And he waddled out.
Two
From the attorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhonse had been knocked down.
“I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman — a big sandy-haired man named Coffee — told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ’em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. There was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”
“In what direction was Newhouse walking?”
“North along Kearny Street, and he was about three-quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car — according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money — paper money — in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money — a hundred-florin note, he says.”
“Found out anything about the men in the car?”
“Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighborhood of California and Kearny Streets — where the car was stolen from — and around Clay and Montgomery Streets — where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it — it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe there was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two — or three-day-old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had an attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days — just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”
“Where’d he live?”
“On Sacramento Street — way out. I got his address here somewhere.”
He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.
That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.
Three
My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details — and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.
Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment — only three blocks from the Hall of Justice — and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.
Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the pressroom in the rear.
The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirt-sleeves, checking off figures in a ledger against others on a batch of papers before him.
I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk, pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.
“This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and—”
He broke off to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.
“Yes... This is Soules... We’re working on them now... I’ll give ’em to you by Monday noon at the least... I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And... And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”
Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.
“You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”
“Chrostwaite?”
“Yes — that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him — promised to have ’em ready yesterday — but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I’ve been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order — and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”
I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited until it was burning in Soilless mouth before I asked:
“You said something about having a couple new hands to break in. How come?”
“Yes. Mr. Newhouse fired two of our printers last week — Fincher and Keys. He found that they belonged to the I.W.W., so he gave them their time.”
“Any trouble with them or anything against them except that they were Wobblies?”
“No — they were pretty good workers.”
“Any trouble with them after he fired them?” I asked.
“No real trouble, though they were pretty hot. They made red speeches all over the place before they left.”
“Remember what day that was?”
“Wednesday of last week, I think. Yes, Wednesday, because I hired two new men on Thursday.”
“How many men do you work?”
“Three, besides myself.”
“Was Mr. Newhouse sick very often?”
“Not sick enough to stay away very often, though every now and then his heart would go back on him, and he’d have to stay in bed for a week or ten days. He wasn’t what you could call real well at any time. He never did anything but the office work — I run the shop.”
“When was he taken sick this last time?”
“Mrs. Newhouse called up Tuesday morning and said he had had another spell, and wouldn’t be down for a few days. He came in yesterday — which was Thursday — for about ten minutes in the afternoon, and said he would be back on the job this morning. He was killed just after he left.”
“How did he look — very sick?”
“Not so bad. He never looked well, of course, but I couldn’t see much difference from usual yesterday. This last spell hadn’t been as bad as most, I reckon — he was usually laid up for a week or more.”
“Did he say where he was going when he left? The reason I ask is that, living out on Sacramento Street, he would naturally have taken a car at that street if he had been going home, whereas he was run down on Clay Street.”
“He said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun for half an hour or so. He had been cooped up indoors for two or three days, he said, and he wanted some sunshine before he went back home.”