That was a lie, but in spite of her chill, she had a throaty quality to her voice that promised warmth. He thought that he ought to get something for his fifteen bucks more than a ten cent pen. Come to think of it, he was a worse sucker than the victims the swindlers conned.
He was also out of luck. The secretary was big as a house. She was Mrs. Satterlee’s secretary, and of course, no society dowager would have an employee better looking than herself. However, she was rather curious and jolly and invited him to lunch on the Satterlee charge account.
The luncheon check was twenty-six dollars, and she left a five dollar tip, so Stack figured that theoretically, he came out fifty cents the winner.
She’d kept the original letter and C.O.D. wrapper, providing an address on Broadway that was a warren for phoney song publishers, bookies, pimps, dubious agents, a uranium stock company, and other assorted con artists.
The office was closed when Chip Stack got there, and the elevator man knew nothing, until a five spot jogged his memory. The tenant had been in that morning, he recalled, and gone out with an arm load of small wrapped packages. He examined the package Chip showed him. They were all like that, he nodded, some mail order business, he guessed.
Back at home, Stack found the usual impatient messages from Aunt Tilly. “What are you going to do about those foul racketeers?” she demanded. “You wouldn’t be stalling until you find a way to cut in on them?”
“Now, Aunt Tilly,” he remonstrated. “I’m as driven as the innocent snow.”
“I know what you’re driven by,” she declared tartly.
“Patience,” he grinned. “I’m just getting the case in hand. I think we’re going to hang, draw and quarter these weasels very shortly.”
“We?” she repeated with sparking interest. Aunt Tilly was a born conspirator. “It is real dirty — dirty enough to make them feel it?”
“It will slap them where it hurts,” he promised. “Now listen closely. I am sending over your pen, which seems to have been manufactured out of military surplus tubing. As a matter of fact, it contains platinum and is worth a good deal more than you paid for it.”
“But it can’t be! Those swindlers would never pay more than a penny for a dime pen—”
“But they don’t know it,” her nephew cut in. “Now what I want you to do is send this pen down to your old pal Senator Gilfoyle with an indignant letter demanding to know why the taxpayer’s money is being wasted on platinum tubing that gets sold for a song as surplus.”
She giggled. “That fussbudget will be roaring for a dozen investigations. But how am I supposed to know it is platinum?”
“Tell him how you got it. Tell him you consider it such an outrage upon your dearly departed’s memory that you had the pen investigated.”
“And then?”
“Just sit tight.”
“I’ll be squirming like a maiden,” she said, and laughed.
Stack hung up and regarded the pen he meant to send to his aunt. Its filler contained platinum, all right, and he’d paid thirty-five bucks to have the tube made up. And now he was going to have to lay out twenty more to get a sneak thief he knew to rob the swindler’s office of their pen supply.
The robbery was easy enough. Who’d bother to lock up cheap merchandise like that? The thief was miffed however because there’d been less than five hundred pens and they were so cheesy that he’d only been able to get four dollars for the lot from a fence who unloaded his stuff to be peddled through the downtown bars.
Chip Stack chuckled when the thief phoned his grumbling report. “You’ll be wishing you’d kept a few of those in a few days,” he told him. “You might make a damned good deal with those swindlers to buy ’em back, and no questions asked.”
Forty-eight hours later, Senator Gilfoyle loosed his thunder. He told the press that possibly “millions” of the taxpayer’s money had been thrown away through the negligent handling of surplus, using the platinum pen as an example. He hinted darkly that he meant to investigate atomic waste and subversive efforts to bankrupt the country. He quoted an unnamed “expert’s” opinion that the platinum tubing might contain a hundred dollars worth of platinum, and confidential information that enough tubing for ten or twenty thousand such pens, retailing at a dime apiece, had slipped through Surplus.
The papers headlined it into the usual sensational story. Surplus was a sure-fire whipping boy because it was so complex that rarely could anything be proven or disproven. Chip Stack read the stories with mischievous humor and took a taxi to the office building of the swindlers. By the simple process of sitting on the firescape of the floor above, he had no difficulty learning their reaction to the newspaper stories.
They hit their small, one-room office like twin cyclones, turning the place topsy turvy to find any pens that had escaped the strange theft which they were just beginning to understand. Somebody had gotten onto the error before the senator and trailed the pens to them and looted them of a veritable fortune.
The two partners screamed at each other and howled. The only way that they could recaptured any of their lost “profits” was to contact the people they had already swindled and try to con them over again.
Chip Stack left his firescape perch with a grin and stopped at the phones in the lobby below to make contact with the sneak thief who’d taken Chip at his word earlier in the week and retrieved a handfull of the purloined ball points. His second call was to Mrs. Satterleee’s secretary.
“Of course,” she said, “I saw the Washington story but I thought it was probably overstated.”
“A little,” he said. “But the swindlers don’t know anything about that—”
“And of course they’ll try to get their pens back.” She laughed. She was way ahead of him. “You’re a very clever gentlemen, Mr. Stack. I won’t speak with those gangsters if they call, so I won’t upset your tea party.”
Chip thought that he deserved a drink and so awarded himself, then went across town to Aunt Tilly’s to find her reading the papers avidly.
“That idiot Gilfoyle never could contain his enthusiasm,” she said. “A hundred dollars worth of platinum indeed! Why, an imbecile would know from the weight of it — and come to think of it, Chip, that pen you had me send Gilfoyle felt considerably heavier than the one I gave you.”
“Well, there might have been a little difference,” he admitted. “I had several of them. Maybe I got mixed.”
She fastened her bird bright eyes upon him. “Now what happens?”
“That we have to wait and see,” he grunted. He extracted the Satterlee pen and her own original from his pocket and laid them on a table. “I think you know Mrs. H. T. S. Satterlee. If the matter crops up, you might say that you were up there to express condolences and picked up this pen at her house.”
“You think I’ll hear from these thieves, then?”
“Like the tax collector,” he said.
She clucked good humoredly and tapped her cane with anticipation. “Just let me get my claws in them!” she declared.
The phone rang and she picked it up herself without waiting for the maid. “Why, the senator certainly got in touch with you quickly!” she said with an air of surprise that would have fooled Stack himself. “I haven’t even had time to find the pens since I spoke with him, but of course, I will since he needs them for investigation—”
Chip could hear a gritty male voice repeat, “Pens? But you only have one. That is, we understand you only—”
“Oh no! I have one that Mrs. Satterlee’s poor husband sent for just before he passed away. He was a great friend of my husband’s and I suppose they both heard about the mistake and were curious. They were both interested in metals, you know — but I don’t suppose you do. Did you say you were with the Treasury?”