“He’s not going to touch you, Watly. You’re going to be in the company of policemen at all times. The policemen will indicate the man in question and all you have to do is nod or shake your head. Now, there’s nothing hard about that, is there?”
Watly said no, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“One other thing. I want you to sit with me out on Center Street near the entrance of the cafeteria there during the noon hour. We’re going to watch everyone who goes in and out on the off chance our man might be one of them.”
“Yes, sir,” Watly said without enthusiasm.
The first call came in then. It was Supernumerary Pebble at Frank’s Tobacco Store. “The employee here could be it,” he said. “In his thirties, dark, slender, tall. I want Watly to see him.”
Fellows hung up. “Your first victim,” he told the man. “Lambert,” he called out to the driver in the front room. “Here’s Watly. It’s Pebble at Frank’s Tobacco. Center and South, northeast corner.”
He shooed Watly into the waiting arms of the patrolman and went to study the map of the town spread out on the table in his office. He marked the spot and made notes.
The man in Frank’s Tobacco Shop wasn’t the one, and Watly was returned to his office. Twice more he was picked up and driven the short distance to some new location for a look at another man and twice more he shook his head.
At ten minutes of twelve it was Fellows who picked him up. They drove over to the cafeteria and parked in front of a hydrant a few yards short of the entrance. “Don’t take your eyes off that door,” Fellows told him. “We’ll sit here till one o’clock when business slacks off and then I’ll take you in there to lunch.”
Watly nodded and watched and said nothing.
“How about that man?” Fellows asked, gesturing.
“No.”
“Not close?”
“No.”
“That one?”
Watly shook his head. “What if he doesn’t eat here?”
“Tomorrow we watch Manny’s. Wednesday we watch the Green Oak. Thursday we’ll sit outside Harper’s.”
“How long will it take?”
“To canvass this whole area? Most of the week.”
“What if you don’t find him?”
“We’ll find him. If he’s here he won’t get away. And he won’t touch you, so stop being nervous.”
They waited until after one without success and then they entered the cafeteria and ate lunch themselves, or at least Fellows ate. Watly had little appetite and toyed with a sandwich at the table the chief selected near the door. They watched each new customer, but by the time they left, when only a scattering of other diners still remained, the man they wanted had not come in.
Watly was called out four more times that afternoon, but the results were the same. The men he looked at were not John Campbell.
On Tuesday the systematic searching continued, and now the papers were picking up the case again. Rumors had spread that & hunt was on and the extraordinary procedures Chief Fellows had invoked were newsworthy. Six reporters showed up at headquarters that morning. Fellows, not an old hand at dealing with the press, nevertheless parried their questions well. Yes, they were canvassing the downtown area. No, he wouldn’t reveal why he thought the mysterious John Campbell was located there. Yes, Raymond Watly was assisting in the investigation. No, he wouldn’t predict what the results would be. There was a possibility, that was all.
Tuesday afternoon brought John Hilders back from Bridgeport, sneaking in and trying to mingle unobtrusively with the other reporters. He didn’t come close to getting away with it. The chief pointed at the man and said, “You! Out!”
Hilders tried to protest, and Fellows broke him off. “My men have orders to chase you out of this town. Starting now, you have thirty seconds to take off.”
Hilders started to plead, but the chief took out his watch. The pleading changed to cursing, but ended when Fellows, without looking up, raised a hand in preparation for a signal and Sergeant Unger came out from behind his desk to be ready. Hilders went to the door and said, “I’ll go anywhere I want and talk to anybody I want in this town and you can’t stop me.” He slammed the door behind him as Fellows’s arm came down.
The Hilders incident brought a laugh from the other newsmen, but it was the only laugh the day afforded. By the end of the afternoon five more identifications had fallen through, nothing had materialized in an hour of waiting outside Manny’s restaurant, and the most likely firms had all been investigated. Another job change was uncovered, but the man didn’t fit Campbell’s description.
When Wednesday also passed without results, an air of gloom settled on headquarters. The men who had started Monday with enthusiasm induced by the novelty of the action and the expectation of results were now going through the motions of a distasteful job that had to be done with as little agony as possible. Questions were asked politely, but a deadness had crept into the policemen’s tones. Watly was getting irritable at the frequent calls for his presence and his employer, Frank Restlin, was becoming irate. “How am I supposed to run a real estate office,” he complained to Fellows on the phone, “when my man can’t take prospective clients out to view the properties? How am I supposed to close deals when he keeps getting called away in the middle of them?”
Fellows said he didn’t know, but it wouldn’t last much longer. “After all, Mr. Restlin, we’re trying to help you. You want to find the man who froze your pipes, don’t you? You want the man who left a body in your house, don’t you? A murder in your house hurts your business, doesn’t it?”
“That
