They rounded the corner and Sylvia Martin in her car, seeing the three men walking toward the entrance to the apartment house, gave Selby a tentative flashing glance, then demurely lowered her eyes and turned her head, taking the part of a modest young woman who, while waiting for her escort to return, has yielded to a brief flicker of curiosity.
“That your friend?” Hardwick asked.
Selby walked over and opened the car door. “It’s all right, Sylvia,” he said. “Miss Martin, may I present Bert Hardwick, of the local sheriff’s office?”
“Glad to know you,” Hardwick said. “Mr. Selby here says you’re to come along, and these boys are running the show as far as we’re concerned.”
Sylvia smiled her thanks, and the four of them entered the apartment house and without even pausing at the manager’s office climbed up two flights of stairs to the apartment Rose Furman had rented.
Hardwick inserted the passkey and opened the door, then stood to one side.
Rex Brandon entered the room. Doug Selby followed, then Sylvia Martin, and after them came Hardwick who closed the door behind him.
Brandon said, “I’m going to ask you to stand over in a corner, Sylvia, and not touch anything. Keep your eyes open, but let Doug and me make the search.”
It was a two-room apartment. The living room had been fitted up as an office with a typewriter, a small safe, and a cabinet containing stationery. A waste basket by the small desk was cleaned out so that there was not so much as a crumpled piece of paper on the bottom. The typewriter, however, was open on the desk, and there was a piece of paper in it as though the occupant of the apartment had been interrupted in the midst of a letter and forced to leave upon some urgent matter of business.
Hardwick, Brandon and Selby, moving in concert, walked over to the typewriter.
The document was addressed to Barton Mosher, and was headed “Final Report.”
Have completed investigation. The six thousand winning on July twenty-sixth was partially on the level, but you had better fire the man at the second roulette table. He is the one who has the little finger of his right hand off at the second joint.
The subject had to go to Los Angeles in July. She was broke at the time. She made a deal with this fellow to let her start with twenty-five-cent bets and run her winnings up to five hundred dollars. She had ten dollars as a starter.
I don’t know how well you control your wheels. I am assuming you can pretty well control the segment but not the actual pocket in which the ball comes to rest. Therefore, odds can be made very decidedly against a person or very decidedly in that person’s favor but that’s all.
Your employee kept his agreement. Things were manipulated so the subject stood a good winning chance. She lost about five dollars out of the ten she had to invest before she started to win. She had a few losing streaks but ran winnings up to the five hundred dollars. Her friendly dealer then gave her the signal to quit.
She took the five hundred, went over to one of the other tables and despite the fact that she had no understanding with the croupier she made a heavy killing.
A man named Carl Remerton was playing at that table. He dropped about fifteen grand in the course of the evening. Your man couldn’t control the situation with two big players as long as they kept at opposite ends of the board. The subject was smart enough to know that and so this dealer (who was on the square) had to take his choice of big money from Remerton and letting the subject win up to six grand, or standing a chance of losing heavily to Remerton in order to stop the subject’s winning.
This is the dealer whom you thought might be in on a crooked play with the girl since she made her winnings at his table. Actually, the sole fix was with the dark-haired, blue-eyed dealer on the second roulette table to the left of the door, the one with the partly amputated little finger.
The subject was acquainted with Remerton which made it easy for her to play along. She kept gambling as long as Remerton did and left with him, which caused some people to think they were together.
Subject took the trip to Los Angeles and for some reason started hitchhiking with hard luck story despite heavy winnings. Hitchhiked from Yuma with Frank Grannis who took her as far as Madison City. She waited over about ten minutes in Madison City for another ride, then came on to Los Angeles. She has talked some about Frank Grannis. He was arrested on hit-and-run and she is in a position to give an alibi, but for some reason is playing the alibi story very close and doesn’t want to go to the authorities in El Centro. She is making the approach through Grannis’s lawyer who lives in Madison City.
Subject is now in Madison City and because of my presence there on this job have been asked to take over another job of greatest importance which will necessitate return to Madison City. I am typing this and waiting for this new client to pick me up. Hope you arrive before I have to return to Madison City, but if this client should come to pick me up before your arrival, I will leave this report at your hotel and will telephone you at your hotel. This job in Madison City is big...”
And there, in midsentence, the report ended.
Selby, Brandon, and Hardwick bent over the typewriter studying the report.
“Well, that’s as far as she got,” Hardwick said. “Someone came and picked her up. Someone who was in one hell of a hurry. You note that she’d promised to complete this report and send it to Mosher at his hotel. She didn’t have time to do that. She didn’t even have time to finish the sentence. Whatever hustled her off to Madison City was something important and mighty urgent. And her client was calling for her. She didn’t call Mosher at the hotel, and he didn’t hear anything from her because she was dead. She must have been killed within a very short time after she arrived in Madison City.”
“Now,” Brandon said, “let’s start finding out how she got to Madison City. That may be important.”
“Her car’s down in the parking lot that’s reserved for tenants of the apartment house,” Hardwick said. “We’ve covered that. She didn’t go in her car.”
Selby said, “It would be interesting to find out just what she was working on. She was originally in Windrift on another job. Then Mosher hired her. That job took her to Madison City and while she was there she got in touch with someone who wanted her for a job of considerable importance.
“She evidently insisted that she return here to make a complete report to Mosher before she returned to Madison City. When she returned to Madison City she was to ride with her new client — not in her own car. Why?”
“Probably,” Hardwick said, “because she was to go on an undercover job where she’d be with someone as a friend or relative or something of that sort. The car’s registered in her name and would be a giveaway.”
“Let’s look around,” Selby said.
Sylvia Martin said eagerly, “We could see whether she had any clothes with her. Apparently she didn’t, Doug, and... there’s a purse over on that desk.”
Selby said to Hardwick, “One of the strange things about the case was that there was no purse found by the body of the murdered woman. That set us all off on a false lead.”
Hardwick opened the purse on the desk. “This looks like the one she must have been carrying. It has her driver’s license and all that in it. I tell you she was going on an undercover job and she didn’t want to have a thing on her that would disclose her identity.”
“Now, who the devil would hire a woman private detective in Madison City, Doug?” Rex Brandon asked. Selby shook his head.
“I don’t suppose she was foolish enough to leave books containing a list of her clients around the apartment,” Brandon said. “And yet she must have kept some books.”