Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner

gambling, and a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses.
    I didn’t get to read it all. Lieutenant Sheldon started talking. “Fold it and put it in your pocket, Lam. You’ll have an opportunity to study it at your leisure. What do you know about the hit-and-run charge?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You have a client, perhaps, who has an automobile that’s been smashed up a little. You’re a shrewd operator. You want to know just what you’re getting into before you represent him, don’t you?”
    “No.”
    “You should.”
    “I mean I don’t have a client who has a broken-up automobile.”
    “Tut-tut,” Lieutenant Sheldon said. “Let’s not spar around with each other, Donald.”
    “I’m not sparring.”
    His eyes twinkled. “And don’t try to get hardboiled. It doesn’t buy you anything — up here.”
    “I’m satisfied it wouldn’t.”
    “That’s fine,” he said. “So now we understand each other perfectly.”
    I nodded. “If I knew anything that would help on that hit-and-run charge I’d let you fellows know.”
    “Of course you would,” Lieutenant Sheldon said. “I know you would. In the first place, we’d be very grateful for any co-operation, and in the second we’d be very, very much put out if we didn’t get the co-operation.”
    I nodded.
    “Now, the way I see it,” Sheldon went on, “is that you’re from Los Angeles. You have a detective agency down there and somebody came to you and said, ‘Look, Lam, I had a little trouble when I was up in San Francisco. I had a few drinks and I had this girl along with me and she was getting affectionate and demonstrative, and there was a crowded street corner and I heard somebody yell. I don’t think I hitanybody, but I’d just like to have you find out. And if I did hit anybody, you try to square it for me, will you?’ž”
    I shook my head. “It isn’t like that at all.”
    “I know,” Sheldon said. “I’m just telling you the way I thought it might be.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “So you come up here and start looking around to try and find out about what happened. Now that’s all right as far as you’re concerned, but as far as the department is concerned we’d like to have the credit of cleaning up the case and solving it. You understand that, don’t you?”
    I nodded.
    Sheldon’s eyes got hard. “So,” he said, “if you know anything about it, you tell us and we’ll all co-operate and play palsy-walsy; but if you don’t co-operate, Donald, your man will be in one hell of a fix. There won’t be anything he can square. He’ll have the book thrown at him, and whenever you come to San Francisco you’ll wish you’d stayed home.” Again I nodded.
    “So,” Sheldon went on, “now that we’ve become acquainted, what have you got to tell us?”
    “Nothing, yet.”
    “Now, we don’t like that, Donald, I don’t like the ‘yet’ and I don’t like the ‘nothing.’ž”
    I didn’t say anything.
    He said, “You’re going to want some co-operation at this end before you get done. Now’s the time to lay the foundation for it.”
    I said, “You could be all cockeyed in your surmises.”
    “Of course I could, of course I could, Donald! You don’t need to tell me that. Good heavens, some man could have walked into your office and said, ‘Look, Donald, my boy went up to San Francisco and when he came home I’m satisfied he’d been in trouble of some sort. Now, he’s a good boy but he does have a tendency to hoist a coupleand then go out and get behind a steering wheel. Now, suppose you just slide up to San Francisco and see if there’s any hit-and-run charge up there that hasn’t been accounted for.’
    “Or,” Lieutenant Sheldon went on, “some man might have come to you and said, ‘I saw a hit-and-run job up there in San Francisco. I was out with a woman who wasn’t my wife and I simply can’t afford to get mixed into it, but I’ll give you a little information about what I saw and perhaps you