a tray up in his room, and since I was expected downtown at ten o’clock, I had buzzed him on the house phone a little before nine to ask for instructions and had been told that he had none. Downtown, Assistant DA Farrell, after letting me wait in the anteroom for an hour, had spent two hours with me, together with a stenographer and a dick who had been on the scene Friday afternoon, going back and forth and zigzag, not only over what I had already reported, but also over my previous association with the Bottweill personnel. He only asked me once if I knew anything about Santa Claus, so I only had to lie once, if you don’t count my omitting any mention of the marriage license. When he called a recess and told me to come back at two-thirty, on my way to Ost’s for the pig’s knuckles I phoned Wolfe to tell him I didn’t know when I would be home, and again he had no instructions. I said I doubted if Cherry Quon would wait until after New Year’s to spill the beans, and he said he did too and hung up.
When I was ushered back into Farrell’s office at two-thirty he was alone-no stenographer and no dick. He asked me if I had had a good lunch, and even waited for me to answer, handed me some typewritten sheets, and leaned back in his chair.
“Read it over,” he said, “and see if you want to sign it.”
His tone seemed to imply that I might not, so I went over it carefully, five full pages. Finding no editorial revisions to object to, I pulled my chair forward to a corner of his desk, put the statement on the desk top, and got my pen from my pocket.
“Wait a minute,” Farrell said. “You’re not a bad guy even if you are cocky, and why not give you a break? That says specifically that you have reported everything you did there yesterday afternoon.”
“Yeah, I’ve read it. So?”
“So who put your fingerprints on some of the pieces of paper in Bottweill’s wastebasket?”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I forgot to put gloves on.”
“All right, you’re cocky. I already know that.” His eyes were pinning me. “You must have gone through that wastebasket, every item, when you went to Bottweill’s office ostensibly to look for Santa Claus, and you hadn’t just forgotten it. You don’t forget things. So you have deliberately left it out. I want to know why, and I want to know what you took from that wastebasket and what you did with it.”
I grinned at him. “I am also damned because I thought I knew how thorough they are and apparently I didn’t. I wouldn’t have supposed they went so far as to dust the contents of a wastebasket when there was nothing to connect them, but I see I was wrong, and I hate to be wrong,” I shrugged. “Well, we learn something new every day.” I screwed the statement around to position, signed it at the bottom of the last page, slid it across to him, and folded the carbon copy and put it in my pocket.
“I’ll write it in if you insist,” I told him, “but I doubt if it’s worth the trouble. Santa Claus had run, Kiernan was calling the police, and I guess I was a little rattled. I must have looked around for something that might give me a line on Santa Claus, and my eye lit on the wastebasket, and I went through it. I haven’t mentioned it because it wasn’t very bright, and I like people to think I’m bright, especially cops. There’s your why. As for what I took, the answer is nothing. I dumped the wastebasket, put everything back in, and took nothing. Do you want me to write that in?”
“No. I want to discuss it. I know you
It cost me more than an hour, twenty minutes of which were spent in the office of the District Attorney himself, with Farrell and another assistant present. At one point it looked as if they were going to hold me as a material witness, but that takes a warrant, the Christmas weekend had started, and there was nothing to show that I had monkeyed with anything that could be evidence, so finally they shooed me out, after I had handwritten an insert in my statement. It was too bad keeping such important public servants sitting there while I copied the insert on my carbon, but I like to do things right.
By the time I got home it was ten minutes past four, and of course Wolfe wasn’t in the office, since his afternoon session up in the plant rooms is from four to six. There was no note on my desk from him, so apparently there were still no instructions, but there was information on it. My desk ashtray, which is mostly for decoration since I seldom smoke-a gift, not to Wolfe but to me, from a former client-is a jade bowl six inches across. It was there in its place, and in it were three stubs from Pharaoh cigarettes.
Saul Panzer smokes Pharaohs, Egyptians. I suppose a few other people do too, but the chance that one of them had been sitting at my desk while I was gone was too slim to bother with. And not only had Saul been there, but Wolfe wanted me to know it, since one of the eight million things he will not tolerate in the office is ashtrays with remains. He will actually walk clear to the bathroom himself to empty one.
So steps were being taken, after all. What steps? Saul, a free lance and the best operative anywhere around, asks and gets sixty bucks a day, and is worth twice that. Wolfe had not called him in for any routine errand, and of course the idea that he had undertaken to sell him on doubling for Santa Claus never entered my head. Framing someone for murder, even a woman who might be guilty, was not in his bag of tricks. I got at the house phone and buzzed the plant rooms, and after a wait had Wolfe’s voice in my ear.
“Yes, Fritz?”
“Not Fritz. Me. I’m back. Nothing urgent to report. They found my prints on stuff in the wastebasket, but I escaped without loss of blood. Is it all right for me to empty my ashtray?”
“Yes. Please do so.”
“Then what do I do?”
“I’ll tell you at six o’clock. Possibly earlier.”
He hung up. I went to the safe and looked in the cash drawer to see if Saul had been supplied with generous funds, but the cash was as I had last seen it and there was no entry in the book. I emptied the ashtray. I went to the kitchen, where I found Fritz pouring a mixture into a bowl of fresh pork tenderloin, and said I hoped Saul had enjoyed his lunch, and Fritz said he hadn’t stayed for lunch. So steps must have been begun right after I left in the morning. I went back to the office, read over the carbon copy of my statement before filing it, and passed the time by thinking up eight different steps that Saul might have been assigned, but none of them struck me as promising. A little after five the phone rang and I answered. It was Saul. He said he was glad to know I was back home safe, and I said I was too.
“Just a message for Mr. Wolfe,” he said. “Tell him everything is set, no snags.”
