’m quite certain it was this apartment,” I said, and caught Elsie Brand’s eye.
“It came from this one right here,” she said.
Dale hesitated a moment, then went over and banged on the door of the apartment.
There was no answer.
He banged again.
After a moment a woman who had some kind of a robe hastily thrown around her shoulders, and who seemed to be completely nude except for that, opened the door a crack. “Well,” she snapped, “what is it?”
“Police,” Dale said. “We’re investigating a disturbance.”
“There’s no disturbance here.”
“Didn’t you scream?”
“I certainly did not.”
Dale said, “I beg your—”
The door was slammed in his face.
Dale looked at me and said, “I’m beginning to know how the Los Angeles officers feel about you, Lam. You knew damned well those sounds didn’t come from that apartment. What are you stalling for?”
I said, “I could have been mistaken.”
“And you could have been playing games,” Dale said.
He strode on down to 519 and pressed the mother-of-pearl button. Nothing happened.
After a moment he banged on the door with his knuckles, a hard, peremptory police knock. “Open up!” he said.
There was a moment of silence, then the door was jerked open.
Bertha Cool, her face flushed, said, “Well, come on in! Don’t stand there in the hallway gawking.”
Vivian Deshler was standing over in a corner sobbing hysterically. Her skirt had been ripped completely off. She was standing there in bra and panties, and the panties were embroidered with fancy mottos: “THAT’S TOO FAR—NOW STOP—I’LL SLAP YOU—WELL MAYBE—YES! YES! YES!”
“Who are you?” Dale asked Bertha Cool.
“I’m Bertha Cool, Donald Lam’s partner,” she said, “and this little bitch is going to make a confession to you about being mixed up with a man by the name of Dudley Bedford in a bank robbery out in North Hollywood. They got about forty thousand dollars in cash and it’s somewhere in the apartment here. Where is it, dearie?”
Vivian Deshler put her hands in front of her eyes. “You stop!” she said.
Bertha Cool moved toward her. “Where is it, dearie?”
“In the suitcase in the closet!” she screamed. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare!”
“Look in the suitcase in the closet,” Bertha Cool said matter-of-factly, and walked over to the closet, took out a coat and tossed it to Vivian Deshler.
“Stick this around you in case you feel self-conscious,” she said.
Dale looked at Bertha, looked at Vivian Deshler, looked at me. “And who murdered Holgate?” he asked.
“Do you need to ask?” I said. “You’ve seen those panties before, you know. She could get plenty of information out of Maxton—the cocktail party and all the rest of the background she needed.”
Dale said to Bertha Cool, “Can you keep her from trying to escape?”
“I can keep her from so much as flapping an eyelash,” Bertha said. “She tries to pull out on me and I’ll slap her to sleep.”
“You’re deputized,” Chief Dale barked. “I’m going to take a look in that suitcase.”
He was back in two minutes with the suitcase opened and looking at the money all neatly arranged in packages.
It was at that moment a latchkey sounded in the door of the apartment.
Vivian Deshler sucked in a deep breath to scream a warning.
Bertha Cool slapped her in the stomach and knocked the wind out of her. She doubled up like an accordion.
The door clicked back and a smiling, debonair Dudley Bedford came marching into the room.
He took one look at what was happening and went for his gun.
Dale beat him to the punch. “You’re under arrest,” he snapped. “Get your hands up.”
Bedford slowly elevated his hands.
“Turn around, face the wall,” Dale ordered. “Now stick your hands out behind you.”
Bedford did as he was instructed.
Dale came over, unlocked the handcuffs from my wrists, put them on Bedford’s wrists, looked at me, grinned, looked at his watch, said to Bertha, “You’re deputized as a matron. Get some clothes on that prisoner and get her up to the station house. I’m in a hurry. I want to get a complete confession out of these people and I want to have it by nine-thirty.”
Bertha said, “Get some clothes out of the closet, dearie, and you’d better take those ornamental panties off. Where you’re going, nobody gives a damn about smart mottos embroidered on fannies.”
15
It was ten-fifteen when Chief Dale emerged from the council meeting, strode over to the telephone, picked it up and said, “Get me police headquarters in Los Angeles. I want to talk with Sergeant Frank Sellers.”
He looked at me and winked.
It took about two minutes for the call to get through, then Dale said, “Hello, Sellers?
“This is Montague Dale. I’m the chief of police at Colinda. I have Donald Lam. I understand that there’s an all points bulletin out for him.”
Dale listened for a while and grinned.
After a moment he said, “Well, before you stick your neck out, Sergeant, you probably should know that there wasn’t any automobile accident with Holgate. That thing was all cooked up. Holgate sideswiped a police car on the evening of the thirteenth when he was drunk, and wanted to get out from under. A man by the name of Bedford, who was friendly with Holgate, learned what had happened and advised Holgate to fake an accident with a friend of his, a Vivian Deshler, so that he could account for the broken front of his automobile. Vivian was also a friend of Maxton, Holgate’s partner.
“It looked like a good deal to Holgate, who didn’t know what he was getting into, but Vivian Deshler, who had previously made a couple of claims against insurance companies on whiplash injuries, tried to shake the insurance company down for thirty grand.
“Her car had been cracked earlier in the day when she lost control of it and backed into an ornamental lighting pole in North Hollywood. At the time she was on her way with her boyfriend, Dudley Bedford, to rob a bank in North Hollywood. They cleaned it up to the tune of more than forty grand.
“Thanks to the cooperation of Donald Lam, who gave me the leads which cracked the case, I have just recovered the money and obtained complete confessions from all concerned.
“I don’t think Holgate ever did know that he was being suckered into a bank robbery, but he knew that the girl was making a claim for whiplash injuries against the insurance company and that scared the hell out of him. When Lam showed up to make an affidavit that he had seen the accident, he knew, of course, that Lam was lying and figured that Lam had been procured by Bedford and that Lam’s affidavit put Holgate in the position of suborning perjury.
“So Holgate decided to make a complete confession of the whole business. He went up to his office, turned on the electric typewriter, telephoned for Lam to come out there and started tapping out a written statement.
“In the meantime, Dudley Bedford had found out what was going on. As soon as his detective agency found out Donald Lam wasn’t an ex-convict who had been released from San Quentin, they knew the fat was in the fire—so Bedford and Vivian Deshler went out to Holgate’s place of business, where they found him tapping out a confession.
“There was a hell of a fight and they knocked Holgate out. Then they read the confession and confiscated it. They dragged Holgate out to their car.
“They looked around for Lam’s affidavit and found it. They did a little searching to see if Holgate had made any other written statements, then they went away. The girl drove Holgate’s car. Bedford drove his car with the unconscious Holgate in it. They tied up Holgate hand and foot, then Bedford left him with the girl and Bedford drove back to the office to retrieve the report from his detective agency which had spilled out of the girl’s broken purse and which she realized she had neglected to recover.
“Bedford found Donald Lam in the office going through things. Lam ducked out of the window and made his escape.
“They knew then they were in over their neckties. There was only one thing for them to do and that was to kill Holgate, plant his body in Donald Lam’s car and frame Lam for the murder.
“I guess you can’t be blamed for falling for it, Sergeant, because it was a pretty good frame-up, but Lam came to me and gave me a lot of help in buttoning the thing up.
“Vivian Deshler, of course, wanted to be in the clear on the murder so she took a plane back to Salt Lake City, boarded a transcontinental plane at Salt Lake and pretended she had just arrived from New York, thereby giving herself an alibi of sorts.
“I have complete confessions.
“Doris Ashley, who knew that Vivian Deshler’s car had been damaged as early as three-thirty, having seen the car right after the completion of the bank robbery, was a troublesome witness. They had a detective agency shadow her to see if she suspected anything and was going to the police, and they had Dudley Bedford get intimate with her so he could see she didn’t suspect anything.
“Now, I have Donald Lam here and if you insist on holding him I’ll hold him but…”
Chief Dale listened for about two or three minutes.
Then as the receiver ceased making squawking noises, Dale laughed and said, “Well, of course, that’s your hard luck, Sergeant. But it just happens that I could use a little good luck. I was in a little trouble here with the city council.…No, it’s nothing to worry about. In fact it’s all fixed up now. I’ve just been retained at a handsome increase in salary and I’ve been given to understand that I can have the five new officers I’ve been asking for, the two new patrol cars I want, and just about anything else I need. And I can keep the ten grand reward offered on the bank job. I’m doing all right.
“Shall I tell Donald Lam anything for you?”
Again Dale listened and a grin wrapped his face from ear to ear. “Okay,” he said, and hung up.
He turned to me, extended his hand, gripped mine and pumped it up and down.
“The sergeant had a message for me?” I asked.
“Two words,” he said. “Drop dead.”
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