Nothing happened.
The lock on the outer door was pretty well worn. Any key that would fit the grooves would work the lock. I didn’t even have to bother with my skeleton keys. The key to my own apartment worked the lock on the outer door.
I went up to Billy Prue’s apartment. I knocked on the door twice. There was no sound from the interior. The place was thick with silence.
I took out my skeleton keys and tried one in the lock. It didn’t work.
Before I could take it out, the door was jerked open from the inside.
Billy Prue said sarcastically, “Make yourself right at home! Walk right in... Oh, it’s you!”
“Why don’t you answer a knock on your door?” I asked her.
Her hand went up to her throat. She said, “You scared the living daylights out of me.”
“You didn’t act like it.”
“I didn’t dare to. Why didn’t you say who it was?”
“How could I?”
“You could have called through the door.”
I carefully closed the door behind me and made sure that the spring lock clicked into place. I said, “That would have been nice — stand out in the hall and yell, ‘Yoo-hoo, Billy, this is Donald Lam, the private detective. I want to see you on business. Open up!’ ”
“Oh,” she said, “on business, is it?”
I looked around the room. The door to the bedroom was open. The bed was pretty well covered with folded clothes. There were two big suitcases and a steamer trunk on the floor, also a couple of hat boxes.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t expect me to stay here, would you?”
“Not if you could find some other place.”
“I’ve found another place.”
“Where?”
“With a friend.”
I said, “Sit down for a minute. We’ve got to talk.”
“I want to get out of here, Donald. It’s terribly depressing and — and I’m afraid!”
“What are you afraid of?”
She hastily averted her eyes. “Nothing.”
“Delightfully logical,” I said.
“Shut up. You don’t have to be logical when you’re afraid.”
“Perhaps not.”
I stretched out in a comfortable chair, lit a cigarette and said, “Let’s talk some sense.”
“What about?”
“About the murder.”
“Do we have to talk about it?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“You’re absolutely certain his watch was an hour fast when you left?”
“Yes.”
“And you set it back an hour when you returned?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you didn’t set it back an hour before?”
“No, and I should have. That bothered me because I was supposed to have done so.”
I said, “All right. Let’s use our heads. Two people tampered with that watch. You were one of them. Now then, how many people knew about the plan to set the watch ahead?”
“Just Pittman Rimley and I.”
“And the boy in the washroom.”
“Yes, I forgot about him.”
I got out of the chair and paced the floor for a minute or so. She sat perfectly still watching me, not saying a word.
I walked over to the windows and stood looking down at the street below.
“What are you looking at?”
“The agency car parked down there in front of the place.”
She came to stand at my side. “What about it?”
I said, “Somebody put the murder weapon in there yesterday. I don’t know when it was put in, so I’ve got to start figuring why it was put in, because that may give me a clue to when.”
She said, “What do you mean why? You mean someone was trying to frame you?”
I said, “Either someone wanted to frame me, or someone didn’t.”
“That’s elemental.”
I said, “We have to begin with elemental facts. There’s one explanation that’s so damn simple that I’ve overlooked it.”
“What?”
I said, “Either someone put that weapon in my car because he wanted to frame me, or he didn’t. Naturally, I’ve acted on the assumption that whoever put it in there wanted to frame me. I’m beginning to think about the simple explanation now.”
“What?”
I said, “Let’s make another division. Whoever put that weapon in the car either knew it was my car, or didn’t.”
“Good Heavens, Donald, you don’t think there’s the slightest possibility anyone put it in your car simply by accident?”
“Not by accident. That’s taxing credulity altogether too much.”
She said, “I don’t get you. You seem to be contradicting yourself.”
“No, there’s one other explanation.”
“What?”
I said, “The weapon was put in my car because my car happened to be the most convenient place to hide the thing.”
“Oh, oh!” she said as the full implication of that dawned on her.
“So,” I said, “I keep thinking back where my car was. Where would it have been parked sufficiently soon after the murder so that someone would find it the most convenient place to dispose of the murder weapon?”
She said eagerly, “Donald, you may have something there.”
I said, “How about Pittman Rimley, can you trust him?”
“So far he’s always been on the square — with me.”
“There were two persons who knew about the watch business — Rimley and the man in the wash-room. Then there was a third person who could have known.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Crail. Stanberry might have commented on the time to her. That’s logical, isn’t it?”
“It is when you put it that way.”
I said, “And I’m wondering why the handle of the hand ax had been sawed off. You’ve used a meat saw?”
“Yes — of course.”
“One here in the apartment?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Let’s get it out and take a look at it.”
She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, then went to the kitchenette. I followed her. The meat saw was under the sink. She handed it to me.
There was some grease on the blade and embedded between the handle and the blade a few grains of sawdust.
“That does it,” I said.
“Does what?”
“Clinches the case.”
“I don’t see why.”
I looked at her steadily. “You had a hand ax here, didn’t you?”
Her eyes shifted.
I said, “Whoever did the job didn’t expect to find Stanberry unconscious. When she did, and found a hand ax... well, that was it.”
“She?”
“Yes. It was a woman.”
I kept looking at her. “She didn’t want to leave the murder weapon here. She had only one way of taking it out — in her handbag. She had to saw a piece off the handle to make it fit.”
“Donald!”
I turned to look down at the street. For several seconds the apartment was silent. Then I said, “I’m still toying with the explanation that the murder weapon was ditched in my car simply because my car happened to be the most convenient place for the murderer to put the weapon. Now then, if we’re going to work on that hypothesis, we suddenly find ourselves up against...”
I broke off.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“See that car?” I said.
She looked where I was pointing. “It’s a police car,” I said. “See the red spotlight...?”
Sergeant Frank Sellers got out of the car, gallantly walked around the car to the right side, opened the door and held out his hand.
Bertha Cool put her hand on Frank Sellers’ and got out of the car about as gracefully as a sack of sugar tumbling down off the top shelf in the pantry.