I found him in the lobby — a freckle-faced youngster of twenty-two or so, whose bright gray eyes were busy just now with a racing program, which he held in a hand that had a finger bandaged with adhesive tape. I passed him and stopped at the cigar stand, where I bought a package of cigarettes and straightened out an imaginary dent in my hat. Then I went out to the street again. The bandaged finger and the business with the hat were our introductions. Somebody invented those tricks back before the Civil War, but they still worked smoothly, so their antiquity was no reason for discarding them.
I strolled up Fourth Street, getting away from Broadway — San Diego’s main stem — and the operative caught up with me. His name was Gorman, and he turned out to be a pretty good lad. I gave him the lay.
“You’re to go down to Tijuana and take a plant on the Golden Horseshoe Café. There’s a little chunk of a girl hustling drinks in there — short curly brown hair; brown eyes; round face; rather large red mouth; square shoulders. You can’t miss her; she’s a nice-looking kid of about eighteen, called Kewpie. She’s the target for your eye. Keep away from her. Don’t try to rope her. I’ll give you an hour’s start. Then I’m coming down to talk to her. I want to know what she does right after I leave, and what she does for the next few days. You can get in touch with me at the” — I gave him the name of my hotel and my room number — “each night. Don’t give me a tumble anywhere else. I’ll most likely be in and out of the Golden Horseshoe often.”
We parted, and I went down to the plaza and sat on a bench under the palms for an hour. Then I went up to the corner and fought for a seat on a Tijuana stage.
Fifteen or more miles of dusty riding — packed five in a seat meant for three — a momentary halt at the Immigration Station on the line, and I was climbing out of the stage at the entrance to the race track. The ponies had been running for some time, but the turnstiles were still spinning a steady stream of customers into the track. I turned my back on the gate and went over to the row of jitneys in front of the Monte Carlo — the big wooden casino — got into one, and was driven over to the Old Town.
The Old Town had a deserted look. Nearly everybody was over watching the dogs do their stuff. Gorman’s freckled face showed over a drink of mescal when I entered the Golden Horseshoe. I hoped he had a good constitution. He needed one if he was going to do his sleuthing on a distilled cactus diet.
The welcome I got from the Horseshoers was just like a homecoming. Even the bartender with the plastered-down curls gave me a grin.
“Where’s Kewpie?” I asked.
“Brother-in-lawing, Ed?” a big Swede girl leered at me. “I’ll see if I can find her for you.”
Kewpie came through the back door just then.
“Hello, Painless!” She climbed all over me, hugging me, rubbing her face against mine, and the Lord knows what all. “Down for another swell souse?”
“No,” I said, leading her back toward the stalls. “Business this time. Where’s Ed?”
“Up north. His wife kicked off and he’s gone to collect the remains.”
“That makes you sorry?”
She showed her big white teeth in a boy’s smile of pure happiness.
“You bet! It’s tough on me that papa has come into a lot of sugar.”
I looked at her out of the corner of my eyes — a glance that was supposed to be wise.
“And you think Ed’s going to bring the jack back to you?”
Her eyes snapped darkly at me.
“What’s eating you?” she demanded.
I smiled knowingly.
“One of two things is going to happen,” I predicted. “Ed’s going to ditch you — he was figuring on that, anyway — or he’s going to need every brownie he can scrape up to keep his neck from being—”
“You God-damned liar!”
Her right shoulder was to me, touching my left. Her left hand flashed down under her short skirt. I pushed her shoulder forward, twisting her body sharply away from me. The knife her left hand had whipped up from her leg jabbed deep into the underside of the table. A thick-bladed knife, I noticed, balanced for accurate throwing.
She kicked backward, driving one of her sharp heels into my ankle. I slid my left arm around behind her and pinned her elbow to her side just as she freed the knife from the table.
“What th’ hell’s all ’is?”
I looked up.
Across the table a man stood glaring at me — legs apart, fists on hips. He was a big man, and ugly. A tall, raw-boned man with wide shoulders, out of which a long, skinny yellow neck rose to support a little round head. His eyes were black shoe-buttons stuck close together at the top of a little mashed nose. His mouth looked as if it had been torn in his face, and it was stretched in a snarl now, baring a double row of crooked brown teeth.
“Where d’ yuh get ’at stuff?” this lovely person roared at me.
He was too tough to reason with.
“If you’re a waiter,” I told him, “bring me a bottle of beer and something for the kid. If you’re not a waiter — sneak.”
He leaned over the table and I gathered my feet in. It looked like I was going to need them to move around on.
“I’ll bring yuh a—”
The girl wriggled out of my hands and shut him up.
“Mine’s liquor,” she said sharply.
He snarled, looked from one of us to the other, showed me his dirty teeth again, and wandered away.
“Who’s your friend?”
“You’ll do well to lay off him,” she advised me, not answering my question.
Then she slid her knife back in its hiding place under her skirt and twisted around to face me.
“Now what’s all this about Ed being in trouble?”
“You read about the killing in the papers?”
“Yes.”
“You oughtn’t need a map, then,” I said. “Ed’s only out is to put the job on you. But I doubt if he can get away with that. If he can’t, he’s nailed.”
“You’re crazy!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t too drunk to know that both of us were here with you when the killing was done.”
“I’m not crazy enough to think that proves anything,” I corrected her. “But I am crazy enough to expect to go back to San Francisco wearing the killer on my wrist.”
She laughed at me. I laughed back and stood up.
“See you some more,” I said as I strolled toward the door.
I returned to San Diego and sent a wire to Los Angeles, asking for another operative. Then I got something to eat and spent the evening lying across the bed in my hotel room smoking and scheming and waiting for Gorman.
It was late when he arrived, and he smelled of mescal from San Diego to St. Louis and back, but his head seemed level enough.
“Looked like I was going to have to shoot you loose from the place for a moment,” he grinned. “Between the twist flashing the pick and the big guy loosening a sap in his pocket, it looked like action was coming.”
“You let me alone,” I ordered. “Your job is to see what goes on, and that’s all. If I get carved, you can mention it in your report, but that’s your limit. What did you turn up?”
“After you blew, the girl and the big guy put their noodles together. They seemed kind of agitated — all agog, you might say. He slid out, so I dropped the girl and slid along behind him. He came to town and got a wire off. I couldn’t crowd him close enough to see who it was to. Then he went back to the joint. Things were normal when I knocked off.”