I was telling him something or other when he cut in with:
“Sneak a look at this kid coming up the street. The one with the dark cap.”
Looking, I saw a gangling youth of eighteen or so; pasty and pimply face, sullen mouth, dull hazel eyes, thick, shapeless nose. He passed the city sleuth and me without attention, and I noticed his ears. They weren’t the battered ears of a pug, and they weren’t conspicuously deformed, but their rims curved in and out in a peculiar crinkled fashion.
At the comer he went out of sight, turning down Boylston Street toward Washington.
“There’s a lad that will make a name for hisself if he ain’t nabbed or rocked off too soon,” Lew predicted. “Better put him on your list. The Whosis Kid. You’ll be looking for him some one of these days.”
“What’s his racket?”
“Stick-up, gunman. He’s got the makings of a good one. He can shoot, and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences. I wish he was. It’s these careful, sensible birds that are easiest caught. I’d swear the Kid was in on a coupla jobs that were turned in Brookline last month. But I can’t fit him to ’em. I’m going to clamp him some day, though—and that’s a promise.”
Lew never kept his promise. A prowler killed him in an Audubon Road residence a month later.
A week or two after this conversation I left the Boston branch of the Continental Detective Agency to try army life. When the war was over I returned to the Agency payroll in Chicago, stayed there for a couple of years, and got transferred to San Francisco.
So, all in all, it was nearly eight years later that I found myself sitting behind the Whosis Kid’s crinkled ears at the Dreamland Rink.
Friday nights is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.
I didn’t place them right away. I couldn’t see their owner’s face. He was watching Kid Cipriani and Bunny Keogh assault each other. I missed most of that fight.
But during the brief wait before the next pair of boys went on, the Whosis Kid turned his head to say something to the man beside him. I saw his face and knew him.
He hadn’t changed much, and he hadn’t improved any. His eyes were duller and his mouth more wickedly sullen than I had remembered them. His face was as pasty as ever, if not so pimply.
He was directly between me and the ring. Now that I knew him, I didn’t have to pass up the rest of the card. I could watch the boys over his head without being afraid he would get out on me.
So far as I knew, the Whosis Kid wasn’t wanted anywhere—not by the Continental, anyway—and if he had been a pickpocket, or a con man, or a member of any of the criminal trades in which we are only occasionally interested, I would have let him alone. But stick-ups are always in demand. The Continental’s most important clients are insurance companies of one sort or another, and robbery policies make up a good percentage of the insurance business these days.
When the Whosis Kid left in the middle of the main event—along with nearly half of the spectators, not caring what happened to either of the musclebound heavies who were putting on a room-mate act in the ring—I went with him.
He was alone. It was the simplest sort of shadowing. The streets were filled with departing fight fans. The Kid walked down to Fillmore Street, took on a stack of wheats, bacon and coffee at a lunch room, and caught a No. 22 car.
He—and likewise I—transferred to a No. 5 car at McAllister Street, dropped off at Polk, walked north one block, turned back west for a block and a fraction, and went up the front stairs of a dingy light-housekeeping room establishment that occupied the second and third floors over a repair shop on the south side of Golden Gate Avenue, between Van Ness and Franklin.
That put a wrinkle in my forehead. If he had left the street car at either Van Ness or Franklin, he would have saved himself a block of walking. He had ridden down to Polk and walked back. For the exercise, maybe.
I loafed across the street for a short while, to see what—if anything—happened to the front windows. None that had been dark before the Kid went in lighted up now. Apparently he didn’t have a front room—unless he was a very cautious young man. I knew he hadn’t tumbled to my shadowing. There wasn’t a chance of that. Conditions had been too favorable to me.
The front of the building giving me no information, I strolled down Van Ness Avenue to look at the rear. The building ran through to Redwood Street, a narrow back street that split the block in half. Four back windows were lighted, but they told me nothing. There was a back door. It seemed to belong to the repair shop. I doubted that the occupants of the upstairs rooms could use it.
On my way home to my bed and alarm clock, I dropped in at the office, to leave a note for the Old Man:
Tailing the Whosis Kid, stick-up, 25-27, 135, 5 foot 11 inches, sallow, br. hair, hzl. eyes, thick nose, crooked ears. Origin Boston. Anything on him? Will be vicinity Golden Gate and Van Ness.
Eight o’clock the next morning found me a block below the house in which the Kid had gone, waiting for him to appear. A steady, soaking rain was falling, but I didn’t mind that. I was closed up inside a black coupe, a type of car whose tamely respectable appearance makes it the ideal one for city work. This part of Golden Gate Avenue is lined with automobile repair shops, second-hand automobile dealers, and the like. There are always dozens of cars standing idle to the block. Although I stayed there all day, I didn’t have to worry over my being too noticeable.
That was just as well. For nine solid, end-to-end hours I sat there and listened to the rain on the roof, and waited for the Whosis Kid, with not a glimpse of him, and nothing to eat except Fatimas. I wasn’t any too sure he hadn’t slipped me. I didn’t know that he lived in this place I was watching. He could have gone to his home after I had gone to mine. However, in this detective business pessimistic guesses of that sort are always bothering you, if you let them. I stayed parked, with my eye on the dingy door into which my meat had gone the night before.
At a little after five that evening, Tommy Howd, our pug-nosed office boy, found me and gave me a memorandum from the Old Man:
Whosis Kid known to Boston branch as robbery-suspect, but have nothing definite on him. Real name believed to be Arthur Cory or Carey. May have been implicated in Tunnicliffe jewelry robbery in Boston last month. Employee killed, $60,000 unset stones taken. No description of two bandits. Boston branch thinks this angle worth running out. They authorize surveillance.
After I had read this memorandum, I gave it back to the boy—there’s no wisdom in carrying around a pocketful of stuff relating to your job—and asked him:
“Will you call up the Old Man and ask him to send somebody up to relieve me while I get a bite of food? I haven’t chewed since breakfast.”
“Swell chance!” Tommy said. “Everybody’s busy. Hasn’t been an op in all day. I don’t see why you fellas don’t carry a hunk or two of chocolate in your pockets to—”
“You’ve been reading about Arctic explorers,” I accused him. “If a man’s starving he’ll eat anything, but when he’s just ordinarily hungry he doesn’t want to clutter up his stomach with a lot of candy. Scout around and see if you can pick me up a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of milk.”
He scowled at me, and then his fourteen-year-old face grew cunning.
“I tell you what,” he suggested. “You tell me what this fella looks like, and which building he’s in, and I’ll watch while you go get a decent meal. Huh? Steak, and French fried potatoes, and pie, and coffee.”
Tommy has dreams of being left on the job in some such circumstance, of having everything break for him while he’s there, and of rounding up regiments of desperadoes all by himself. I do
n’t think he’d muff a good chance at that, and I’d be willing to give him a whack at it. But the Old Man would scalp me if he knew I turned a child loose among a lot of thugs.
So I shook my head.
“This guy wears four guns and carries an ax, Tommy. He’d eat you up.”
“Aw, applesauce! You ops are all the time trying to make out nobody else could do your work. These crooks can’t be such tough mugs—or they wouldn’t let you catch ’em!”
There was some truth in that, so I put Tommy out of the coupe into the rain.
“One tongue sandwich, one ham, one bottle of milk. And make it sudden.”
But I wasn’t there when he came back with the food. He had barely gone out of sight when the Whosis Kid, his overcoat collar turned up against the rain that was driving down in close-packed earnest just now, came out of the rooming-house doorway.
He turned south on Van Ness.
When the coupe got me to the comer he was not in sight. He couldn’t have reached McAllister Street. Unless he had gone into a building, Redwood Street—the narrow one that split the block—was my best bet. I drove up Golden Gate Avenue another block, turned south, and reached the comer of Franklin and Redwood just in time to see my man ducking into the back door of an apartment building that fronted on McAllister Street.
I drove on slowly, thinking.
The building in which the Kid had spent the night and this building into which he had just gone had their rears on the same back street, on opposite sides, a little more than half a block apart. If the Kid’s room was in the rear of his building, and he had a pair of strong glasses, he could keep a pretty sharp eye on all the windows—and probably much of the interiors—of the rooms on that side of the McAllister Street building.
Last night he had ridden a block out of his way. Having seen him sneak into the back door just now, my guess was that he had not wished to leave the street car where he could be seen from his building. Either of his more convenient points of departure from the car would have been in sight of this building. This would add up to the fact that the Kid was watching someone in this building, and did not want them to be watching him.
He had now gone calling through the back door. That wasn’t difficult to explain. The front door was locked, but the back door—as in most large buildings—probably was open all day. Unless the Kid ran into a janitor or someone of the sort, he could get in with no trouble. The Kid’s call was furtive, whether his host was at home or not.
I didn’t know what it was all about, but that didn’t bother me especially. My immediate problem was to get to the best place from which to pick up the Kid when he came out.
If he left by the back door, the next block of Redwood Street—between Franklin and Gough—was the place for me and my coupe. But he hadn’t promised me he would leave that way. It was more likely that he would use the front door. He would attract less attention walking boldly out the front of the building than sneaking out the back. My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood Street.
I slid the coupe down to that comer and waited.
Half an hour passed. Three quarters.
The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.
A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall when I took my plant there.
It curved around my coupe, slid with chainless recklessness in to the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.
A curtain whipped loose in the rain.
Out of the opening came pale fire-streaks. The bitter voice of a small-caliber pistol. Seven times.
The Whosis Kid’s wet hat floated off his head—a slow balloon-like rising.
There was nothing slow about the Kid’s moving.
Plunging, in a twisting swirl of coat-skirts, he flung into a shop vestibule.
The Cadillac reached the next comer, made a dizzy sliding turn, and was gone up Franklin Street. I pointed the coupe at it.
Passing the vestibule into which the Kid had plunged, I got a one-eyed view of him, on his knees, still trying to get a dark gun untangled from his overcoat. Excited faces were in the doorway behind him. There was no excitement in the street. People are too accustomed to automobile noises nowadays to pay much attention to the racket of anything less than a six-inch gun.
By the time I reached Franklin Street, the Cadillac had gained another block on me. It was spinning to the left, up Eddy Street.
I paralleled it on Turk Street, and saw it again when I reached the two open blocks of Jefferson Square. Its speed was decreasing. Five or six blocks further, and it crossed ahead of me—on Steiner Street—close enough for me to read the license plate. Its pace was moderate now. Confident that they had made a clean get-away, its occupants didn’t want to get in trouble through speeding. I slid into their wake, three blocks behind.
Not having been in sight during the early blocks of the fight, I wasn’t afraid that they would suspect my interest in them now.
Out on Haight Street near the park panhandle, the Cadillac stopped to discharge a passenger. A small man—short and slender—with cream-white face around dark eyes and a tiny black mustache. There was something foreign in the cut of his dark coat and the shape of his gray hat. He carried a walking stick.
The Cadillac went on out Haight Street without giving me a look at the other occupants. Tossing a mental nickel, I stuck to the man afoot. The chances always are against you being able to trace a suspicious car by its license number, but there is a slim chance.
My man went into a drug store on the comer and used the telephone. I don’t know what else he did in there, if anything. Presently a taxicab arrived. He got in and was driven to the Marquis Hotel. A clerk gave him the key to room 761. I dropped him when he stepped into an elevator.
At the Marquis I am among friends.
I found Duran, the house copper, on the mezzanine floor, and asked him:
“Who is 761?”
Duran is a white-haired old-timer who looks, talks, and acts like the president of an exceptionally strong bank. He used to be captain of detectives in one of the larger Middle Western cities. Once he tried too hard to get a confession out of a safe-ripper, and killed him. The newspapers didn’t like Duran. They used that accident to howl him out of his job.
“761?” he repeated in his grandfatherly manner. “That is Mr. Maurois, I believe. Are you especially interested in him?”
“I have hopes,” I admitted. “What do you know about him?”
“Not a great deal. He has been here perhaps two weeks. We shall go down and see what we can learn.” We went to the desk, the switchboard, the captain of bellhops, and upstairs to question a couple of chambermaids. The occupant of 761 had arrived two weeks ago, had registered as Edouard Maurois, Dijon, France, had frequent telephone calls, no mail, no visitors, kept irregular hours and tipped freely. Whatever business he was in or had was not known to the hotel people.
“What is the occasion of your interest in him, if I may ask?” Duran inquired after we had accumulated these facts. He talks like that.
“I don’t exactly know yet,” I replied truthfully. “He just connected with a bird who is wrong, but this Maurois may be all right himself. I’ll give you a rap the minute I get anything solid on him.”
I couldn’t afford to tell Duran I had seen his guest snapping caps at a gunman under the eyes of the City Hall in daylight. The Marquis Hotel goes in for respectability. They would have shoved the Frenchman out in the streets. It wouldn’t help me to have him scared up.
“Please do,” Duran said. “You owe us something for our help, you know, so please don’t withhold any information that might save us unpleasant notoriety.”
“I won’t,” I promised. “Now will you do me another favor? I haven’t ha
d my teeth in anything except my mouth since seven-thirty this morning. Will you keep an eye on the elevators, and let me know if Maurois goes out? I’ll be in the grill, near the door.”
“Certainly.”
On my way to the grillroom I stopped at the telephone booths and called up the office. I gave the night office man the Cadillac’s license number.
“Look it up on the list and see who it belongs to.”
The answer was: “H. J. Paterson, San Pablo, issued for a Buick roadster.”
That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.
All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.
The Whosis Kid lived in a joint from which some of the McAllister Street apartments could be watched. He visited the apartment building furtively. Leaving, he was shot at from a car that must have been waiting somewhere in the vicinity. Had the Frenchman’s companion in the Cadillac—or his companions, if more than one—been the occupant of the apartment the Kid had visited? Had they expected him to visit it? Had they tricked him into visiting it, planning to shoot him down as he was leaving? Or were they watching the front while the Kid watched the rear? If so, had either known that the other was watching? And who lived there?
I couldn’t answer any of these riddles. All I knew was that the Frenchman and his companions didn’t seem to like the Whosis Kid.
Even the sort of meal I put away doesn’t take forever to eat. When I finished it, I went out to the lobby again.
Passing the switchboard, one of the girls—the one whose red hair looks as if it had been poured into its waves and hardened—gave me a nod.
I stopped to see what she wanted.
“Your friend just had a call,” she told me.
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