Kept Women Can’t Quit

Frank Sellers jerked the cigar out with the first two fingers of his right hand and said, “Look here, Pint Size, if you’re pulling a fast one on us, so help me God I’ll break you into pieces until you look like a jigsaw puzzle. And I promise you that after I’ve done that no one is ever going to be able to put you back together again.”

“Now what?” I asked.

“Hazel Downer,” Sellers said.

I waited for him to go on but he didn’t go on.

“Don’t play it innocent,” Sellers said, transferring the soggy cigar to his left hand as he fished in his side coat pocket with his right hand and pulled out a square of paper on which had been written in feminine handwriting “Cool and Lam,” with the office address and the telephone number.

I thought for a moment there was a faint odor of heady perfume about it, but when I raised it to my nose the fresh smell of damp tobacco from Sergeant Sellers’ fingers overcame the scent of perfume.

“Well?” Sellers asked.

“Well, what?” I wanted to know.

Bertha said, “You can gamble one thing, Frank. If she’s young, attractive and full of curves and has had any contact with this agency, Donald is the one she saw.”

Sellers nodded, reached for the slip of paper, put it back in his pocket, shoved the cold, soggy cigar back into his mouth, chewed on it for a minute, frowned at me ominously and said, “She’s young and full of curves — Hazel Downer, Pint Size. You tell me about her.”

I shook my head.

“You mean you haven’t been in touch with her?” he asked in surprise.

“Never heard of her in my life,” I said.

“All right. Now look,” Sellers said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve already told Bertha. It’s confidential. If I read it in the paper I’ll know where it came from. Yesterday an armored truck reported a loss of a cool hundred thousand bucks a neat one hundred G’s, all in thousand-dollar bills.

“We got a clue from a young Eagle Scout. I’m not going to tell you how we got it or how we ran it down, but it pointed to a two-time loser, a red-headed sonofabitch named Herbert Baxley, and for your information, I’m damned apt to choke him with my two hands — I would, if I thought I could get away with it.”

“What about Baxley?” I asked.

“We picked him up,” Sellers said. “He was going places and doing things, so we tagged along. We had a pretty good description but we still weren’t sure. My partner and I were ready to close in on him but we wanted to let him lead us around a little bit before we made the pinch.

“This guy had been eating at the Full Dinner Pail. That’s a drive-in where they have some of the most curvaceous cuties in town. When the weather’s hot they come out in shorts that leave nothing whatever to the imagination. When the weather’s cool they have slacks and sweaters that fit them like the skin on a sausage and leave but little to the imagination.

“They do lots of business — too damn much business. We’re going to look into the place on a morals charge one of these days and we may knock It over. But the point is that quite a few regular customers’ drop in there for coffee breaks. That was where this armored truck had been pulling in almost every day for the last month while the two drivers took turns drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and getting an eyeful. There’s both curb and counter service.

“We have reason to believe that’s where someone got into the back door of the armored truck with a set of duplicate keys and grabbed the hundred G’s.

“Anyhow, while we’re tailing this character Baxley, he goes into the joint and orders some hamburgers to take out. He ordered two hamburgers, one with everything, one with everything except onions. They gave them to him in a paper bag. Then he went out to his car and waited for this dame he was to meet to show up.

“She didn’t show. He looked at his watch several times and was mad. After a while he ate both hamburgers — the two of them, you understand, the one with onions and the one without. Then he threw the napkin and the paper bag in the garbage, wiped his hands, got back in his car and drove off down the street. It’s a cinch some dame was to join him and they were going places with those two hamburgers. The dame didn’t want onions. He did. He wouldn’t have ordered one with and one without if he’d been intending to eat both of them. So the way we look at it something must have made this dame suspicious and she stood him up.

“Anyhow, we tailed along behind Baxley. He left this drive-in and went to a service station where there was a telephone booth. He parked his car and went into the booth. We carry a pretty damned good pair of binoculars for situations of that sort and I focused the binoculars on the telephone and was able to pick up the number he was dialing. It was Columbine 6-9403.