Once in a while I’ve misjudged a man. I don’t do it very often. In my line of work a man can’t make very many mistakes, either in observation or in character reading. This was one of my mistakes. I’d sized up Don G. Herman as an ordinary crooked, politician, a high-grade blackmailer, a pussyfooter.
He was all of those things all right. But he was more. The man was a power and he was a devil. As he shot that last at me his mask slipped off and his eyes squinted into two narrow slits. For a long moment I saw him as he was. The rest of his face was the same, flabby cheeks, spondy lips, thick formless mouth, coarse nose, and all; but those eyes… If ever there were twin devils that peered out from a recess of hell, from a throne of power, they peered out then from those eyes.
A moment and it was gone. He had caught himself, and his muscles forced his eyes wide open, giving them his ordinary credulous, wide-eyed innocent expression of cherubic fatuity.
I got to my feet and gave him look for look.
“Like hell I will,” I said, and then I added as I started for the door, “Laugh that off.”
He kept his expression of beaming frankness.
“Oh yes you will,” he replied. “I’ve just made the proposition. I haven’t used any of the various means I have of making you accept it yet.”
I paused at the door.
“Listen, Herman, let me warn you. Don’t try to force me, and don’t try to double-cross me. People who pull those stunts have a habit of getting in bad somewhere along the line.”
He laughed, a warped twisting of his flabby lips.
“You think I’m that crude? Do you think I was so foolish as to tell you all of this, to ask you to do this unless I had with me the means of enforcing my requests?”
I wanted to see what he had up his sleeve, and stopped.
“Yes?” I said, inquiringly.
He arose and bowed me to the door, along the hall, and out into the night.
“Yes,” he said as the door slammed, and there was something of mockery in his voice.
I didn’t like my first interview with Don G. Herman, San Francisco millionaire, politician, blackmailer, king of the underworld. I walked half a block before I whistled to Bobo so that he could shortcut across the yard and jump the fence to me. I didn’t care about any watching eyes seeing the dog that had been guarding the front steps during the interview.
I went back to my apartment and thought things over — thought over the whole proposition, the series of ten notes, thought over the look I had seen come over Herman’s face. The more I thought of the thing the less I liked it. I came to the conclusion that I would hear more of Don G. Herman, and I also came to the conclusion that unless he looked sharp and watched his step he would see and hear more of Ed Jenkins, the phantom crook. I don’t like to have people try to slip anything over on me.
The next afternoon I took a walk. At first I’d thought of giving ’em all the slip, — simply vanishing into thin air, and then I decided against it. After all, even with my criminal record and all, I wasn’t going to be stampeded by no damned politician. I’d hold my ground — until the going got rough, anyway. I wouldn’t pull any of my phantom tricks until the necessity arose, and when I did, someone would pay for my time and trouble.
I got back into the apartment about dusk, and knew there was something wrong as soon as I got in the door. Bobo bristled up, braced his feet, growled slightly and looked up at me, his lips working back from his teeth.
I knew what he had on his mind. Someone had been in the apartment and his scent still clung to things. Probably it was the heavyset bird that posed for the time being as E. C. Simpson, more generally known as Big Front Gilvray.
I took a good look around and things seemed to be in order, all apple pie like. That didn’t sound so good to me, somehow. I commenced to think I knew the answer.
I called Bobo to me and went over everything in the apartment, letting him smell of everything I could pick up. He didn’t seem to get the idea at first. He acted as though I wanted to play with him, and he’d try and grab the things I held up. After a bit he saw I was in deadly earnest, and then he commenced to look puzzled, wondering what I was holding the things up in front of his nose for. He smelled ’em, though. He couldn’t help himself, not with the nose that dog’s got.
It took me an hour and a half patiently running through everything I could think of. I had him smell everything moveable in the blamed apartment. Finally I got a hunch I should have had earlier in the evening. I got an extra pair of heavy walking shoes and held them to his nose. They were blamed near the only things that he hadn’t sniffed at that.
Right then and there I got action. The dog was looking puzzled, almost bored, trying to figure out what it was all about. The left shoe went past his nose leaving him bored as ever. When the right shoe got within a couple of inches of his face he seemed to get the idea all at once, and jumped to his feet, his lips curling back over his teeth, and he growled.
I looked at the shoe. That was what the visitor had been after. I wondered if he had taken it and left a footprint somewhere, a footprint that would be used to send me to the gallows if I didn’t knuckle under to Herman.
The dog grabbed the shoe in his teeth and began to paw at it. I took it away from him and carefully looked it over once more, looking for any signs of fresh earth on it, any bloodstains. When a man is in my profession — if you choose to call it that — the price of safety, of freedom, of life itself, is eternal vigilance, and the ability to concentrate on the problem in hand without overlooking any bets.
It was the dog that gave the solution I’d eventually have arrived at, anyhow. He grabbed the shoe again, held it firmly and determinedly with his paws as though it had been a big bone, twisted his great jaws around until he had his powerful back teeth fastened in it, gave a wrench, and pulled off the outer layer of leather. The heel beneath had been skilfully hollowed out, filled with cotton, and, in the cotton, reposed three diamonds. They weren’t particularly large, but they were big enough to be worth a pretty penny, and an examination showed me that they were perfectly matched. Evidently they were a part of some finely selected necklace, or rather had been a part of it. The necklace had been lifted and the stones pried from their settings. Those three, so perfectly matched for size, color and fire would serve as a positive identification.
I sat there with the stones in my hand, looking at the coruscations that emanated from them, and thinking of just where I’d have been if the police had raided my apartment and found those things concealed in the heel of that shoe.
Bobo lay on the floor, the dismantled shoe between his paws, looking as proud of himself as a turkey the day before Thanksgiving, and slowly wagging his tail. I could hear it thump, thump on the floor, slowly, rhythmically.
I guess it was that which finally aroused me to action. It sounded like a step on the stairs. Right then I was facing a term in prison, stolen gems in my hand and a criminal record that stretched across the entire span of the United States behind me.
I got up and took down one of the curtains, unrolled it, took the spring out of the roller, dropped the gems within the cavity, crowded back the spring with a little more tension on it and readjusted the curtain. Then I took three buttons, put them in with the cotton, stuffed the whole back in the heel, and nailed the patch on again. At any rate whoever planted that little surprise for Ed Jenkins was going to be out the price of three dandy diamonds.