At Franklin Street, half a block from the rooming-house into which he had shadowed the young man that afternoon, the detective stopped his coupe.
“You want to drop out here?” he asked.
Scuttle Zeipp looked sidewise, speculatively, into the elder man’s ugly face.
“It’ll do,” the young man said, “but you’re a damned good guesser, just the same.” He stopped with a hand on the door. “It’s a go, is it, Alec? Fifty-fifty?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” Alec Rush grinned at him with hideous good-nature. “You’re not a bad lad, Scuttle, and if there’s any gravy you’ll get yours, but don’t count on me mobbing up with you.”
Zeipp’s eyes jerked to slits, his lips snarled back from yellow teeth that were set edge to edge.
“You sell me out, you damned gorilla, and I’ll — ” He laughed the threat out of being, his dark face young and careless again. “Have it your own way, Alec. I didn’t make no mistake when I throwed in with you. What you say goes.”
“Yeah,” the ugly man agreed. “Lay off that joint out there until I tell you. Maybe you’d better drop in to see me tomorrow. The phone book’ll tell you where my office is. So long, kid.”
“So long, Alec.”
In the morning Alec Rush set about investigating Hubert Landow. First he went to the City Hall, where he examined the gray books in which marriage licenses are indexed. Hubert Britman Landow and Sara Falsoner had been married six months before, he learned.
The bride’s maiden name thickened the red in the detective’s bloodshot eyes. Air hissed sharply from his flattened nostrils. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said to himself, so rasp-ingly that a lawyer’s skinny clerk, fiddling with other records at his elbow, looked frightenedly at him and edged a little away.
From the City Hall, Alec Rush carried the bride’s name to two newspaper offices, where, after studying the files, he bought an armful of six-months-old papers. He took the papers to his office, spread them on his desk, and attacked them with a pair of shears. When the last one had been cut and thrown aside, there remained on his desk a thick sheaf of clippings.
Arranging his clippings in chronological order, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar, put his elbows on the desk, his ugly head between his palms, and began to read a story with which newspaper-reading Baltimore had been familiar half a year before.
Purged of irrelevancies and earlier digressions, the story was essentially this:
Jerome Falsoner, aged forty-five, was a bachelor who lived alone in a flat in Cathedral Street, on an income more than sufficient for his comfort. He was a tall man, but of delicate physique, the result, it may have been, of excessive indulgence in pleasure on a constitution none too
strong in the beginning. He was well known, at least by sight, to all night-living Baltimoreans, and to those who frequented race-track, gambling-house, and the furtive cockpits that now and then materialize for a few brief hours in the forty miles of country that lie between Baltimore and Washington.
One Fanny Kidd, coming as was her custom at ten o’clock one morning to “do” Jerome Falsoner’s rooms, found him lying on his back in his living-room, staring with dead eyes at a spot on the ceiling, a bright spot that was reflected sunlight — reflected from the metal hilt of his paper-knife, which protruded from his chest.
Police investigation established four facts:
First, Jerome Falsoner had been dead for fourteen hours when Fanny Kidd found him, which placed his murder at about eight o’clock the previous evening.
Second, the last persons known to have seen him alive were a woman named Madeline Boudin, with whom he had been intimate, and three of her friends. They had seen him, alive, at some time between seven-thirty and eight o’clock, or less than half an hour before his death. They had been driving down to a cottage on the Severn River, and Madeline Boudin had told the others she wanted to see Falsoner before she went. The others had remained in their car while she rang the bell. Jerome Falsoner opened the street door and she went in. Ten minutes later she came out and rejoined her friends. Jerome Falsoner came to the door with her, waving a hand at one of the men in the car —a Frederick Stoner, who knew Falsoner ‘•slightly, and who was connected with the district attor-