LITMIR.BIZ

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“Now there’s no profit in it for me.”

      I shook my head wonderingly. “For a call girl you’re the poorest businesswoman I ever heard of. Stop trying to give me my money back every few minutes. You’ve kept your part of the bargain. It’s my loss if I don’t want to take advantage of it.”

      She watched me quietly, looking a little lost, as I picked up the bills and dropped them back in the bag.

      “I said, “What’s your real name, Penny?”

      “It’s Coynes. The Penny is faked, but the last name is right. Peggy Coynes.”

      “Then next time I’ll take you out as Peggy Coynes the dress model, instead of as Penny Coynes the call girl. I think we’d both like it better.”

      She went over to the bed, drew the filmy nightgown from beneath the pillow, went to the bathroom and returned with her toothbrush. She stowed both sway in her bag without looking at me. She started for the door, stopped with her hand on the knob and suddenly turned and ran to me.

      “Mike,” she said, “be careful. Be awfully careful.”

      She gave me a quick kiss, ran back to the door and was gone.

       chapter seven

      THE NEXT MORNING, Saturday, I phoned Ross Memorial Hospital again and talked to Miss Henning. She said it had now been determined that Gloria Townsend had only a concussion instead of a skull fracture, and her condition was listed as fair. She had regained consciousness, she had no serious internal injuries, but she wouldn’t be allowed visitors for several days yet. Barring complications, it was expected she would be completely recovered in about a week.

      The District Attorney’s office closes at noon on Saturdays, so I decided to use the afternoon for a visit to Sheriff Merz’s office. I took my own car instead of an official car for the twenty-mile drive to the county seat.

      The village of Rawley is an old-fashioned place built around a village square. The ancient courthouse is in the center of the square, and the sheriff’s office is on the first floor of the courthouse.

      None of the county agencies aside from the sheriff’s office was open on Saturday afternoons. I walked along the deserted corridor until I spotted the sign I was looking for, opened a frosted-glass door and found myself in a large waiting room. A complaint desk ran the width of the room to my right, and beyond it were the bars of three detention cells, all vacant and with their doors standing open. To my left were two huge windows. Centered between them was the panel, switches, dials and microphone of a modern sending-and-receiving short-wave set. Directly across from me was a door labeled “Private.”

      The western-style deputy I had clashed with at the Lagoon sat behind the complaint desk, looking just as much like a hero of the old west except that he wasn’t wearing his Stetson.

      He frowned when he looked up and recognized me, and I said, “Hi there, podner. Sheriff Merz around?”

      “What you want with him?”

      “Let’s not go through that again,” I said wearily. “Is he in, or isn’t he?”

      “Over there,” he said shortly, pointing to the door marked “Private.”

      Probably the sheriff expected visitors to knock, but I just opened the door and walked in. Sheriff Merz was seated behind an oversized desk reading reports, his faded denim work shirt open halfway down his chest to expose the mat of graying hair which covered his body. He scowled at me, then leaned back in his chair with his arms resting along the wooden arm rests, an expression of weary patience on his face. He didn’t say anything.

      “Afternoon, Sheriff,” I said, taking a seat in the wooden chair in front of his desk. “Just dropped by to see how the Gloria Townsend investigation is coming.”

      He stared at me for a time, fiddling with the tuft of hair growing from one of his ears. Presently he said, “Didn’t know things that happen in the county were city business, son.”

      “When they have bearing on things happening in the city they are, Sheriff. You’ve heard of the call-girl racket operating in the city, I suppose.”

      “Heard there was one. Never paid much attention. I got my own troubles.”

      “Then maybe you’ve heard that while it operates in the city, it operates out of the county. The headquarters is a farm out on Rivershore Drive owned by a man named Tupper Smith.”

      The sheriff snorted. “Where’d you get that idea, son? There’s no cat houses operating in my territory.”

      “I didn’t say it was a cat house. It’s just the clerical center for the call-girl racket, so far as I know. Tupper Smith is too smart to let his girls keep dates anywhere except inside the city limits. He keeps himself clean insofar as the county is concerned. The only way to crack his setup is for the city and the county to co-operate.”

      Merz scratched the scanty strip of hair behind his ears. “Don’t see how I can help you, son. If he isn’t working his racket in this county, I can’t touch him.”

      “And we can’t touch him because he works from beyond the city limits,” I said angrily. “Oh, sure, the Morals Division can pull in one of his girls now aid then, if they go to the trouble of setting up a date and catching her in the act of accepting money. Except there’s only six men on the Morals Squad, and the girls probably have been given descriptions of all of them. And even when one is nailed, all she gets is a suspended sentence. Unless you and I co-operate, we can’t touch Smith himself.”

      Sheriff Merz said, “Well, if I ever hear of a call girl meeting a date in my territory, I’ll raid this feller’s place and see what I find. About all I can do for you.”

      “In other words, nothing, eh? What have you done about Gloria Townsend?”

      Sheriff Merz tugged at the hair sticking from his other ear. “I told you that was strictly a county case, son. No business of the city.”

      “She’s one of Tupper Smith’s call girls,” I said. “She wanted out of the racket and was going to spill everything she knew to me. That’s why I was meeting her at the Lagoon. She was beaten to stop her from talking.”

      He raised hairy eyebrows. “Sounds kind of far-fetched to me, son. But I’ll ask her about it when she’s well enough to talk.”

      “Find any fingerprints on that shoe?” I asked sarcastically.

      He shook his head. “Not a print.”

      “Not even your own?” I inquired. “Last I saw, you were smearing your hands all over it.”

      He frowned at me.

      I said, “Since it’s pretty obvious I’m not going to get cooperation from you anyway, I might as well stop being polite and get a couple of things off my chest. Your handling of this case smells, Sheriff. Either you’re incompetent, or you deliberately obstructed evidence by handling that shoe. I’m inclined to think the latter. A racket like this call-girl thing can’t exist without the connivance of local authorities. I think you’re getting a rake-off from Tupper Smith, and I think you know exactly why that girl was beaten. You may even know who did it. You even went so far in covering up, you were willing to let the girl die. I think you knew damned well she wasn’t dead, and deliberately held off calling a doctor.”

      His face had been getting redder and redder as I spoke. By the time I finished, he was on the verge of apoplexy.

      Slamming back his chair, he came erect and yelled, “Get out of here, you meddling son-of-a-bitch! Get out and stay out!”

      I came erect too. “Why don’t you throw me out, Sheriff? I think I’d enjoy that more.”

      He started to lumber around his desk, but stopped when he saw the expression on my face.

      “Gordy!” he yelled.

      There

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