The Count of Nine by A A Fair

Author:A A Fair [Fair, A A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I walked into the Cool & Lam offices, and Lionel Palmer jumped up from a seat back of the filing case where he had evidently been talking with Eva Ennis. Her face was slightly flushed and she was smiling in that peculiarly self-conscious but tolerant way a girl has when somebody has been handing her a pretty good line.

Palmer came striding across the office toward me.

“Hello, Palmer,” I said. .

“What the hell!” he stormed at me. “What was the idea of putting me on the spot with Dean Crockett?”

“Did I put you on a spot?”

”You know damn well you did. As soon as you were hired to get those stolen articles back, you made a beeline for my shop. That makes it look as if you felt I d been mixed up in the theft. Crockett thinks so, and Olney thinks so. You know, I should smack you right in the kisser and teach you a lesson.

I took out my cigarette case, opened it, extended it to him.

“Cigarette?” I asked.

“To hell with you,” he said.

I took a cigarette, put it in my mouth, lit a match, and said “What difference does it make whether I wanted to start out by looking at pictures or by looking at people?”

I saw that Eva Ennis had been edging up, looking at Lionel Palmer with the admiration which a girl of a certain type shows for a man who is talking big.

“Hell,” he said, “you pumped me for all the dope on my friends. You’ve caused me so much trouble I think I’ll just take it out of your hide in installments, and-“

I said, “You don’t even know what trouble is-yet.”

He said sneeringly, “I suppose you’re going to make trouble for me?”

“Not me,” I told him, “somebody else.”

“Who?” he asked, noticing Eva Ennis out of the corner of his eye and getting his chin up and his chest stuck way out.

“The police,” I told him.

It took a minute for that to dawn on him. Then his chest began to go down like a tire with a slow leak. “What the hell have the police got to do with it?”

“Quite a few things,” I said. “They’re looking for you now.”

“For what?”

“They want to interrogate you.”

“What the hell do they want to interrogate me about?”

I said, “Did you know that a blowgun and a small jade idol had been stolen from Crockett’s house the night of the shindig?”

“Of course I knew it.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Why should it?”

“You knew a blowgun was missing?”

“Of course I did, I tell you. There’s no secret about that. Crockett was yelling his head off about it. Yesterday afternoon he told me that he’d hired you and your partner to get the stuff back, and wanted to know why you were hanging around my place, and did I know-“

“I got the stuff back,” I interrupted.

“So what? Why tell me about it?”

“I thought you might be interested.”

“I’m not. I’m not interested in anything about you, or what you do, just so you don’t ever stick your nose in my place again.

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