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

Forty-eight hours later, Senator Gilfoyle loosed his thunder. He told the press that possibly “millions” of the taxpayer’s money had been thrown away through the negligent handling of surplus, using the platinum pen as an example. He hinted darkly that he meant to investigate atomic waste and subversive efforts to bankrupt the country. He quoted an unnamed “expert’s” opinion that the platinum tubing might contain a hundred dollars worth of platinum, and confidential information that enough tubing for ten or twenty thousand such pens, retailing at a dime apiece, had slipped through Surplus.

The papers headlined it into the usual sensational story. Surplus was a sure-fire whipping boy because it was so complex that rarely could anything be proven or disproven. Chip Stack read the stories with mischievous humor and took a taxi to the office building of the swindlers. By the simple process of sitting on the firescape of the floor above, he had no difficulty learning their reaction to the newspaper stories.

They hit their small, one-room office like twin cyclones, turning the place topsy turvy to find any pens that had escaped the strange theft which they were just beginning to understand. Somebody had gotten onto the error before the senator and trailed the pens to them and looted them of a veritable fortune.

The two partners screamed at each other and howled. The only way that they could recaptured any of their lost “profits” was to contact the people they had already swindled and try to con them over again.

Chip Stack left his firescape perch with a grin and stopped at the phones in the lobby below to make contact with the sneak thief who’d taken Chip at his word earlier in the week and retrieved a handfull of the purloined ball points. His second call was to Mrs. Satterleee’s secretary.

“Of course,” she said, “I saw the Washington story but I thought it was probably overstated.”

“A little,” he said. “But the swindlers don’t know anything about that—”

“And of course they’ll try to get their pens back.” She laughed. She was way ahead of him. “You’re a very clever gentlemen, Mr. Stack. I won’t speak with those gangsters if they call, so I won’t upset your tea party.”

Chip thought that he deserved a drink and so awarded himself, then went across town to Aunt Tilly’s to find her reading the papers avidly.

“That idiot Gilfoyle never could contain his enthusiasm,” she said. “A hundred dollars worth of platinum indeed! Why, an imbecile would know from the weight of it — and come to think of it, Chip, that pen you had me send Gilfoyle felt considerably heavier than the one I gave you.”

“Well, there might have been a little difference,” he admitted. “I had several of them. Maybe I got mixed.”

She fastened her bird bright eyes upon him. “Now what happens?”

“That we have to wait and see,” he grunted. He extracted the Satterlee pen and her own original from his pocket and laid them on a table. “I think you know Mrs. H. T. S. Satterlee. If the matter crops up, you might say that you were up there to express condolences and picked up this pen at her house.”

“You think I’ll hear from these thieves, then?”

“Like the tax collector,” he said.

She clucked good humoredly and tapped her cane with anticipation. “Just let me get my claws in them!” she declared.

The phone rang and she picked it up herself without waiting for the maid. “Why, the senator certainly got in touch with you quickly!” she said with an air of surprise that would have fooled Stack himself. “I haven’t even had time to find the pens since I spoke with him, but of course, I will since he needs them for investigation—”

Chip could hear a gritty male voice repeat, “Pens? But you only have one. That is, we understand you only—”

“Oh no! I have one that Mrs. Satterlee’s poor husband sent for just before he passed away. He was a great friend of my husband’s and I suppose they both heard about the mistake and were curious. They were both interested in metals, you know — but I don’t suppose you do. Did you say you were with the Treasury?”

The speaker’s cough exploded over the phone. He hastened to deny that, making some vague reference to just “Investigation.”

“Well,” Aunt Tilly said, “I don’t suppose you can tell those things, but it’s clear that the senator had you phone, and it was certainly generous of him to allow me fifty dollars a pen, when it’s really a patriotic duty—”

The speaker made a sound that conveyed extreme pain. He said nothing had been said about that to him.

“But it must have been mentioned!” she said steadfastly. “He said that he was having a hundred of them picked up in the city and they’d all be paid for at the same rate in cash.”

“A hundred of them?” the speaker choked. Then he switched his tune. “But I think I can explain. You see, we’re not picking them up. The manufacturer is — as it was apparently a mistake clean through.”