Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o'clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.
The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.
"Hello, Alec!" she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. "What are you doing in my territory?"
"Got a booster for you," he mumbled. "The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?"
The store detective looked and nodded.
"Yes. Thanks, Alec. You're sure she's boosting, of course?"
"Now, Minnie!" he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. "Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it's more than likely she's got herself some lace by now."
"Um-hmm," said Minnie. "Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I'll be with her."
Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective's arm again.
"I want a line on her," he said. "What do you say we tail her around and see what she's up to before we knock her over?"
"If it doesn't take all day," the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.
Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.
"Take a plant on the joint while I get a copper," Alex Rush ordered.
When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.
"Second floor," she said.
Behind her the house's street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, "What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I'll have you understand, and I—"
"Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here," Alec Rush croaked. "Second floor. Take us up."
The woman's scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective's voice for the harshness of great emotion.
"Why—why—" she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management—n ever to stand in the way of the police. "I'll take you up," she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.
Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the stairs.
"Who's that?" a casually curt feminine voice asked.
"Landlady."
The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, "This is her," the policeman said, "You'll have to come along," and Minnie said, "Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you."
"My God!" exclaimed the girl. "There'd be just as much sense to it if you'd all jumped out at me and yelled 'Boo!'"
"This ain't any way," Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. "Let's go in where we can talk it over."
Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshalling the others into the girl's rooms.
"Remember, I got no idea what this is all about," said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. "I'm easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you're counting on me talking, too, you'd better smart me up."
"Boosting, dearie," Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl's arm. "I'm at Goodbody's."
"You think I've been shoplifting? Is that the idea?"
"Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That's what." Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.
The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.
"It's all right with me," she announced, "so long as Goodbody's is hanging the rap on me —somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I've got nothing to say. Take me for my ride."
"You'll get your ride, sister," the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. "Nobody's going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?"
"Got anything with a judge's name on it that says you can?"
"No."
"Then you don't get a peep!"
Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.
"Who's this?" he asked the girl.
"Try and find out!"
"I am trying," he lied.
"You big bum!" said she. "You couldn't find water in the ocean!"
Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.
Twilight was around the graystone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl—Polly Vanness was the name she had given—had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph's subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these things.
Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curb-side spot within sight of the house.
The night went along and no one left or entered the Landow house.
Fingernails clicked on the coupe's glass door.
A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective's notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.
Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.
"Got a match?" the man asked.
The detective hesitated, said, "Yeah," and held out a box.
A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large nose, high cheek-bones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.
But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.
"I thought it was you," he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. "Maybe you don't know me, but I knew you when you were on the force."