“You mailed the report to the apartment in Salt Lake?” Sellers asked.
“No, we didn’t. We mailed the report to Oscar Bowman, General Delivery, Colinda.”
“The hell,” Sellers said. “What about your fees?”
“We had received a retainer in the form of cash in an envelope sent through the mail. There is still a credit to the client on the case. We were instructed to forget about the credit and close out the case.”
“In other words,” Sellers said, “when Lam got on the job, it caused them to press the panic button and get out?”
“I don’t know,” Patton said. “All I know is what happened. I’m telling that to you.”
“Who told you to close up the case when you telephoned? Was it a man or a woman that was talking?”
“I remember that very distinctly. It was a woman talking.”
I said, “On a deal of that sort, Sergeant, they’d protect themselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d tell her to hang on for a minute and he’d switch the phone conversation onto a recording. They’ve got a recording of the thing somewhere.”
Sellers looked at Patton.
Patton said to me, “I wish you’d drop dead.”
“He will someday,” Sellers said, “but right now I’m interested in finding out whether you have a recording of that conversation.”
“We have a recording.”
“Let’s listen.”
“You can listen,” Patton said, “if you get tough about it. Lam can’t listen. We don’t have to turn the records of our employment over to a competitive agency, particularly when the man figures in the case and—”
“You’re right,” Sellers said. “I’m going to get tough about it. And I’m beginning to do a little thinking on my own.
“Donald, you can just toddle along. I know where to get you whenever I want you. Don’t try to pull any fast ones. Don’t try to leave town.”
Patton’s face lit up. “You mean he’s a suspect?”
“I mean he’s a suspect,” Sellers said, “and before I get done prowling through your records, there’s just a chance little Pint Size here is going to find himself mixed up in that murder worse than ever.”
Patton became downright cordial. “If you’ll step right this way, Sergeant,” he said, “I’ll dig out the records of the conversation. For your information, the whole conversation was recorded. That is, we phoned a report on Donald Lam entering the picture and immediately were ordered to discontinue our surveillance and close up the case, to send a final report to Oscar Bowman, care of General Delivery, Colinda and to keep the credit, whatever it might be... It’s all recorded on tape.”
Sellers took the cigar out of his mouth. “Get lost, Pint Size,” he said to me. “I’ll get in touch with you when I want you — and that may be pretty damned soon. If you’ve got any business you want to wind up, you’d better wind it up.”
I took a taxi to the offices of Cool & Lam, went up in the elevator, pushed my way through the big glass door into the reception room, nodded to the girl at the switchboard and said, “Don’t bother to tell Bertha I’m here for a minute. I want to—”
“But she wanted to know in case you came in, Mr. Lam. She wanted you just as soon as you arrived.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell her I’m on my way in.”
I walked through the door marked B. COOL — PRIVATE. Bertha was just hanging up the phone.
“All right, Donald,” she said. “What happened?”
I said, “They jerked the rug out from under me. The bottom fell out”
“What happened to all this theory of yours?”
“Out the window. Down the drain,” I said. “It was nice while it lasted.”
“It’s no good?”
“No good.”
“Where does that leave you?”
“Behind the eight ball.”
“What’s Sellers doing?”
“Getting an earful from the Ace High Detective Agency.”
“An earful or an eyeful?”
“Both. They have some recorded telephone conversations he’s listening to. Whoever it was hired them got in a panic as soon as it appeared another detective agency was interested and ordered the investigation stopped and the case closed out.”
“Why?”
“That,” I said, “is what I’ve got to figure out.”
“You’ve been figuring out too damned much,” Bertha said. “You got a theory and tried to sell Sellers on it and when the theory busted it leaves you behind the eight ball. If you’d just sat tight and told him it was up to the police to prove their case, it wouldn’t have looked so bad for you.
“How in hell do they figure you could have picked up Holgate’s body and shoved it into the trunk of the agency automobile?”
“They figure I might have had an accomplice,” I said. “Those things do happen.”
“Phooey!” Bertha said. “It would take an accomplice that was strong as an ox and— Who the hell would be so involved as to get mixed up in murder with you?”
I looked her straight in the eyes. “You.”
“Me!” Bertha screamed.
“You,” I said.
“What in hell are you talking about?”
I said, “I’m talking about police thinking. After they get done manufacturing a case against me and looking for an accomplice that would stand by me in a murder, someone who was sufficiently interested to go all the way in the thing, they’ll start thinking about you.”
“Fry me for an oyster!” Bertha said.
“They may do just that,” I told her.
Bertha said, “How do you know this Mrs. Troy isn’t lying? She may—”
“She is lying,” I said. “They’ve got the party who killed those two people at the bus stop. It wasn’t Holgate at all. Mrs. Troy made a mistaken identification. She didn’t identify a man, she identified a mustache and some western clothes.”
Bertha’s diamonds glittered as her pudgy fingers started drumming on the top of the desk.
“Of all the damned cases!” she said.
That gave me a grin. I said, “This is one that you picked, remember? You wanted one of the nice, quiet, respectable kind of cases. You were tired of the spectacular hairbreadth escape cases that I dreamed up.”
“Where’s Sellers now?” she asked.
“At the Ace High.”
“You get the hell down to your office,” she said, “and you let me talk with Sellers. If he comes messing in here with any of his accomplice theories, I’ll pin his ears back, but good.”
“Remember,” I told her, “that anything you say may be used against you.”
I looked back as I went out the door. She was sitting there with her mouth open, so damned mad she was temporarily speechless.
Elsie Brand was waiting for me in my office. “Did it pan out, Donald?” she asked eagerly.
I shook my head. “It didn’t pan out,” I said, “and dammit, it should have. Everything would have fitted in nicely but—”
“Why didn’t it pan out? I thought—”
“It didn’t pan out because a fellow by the name of Swanton had his conscience bothering him and the minute the police pointed a finger at him, he started confessing all over the place.”
“You mean to the murder?”
“No, no. To the hit-and-run. You can cross that off your books now. That’s solved.”
“Oh, Donald,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Her eyes were sympathetic. She seemed almost on the point of tears.
I said, “Well, there’s no use wasting sympathy at this point, Elsie. We’ve just got to start thinking constructively.”
“Can I help?” she asked, her voice showing that she wanted to help, that she desperately wanted to help.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“Of course, Donald, you asked for the hit-and-run accidents on the evening of the thirteenth and as soon as I told you about that one in the bus stop you grabbed on it, but actually there were two and—”