“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and — and — well — I don’t —That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”
“Maybe, but, mind you, I’m not saying I will. I’d want to know more first.”
“More? You mean more —”
“More about you and her.”
“But there is nothing about us!” the man in gray protested. “It is exactly as I have told you. I might add that the young woman is — is married, and that until yesterday I had not seen her since her marriage.”
“Then your interest in her is — ?” The detective let the husky interrogation hang incompleted in the air.
“Of friendship — past friendship.”
“Yeah. Now who is this young woman?”
The man in gray fidgeted again.
“See here, Rush,” he said, coloring, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you, and shall, of course, but I don’t want to tell you unless you are going to handle this thing for me. I mean I don’t want to be bringing her name into it if — if you aren’t. Will you?”
Alec Rush scratched his grizzled head with a stubby forefinger.
“I don’t know,” he growled. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I can’t take a hold of a job that might be anything. I’ve got to know that you’re on the up-and-up.”
Puzzlement disturbed the clarity of the younger man’s brown eyes.
“But I didn’t think you’d be —” He broke off and looked away from the ugly man.
“Of course you didn’t.” A chuckle rasped in the detective’s burly throat, the chuckle of a man touched in a once sore spot that is no longer tender. He raised a big hand to arrest his prospective client in the act of rising from his chair. “What you did, on a guess, was to go to one of the big agencies and tell ’em your story. They wouldn’t touch it unless you cleared up the fishy points. Then you ran across my name, remembered I was chucked out of the department a couple of years ago. ‘There’s my man,’ you said to yourself, ‘a baby who won’t be so choicy!'”
The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.
Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain’t sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I’ll take your job. It sounds phony, but maybe it ain’t. It’ll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”
“I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you’ll find that it’s quite all right. You’ll want a retainer, of course.”
“Yes, say fifty.”
The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.
“Your name?” he asked.
“I would rather not. I’m not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”
Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.
“Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”
The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.
“It’s in your favor, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain’t to your credit. But if you
were off-color I guess you’d have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman —who is she?”
“Mrs. Hubert Landow.”
n’Well, well, we’ve got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”
“On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and