I guided him to a stakeout a few doors down from the building Riordan had entered and pointed it out to him.
“How will I spot him?”
“A Mick, County Cork sort. Sandy-red hair. Six footer. He had on a teal two-piece with yellow pinstriped vest when I tailed him here. Brown hat, yellow ribbon.”
Arney stood there, absorbing this information.
“Stay behind him. See where he goes, who he meets.” Looking upon the youth, I couldn’t resist saying, “Oh, yeah. He’s only got one arm.”
Arney looked startled, and then asked, “Which one?”
I grinned at him. “I’m kidding about the arm. He used to be a detective, Burns out of Chicago. When he steps out the door, he’ll look left and right and he’ll check again quickly. Same at every intersection. Just trail along slowly in his wake, do us proud.”
I climbed back to the Fairmont and grabbed a hack down to the office, where the lazy atmosphere of the morning had given way to some real bustle. The secretaries were working the phones and typing reports based on the field notes operatives were handing in. More bodies had been pulled into the fray, going in and out the doors. The only note of calm was Vincent Emery, a thin agent of a couple years standing, fast asleep in the waiting room. They must have hauled him out of bed before his proper rest was finished up.
“Who got robbed?” I asked the first secretary I came to who looked less than fully occupied.
“An old money family, South of the Slot. Jewelry, looted from a safe, valued at—” she consulted the notes, “—hmm, extent of loss not yet determined. Their butler was killed, but the family members were all someplace else at the time.”
Little Foley strolled easily into the din and told me, “Patrick Helland had some caper cooking.”
“Said who?”
“A source.”
“Reliable?”
“Sometimes.”
“And who is Paddy working with these days?”
“Shaky Squires. Plus some yegg out from Hackensack.”
I filed this information away for subsequent chewing and strolled across the room to where Emery sawed away at his dreams. Kicking his foot, I said, “Wake up. Don’t you know that we never sleep?”
While the operative struggled toward consciousness, I instructed him to wire Chicago, and have the boys there do some backtracking on the old Riordan case. Talk with the banker. Phone the insurance agency and give them hope that funds might be returning to the coffers.
I sat around smoking, offering advice when asked on the new robbery down in the Rincon Hill mansion. Two hours passed in this fashion. Then Arney rang in from the trenches.
“He went to the Warrington in Post Street,” he reported, “walked all the way. Like you said, he kept his eyes roving.”
“You find out why he likes that building?”
“The doorman told me he’s been coming around for a couple of weeks, seeing this woman and a man who just moved in there.”
“A couple?”
“They’re keeping separate suites. The woman is pure dynamite.”
I took that observation with a pound of salt. Young Wild West thought that everything with a minimum of two legs covered in a skirt rolled off the line in a TNT factory.
“What about the man?”
“About the same build as Riordan, brown suit, black applejack. He’s really mean-looking.”
Another useless observation, in all likelihood. How few people who’d gladly kill you bear some mark of Cain?
“Where are you now, kid?”
“The theatre lobby on Geary. They went to eat across the street.”
“All three?”
“Yes. It looks as if the men are both interested in the woman. She’s a knockout. Beautiful silver eyes.”
“Silver? You mean gray or bl — Did you make eye contact with the dame? I told you never to make eye contact.”
“Well, no, I—”
The youngster had looked in her eyes. Bad procedure. It would have been worse if he’d exchanged a look with either of the men, because they were no doubt more dangerous. But still, the skirt might see him later and remember his face, and tip the fellows with stronger arms.
“I’m pulling you off. I’ll have a couple of other operatives there in five minutes to relieve you. Once they get on the tail, you back out.”
“I can handle it, I’m sure I can,” Arney pleaded. A good lad.
“If you had more hours logged on the chase, maybe. But you don’t know what you’re facing and you don’t have your rods with you, because their weight in your clothes would have sang out to Riordan. You back off. Go home. Get some rest. We’ll take it from hence forward.”
I figured that was the best play. The child might not be safe out on the streets, without his brace of pistols to blow many mighty holes through Frisco.
III
Reports from the Chicago branch would be awhile coming, so I left the office by the front entrance and cut like a cat across the streetcar tracks on Market to the Pacific Building. I wanted dinner in the States Restaurant before returning to the Clay Street apartment house. Fortified with bratwurst, potato pancakes, and black coffee, my plan was to relieve Riordan’s new shadow and catch up on my prey’s doings until something more stimulating happened.
Neither of the men I’d sent out to double for young Arney was in evidence, so I took a position in a doorway and set fire to a Fatima. The light changed rapidly, as a bank of clouds to seaward blotted up the setting sun. The only activity in the block was the appearance of a couple of Flips, dressed to the nines, moving east down the hill toward Manilatown off Portsmouth Square. If they were lucky, they’d see some kind of action tonight. Knives could get yanked out and wetted under the very shadow of the Hall of Justice, and if their skin didn’t get pricked, they’d come home happy.
I smoked and contemplated the merry pursuits of the species, when I heard the roar of an engine pushed to sudden agonized life.
A gunshot boomed. Another. Where? Up the hill. I dropped the fag and ran against the grade toward Mason Street just as a black coupé came skidding on screaming tyres into Clay, driven by a dead man.
The corpse took his machine smack into a flivver parked in the gutter, pushing it up on the kerb and spraying glass shards around. I glanced at the carnage. No question about the driver being dead, because Paddy Helland had the bone handle of a throwing knife lodged in his left eye socket, with the gleaming point of the blade showing above his right ear.
I made the corner with caution, leaving my own gun pocketed so I might appear as just another excitable citizen until circumstances dictated otherwise. A figure went pounding across the weeded lot west of Mason. Fast. I’d never catch up.
From what I’d seen, I figured Helland for the shooter, yanking his roscoe and firing off a couple of shots as he tried to make a getaway. Whoever tossed the blade was good with it, some farm boy with years of no other gags or a city kid who’d gotten inspired reading Fenimore Cooper. I almost turned back to investigate Paddy’s pockets and check the smell of his gun, when I saw a slight movement in a doorway up Mason.
Walking over, I found The Fin crouched back in the vestibule with fear printed bold on his face like a headline. If he hadn’t risked a look, I might have missed him. I guess his experience of the rough and tumble stopped with head-busting, so he was having trouble adjusting to homicide.
“Well, well. The kid himself,” I greeted him.
He stared at me with a blank look, but stuck his head out of the doorway again for another gander. Then he said, “Where’d you come from?” The kid didn’t quite recognize me.
“Your mother sent me out to find you before the city burns down again. She’s made sandwiches.”