“No,” emphatically. “I’d never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”
“I don’t like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story’s got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:
“It wouldn’t be the way it happened.”
“That’s too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don’t mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”
He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.
The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn’t like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.
I got up on my feet, telling him:
“Suit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I’ll have to take you both in.”
He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.
The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.
“This is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to take the fall with you.”
“Shut up,” he said in his throat.
“Shut me up,” she cried.
He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.
She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:
“Joe does know her. He got the things from her. She’s at the St. Martin on O’Farrell Street — her and Babe McCloor.”
While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe’s right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:
“Let me tell it.”
“Hop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.
He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:
“He was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don’t think old man Hambleton’s hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn’t a bad guess.
He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.
I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”
“You’ve got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”
“What’s Babe doing now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Is he still puffing them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
“I don’t,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can’t get anything out of him about what he’s doing.”
“How long have he and Sue been here?”
“About six months that I know of.”
“Who’s he mobbed up with?”
“I don’t know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”
“How’s he fixed?”
“I don’t know. There’s always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”
Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn’t going to get much information about my people here.
I went to the phone in the passageway and called the Agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives’ room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.
MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and told him:
“This fellow says his name’s Joe Wales, and the girl’s supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We’ve got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I’ve made a deal with them. I’m going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There’s a fire-escape in front of the window. The window’s locked now. I’d keep it that way. If the deal turns out O.K. we’ll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I’m gone there’s no reason why you can’t knock them around as much as you want.”
MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.
Joe Wales called:
“Hey, you’re not going to uncover me to Babe, are you? That’s got to be part of the deal.”
“Not unless I have to.”
“I’d just as leave stand the rap,” he said. “I’d be safer in jail.”
“I’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”
IV
Walking over to the St. Martin — only half a dozen blocks from Wales’s place — I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stick-up in Alameda the previous week. He hadn’t been in on it — if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them — so it wasn’t likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.
The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed, R. K. McCloor, 313, as Wales and Peggy had told me.
I pushed the bell button. Nothing happened. Nothing happened any of the four times I pushed it. I pushed the button labeled Manager.
The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street door.
“Some people named McCloor live here?” I asked.
“Three-thirteen,” she said.
“Been living here long?”
She pursed her fat mouth, looked intently at me, hesitated, but finally said: “Since last June.”
“What do you know about them?”
She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.
I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.
Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.
“Come in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.
I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:
“What is it?”
“Maybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He’s done time for safe-burglary. I’m trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don’t know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph — front and profile, taken at Leavenworth — out of my pocket. “This him?”
She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that’s him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that’s him, all right.”
“His wife is here with him?” I asked.
She nodded vigorously.
“I don’t know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”
She described a girl who could have been Sue Hambleton. I couldn’t show Sue’s picture, that would have uncovered me if she and Babe heard about it.