I said, “This chap put a chip on the thirty-six. The thirty-six turned up, and the croupier raked in all the chips.”
“Dollar chips?” the manager asked.
I nodded.
He opened a drawer, took out a stack of silver dollars, and shoved them across to the Jap. “All right,” he said, “that disposes of you.”
He looked at me and said, “Now that you’re here, Lam, you can sit over there at that desk and write out a statement that you were in room four-twenty-one when Jed Ringold was killed, that you went through his pockets, and took out a check for ten thousand dollars payable to cash.”
I said, “You can go to hell.”
He opened the humidor on the desk. There was a peculiar click as the cover swung back, but all that was inside was a row of cigarettes. He took one out and closed the cover. The humidor didn’t move by so much as a hair’s breadth. It might have been a part of the desk itself. The signal wires ran through it, of course, down through the desk and under the carpet.
A door opened. Two men came in.
The man behind the desk said, “Frisk them.”
I said to Hashita, “Stand perfectly still.”