“That raised merry hell with Morgan Birks. He couldn’t go into court to fight the divorce action. She had all of the stuff where she could get at it and he couldn’t. He had to take things lying down. So he reached an agreement with her—the best he could get—which wasn’t much. He had the deadwood on her, but he couldn’t use it because of what she had on him and because the chief would have taken him for a ride if he’d stuck his head out of cover.”

“Where was Morgan Birks?” the district attorney asked.

“I’m coming to that,” I said. “You said you wanted it from the beginning.”

“All right. Go ahead and give it to me.”

“Well, the chief found out that Sandra Birks was going to hire the Cool Detective Agency to serve the papers. So the chief planted me to get a job with the Cool Detective Agency, figuring that we’d find Morgan that way. I got the job and was assigned to serve the papers. Sandra Birks naturally wanted the thing cleaned up.

“Now, Sandra was protecting Morgan Birks, but we didn’t know it at the time. She had a man in the house who was supposed to be her brother. It wasn’t her brother at all. It was Morgan. But Morgan was watching her like a hawk. He was afraid she was going to two-time him all the way along the line and skip out with all the money from the safety deposit boxes instead of the cut that they’d agreed on.

“Well, as soon as I’d get any information from Sandra Birks and Alma Hunter I’d relay it on to the chief. And in that way, we found out where Morgan Birks was hiding—that is, we found out the man who was supposed to be Sandra’s brother was really the man we wanted.”

“But how could he pose as her brother when you already knew him?” the sheriff asked.

“Because he’d pretended he was in an automobile accident, and they’d taped a lot of stuff over his nose, and the tape had pulled his face all out of shape. He was combing his hair differently, and he’d put on some padding under his coat, enough to fill him out. After I bumped Morgan off, I rolled that padding up into a bundle and dropped it in an ashcan in front of the apartment house. You can check on that.”

“Go ahead,” the sheriff said.

“Well, I passed all this information on to the chief. So the chief had a pug by the name of Fred—I never did know his last name. And he sent Fred out to bring Morgan Birks to time.