Mister X Read Free

Sixth National Bank in Lower Manhattan.
    They’d both stopped what they’d been doing and went to work for Quinn as minority partners in Quinn and Associates Investigations. They were the associates.
    Restaurateur Sammy Caminatto had hired QAI to discover how his cousin’s Visa card number was stolen, when the only place he’d used his new card and new number, before cutting the card into six pieces to keep it out of his new trophy wife’s hands, was at Sammy’s.
    Quinn had assigned Pearl and Fedderman to the case, and they’d slipped into their roles at Sammy’s. Now it looked as if they’d found the answer to the riddle of the roaming card numbers. It was in Linda’s apron pocket. Which Pearl thought was a shame, because she liked Linda, who was cute as puppies, naïve, and probably being used.
    “Looks like Linda’s it,” Pearl said to Fedderman.
    He showed no reaction but said, “I’m surprised. She seems like a good kid.”
    “Maybe she is, but she’s going down for this one. Carries a mimic card swiper in her apron pocket.”
    “I watched for those and missed it,” Fedderman said. “She must be smooth.”
    “You can tell she’s done it before.”
    “Let’s not spoil her evening,” Fedderman said, sipping some of his martini that he hadn’t poured into his water glass. “Let’s let her copy some more numbers, build up the evidence against her.”
    “Watch her keep breaking the law?”
    “Sure.”
    “Doesn’t that kind of make us accomplices?” Pearl asked. Since becoming an associate and not having the NYPD to cover legal expenses, she’d become cautious about exposing herself and the agency to potential litigation. Or maybe this was because she’d become fond of Linda and didn’t want to compound the mess the young woman was in.
    “In a way,” Fedderman said, “but nobody’ll know but us. And you and me, Pearl, we’d never rat each other out.”
    “I suspect you’re half right,” Pearl said.
    She waited till an hour before closing time to call the NYPD, and Linda was apprehended with the card recorder in her apron pocket. It contained the names and credit card numbers of five diners who’d paid their checks with plastic that evening. Damning evidence.
    As she was being led away, Linda was loudly and tearfully blaming everything on a guy named Bobby. Pearl believed her.
    “Men!” Pearl said, with a disdain that dripped.
    Fedderman didn’t comment, standing there thinking it was Linda who’d illegally recorded the card numbers.
     
    A beaming and impressed Sammy told them his check to QAI would be in the mail, and Pearl and Fedderman left the restaurant about eleven o’clock to go to their respective apartments. They would write up their separate reports tomorrow and present them to Quinn, who would doubtless instruct Pearl to send a bill to Sammy even though it might cross with his check in the mail. Business was business.
    Fedderman waited around outside the restaurant with Pearl while she tried to hail a cab. The temperature was still in the eighties, and the air was so sultry it felt as if rain might simply break out instead of fall.
    It never took Pearl long to attract the eye of a cabbie, so they’d soon part and Fedderman would walk the opposite direction to his subway stop two blocks away.
    Pearl extended one foot off the curb into the street and waved, kind of with her whole body.
    Sure enough, a cab’s brake lights flared, and it made a U-turn, causing oncoming traffic to weave and honk, and drove half a block the wrong way in the curb lane to come to a halt near Pearl.
    “It might have been Bobbie with an ‘I-E,’” Fedderman said, as she was climbing into the back of the cab. “A woman.”
    Pearl glared at him. “Dream on.”
    She slammed the cab’s door before he could reply.
    Fedderman watched the cab make another U-turn to get straight with the traffic. He wondered if Pearl had always been the way she was, born with a burr up her ass. She was so