Her photographs had been distributed and published widely. The newspapers, from San Diego to Vancouver, gave us a tremendous play, whooping it up in all the colored ink they had. All the San Francisco and Los Angeles Continental operatives who could be pulled off other jobs were checking Quesada’s exits, hunting, questioning, finding nothing. Radio broadcasters helped. The police everywhere, all the agency’s branches, were stirred up.
And by Monday all this hubbub had brought us exactly nothing.
Monday afternoon I went back to San Francisco and told all my troubles to the Old Man. He listened politely, as if to some moderately interesting story that didn’t concern him personally, smiled his meaningless smile, and, instead of any assistance, gave me his pleasantly expressed opinion that I’d eventually succeed in working it all out to a satisfactory conclusion.
Then he told me that Fitzstephan had phoned, trying to get in touch with me. “It may be important. He would have gone down to Quesada to find you if I hadn’t told him I expected you.”
I called Fitzstephan’s number.
“Come up,” he said. “I’ve got something. I don’t know whether it’s a fresh puzzle, or the key to a puzzle; but it’s something.”
I rode up Nob Hill on a cable car and was in his apartment within fifteen minutes.
“All right, spring it,” I said as we sat down in his paper-, magazine-, and book-littered living room.
“Any trace of Gabrielle yet?” he asked.
“No. But spring the puzzle. Don’t be literary with me, building up to climaxes and the like. I’m too crude for that–it’d only give me a bellyache. Just spread it out for me.”
“You’ll always be what you are,” he said, trying to seem disappointed and disgusted, but not succeeding because he was–inwardly–too excited over something. “Somebody–a man–called me up early Saturday morning–half-past one–on the phone. He asked: ‘Is this Fitzstephan?’ I said: ‘Yes;’ and then the voice said: ‘Well, I’ve killed him.’ He said it just like that. I’m sure of those exact words, though they weren’t very clear. There was a lot of noise on the line, and the voice seemed distant.
“I didn’t know who it was–what he was talking about. I asked: ‘Killed who? Who is this?’ I couldn’t understand any of his answer except the word ‘money.’ He said something about money, repeating it several times, but I could understand only that one word. There were some people here–the Marquards, Laura Joines with some man she’d brought, Ted and Sue Van Slack–and we had been in the middle of a literary free-for-all. I had a wisecrack on my tongue–something about Cabell being a romanticist in the same sense that the wooden horse was Trojan–and didn’t want to be robbed of my opportunity to deliver it by this drunken joker, or whoever he was, on the phone. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was saying, so I hung up and went back to my guests.
“It never occurred to me that the phone conversation could have had any meaning until yesterday morning, when I read about Collinson’s death. I was at the Colemans’, up in Ross. I went up there Saturday morning, for the week-end, having finally run Ralph to earth.” He grinned. “And I made him glad enough to see me leave this morning.” He became serious again. “Even after hearing of Collinson’s death, I wasn’t convinced that my phone call was of any importance, had any meaning. It was such a silly sort of thing. But of course I meant to tell you about it. But look–this was in my mail when I got home this morning.”
He took an envelope from his pocket and tossed it over to me. It was a cheap and shiny white envelope of the kind you can buy anywhere. Its corners were dark and curled, as if it had been carried in a pocket for some time. Fitzstephan’s name and address had been printed on it, with a hard pencil, by someone who was a rotten printer, or who wanted to be thought so. It was postmarked San Francisco, nine o’clock Saturday morning. Inside was a soiled and crookedly torn piece of brown wrapping paper, with one sentence–as poorly printed with pencil as the address– on it: