The Count of 9 Read online

  As I opened the door marked Lionel Palmer—Photographer— Entrance, a bell on the door sounded in back somewhere. An electric sign flashed on which read, “Photographer is busy in darkroom. Will join you in a moment. Please sit down and wait.”

  I looked around.

  There was a desk, a swivel chair, a couple of straight-backed chairs, a studio camera, some stock backgrounds, and a shelf of portable hand cameras. This shelf was protected by a sliding glass cover.

  There were some framed camera portraits and quite a few enlargements of hunting scenes, in each of which Dean Crockett the Second was very much in evidence.

  It took about two minutes for Palmer to come out. His eyes were blinking in the light. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” he said. “I was in the darkroom loading some plateholders, and… well, well, well, it’s the detective.”

  “That’s right.”

  I got up and shook hands.

  “What are you doing here? I mean, is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’m leading a double life,” I told him.

  “That’s nothing,” he said. “Double lives are simple. It’s triple and quadruple lives that give you the excitement. What do you want?”

  “Pictures.”

  “What of?”

  “The shindig last night.”

  “I’m making some of them now,” he said. “I want to study the pictures,” I said.

  He frowned for a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll treat you as one of the family. Come on in.”

  The darkroom had been constructed so that by means of an S-shaped labyrinth the outer light was kept from the darkroom. It was a big darkroom. An orange light showed the pin-up pictures.

  The walls were literally covered with pin-ups; some of them were artistic nudes; some of them were just naked women; some of them were a more daring type of cheesecake than any magazine would publish. There were no pictures in the place except those of women. The only ones who had more clothes on than could be covered by a couple of good-sized postage stamps were the ones who were doing the high kicks or those standing over a wind machine in a house of fun.

  “Quite a collection,” I said, looking around and whistling. “I get around,” Palmer admitted.

  “I want prints of your shindig pictures,” I told him.

  “What for?”

  “So I can study the faces of the people who were there.”

  “You’re working for Crockett, Lam?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You think these pictures will help you recover the stolen articles?”

  “They may.”

  “That would be nice for you.”

  “In what way?”

  “You’d get a reward?”

  “No one’s said so—not yet. My partner makes the financial arrangements.”

  “I’d be helping you cut yourself a piece of cake?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “If I help you, perhaps you could help me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I happen to be awfully short of cash right now,” he said. “Hang it! I can’t ever seem to keep money ahead. I want to take a babe to dinner tonight.”

  “Have you been making passes at that file clerk in the office?” I asked.

  “What office?”

  “Ours.”

  “Oh, that babe.” He took a book out of his pocket, switched on a brighter light, ran through the book and said, “Let’s see, what was her name? Oh, yes, Ennis. Eva Ennis. Here’s her telephone number.”

  “That book looks well filled,” I said.

  He riffled through it, shrugged his shoulders and said, “After I’ve been out with a babe three or four times I get fed up. I like to play the field and get new ones.”

  I said, “I’d like to talk babes, but I’ve got to get the pictures of that shindig last night. You took lots of flash-shots?”

  “About fifty.”

  “Any I can look at now?”

  “No extra prints yet,” he said, “but you can look. That’s what I’ve been doing today, developing the negatives and pulling some eight-by-ten enlargements on glossy. They’re just coming out of the dryer now. Want to look?”

  “Sure.”

  He manipulated a big drum covered with canvas. I heard prints dropping, then the canvas slid back and I saw a big heated, stainless-steel drum, polished to a mirror finish.

  Palmer opened a drawer and the prints came out; some three dozen of them.

  “That’s nice work,” I told him.

  “I do nice work.”

  “They feel nice.”

  “Double weight paper,” he said, “and I soak it in a glycerin bath after I’ve washed the hypo out of them and before I put them on the drum dryer.”

  I started looking through the prints. “Some nice-looking babes here,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know their names?”

  “I can find out their names. Each one of these is numbered. I number the plate when I take a picture, and then I get names in a book reading from left to right.”

  “Addresses?”

  “That depends. Some of them want prints; some of them don’t care.”

  “Crockett gives them the prints?”

  “I do. Crockett wants the pictures. I tell them they have to make arrangements with me.”

  “What sort of arrangements?” I asked.

  He winked at me and said, “It depends on the age.”

  He put his fingers on a photograph, indicating the cleavage of an attractive young woman who was leaning over as the picture was taken. “This babe likes pictures,” he said. “She’s a nut on pictures.…Know what I think? I think she’s going to try to crash the movies or TV, and she wants some nice pictures. She asked me to take some professional shots a while back. Want to look?”

  “Sure.”

  He opened another drawer, took out the usual eight-by-ten professional portraits, then some full-length shots with legs and bathing suit.

  “Nice looker,” I said.

  He hesitated a moment, then took an envelope out of the drawer. “You look like a good egg,” he said. “Maybe you’d be interested in these.”

  I opened the envelope. It had half a dozen five-by-seven shots of the same girl. This time she was posing for pictures I was certain had been suggested by the photographer. Clothes were absent.

  “How do you like that number?”

  “Class,” I said.

  “Lots of them are like that. I won’t monkey with them unless they’re real class.”

  He stood looking at the nudes thoughtfully. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.

  “Know how I got this babe, Lam?”

  “How?”

  “This is one I invented myself, and, boy, is it a scream.”

  I stood there waiting.

  “You’ve been out at the airport and seen these machines where you get a hundred and twenty-five thousand accident insurance in lots of twelve thousand, five hundred to twenty-five thousand at a throw?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “You go out with a babe, don’t make any passes at her unless she makes them at you, play her along, keep her guessing a bit. Then go down to the airport, put two bits in a machine and take out a policy in her name. You get a carbon copy that you put in an envelope and mail to her.”

  “Then what?”

  “Forget the whole business,” he said. “A week or so later you call her up. She wants to see you. She’s puzzled as hell. She says, ‘How did it happen that I got this insurance policy?’

  “You look at her and brush it off. You say, ‘Oh, what the hell? I was taking an airplane trip, I saw this insurance machine and somehow I had a hunch maybe this time was going to be it.’ Then you laugh and say, ‘It was a bum hunch. It didn’t pay off.’

  “But the babe is looking at you sort of funny-like. She says, ‘All right, you had the hunch, but how did it happen you put my name on the policy?’

/>   “Right there, of course, is the place where you’ve got to watch carefully that you don’t go too far and get sucked into buying an engagement ring. You start talking fast. You tell her that she may not realize it, but there’s something that she has that makes quite an impression on a guy; a little trick she has of smiling, the way she walks, and so on. And the first thing you know, you’ve got her going.

  “You know, so many guys make the mistake with a babe by trying to turn on their charm and hypnotizing the jane. The thing to do is to tell the frail how much charm she has and how she can certainly make a man reach for his hole card. From there on, she’s the one who’s trying to make the sale—you know what I mean? No babe likes to think she can’t make a big smoke.

  “So you wait until she’s pretty well extended and then you move in for the kill, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” I said thoughtfully. “What the hell— and you thought that up all by yourself?”

  “Sure. I’ve got lots of them. A guy that has tastes like I have wants to get around and wants company. I’ll tell you another good stunt if you’re in a strange town.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Go into a telephone booth at the airport and start looking through the directory. Now, here’s something you may not have realized: a guy gets into town, he has a babe staked out and he’s in a hurry. Fellows who travel by air are the kind who don’t waste time. While they’re waiting for their baggage to come out, they go into the telephone booth and make a call.

  “Now here’s what happens: the light usually isn’t too good in those booths out by the incoming baggage. A man will hold the directory up so he gets the light on the name he wants. Then he’ll take a pencil and make a little dot opposite the name, or maybe just a small check mark. In that way, if the line is busy on the first try, he can drop his dime, then look down at the number and dial right from the book.”

  “And those numbers are all live?” I asked.

  “Hell no,” he said. “Some of them are the names of boyhood friends; some of them are business numbers. But some of them are babes who are on the make.

  “You use your own judgment. If the number is E. L. Lewiston, that’s one thing, but if the listing is Evelyn L. Lewiston, that’s a pretty good bet.

  “So you drop a dime and give it a try. A girl’s voice answers and you start making. You tell her, ‘I’ll bet you don’t remember me. The last time I saw you, I was with somebody else. You were on a date with the other guy and I couldn’t even make a play for my babe because I couldn’t take my eyes off you.’”

  “Then what?”

  “If she isn’t that kind, she gets dignified and tells you you’ve got the wrong number. But if she’s the type you’re looking for, she’s interested. She starts trying to remember when and where, and you get cagey and tell her you don’t want to offend your friend who had her out, but you made up your mind you were going to call and see what the chances were of speaking for yourself, John.

  “Hell, there’s a dozen different approaches. You can just sit out there and sometimes make them up off the top of your hat.”

  “I don’t think that fast,” I said.

  “You do when you get a babe on the line. You can always tell her that you remember what the other girl said about her. A babe may or may not want to know what you look like, but she sure as hell wants to know what the other girl was telling around about her. That’s a line that never misses.”

  “God,” I said, in awe, “do you know women!”

  “Do I know women,” he admitted. “Say, I don’t know why I got started telling you all the tricks; but you pick out the pictures you want, and I’ll get some babes lined up and we’ll have a date. Meanwhile I’ve got some work to do. You can sit out in the office and go through the stuff.”

  He fixed me up at the desk, gave me a bunch of scrapbooks and said, “I’m going in and load some more plate-holders, then I’ve got some stuff in the hypo I want to take out and wash. Just come on in whenever you’ve got your stuff lined up. Look in these scrapbooks. Those photos are all first-class babes.”

  I thanked him and sat down at the desk.

  After he’d gone back to the darkroom, I started exploring the office. I looked at the array of cameras on the shelf and picked out the press camera he’d been using in the agency office. It was a Speed Graphic. I opened the back. There was nothing in the camera. I looked in the backs of a couple of other cameras and figured I’d drawn a blank. I guessed I’d have to suffer through a date with the guy and a couple of his babes in order to get the lead I wanted.

  Then I saw another Speed Graphic with a wide-angle lens.

  I swung that around and opened the back. It was in there: a carved jade Buddha about four inches high, all wrapped in cotton. There was a big flaming ruby in the forehead.

  I put the statue in my pocket, ran through the enlargements and the scrapbooks. I chose some prints of the shindig, went into the darkroom and said, “Here’s a list of the pictures I want.”

  He took the list, said, “That’s swell. I’ll make prints tomorrow.

  Did you find any frails you liked in the stag book?”

  “I liked ’em all. You sure can pick ’em.”

  “Where do we meet tonight?” he asked.

  “Just a minute,” I told him. “I’ll have to get a clearance from the office.”

  I dialed the office and said, “This is Donald Lam talking. Where’s my secretary? Is she around?”

  “Just a minute,” the operator said.

  A moment later Elsie Brand came on the line and said, “What is it, Donald?”

  I said, “Look, I’m playing around with a little romance tonight. Any reason why I can’t go out on a heavy date with another guy and a couple of broads?”

  Elsie’s voice was cold as ice. “I know of no reason,” she said.

  “Wait a minute!” I yelled at her. “Don’t hang up. Go and ask Bertha.”

  “Bertha isn’t in,” she said.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  There was a moment of puzzled silence at the other end of the line, then Elsie Brand hung up.

  I held the dead phone for a couple of minutes, then said, “Hello, Bertha. I’ve got something lined up for tonight, and—” I broke off and let my face show dismay.

  After a minute, I said, “Now look, Bertha, this is something special. I—”

  After a while I tried it again. “Look, Bertha, this is business. This really is. This guy is someone who has some contacts with…with a client of ours. I want to—”

  After a few seconds, I said wearily, “Okay, if that’s the way it is. Okay, okay, quit yelling. I’ll take over on the damn thing.”

  I slammed the telephone disgustedly into the cradle and shook my head at Lionel Palmer. “Tied up,” I told him. “That’s the hell of this business.”

  His face showed disappointment. “Gee, I was looking forward to something swell tonight.”

  “And I wanted to get some lessons,” I told him. “I’d sure like to learn some of the stuff you know about women.”

  “Hang around me and I’ll show you the works,” he said. “You look like a good egg.”

  We shook hands and I went out.

  Chapter Seven

  I walked into my office. Elsie Brand nodded coolly.

  I closed the door, said, “Now look, sister, next time I cut you in on a deal, at least follow suit and don’t start trumping my aces.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know damn well what I mean!” I told her. “If I had a heavy date, I wouldn’t be asking you for permission to keep it. When I ring you up with some kind of a stall that way, at least stay on the line and start playing along until you can find out what I’m after. For all you knew, that conversation might have been monitored. As it was, I had to keep talking to beat hell after you had slammed up the phone so I could get out of a date I didn’t want to keep.”

  Her face lit up. “Oh, I
’m sorry, Donald. I didn’t know what it was you had in mind.”

  “Next time,” I said, “have a little more confidence in me. Stick around and try to see what I’m shooting at.”

  I went over to my closet, opened it and took out the blowgun.

  “Would you mind telling me what that is?” Elsie asked. “I went in there to hang up my coat and—that’s the darnedest-looking thing I ever saw.”

  “That,” I said, “is the nucleus of a juicy little fee.…Is Bertha in?”

  “She’s in.”

  “Alone?”

  “I think so. Want me to ring?”

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ll go on in.”

  I took the blowgun and walked into Bertha’s office.

  Bertha was pouring words into a dictating machine; her voice high-pitched and metallic.

  She looked up in annoyance, shut off the dictating machine, said, “Damn it, when I want you, I can’t ever find you. But when I’m right in the middle of an important letter you— Donald, what the hell is that?”

  “That,” I said, “is the missing blowgun.”

  I reached in my pocket and took out the jade Buddha. “This,” I said, “is the missing jade Buddha.

  “Since you’ve had the personal contact with Dean Crockett the Second, it might be a good plan for you to return the loot.”

  Bertha looked at me with her double chin resting on her Adam’s apple; her little piggish eyes were big and wide for once. “What the hell!” she said.

  I stood the blowgun in the corner, brushed a little imaginary lint off my coat sleeve, said, “Well, I’ll be getting along.…”

  “Come back here, you bastard!” Bertha Cool screamed at me.

  I stopped and looked over my shoulder in surprise.

  “Something else?” I asked.

  “Something else. Where the hell did you get those things?”

  “From the people that had stolen them.”

  Bertha Cool’s diamonds flashed in a scintillating arc as she pointed a finger at a chair and said, “You park your fanny right there in that chair and tell me what the hell this is all about.”

  It isn’t often you can take Bertha like that. It made me feel good.

  I sat down and lit a cigarette while Bertha’s glittering eyes were fastened on me, getting more angry by the minute.