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“And don’t think you’ve got a damn cent coming. You’ve raised enough hell with the business so that it’ll take every cent of assets to compensate for the damage. I’ve talked with my lawyer and he says I’m dead right. Go get yourself a lawyer and see how much good it does you.

“The personal things that were cleaned out of your desk are in that cardboard box in the corner. Now, get the hell out of here.”

I said, “You’d better sign that card, Bertha. It’s the new partnership bank account in San Francisco.”

“A partnership account? What the hell have you been doing? Signing checks? Damn you, Donald, you’ll go to prison. I stopped payment on any check bearing your signature. I cleaned out the partnership bank account and redeposited it in my individual name. I’ve dissolved the partnership. I picked you up out of the gutter and, so help me, I’m going to drop you back
into
the gutter.”

I said, “That’s all right. Then I’ll take over the San Francisco bank account. You keep the business here in Los Angeles if you want. You won’t need to bother about legal stuff. If the partnership was dissolved, the money I
made up there then becomes my individual—”

“The money you
made
up there?”

“That’s right.”

She grabbed the card and looked at it, said, “Why, this is just a banking card in the San Francisco bank for signatures on the partnership account of Cool and Lam.”

“That’s right,” I said. “There was quite a bit of money up there so I decided we’d better have a San Francisco bank account. After all, we’re in good with the San Francisco police and they’re going to send us all the business they can. Anything we get with a San Francisco angle will be handled up there as though we were the mayor’s partners.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she said.

“You knew the Bishop murder case was solved?”

“
Was
solved is right,” she said. “Don’t try to tell me you had anything to do with that. I read the newspapers. Of all the damned, botched-up messes. You stuck your neck out and got Billings mixed up in it and damn near ruined his reputation. My God, if Billings sues us for damages and—”

“He won’t,” I said. “He gave me a check for five thousand dollars.”

“For five thousand dollars?”

“That’s right. Previous to that time he’d given me a check for fifteen hundred dollars for expenses.”

“He gave
you
a check for fifteen hundred dollars for expenses?”

“That’s right.”

“Stew me for a clam!” Bertha said in an awed voice.

“From the way you describe it,” I said, “I gather that check was after the partnership had been dissolved.”

Bertha blinked her eyes at me. Suddenly she said, “How much is in the San Francisco bank?”

I said, “The five thousand dollars that I collected from Billings by way of a fee is there. In addition to that, the
expense money he gave me I invested in mining stock.”

Bertha’s face became even more purple. “You took expense money and put it in — in — in mining stock? Why, you canary-brained, pint-sized bastard. I could take you — Why, damn you, that’s embezzlement. I could — Get the police! Get the police. I’m going to make a complaint myself,” she screamed over her shoulder.

“And then,” I went on, “I sold the stock at a neat little profit. We cleaned up something like forty thousand. My broker was able to corner just about all the outstanding stock in the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate. We haven’t got the bill for long-distance telephones yet. It’ll probably be several hundred dollars, but we got the stock and we made a cleanup. We—”

Bertha’s jaw was sagging as though I’d hit her in the face with a wet towel. “You — You what?”

“Of course, when I say I sold out at a profit, Bertha, you understand that’s before taxes. We’ll have to pay income tax on this. I didn’t think it was safe to hold it long enough to go for a capital gains. It was one of those stock deals where you want to get in fast and out fast. However, I did hang on to a small block of stock so that if it should go up much higher we could hang on and take a capital gains.”

Bertha grabbed up the white card with the banking imprint and the blank for signatures. She jerked a fountain pen out of Elsie Brand’s desk set, then suddenly remembered and stepped back into the outer office.

“What the hell are
you
doing?” she screamed at the girl at the reception desk. “Hang up that damned phone.”

Bertha plumped herself down in a chair and scrawled her signature just over mine on the banking card.

“Elsie, darling,” she said, “you send that right up to San Francisco, right away. Send it up to the bank.”

She looked up at me and took a deep breath. Her ragepurpled lips twisted into a grin.

“Donald, lover,” she said, “you
do
upset Bertha’s nerves terribly at times. You know Bertha’s irritable, and there are times when she doesn’t understand just what you’re doing. You ought to keep in closer touch with Bertha.

“Come into the office and tell me all about it, Donald, lover, and Elsie, you get that jerk of a sign painter and tell him to get Donald Lam’s name back on the door before noon. And get the things out of that cardboard box and have them all put back in Donald’s desk just like they were. I’ll hold you personally responsible if Donald is inconvenienced the least little bit.

“Now, Donald, you need a rest. You’ve been going day and night. How you stand it Bertha will never know.

“You come right into Bertha’s office, lover, and tell her all that happened. Come right on in, lover.”

Elsie Brand pushed a postcard across the desk toward me. “I thought you might like your mail before you went in, Mr. Lam,” she said.

I picked up the postcard. It was an airmail postcard from Havana, Cuba. It was addressed to me personally and it said:

Darling: Having a wonderful time.
Wish you were here.

Millie.

The words,
Wish you were here,
had been heavily underscored.

Bertha Cool slipped an affectionate arm around me. “Come on in, you little bastard,” she said. “Tell Big Bertha all about that forty thousand bucks. You brainy little son of a bitch.”

Shamus Award Winner for
Best Original Paperback Novel of the Year

by
RICHARD ALEAS

Three years ago, detective John Blake solved a mystery that changed his life forever — and left a woman he loved dead. Now Blake is back, to investigate the apparent suicide of Dorothy Louise Burke, a beautiful college student with a double life. The secrets Blake uncovers could blow the lid off New York City’s sex trade... if they don’t kill him first.

Richard Aleas’ first novel, LITTLE GIRL LOST, was among the most celebrated crime novels of the year, nominated for both the Edgar and Shamus Awards.
But nothing in John Blake’s first case could prepare you for the shocking conclusion of his second...

R
AVES FOR
SONGS OF INNOCENCE
:

“An instant classic.”

— The Washington Post

“The best thing Hard Case is publishing right now.”

— The San Francisco Chronicle

“His powerful conclusion will drop jaws.”

— Publishers Weekly

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— Playboy

Available now at your favorite bookstore. For more information, visit
www.HardCaseCrime.com