Kept Women Can’t Quit

The sign that was painted on the frosted glass of the corridor door read COOL & LAM. Down below that appeared the names, B. COOL — DONALD LAM and the single word, ENTER.

There was nothing about the sign on the door to indicate that B. Cool was a woman, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of greedy-eyed suspicion. Bertha Cool’s shape and toughness was that of a spool of barbed wire ready for shipment f.o.b. factory.

I pushed open the door, nodded to the receptionist, walked over to the door marked DONALD LAM — PRIVATE and opened it.

Elsie Brand, my secretary, looked up from the scrapbook she was working on.

“Good morning, Donald.”

I looked over her shoulder at the stuff she was pasting in the scrapbook. It was the fifth volume of unsolved cases which might at some time give us a chance to make a profit. The chances on most of these cases were one in ten thousand, but I always felt that any good detective agency should know what was cooking in the crime world.

The dress Elsie was wearing had a square cut at the throat and, as she leaned forward pasting in the clipping, I found my eyes drawn down to the line of her neck.

She felt my gaze, glanced up, laughed nervously and shifted her position. “Oh, you!” she said.

I looked at the piece she had been pasting in the scrapbook: the story of an audacious theft of a cool hundred thousand bucks from an armored car. It had been done so smoothly that no one knew how it had been done, where it had been done, or when it had been done. Police thought it might have been done at a drive-in restaurant called the Full Dinner Pail.

An intelligent fourteen-year-old boy had seen the armored truck parked at the roadside restaurant, and had noticed that a sedan was parked immediately behind the truck. A red-headed man about twenty-five was fitting a jack under the left front wheel of that sedan. The thing that was odd about it was that this witness swore the car didn’t have a flat tire on the left front wheel, although the man was going through all the motions of changing a tire.

The money had been in a rear compartment. It took two keys to open that compartment. One of the keys was in the hands of the driver, the other was in the pocket of the armed guard. The locks couldn’t be picked.

There were always two men riding the armored trucks: the driver and the guard. They had stopped for coffee at this place, but they had carefully followed the routine of having one man remain inside the cab while the other went in and got coffee and doughnuts. Then that man came out, took his turn sitting in the cab, and the other man went in. The coffee break was a technical violation of the rules but it was a violation that the company habitually overlooked as long as one man remained in the cab of the truck.

Elsie Brand looked up at me and said, “Sergeant Sellers is closeted with Bertha Cool.”

“Social, sexual or business?” I asked.

“I think it’s business,” she said. “I heard something over the radio when I was driving in this morning. Sellers and his partner have been working on a case and there’s a rumor that fifty thousand dollars of money that was recovered is missing.”

“This case?” I asked, nodding toward the clippings she had just pasted in the scrapbook.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. And then added “Bertha doesn’t take me into her confidence, you know.”

She changed her position slightly. The front of the dress flared out a bit and she said, “Donald, stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“It wasn’t made to be viewed from that angle.”

“It’s not an angle,” I said, “it’s a curve. And if it wasn’t made to be viewed, why was it made so beautiful?”

She put her hand up, pushed the dress in and said, “Get your mind on business. I have an idea that Sergeant Sellers—”

She was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

She picked up the instrument, said, “Donald Lam’s secretary,” then looked at me and arched her eyebrows.

I nodded.

“Yes, Mrs. Cool,” she said. “He just came in. I’ll tell him.”

I heard Bertha’s voice, sounding raucous and metallic as it came through the receiver, saying, “Put him on. I’ll tell him myself.”

Elsie Brand handed me the telephone. I said, “Hello, Bertha. What’s new?”

“Get in here!” Bertha snapped.

“What’s the trouble?”

“Hell’s to pay,” she said, and hung up.

I handed the telephone back to Elsie, said, “The fried eggs must have disagreed with her this morning.” I walked out of my office, across the reception room and through the door marked B. COOL — PRIVATE.

Big Bertha Cool sat in her squeaky swivel chair behind the desk. Her eyes and her diamonds were both glittering.

Police Sergeant Frank Sellers, worrying an unlit cigar like a nervous dog chewing on a rubber ball, sat in the client’s chair, his jaw thrust forward as though he expected to take a punch or to give one.

“Good morning, folks,” I said, making with a cheerful greeting.

Bertha said to me, “Good morning my eye! What the hell have you been up to?”