Kept Women Can’t Quit

“I didn’t want to miss that number he was calling, so we may have been parked a little closer than we should have. The guy was just starting to talk on the phone when he happened to look over his shoulder right square into the binoculars I was holding on him. I still don’t know whether he saw us or not but I made the sort of blunder that’s mighty easy to make. Those were nine-power binoculars and sharp as a tack. We were seventy-five feet away in a parked automobile, but when he looked up and looked right in my eyes as I was looking through those binoculars it looked just the way it would look if a guy eight feet away had looked up and suddenly seen me. I yelled to my partner, ‘Okay, he’s made us. After him!’

“We boiled out of the car. Well, if he hadn’t seen us before, he sure as hell saw us then. He tore out of the booth, leaving the receiver dangling, and jumped into his car. Before he could get it started we had our guns on him and he didn’t dare to make a play for It, so he stuck his hands up in the air.

“We frisked him and found a gun, and we also found keys to his apartment, his address and all of that stuff, and by the time we worked him over he admitted he was a two-time loser.

“My partner drove the squad car behind us. I got in his car, put the cuffs on him and drove. We didn’t want to take a chance on leaving anything unsearched, so before we booked him we stopped by his apartment. We found a locked suitcase. I picked the lock and there were fifty G’s inside, a cool fifty thousand bucks, exactly one half of the loot. I took the damned apartment to pieces and I couldn’t find any more.

“So we took this guy and the fifty G’s down to Headquarters and what do you think the sonofabitch said after we got there?”

“That you’d gone south with fifty G’s,” I said.

Sellers chewed on the cigar, then took it out of his mouth as though he didn’t like the taste of it and nodded moodily. “That’s exactly what he said. What’s more, the Colter-Craig Casualty Company, that handles the insurance on everything shipped in the armored truck of the Specie and Securities Transfer Company, sort of halfway believe the sonofabitch. It was a damn good thing for him he waited to say it until he got to Headquarters or he wouldn’t be as smart-looking as he is now.

“All right, you know what that means and I know what it means. It means that he had a partner who was in on the thing with him and he split the swag two ways. Then he blew the whistle on us when we only found half of it.

“Okay, we had an answer of our own for that. We went out and started looking for the partner. Naturally the first clue we had was this telephone number, Columbine 6-9403.

“That’s a private phone. It’s in Apartment Seven A at the Laramie Apartments. It’s a high-class dump. The owner of Apartment Seven A is a cute trick named Hazel Downer. Hazel Downer has lots of this and that and these and those. By the time we got there she was packing up, getting ready to take a run-out powder. We nailed her before she could get anywhere. She claims that Herbert Baxley had been making passes at her but that she wouldn’t have any and that from time to time he’d called her; that he’d found out her telephone number somehow but that she’d never given it to him.

“Now then, we finally got a warrant and frisked her place, and I mean we really frisked it. All we found was this thing in her purse, that slip of paper with the name ‘Cool and Lam’ written on it.

“Now, the way I put two and two together, Hazel Downer was in on this thing with Herbert Baxley. She had managed to get hold of the keys to the armored car, had duplicates made and Baxley pulled the job.”

“She worked at the Full Dinner Pail?” I asked.

“No, she didn’t,” Sergeant Sellers said. “If she had, she’d have been in the can right now. But she’d been a car hop once, she’d been a secretary for a while, and then she had suddenly become fairly affluent. For the last few months she’s been living in this swank apartment and she hasn’t been working. We can’t find out where the man is that’s paying the bills. All we know is his name, Standley Downer. She’s posing as his wife. My best guess is she’s just a pickup. Somehow she managed to get word to this Downer guy, or someone tipped him off and he’s crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in after him.

“We can’t get a single damn thing on this Hazel Downer except that Baxley was calling her up from a phone booth. Well, we can’t hold her on that and if she got really nasty about it she could probably raise hell over the search-warrant business. I signed that affidavit myself. I was so damn certain we’d find the other half of the loot cached in her apartment that I stuck my neck way, way out. Either she or Standley Downer is Baxley’s partner but we’re going to have a hell of a time proving it — now.

“Now then, Pint Size, I’m just going to tell you that this girl is hotter than a stove lid. If you so much as give her the time of day we’ll have your license and—”