At a little after five that evening, Tommy Howd, our pug-nosed office boy, found me and gave me a memorandum from the Old Man:
Whosis Kid known to Boston branch as robbery-suspect, but have nothing definite on him. Real name believed to be Arthur Cory or Carey. May have been implicated in Tunnicliffe jewelry robbery in Boston last month. Employee killed, $60,000 unset stones taken. No description of two bandits. Boston branch thinks this angle worth running out. They authorize surveillance.
After I had read this memorandum, I gave it back to the boy, — there’s no wisdom in carrying around a pocketful of stuff relating to your job, — and asked him:
“Will you call up the Old Man and ask him to send somebody up to relieve me while I get a bite of food? I haven’t chewed since breakfast.”
“Swell chance!” Tommy said. “Everybody’s busy. Hasn’t been an op in all day. I don’t see why you fellas don’t carry a hunk or two of chocolate in your pockets to—”
“You’ve been reading about Arctic explorers,” I accused him. “If a man’s starving he’ll eat anything, but when he’s just ordinarily hungry he doesn’t want to clutter up his stomach with a lot of candy. Scout around and see if you can pick me up a couple of sandwiches and a bottle of milk.”
He scowled at me, and then his fourteen-year-old face grew cunning.
“I tell you what,” he suggested. “You tell me what this fella looks like, and which building he’s in, and I’ll watch while you go get a decent meal. Huh? Steak, and French fried potatoes, and pie, and coffee.”
Tommy has dreams of being left on the job in some such circumstance, of having everything break for him while he’s there, and of rounding up regiments of desperadoes all by himself. I don’t think he’d muff a good chance at that, and I’d be willing to give him a whack at it. But the Old Man would scalp me if he knew I turned a child loose among a lot of thugs.
So I shook my head.
“This guy wears four guns and carries an ax, Tommy. He’d eat you up.”
“Aw, applesauce! You ops are all the time trying to make out nobody else could do your work. These crooks can’t be such tough mugs — or they wouldn’t let you catch ’em!”
There was some truth in that, so I put Tommy out of the coupé into the rain.
“One tongue sandwich, one ham, one bottle of milk. And make it sudden.”
But I wasn’t there when he came back with the food. He had barely gone out of sight when the Whosis Kid, his overcoat collar turned up against the rain that was driving down in close-packed earnest just now, came out of the rooming-house doorway.
He turned south on Van Ness.
When the coupé got me to the corner he was not in sight. He couldn’t have reached McAllister street. Unless he had gone into a building, Redwood street — the narrow one that split the block — was my best bet. I drove up Golden Gate avenue another block, turned south, and reached the corner of Franklin and Redwood just in time to see my man ducking into the back door of an apartment building that fronted on McAllister street.
I drove on slowly, thinking.
The building in which the Kid had spent the night and this building into which he had just gone had their rears on the same back street, on opposite sides, a little more than half a block apart. If the Kid’s room was in the rear of his building, and he had a pair of strong glasses, he could keep a pretty sharp eye on all the windows — and probably much of the interiors — of the rooms on that side of the McAllister street building.
Last night he had ridden a block out of his way. Having seen him sneak into the back door just now, my guess was that he had not wished to leave the street car where he could be seen from this building. Either of his more convenient points of departure from the car would have been in sight of this building. This would add up to the fact that the Kid was watching someone in this building, and did not want them to be watching him.
He had now gone calling through the back door. That wasn’t difficult to explain. The front door was locked, but the back door — as in most large buildings — probably was open all day. Unless the Kid ran into a janitor or someone of the sort, he could get in with no trouble. The Kid’s call was furtive, whether his host was at home or not.
I didn’t know what it was all about, but that didn’t bother me especially. My immediate problem was to get to the best place from which to pick up the Kid when he came out.
If he left by the back door, the next block of Redwood street — between Franklin and Gough — was the place for me and my coupé. But he hadn’t promised me he would leave that way. It was more likely that he would use the front door. He would attract less attention walking boldly out the front of the building than sneaking out the back. My best bet was the corner of McAllister and Van Ness. From there I could watch the front door as well as one end of Redwood street.
I slid the coupé down to that corner and waited.
Half an hour passed. Three quarters.
The Whosis Kid came down the front steps and walked toward me, buttoning his overcoat and turning up the collar as he walked, his head bent against the slant of the rain.
A curtained black Cadillac touring car came from behind me, a car I thought had been parked down near the City Hall when I took my plant here.
It curved around my coupé, slid with chainless recklessness in to the curb, skidded out again, picking up speed somehow on the wet paving.
A curtain whipped loose in the rain.
Out of the opening came pale fire-streaks. The bitter voice of a small-caliber pistol. Seven times.
The Whosis Kid’s wet hat floated off his head — a slow balloon-like rising.
There was nothing slow about the Kid’s moving.
Plunging, in a twisting swirl of coat-skirts, he flung into a shop vestibule.
The Cadillac reached the next corner, made a dizzy sliding turn, and was gone up Franklin street. I pointed the coupé at it.
Passing the vestibule into which the Kid had plunged, I got a one-eyed view of him, on his knees, still trying to get a dark gun untangled from his overcoat. Excited faces were in the doorway behind him. There was no excitement in the street. People are too accustomed to automobile noises nowadays to pay much attention to the racket of anything less than a six-inch gun.
By the time I reached Franklin street, the Cadillac had gained another block on me. It was spinning to the left, up Eddy street.
I paralleled it on Turk street, and saw it again when I reached the two open blocks of Jefferson Square. Its speed was decreasing. Five or six blocks further, and it crossed ahead of me — on Steiner street — close enough for me to read the license plate. Its pace was moderate now. Confident that they had made a clean getaway, its occupants didn’t want to get in trouble through speeding. I slid into their wake, three blocks behind.
Not having been in sight during the early blocks of the flight, I wasn’t afraid that they would suspect my interest in them now.
Out on Haight street near the park panhandle, the Cadillac stopped to discharge a passenger. A small man — short and slender — with cream-white face around dark eyes and a tiny black mustache. There was something foreign in the cut of his dark coat and the shape of his gray hat. He carried a walking-stick.