JAMES HADLEY CHASE: A COFFIN FROM HONG KONG

Moving as if I were wading through water, I entered the room and touched the side of her cold face. She had been dead some hours.

Taking in a long deep breath, I reached for the telephone and called the police.

2

While waiting for the cops to arrive, I took a closer look at my dead Asian visitor. At a guess she had been around twenty-three or four and apparently not short of money. I assumed this since her clothes seemed expensive, her stockings sheer nylon and her shoes nearly brand new. Also she was well groomed: her nails were immaculate and her hair impeccable. I had no mean knowing who she was. She had no handbag. I assumed the killer had taken it. I couldn’t imagine a woman as well turned out as this one would go around without a handbag.

Having satisfied myself that she was anonymous, I went into the other room and waited for the sound of trampling feet that would tell me the boys were arriving. I didn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes of my telephone call they came swarming over me like ants over a lump of sugar.

The last to arrive was Detective Lieutenant Dan Retnick. I had known him off and on for the past four years. He was an undersized bird with thin, foxy features and a snappy line in clothes. The only reason why he held his position on the city’s police force was because he had been lucky enough to have married the Mayor’s sister. As a police officer he was about as useful as a hole in a bucket. Luckily for him there had been no major crime in Pasadena City since he had got his appointment. This affair would be the first murder case since he had been upped to Detective Lieutenant from a desk sergeant in a small, unimportant cop house along the Coast.

But I’ll say this for him: even though be hadn’t the brains to solve a child’s crossword puzzle, he certainly looked the pan of an efficient tough cop as he breezed into my office with Sergeant Pulski, his side kick, trampling along in his rear.

Sergeant Pulski. was a big man with a red fleshy face, small vicious eyes and two fists that seemed to be itching all the time to connect with a human jaw. He had less brains than

Retnick if that is possible, but what he lacked in mental equipment, he made up in muscle.

Neither of them looked at me as they came in. They went into my office and stared for a long time at the dead woman, then while Pulski was going through the motions of being a police officer, Retnick joined me in the outer room.

He now looked a little worried and a lot less breezy.

“Okay, shamus, give with the story,” he said, sitting on the desk and swinging his immaculately polished shoes. “She a client of yours?”

“I don’t know who she is or what she’s doing here,” I said. “I found her like that when I opened up this morning.”

He chewed on his dead cigar while be stared his hard cop stare.

“You usually open up this early?”

I gave him the story without holding anything back. He listened. Pulski who had finished acting the police officer with the boys in my office, propped up the door-post and listened too.

“As soon as I found out the bungalow was empty, I came straight back here,” I concluded. “I figured something was going on, but I didn’t expect this.”

“Where’s her handbag?” Retnick said.

“I don’t know. While I was waiting for you to arrive I searched for it, but couldn’t find it. She must have had one. Maybe the killer took it away with him.”

He scratched the side of his jaw, took the dead cigar out of his mouth and looked at it, then put it back into his face again.

“What did she have in it, shamus, that tempted you to kill her?” he demanded finally.

There was never anything subtle about Retnick. I knew when I telephoned for the police, I would be his suspect number one.

“Even if she had had the Koh-i-Noor diamond, I wouldn’t have been that dumb to knock her off here,” I said patiently. “I would have tailed her back to where she lived and fixed her there.”

“How do you explain what she was doing here and how she got in if you had locked up?” “I could make a guess.”

His eyes narrowed and he cocked his head on one side.

“Go ahead and guess.”

“I think this woman had business with me. A guy calling himself John Hardwick didn’t want her to talk to me. I don’t know why nor do I know what she wanted to talk to me about—I’m just guessing. It’s my guess Hardwick sent me to sit outside an empty bungalow to be sure I wouldn’t be in my office when she arrived. I think he was waiting here for her. My locks are nothing special. He wouldn’t have any trouble opening the doors. He was probably sitting at my desk when she walked in. The fact she doesn’t look scared makes me think she didn’t know this guy and thought he was me. After she had said her say, he shot her. It was a quick expert shot. She didn’t have time even to change the expression on her face.”

Retnick looked at Pulski.

“If we don’t watch out, this shamus will be stealing our jobs.”

Pulski removed something from a back tooth and spat it on my carpet. He didn’t say anything: it wasn’t his job to talk. He was a professional listener.

Retnick thought for a moment. It was a process that apparently gave him some pain. Finally, he said, “I’ll tell you what makes your guess stink, bright boy. This guy called you from the airport which is two miles from here. If you’re not lying, you left your office just after six. He couldn’t have got here much before seven-thirty the way the traffic is on that highway at that time, and anyone, even a yellow skin, would know that’s after business hours. She wouldn’t have come here on the off-chance of finding you here. She would have telephoned first.”

“What makes you so sure she didn’t? Maybe she did and Hardwick was in my office to take the call. Maybe he told her he would be waiting for her and for her to come right along.”

By his change of expression I knew he was irritated with himself for not having worked this out for himself.

The M.O., plus two interns, plus the usual stretcher appeared in the doorway.

Pulski reluctantly pushed himself off the door-post and took the M.O., a fussy little guy with a lemon sour face, into the inner room to view the remains.

Retnick adjusted a pearl stickpin in his tie.

“She shouldn’t be difficult to trace,” he said as if he were talking to himself. “When a yellow skin is as pretty as this one, she gets noticed. When did you say this guy Hardwick was going to call on you?”

“T omorrow—Friday.”

“Think he will?”

“Not a chance.”

He nodded his head.

“Yeah.” He looked at his watch, then yawned. “You look like hell. Suppose you go get yourself a cup of coffee? Don’t go far and don’t flap your mouth. I’ll be ready to talk to you in about half an hour.”

I wasn’t kidded for a moment. He wasn’t being considerate: he wanted me out of the way.

“I guess I can use some coffee,” I said. “Okay for me to go home and take a shower?”

“Who cares how bad you smell?” he said. “Just coffee and where you can be seen.”

I took the elevator to the ground floor. Although it was only twenty minutes to eight o’clock, a small crowd had collected to stare at the waiting ambulance and the four police cars parked in front of the building As I walked to the Quick Snack Bar I heard heavy footfalls behind me. I didn’t bother to look around. I expected to drink my coffee under police supervision.

I entered the bar and eased myself up onto a stool. Sparrow, his eyes bugging, tore himself from the window where he was watching the ambulance and looked expectantly at me.

“What’s cooking, Mr, Ryan?’ he asked, his breath hissing between his teeth.