In the last episode of Special Delivery, Rocky found out where the missing statue was: a seaside mansion in a town called Parker Beach. He also discovered detective James Wong, who was also taking a look at the house. The following entry continues the April 26th, 1949 entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks:
The finish on Wong's car looked as unspoiled as the day he bought it and free of all rain water that had fallen in the last hour. He sat in the driver's seat and watched me approach through his sunglasses. It amused me to see him here and by the look on his face he felt the same way. He rolled down his window and said, simply: “Let's go for a walk.”
“Suit yourself,” I replied.
Wong eased out and jogged across the street past the hideous mailbox and up the drive toward the front steps of the house. I stayed behind a few feet to make sure he knew what he was doing, stepping on to private property as he was. He looked back at me, annoyed, and waited for me to catch up. “This is the second home of Sid Hoffman. Ever heard of him?”
I had and told him so. Sid Hoffman was a defense attorney and a good one for the firm of Hoffman and Frenchman. I butted heads with him once or twice when I worked for the District Attorney and knew he wasn't the type to take trespassing lightly.
The house got bigger with every step we took toward it and every step forward I took I wanted to take a step back. Wong had no trepidation. He plowed ahead and bounced up the front steps to the massive glass-paneled doors that led inside. “We'll be able to see it from here,” he said to himself. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I knew what he meant. It almost didn't seem possible that there really was a statue after all those lies. I jumped in after him and stood at the door.
He peered in from the right side and I did so from the left. The statue stood in the middle of the floor, still half in its crate, at the foot of a magnificent staircase. A red blanket lay on the shiny black floor and mixed up inside of it was a white handkerchief, monogrammed. Behind it was a crow bar, which had been used to pry open the packaging.
Why the statue was so valuable remained a mystery to me. The sculptor had a great deal of skill, but no more than the average artist of his day. The subject was the slim figure of a woman in the most advanced state of undress. She was carved from a slab of white marble, but only from the waist up. The rest remained unfinished. It was hard to see through the window but I thought I saw something along the inside of her left hand, at the point where the artist had given up. A dark patch, or so it appeared. Maybe a trick of the light.
“It's just as it was described to me,” Wong said. “A lot of people want to get their hands on her. The two men we found yesterday—their handlers would have smiled very kindly on them if they were successful.”
“So why is it so valuable?”
Wong grinned at me. “Haven't the faintest idea. I'm meeting an art expert at Diablos University this morning. When I talked to him on the phone, he seemed most interested. I was just on my way over there when I thought I'd take a look.” He peered in at the statue and another smile broke out. “Since fate seems to have brought us together again, would you care to tag along?”
“Don't mind if I do,” I said. “But we should probably get started. The last thing I need is to get dragged off to court by Sid Hoffman.”
“You don't need to worry about that.”
“Why don't I?”
He winced at the question and replied, quietly: “Because Sid Hoffman died this morning.”
How did Sid Hoffman die and how was the statue involved? Find out in the next episode of The Adventures of Rocky Stone!
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