"Did you," he asked, "ever hear of 'The Kiss and Cut Girl'?"
"Doubtless," said Jax Bowman, "Miss Marchand can tell us all we need to know about her. Who was she?"
"Her real name," Grood said, "is Evelyn Mayer. She was engaged to a man. No one knows exactly what happened on the night when the man came to her apartment to tell her something that he had tried to write and had been unable to put on paper. Some said that it was another woman who had been tricked into a fake marriage; some that it was the embezzlement of money from an old crippled woman who had given him funds to invest.
"Whatever it was, there was a quarrel, the sound of loud voices, then the thud of a blow followed by the scream of a woman.
"Those things were plainly heard by the occupants of the adjoining apartment. Two minutes later Evelyn Mayer calmly rang up police headquarters and said 'I've killed a man. Send officers to my apartment.' The officers came. They found her boy friend dead. Stabbed through the heart with a long, pointed pair of scissors. Evelyn Mayer had a black eye. There were some bruises on her body. It looked as though she had been kicked several times. She never took the witness stand, never made any explanations. The thing that was duck soup for the newspaper boys was the fact that she had kissed the man, probably as he lay dying. Lip stick was smeared over his dead lips. The mark of the woman's last kiss.
"The newspapers called her 'The Kiss and Cut Girl.' They always need some kind of a label for attractive women murderers."
"What about her?" asked Jax Bowman.
"Rita Coleman," Grood said, "who is now going under the name of Rita Coleman Crane, drove an automobile with too much champagne under her belt. A speeding car at an intersection crowded her to one side. She clipped the corner of a safety zone, lost control of her car and killed a child. She was wealthy. She turned part of her wealth over to the child's mother, the rest of it went to a number of children's hospitals. She served a term in the penitentiary for manslaughter. When she got out, she disappeared."
Jax Bowman's voice was impatient.
"What's the connection?" he asked.
"When I checked back on the prison records," Grood said, "I found that Rita Crane and Evelyn Mayer were in the Big House at the same time. They struck up quite a friendship. The warden remembers it well. They were both unusual women.
"Evelyn Mayer got out first. She tried to beat the game for awhile, but couldn't do it. Criminal associations dragged her down. The last I heard of her, she was tangled up with Sam Belting. They call him 'Baloney' Belting. He's got a glib tongue. He was posing as a philanthropist, who was trying to give ex-convicts a chance to go straight, when she met him. He got her pretty well tangled up in his game before she found out what it was all about; then it was too late to extricate herself. Her criminal record was against her. She played along with him."
"What," asked Bowman, "is his game?"
"Rather a peculiar one," Grood said, frowning meditatively at the end of the cigar. "He works with a gang. He always relies on a pleasing personality to lay the foundation, but he hasn't got the patience to play a regular confidence man. When he's got his victim picked, he leads them into the hands of the gang. He's a killer at heart."
"He's done time?" asked Bowman, interested.
"No. About the only persons who can testify against a confidence man are his victims. Sam Belting's victims never testify."
"Why?" asked Jax Bowman.
"For the same reason," Grood said significantly, "that a mummy doesn't sing."
Jax Bowman pressed a business-like finger on a call button in the edge of his desk. Almost immediately the door to the outer office clicked open and Rhoda Marchand stood in the doorway, a figure of slim efficiency. Steady hazel eyes flashing a glance of alert inquiry.
"Look in your mode of operation file," Jax Bowman said, "and get anything dealing with bunco games worked with violence."
She frowned as though trying to recall some vague memory.
"Not very often," she said, as though thinking out loud, "do confidence men resort to violence. Not very often do stick-up men use a build-up. They're distinctive types of criminals. Let me see ... Yes, I think I have it."
She turned abruptly. From the outer office came the sound of steel filing cabinets being opened and closed with businesslike efficiency. Ten seconds later Miss Marchand entered the office with a brown manila jacket which she placed on Jax Bowman's desk.
Jax Bowman glanced at the type-written label which had been pasted on the top of the file. "Confidence games with violence."
He opened the jacket, took out some clippings which had been fastened together, turned through them with fingers that moved with the dextrous swiftness of a professional card dealer. His eyes slithered back and forth following the lines of the newspaper reports. His face settled into attentive interest.
"Not many clippings," Jim Grood said, rolling the cigar over to one corner of his mouth. "As Rhoda says, they're distinctively different crime types."
Jax Bowman's voice had the toneless quality of one who is trying to read and talk at the same time.
"A bunch of crimes centering around Southern California. Here's one about a year ago. The victim went across to Tijuana. He made a clean-up at the gambling tables at Agua Caliente, won about ten thousand dollars. He was last seen in the company of a very attractive, magnetic fellow with an iron-gray mustache. A man of about fifty-five, rather distinguished looking and well tailored. The body was found just outside of San Diego. There were two bullet holes—one in the head and one in the heart, the one in the head had been fired from the rear. There were powder burns on the back of the head. The money was gone.
"Here's another one that happened in Hollywood. This man also had been to Tijuana. He'd won quite a bunch on the races, played a ten to one shot to the tune of two thousand dollars. He was last seen in the company of a well-dressed, distinguished looking stranger—a man who was inclined to weight, a chap about fifty-five with keen gray eyes and iron-gray mustache. The hotel clerk placed him as a banker, or wealthy broker. The two went out together. The man who had picked the winner in the horse race soaked up a lot of lead without dying, until after the ambulance had reached the spot where the shooting took place. He made a dying statement. There'd been a stickup. He thought his friend had been either killed or kidnaped. He died before he could give details. The officers never got a clue.
"Here's another winner at Agua Caliente; won fifteen thousand dollars from the gold table—that was before they clamped the lid down on gold. They had a table, you know, at which only gold coins were accepted in play, and all winnings were paid in gold. No one knows what happened to this man. He told his wife a prominent banker from the East had taken him in on the ground floor of a wonderful proposition. He went out to investigate. His body was found in the Imperial Valley—a hundred and some odd miles east of San Diego. He'd been shot once through the heart. There were powder burns on the vest."
Jax Bowman ceased speaking. Big Jim Grood nodded his head thoughtfully.
"That girl," he said, "is a wonder."
"What girl?" Bowman asked.
"Rhoda Marchand. She saw through the scheme where the police didn't. She filed them as 'Confidence Games with Violence.'"
"Confidence games," said Jax Bowman, in that peculiarly incisive voice of his, "with murder."
His finger pressed the button on the desk.
Rhoda Marchand appeared in the doorway.
"Get us," said Bowman, "two tickets by the first plane to Agua Caliente in Mexico."
Big Jim Grood lunged to his feet, crossed to a wall safe of latest design, spun the dials of the combination, pulled the door open, took out holstered automatics with extra clips of shells; took out also two jet black masks large enough to completely cover the upper portion of a man's face. Each of these masks had eye-holes that were circled with wide rings of white.