his opinion that one of the roomers had left recently and in some haste. The mutilation of the register, however, the character of the neighborhood, the lack of an accurate description of the missing man, made the job of tracing him extremely difficult.
“I have no idea at present why Clausen was murdered,” Maglashan announced at a late hour last night. “But I have had my eye on this man for some time. Many of his associates are known to me. It’s a tough case, but we’ll crack it.”
It was a nice piece and only mentioned Maglashan’s name twelve times in the text and twice more in picture captions. There was a photo of him on page three holding an ice pick and looking at it with profound thought wrinkling his brows. There was a photo of 449 Idaho Street which did it more than justice, and a photo of something with a sheet over it on a couch and Lieutenant Maglashan pointing at it sternly. There was also a close- up of the mayor looking as executive as hell behind his official desk and an interview with him on the subject of post-war crime. He said just what you would expect a mayor to say—a watered-down shot of J. Edgar Hoover with some extra bad grammar thrown in.
At three minutes to nine the door of the Bay City Camera Shop opened and an elderly Negro began to sweep dirt across the sidewalk into the gutter. At nine A.M. a neat-appearing young guy in glasses fixed the lock on the door and I went in there with the black-and-orange check Dr. G. W. Hambleton had pasted to the inside of his toupee.
The neat-appearing young man gave me a searching glance as I exchanged the check and some money for an envelope containing a tiny negative and half a dozen shiny prints blown up to eight times the size of the negative. He didn’t say anything, but the way he looked at me gave me the impression that he remembered I was not the man who had left the negative.
I went out and sat in my car and looked over the catch. The prints showed a man and a blond girl sitting in a rounded booth in a restaurant with food in front of them. They were looking up as though their attention had suddenly been attracted and they had only just had time to react before the camera had clicked. It was clear from the lighting that no flashbulb had been used.
The girl was Mavis Weld. The man was rather small, rather dark, rather expressionless. I didn’t recognize him. There was no reason why I should. The padded leather seat was covered with tiny figures of dancing couples. That made the restaurant THE DANCERS. This added to the confusion. Any amateur camera hound that tried to flash a lens in there without getting an okay from the management would have been thrown out so hard that he would have bounced all the way down to Hollywood and Vine. I figured it must have been the hidden-camera trick, the way they took Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. He would have the little camera up hanging by a strap under his coat collar, the lens just peeping out from his open jacket, and he would have rigged a bulb release that he could hold in his pocket. It wasn’t too hard for me to guess who had taken the picture. Mr. Orrin P. Quest must have moved fast and smooth to get out of there with his face still in front of his head.
I put the pictures in my vest pocket and my fingers touched a crumpled piece of paper. I got it out and read: “Doctor Vincent Lagardie, 965 Wyoming Street, Bay City.” That was the Vince I had talked to on the phone, the one Lester B. Clausen might have been trying to call.
An elderly flatfoot was strolling down the line of parked cars, marking tires with yellow chalk. He told me where Wyoming Street was. I drove out there. It was a cross-town street well out beyond the business district, parallel with two numbered streets. Number 965, a gray-white frame house, was on a corner. On its door a brass plate said
The house looked quiet and decent. A woman with an unwilling small boy was going up the steps. She read the plate, looked at a watch pinned to her lapel and chewed irresolutely on her lip. The small boy looked around carefully, then kicked her on the ankle. She winced but her voice was patient. “Now, Johnny, you mustn’t do that to Aunty Fern,” she said mildly.
She opened the door and dragged the little ape in with her. Diagonally across the intersection was a big white colonial mansion with a portico which was roofed and much too small for the house. Floodlight reflectors were set into the front lawn. The walk was bordered by tree roses in bloom. A large black and silver sign over the portico said:
I turned around at the intersection and drove back to Los Angeles, and went up to the office to look at my mail and lock my catch from the Bay City Camera Shop up in the battered green safe—all but one print. I sat down at the desk and studied this through a magnifying glass. Even with that and the camera shop blow-up the detail was still clear. There was an evening paper, a News-Chronicle, lying on the table in front of the dark thin expressionless man who sat beside Mavis Weld. I could just read the headline. LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDER SUCCUMBS TO RING INJURIES. Only a noon or late sports edition would use a headline like that. I pulled the phone towards me. It rang just as I got my hand on it.
“Marlowe? This is Christy French downtown. Any ideas this morning?”
“Not if your teletype’s working. I’ve seen a Bay City paper.”
“Yeah, we got that,” he said casually. “Sounds like the same guy, don’t it? Same initials, same description, same method of murder, and the time element seems to check. I hope to Christ this doesn’t mean Sunny Moe Stein’s mob have started in business again.”
“If they have, they’ve changed their technique,” I said. “I was reading up on it last night. The Stein mob used to jab their victims full of holes. One of them had over a hundred stab wounds in him.”
“They could learn better,” French said a little evasively, as if he didn’t want to talk about it. “What I called you about was Flack. Seen anything of him since yesterday afternoon?”
“No.”
“He skipped out. Didn’t come to work. Hotel called his landlady. Packed up and left last night. Destination unknown.”
“I haven’t seen him or heard from him,” I said.
“Didn’t it strike you as kind of funny our stiff only had fourteen bucks in his kick?”
“It did a little. You answered that yourself.”
“I was just talking. I don’t buy that any more. Flack’s either scared out or come into money. Either he saw something he didn’t tell and got paid to breeze, or else he lifted the customer’s case dough, leaving the fourteen bucks to make it look better.”
I said: “I’ll buy either one. Or both at the same time. Whoever searched that room so thoroughly wasn’t looking
