Double or Quits

Erle Stanley Gardner

• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781504074216
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de crímenes y misterio

The search for stolen jewels and a missing woman yields deadly trouble for an LA detective duo in this hard-boiled mystery by the creator of Perry Mason. Side by side, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam make quite the odd couple of private investigators. She's a fifty-something-year-old widow, built like a bulldog, with the personality to match. He's a wiry, ex-lawyer in his thirties with a lightning-quick wit that always helps him out of a jam, including the one he finds himself in with their latest case... After Dr. Milton Devarest discovered his wife's jewelry stolen from their safe, they noticed his wife's secretary was also missing. Certain of what happened, Devarest asks Bertha and Donald to locate the secretary and persuade her to return the jewelry, no questions asked. But when Donald heads to Devarest's home to get some answers, all he finds are more questions—and a body... "The best American writer, of course, is Erle Stanley Gardner." —Evelyn Waugh "Gardner has a way of moving the story forward that is almost a lost art: great stretches of dialogue alternate with lively chunks of exposition, and the two work together perfectly, without sacrificing momentum." — Booklist

Chapter One

The Plant

The big fishing barge rolled lazily on the incoming swells. It was still too early for the crowd. Only a few scattered fishing poles were cocked at various angles over the rail. To the east, the sun cleared the tops of California’s coast range, beat down on the oily surface of the windless sea, and reflected in a glitter of eye-aching glare.

Bertha Cool, as solid and as competent as a coil of barbed wire, sat in the director’s chair, her feet propped on the rail, a long bamboo pole held steadily. Her calm gray eyes, diamond-hard and watchful, were fastened on the line just where it entered the water, watching for that first little jerk.

She reached in the pocket of her sweater, pulled out a cigarette and fitted it to her mouth without taking her eyes off the fishline. “Got a match?”

I propped my fishpole against the rail, held it in position with my knees, struck a match, cupped the flame in my hands, and held it to her cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said, sucking in a deep drag.

Bertha’s sickness had dropped her down to 160 pounds. As she got her strength back, she began to go fishing. The outdoor life was making her brown and hard. She still tipped the beam at 160, but now it was solid muscle.

The man on my right, a heavy-set individual who gave the impression of wheezing as he breathed, said, “Not much doing, is there?”

“Nope.”

“You’ve been here quite a while, haven’t you?”

“Uh huh.”

“You two together?”

“Yes.”

“Caught anything at all?”

“A few.”

We fished for a while, then he said, “I don’t care whether I get anything or not. It’s so much fun being out where you can relax, inhale the salt air, and get away from the infernal din of civilization.”

“Uh huh.”

“I get so a telephone bell sounds as ominous as a bomb.” He laughed, almost apologetically, and said, “And it seems only yesterday, when I was starting my practice, that I’d keep watching the telephone, as though looking at it would make it ring. Just like your—Pardon me. She isn’t your wife or—”

“No.”

“I started to call her your mother, and then I realized you never can tell these days. Well, anyway, she’s watching the fishline just as I used to watch the phone, trying to make something happen.”

“Lawyer?” I asked him.

“Doctor.” After a little while he said, “That’s the way with us doctors. We get so busy safeguarding the health of other people, we neglect our own. It’s a constant grind. Operations in the morning, then hospital calls. Office every afternoon. Visits in the evening, and invariably someone who’s been nursing a pain all day will wait until you’re comfortably settled in bed to call and ask you to come over.”

“On a vacation?” I asked him.

“No, just playing hooky—trying to do it every Wednesday.” He hesitated, then added, “I have to. Doctor’s orders.”

I looked at him. He was a little too heavy. The tops of his eyelids were puffed so that when he lowered his lids he seemed to have trouble getting them back up. His skin was pale. Something about him made me think of a batch of dough which had been put on the back of the stove to raise.

He said, “Your friend certainly looks fit.”

“She is. She’s my boss.”

“Oh.”

Bertha might or might not be listening. She kept her eyes on her fishline as a cat watches a gopher hole. There was nothing indefinite about Bertha when she wanted something. Right now she wanted fish.

“You say you work for her?”

“Yes.”

His forehead showed he was puzzled.

“She runs a detective agency,” I explained. “B. Cool-Confidential Investigations. We’re taking a day off—in between cases.”

Bertha tensed her muscles, leaned slightly forward, motionless, waiting. The tip of her pole bent down. Bertha clamped her right hand on the reel. Her diamonds glittered in the morning sunlight. The tip of her pole went down again and stayed down. The line started cutting through the water in swift, irregular patterns.

“Pull in your line,” Bertha said to me. “Give me room.”

I started to pull in my line. Something gave a terrific jerk, as though trying to pull the pole out of my hands. My own line began hissing through the water.

“Oh, I say,” the doctor said. “That’s splendid! I’ll get out of the way.”

He got up and started walking along the rail, then his own pole bent almost double. I saw his eyelids flutter. His face twisted with excitement.

I tried to hang onto my pole. I heard Bertha’s voice over on my left say, “Reel him in. Start pumping.”

The three of us were busy. Occasionally down in the green depths of the water, I could get the flash of silver as a fish flung himself against the pull of the line.

Bertha braced herself. Her shoulders heaved against the drag of the pole. A big fish leaped out of the water, and Bertha used the momentum of that leap to keep him coming right on up over the rail.

He hit the deck as though he’d been a sack of wet meal, and started beating the planks with his tail. The doctor landed his fish. Mine got away.

“Too bad yours got away,” the doctor said to me.

Bertha said, “Donald doesn’t care.”

The doctor looked at me curiously.

I said, “I like the air, the exercise, and the feeling of leisure. When I’m on a case, it’s an all-out affair. I like to rest in between times.”

“Same with me,” the doctor said.

From the hot-dog stand at the center of the boat, savory odors came eddying down wind. The doctor said to Bertha, “How about a hot dog?”

“Not now,” she said. “Fish are running.” She competently detached her hook, slid the big fish into a sack, put on more bait, threw her line over the side.

I didn’t put my pole out again, but stood watching Bertha fishing. She tied into another one within 30 seconds. The doctor got another strike, and his got away. Bertha landed hers. After that, the doctor landed a good-sized one. Bertha got a small one. Then the run was over.

“How about that hot dog?” the doctor asked.

Bertha nodded.

“You?” he asked me.

“Okay.”

“I’ll get ’em,” the doctor said. “We should celebrate. You stay here and fish. Will you keep an eye on my pole?”

I told him I would.

The sun had risen higher over the mountains. The morning mists had dispersed. You could see automobiles moving along the paved road which bordered the ocean.

“Who is he?” Bertha asked, her eyes on her line.

“A doctor who’s been working too hard and not playing enough. His doctor told him to take it easy. I think he wants something.”

“Didn’t I hear you telling him who I was?”

“Uh huh. I thought he might be interested.”

“That’s good,” she said. “You never can tell where you’ll pick up a piece of business,” and then, after a moment, added, “He wants something, all right.”

The doctor came back with six hot dogs on toasted buns, plenty of pickles and mustard. He ate his first one with relish. The large fish scales that were stuck to his hands didn’t take his appetite. He said to Bertha, “I never would pick him for a detective. I thought detectives had to be big, tough individuals.”

“You’d be surprised about him,” Bertha said, flashing me a glance. “He’s chain lightning. Brains count in this business.”

I saw the swollen-lidded eyes studying me speculatively, then the lids closed, and after a moment fluttered laboriously back open.

Bertha said, “If something’s on your mind, for God’s sake go ahead and spill it.”

He flashed her a startled look. “What? Why, I didn’t—” and then he gave way to shoulder-shaking laughter. “All right,” he said, “you win! I’ve prided myself on diagnosing patients as they walked across the office. It never occurred to me I’d have someone do the same to me. How did you know?”

Bertha said, “You were wide open. Ever since Donald told you who I was, you’ve been sizing us up. What is it?”

The doctor held his second hot dog in his left hand. He took a card case from his pocket, opened it with something of a flourish, and took out two cards. He gave one to Bertha, and one to me.

I glanced at my card, and pushed it in my pocket. I learned that he was Dr. Hilton Devarest, that his hours were by appointment only, that his residence was in a swanky suburban district, and that his office was in the Medical Mutual Building.

Bertha rubbed her thumb over the engraving, snapped the corner of the card against her nail to determine the quality of the pasteboard. Then she slipped it down in her sweater pocket. She said, “The organization’s all here—all that counts. I’m Bertha Cool. He’s Donald Lam. What’s bothering you?”

Dr. Devarest said, “My problem is really very simple. I’ve been the victim of a theft. I’d like to get the stuff back. I’ll run over the facts. Adjoining my bedroom is a den which is fixed up with a lot of obsolete stuff I’ve picked up—old X-ray machines, various electrical equipment, a microscope under a glass shell. It makes a very impressive-looking place.”

“You work there?” Bertha asked.

His stomach jiggled with amusement. The slightly puffy lids of his eyes lowered, and after a moment fluttered back. “I do not,” he said. “The obsolete equipment is simply a stage-setting to impress visitors. When I’m bored by company, I plead some research work which has to be done, excuse myself and go up to my den. All of my guests have seen that den, and have been properly impressed by it. I can assure you that, to a layman, it is very impressive.”

“What do you do up there?” Bertha asked.

“In one corner of the room,” he said, “is the most comfortable chair I have been able to buy, and a very satisfactory reading lamp. I sit there and read detective stories.”

Bertha nodded approvingly.

Dr. Devarest went on, “Monday night we had some particularly boring guests. I retired to my study. After the guests went home, my wife came up.”

“How does your wife feel about you ducking out and leaving her to entertain the bores?”

The smile left Dr. Devarest’s face. “No one ever bores my wife,” he said. “She’s interested in people, and she—well, she thinks I’m working.”

“You mean she doesn’t know the study setup is a fake?” Bertha asked.

He hesitated, trying to select just the right words.

“Don’t you see?” I said to Bertha. “He fitted it up primarily to fool her.”

Dr. Devarest stared at me. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

I said, “You’re too smugly satisfied with it. You chuckle every time you think of it. Anyhow, it doesn’t make any difference. Go ahead with the story.”

“A very discerning young man,” he said to Bertha.

“Told you so,” she commented dryly. “What happened Monday?”

“My wife was wearing some jewelry. I have a wall safe in the study.”

“Something obsolete like the rest of the stuff?” Bertha asked.

“No,” he said. “There’s no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Preview: Owls Don’t Blink
• About the Author
• Copyright