taken in the first place. To tell you the truth, if she isn’t liberated soon, she won’t need our help. I’ve done my utmost to have her released on bail – pulled every wire I know – but there’s little likelihood of success in that direction.
“Knowing that she is a prisoner – charged with murdering her husband – is killing her. She isn’t young, and she has always been subject to nervous disorders. The bare shock of her husband’s death was enough to prostrate her – but now – You’ve got to get her out – and quickly!”
He was striding up and down his office, his voice throbbing with feeling. I left quickly.
Six
From the attorney’s office, I returned to the Agency, where I was told that Bob Teal had phoned in the address of a furnished apartment he had rented on Laguna Street. I hopped on a street car, and went up to take a look at it.
But I didn’t get that far.
Walking down Laguna Street, after leaving the car, I spied Bob Teal coming toward me. Between Bob and me – also coming toward me – was a big man whom I recognised as Jacob Ledwich: a big man with a big red face around a tiny mouth.
I walked on down the street, passing both Ledwich and Bob, without paying any apparent attention to either. At the next corner I stopped to roll a cigarette, and steal a look at the pair.
And then I came to life!
Ledwich had stopped at a vestibule cigar stand up the street to make a purchase. Bob Teal, knowing his stuff, had passed him and was walking steadily up the street.
He was figuring that Ledwich had either come out for the purpose of buying cigars or cigarettes, and would return to his flat with them; or that after making his purchase the big man would proceed to the car line, where, in either event, Bob would wait.
But as Ledwich had stopped before the cigar stand, a man across the street had stepped suddenly into a doorway, and stood there, back in the shadows. This man, I now remembered, had been on the opposite side of the street from Bob and Ledwich, and walking in the same direction.
He, too, was following Ledwich.
By the time Ledwich had finished his business at the stand, Bob had reached Sutter Street, the nearest car line. Ledwich started up the street in that direction. The man in the doorway stepped out and went after him. I followed that one.
A ferry-bound car came down Sutter Street just as I reached the corner. Ledwich and I got aboard together. The mysterious stranger fumbled with a shoe-string several pavements from the corner until the car was moving again, and then he likewise made a dash for it.
He stood beside me on the rear platform, hiding behind a large man in overalls, past whose shoulder he now and then peeped at Ledwich. Bob had gone to the corner above, and was already seated when Ledwich, this amateur detective – there was no doubting his amateur status – and I got on the car.
I sized up the amateur while he strained his neck peeping at Ledwich. He was small, this sleuth, and scrawny and frail. His most noticeable feature was his nose – a limp organ that twitched nervously all the time. His clothes were old and shabby, and he himself was somewhere in his fifties.
After studying him for a few minutes, I decided that he hadn’t tumbled to Bob Teal’s part in the game. His attention had been too firmly fixed upon Ledwich, and the distance had been too short thus far for him to discover that Bob was also tailing the big man.
So when the seat beside Bob was vacated presently, I chucked my cigarette away, went into the car, and sat down, my back toward the little man with the twitching nose.
“Drop off after a couple of blocks and go back to the apartment. Don’t shadow Ledwich any more until I tell you. Just watch his place. There’s a bird following him, and I want to see what he’s up to,” I told Bob in an undertone.
He grunted that he understood, and, after a few minutes, left the car.
At Stockton Street, Ledwich got off, the man with the twitching nose behind him and me in the rear. In that formation we paraded around town all afternoon.
The big man had business in a number of poolrooms, cigar stores, and soft-drink parlours – most of which I knew for places where you can get a bet down on any horse that’s running in North America, whether at Tanforan, Tijuana, or Timonium.
Just what Ledwich did in these places, I didn’t learn. I was bringing up the rear of the procession, and my interest was centered upon the mysterious little stranger. He didn’t enter any of the places behind Ledwich, but loitered in their neighbourhoods until Ledwich reappeared.
He had a rather strenuous time of it – labouring mightily to keep out of Ledwich’s sight, and only succeeding because we were downtown, where you can get away with almost any sort of shadowing. He certainly made a lot of work for himself, dodging here and there.
After a while, Ledwich shook him.
The big man came out of a cigar store with another man. They got into an automobile that was standing beside the curb and drove away, leaving my man standing on the edge of the sidewalk twitching his nose in chagrin. There was a taxi stand just around the corner, but he either didn’t know it or didn’t have enough money to pay the fare.
I expected him to return to Laguna Street then, but he didn’t. He led me down Kearny Street to Portsmouth, where he stretched himself out on the grass face – down, lit a black pipe, and lay looking dejectedly at the Stevenson Monument, probably without seeing it.
I sprawled on a comfortable piece of sod some distance away – between a Chinese woman with two perfectly round children and an ancient Portuguese in a gaily checkered suit – and we let the afternoon go by.
When the sun had gone low enough for the ground to become chilly, the little man got up, shook himself, and went back up Kearny Street to a cheap lunchroom, where he ate meagrely. Then he entered a hotel a few doors away, took a key from the row of hooks, and vanished down a dark corridor. Running through the register, I found that the key he had taken belonged to a room whose occupant was ‘John Boyd, St. Louis, Mo.,’ and that he had arrived the day before.
This hotel wasn’t of the sort where it is safe to make inquiries, so I went down to the street again, and came to rest on the least conspicuous near-by corner.
Twilight came, and the street – and shop-lights were turned on. It got dark. The night traffic of Kearny Street went up and down past me: Filipino boys in their too-dapper clothes, bound for the inevitable blackjack game; gaudy women still heavy-eyed from their day’s sleep; plain-clothes men on their way to headquarters, to report before going off duty; Chinese going to or from Chinatown; sailors in pairs, looking for action of any sort; hungry people making for the Italian and French restaurants; worried people going into the bail-bond broker’s office on the corner to arrange for the release of friends and relatives whom the police had nabbed; Italians on their homeward journeys from work; odds and ends of furtive-looking citizens on various shady errands.
Midnight came, and no John Boyd, and I called it a day, and went home.
Before going to bed, I talked with Dick Foley over the wire. He said that Mrs. Estep had done nothing of any importance all day, and had received neither mail nor phone calls. I told him to stop shadowing her until I solved John Boyd’s game.
I was afraid Boyd might turn his attention to the woman, and I didn’t want him to discover that she was being shadowed. I had already instructed Bob Teal to simply watch Ledwich’s flat – to see when he came in and went out, and with whom – and now I told Dick to do the same with the woman.
My guess on this Boyd person was that he and the woman were working together – that she had him watching Ledwich for her, so that the big man couldn’t double-cross her. But that was only a guess – and I don’t gamble too much on my guesses.
Seven
The next morning I dressed myself up in an army shirt and shoes, an old faded cap, and a suit that wasn’t downright ragged, but was shabby enough not to stand out too noticeably beside John Boyd’s old clothes.
It was a little after nine o’clock when Boyd left his hotel and had breakfast at the grease-joint where he had
