Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 6, May 1963

“Perfect,” Stack said and hung up with a sour face. She hadn’t even suggested a personal check. Money order, she’d said. There was something about rich people and money — they stuck together like fly paper.

He got out his American Express checks and mailed the requisite amount, wondering what the cool secretary would say if, handling costs ran eight cents over. Then he re-examined the pen that his Aunt Tilly had been swindled for. Just a ten cent piece of junk, the kind of ballpoint that was sold by the hundred at any surplus mail order house.

He recalled that the first cheap ones had been made out of WW II surplus ballbearings and tubing, and supposed that the practice might still be existent. Some of the small, fringe manufacturers would find a way to make something out of a pig’s squeal, if it showed a ten cent profit on a gross.

Five days later, the social secretary was considerate enough to phone. She sounded a little more cordial. “You were right. It’s a cheap pen that Mr. Satterlee never would have ordered. Shall I mail it to you?”

“If it’s convenient, I’ll stop by for it,” he said. “There’s a little urgency to catch the birds before they’ve flown.”

That was a lie, but in spite of her chill, she had a throaty quality to her voice that promised warmth. He thought that he ought to get something for his fifteen bucks more than a ten cent pen. Come to think of it, he was a worse sucker than the victims the swindlers conned.

He was also out of luck. The secretary was big as a house. She was Mrs. Satterlee’s secretary, and of course, no society dowager would have an employee better looking than herself. However, she was rather curious and jolly and invited him to lunch on the Satterlee charge account.

The luncheon check was twenty-six dollars, and she left a five dollar tip, so Stack figured that theoretically, he came out fifty cents the winner.

She’d kept the original letter and C.O.D. wrapper, providing an address on Broadway that was a warren for phoney song publishers, bookies, pimps, dubious agents, a uranium stock company, and other assorted con artists.

The office was closed when Chip Stack got there, and the elevator man knew nothing, until a five spot jogged his memory. The tenant had been in that morning, he recalled, and gone out with an arm load of small wrapped packages. He examined the package Chip showed him. They were all like that, he nodded, some mail order business, he guessed.

Back at home, Stack found the usual impatient messages from Aunt Tilly. “What are you going to do about those foul racketeers?” she demanded. “You wouldn’t be stalling until you find a way to cut in on them?”

“Now, Aunt Tilly,” he remonstrated. “I’m as driven as the innocent snow.”

“I know what you’re driven by,” she declared tartly.

“Patience,” he grinned. “I’m just getting the case in hand. I think we’re going to hang, draw and quarter these weasels very shortly.”

“We?” she repeated with sparking interest. Aunt Tilly was a born conspirator. “It is real dirty — dirty enough to make them feel it?”

“It will slap them where it hurts,” he promised. “Now listen closely. I am sending over your pen, which seems to have been manufactured out of military surplus tubing. As a matter of fact, it contains platinum and is worth a good deal more than you paid for it.”

“But it can’t be! Those swindlers would never pay more than a penny for a dime pen—”

“But they don’t know it,” her nephew cut in. “Now what I want you to do is send this pen down to your old pal Senator Gilfoyle with an indignant letter demanding to know why the taxpayer’s money is being wasted on platinum tubing that gets sold for a song as surplus.”

She giggled. “That fussbudget will be roaring for a dozen investigations. But how am I supposed to know it is platinum?”

“Tell him how you got it. Tell him you consider it such an outrage upon your dearly departed’s memory that you had the pen investigated.”

“And then?”

“Just sit tight.”

“I’ll be squirming like a maiden,” she said, and laughed.

Stack hung up and regarded the pen he meant to send to his aunt. Its filler contained platinum, all right, and he’d paid thirty-five bucks to have the tube made up. And now he was going to have to lay out twenty more to get a sneak thief he knew to rob the swindler’s office of their pen supply.

The robbery was easy enough. Who’d bother to lock up cheap merchandise like that? The thief was miffed however because there’d been less than five hundred pens and they were so cheesy that he’d only been able to get four dollars for the lot from a fence who unloaded his stuff to be peddled through the downtown bars.

Chip Stack chuckled when the thief phoned his grumbling report. “You’ll be wishing you’d kept a few of those in a few days,” he told him. “You might make a damned good deal with those swindlers to buy ’em back, and no questions asked.”