Crime Does Not Pay #99

Private eye Chip Gardner takes on the dangerous job of protecting a valuable ruby sale involving the elegant Marianne Corday, only to find himself ambushed, knocked cold, and racing against time to stop a coordinated heist unfolding at his client's home. With mobsters, crooked painters, and stolen safes converging on one address, Gardner must piece together who's running the operation before the criminals make their escape.

A paroled ex-con fresh out of prison spots an opportunity too good to resist: a respectable businessman named Ernie who bears an uncanny resemblance to him—same build, same voice, same everything. As the idea takes shape over weeks of careful observation, our protagonist begins to wonder if he could step into Ernie's life and leave his own troubled past behind in the quicksands. What unfolds is a crime so audacious it defies belief, earning its place in the annals of criminal deception.

Lucky Barrows runs a high-stakes poker game where a desperate man loses big, and when a confrontation over the debt turns deadly, Lucky finds himself the prime suspect in a murder investigation. District Attorney Frank Miles believes he has his man, but proving it proves trickier than expected when Lucky's alibi holds and the evidence doesn't quite add up. In this 1951 crime tale, a slick operator discovers that being clever enough to outsmart the law is one thing—but staying ahead of justice is another.

When Detective Blaine intercepts a wiretapped call setting up a green goods swindle at Woodland Park, he stakes out the meeting expecting to catch the con artists red-handed—but a gunshot shatters the plan, leaving the target, "Dutch" Treat, dead and a briefcase full of cash vanished. Now Blaine must untangle conflicting alibis from a cast of suspicious characters, each claiming to have been elsewhere in the park when the murder occurred. With multiple suspects and motives tangled up in the scheme, can the detective finger the real killer before the trail goes cold?