“Yes, what is it?”
“I want to talk with you.”
She seemed dubious, but Best smiled amiably and pushed past her into a modest, one-room apartment.
“Nice place,” said Best.
“Thank you,” she said in tones of rather frigid formality. “Don’t you think you’re taking in quite a bit of territory?”
“What do you do for a living?” asked Best.
“Work — when I can get it.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Looking for work.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“Work.”
She stood by a soft wood table that had been stained to make it resemble mahogany. “Go on,” she said, “what’s the catch?”
“You’re a stenographer?”
“Yes.”
“Out of work?”
“Yes.”
“Any relatives or dependants?”
“No, not here. I’ve been supporting my mother, when I had anything to send her. She’s in Denver.”
“That’s a break,” Best said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re going to Denver.”
“Listen, big boy, I wasn’t born yesterday. If you’ll come down to earth and tell me exactly what it is you’re fishing for, we’ll get along a lot better.”
Best looked professionally serious. “I’ve got a job for you,” he said. “It’s a job I’ve got to send someone on personally. I want a stenographer who can take down shorthand so she can make a complete report. I’m working on a case. It doesn’t matter to you what sort of a case it is. I want you to go to Denver. I want you to cover all of the hotels in Denver. I want you to look for a man named Walter Manning. If you find him, I want you to get acquainted with him. Find out what he’s doing in Denver, who sent him there and who’s paying his expenses. Then report to me.”
Best took a card from his pocket, handed it to her.
“Oh,” she said with quick interest in her voice, “a detective, huh?”
“Some people say I am.”
Quick hope glean in her face. “Then it’s on the square.”
“What is?”
“The job.”
“Of course.”
Best opened a wallet, pulled out bills. “Here’s money for the trip to Denver,” he said. “Better take a plane. Stay at the Brown Palace Hotel. Register under your own name — Ellen Hanley. When you’ve finished covering the hotel registers, wire me what you find.”
“But suppose he’s there and not registered under his own name?”
“That won’t make any difference. You just ask the question.”
“When do I leave?”
“Quick as you can pick up a bag. And,” said Best casually, “you’d better leave me the keys to this apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to use it.”
“Use my apartment?”
“We might say,” Best remarked, still holding open his wallet, “that I’m going to rent it.”
She leaned against the table. “Listen,” she said, “I’ve had nothing on my stomach except coffee and doughnuts for so long I’d hate to tell you about it. There’s two month’s rent due on the apartment. If you want it, you’ve got to pay that rent. If you’re going to talk turkey with me, you’ve got to do it over a table in the restaurant downstairs, after you’ve advanced me enough for a sirloin steak and some longbranch potatoes. Now when do we start?”
Best grinned at her. “Now,” he said.
Evelyn Rane sat in Gil Best’s private office and shoved a fountain pen rapidly over a pad of legal foolscap. From the tip of the fountain pen flowed smooth signatures, each one that of Ellen Hanley, and each one matched with a surprising accuracy the signature of Ellen Hanley which that individual had signed in Dillon’s private office the day before.
Best nodded approvingly. “You got it down now,” he said. “Try and develop a little more speed, Evelyn.”
She nodded, increased the swing of her forearm.
“A nice, smooth job,” Best remarked approvingly. “I can believe that story now about the way you forged a pardon when you were sent up.”
She looked up at him, a face that was neither unsophisticated, nor yet hard. Her eyes were wide, dark and mysterious. When she spoke, her voice had a soft, cooing quality.
“Gil,” she, said, “please don’t talk that way about me. I know it’s just a joke, but someone might hear you and not know you were joking. I told you I got my gift with a pen from studying penmanship when I was a little girl. I had one of those old-fashioned professors — a relic of the gay nineties. He used to make me draw beautiful doves with flourishes of the pen. You should have seen his business cards, Gil, they were written by hand with more flourishes to the square inch than—”
Best laughed, opened the drawer of his desk, took out a printed dodger with its conventional front and profile views, its smear of fingerprints.
The photographs were those of Evelyn Rane, photographs which had been taken some five years earlier when her face held a look of cherubic innocence.
Evelyn Rane stared at the dodger. She scraped her chair back from the table, got to her feet, slid her tongue along the line of her lips.
“Gil,” she said in a harsh, strained voice, “where did you get that?”
“I dug it up,” he told her. “I always figured there was something fishy about that story of the old-fashioned penmanship teacher. I got you to press your hands against the glass top on the desk a month or so ago. There was a fine coating of oil on the glass. I got your fingerprint classification, and—”
“You dirty two-timing crook! You cheap tin-star, gumshoe, stool pigeon!” she blazed. “You damn blackmailing rat! What do you want? Go ahead and spill it, you’ve got me. What is it? What’s the price?”
Gil laughed, motioned to the chair. “Sit down, Evelyn,” he said, “I just wanted you to understand that we understood each other.”
Her nostrils were wide now. She was breathing heavily.
“It makes such a hell of a lot of difference,” the detective said, “if two people have confidence in each other. I always like to have operatives that I know I can trust. So many of them give a detective a double-cross. Now you know that you can trust me, and if anything should happen that I couldn’t trust you, it would be — well, it would be too bad, that’s all, because I like to trust people.”
“So that’s it,” she said.
“That’s it.”
She picked up the pen again, tried to sign the name, but her hand trembled so that she could hardly hold the pen.
“Damn you,” she said softly, and looked up at him, once more, with eyes that had lost their hard glitter, and were dark pools of mysterious invitation.
“You’re hard, Gil,” she said softly.
“I have to be,” he told her, without the slightest change of expression.
He took a key ring from his pocket, slipped off a key, tossed it to her. “Take some suitcases,” he said, “and move into that apartment on Ninety-first Street, the one that I gave you to use as a residence.”
She stared at the key with surprised eyes. “Then that’s not a phony address?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “it’s a real address.”
“You want me to live there?”
“Yes.”
“Under the name of Ellen Hanley?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” she said, “you think people are going to call on me.”
“Right.”
“But listen you boob, they’ll check up on how long I’ve been living there.”
Gil laughed. “When they do,” he said, “they’ll find out that Ellen Hanley has lived in that apartment for more than three months.”
“Gil,” she said, “you do some of the damndest things!”
He nodded and smiled. “It’s my artistic temperament,” he said. “I like to do everything artistically, and I hate to leave a back trail that anyone could follow.”