magnifying glass. He shook his head, then picked some thing off the screw with which the box had been fastened shut.
“Gray cotton undertaker’s gloves,” he said disgustedly. “Cost about four cents a pair wholesale. Fat lot of good printing this joint. They were looking for something in the telephone box, huh?”
“Evidently something that could be there,” French said. “I didn’t expect prints. These ice-pick jobs are a specialty. We’ll get the experts after a while. This is just a quickover.”
He was stripping the dead man’s pockets and laying what had been in them out on the bed beside the quiet and already waxy corpse. Flack was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out morosely. The assistant manager had been up, said nothing with a worried expression, and gone away. I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.
Flack said suddenly: “I figure an ice-pick job’s a dame’s work. You can buy them anywhere. Ten cents. If you want one fast, you can slip it down inside a garter and let it hang there.”
Christy French gave him a brief glance which had a kind of wonder in it. Beifus said: “What kind of dames you been running around with, honey? The way stockings cost nowadays a dame would as soon stick a saw down her sock.”
“I never thought of that,” Flack said.
Beifus said: “Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.”
“No need to get tough,” Flack said.
Beifus took his hat off and bowed. “You mustn’t deny us our little pleasures, Mr. Flack.”
Christy French said: “Besides, a woman would keep on jabbing. She wouldn’t even know how much was enough. Lots of the punks don’t. Whoever did this one was a performer. He got the spinal cord the first try. And another thing—you have to have the guy quiet to do it. That means more than one guy, unless he was doped, or the killer was a friend of his.”
I said: “I don’t see how he could have been doped, if he’s the party that called me on the phone.”
French and Beifus both looked at me with the same expression of patient boredom. “If,” French said, “and since you didn’t know the guy—according to you—there’s always the faint possibility that you wouldn’t know his voice. Or am I being too subtle?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t read your fan mail.”
French grinned.
“Don’t waste it on him,” Beifus told French. “Save it for when you talk to the Friday Morning Club. Some of them old ladies in the shiny-nose league go big for the nicer angles of murder.”
French rolled himself a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on the back of a chair. He sighed.
“They worked the technique out in Brooklyn,” he explained. “Sunny Moe Stein’s boys specialized in it, but they run it into the ground. It got so you couldn’t walk across a vacant lot without finding some of their work. Then they came out here, what was left of them. I wonder why did they do that.”
“Maybe we just got more vacant lots,” Bell us said.
“Funny thing, though,” French said, almost dreamily. “When Weepy Moyer had the chill put on Sunny Moe Stein over on Franklin Avenue last February, the killer used a gun. Moe wouldn’t have liked that at all.”
“I betcha that was why his face had that disappointed look, after they washed the blood off,” Beifus remarked.
“Who’s Weepy Moyer?” Flack asked.
“He was next to Moe in the organization,” French told him. “This could easily be his work. Not that he’d have done it personal.”
“Why not?” Flack asked sourly.
“Don’t you guys ever read a paper? Moyer’s a gentleman now. He knows the nicest people. Even has another name. And as for the Sunny Moe Stein job, it just happened we had him in jail on a gambling rap. We didn’t get anywhere. But we did make him a very sweet alibi. Anyhow he’s a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen don’t go around sticking ice picks into people. They hire it done.”
“Did you ever have anything on Moyer?” I asked.
French looked at me sharply. “Why?”
“I just had an idea. But it’s very fragile,” I said.
French eyed me slowly. “Just between us girls in the powder room,” he said, “we never even proved the guy we had was Moyer. But don’t broadcast it. Nobody’s supposed to know but him and his lawyer and the D.A. and the police beat and the city hall and maybe two or three hundred other people.”
He slapped the dead man’s empty wallet against his thigh and sat down on the bed. He leaned casually against the corpse’s leg, lit a cigarette and pointed with it.
“That’s enough time on the vaudeville circuit. Here’s what we got, Fred. First off, the customer here was not too bright. He was going by the name of Dr. G. W. Hambleton and had the cards printed with an El Centro address and a phone number. It took just two minutes to find out there ain’t any such address or any such phone number. A bright boy doesn’t lay open that easy. Next, the guy is definitely not in the chips. He has fourteen smackeroos folding in here and about two bucks loose change. On his key ring he don’t have any car key or any safe-deposit key or any house key. All he’s got is a suitcase key and seven filed Yale master keys. Filed fairly recently at that. I figure he was planning to sneak the hotel a little. Do you think these keys would work in your dump, Flack?”
Flack went over and stared at the keys. “Two of them are the right size,” be said. “I couldn’t tell if they’d work by just looking. If I want a master key I have to get it from the office. All I carry is a passkey. I can only use that if the guest is out.” He took a key out of his pocket, a key on a long chain, and compared it. He shook his head. “They’re no good without more work,” he said. “Far too much metal on them.”
