Read Online Gold Comes in Bricks by A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) - Free Book Online

haven’t got it.”
    “You’d better have it, then.”
    “Donald, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you fifty times that you can’t just come in here and hold me up for a lot of expense money. You’re careless, Donald. You’re extravagant. Mind you, I don’t think you pad the swindle sheet, but you just don’t have any perspective in money matters. All you can see is what you want to accomplish.”
    I said, casually, “It’s a nice piece of business. I’d hate to see you lose it.”
    “She knows you’re a detective now?”
    “Yes.”
    “I won’t lose it, then.”
    “No?” I asked.
    “Not if you play your part.”
    “I can’t play my part unless I have a roll.”
    “Good heavens, listen to the man. What do you think I his agency is, made of money?”
    I said, “Officers were out last night—early this morning.”
    “Officers?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why? What happened?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I was sleeping through most of it, but it seems that Robert Tindle—that’s the stepson—had a man working with him by the name of Ringold—or did you read the paper?”
    “Ringold? Jed Ringold?” she asked, her voice seeming to jump down my throat.
    “That’s the one.”
    She kept looking at me for a long time, then she said, “Donald, you’re doing it again.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Falling for a woman. Listen, lover, some day that’s going to get you in an awful jam. You’re young and innocent and susceptible. Women are shrewd and designing. You can’t trust them. I don’t mean all women, but I mean the kind of women who try to use you.”
    I said, “No one’s trying to use me.”
    She said, “I should have known better. I thought it was too damned improbable at the time.”
    “What was?”
    “That a girl like Alta Ashbury with a lot of money, swell looks, and a lot of men chasing after her would fall for you. It’s the other way around. You’ve fallen for her, and she’s using you as a cover-up. Went to a movie! Movie, my eye! At eleven o’clock at night.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    She picked up the newspaper and checked through it before she found the address. “Murdered within a couple of blocks of the place where she parked her car—you tailing along behind—officers out at the house at three o’clock in the morning. She knows you’re a detective—and we still have the job.”
    Bertha Cool threw back her head and laughed—hard, mirthless laughter.
    I said, “I’m going to need three hundred dollars.”
    “Well, you can’t have it.”
    I shrugged my shoulders, got up, and started for the door.
    “Donald, wait.”
    I stood at the door looking at her.
    “Don’t you understand, Donald? Bertha doesn’t want in be harsh with you, but—”
    “Do you,” I asked, “want me to tell you all about it?” She looked at me as though her ears hadn’t been working right, and said, “Of course.”
    I said, “Better think it over for twenty-four hours, and then let me know.”
    All of a sudden her face twitched. She opened her purse, look a key from it, unlocked the cash drawer, opened an inner compartment with another key, took out six fifty-dollar bills, and gave them to me. “Remember, Donald,” she said, “this is expense money. Don’t squander it.”
    I didn’t bother to answer her but walked across the office, folding the fifty-dollar bills. Elsie Brand looked up from the typewriter, saw the roll of fifties, and pursed her lips into a silent whistle, but her fingers didn’t quit hammering away at the keyboard.
    Going out to Ashbury’s place in a taxicab, I read the morning newspaper. Ringold had been identified as an ex-convict, a former gambler, and, at the time of his death, had been employed by “an influential corporation.” The officials of the corporation had expressed surprise when they had been told of the man’s record. Although his employment had been in a minor capacity, the corporation had used great care in the selection of its