Guild seemed about to smile. “What’d you say to that?”
Fremont drew his thin lips back tight against his teeth. “Do I look like I’d tell him anything except to go to hell?” he demanded.
The dark man nodded. “All right. What do you know about him?”
“Nothing.”
Guild frowned. “You must know something. She’d’ve talked about him.”
Anger went out of Fremont’s lean face, leaving it gloomy. “I didn’t like her to,” he said, “so she didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Jesus!” Fremont exclaimed. “She was living up there. I was nuts about her. I knew he was. What the hell?” He bit his lip. “Do you think that was something I liked to talk about?”
Guild stared thoughtfully at the other man for a moment and then addressed the girl: “What’d she tell you?”
“Not anything. She didn’t like to talk about him any more than Charley liked to have her.”
Guild drew his brows together. “What’d she stay with him for, then?”
Fremont said painfully: “She was going to leave. That’s why he killed her.”
The dark man put his hands in his pockets and walked down the room to the front windows and back, squinting a little in the smoke rising from his cigarette. “You don’t know where he’s likely to go? Who he’s likely to connect with? How we’re likely to find him?”
Fremont shook his head. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?” he asked bitterly.
Guild did not reply to that. He asked: “Where are her people?”
“I don’t know. I think she’s got a father still alive in Texas somewhere. I know she’s an only child and her mother’s dead.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Four – nearly five months.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“In a speakeasy on Powell Street, a couple of blocks beyond the Fairmont. She was in a party with some people I know – Helen Robier – I think she lives at the Cathedral – and a fellow named MacWilliams.”
Guild walked to the windows again and back. “I don’t like this,” he said aloud, but apparently not to the Fremonts. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s – Look here.” He halted in front of them and took some photographs from his pocket. “Are these good pictures – of her?” He spread three out fanwise. “I’ve only seen her dead.”
The Fremonts looked and nodded together. “The middle one especially,” the girl said. “You have one of those, Charley.”
Guild put the dead girl’s photographs away and displayed two of a bearded man. “Are they good of him?”
The girl said, “I’ve never seen him,” but her brother nodded and said: “They look like him.”
Guild seemed dissatisfied with the answers he had been given. He put the photographs in his pocket again. “Then it’s not that,” he said, “but there’s something funny somewhere.” He scowled at the floor, looked up quickly. “You people aren’t putting up some kind of game on me, are you?”
Charles Fremont said: “Don’t be a sap.”
“All right, but there’s something wrong somewhere.”
The girl spoke: “What? Maybe if you’d tell us what you think is wrong -“
Guild shook his head. “If I knew what was wrong I could find out for myself what made it wrong. Never mind, I’ll get it. I want the names and addresses of all the friends she had, the people she knew that you know of.”
“I’ve told you Helen Robier lives – I’m pretty sure – at the Cathedral,” Fremont said. “MacWilliams works in the Russ Building, for a stockbroker, I think. That’s all I know about him and I don’t believe Columbia knows” – he swallowed – “knew him very well. They’re the only ones I know.”
“I don’t believe they’re all you know,” Guild said.
“Please, Mr. Guild,” the girl said, coming around to his side, “don’t be unfair to Charley. He’s trying to help you – we’re both trying-but -“ She stamped her foot and cried angrily, tearfully: “Can’t you have some consideration for him now?”
Guild said: “Oh, all right.” He reached for his hat. “I drove your car down,” he told Fremont. “It’s out front now.”
“Thank you, Guild.”
Something struck one of the front windows, knocking a triangle of glass from its lower left-hand corner in on the floor. Charles Fremont, facing the window, yelled inarticulately and threw himself down on the floor. A pistol was fired through the gap in the pane. The bullet went over Fremont’s head and made a small hole in the green plastered wall there.
Guild was moving toward the street door by the time the bullet-hole appeared in the wall. A black pistol came into his right hand. Outside, that block of Guerrero Street was deserted. Guild went swiftly, though with many backward glances, to the nearest corner. From there he began to retrace his steps slowly, stopping to peer into shadowy doorways and the dark basement entrances under the high front steps.
Charles Fremont came out to join him. Windows were being raised along the street and people were looking out.
“Get inside,” Guild said curtly to Fremont. “You’re the one he’s gunning for. Get inside and phone the police.”
“Elsa’s doing that now. He’s shaved his whiskers off, Guild.”
“That’d be the first thing he did. Go back in the house.”
Fremont said, “No,” and went with Guild as he searched the block. They were still at it when the police arrived. They did not find Wynant. Around a corner two blocks from the Fremonts’ house they found a year-old Buick coupe bearing the license numbers Boyer had given Guild-Wynant’s car.
Four
After dinner, which Guild ate alone at Solari’s in Maiden Lane, he went to an apartment in Hyde Street. He was admitted by a young woman whose pale, tired face lighted up as she said: “Hello, John. We’ve been wondering what had become of you.”
“Been away. Is Chris home?”
“I’d let you in anyhow,” she said as she pushed the door farther open.
They went back to a square, bookish room where a thick-set man with rumpled sandy hair was half buried in an immense shabby chair. He put his book down, reached for the tall glass of beer at his elbow, and said jovially: “Enter the sleuth. Get some more beer, Kay. I’ve been wanting to see you, John. What do you say you do some detective-story reviews for my page – you know – ‘The Detective Looks at Detective Fiction’?”
“You asked me that before,” Guild said. “Nuts.”
“It’s a good idea, though,” the thick-set man said cheerfully. “And I’ve got another one. I was going to save it till I got around to writing a detective story, but you might be able to use it in your work sometime, so I’ll give it to you free.”
Guild took the glass of beer Kay held out to him, said, “Thanks,” to her and then to the man: “Do I have to listen to it?”
“Yes. You see, this fellow’s suspected of a murder that requires quite a bit of courage. All the evidence points right at him – that kind of thing. But he’s a great lover of Sam Johnson – got his books all over the place – so you know he didn’t do it, because only timid men – the kind that say, ‘Yes, sir,’ to their wives and, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ to the policemen – love Johnson. You see, he’s only loved for his boorishness and the boldness of his rudeness and bad manners and that’s the kind of thing that appeals to -“
“So I look for a fellow named Sam Johnson and he’s guilty?” the dark man said.
Kay said: “Chris has one of his nights.”
Chris said: “Sneer at me and be damned to you, but there’s a piece of psychology that might come in handy some day. Remember it. It’s a law. Love of Doctor Johnson is the mark of the pathologically meek.”
Guild made a face. “God knows I’m earning me beer,” he said and drank. “If you’ve got to talk, talk about Walter Irving Wynant. That’ll do me some good maybe.”
“Why?” Chris asked. “How?”
