Kept Women Can’t Quit

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.

Chapter 10

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Hobart came back. “All right, Lam, we’re letting you go.”

“Where’s Ernestine?”

“I sent her home an hour ago.”

“You could have let me escort her home,” I said.