A COFFIN FROM HONG KONG

I took out my keys, but on second thoughts, reached for the door handle and turned it. The door wasn’t locked although I had locked it when I had left the previous evening. I pushed open the door and looked into the small outer office that contained a table on which lay some dog eared magazines, four well worn leather lounging chairs and a strip of carpet: a gesture to anyone with tender feet.

The inner door, leading to my office stood ajar. This too had been locked before I had left.

Again aware of the creepy feeling, I crossed to the door and pushed it wide open.

Sitting, facing me in the clients’ chair was a lovely-looking Chinese girl, her hands folded rather primly in her lap. She was wearing a green and silver Cheongsam, slit up either side to show off her beautiful legs. She looked peaceful and not even surprised. From the small bloodstain over her left breast, I guessed she had been shot quickly and expertly: so quickly, she had had no chance even to be scared. Whoever had shot her had done a good, swift job.

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.”