“Up in three ten,” he said.
I rode up in a rickety elevator. When I got out on the third floor, I came face to face with Mrs. Leggett and her daughter, leaving.
“Now I hope you’re satisfied that Minnie had nothing to do with it,” Mrs. Leggett said chidingly.
“The police found your man?”
“Yes.”
I said to Gabrielle Leggett: “Eric Collinson says it was only midnight, or a few minutes later, that you got home Saturday night.”
“Eric,” she said irritably, passing me to enter the elevator, “is an ass.”
Her mother, following her into the elevator, reprimanded her amiably: “Now, dear.”
I walked down the hall to a doorway where Pat Reddy stood talking to a couple of reporters, said hello, squeezed past them into a short passage-way, and went through that to a shabbily furnished room where a dead man lay on a wall bed.
Phels, of the police identification bureau, looked up from his magnifying glass to nod at me and then went on with his examination of a mission table’s edge.
O’Gar pulled his head and shoulders in the open window and growled: “So we got to put up with you again?”
O’Gar was a burly, stolid man of fifty, who wore wide-brimmed black hats of the movie-sheriff sort. There was a lot of sense in his hard bullet-head, and he was comfortable to work with.
I looked at the corpse–a man of forty or so, with a heavy, pale face, short hair touched with gray, a scrubby, dark mustache, and stocky arms and legs. There was a bullet hole just over his navel, and another high on the left side of his chest.
“It’s a man,” O’Gar said as I put the blankets over him again. “He’s dead.”
“What else did somebody tell you?” I asked.
“Looks like him and another guy glaumed the ice, and then the other guy decided to take a one-way split. The envelopes are here”–O’Gar took them out of his pocket and ruffled them with a thumb–“but the diamonds ain’t. They went down the fire-escape with the other guy a little while back. People spotted him making the sneak, but lost him when he cut through the alley. Tall guy with a long nose. This one”–he pointed the envelopes at the bed–“has been here a week. Name of Louis Upton, with New York labels. We don’t know him. Nobody in the dump’ll say they ever saw him with anybody else. Nobody’ll say they know Long-nose.”
Pat Reddy came in. He was a big, jovial youngster, with almost brains enough to make up for his lack of experience. I told him and O’Gar what I had turned up on the job so far.
“Long-nose and this bird taking turns watching Leggett’s?” Reddy suggested.
“Maybe,” I said, “but there’s an inside angle. How many envelopes have you got there, O’Gar?”
“Seven.”
“Then the one for the planted diamond is missing.”
“How about the yellow girl?” Reddy asked.
“I’m going out for a look at her man tonight,” I said. “You people trying New York on this Upton?”
“Uh-huh,” O’Gar said.
III. Something Black
At the Nob Hill address Halstead had given me, I told my name to the boy at the switchboard and asked him to pass it on to Fitzstephan. I remembered Fitzstephan as a long, lean, sorrel-haired man of thirty-two, with sleepy gray eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes; a man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary.
I had met him five years before, in New York, where I was digging dirt on a chain of fake mediums who had taken a coal-and-ice dealer’s widow for a hundred thousand dollars. Fitzstephan was plowing the same field for literary material. We became acquainted and pooled forces. I got more out of the combination than he did, since he knew the spook racket inside and out; and, with his help, I cleaned up my job in a couple of weeks. We were fairly chummy for a month or two after that, until I left New York.