Beware the curves, p.1
Beware the Curves, page 1
part #15 of Cool-Lam Series
Bertha Cool banged into tSie room lllce a fortified taok. “What the hell was the idea of shooting Karl Endicott?” she demanded.
Helen Manning’s hand went to her throat. “What in the world are you talking about?“
“You took your gun with you when you went to see Endicott the day he was murdered, didn’t you, dearie? Well, I’ll tell you all about where and when you bought that gun.”
Helen Manning started to sob.
“Cut out the waterworks, dearie, and give me the low-down before I decide to really get tough.”
“I didn’t shoot him, Mrs. Cool, I honestly didn’t.”
But someone had, and the final solution involves two legal twists of which even that brainy little private eye, Donald Lam, was proud. BEWARE THE CURVES was originally published by William Morrow & Company, Inc.
Other books by A. A. Fair
Bachelors Get Lonely
The Bigger They Come
The Count of Nine
Cut Thin to Win
Fish or Cut Bait
Kept Women Can't Quit
Pass the Gravy
Shills Can't Cash Chips
Some Slips Don't Show
Try Anything Once
Up for Grabs
You Can Die Laughing
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BEWARE THE CURVES
William Morrow edition published November, 1956
A Pocket Book edition
1st printing...........July, 1960
3rd printing.......December, 1966
This Pocket Book edition includes every word contained in the original, higher-priced edition. It is printed from brand-new plates made from completely reset, clear, easy-to-read type. Pocket Book editions are published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. T0020.
Trademarks registered in the United States and other countries.
Copyright, ©, 1956, by Erie Stanley Gardner. All rights reserved.
This Pocket Book edition is published by arrangement with William Morrow & Company, Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A.
FOREWORD
FOR SOME YKARS now my Perry Mason books have included Forewords describing interesting characters in the field of legal medicine. The books have been dedicated to the people described in the Forewords.
In the books I am now writing about Bertha Cool and Donald Lam (under the pen name of A. A. Fair) I want to depart from the field of legal medicine and tell you readers something about interesting personalities in the administration of justice.
That field includes law enforcement, crime investigation, and penology.
Few people realize the extent to which our penitentiaries are in effect crime factories. Professional penologists know some of the reforms which are needed but they hesitate to speak out because of public apathy in some instances, and public hostility in others.
My friend Arthur Bernard is the Warden of the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City.
This is a small prison, so small that Art Bernard knows all of the inmates personally.
Bernard started his career in penology some years ago as a political appointee. He became interested in his work and interested in trying to find out the causes of crime.
It is a peculiar thing that very few criminals know why they took up a life of crime in the first place. Like everyone else they are inclined to rationalize and quits frequently to blame others.
Some of the inmates of the Carson City penitentiary won’t even give a warden the time of day. Others are vicious, depraved killers. Some of them are shrewd “cons,” who will cheerfully tell any investigator anything he wants to hear which they think will result in some benefit, however slight, to themselves.
There are, however, a large number of prison inmates who want to complete their sentences and then go straight. Whether they can do so or not is another question. Some of them will, many of them won’t. Society imposes terrific handicaps upon a man who has just been released from prison.
Art Bernard is doing a lot of work with these prison inmates, trying to help them, trying to find out how it happened they became law violators.
Art Bernard has a tape recorder in his office and, when one of these men gets to a point where he is willing to talk and talk frankly, Art Bernard interviews him, puts the interview on tape, listens back to the tape recording, makes his own comments and suggestions, then sends the tape recording to Dr. LeMoyne Snyder, the medicolegal investigator, and to me. I make duplicates of these tape recordings and we are gradually building up quite a library. Slowly but surely we are getting significant clues to some of the underlying impulses, drives, urges, and weaknesses which cause men to run afoul of the law.
It is an interesting work and I feel that it is a valuable work.
Art Bernard has been a miner, a prize fighter, a cat- tie and sheep rancher and broncobuster, and a state inspector of mines. He knows human nature, and to a very large extent he is self-educated.
Because he is essentially modest, he tends to minimize the very wonderful education he has given himself in the school of hard knocks. But because he has always dealt in the realm of practice rather than theory, and because so much of his knowledge was acquired at first hand in the hard way, he is essentially and entirely practical. He has little use for theory as such. He won’t touch anything unless he feels sure it will work, and his background and training have been such that when he starts doing anything he makes it work.
Art Bernard tells me that some of the greatest tragedies of prison life come from the fact that the first offender has a minimum sentence of one year to serve.
Altogether too many of these first offenders are young men in the formative years of their lives. They are men who might well have been your sons or my sons. They have been guilty of some infraction of law and because of that have been sentenced to prison. They may have graduated from a field of juvenile delinquency and many of them have chips on their shoulders. However, in virtually every instance they have no real concept of prison life.
Perhaps the typical young man who is sent to prison for the first time acts as something of a smart aleck. He tries to swagger his way through life and he tries to be tough. That is largely a pose which he has adopted to reassure himself.
When the prison doors first clang shut on such a young man, when he first realizes the horror and degradation of prison life, when he is plunged into an existence of men deprived of women but not of sex, when he encounters the restrictions imposed by armed guards, strict discipline and narrow cells, there is a feeling of revulsion and of horror.
Art Bernard contends, and many thoughtful penologists agree, that if it were possible to release these young men from prison after they have been there just long enough to get a strong taste of prison life and to realize what it really is, they would never commit another crime as long as they lived.
Unfortunately, the minimum sentence is for a year. The young human male is remarkably adaptable and, as Art Bernard expresses it, after the first few weeks when the horror wears off the young man “becomes acclimated to prison life.”
After that there are two strikes against him, or perhaps it would be better to say, two strikes against the society which sent him to prison in the first place and which maintains the institution in such a manner that it is a veritable crime factory.
There is great need for reform in our prison institutions, particularly in regard to the first offender, as well as to the weak-willed individual who has drifted into a life of crime by following the paths of least resistance.
There is no space available here to comment on these matters, but I do want to call attention to the work that my friend Art Bernard is doing in making an intelligent study of people about whom society should have a lot more information.
So I dedicate this book to my friend, ARTHUR E. BERNARD, Warden of the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City, Nevada.
—ERLE STANLEY GARDNER
CHAPTER 1 …
BIG BERTHA Cool displayed all of the ingratiating mannerisms of hippopotamus acting coy during the season of courtship.
“Donald,” she cooed, “I want you to meet Mr. Ansel, Mr. John Dittmar Ansel. This is Donald Lam, my partner, Mr. Ansel.”
John Dittmar Ansel, a tall drink of water with the dark eyes of a poet, a thin straight nose, sensitive mouth, a profusion of wavy black hair, long tapering hands, and quiet clothes, was sitting very straight in his chair. He got up to acknowledge the introduction. His eyes were seven or eight inches above mine. I placed him at around six feet two or three. His voice was well modulated and quiet. His handclasp was the somewhat timid grip of a man who shrinks from ph
It was difficult to imagine any greater contrast than that existing between big Bertha Cool and John Dittmar Ansel.
Bertha, seated behind her desk, went on in her most ingratiating manner, the diamonds on her fingers scintillating in the light from the window as she gestured with her hands.
“John Dittmar Ansel,” she explained, “is a writer, I
Donald. Perhaps you’ve read some of his stuff—I mean his material.”
She paused, anxiously.
I nodded.
Bertha beamed.
Ansel said apologetically, “I don’t do a great deal of fiction, mostly technical articles. I use the pen name Dittmar.”
“He has a problem,” Bertha went on. “Someone recommended us to him. He asked for me because the name on the door B. Cool’ made him think I was a man.”
Bertha smiled at Ansel and said, “He was very gentlemanly about it, and was most considerate in making excuses, but I recognized the symptoms. I told him my partner was a man and I wanted him to meet you.
“If we can serve Mr. Ansel, Donald, we will, and if we can’t there’s no hard feelings, no hard feelings at all.”
Bertha’s lips were smiling affably. It became difficult for her to control the expression in her avaricious little eyes that were as glitteringly cold as the diamonds on her fingers.
Ansel looked dubiously from Bertha to me, from me to Bertha.
Bertha, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of woman, somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties, as tough, hard and rugged as a coil of barbed wire, now smiling and purring in a manner so exaggerated that it was obviously phony, evidently didn’t appeal to Ansel. Ansel was still standing. He quietly maneuvered his position across the office so that he was between Bertha and the door.
He looked at me, hesitated, and apparently was trying to find some way of saying what was on his mind without hurting my feelings.
Bertha hurried along with a line of sales patter, talking fast, trying to get her ideas over before Ansel got out of the door.
“My partner Donald Lam is young, and he doesn’t have the build you’d expect of a private detective. But he has brains, lots of brains, and because he looks so-“
Bertha, obviously groping for a word, suddenly decided the game wasn’t worth the effort of being polite and nasty nice. Tossing her cooing manners to one side, she quit talking in her tone of assumed culture, and got down to brass tacks.
“Hell,” she snapped, “he looks so goddam innocuous he can move around in the background and get all the dope he wants without anybody having any idea he’s a private detective. He’s a brainy little bastard, and you can gamble on that.
“Now then, do you want us or not? If you don’t, say so, and get the hell out of that door because we’re busy. If you do, come back here and sit down and start talking turkey. You give me the jumps standing on one foot and the other, like a guy waiting in front of the door at a boardinghouse bathroom.”
That did it. Ansel’s sensitive mouth twisted into a smile. He came back and sat down.
“I think I want you,” he said.
“All right,” Bertha told him, “it’s going to cost you money.”
“How much money?”
“Tell us your problem and we’ll tell you how much.” Ansel said, “Writers are not exactly overburdened with money, Mrs. Cool.”
That line got him no place.
“Neither are detectives,” Bertha snapped.
Ansel’s eyes lowered to look at her diamonds.
“Except the good ones,” Bertha hastily amended. “What’s on your mind?”
“I want you to find someone.”
“Who?”
“I’ve forgotten his last name. His first name is Karl.“
“You kidding?” Bertha asked.
“No.”
Bertha looked at me.
“Why do you want to find him?” I asked.
Ansel ran long fingers through his dark, wavy hair. He looked at me and smiled. “He gave me an idea for a whale of a story,” he said.
“When?” I asked.
“Six years ago.”
“Where?”
“In Paris.”
“Why do you want to find him?”
“To see if I can get the exclusive right to use the story.”
“Fiction or fact?”
“Fact, but I want to turn it into fiction. It would make a powerful novel.”
“All right,” I said, “you met Karl in Paris. Lots of Karls go to Paris. What else do we have to go on?”
“I knew his last name at the time, of course, but I find that it’s slipped my mind. He came from around this part of the country, a place by the name of Citrus Grove which is a suburb of Santa Ana. He was rather wealthy and he was on his honeymoon. His wife’s name was Elizabeth. He called her Betty. She was a nice girl.“
“What was the story about?” I asked.
“Well, it was about a marriage situation... I— It was about a man who convinced the girl he loved but who didn’t love him that her real sweetheart was—” He stopped.
“I don’t want to give away the plot of a perfectly good story,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “We’re supposed to find a man by the name of Karl from Citrus Grove who went to Paris six years ago on his honeymoon, and who has the plot of a good story that you can’t tell us about.
“What did he look like?”
“Tall, hard, broad-shouldered, a driving personality, the sort who gets what he wants.”
“How old?”
“About my age.”
“How old is that?”
“I’m thirty-two now.”
“How did he make his money?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“Investments, I think.”
“How rich was he?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to be fairly well fixed.“
“That’s rather a general term.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“Blond or brunette?”
“Redheaded.”
“Eyes?”
“Blue.”
“Height?”
“Six feet.”
“Weight?”
“Heavy. Around two hundred and fifteen or twenty. Not fat. Sort of thick, if you know what I mean.“
“Troubled with weight?”
“I supposed so, but he didn’t diet. He ate what he wanted. He got what he wanted.”
“You don’t know what hotel he stayed at?”
“No.”
“Don’t know whether he went over by air or boat?“
“I think it was by boat, but I’m not sure.”
“What month?”
“July, I think. I’m not certain.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Just locate him. Get me his name. That’s all.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll do it.”
“How much will it cost?”
“Fifty dollars,” I told him.
Bertha’s desk chair gave an indignant squeak as she abruptly leaned forward. She opened her mouth, started to say something, then changed her mind.
I could see her eyes begin to flash. She was blinking the eyelids rapidly and a slow flush crept up on her face.
“Where can we reach you?” I asked Ansel.
“How long will it take?” he wanted to know.
“Probably not over a day.”
“You can’t reach me,” he said. “I’ll be in at this same time tomorrow afternoon.” He gave me his hand, a light, sensitive grip of long fingers.
He bowed to Bertha Cool and dissolved out of the door.
Bertha could hardly wait until the door had clicked shut. “Well, of all the namby-pamby, diffident, weak-kneed bastards!” she said.
“Him?” I asked.
“You!” she yelled.
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“No retainer!” Bertha screamed at me. “Nothing down even for expenses! No address! A lousy fee of fifty dollars for finding a guy by the name of Karl who was in Paris six years ago. And you’re going to find him for a flat fifty bucks and not a damn cent down. You let that guy ease out of the office without so much as a red cent by way of retainer to cover expenses. You fix a flat fee of fifty bucks for doing something that may cost us a thousand.”
