“Don’t the police and the detective agencies work together?”

  I said, “The answer to that is best contained in a one-syllable word of unmistakable meaning. It’s no!”

  “But this raises the devil with all of my plans. You’re sure this woman was the same Roberta Fenn whose pictures I showed you?”

  “Yes.”

  Hale said, “I wonder where she is.”

  “The police are probably asking themselves that same question.”

  “Do you think you could find her again, Lam?”

  “It’s possible.”

  His face lit up. “I mean in advance of the police?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How would you go about doing it?”

  “I can’t tell just yet.”

  He waited by the car tracks. He was nervous, kept glancing at his watch.

  A streetcar came along. We swung aboard, and I knew Hale had reached a decision on something by the time we took our seats. He kept looking for an opportunity to break it to me, but I didn’t give him any conversational opening for anything. I simply sat looking out the window.

  We craned our necks as we went by the Gulfpride Apartments. Quite a few cars were still in front of the place. A little group of men was standing on the sidewalk, heads close together, talking.

  That gave Hale the opportunity he wanted. He sucked in a deep breath, said, “Lam, I’m going back to New York. I’m going to leave you in charge here.”

  I said, “You’d better get a room, hole up, and get some sleep. You can’t keep commuting back and forth to New York all the time.”

  “I’m afraid I wouldn’t rest much.”

  I said, “That apartment Bertha Cool just vacated is wide open. You can move in there and go to sleep. It won’t be like a hotel. There won’t be anyone to disturb you. You can simply lock your door and pass out.”

  I could see that the idea appealed to him.

  “What’s more,” I said, “you’ll find that apartment interesting for another reason. Roberta Fenn lived there for several months. She was then going under the name of Edna Cutler.”

  That brought him bolt upright. His eyes, red-rimmed, slightly bloodshot from lack of sleep, were wide with startled interest. “Is that how you found her?”

  “I got some clues there, yes.”

  He seemed a bit worried. “It’s uncanny how you find things out. Lam. You’re a regular owl.”

  I laughed at that.

  “Perhaps you know a lot more about Miss Fenn than you’ve told me?”

  “You wanted me to find her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I found her. We try to give results, and don’t bother our clients reporting methods, or talking about clues.”

  He settled back once more in the car seat. “You’re a very unusual young man. I don’t see how you found out so much in so short a time.”

  I said, “We get off here and walk the rest of the way. It’ll take five minutes.”

  Hale was very much interested in the furniture, and the old-fashioned, high-ceilinged rooms. He walked out onto the porch, looked around at the plants, looked up and down the street, came back, tried the bedspring with the palm of his hand, and said, “Very, very nice. I think I’ll be able to rest here. And so Roberta Fenn lived here—very, very interesting.”

  I told him he’d better try to get some sleep, left him there, went out, and hunted up a telephone booth where I’d be assured of privacy.

  It took me half an hour dealing over the phone with a detective agency in Little Rock to find out that 935 Turpitz Building, the address given in Edna Cutler’s letter to Roberta Fenn, had been a mailing address only. It was a big office where a girl rented out desk space to small businessmen, did stenographic work, and forwarded mail.

  She would forward mail to Edna Cutler, but the actual address of her client was confidential—very much of a secret.

  I told the Little Rock man the agency would send him a check, and then hunted up a commercial typing agency. I asked the girl in charge, “Could you make a stencil for me and run off a thousand letters on a mimeograph machine?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “Got a stenographer I can dictate a sales letter to?”

  The girl smiled at me, picked up her pencil. “The managing department now becomes the clerical unit. You can start whenever you’re ready.”

  I said, “I’m ready. Here we go.”

  I started dictating:

  Dear Madam,

  A close personal friend of yours says that you have pretty legs. You want them to look pretty, and ice want them to look pretty.

  You can’t get the sheer hosiery which you could formerly buy—not if you try to buy in the United States.

  It is quite possible, however, that exclusive arrangements could be made to supply you with sheer silk hosiery for the duration of the war. At the time of Pearl Harbor a Japanese ship put into a Mexican port and we were able to obtain its cargo of silk stockings originally destined for the United States. This hosiery would be shipped to you duty prepaid from Mexico City. All you’ll have to do will be to open the package, put on the stockings, and wear them for thirty days. If, at the end of those thirty days, you are entirely satisfied, make a remittance at the same price you were paying for hosiery a year ago. If any of the hose should develop runs or show signs of defective workmanship or of material, you need only to return such defective hose for a complete credit.

  Simply place your name and address, the size, style, and color of sheer silk stocking you prefer to wear on the enclosed blank, put it in the enclosed, stamped, addressed envelope, drop it in the mail. You are not obligated in any way.

  The girl looked up. “That all?”

  “That’s all,” I said, “except that it will be signed Silk-wear Importation Company, and I’ll have to work out a color chart and order blank to enclose.”

  “How many of these do you want?”

  “A thousand. After you have the stencil made, I’d like to see one or two samples before we go ahead with the full thousand letters.”

  She looked up at me, studying me. “All right. Now, what’s the racket?”

  I just stared at her, saying nothing.

  “Look—there was an embargo on silk a long time before Pearl Harbor, and when did stockings ever come from Japan?”

  I grinned. “If the people who get these letters are as smart as you are, I’m out of luck. I’m a private detective.

  This is a stall. I’m trying to smoke someone out from behind a blind address.”

  She looked me up and down. I could see the puzzled surprise in her eyes change to respect. She said, “Okay, you almost took me to the cleaners. So you’re a detective?”

  “Yes, and don’t tell me I don’t look like one. I’m getting tired of hearing that.”

  “It’s a business asset,” she announced. “You should be proud of it. All right, what’s the real dope on these? How many of them do you really want?”

  “Just two. Don’t make too good a job of it. Smear them up a little as though out of a thousand copies these people were getting the last two. You can address the envelopes. The first is Edna Cutler, 935 Turpitz Building, Little Rock, Arkansas, and the other is Bertha Louise Cool, Drexel Building, Los Angeles.”

  She laughed, swung the typewriter from the side compartment of her desk, and announced, “It’s a good gag. Come back in half an hour, and I’ll have ‘em ready.”

  She fed the stencil sheet into her typewriter and started playing a tune on the keyboard.

  I told her I’d be back, went out, bought an early afternoon paper, and sat down at the lunch counter to read the account of the murder.

  As yet, the newspapers didn’t have all the details, but they had enough to hit the high spots. Paul G. Nostrander, a popular young attorney, had been found dead in the apartment of Roberta Fenn. Roberta Fenn was missing. Employed in a secretarial position in a downtown bank, she had failed to show up for work. An examination of her apartment convinced police that if she had fled, she had taken no clothes with her, not even her facial creams, toothbrush, or even her purse. The purse was lying unopened on the dresser in the bedroom. Not only did it contain her money, but her keys as well. Police reasoned, therefore, that she was entirely without funds, without means of re-entering her own apartment. They expected either to find her body sometime within the next twenty-four hours, or that she would voluntarily surrender to the police. Police inclined to two theories. One was that the murderer had killed the young attorney, then forced Roberta Fenn to accompany him at the point of a gun. The other was that the murder had taken place during Miss Fenn’s absence from her apartment, that she returned to find the body in much the same position as police had found it, and, in a panic, had resorted to flight. There was, of course, the third possibility, which was that Roberta Fenn had been the one who pulled the trigger on the gun.

  Apparently police were inclined to give more credence to the first theory.

  Police were making a diligent search for a young, well-dressed man wearing a gray checkered suit who had been waiting for Roberta Fenn when she finished her work at the bank the evening before. Witnesses had seen him escort her into a taxicab. Police had a good description: Height, 5 feet six inches; weight, 130 pounds; hair, dark, wavy; eyes, gray and keen; age, 29; suit, gray, double-breasted; shoes, brown-and-white sport.

  Nostrander had been practicing law for about five years. He was 33 years of age, and among lawyers was noted for his ingenuity as well as his mental agility in the trial of a case. He was a bachelor. Both parents were dead, but he had an older brother, 37, who was employed in an executive capacity with one of the bottling companies. So far as was known, the dead lawyer had no enemies, although he had a host of friends who were shocked to learn of his passing.

  The crime had been committed with a .38 caliber police special. Only one shot had been fired, and only one shot had been needed. Doctors said death was almost instantaneous. The position of the body and the distance from the hand of the corpse to the gun which was found lying on the floor made it almost impossible to consider the death as other than deliberate murder. Police were also investigating the theory that the death might have been part of some strange suicide pact, that Roberta Fenn had become too nervous or frightened to carry out her part of the bargain, and so had disappeared. /

  Police fixed the time of the murder as being almost exactly at 2:32 in the morning. Because a pillow had been held over the gun, the report had been muffled. Only one person had actually heard the shot. That person, Marilyn Winton, a hostess at the Jack-O’-Lantern, had been returning home. She had the apartment directly across the hall from that of Miss Fenn. It had been just as she was fitting her latchkey to the street door to the apartment house that she had heard what she took to be a shot. Two friends, who had driven her home, were waiting at the curb to “see that she got in all right.” Miss Winton had immediately returned to their car to ask if either ,of them had heard a shot. Neither had. Police attached some significance to this, as it indicated that the pillow had muffled the explosion sufficiently to make the single shot inaudible above the sound of the idling motor.

  The friends had convinced Miss Winton that she had merely heard a door slam. She had gone on upstairs to her apartment, but still only half convinced that it was not a shot she had heard, had looked at her watch to note the exact time. The time was then exactly 2:37. She estimated it had then been not over five minutes since she had heard the shot.

  There was nothing in the paper as to how the police had happened to discover the crime. News of that mysterious telephone call of mine had apparently been deliberately suppressed. The newspaper explained that the police who stumbled upon the murder were “merely upon a routine tour of inspection.”

  I read the news, smoked a cigarette, and went back up to the public typing agency.

  Ethel Wells had pulled a proof of the letter for me.

  I read it over.

  “You think this will do the work?” I asked.

  She said, “It rang the bell with me—as you may have noticed.”

  “I noticed.”

  She laughed up at me. “You were all eyes, as the saying goes.”

  I said, “I need an address for the Silkwear Importation Company.”

  “Three dollars a month entitles you to use the office as a mailing address. You can have as many letters sent here as you want.”

  “Can I trust your discretion?”

  “Which, I suppose, is a nice way of asking if I can keep my mouth shut if someone comes around asking questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “If it’s a postal inspector, what do I do?”

  “Tell him the truth.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you don’t know my name or anything about me.

  She turned that over in her mind for a few seconds, then said, “That’s an idea. is your name?”

  “On the books, it’ll be Cash. You’ve added three dollars to your month’s income, as well as the price of the typing.”

  Chapter Ten

  I WENT back to the hotel, went up to my room, opened a fresh package of cigarettes, sat by the window, and did a little thinking.

  Bertha Cool was somewhere between New Orleans and Los Angeles. Elsie Brand would be running the office. It looked like a good time to get the information I wanted.

  I picked up the telephone and placed a station-to-station call. It took about five minutes to get the call through. Then I heard Elsie Brand’s voice, crisp and businesslike, saying, “Hello.”

  “Hello, Elsie. Donald talking.” The hard, keen edge came off her voice. She said informally, “Oh, hello, Donald. Operator said New Orleans was calling, and I thought it was Bertha. What’s new?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me.”

  “How come?”

  “Bertha tells me she’s gone in for war work.”

  “Didn’t you know?” .

  “No. Not until she told me.”

  “She’s been working with it for about six weeks. 1 thought you knew.”

  “I didn’t. What’s the idea?”

  She laughed and said uneasily, “I guess she wants to make money.”

  “Listen, Elsie, I’ve been associating with Bertha long enough so I object to paying long-distance telephone rates for the pleasure of listening to you beat around the bush. What’s the idea?”

  “You ask her, Donald.”

  “I could get pretty damned peeved about this in a minute,” I warned.

  “Use your head,” she said suddenly. “You’re sup posed to have brains. Why should Bertha want to get into war work? Why would you do it if you were in Bertha’s position? Figure it out for yourself, and quit pressing me for information. I’ve got a job to hold, and you’re just one of the partners.”

  “Was it so she could make a claim that would exempt me from military service?”

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  “Was it?”

  “We’re having very nice weather out here,” Elsie said, “although I suppose.! shouldn’t tell you that, because it’s a military secret.”

  “It is indeed?”

  “Oh, yes. By suppressing all information about the weather, we’ve taken a long step toward winning the war. One of the things we’re short on is newsprint. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce used to use up enough paper telling about the climate to cover with dense forest an area of nine thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven acres, assuming that the trees would be on an average of eighteen inches in diameter and would be growing at distances of ten and six-tenths feet, measuring from the center of the trunks. That assumes that the trees would have an average height of—”

  “Your three minutes are up,” the operator broke in.

  “You win,” I told Elsie. “Good-by.”

  “By-by, Donald. Good luck.”

  I heard the receiver click at the other end of the line, and hung up.

  I sat back with my feet propped on a chair, thinking.

  The telephone rang.

  I picked up the receiver, said, “Hello,” and heard a man’s voice saying cautiously, “Are you Mr. Lam?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a detective, having offices in Los Angeles—a member of the firm of Cool and Lam?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Who is this?”

  He said, “You’ve met me before.”

  “Your voice is vaguely familiar, but I don’t place you—”

  “You will when you see me.”

  I laughed and said cordially, “Come on up.”

  I dropped the receiver into its cradle on the telephone, grabbed my hat, topcoat, and briefcase, made certain the key to the room was in my pocket, slammed the door shut, locked it, and sprinted down the corridor. I slowed down as I neared the elevator shaft, walked past the elevators, on down to a turn in the corridor, and waited.

  I heard an elevator door slide open, waited a few seconds, and peered cautiously around the comer.

  There was only one man. He was hurrying down the corridor. There was something vaguely familiar about the way he held his shoulders, and that came as a surprise to me. I’d have bet ten to one that the call had been from the cops, making certain I was in the room before they started to sew the place up. The fact that this man was alone and that I really knew him was an agreeable surprise, but I didn’t start down the corridor until I’d placed him, and I didn’t do that until he made the turn to the left. It was Marco Cutler.

  Cutler was knocking at my door for the second time when I joined him. “Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Cutler.” He whirled. “I thought you were in your room.”

  “Me? Why, I just came in!” He looked at the briefcase, the hat, the topcoat, said, “I’d have sworn that I recognized your voice. I called your room just now.”

  “Must have got the wrong number.”

  “No. I told the operator very distinctly the room I wanted.”

  I stepped back from the door and lowered my voice. “And someone answered the telephone?”