"But I couldn't get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighbourhood of—of the young woman's house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man—I'm certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?"
"Sure," the detective agreed hoarsely, "but didn't you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?"
The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.
"No, I didn't. I didn't want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don't. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and—and—well—I don't—That's impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all."
"Maybe, but, mind you, I'm not saying I will. I'd want to know more first."
"More? You mean more—"
"More about you and her."
"But there is nothing about us!" the man in gray protested. "It is exactly as I have told you. I might add that the young woman is—is married, and that until yesterday I had not seen her since her marriage."
"Then your interest in her is—?" The detective let the husky interrogation hang incompleted in the air.
"Of friendship—past friendship."
"Yeah. Now who is this young woman?"
The man in gray fidgeted again.
"See here, Rush," he said, colouring, "I'm perfectly willing to tell you, and shall, of course, but I don't want to tell you unless you are going to handle this thing for me. I mean I don't want to be bringing her name into it if—if you aren't. Will you?"
Alec Rush scratched his grizzled head with a stubby forefinger.
"I don't know," he growled. "That's what I'm trying to find out. I can't take a hold of a job that might be anything. I've got to know that you're on the up-and-up."
Puzzlement disturbed the clarity of the younger man's brown eyes.
"But I didn't think you'd be—" he broke off and looked away from the ugly man.
"Of course you didn't." A chuckle rasped in the detective's burly throat, the chuckle of a man touched in a once-sore spot that is no longer tender. He raised a big hand to arrest his prospective client in the act of rising from his chair. "What you did, on a guess, was to go to one of the big agencies and tell 'em your story. They wouldn't touch it unless you cleared up the fishy points. Then you ran across my name, remembered I was chucked out of the department a couple of years ago. 'There's my man,' you said to yourself, 'a baby who won't be so choicy!'"
The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.
Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, "No matter. I ain't sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I'll take your job. It sounds phoney, but maybe it ain't. It'll cost you fifteen a day and expenses."
"I can see that it sounds peculiar," the younger man assured the detective, "but you'll find that it's quite all right. You'll want a retainer, of course."
"Yes, say fifty."
The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.
"Your name?" he asked.
"I would rather not. I'm not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?"
Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.
"Now! Now!" he grumbled good-naturedly. "How am I going to do business with a man like you?"
The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.
"It's in your favour, maybe," the detective admitted as he surrendered, "though it ain't to your credit. But if you were off-colour I guess you'd have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman—who is she?"
"Mrs. Hubert Landow."
"Well, well, we've got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?"
"On Charles-Street Avenue," the man in gray said, and gave a number.
"Her description?"
"She is twenty-two or—three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and very white skin."
"And her husband? You know him?"
"I have seen him. He is about my age—thirty—but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type."
"And your mystery man? What does he look like?"
"He's quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large—medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He's very dark, with high cheek-bones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps."
"Clothes?"
"He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I'm not positive."
"I suppose you'll drop in here for my reports," the detective wound up, "since I won't know where to send them to you?"
"Yes." The man in gray stood up and held out his hand. "I'm very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush."
Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.
The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, "Now, Mr. Man!" got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.
He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bearlike, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders—sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.
He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block, and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.
The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.
Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupe, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.
Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.
He had not seen Millar's dark, high-shouldered young man.
Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush's heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupe while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.