“That’s what I thought. But you almost overdid it.”
“Not at all. I knew I could depend on you. You wouldn’t let him out of the house with a nickel left on him.”
She smiled happily. “You’re a nice man, Teddy. And we have so much in common. We both like money. How much of his story did you believe?”
“Not a damned word of it.”
“Neither did I. He’s rather a horrid little beast — I wonder what he’s up to.”
“I don’t know, but I mean to find out.”
“You aren’t going to shadow him yourself, are you?”
“Why not? Why pay ten dollars a day to some ex-flattie to muff it?”
“Teddy, I don’t like the set-up. Why should he be willing to pay this much” — she gestured with the bills — “to lead you around by the nose?”
“That is what I’m going to find out.”
“You be careful. You remember ‘The Red-headed League.'”
“The ‘Red-headed-‘ Oh, Sherlock Holmes again. Be your age, Cyn.”
“I am. You be yours. That little man is evil.”
She left the room and cached the money. When she returned he was down on his knees by the chair in which Hoag had sat, busy with an insufflator. He looked around as she came in.
“Cyn — ”
“Yes, Brain.”
“You haven’t touched this chair?”
“Of course not. I polished the arms as usual before he showed up.”
“That’s not what I mean. I meant since he left. Did he ever take off his gloves?”
“Wait a minute. Yes, I’m sure he did. I looked at his nails when he told his yarn about them.”
“So did I, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t nuts. Take a look at that surface.”
She examined the polished chair arms, now covered with a thin film of gray dust. The surface was unbroken — no fingerprints. “He must never have touched them — But he did. I saw him. When he said, ‘I’m frightened,’ he gripped both arms. I remember noticing how blue his knuckles looked.”
“Collodion, maybe?”
“Don’t be silly. There isn’t even a smear. You shook hands with him. Did he have collodion on his hands?”
“I don’t think so. I think I would have noticed it. The Man with No Fingerprints. Let’s call him a ghost and forget it.”
“Ghosts don’t pay out hard cash to be watched.”
“No, they don’t. Not that I ever heard of.” He stood up and marched out into the breakfast nook, grabbed the phone and dialed long distance. “I want the Medical Exchange in Dubuque, uh — ” He cupped the phone and called to his wife. “Say, honey, what the hell state is Dubuque in?”
Forty-five minutes and several calls later he slammed the instrument back into its cradle. “That tears it,” he announced. “There is no St. George Rest Home in Dubuque. There never was and probably never will be. And no Dr. Rennault.”
III
“There he is!” Cynthia Craig Randall nudged her husband.
He continued to hold the Tribune in front of his face as if reading it. “I see him,” he said quietly. “Control yourself. Yuh’d think you had never tailed a man before. Easy does it.”
“Teddy, do be careful.”
“I will be.” He glanced over the top of the paper and watched Jonathan Hoag come down the steps of the swank Gotham Apartments in which he made his home. When he left the shelter of the canopy he turned to the left. The time was exactly seven minutes before nine in the morning.
Randall stood up, folded his paper with care, and laid it down on the bus-station bench on which he had been waiting. He then turned toward the drugstore behind him, dropped a penny in the slot of a gum-vending machine in the shop’s recessed doorway. In the mirror on the face of the machine he watched Hoag’s unhurried progress down the far side of the street. With equal lack of rush he started after him, without crossing the street.
Cynthia waited on the bench until Randall had had time enough to get a half block ahead of her, then got up and followed him.