I read about the blowoff in the paper as I was approaching San Francisco on a train packed with young Americans who were looking for a scrap.
Hale had told the whole story as soon as he realized he wasn’t going to get hooked for murder. He’d been shadowing Nostrander. Everything else had failed. He wanted Nostrander to admit that the service of the papers on the wrong woman was a put-up job. He found Nostrander in Roberta Fenn’s apartment, and Nostrander was drunk. Hale had been prepared to offer him a ten-thousand-dollar bribe to sell out, and because he didn’t want to get hooked for bribery in case Nostrander refused, he’d built up an elaborate alibi that.would make it appear he’d gone to New York by plane.
Marilyn Winton had been placed under arrest. Police had the deadwood on her. She’d been trying to get Nostrander to marry her. That was the unfortunate love affair which had turned her sour on the world.
Marco Cutler had confessed to the murder of Craig, but he still insisted that police had planted the gun. He claimed that he’d actually ditched the murder weapon in New Orleans in an apartment which had formerly been occupied by Roberta Fenn so that his detective, Hale, could bring pressure to bear on Roberta.
As the train pulled into San Jose and stopped for twenty minutes, I sent Bertha Cool a wire:
Edna Cutler should be good for a ten thousand fee because we have brought undisclosed assets into the community funds. Silk stockings aren’t made in Japan, Will send you a cherry blossom instead. Love.
The man at the Western Union counted the words, took my money, said, “You’ll want to put an address on this, Mr. Lam, where the party can reply?”
I didn’t crack a smile. “Care U.S.N., Tokyo,” I said.
He wrote it down.