“God almighty!” Bertha screamed at me. “Do I have to tell you how to be a detective? Take those damn pictures and beat it up to San Francisco. Go to that Jap photograph store. Find the man who was waiting on this babe, show him those pictures and ask him if that was the woman who was in there looking at cameras. If she’s the same one you wire me and I’ll come up and work her over. A good-looking leg and you’re putty in their hands. Let ’em try showing me leg and I’ll turn ’em over my knee. Now, for the love of Mike, get started before Sergeant Sellers gets wise and throws you in the clink.”
I said, “Bertha, either I’m getting so I think like you or you’re getting so you think like me, because that’s exactly what I was planning to do.”
“Well, get started,” Bertha yelled. “Don’t stand there telling me that we’re seeing eye to eye for a change. My God, you’ve got me where I’m going to lose my license and you’re just standing around here yakkity-yakking.”
I started for the door.
I didn’t dare to tell her the Japanese camera company had taken the publicity pictures of Evelyn Ellis. It was just as Bertha had said, I’d played myself for a sucker.
Chapter 6
The jet plane deposited me in San Francisco at seven-thirty P.M. I’d had a couple of complimentary glasses of champagne and a dinner. I took a taxi to the Palace Hotel, then did a little doubling around.
If they were following me it was such an artistic job I couldn’t detect it.
When I had my back trail cleared I went to the Caltonia Hotel, went up to Room 751 without being announced and knocked.
After a moment I heard motion behind the door, a sort of rustling cautious motion and then a woman’s voice saying, “Who is it?”
“Open up,” I said gruffly.
“Who is it?” she asked, and this time there was a note of alarm in her voice.
“Oh, for the love of Pete!” I said. “You should know my voice by this time. Open up.”
I heard the bolt turn and the door opened.
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” she said. “I didn’t recognize your voice the first time. I—”
She did a double-take and started to close the door.
I pushed a foot against the door, then a shoulder, and came on in.
“You — who are you?”
“The name,” I said, “is Lam. I’m an investigator.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, “you’re the man whose trunk—”
“Exactly,” I said. “What I want to know is how he got hold of my trunk.”
She had on pajamas, a silk creation of clinging cloth and vivid color. The top was unbuttoned down to the third button and the lower part of the pajamas had been tailored to show curves.
She was quite a dish, and she’d been crying.
She looked me over and said, “I’m sorry you came. The police have your trunk. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“Where did all this happen?” I asked.
“On the tenth floor.”
“When did it happen?”
“It must have been right after he arrived. He came in on the train and he had this suite reserved and—”
“Suite?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“Why the suite?” I asked.
“That’s the reservation he made over the telephone.”
“But why a suite? Why not just a room?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” she said. “And there’s not much chance of that now, is there?”
“Apparently not,” I said.
“Sit down,” she invited, and draped herself on a davenport, sizing me up with large limpid eyes that tried to look naive and hurt but somehow seemed to contradict themselves. It was an expression of sinister innocence.
She said, “I understand you’re working for that woman.”
“What woman?”
“That woman — that Hazel Clune, She called herself Hazel Downer.”
“You don’t like her?”
“She’s just a... a creature.”
“We’re all creatures.”
“She’s a gold-digger.”
“How come?”
“You know, or at least you should know. She just latched on to Standley because she wanted money.”
“He gave her money?”
“Of course he gave her money. That’s why she ditched her regular boy friend and latched on to Standley. She milked him dry.”
“What did she do with it?” I asked.
This time the eyes snapped fire. “You know what she did with it,” Evelyn Ellis blazed. “She spent all she could get on glad rags, and then she stole fifty thousand more by switching the trunks. Then when poor Standley couldn’t payoff they thought it was a stall and rubbed him out.”
“Now,” I said, “you’re beginning to interest me.”
“Thank you,” she said sarcastically. “It’s so seldom I interest men that it’s a real thrill to have a big, strapping, stalwart, two-fisted hunk of man like you tell me he’s interested.”
She yawned ostentatiously.
I said, “He had fifty thousand in his trunk?”
“He did have.”
“And what happened to the trunk?”
“Hazel has it hidden away somewhere. She managed to switch your trunk so that he got the wrong trunk and then when he got here and opened it up and found he had the wrong trunk... well, then it was too late. He was... involved.”
“What do you mean, involved?”
“There were other people in with him and those people didn’t like the way things were going.”
“What do you mean, the way things were going?”
“He owed them money.”
“That he hadn’t paid?”
“That’s what I told you. He couldn’t pay. They thought he was stalling.”
“He was intending to pay?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“And he had fifty thousand?”
“At least that. Perhaps more.”
“And where did this cash come from?”
She tilted her chin and looked down her nose. “I wouldn’t know,” she said demurely.
“Perhaps it would help if I did.”
“And perhaps it wouldn’t.”
“Have you told the police any of this?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll find out, and when they find out they’ll have this Hazel creature dead to rights. If I tell the police and the police start running down that clue on my say-so, they’ll think I was jealous and trying to frame her. She’d tell them that it was all a cockeyed story made up by a jealous rival and the police might fall for it and give her enough of a head start to let her cover her back trail.
“By not telling the police anything and playing it dumb, when the police get on her trail they’ll go all the way before she has a chance to run to cover. I’ve answered the questions the police have asked and that’s all. I haven’t volunteered a thing.”
I said, “You knew he was coming in here on the Lark?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you meet him?”
“He didn’t want me to.”
“You knew he was going to have a trunk with him?”
“I knew he was bringing a large sum of cash with him so he could payoff. I didn’t know it would be in a trunk.”
“You knew he was going to stay at this hotel?”
She looked at me, moved slightly inside of the clinging silk so as to give her body a voluptuous sway, and said, “Look, Mr. Lam, I’m not a child, you know.”
“You knew he had a reservation here?”
“Naturally.”
“That it was a suite?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t go to the train to meet him?”
“He thought it would be too dangerous.”
“He was going to call you after he got in?”
“Yes.”