Kept Women Can’t Quit

Chapter 9

It was quarter to eleven by the time I reached Ernestine Hamilton’s apartment.

She must have been waiting within six feet of the door because I had no sooner pressed the button than the door was jerked open and Ernestine all but grabbed me into her arms.

“Donald!” she exclaimed, “I’m so glad... I was afraid you weren’t going to show up.”

“I was unavoidably detained,” I told her.

There were traces of tears in her eyes.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve been telling myself that for the last hour but... well, I got to thinking and wondering if perhaps you hadn’t handed me a line. You know, I must have seemed an awful ninny to you last night and I was afraid I’d disgusted you and...”

“Stop it,” I said.

“Stop what?”

“This business of running yourself down,” I said. “From now on, you’re going to think of yourself in an entirely different manner. Did you ask Bernie about—”

“I asked her about everything,” she said. “I told her to tell me everything in that hotel that looked the least bit unusual. And, believe me, I turned her inside out. Donald, you’d be absolutely surprised at the things that go on in a big hotel like that.

“Of course, the house detectives know some of it, but I don’t think they know as much as a good, smart telephone operator — and, of course, the house detectives don’t do anything about things unless they feel that a situation is something that’s apt to create a disturbance or hurt the good name of the hotel in some way, or... well, you know, give it a bad reputation.

“My gosh, Donald, we didn’t get to sleep until three o’clock this morning and Bernie is so tired she can hardly hold her head up. Believe me, I got all the dirt. There’s the married woman in 917 whose husband is away on a trip. There’s the girl who slipped into another room and then found she’d left her purse with her key in it. She’d locked her purse with her key in it, her driving license, all of her money, everything, in the man’s room.”

“Nothing that would help on this case?” I asked.

“I couldn’t find a thing. I just turned Bernie inside out about everything. It would take me an hour to tell you all of it. I made some notes and—”

“Let’s go down to the hotel,” I said. “Is there any chance of meeting Bernie?”

She shook her head. “Bernie’s on the switchboard right straight through. She takes her lunch.

“Donald, there’s one thing that might interest you and that’s the unclaimed brief case.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“Well, when guests come in they come in by taxi or by private car and unload their baggage out front. That’s the doorman’s jurisdiction. He takes the baggage and piles it by the entrance. The bell boys take it from there and put it all in a big row while they wait for the guests to register and be assigned rooms.

“After a guest is assigned a room the clerk calls out, ‘Front,’ and a bell boy comes and picks up the key and the clerk says, ‘Take Mr. So-and-So to Room such-and-such.’

“So then the guest goes over to the row of baggage and indicates the bags that are his and the boy takes them up to the room.”

“Go on,” I said. “What about the unclaimed brief case?”

“Well, you know how it is, Donald, during the rush hour, along early in the morning when the planes come in. There’s a lot of luggage that piles up there, quite a row of it. Then along during the slack time of day there won’t be any luggage at all. Then it will build up again along in the afternoon. For some reason people don’t check in quite as much during the middle of the day. Well, anyway, when they got all caught up with their baggage yesterday, there was one brief case left over. Some incoming guest had evidently failed to remember that he had a brief case and had gone up to his room and just left it sitting there.”

“All right,” I said, “there was an unclaimed brief case. What happened to it?”

“It was turned in to the Lost and Found, but no one’s claimed it.”

“Let’s go take a look,” I said.

“You think the brief case could be important, Donald?”

“Anything could be important; anything that’s the least bit out of the ordinary.”

“Heavens,” she said, “I never realized how many things happen that are out of the ordinary in a hotel of that sort — that is, things that I’d call out of the ordinary.

“What detained you, Donald?”

I said, “I was questioned by the police.”

“You were?”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Oh, they thought I might know something.”

“Donald, you’re so mysterious and so casual and offhand about these things. I... Donald, I’m so excited I’m trembling like a leaf.”

“You’ve got to get over that,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s got into me,” she said. “Just the idea of associating with... with a private eye... Donald, I’m so excited I couldn’t eat a bit of breakfast. I managed to drink the coffee but, I just didn’t want a thing to eat this morning. And poor Bernie, she s absolutely all in. The look she gave me when she left... I just kept her awake half the night.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s go to the hotel.”

We went to the hotel and Ernestine, who knew most of the employees, was proud as a peacock, taking me in tow and nodding to the bell boys and one of the porters. Then she took me over to the porter’s office and said, “He handles the Lost and Found.”

The porter looked me over, then looked at Ernestine as though he had never fully appraised her before.

Ernestine said, “John, my friend wants to see that brief case that was picked up. The sleeper that no one claimed. He—”

The porter produced the brief case.

“Locked?” I asked.

He nodded.

“That wouldn’t be any handicap, would it?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I’d like to look inside of it.”

“Yours?”

“It could be.”

“Oh, I know John could open it,” Ernestine said. “He’s clever with locks, and he has all sorts of keys, don’t you, John?”

The porter opened a drawer containing half a dozen key rings, selected one with small keys on it, tried a couple of keys without doing any good. On the third try the lock clicked back and the brief case opened.

I looked inside.

It was a brief case that held three compartments. There was a bloodstained knife in the middle compartment. There was a chamois-skin money belt also bloodstained, and nothing else.

The porter got a brief glimpse of the knife. He started to reach for the brief case. I grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t touch it,” I said. “It’s been contaminated enough already. Don’t touch a thing. We’ll let the fingerprint men work on it.”

“Oh, Donald, what is it?” Ernestine asked.

I said, “Ernestine, I’m putting you in charge. Don’t let anybody or anything touch that brief case. Tie a string around the handle so we don’t leave any more fingerprints or smudge any that might be on there. Now then, where’s the telephone?”

The porter said, “Use this one right here and I’ll listen while you’re doing your talking.”

I rang up police headquarters and asked for Inspector Hobart. After a few seconds I had him on the line. “Lam talking, Inspector” I said.

“Okay, Lam, what’s on your mind?”

“You have found the murder weapon,” I said.

“I have?”

“Yes, you.”

“Where?”

“At the hotel in a brief case.”

Hobart hesitated for a moment, then said, “I don’t like that, Donald.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too fast. It was too easy. You may be a smart investigator, but on this you’re too damned smart.”

I said, “If you and Sellers hadn’t interfered with my schedule this morning I’d have had it earlier.”

“You knew it was there?”

“I was looking,” I said.

“Where are you now?”

“In the porter’s office at the hotel.”

“Don’t go away,” Hobart said. “Don’t let anybody touch anything. I’m coming down.”

“Okay,” I said, and started to hang up.

“Just a minute,” the porter said, and pushed me away from the telephone. “Hello,” he said, “this is the porter at the hotel. With whom am I talking?”

The receiver made squawking noises.

“All right,” the porter said. “I’ll see that no one touches anything and that everyone stays here. You’re coming right down? Okay, thanks.”

The porter hung up and said apologetically to Ernestine, “I know you, Ernestine, but I don’t know this man, and this is important. The police are coming right down.”

Ernestine grabbed my arm. Her fingers clamped so tight they hurt.

“Donald,” she squealed, “oh, Donald, I’m so excited... I suppose I’m going to have to learn to control myself, but this thing is... this is terrific!”

The porter looked at her speculatively. “How did you know that knife was in there?” he asked me.

“I didn’t.”

“You came and asked for it.” He turned to Ernestine. “Who is this guy?”

“Donald Lam,” I said, “of Cool and Lam, Los Angeles.”

“All right, what’s Cool and Lam?”

“Investigators.”

“Private eyes?”

“Call us that if you want.”

“How did you know what to ask for and what to look for?”

“I didn’t. I looked. I found.”

“Also, you asked.”

“I asked,” I said.

“That’s the part I want to know about.”

“That’s the part the police may want to know about,” I said. “You can stick around and listen.”

“I’ll be sticking around and listening,” he promised. “Don’t worry.”

Inspector Hobart made it in record time. He had a laboratory man with him. I showed him what we had. The laboratory man took it into custody and Hobart wanted to know about Ernestine.

I told him.

Hobart looked me over and said, “All right, let’s go.”

He took Ernestine and me out to the squad car and up to Headquarters.

I was back in his office within an hour and a half of the time I’d left it.

“Private investigators,” Hobart said, “can serve papers and get evidence in divorce cases and things of that sort. The police solve murder cases.”

I nodded.

“I just wanted to be sure you understood that,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Ernestine asked.

“It means,” Inspector Hobart said, “that your boy friend is inclined to take in too damn much territory.”

Ernestine flushed and said hastily, “He’s not my boy friend.”

Hobart looked us both over. “You sit there,” he said to Ernestine. He crooked his forefinger at me. “Lam, you come with me.”

He took me into another room and said, “Give.”

“On what?”

“Ernestine.”

I said, “Ernestine is a TV enthusiast. She’s nuts over private eyes.”

“Go on.”

“She’s the roommate of Bernice Glenn, who is a telephone operator at the hotel.

“Bernice is easy on the eyes and attractive to men. She goes out. She seldom eats a meal in the apartment. Ernestine keeps the place clean and thrills to hear Bernice’s adventures when she gets home at night from a date. That’s Ernestine’s whole life, vicarious substitution of other people’s experiences for her own. She gets her romantic adventures by listening to Bernice. She gets her excitement from watching television.

“When she found out I was a private detective she looked at me with stars in her eyes.”

“What are you doing, just playing her along?”

I said, “Believe it or not, I’ve got plans for Ernestine.”

“Such as what?”

“I think I’ll get her a job.”

“Where?”

“In Los Angeles.”

“Doing what?”

“Being an operative.”

“Has she had any experience?”

“She has talents.”

“Keep talking.”

“Notice her face,” I said. “She does her hair all wrong. She’s so eager to learn about life from other people that she doesn’t stop to think about living her own life herself. If she keeps on she’ll be a mousy person with frustrations. If she can only learn to quit selling herself short she’s going to marry some earnest, sincere guy who will make her a good husband and she’ll make a wonderful wife and mother, and, later on, a damn fine grandmother.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“Get her excited, get her to break out of her shell, to take a look at life, get her doing things, get her to use some sense in the way she does her hair, get her to develop some of her natural aptitudes.”

“Trying to turn a wallflower into a vamp in the approved Hollywood tradition, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I don’t want her to be a vamp. She doesn’t want to be a vamp. She loves people. She wants human contacts. She wants to feel she belongs. She doesn’t want to be a sultry femme fatale. She wants to be an honest, hard-working girl with an honest, hard-working husband. She wants to raise a family that will be a credit to her and to the community. In the meantime, she has exceptional talents of observation and dependability.”

“You’ve just gone off your rocker falling for a dame who appealed to your sympathies,” Hobart said. “It takes talent and training to be a detective. You damned amateurs! You give me a pain.”

I said, “We found the murder weapon, didn’t we?”

He looked at me, grinned, and said, “Ouch!”

After a while he took out his pack of cigarettes, gave me one, took one himself, and said, “How the hell did you happen to find it?”

I said, “Ernestine found it for me.”

“All right, how did she happen to find it for you?”

“Because I asked her to look for it.”

“And what brought that up?”

I said, “I wanted to find out whatever was unusual about events in the hotel. I wanted to find out what was going on. I asked her to find out everything that was the least bit out of the ordinary, reviewing all the things that had happened there in the hotel.”

“Was that looking for a murder weapon?” he asked.

“Something like that,” I said. “You kill a man with a carving knife. You don’t carry the knife out with you.”

“Why not?”

“In the first place, it’s incriminating. In the second place, it’s hard to carry.”

“The murderer carried it in with him,” Hobart said. “He could carry it out with him.”

“That’s what puzzles me,” I said.

“What does?”

“It isn’t the kind of knife that a man would carry with him as a weapon. A knife that was intended to be a weapon would be of rigid, heavy steel, with a keen edge for the blade and a heavy back. Or it might be a two-edged stiletto type of affair. This thing is a carving knife. It has a peculiar onyx handle.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw that much when I looked in the brief case.”

Hobart’s eyes narrowed. “All right. What else do you know?”

I said, “I don’t think the murderer carried the knife in with him. I think that knife originally came from someplace in the hotel. I think someone must have had access to the kitchen or to room service — unless the knife was bought at some store near the hotel by someone who suddenly decided it would be nice to have a weapon.

“If you hadn’t interfered with my activities I’d have been scouting around the neighborhood, talking with hardware stores.”

“Then it’s a damn good thing we interfered with your activities,” Hobart said. “That’s the trouble with you amateurs. You underestimate the intelligence of the police. I’ve had men out covering the hardware and cutlery stores for the past fifteen minutes. We should get a report soon.

“For your information, Lam, that is a peculiar knife. This imitation onyx handle is a species of plastic that is relatively new. The knife comes from Chicago. We telephoned the distributor to find out how many wholesalers here had carried it.

“There’s just one jobber on the Coast that put in an order and his shipment just came in a few days ago. A few of the salesmen had samples but that’s all. They haven’t made any retail deliveries.”

“Then this knife came from the stock of the wholesaler?”

Hobart shook his head. “I don’t know. We can’t afford to jump at conclusions. We’re making a canvass right now on each one of their salesmen. The jobber is asking them to report on whether they can return the samples to stock. That way they can tell if one knife is missing. Apparently the rest of the shipment is intact.

“The plastic on the knife handle is a new type. The design is new, and the blade is a new type of steel that is designed to hold its edge almost indefinitely. The knife is exceptionally thin. This new steel that has only been on the market a short time comes from Sweden.”

“That should make the knife easy to trace,” I said.

Hobart nodded and said, “If one salesman doesn’t have his sample we’ll find out what he did with it and start tracing the murder weapon from there. That’s the kind of a break we don’t ordinarily get in a murder case.”

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“You wait,” he said. “You do absolutely nothing. I don’t want you going out and gumming up the works. This is a job for a Police Department, a whole department, you understand. One lone guy prowling around and asking questions can do more harm than good.

“Now then, I want some cards face up on the table. You weren’t interested in solving a murder. You were up here on something else. What?”

I looked him in the eye and said, “Fifty grand.”

“That’s better,” he said. “I thought so. What were you planning to do?”

“Turn it in for a reward,” I said.

“Sellers wouldn’t like that. He wants to solve the case himself.”

“Let him solve it then. I’m not stopping him. He’s got the whole damned Police Department back of him. He can do more than I can.”

Hobart looked at me and said, “You can’t get along in your business if you have police enmity.”

“I won’t have anyone’s enmity after I’ve got the fifty grand,” I said. “Sure, Sellers would like to solve it, but what he absolutely needs is to have it proved that someone else had the fifty grand. Once he does that, he’s clean.

“I’ll tell you something else. If we get a reward we’re willing to let Sellers take all the credit.”

Hobart drummed with his fingers on the desk. “Lam,” he said, “I’m going to ask you something. You don’t need to answer it if you don’t want to, but don’t lie to me. We’re working on a case where false information could cross us up more than anything else.”

I nodded.

“Did you have that fifty grand?” he asked.

“Would you protect me?” I asked.

“It depends. I’m not making any promises.”

I said, “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I had the fifty grand.”

“Then that story you fed Frank Sellers about this man, Inman, at the Full Dinner Pail having it was just a cock-and-bull story?”

“That wasn’t a cock-and-bull story,” I said. “I think Inman had it before I did.”

Hobart’s eyes narrowed. “All right,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“I got it from Downer’s trunk.”

“And where did you get Downer’s trunk?”

“I picked it up at the railroad station.”

“Where is it now?”

I told him.

“Go on,” he said. “What happened to the fifty grand?”

I said, “Either one of two people have it.”

“Who?”

“Either Takahashi Kisarazu, who runs the camera store, or Evelyn Ellis.”

“What’s your reasoning?”

I said, “I bought a camera and some enlarging paper. I took some paper out of the box of enlarging paper. I don’t know how many sheets, probably fifteen or twenty. The camera store says they found seventeen sheets of paper under the counter so I’ll settle for seventeen.”

“And you put the money in there with the rest of the enlarging paper and closed the box?”

I nodded.

“How do you know the money wasn’t taken out in Los Angeles?”

“It was done by somebody in a camera store,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because when Sellers got into the package in Los Angeles the box of enlarging paper had the seals cut all right so I wouldn’t be suspicious, but it was a different box of paper. It was a full box. If it had been my box, seventeen sheets would have been missing.”

Hobart said, “All right, Lam, I think you’re coming clean. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do some work on that Jap at the camera store.”

I shook my head.

“No?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I want to be sure.”

“How are you going to get sure?”

“I don’t know, but I have an idea the murder of Downer was tied in with the loss of the fifty grand.”

“The murder is my meat,” Hobart said.

“You can have it. I want the money. You keep your meat. I’ll keep mine.”

“All right. What do you think happened?”

I said, “I think that Baxley had a partner in the Full Dinner Pail Drive-in. I think Baxley didn’t know the police were after him until after he’d made that telephone call and looked back over his shoulder. I think Baxley went to that drive-in and ordered the two hamburgers, one with onions and one without onions, so he’d have a good excuse to have them put in a paper sack. Then I think he sat there and ate the hamburgers slowly and leisurely so people could see him eating the hamburgers. I think that was all part of the plan. Then I think he took the fifty grand, which was the split of his partner, put it in the paper bag, threw the paper bag into the refuse can and drove off.

“I think that’s where Sellers made his first mistake. I think he should have pulled back the lid on that trash can and pulled out that paper bag. Then I think he should have tagged along after Baxley.”

“Then where did Downer get the fifty grand?”

“He got it from Baxley s accomplice,” I said, “and because there wasn’t any split, it means that he had to highjack it. If he’d shown up with twenty-five grand I’d have figured there were three partners in the job, that Baxley got half and the other two split another half for setting the thing up for him. Because Downer had fifty grand, it means it was a highjack.”

Inspector Hobart said, “I’ve got news for you, Lam.”

“What?”

“It didn’t work out that way and it isn’t going to be that way when we get the thing unscrambled.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Hobart said. “Call it a cop’s instinct if you want, but things just don’t come out that smooth. You’ve got a bright idea and that’s all it is, an idea.

“That’s the worst of you guys who single-shot. You play things as a lone wolf. You get an idea and you follow it through. You work out some ingenious solution and then you start playing that solution. The cops can’t afford to work that way. They have to go one step at a time. They can’t take short cuts. They plod along, picking out one thing and then another.”

“Okay. You work your way, I work my way,” I said.

“What else do you know?” Hobart asked.

I said, “There were things in that trunk that I couldn’t figure out — cards, books and things. Sellers has them now.”

Hobart said, “Tell me about these cards.”

“They consisted of strings of figures.” I pulled out my notebook. “Here’s one — O, O, five, one, three, six, four.”

Hobart reached out and took the book.

“Now then, take a look at the next one,” I said.

Hobart read out the figures. “Four, dash, five, dash, fifty-nine, dash, ten, dash, one, dash.”

“Take a look at the next line,” I said. “That ends in a plus sign.”

He read off the figures. “Eight, dash, five, dash, fifty-nine, dash, four, dash, one, with a plus at the end of it.

“Try one of your hunches on this stuff,” Hobart suggested.

I said, “I noticed a lot of the numbers on those cards ended with three, six, four.”

“Any ideas?”

“I’ve been thinking, particularly about that plus and minus.”

“All right, Lam,” he said. “I’m going to let you think some more. You’re going to sit right here.”

“What about Ernestine?” I asked.

“I’m going to let the matron keep her in charge for a little while.”

“You’re holding her?”

“Not exactly holding her,” Hobart said, “but I want to get this damn case buttoned up, and I can’t do it if I’ve got a lot of temperamental prima donnas running around the city playing hunches. If that damned Jap is mixed in this thing I want to shake him down.”

I said, “You keep out of my end of it and I’ll keep out of yours.”

He grinned and said, “You’ll damn well keep out of everything. You won’t be in circulation. You don’t have any end.”

He strode out of the place and closed the door behind him.

I sat there for a long while. There wasn’t anything else to do. I studied the copies of the cards that had been in the trunk.

After a while the door opened and an officer came in with a couple of hamburgers wrapped in paper napkins and a carton of milk.

“Compliments of Inspector Hobart,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“Working.”

“I want to see him.”

“So do lots of other people.”

“I may have something he’d like to know about,” I said.

“He wouldn’t like that.”

“Why not?”

“You were supposed to tell him all you knew the first time.”

“Tell him I’ve thought of something.”

The man nodded and went out.

I finished the hamburgers, drank the milk, put the empty carton in the paper bag and dropped them in the wastebasket.

Fifteen minutes later Inspector Hobart came in. He looked flushed and angry.

“All right,” he snapped. “What the hell have you been holding out?”

“Nothing. I have another idea. I’ve been thinking about those figures.”

He made a gesture of irritation, started to go out, then said, “All right. Give it to me fast. I’ll listen.”

I said, “A lot of those figures end in three, six, four. Now suppose those were telephone numbers written backwards.”

“What do you mean?”

“Three, six, four,” I said, “would be H, O, three. Then the numbers on this first card would be Hollywood three, one, five hundred. That would be a telephone number. Now then, if you found that the man at that number made a bet on the fourth of May, nineteen hundred fifty-nine, at ten to one and lost, and then on the eighth of May, made a bet at four to one, and won, it might explain something.”

Hobart paused for a minute, came back to the table, drew up a chair, reached for my notebook and started studying the figures. After a while he said, “It’s an idea. For your information, we’ve got the original books and the original cards. I’m going to start checking them on that theory.”

“What else do you know?” I asked.

“Lots,” he said, and got up and walked out.

An hour and a half later Hobart was back again. “Lam,” he said, “you have hunches. Some of them are damn good hunches. I hate to say so because I tell my men not to play hunches. I tell them to go one step at a time, not to get brilliant, just keep methodical.”

I nodded.

“However,” he said, “for your information, the guy at Hollywood three, one, five hundred had been playing the races but not with Downer. He’d made a bet on a horse at ten to one odds on the fourth of May and had lost. He made a bet on the eighth of May at four to one odds and had won. We’ve run down a couple of other cards and they check out.

“Now then, this is your hunch. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hesitate to try to parlay that information into a winning combination but if you want another hunch I’ll give you one.”

“What’s that?”

I said, “This shipment of thousand-dollar bills that was stolen, that’s kind of a peculiar shipment — a hundred thousand in thousand-dollar bills.”

“Go on,” he said.

I said, “It must have been a special order. The bank that ordered that shipment of one hundred thousand in thousand-dollar bills just might have had Standley Downer as a depositor and it might have been Standley Downer who ordered the hundred grand in thousand-dollar bills.”

“Why?”

“Because he was intending to liquidate and get out,” I said, “and he wanted the dough to carry with him.”

“And then?” Hobart asked.

“Then,” I said, “somebody who knew Downer knew that he had ordered the hundred grand and decided to highjack the dough. But if this person knew Downer, then Downer knew this person. So we may have a sort of ring-around-the-rosy. And this person also had to know what armored truck would be making the shipment.”

“Now, that is something I won’t buy,” Hobart said. “That’s the worst of you brilliant guys. You get one good hunch that pays off and it paves the way for playing a thousand hunches that don’t.

“I’m sorry I listened to you the first time. I find myself trying to play short cuts. That’s a hell of a way to solve crimes. That’s the way they solve ’em on television, where they have only half an hour in which to show the crime, bring in the solution and drag in a half-dozen commercials, all in thirty little minutes. Count ’em, thirty.

“You go to hell. You’re corrupting me. I won’t watch television for fear my thinking will be contaminated. You’re corrupting me worse than television.”

He got up and walked out.

Ten minutes later he was back.

“I can’t get you out of my mind,” he said. “You’ve ruined my method of approach.”

He handed me the copy of Hardware Age that I’d picked up in Evelyn Ellis’ apartment.

“Ernestine said that you had this magazine with you when you came up to her apartment last night. When you left you forgot to take it with you.”

“And so?” I asked.

“What were you doing with a copy of Hardware Age? Why did you want it?”

“I just wanted to read it.”

“It’s an old copy. Where did you get it?”

I said, “I got it from Evelyn Ellis’ room in the hotel. I was reading it when she decided to get rough and get me out of there.”

“And you went?”

“I went.”

“Why the abrupt departure?”

“Because she was tearing her clothes off and was going to yell assault with intent to commit rape when she had ’em all off — and she didn’t have far to go.”

“Then the magazine is hers?”

“I guess so.”

“What would she be doing with it?”

I said, “If you look through it you’ll probably find a photograph of Evelyn in a bathing suit as Miss Hardware. She was chosen as the queen of the hardware convention.”

Hobert snapped his fingers and said, “There you go. Another example of what happens when you get away from steady, plodding detective work.”

“Why?”

“I turned every page of that damn thing from cover to cover,” he said, “trying to find her picture. It isn’t in there.

“That’s what comes of playing hunches. You and television will be the ruination of a lot of good cops.”

He was so mad he slammed the magazine down on the table and started to leave the room. He was within two feet of the door when it was opened by an officer who handed him a message typewritten on a piece of paper.

“Thought you might like to see this, Inspector,” he said.

Hobart looked at the message, frowned, looked at it again, said, “They’re sure?”

The officer nodded.

Hobart said, “All right. I’ll take it from here.”

He folded the message, shoved it down in his pocket and stood thoughtfully looking at the door as it closed behind the departing officer.

“All right,” he said, turning to me, “here’s a puzzle for you. You like to be brilliant. Go ahead and be brilliant on this one.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The outfit that makes this knife hasn’t sold a single carving knife any place west of Denver except that one San Francisco shipment. They’re developing the territory regionally.

“Colfax and Bristol, the hardware jobbers here who saw the knife at the hardware convention, insisted on having the first shipment to the Coast, backing it up with a definite order. They got their shipment four days ago.

“Now then, every one of their salesmen has been checked and each man reports that he has his sample intact.”

“Well,” I said, “what would you do if you’d committed a murder with a knife, ditched the weapon and then somebody contacted you on the telephone and asked you to report whether or not you had the knife — what would you say?”

“Oh, sure,” Hobart said, “that occurred to me a long time ago. We’re going to have to have men check every one of those salesmen. But somehow I have an idea they’ll check out, and that will leave us right back where we started.”

He went out of the room. Because there was nothing else to do, I picked up the hardware magazine and started reading it from cover to cover.

Suddenly I found an item that made sense. I kicked myself for not having thought of it and went to the door and jerked it open.

A uniformed officer was sitting outside the door in a straight-backed chair tilted back against the wall, his heels braced on a cross-rung. As I opened the door he snapped forward so that the other two legs of the chair came down on the floor with a bang and his big bulk came up out of the chair. “No, you don’t, brother,” he said. “You stay right there.”

“All right, I stay here,” I said, “but get me Inspector Hobart. I have to see him.”

“Well, that’s something,” the officer said. “You’re running the place now?”

I said, “You get Inspector Hobart or you’re both going to be sorry,” stepped back inside the room and closed the door.

Ten minutes later Inspector Hobart came pushing into the room. “Now this,” he said, “has damn well got to be good. If it isn’t good, you’ll do your waiting in a cell.”

“I think it’s good,” I said.

“Let’s hope so. What is it, another brainy idea of flashing brilliance?”

I said, “An article in the Hardware Age. Want me to read it?”

“What’s it about?”

“Just a paragraph of news comments about the convention in New Orleans.”

“What does it say?”

I picked it up and read: “Christopher, Crowder and Doyle Cutlery Company of Chicago announced a new general utility carving knife which will be placed on the market first in the eastern territory and then in the western territory. A distinguishing feature of the knife is the resilient toughness of the steel which makes it possible to use an exceedingly thin blade. President Carl Christopher points out the blade is almost as thin as a sheet of paper. A new synthetic makes the plastic handle look like onyx.

“Evelyn Ellis, Miss American Hardware, presented carving sets to some hundred buyers who were asked to drop by the booth of the Christopher, Crowder and Doyle Cutlery Company between four and five in the afternoon and receive complimentary carving sets in plush-lined boxes.”

I folded the magazine back so it was open at the page from which I had been reading and handed it to Inspector Hobart.

He didn’t look at the magazine, but instead looked me over and said, “Somehow I can appreciate the way Frank Sellers feels.”

“What do you mean?”

“I regard you with mingled emotions,” Hobart said. “I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t an important lead. It’s one I should have thought of myself. Of course, this babe had one of those carving sets. After all, she was the queen of the hardware industry. She was taken to New Orleans and paraded around in evening gowns and bathing suits. She had all of her expenses paid, was given a big build-up and a lot of publicity.

“She must have picked up a lot of loot, and if she was giving away carving sets to buyers who stopped by the booth during the time the company was announcing its new number, it’s a cinch she picked up a carving set for herself. Now, all we’ve got to do is to get a search warrant, go through the hotel, find the box containing the fork that matches this knife and ask her where the hell the knife is and see what she says.

“That’s fine. I’m grateful. But you do these things too damned easy and there’s just a little too much of a flourish about the way you wrap these things up. Oh, hell, Lam, I suppose I’m nervous, irritable and upset. I’m in my office on the telephone flashing messages out to the dispatcher, getting reports, trying to cover the whole damn front and you sit in here with nothing to do except sharp-shoot. No wonder you can highgrade the stuff. But it makes me just a little mad.”

“At me?” I asked, trying to look innocent.

“You’re damn right, at you,” he said. “But half at myself. I should have thought of this myself. It’s the way the breaks come. I shut you in here in this damn room with nothing to look at except four walls and a hardware magazine. Naturally you read the hardware magazine. Then you come up with a lead and have all the smug modesty of a guy who’s just caught a forward pass and carried it forty yards for a touchdown.”

I said, with all the synthetic bitterness I could put in my voice, “That’s what comes of trying to co-operate! What I should have done was to have kept this information to myself, chucked the hardware magazine in the wastebasket, then gone out and followed up the lead.”

“There are just two things wrong with that,” Hobart told me. “In fact, three things. The first one is that you aren’t going out, the second one is you aren’t going to follow up any leads, and the third one is that any time you stumble onto something hot like this and try to hold it from me, you’re going to find yourself behind the eight ball.”

He stood looking at me angrily and then suddenly threw back his head and laughed. “All right, Lam,” he said, “I can see it from your viewpoint. You can’t see it from mine because you don’t know the thousand and one things I’ve got to try to co-ordinate in order to put across this investigation. Anyhow, thanks for the lead. We’ll follow it up.”

“What’s happened to Ernestine?” I asked.

“We’ve been pumping her to find out if she knows anything else that she hasn’t told.”

“When are you going to let us go?”

“When we get done with this phase of our investigation,” he said. “We don’t want you amateurs going out and lousing it up for us.”

I said, “In other words, you’re going to wait until you get damn good and ready to let me go and that won’t be until Frank Sellers telephones from Los Angeles that it’s all right to let me out of quarantine.”

He smiled.

“In that case,” I told him, “I demand to see a lawyer”

He shook his head. “My ears aren’t good Lam. You’re talking to my bum ear.”

“Turn around,” I said, “so I can talk to the other one.”

He just grinned, said, “Sit here and do some more thinking, Lam. Don’t bother me unless you get something good. But if you get something good and don’t let me know, I’ll clobber you.”

He took the hardware magazine with him and walked out.