Kept Women Can’t Quit

“They had rooms on the same floor of the hotel. Nobody did any peeping at the keyhole. Mr. Christopher is an important man. He’s the president of a big cutlery company, but... well, he was entertaining some customers and I guess he was being entertained himself and... anyway, I know they were friends and I know that Evelyn has called him — oh, a dozen times while she’s been here in the hotel.”

“At the company?” I asked, frowning. “Why didn’t Inspector Hobart—”

“Oh, not at the company,” she said. “She calls him at his club. That’s his home number. He lives in a club. He’s a widower and that’s his private number at the club. Miss Ellis put calls through station to station.”

I went over to sit down on the davenport.

“You want me to call him?” Bernice asked.

I thought it over a minute and said, “I want you to call him very much indeed.”

She went over to the phone, put through the call and within two minutes I heard a masculine voice with the tone of authority come booming over the line.

I said, “Mr. Christopher, this is an investigator working on that San Francisco homicide. I—”

“My God,” he groaned. “Can’t you folks give a man any peace at all? I’ve been talking with inspectors and detectives all day. I’ve told you all I know. I made it a point to look up the records personally so there’d be no—”

“That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

“Well, what do you want to talk to me about?”

I said, “Have you made any special shipments of samples within the last few days because of any personal request that you might consider unusual?”

“No.”

“Has anyone called you up and asked you to send out a rush sample of—”

“No.”

I thought of Inspector Hobart and his condemnation of short cuts, his discounting brilliant detective work. I said, “All right, I’m sorry, Mr. Christopher. I’m sorry I had to bother you. I guess I was working on a bum lead.”

He said, “Well, I wish you folks wouldn’t disturb me. My God, I’m sorry I ever brought out the knife. And yet it’s a good number.”

“A ready sale?”

“Selling like hot cakes here in the East,” he said.

“But no sales on the Coast?”

“No. We’re getting a lot of repeat orders out of the East and our shipments have been limited. That’s a very special grade of steel and you don’t just turn that stuff out like the ordinary cutlery. That’s real quality.”

“You say your shipments are limited?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “We don’t do manufacturing on our numbers. We sell them. This is an imported article.”

“Where’s it from?” I asked.

“Japan. The blades are made in Sweden, the handles in Japan.”

I gripped the receiver. “Where did you say?”

“Japan,” he said. “What’s the matter, haven’t you got a good connection? I can hear you perfectly.”

“Can you give me the name of the firm that does the manufacturing?”

“Not offhand,” he said. “It’s some kind of a jaw-breaking name.”

I said, “How did you happen to get onto the article in the first place? In other words, why should a knife made in Japan be brought to a cutlery company in Chicago and—”

“Because we can give them the best merchandising outlet they can possibly get,” Christopher said. “The number was first called to our attention by a Japanese importing company here in Chicago.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I remember the background on that now. That was where Miss American Hardware worked, wasn’t it?”

“I believe so. It was the Mizukaido Importing Company.”

“Big importers?”

“That’s right. They’re big importers — represent a bunch of Japanese manufacturers, mostly heavy goods. They don’t go in for the cameras, binoculars and other stuff, but cutlery mostly, and novelties and knick-knacks.”

“Thanks,” I told him. “I’m sorry. We’ll try not to bother you again.”

“Tell your men to try and get together on this stuff. What did you say your name was, Inspector?”

I gently slipped the phone back into the cradle.

“What is it, Donald?” Ernestine asked.

I said, “That’s one of the pitfalls of investigative work. You get all loused up on sequences.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I said, “Everybody looks up the distributor who sells those knives, Christopher, Crowder and Doyle. Nobody thinks of trying to find who supplies Christopher, Crowder and Doyle with their knives or when the first samples were brought into the country.

“Moreover, I’m so dumb it never occurred to me that a person doesn’t get elected queen of the wholesale hardware convention and become Miss American Hardware and then have portraits taken in a bathing suit. The portraits come first.”

“Of course they come first,” Bernice said. “I tried out for one of those jobs once. This was a credit association meeting. All applicants had to be photographed and accompany their applications with bathing-suit photographs.”

“Did you win?” I asked.

“No.”

“How come?”

“I was dumb. I thought the bathing suit I was to be photographed in should be the bathing suit I was going to wear for the final judging. Some of the other girls were more generous.”

“You mean Bikini bathing suits?”