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“Shut up,” he blurted. “I want to think. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll keep your damned trap closed for the next five minutes.”

I eased back on the bed. The pillow propped under my neck took some of the soreness out of the aching head.

It wasn’t five minutes, not much over two minutes, when Bill said, “There’s a phone booth down at the end of the hall. Now, for the love of Mike don’t make any noise and don’t let anybody see you.”

I got up off the bed. Bill took my arm to steady me.

“Got any money?” Bill asked.

I ran my hand clown into my trousers pocket and encountered the small change. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” Bill told me. “You’re on your own. If anyone spots you I’m going to put a slug in your ribs and claim you were escaping.”

He opened the door, looked up and down the corridor, then nodded to me.

I eased my way down the hall and into the phone booth, closed the door, and tried to recall the number of Gabby’s hotel. The thought of having to look it up in the phone book was an agony to my aching eyes and I couldn’t take any chances with the delay.

I remembered the number, dropped a coin, and spun the dial on the telephone.

When the hotel answered I said, “George Granby, please.”

I could hear the connection being made. Realizing how much depended on Gabby being in and talking with me, I
could feel my hand begin to shake and my knees quiver at the mere thought that he might not be there.

The man who answered the telephone was undoubtedly the bodyguard who had thrown me out.

“Put Gabby on,” I said.

“Who is this?”

“This,” I told him, “is Santa Claus and it’s Christmas. Get Gabby on fast or his stocking will be empty.”

I heard the guy say, “Some nut says he’s Santa Claus passing out information. You want to talk with the goof?”

I heard Gabby rumble something, and then the bodyguard said, “Go peddle your papers.”

I said, “This is Donald Lam, the private detective, whom you threw out a while back.”

“Oh-oh,” the man said.

I said, “I’ve completed my investigations up here. I told Gabby I might do him a good turn. Now I’m in a position to do it.”

“What way?”

“By giving him information about what I’ve uncovered.”

“We don’t give a damn what you found out.
We
know what
we
want to know.”

“You think you do,” I said. “You’d better know what I know and then you’ll know who killed Maurine Auburn and why. Ask Gabby if he’s interested.”

This time I couldn’t hear anything. The bodyguard was evidently holding his palm over the transmitter so I couldn’t, but after what seemed an interminable wait, and after Central had asked, “Are you waiting?” Gabby Garvanza’s voice said cautiously, “Start talking. Give me facts. To hell with what you think. Give me facts.”

“I told you I might be able to do you some good,” I said. “Now I’m—”

“Can the chatter. Give me facts.”

I said, “You’ve known Maurine for over a year. How many times in that year has she got drunk enough to start playing around with strangers? The business of getting boiled and walking out on the bodyguard was part of an act. The fellow she went out with was an aviator. He took her to San Francisco.”

“Any damn fool could put two and two together on that,” he said, “now that her body’s been found.”

I said, “All right, she went of her own accord, under her own power, on an errand she didn’t dare to tell you about and didn’t dare to let the bodyguard know about. The errand was that she wanted to keep a rendezvous with George Bishop.”

“That all?” Gabby asked.

“George Bishop shot you,” I said.

Silence at the other end of the line.

“Maurine put the finger on you.”

“You talk a lot,” Gabby said.

“You wanted facts. There they are.”

“You got proof — about Maurine?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Gabby rasped, “spill it.”

I said, “The man who killed both Bishop and Maurine was Hartley L. Channing. He wants to take over The Green Door. He knew that with Bishop out of the way and enough murder mixed up in the thing the police wouldn’t dare let you muscle in up here.”

“Where are you now?”

“Right now,” I said, “I’m being held prisoner by Channing. I think he intends to pour some nice wet concrete around me and clunk me in the deepest part of San Francisco Bay. I’d like like hell to have you do something about it before—”

“How did you get to the phone?”

I said, “I talked my guard into the idea that you were
going to be the new boss.”

Once more there were four or five seconds of silence, then he said, “You’re a naïve son of a bitch.”

“I’m talking, ain’t I?”

“Sure, you’re talking,” he said, “and your guard was Bill. Right?”

I hesitated a moment, and in that moment realized why it had been so easy to sell Bill on letting me talk to Gabby.

“Right,” I said.

“All right,” he said, “let me talk to Bill.”

I left the receiver dangling and tiptoed back to the room.

“Your boss wants you on the line,” I told Bill.

Without a word he got up and walked out, leaving me sitting there on the bed.

I wanted to give it an artistic touch. I went over and picked up Bill’s magazine. When he came back I was deeply engrossed in reading one of the so-called true detective cases.

“Come on,” he said, “you’re going out.”

I slowly got up from the bed.

He looked at me curiously.

“How the hell did you know I was one of Gabby’s men?” he asked.

I didn’t answer that question. I’d made the only play I had to make and the fact that Lady Luck had dumped the jackpot into my lap was just her way of squaring up for the bum break she’d given me when Frank Danby spilled his guts to Hartley Channing and sold me down the river.

I tried to look modest.

“You might be a smart bastard,” Bill said. “Come on, let’s go.”

From my cheap hotel I called police headquarters and got Lieutenant Sheldon on the line.

“Donald Lam speaking,” I said.

“Son of a gun,” Sheldon said. “Where are you, Donald?”

I gave him the address of the hotel.

“What are you doing there?”

“I’ve been hiding out.”

“What from?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to break in on your time. I knew you were a busy man and I thought some of your boys were trying to take me up to see you.”

“You shouldn’t have been so considerate, Donald. I
want
to see you. I want to see you pretty damn bad. In fact, I’ve had the word out to pick you up wherever you happen to be, either here or when you showed up in your office at Los Angeles.”

“I’ll be glad to see you, Lieutenant.”

“
Would
you now?”

“I have the information you wanted,” I told him.

“What information?” he asked, suspiciously.

“About the hit-and-run driver.”

“Oh-oh,” he said.

“Moreover,” I told him, “I can tell you all about the Bishop murder and you can solve both cases. When you come up to see me you’d better have your new uniform on and you’d better come alone.”

“How come?”

“The newspapermen will want to take pictures.”

“You know, Lam,” he said, “there’s a lot about you I like, but you have one bad point.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know geography. You think this is Los Angeles.”

“No, I know where this is.”

“You think the kind of stuff that sells real estate in Los Angeles will get you by with the San Francisco police department.”

“What do
you
think sells the real estate in Los Angeles?” I asked.

“Meadow mayonnaise,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” I told him. “It’s the climate,” and hung up.

I didn’t have to wait much over ten minutes. He hadn’t put on a new uniform but he’d taken a chance that there might be some favorable publicity and had come alone.

I said, “On that hit-and-run business—”

“Oh, yes.”

“I have to protect the source of my information.”

“I don’t like that, Donald.”

“But,” I said, “if you get a confession, you don’t give a damn who gave me the information.”

“Not if I get a confession.”

I said, “Let’s go and get one and then I’ll tell you about the Bishop murder case.”

“Where are we going?”

I gave him the name and address of Harvey B. Ludlow.

“You know, if this is a bum steer, Donald,” he said, “you could be awfully slap-happy when you came into court on a blackmail charge.”

I said, “I called you, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“I told you where to come, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Do I look that dumb?”

“No, you don’t look that dumb, but I get fooled every once in a while on you Los Angeles creeps.”

I didn’t say anything. It was better not to.

We made time in the lieutenant’s car.

“How about the Bishop murder?” he asked after a few minutes.

I said, “Let’s try the Ludlow business first. If that’s pay dirt then you’ll be more ready to listen, and if it isn’t pay dirt you wouldn’t have confidence in anything I said.”

“Donald,” he said, “if that isn’t pay dirt you aren’t even going to feel like talking.”

We went to the Ludlow residence. Ludlow was in bed.

It was pay dirt.

Harvey B. Ludlow, a fleshy, heavy-set, retired broker, started to shake like cold consommé on a plate when he saw the lieutenant’s badge. Before Sheldon had asked half a dozen questions Ludlow was blabbing it all out.

It didn’t even need the marks on Ludlow’s car by way of confirmation to clinch the case. Ludlow was just aching for an opportunity to spill everything he knew and get it off his chest.

He’d had four or five drinks and had been at a business conference. One of his associates had had his secretary at the conference taking notes, and Ludlow had said he’d take her home.

They stopped for a couple of cocktails, and Ludlow kept looking the secretary over with an appraising eye. She didn’t like her job, knew Ludlow had lots of dough, and looked right back at him.

Ludlow didn’t tell us
that
angle, but we could see the money angle was the only inducement from a girl’s viewpoint he could have had to offer.

By the time Ludlow started for home by way of the girl’s apartment, he was feeling the effects of the four or five cocktails, and a sudden surge of self-confidence which made him think he wasn’t such a bad-looking old coot after all. The girl was willing to listen to his quavering wolf howls.

That was the story.

Ludlow had wanted to protect his “good name.” He saw a chance to get away and he took that chance. He’d been terror-stricken ever since.

He was a prominent clubman and it was going to make enough of a scandal so Lieutenant Sheldon thought he’d better get his captain in on the deal. He got him up out of bed.

The newspaper photographers came out and took pictures of them inspecting Ludlow’s car with a microscope, took pictures of Ludlow’s wife with her arms around his neck, stating that she’d stand by him through thick and thin, that it had all been a lamentable misunderstanding.

Lieutenant Sheldon and the captain gave the newspaper reporters a great story about how they had carefully worked the thing out by a process of elimination, that they’d made a surreptitious examination of Ludlow’s car without his having the least idea that he was an object of police suspicion, that he had been under investigation for some three or four days. That was the way the police worked, quietly, efficiently, but with deadly precision.

It was a beautiful story.

No one even introduced me to the newspaper reporters.

After the pictures had been taken, the captain and Lieutenant Sheldon drove me back to police headquarters.

Sheldon had his arm around my shoulders when we went in. We were buddies. I could have squared all the parking tickets in San Francisco.

We went into the captain’s office.

Sheldon said, “I haven’t had a chance to explain to you about Donald Lam, Captain.”

“He gave you a tip on that Ludlow case?” the captain asked.

Sheldon looked at him reproachfully. “Hell, no,” he said. “I did that on my own, but I’ve been looking for Lam for quite a while.”

“Why, Lieutenant?”

“I think he knows something about the Bishop murder.”

The captain whistled.

“Mind if I take him in and talk to him for a while in my office, Captain? Would you mind waiting a few minutes longer?”

“Hell, no. Don’t you want me along?”

“I think I can do better if Donald and I just sit down and talk things over, sort of palsy-walsy. I don’t mind telling you, Captain, I think I know what happened in that case. I think I can go out and put my finger on the murderer right now.”

“Well, who is it?”

Lieutenant Sheldon shook his head. “Donald Lam has a couple of facts that I think will clinch the matter, at least I think he has. Give me half an hour with him and then I’ll tell you the whole story, and I
hope
I’ll have proof.”

The captain said, “You come right to me with it, Lieutenant. Don’t talk to anyone else. Just talk to Lam and then come right in to me. You understand?”

Lieutenant Sheldon met his eyes. “Of course I understand, Captain.”

“You’re doing a damn fine job,” the captain went on. “That’s the kind of an officer I like to have. You think it’ll be about half an hour?”

“About half an hour.”

“The chief will be interested in this,” the captain said.

Sheldon nodded, got up and took my arm. “Come on, Donald,” he said. “I think you have some information that’ll help. You may not know it’ll help but I’ve got a
pretty good theory as to what happened. If I can get a couple of angles from you I think I’ll be ready to sew the case up. Be seeing you, Captain.”

I said to Lieutenant Sheldon, “We’re going to have to get John Carver Billings in here.”

“The kid?”

“No, the old man.”

He said, “They’ve got a high-power attorney. He’s instructed them not to talk, and—”