'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.
'Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up,' the switchboard boy said.
His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.
'By God,' he said, holding out a lean hand, 'it _is_ you!'
'None other.'
He hadn't changed any. We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere--all just as it used to be in his New York rooms.
We sat down, found places for our feet between table-legs, and accounted roughly for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco for a little more than a year--except, he said, for week- ends, and two months hermiting in the country, finishing a novel. I had been there nearly five years. He liked San Francisco, he said, but wouldn't oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.
'How's the literary grift go?' I asked.
He looked at me sharply, demanding: 'You haven't been reading me?'
'No. Where'd you get that funny idea?'
'There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven't met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?' He had always liked to talk that way.
'Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk.'
'On sherry--Elsa Donne's sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished, and you said it was pretty. Sweet God, wasn't she furious! You said it so vapidly and sincerely and as if you were so sure that she would like your saying it. Remember? She put us out, but we'd both already got plastered on her sherry. But you weren't tight enough to take the books.'
'I was afraid I'd read them and understand them,' I explained, 'and then you'd have felt insulted,'
