Kept Women Can’t Quit

“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.