I made up my mind I’d be a lot more cautious with Mr. Thomas Durham in the future — in the event there was going to be any future.
It was typical of Bertha’s memo that she had boosted the price a hundred dollars while she’d been talking with the client, and a clinical record of Bertha’s mental processes was preserved on those sheets of legal foolscap, but she hadn’t even bothered to find out whether the client had a telephone, or anything about the client’s history. She’d received two hundred dollars, and that was that.
I looked under the name of Bushnell in the telephone directory and couldn’t find anything. I got hold of Enquiries, and Enquiries either couldn’t or wouldn’t help me, so I went down to the garage and got out our old agency car ‘Number Two.’
Agency ‘Number One’ was a new job and Bertha usually managed to use that on her business. Agency ‘Number Two’ was a nondescript, stout-hearted little old crock that had rubbed dents in its wings being loyal to the agency business. For over a hundred thousand miles it had trailed other cars, shadowed married men who were explaining to cuties that their wives didn’t understand them, worn out tyres digging up witnesses and chasing down clues in an assortment of murder cases.
I got the motor warmed up and waited until most of the rattles and bangs had ceased to be quite so noticeable before pushing the car in gear and starting out for Claire Bushnell’s place.
1624 Veronica Way turned out to be an apartment house. I looked over the cards and saw the name Claire Bushnell, cut from a visiting card and inserted in a little holder over the button.
I pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
It was Sunday and she might be loafing around or she might be out taking a walk. From the name on the card, she evidently didn’t have a husband, so I decided to be informal. I played a little tune on the bell, a long, two shorts, a long, a short, a long, a short, then a long followed by three quick shorts.
That did the trick. The buzzer announced the door was being opened.
I took a look at the number, saw it was Apartment 319, and went inside.
It was a gorgeous day outside, with beautiful clear sunlight, and the air had a nice fresh tang to it that had made me want to take the agency car way out on the highway, park under some trees and watch the birds. Inside the apartment house the air was stuffy and stale. After the bright sunlight outside, it was difficult to see things down the hall.
The owners of the apartment must have decided to conserve electricity so the big industrial users could have all they wanted.
I finally found the lift, and rattled and banged up to the third floor. It didn’t take me long to locate Apartment 319.
The door wasn’t open.
I tapped on the panels.
Nothing happened.
I tried the knob and went in.
It was an ordinary furnished apartment, the kind that used to be medium-priced. It was an old building with something of rambling incoherency about its design, and the apartments had been figured out, not on a basis of the greatest efficiency, but on a sort of hit-or-miss basis. I gathered perhaps the building had at one time consisted of flats or larger apartments, and had been cut up.
There was water running in the bathroom, and as I closed the door behind me, a woman’s voice called out. “It’s a wonder you didn’t show up with the car earlier. It’s a nice day outside and…”
I walked over to a chair by the window and sat down.
When I didn’t say anything, the voice from the bathroom quieted down, and then the water shut off and a door opened.
Claire Bushnell, wearing a bath-robe and slippers, her eyes wide with startled curiosity, came shuffling into the room.
“Well, I like that!” she exclaimed.
There was a Sunday paper on the table. I’d already seen all of it that interested me, mostly about the mess out at the KOZY DELL SLUMBER COURT, but I thought it was a good time to appear nonchalant. I picked up the paper and said, “Don’t let me interfere with your bath. Go ahead and get your clothes on.”
“Get out!” she said.
I lowered the paper and looked up over the top of it with mild surprise registered on my face.
“What’s that?”
“You heard what I said. Get out!”
“But I want to see you.”
“Get out. I thought you were…”
“Yes?” I asked as she hesitated.
“Who are you?”
I said, “Didn’t you want a detective agency to shadow...?”
“No!” she screamed at me.
“I think you did.”
“Well, you’re completely wrong. I never hired a detective agency in my life.”
I put down the paper, took my card-case from my pocket, extracted a business card, got up out of the chair, walked over and handed it to her.
She took the card, read it, looked at me suspiciously for e moment, then said, “Oh!”
I went back to the chair and sat down.
She looked at the card again.
“You’re Donald Lam?”
“That’s right.”
She thought things over for a moment, then said, “Got anything on you to identify you?”
I showed her my driver’s licence and my licence as a private detective.
She said, “I was just taking a bath.”
“So I gathered.”
“Well,” she said, “no use telling you to make yourself at home. Do you have this much assurance with all your clients?”
“I knocked at the door,” I said. “You didn’t answer.”
“I left it unlocked. I thought you were — a girl friend.”
“Well,” I said, “I couldn’t help that. I didn’t want to stand out in the hall and shout my identity for the benefit of your neighbours.”
“No,” she admitted, “I suppose not. All right, I’ll get some clothes on.”
There evidently was a bedroom on the other side of the bath. She went through the bathroom, pulled the door shut, and I heard the bolt shoot into position. She trusted me about as much as a canary trusts a house cat.
I waited for about fifteen minutes; then she came back.
Bertha Cool was right. She was a slick-looking chick, easy on the eyes.
She had nice lines, lively black eyes which probably could twinkle with humour on occasion, hair so dark that it seemed almost blue-black in some lights, and a very, very neat figure.
She looked cool, clean and comfortable, as she sat down and said, “Suppose you tell me what it’s all about. What have you found out?”
I said, “I’d like to have you fill in a few details.”
“I gave Mrs. Cool all the information.”
I said, “You probably did, at that, but she didn’t write it down.”
“Why, yes she did. She was sitting there with a pencil and a pad, making notes of everything.”
I said, “Bertha Cool was mainly interested in the fee. She wrote down the amount of money we were getting quite a few times, but…”
Claire Bushnell threw back her head and laughed.
I said, “First, let’s find out something about your aunt. According to Bertha Cool, she’s Amelia Jasper, and she lives at 226 Korreander. You’re the only living relative she has.”
“That’s right.”
“What else?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
She hesitated for a moment, looking me over as though trying to decide how much to tell me. Then she said, “My uncle died a few years ago and apparently left my aunt some money. No one knows how much.”