Murder Room
43 total works
A cool girl hunt is what the blind man wanted. He was searching for a pretty young woman, soft spoken and slender, whom he'd never seen but knew had vanished, and he was willing to pay Bertha Cool anything to find her.
The whole thing seemed impossible and sounded suspicious, but the man's money was right - even if his motives weren't - and given the choice Bertha always followed the dollar sign.
Only this time, the dollar sign pointed to murder and fingered Bertha Cool as a red hot suspect.
Douglas Selby, the ambitious young District Attorney of the territory around Madison City, had up before him a young man guilty of embezzling a comparatively small sum of money which he had spent gambling. Selby could have locked him up - and perhaps ruined his life. But he wanted to find the how and the why of this otherwise law-abiding young man's gambling.
Selby's investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for himself.
Mira Woodford was a beautiful girl who believed that the best things in life were expensive. She bartered her youthful charms for the rewards of being an old man's bride, and her investment paid off in millions when she suddenly became his widow.
When Bertha Cool sent Donald Lam to find out if Mira's kisses had turned to poison for the rich little poor girl's late husband, one look at Mira made Donald eager to see for himself how deadly her embrace really was. But though Mira was lovely and willing, her past was ugly and threatening - and when passion and blackmail went hand in hand, murder could not be far behind.
Donald Lam arrives at work one day to find an outraged police sergeant Frank Sellers stewing in the office of his senior partner, Bertha Cool. Sellers is close to cracking an armoured car robbery case, but in the course of his investigation, a telephone number for the Cool-Lam detective agency was found on one of his primary suspects - one Hazel Downer.
The same Hazel Downer employs Donald Lam to find her husband who has run off with another broad, taking her fifty thousand dollars with him. Wasn't it fifty thousand dollars that haven't been recovered from the armoured car job ... ?
All that glitters isn't gold.
A rich man sends Donald Lam looking for a man - when he really wants to find a woman. A minor missing persons case turns out to be a major one. And a pleasure boat on pontoons serves as a smuggler's ship on wheels.
This is a job for detectives who know their fact from fiction, and Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are pitted against people who know too well that all grass isn't green.
Death gave its warning in the form of a luscious brunette. She walked into the office of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool, calmly announced that her employer was about to be killed, and paid them a healthy fee to keep the boss alive.
For Cool this case meant cold cash. For Lam it meant warm curves. But before long it meant murder ...
Bertha Cool was purring like a kitten. A client had just hired the agency to investigate a suspected insurance swindle and, in Bertha's glittering eyes, that was just the sort of respectable case they needed. Donald Lam had his doubts but he began looking around for suitable bait to set the trap.
What he didn't know was that the trap was already baIted - and more than ready to spring.
Bertha Cool was in a flap. The distinguished Mr Homer Breckinridge had been waiting twenty minutes for Donald Lam to make an appearance, and around Mr Breckinridge was the heady aroma of C-A-S-H.
Then Donald appeared and in no time found himself hired to investigate an insurance claim. 'Such nice, safe, respectable work', purred Bertha, 'and it's up for grabs.'
But it didn't take Donald long to find out he was anything but safe and that he was the one up for grabs ...
Money in the bank had always been a persuasive factor in Bertha Cool's life - and Lamont Hawley represented a lot of it. He also represented an insurance company that smelled a rat about a traffic-accident claim. The trouble was the claimant had drifted away - a beautiful blonde who had been co-operative and level-headed. In fact, too level-headed ... she sounded almost professional.
Donald Lam didn't like it. Why should a large insurance company need an outside investigator? But Bertha's eyes see $$$ so Donald gets cracking, and within no time he is the prime suspect. For what on earth is a body doing in the trunk of Donald's car?
The story of how a man can commit a brutal murder, confess, and get away with it!
The killer was guilty without a shred of doubt. The police had him behind bars. The district attorney had plenty of evidence. But - no court in the state could convict him!
The Bigger They Come features that fast-moving, skull-cracking team: Bertha Cool, a two-hundred pound "lady" who uses the language of a longshoreman. And Donald Lam, a pint-sized process server who would have been in the morgue long ago except that he can think faster than the next man ... or woman.
Bertha Cool has just been released from a sanitarium where she has been recovering from flu and pneumonia, but soon she and Donald Lam are on the hunt for a missing bride-to-be.
They become tangled in case filled with slot-machine skullduggery, a double-crossing client, murder and a spot of financial finagling before they eventually achieve their goal.
You might call Bertha Cool the broad beam of the Cool and Lam Detective Agency. As this story begins, all 200-odd pounds of her are quivering happily at the thought of a fat fee to come.
All Bertha has to do is guard the priceless treasures of wealthy explorer Dean Crockett II, who is about to throw a fabulous party. But somebody's hand is quicker even than Bertha's gimlet eye, and one valuable jade Buddha and a primitive blowgun disappear.
That's when brainy bantam-weight Donald Lam steps in, and the pace sets off fiercely, before reaching a sensational, unexpected climax.
The case started with a corpse. Nobody knew who he was. Next, a man named John Burke disappeared. But D.A. Doug Selby could not find his body.
Then Mrs Burke swore that the corpse and her missing husband were one and the same man. This should have solved both mysteries. All it did was run the D.A. up two different trees. Sure, the faces of the dead man and John Burke were exactly the same. The only trouble was that their fingerprints were different!
Impossible? That's what Doug Selby thought too - until the killer struck again ...
Two incidents involving a Peeping Tom are reported from the Swim and Tan Motel to the detective agency belonging to Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. Bertha, meanwhile, has warned Donald to steer clear of the dangerous jobs and stick to aiding solid, sane citizens like Montrose L. Carson. And all Carson wants is the name of the informer in his office who is passing on confidential material to a business rival, Herbert Dowling.
But when Dowling is murdered at the Swim and Tan Motel, it looks as though Bertha has picked the wrong client, and Donald the right girl when he chooses a lively bait to catch the Peeping Tom ... and the murderer.
Muriell Gilman left her father at the breakfast table while she cooked seconds of sausage and eggs. When she returned, he had disappeared - seemingly into thin air.
She searched the house from cellar to attic. Then she went out to the workshop ... there, scattered on the floor, were hundred-dollar bills - and in their midst a spreading, crimson stain. That's when she telephoned Perry Mason, who soon discovers that the missing piece of the mystery seems to belong to his arch nemesis Hamilton Burger.
Clayton Dawson came to Lam & Cool as a last resort. He needed an under-cover agent to 'protect the family name'.
Bertha Cool didn't want to take the case, but Donald Lam talked her into it when their client laid twelve one-hundred-dollar bulls on the table. What seemed a simple case of protecting an undisciplined daughter soon erupted into an explosion of trouble for Lam - trouble in the form of murder and blackmail.
She pulled herself out of the water and into a canoe and gasped, 'I don't know who you are ... but you'd better paddle like hell!' Flashlights appeared on the shore. Someone shouted 'There she is!' but Perry Mason was doing as he was told for a change, paddling into the night, with a strange girl, towards the hottest water he had ever been in.
By morning, Mason was in all the papers - wanted for robbery. By afternoon, he had a second client - in jail. Then murder arrived and he was precipitated into the tensest battle of his career.