I looked at her and said, “Kid, I’ll be damned if I know,” and it was the truth.
She said, “You could still be the one who bumped Jed Ringold.”
“I could be.”
“I could put you in a spot on that.”
“Think so?”
“I know so.”
I said, “There’s the telephone.”
Her eyes narrowed. She said, “And then you could drag me into it, show perhaps that my motives weren’t so pure, and— Oh, hell, what’s the use?”
“What do we do next?” I asked.
“We have a damn good stiff drink. When I think of what you could have done to me and didn’t— Dammit, I just can’t figure you. You aren’t dumb. You’re smarter than greased chain lightning. You figured the play and called the signals, and then when I was rushing into the trap, you turned me back. Well, we live and learn. What do you want in your Scotch? Soda or water?”
“Got any Scotch?” I asked.
“Some.”
I said, “I’ve got an expense account.”
“Well now, ain’t
that
something!”
“Got a dealer who can deliver this hour of the night?”
“I’ll say I have.”
“All right,” I said, “call him. Tell him to send up half a case of Scotch.”
“Listen, you aren’t kidding me?”
I shook my head, opened my wallet, pulled out a fifty-dollar bill, and casually tossed it over to the table. “That’s what my boss would call squandering money.”
She ordered the Scotch, hung up the phone, and said, “May as well drink up mine while we’re waiting for that to come.”
She poured out stiff drinks. There was soda in the icebox,
She said, “Don’t let me get drunk, John.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll get on a crying jag. It’s been a long time since anyone gave me a fair break. What makes me sore is that you didn’t give it to me because I’m me, but because you’re you. You’re just made goofy. There’s something about you that can’t— Kiss me.”
I kissed her.
“To hell with that stuff,” she said. “Really kiss me.” Fifteen minutes later, the kid came up with the half case of Scotch.
I showed up at Ashbury’s place about two o’clock in the morning. I still couldn’t get that girl’s hair out of my mind. I thought of that strand of the hangman’s rope every time I thought of the way the light glinted along those blond tresses.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A
T BREAKFAST
I asked Mr. Ashbury what he knew about Amalgamated Smelters Mines and Minerals. I said I had a friend—a man by the name of Fischler who had an office in the Commons Building and had inherited a wad of dough. He wanted something to put it in and was the type that liked to gamble. I’d suggested a good mining stock.
Bob spoke up and said, “Why not keep it all in the family?”
I looked at him in surprise. “It’s an idea at that.”
“What’s his address?”
“Six-twenty-two Commons Building.”
“I’ll have a salesman call on him.”
“Do,” I said.
Ashbury asked Bob if he’d heard anything more from the police about what they were doing on the Ringold murder. Bob said the police had checked up on Ringold, had come to the conclusion that it was a gambling kill, and were checking back on Ringold’s associates, hoping to find someone who would answer the description of the man who had been seen leaving Ringold’s room after the murder.
After breakfast Bob got me off to one side and asked me some more about Fischler, wanted to know about how much money he was going to inherit, and about how much I thought he wanted to invest. I told him he was getting two inheritances. He’d already received some small amount, but would get over a hundred thousand before the end of the month. I asked Bob how his company was coming along, and he said, “Fine. Things look better and better every day.”
He dusted out, and Ashbury looked at me over the tops of his glasses as though he were getting ready to say something; then he checked himself, cleared his throat a couple of times, and finally said, “Donald, if you need a few thousand more for expenses, don’t hesitate to ask for it.”
“I won’t,” I said.
Alta showed up in a housecoat and made signals that she wanted to see me. I pretended not to notice and told Ashbury that I’d go out as far as the garage with him.
Once out in the garage I told him I didn’t want to talk, which relieved him a lot, but did want to ride uptown with him.
He kept his eyes on the road and his mouth shut. I could see there were lots of things he wanted to ask—but he couldn’t think of a single question to which he wasn’t afraid to hear the answer. Twice he thought of something he wanted to say, sucked in a quick breath, hesitated with she first word trembling on his lips, exhaled, and settled down to driving the crate.
It wasn’t until we were in the business district that he managed to get a question he thought was safe. He said, “Where can I drop you, Donald?”
“Oh, any place along here.”
He started to say something else, changed his mind, turned to the right, went a couple of blocks out of his way, and pulled up in front of the Commons Building. “How will this do?” he asked.
“This,” I said, “will be just swell,” and got out.
Ashbury drove away in a hurry, and I went up to the sixth floor, and took a look at the sign on six-twenty-two. It looked all right. I opened the door and went in. Elsie Brand was hammering away on the typewriter.
I said, “For God’s sake, you’re just a front here. You don’t need to pretend there’s that much business going on.”
She quit typing and looked up at me.
“The people who are coming in,” I said, “think that I’m a chap who inherited money. They don’t think I made it out of the business, so you don’t have to spread it on that thick.”
She said, “Bertha Cool gave me a lot of letters to write, told me I could take them up here, and do the work—”
“On what stationery?” I interrupted, and leaned over her shoulder to take a look at the letter that was in the typewriter.
“On her stationery,” she said. “She told me I could—” I ripped the letter out of the typewriter, handed it to Elsie, and said, “Put it in the drawer. Keep it out of sight. Keep all of that stationery out of sight. When you go out to lunch, take the damn stuff out of the office and keep it out. Tell Bertha Cool I said so.”
Elsie looked up at me with the twinkle of a smile. She said, “I can remember when you first came to work.”
“What about it?”
“I figured you’d last just about forty-eight hours. I thought Bertha Cool would ride you to death. That’s why all of her other detectives walked out on her. And now, you’re the one who’s giving orders.”
“I’m going to make this order stick,” I said.
“I know you are. That’s what makes it so interesting. You don’t stand up and argue with Bertha. You don’t knuckle under to her. You just go ahead in your own sweet way, and the first thing anyone knows Bertha is muttering and grumbling, but tagging along after you and doing just what you tell her to.”
“Bertha’s all right when you get to understand her.”
“You mean when she gets to understand you. Trying to get friendly with her is like playing tag with a steam roller—the first thing you know, you’re flattened out.”
“Are you,” I asked, “all flattened out?”
She looked at me and said, “Yes.”
“You don’t seem like it.”
She said, “I have one system with Bertha. I do all the work she hands me. When I’ve finished, I leave the office. I don’t try to be friendly with her. I don’t want her to be friendly with me. I’m just as much a part of this typewriter as the keyboard. I’m a machine—and I try to be a good one.”
“What’s all that correspondence you keep hammering away at?” I asked.
“Letters she sends out to lawyers from time to time soliciting business, and correspondence dealing with her investments.”
“Many investments?”
“Lots of them. She goes to two extremes. Most of the time she’s wanting something that’s as safe as a government bond, but paying about twice as much interest. Then there’s another side to her—the plunger. She’s a great gambler.”
I said, “Well, the way this office is going to be run you’re not to be overburdened with work. Go down to the newsstand in the lobby, pick up a couple of motion picture magazines, and a chew of gum. Put a magazine in the top drawer of your desk. Open the drawer, and sit there chewing gum and reading the magazine. When anyone comes in, close the drawer; but not until after they’ve seen what you’re doing.”
She said, “I’ve always wanted a job like that. Other girls seem to get them. I’ve never been able to.”
“This’ll probably not last longer than a couple of days, but it’s the sort of job you’re going to have.”
“Bertha will switch. She’ll get you some girl from an employment office and take me back to the mill.”
“I won’t let her. I’ll tell her that I need someone I can trust. She can get lots of girls to do typing— It might be a good idea to let her see just how hard it is to fill your place.”
She looked up at me for a minute and said, “Donald, I’ve often wondered why it is you get people boosting for you. I guess perhaps it’s because you’re so darn considerate. You—” She quit talking all at once, pushed back her chair, rushed across the office and out the door as though she’d been going to a fire.
I went on into the private office, closed the door, tilted back in a swivel chair, and put my heels up on the top of a desk that had seen lots of hard usage.
After I heard Elsie Brand return to the outer office I picked up the telephone and pushed the button that connected me with her desk.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Make a note of three names, Elsie. They’re Parker Stold, Bernard Carter, and Robert Tindle. Got them?”
“Yes. What about them?”
“If any one of those people comes in, I’m busy, and I’m going to be busy all morning. I can’t see them and I don’t want them to wait. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“If anyone else comes in, try and find out what he wants. Have him sit down and wait. Get him to give you a card if possible. Bring the card in to me.”
“That all?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said, and I heard her telephone click.
I had a lot of thinking to do, and I sat there in the chair, smoking and thinking, trying to figure things out so they made sense. I wasn’t trying to solve the whole puzzle because I knew I didn’t have enough facts, but I was getting facts. I felt that if I could keep my head and not make any false steps, things would open up.
About eleven I heard the door of the outer office open and close, and the sound of voices. Elsie came in with a card. The card had a man’s name on it, nothing more.
I studied the card. “Gilbert Rich, eh? What does he look like?”
“High pressure,” she said. “Salesman of some kind. Won’t tell me what. I asked him what he wanted to see you about, and he said a sales proposition. He’s forty, and he dresses for twenty-seven. He isn’t exactly what
you’d
call well dressed. What
he’d
call a ‘nifty dresser.’ ”
“Fat?”
“No, fairly slender, getting bald on each side of his forehead. Dark hair slicked back. Black eyes, no glasses. Quick, nervous, glib. His nails are well manicured and polished. He’s had a fresh shoeshine this morning, and smells like a barbershop. Do you want to see him?”
“Yes.”
She went out, and Gilbert Rich came in. He crossed the office with quick steps to grab my hand. His manner was nervous and magnetic. He started talking as though he’d been accustomed to try and get in as many words as possible before he got thrown out.
“Doubtless, Mr. Fischler, you’ll wonder about the nature of my business. When I told your secretary it was a sales proposition, perhaps you thought that it was something I had that I wanted you to handle. As a matter of fact, it’s exactly the other way around. I want to make you a lot of money, Mr. Fischler. In order to do that, I’m going to require three minutes of your time.”
He jerked a watch out of his pocket and placed it on my desk in front of me.
“Kindly notice the time, Mr. Fischler. Keep your eyes right on that watch. As soon as my three minutes are up, tell me. That’s all I want, three minutes of your time, and in return I’ll guarantee they’ll be the most profitable three minutes you’ve spent in the last ten years.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “You’ve got three minutes.”
“Mr. Fischler, have you ever paused to think of the marvels of modern science? Don’t bother to answer, because I can see that you have. You realize, Mr. Fischler, that things we regard as everyday occurrences today are things which were scientific impossibilities a few years ago.
“Now then, Mr. Fischler, in order to show you how
you
are going to make money out of modern scientific developments, it’s necessary for me to turn back a page in the history of our great and glorious state. We’ll turn back, not to the days of forty-nine, but to the days which followed it, days when the state was a swarming horde of gold seekers. Men were grubbing with pick and shovel, with rockers and gold pans, taking gold out of the earth, and there was a vast amount of gold taken out, Mr. Fischler. It poured back to the money centers of the East in a steady golden stream. But there was lots of gold left.
“Up in the country around Valleydale there was a rich placer deposit. The river came roaring out of the mountain carrying gold, depositing it in a vast alluvial plane over the broad agricultural valley which opened out to receive the smiling waters of a river suddenly grown placid. Men, naked to the waist, toiled through the winter rains, through the broiling summer suns, grubbing out gold, and always more gold. Then, as the richer alluvial deposits were exhausted, they moved on down, tracing the course of the river through the geological ages, finding the top soil rich for agricultural purposes, but the gold values collected on bedrock where they had settled— And then just when they were on the verge of reaping their richest harvest, they encountered the problem of surface water. They could dig down to twenty-five feet before encountering water. They got gold almost from the grass roots, but they couldn’t get down to the rich deposits on bedrock. Bedrock at that point lay in a uniform bench at about forty-two feet below the surface.
“But I won’t detain you with sketching the details of that picture, Mr. Fischler. Doubtless, you’re familiar with it from having seen the various historical films which are masterpieces of cinematic art. We will hurry on to the edge of modern inventions. A man of vision conceived the idea of using the water, not as an enemy, but as an aid. He built a big barge, and on that he placed the machinery necessary to dredge. An endless chain of steel buckets dipped far below the surface of the water to scrape the values up from bedrock. The agricultural land was ruined, but in its place the owner received a vast royalty on the gold extracted. The entire topography of the country changed. Because of the peculiar process used in gold dredging, the silt and soil was discharged on the bottom, the rocks and boulders on the top. As a result, the rich agricultural valley became a heap of sun-bleached tailing piles.
“Years passed. The gold dredgers completed chewing up all of the profitable ground, and, as they demolished the last acre, they found themselves trapped in a rocky waste of their own fashioning. There was no further use for them. They were too bulky to dismantle and move, and, even so, there was no place for them to go. They fell into ruins as grim as the ruins of the fair land which they themselves had devastated. The barges began to leak, careened over to one side. The machinery rusted. That which could be profitably transported for junk was sold. The rest became a rusted monument to the greed of man.
“Even the dredgers had not been able to get to bedrock on all the land. In places they had been forced to leave fifteen to twenty feet of the richest pay soil on top of bedrock.
“Now then, Mr. Fischler, we come to a great dream, a golden dream, a dream which is coming true. Modern engineering has devised a means by which the land can be redredged and the boulders placed on the bottom, the silt put back on the top, so that once more the land will be fair and fertile. This has long been known. The Chamber of Commerce of Valleydale had even thought of redredging the land with modern equipment simply for the purpose of restoring it to agricultural productivity, but the process would have been too expensive. What the Chamber of Commerce didn’t realize was that there was still a vast fortune of gold lying on top of bedrock waiting for the proper person to—”