“Because I asked her to look for it.”
“And what brought that up?”
I said, “I wanted to find out whatever was unusual about events in the hotel. I wanted to find out what was going on. I asked her to find out everything that was the least bit out of the ordinary, reviewing all the things that had happened there in the hotel.”
“Was that looking for a murder weapon?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said. “You kill a man with a carving knife. You don’t carry the knife out with you.”
“Why not?”
“In the first place, it’s incriminating. In the second place, it’s hard to carry.”
“The murderer carried it in with him,” Hobart said. “He could carry it out with him.”
“That’s what puzzles me,” I said.
“What does?”
“It isn’t the kind of knife that a man would carry with him as a weapon. A knife that was intended to be a weapon would be of rigid, heavy steel, with a keen edge for the blade and a heavy back. Or it might be a two-edged stiletto type of affair. This thing is a carving knife. It has a peculiar onyx handle.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw that much when I looked in the brief case.”
Hobart’s eyes narrowed. “All right. What else do you know?”
I said, “I don’t think the murderer carried the knife in with him. I think that knife originally came from someplace in the hotel. I think someone must have had access to the kitchen or to room service — unless the knife was bought at some store near the hotel by someone who suddenly decided it would be nice to have a weapon.
“If you hadn’t interfered with my activities I’d have been scouting around the neighborhood, talking with hardware stores.”
“Then it’s a damn good thing we interfered with your activities,” Hobart said. “That’s the trouble with you amateurs. You underestimate the intelligence of the police. I’ve had men out covering the hardware and cutlery stores for the past fifteen minutes. We should get a report soon.
“For your information, Lam, that is a peculiar knife. This imitation onyx handle is a species of plastic that is relatively new. The knife comes from Chicago. We telephoned the distributor to find out how many wholesalers here had carried it.
“There’s just one jobber on the Coast that put in an order and his shipment just came in a few days ago. A few of the salesmen had samples but that’s all. They haven’t made any retail deliveries.”
“Then this knife came from the stock of the wholesaler?”
Hobart shook his head. “I don’t know. We can’t afford to jump at conclusions. We’re making a canvass right now on each one of their salesmen. The jobber is asking them to report on whether they can return the samples to stock. That way they can tell if one knife is missing. Apparently the rest of the shipment is intact.
“The plastic on the knife handle is a new type. The design is new, and the blade is a new type of steel that is designed to hold its edge almost indefinitely. The knife is exceptionally thin. This new steel that has only been on the market a short time comes from Sweden.”
“That should make the knife easy to trace,” I said.
Hobart nodded and said, “If one salesman doesn’t have his sample we’ll find out what he did with it and start tracing the murder weapon from there. That’s the kind of a break we don’t ordinarily get in a murder case.”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“You wait,” he said. “You do absolutely nothing. I don’t want you going out and gumming up the works. This is a job for a Police Department, a whole department, you understand. One lone guy prowling around and asking questions can do more harm than good.
“Now then, I want some cards face up on the table. You weren’t interested in solving a murder. You were up here on something else. What?”
I looked him in the eye and said, “Fifty grand.”
“That’s better,” he said. “I thought so. What were you planning to do?”
“Turn it in for a reward,” I said.
“Sellers wouldn’t like that. He wants to solve the case himself.”
“Let him solve it then. I’m not stopping him. He’s got the whole damned Police Department back of him. He can do more than I can.”
Hobart looked at me and said, “You can’t get along in your business if you have police enmity.”
“I won’t have anyone’s enmity after I’ve got the fifty grand,” I said. “Sure, Sellers would like to solve it, but what he absolutely needs is to have it proved that someone else had the fifty grand. Once he does that, he’s clean.
“I’ll tell you something else. If we get a reward we’re willing to let Sellers take all the credit.”
Hobart drummed with his fingers on the desk. “Lam,” he said, “I’m going to ask you something. You don’t need to answer it if you don’t want to, but don’t lie to me. We’re working on a case where false information could cross us up more than anything else.”
I nodded.
“Did you have that fifty grand?” he asked.
“Would you protect me?” I asked.
“It depends. I’m not making any promises.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I had the fifty grand.”
“Then that story you fed Frank Sellers about this man, Inman, at the Full Dinner Pail having it was just a cock-and-bull story?”
“That wasn’t a cock-and-bull story,” I said. “I think Inman had it before I did.”
Hobart’s eyes narrowed. “All right,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“I got it from Downer’s trunk.”
“And where did you get Downer’s trunk?”
“I picked it up at the railroad station.”
“Where is it now?”
I told him.
“Go on,” he said. “What happened to the fifty grand?”
I said, “Either one of two people have it.”
“Who?”
“Either Takahashi Kisarazu, who runs the camera store, or Evelyn Ellis.”
“What’s your reasoning?”
I said, “I bought a camera and some enlarging paper. I took some paper out of the box of enlarging paper. I don’t know how many sheets, probably fifteen or twenty. The camera store says they found seventeen sheets of paper under the counter so I’ll settle for seventeen.”
“And you put the money in there with the rest of the enlarging paper and closed the box?”
I nodded.
“How do you know the money wasn’t taken out in Los Angeles?”
“It was done by somebody in a camera store,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because when Sellers got into the package in Los Angeles the box of enlarging paper had the seals cut all right so I wouldn’t be suspicious, but it was a different box of paper. It was a full box. If it had been my box, seventeen sheets would have been missing.”
Hobart said, “All right, Lam, I think you’re coming clean. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do some work on that Jap at the camera store.”
I shook my head.
“No?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I want to be sure.”
“How are you going to get sure?”
“I don’t know, but I have an idea the murder of Downer was tied in with the loss of the fifty grand.”
“The murder is my meat,” Hobart said.
“You can have it. I want the money. You keep your meat. I’ll keep mine.”
“All right. What do you think happened?”
I said, “I think that Baxley had a partner in the Full Dinner Pail Drive-in. I think Baxley didn’t know the police were after him until after he’d made that telephone call and looked back over his shoulder. I think Baxley went to that drive-in and ordered the two hamburgers, one with onions and one without onions, so he’d have a good excuse to have them put in a paper sack. Then I think he sat there and ate the hamburgers slowly and leisurely so people could see him eating the hamburgers. I think that was all part of the plan. Then I think he took the fifty grand, which was the split of his partner, put it in the paper bag, threw the paper bag into the refuse can and drove off.