Double or Quits

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  I said, “I have something to tell you. I’m not really a friend of the Devarest family. Up to a short time ago I’d never seen Nadine Croy.”

  “How interesting.”

  “I am, in fact, a private detective.” He broke out laughing then. “Is this supposed to surprise me?”

  “‘Why not?”

  “Good heavens, give me credit for some intelligence. The whole situation fairly screamed that you were detectives: the way you took charge of things, the ideas you had about that garage door. Come, come, Lam. Don’t tell me that friend-of-the-family business was assumed for my benefit. I thought that perhaps you didn’t want the servants gossiping, but the idea that you thought you were fooling me is absolutely preposterous—particularly when one only needs to consult the telephone directory to find the name of `B. Cool—Confidential Investigations’ and learn that Donald Lam is her right-hand man.”

  “Partner,” I said.

  “So you’ve been promoted, eh? My congratulations—to both of you.” He was very suave, very much master of himself and of the situation now.

  I said, “In my capacity as private detective, I made rather a complete investigation.”

  “Certainly. That’s what you were being paid to do.”

  “In the course of that investigation I went up to the probate clerk’s office and looked up several large estates. I did a little telephoning to try and find out if any person who answered your description had perhaps borrowed money from the decedent a few months before his death, and then gone to South America, only to return the day after the man died. Do you want names, dates, telephone numbers and amounts, or is that a sufficient statement to break the ice?” The assurance which had given him such patronizing impregnability was leaking out fast.

  “Well?” I asked.

  He said, “Let’s all sit down.” Bertha walked over to the centre of the room, picked the easiest chair, and dropped into it. I kept the position which was between Harmley and the door.

  “What do you want?” Harmley asked.

  “You might give us the complete facts. We can get them in a very short time by communicating with the police. It might save trouble all around if you gave them to us now.” He pushed his hands down in his pockets, stood looking moodily at Bertha Cool. Then he turned to me. He said, “You left yourself wide open. I looked you up, and found out all about you. It never occurred to me that you’d do the same by me.”

  “That was most unfortunate—for you.”

  “So it seems.”

  “However, there’s no use stalling about it.” He said, “Perhaps we could talk a little business.”

  “Perhaps we could.” Harmley asked, “How could we work this out?”

  “I don’t know.” He said, “My motto is live and let live.”

  “It’s a good motto.”

  “I could make this all right for you.”

  “Could you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d have to know all the details before I’d know what to say.” He thought that over for a while, then said, “Well, after all, why not?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He seemed to be trying to convince himself. He said, in that expressionless voice a man uses when he hasn’t any particular audience to address, “If you’ve got that much dope on me, you can get the whole business. I couldn’t hurt anything by telling you the whole story.” I warned Bertha with a glance to keep quiet. The man was selling himself out. There was no need of interpolating any comments.

  “After all,” he went on in that same monologue, “Walter Croy would double-cross me in a minute—and I’d warned him about this.” I sat perfectly still, not saying anything, not moving, hardly breathing.

  Harmley’s eyes weren’t even on me. They were studying the pattern on the carpet. “I suppose I should have covered up more. I got too careless.” He pushed his hands down in his pockets. There was an interval of silence which lasted for thirty seconds.

  Harmley said, “I’d like to have you see this from my viewpoint. I don’t suppose you will. After all, what I’m doing isn’t so bad.” I knew if I could get him talking about himself and justifying himself, I’d get more details than if I tried to bore right in. I glanced at Bertha, then said, “How did you happen to get started with this, Harmley?”

  “That’s the thing,” he said, almost eager in his attempt to justify himself to himself and to us. “It sort of grew. I was a younger brother. I had an older brother who had the knack of selling anybody anything.” A look of bitterness came over his face. His mouth, for the moment, grew surly.

  “I suppose your brother got all the breaks,” I said.

  “I’ll say he did. He kidded the school teachers along. He kidded Mother. He didn’t do quite so well with Dad, but Dad couldn’t hold out against all the feminine pressure. Well, anyway, I was left to shift for myself. The brother got all the education, all the opportunities—and then started playing the races and gambling, forged cheques which the old man had to make good. The guy finally busted the family—and they still think he’s a little tin god, that he just didn’t get the breaks, and—oh, what’s the use?”

  “There isn’t any,” I told him.

  “Well, I saw what could be done by working on credulous women—but I didn’t see it right away. When I left home and went out in the world, I was pretty sour. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Then I got acquainted with a woman. She began to feel sorry for me. She was married. Her husband was older than she was. She fell for me pretty hard, started giving me money, lectured me about being surly and sullen and said I should cultivate my personality. She started paying for my education. God, I even took voice lessons. I was crazy about her. She’d never had any children. Guess I was sort of her son, her lover, and something she was training all at once.”

  “What happened to her?” Bertha asked.

  He looked up to meet Bertha’s eyes. His face became hard and bitter. “Her husband found out about it, and killed her,” he said slowly.

  Bertha’s face showed the way she felt. “What did you do to the husband?”

  “Not a damn thing,” he said, and watching his hands, I could see the fists clench until the skin grew tight and white across his knuckles.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “There was nothing I could do. Understand, he wasn’t so crude as to take a gun and bump her off. He murdered her in a diabolically clever way. It could have been either him or me that did the job. If I’d stirred anything up, he’d have pinned it on me.”

  “I don’t see how that could have happened,” Bertha said. He said bitterly, “She died while she was with me—in my arms.”

  “Poison?” I asked.

  “Yes. He’d found out she was leaving for a rendezvous with me, but pretended not to know anything about it. He said he was leaving for a lodge meeting. It was her birthday. He opened a bottle of champagne. They had a couple of toasts together, then he left, and she came to me. It was almost half an hour before the thing hit her. At first, we didn’t know what it was. Then she realized. I wanted to get a doctor, but she insisted she was going to go home and telephone a doctor from there. She didn’t make it.” Once more there was an interval of silence. I waited until I saw some of the bitterness leave his face and a wistful expression soften the lines. “What happened after that?” I asked.

  He said, “I was half crazy for a while. She’d left me with some money. It should have lasted me for quite a little while. It didn’t. I tried to forget about things with booze. That didn’t work. It never does. Well, I had to eat. I got a job in a café. They said I was to be an entertainer. It turned out they wanted me for a gigolo.

  “I didn’t care too much about the job, but it was all right at that. I began to practise some of the lessons Olive had taught me, trying to impress people, to keep laughing and smiling, and hold the thought that the world was my oyster. I put my stuff across. There was good money in it.

  “I began to learn something about a certain type
of woman, the woman who has a successful husband, so fascinated making money he pays no attention to his wife. They’re the loneliest women on earth. Marriage ties them up to a certain extent. They’re dependent on a man who cares nothing for them. They want something to do. Above all, they want to be noticed. They want to feel that they’re not just an animated clothes rack.”

  “And so they go to places and hire gigolos?” I asked.

  “Yes, and if the gigolo plays it right, he gets easy pickings.”

  “I take it you played it right?”

  “Of course I did—and don’t think I didn’t give them value received either. I made them happy. Well, then I drifted into this racket. I stumbled on to it almost by accident.”

  “How did you get your prospects?” I asked.

  “I’d watch the obituary columns. When some prominent man would die, I could tell from reading the obituary whether there was a chance to put my stuff across.”

  “Then you’d be a man whom the husband had befriended?”

  “That’s right. Shortly after the death I’d write a letter of condolence and ask permission to call and express my sympathies in person. A woman can’t very well shut out a chap who wants to tell her how marvellous her husband was, and repay a loan.” I nodded.

  “After that,” he said, “it’s easy sailing. You’re dealing with a woman who has suffered the emotional shock of suddenly finding herself a widow, a woman who has been more or less neglected, a woman who is slightly bitter about marriage, a woman who sees the sands of life slipping through her fingers, a woman who has seen her mind narrow as her hips broaden.” Bertha Cool flushed angrily, started to say something, then caught my eye and kept quiet.

  “How long had you been associated with Croy?”

  “Quite a while. Walter was in another branch of the same racket. He worked his stuff on the widow of a man Dr. Devarest had been treating. Devarest got the whole dope, including a sworn statement by the woman. That held Walter for a while; then the woman died. Her statement was the only evidence Dr. Devarest had. Walter thought if he could get that, he’d be okay.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then Dr. Devarest’s safe was robbed.”

  “Walter Croy had something to do with that?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know absolutely.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “When you know what happened after that, you’ll understand that he didn’t.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “After Dr. Devarest died, Walter didn’t know where that statement was. He thought at first Mrs. Devarest had it. He didn’t think she’d ever connect me with him. Nadine had seen me one night. I’d called on Walter. That had been years ago. We didn’t think there was any chance she’d remember about that. Walter insisted I pull the old gag with the widow, to see if she was the one who had the dope out of the safe.”

  “What made him think she had it?”

  “He couldn’t imagine who else could have taken it.”

  “Did Walter think Mrs. Devarest would rob the safe of her own stuff?”

  “Walter didn’t take me entirely into his confidence. He’s close-mouthed on some things. But he knew pretty much what was going on. Devarest had started to play around with his wife’s secretary. Walter thought Mrs. Devarest had taken a tumble to that and had decided to frame her with the theft of the jewels.”

  “You can tell me some more about that.”

  “Mrs. Devarest got the jewels out of the safe. She planted evidence so Nollie Starr would be blamed. Dr. Devarest realized that. As soon as he found out about the theft, he arranged with the Starr girl to beat it and keep under cover until he had time to straighten things out.”

  “Then how about the jewels?”

  “The wife had the jewels. Devarest knew it. He let the Starr girl skip out while he was trying to find how thoroughly his wife had framed her. While he was doing that, he quietly snooped around and found out where his wife had the jewels hidden. He got them out of the hiding place and arranged to have them returned under such circumstances it would break the frame-up on the Starr girl. He never lived to do it.”

  “Why?” He looked me straight in the eye and said, “You should know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He was murdered before he had a chance to do anything.”

  “What makes you think he was murdered?”

  “The same thing that makes you think he was.”

  “Who killed him?” He made a little gesture of dismissal with his shoulders. “And what did you do?”

  “I convinced myself the wife either didn’t have what Walter was afraid of, or, if she did, she had destroyed it. I reported to Walter and he started proceedings.”

  “That was all you were supposed to do?”

  “That was all I was supposed to do for Walter.”

  “But you stayed on to work for yourself?”

  “That’s right. Colette fell for that story about the loan, fell for it so hard that I saw no reason why I shouldn’t cash in on it. I thought perhaps Nadine had recognized me at first, but after a while, when she didn’t say anything, I felt I was getting by. I tried a few leads to see if she’d talked with you. You were too smart for me. You questioned me about what might have been in the safe, and I gave you a lead which would make you think the dope Devarest had on Walter was a photograph. You pretended to fall for that so thoroughly, you had me fooled. I decided you were dumb. I decided to stay on, and make a clean-up under your nose. Well, I underestimated you. You’re slick—but we can do business. I’m not going to be greedy, and, as far as I’m concerned, Walter’s out of it. You let me go ahead. You won’t have to show your hand in it at all. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut, and you get a fifty-fifty split.”

  “How do I know I get the split?” I asked.

  “You could turn me in if you didn’t get it.”

  “And have you made a blackmail squawk?” He said, “You’d know when I got it. You could be on hand to get yours. I’d play fair with you. I’d have to.” I pretended to think it over for a while.

  He said eagerly, “She wants me to look after some of her investments. I tell you, Lam, I’ve got this thing all sewn up. It’s just the same as money in the bank. I’ll handle it in such a way it’ll be entirely legal. Get her to invest in certain stocks. No one will ever be able to prove that I controlled those stocks or got a cut out of the investment. No one will ever be able to prove that you got anything out of it. You can make more money in a few weeks trailing along with me than you can by running a detective agency for a year.”

  “And leave Mrs. Devarest strapped?” I asked.

  “I don’t leave them strapped. I’m too smart for that. If I did, they’d go to their lawyers and make a squawk. I only take a few thousand. I’ll take perhaps fifteen or twenty from Mrs. Devarest. You’d get a cut of ten thousand.” Bertha squirmed nervously.

  I said, “I’ll have to talk it over with my partner.”

  “When will you let me know?”

  “Some time tomorrow.” He said, “Remember it’s absolutely on the up-and-up. Dr. Devarest left his wife something like two hundred thousand dollars—by the time you figure the estate and the life insurance. She’ll never miss twenty or thirty.”

  “You’ve boosted the ante.”

  “Well,” he said, “she can stand a touch of thirty, and if I’ve got to split fifty-fifty with you, I’d have to make it thirty to make it worth my while.”

  “And Walter?”

  “To hell with him. He gets no split at all. After all, he was interested in this other matter. He’s found out he’s in the clear on that now, and he’ll get his out of Nadine.” I got up and nodded to Bertha. “Okay, Bertha, that’s the proposition. Let’s talk it over.” Harmley solicitously bowed us to the door. “You think it over,” he said anxiously. “You’ll never have a chance to pick up fifteen gran
d any easier—and it’s perfectly legitimate.” I took Bertha Cool’s arm. “We’ll think it over,” I told him.

  “I don’t see what you’ve got to think over.”

  “You wouldn’t. Come on, Bertha.” Out in the corridor, Bertha Cool said to me, “Lieutenant Lisman is going to be combing the city for you. You’ve either got to crack this thing, or else get away from me. You’ll have me in a hospital by morning.” I said, “You’re giving me an idea.”

  “What?”

  “The one place Lisman would never look for me.”

  “Where?”

  “In a hospital.”

  “And how are you going to get into a hospital?” I said, “That’s a detail. It may cost money.” Bertha’s face twisted into a wry contortion. “You think money grows on trees.” I said, “Of course, I can stay with you, if you’d prefer.” She said hastily, “How much will it cost?”

  “Oh, perhaps a hundred, or a hundred and fifty.” Bertha sighed.

  “In cash,” I said.

  Bertha stood in a hallway in front of the elevators, opened her purse, counted out a hundred and fifty dollars in currency, and slammed it in my palm.

  Chapter XVIII

  DR. GELDERFIELD came to the door himself in response to my ring. His expression showed the annoyance of a professional man at being disturbed when he is off duty; but when he saw who it was his face lit up.

  “Well, well, it’s Donald Lam, the mighty little fighter. Come in, come in. This is the maid’s night off, and I have to answer the doorbell myself. I always dread this night, because so many people disturb a doctor for trivial reasons. Come right in and sit down.” I followed him into a reception hallway in which were several chairs. He said, “I fixed this up so emergency patients can have a place to wait. I have a small room in back where I can perform minor surgery. We’ll go back to the living-quarters where we can stretch out and relax. I hope you aren’t in too much of a hurry.”

  “I’m not in too much of a hurry as long as I’m here.”

  “That’s splendid. I want a long talk with you. I have something on my mind that’s worrying me—my patient and your client—Mrs. Devarest, you know.”