Free Jackpot (Nameless Dectective) by Bill Pronzini

was no exception.
    “Things like that don’t happen much,” he said. “Not here, they don’t. Young guy comes waltzing in off the street, plunks down fifty thousand bucks for a new ‘Vette, drives it for a week, puts a couple hundred miles on it, and then brings it back and says he wants a full refund.”
    “Did he pay the fifty thousand in cash?” I asked.
    “Yes, sir. Stacks of fifties and hundreds in a Giants tote bag. Can you believe it?”
    “He say why he was paying cash?”
    “Told Lloyd Adams he won the money in Reno, big slot-machine payoff. Well, why not? It’s none of our business where they get the money to buy a car.”
    “So then he brought the Corvette back a week later.”
    “That’s right,” Kamroff said. “Says something came up, big emergency, he’s got to have the fifty thousand back.”
    “What sort of emergency, did he say?”
    “No. But he was all worked up over it. Even more worked up when I explained the facts of life to him. We couldn’t have refunded the full purchase price if we’d wanted to. You can’t sell a car as new when it’s got mileage on it—that’s a state law. You have to market it as used, which means a price reduction even if it is brand-new and only has a couple hundred miles on it. I did what I could to oblige Mr. Burnett, got most of his outlay back to him; we try to please our customers, even the wacky ones. He didn’t like it, but that’s life. You take the good with the bad.”
    “Did he ask for the refund in cash?”
    “At first he did. We convinced him to take a cashier’s check.”
    “Can you tell me whether he cashed it or signed it over to someone?”
    “Cashed it.”
    “For currency or another cashier’s check?”
    “Currency. The bank manager mentioned it when I spoke to him the next day.”
    So David Burnett had taken both his jackpot winnings and his refund in cash. Which meant what? Why would he want to risk carrying around all that green?

    MY OFFICE was only a few blocks from Benoit Chevrolet, on O’Farrell Street, so I made that my next stop. For one thing, I needed to prepare an agency contract for Allyn Burnett to sign. And for another, I wanted to get hold of Joe DeFalco— Chronicle reporter, poker buddy, and expert on gambling and related matters. There were a couple more theories I wanted to explore, one reasonable and the other off-the-wall.
    Eberhardt had closed up last night and for a change he had remembered to switch on the answering machine. No messages, though. I called DeFalco’s home number. His wife said he was out on some sort of assignment but that he was due home by six. I asked her to have him call when he showed up.
    I used my old portable to fill out one of the standard contract forms. Then I took a look at Saturday’s mail, which consisted of two bills and a catalogue of “the latest in professional and security control devices” from some company in Kentucky. Eberhardt was always after me to upscale the agency, outfit ourselves with modern technological advancements that would, he claimed, make our job easier. So I opened the catalogue and paged through it.
    Miniature cameras and “camera systems.” Mini-stethoscopes. A variety of bugs and bug monitors. A thing to detect whether or not somebody you were shaking hands with was wearing a covert listening device. Bulletproof briefcases and tote bags made of something called “ballistic polypropylene” that was guaranteed to have five times the strength of steel in stopping slugs fired at point-blank range. Some gunk you could spray on letters to turn the envelopes translucent, thus allowing you to read the contents without muss or fuss. But the gunk wasn’t the best little privacy-invader offered in the catalogue. No siree. That honor belonged to a glittering gem of advanced technology called the Night Penetrator.
    What the Night Penetrator did was to electro-optically amplify starlight or other ambient light into phosphor green images that literally