O’Gar scratched his head and turned away from Gatewood.
“In sight of Twin Peaks! There are hundreds of houses that are!”
Gatewood meanwhile had finished denouncing the telephone company and was pounding on his desk with a paperweight to attract our attention.
“Have you people done anything at all?” he demanded.
I answered him with another question: “Have you got the money ready?”
“No,” he said, “I won’t be held up by anybody!”
But he said it mechanically, without his usual conviction—the talk with his daughter had shaken him out of some of his stubbornness. He was thinking of her safety a little now instead of altogether of his own fighting spirit.
We went at him hammer and tongs for a few minutes, and after a while he sent a clerk out for the money.
We split up the field then. Thode was to take some men from headquarters and see what he could find in the Twin Peaks end of town; but we weren’t very optimistic over the prospects there—the territory was too large.
Lusk and O’Gar were to carefully mark the bills that the clerk brought from the bank, and then stick as close to Gatewood as they could without attracting attention. I was to go out to Gatewood’s house and stay there.
The abductors had plainly instructed Gatewood to get the money ready immediately so that they could arrange to get it on short notice—not giving him time to communicate with anyone or make any plans.
Gatewood was to get hold of the newspapers, give them the whole story, with the $10,000 reward he was offering for the abductors’ capture, to be published as soon as the girl was safe—so that we would get the help of publicity at the earliest moment possible without jeopardizing the girl.
The police in all the neighboring towns had already been notified—that had been done before the girl’s phone message had assured us that she was held in San Francisco.
Nothing happened at the Gatewood residence all that evening. Harvey Gatewood came home early; and after dinner he paced his library floor and drank whiskey until bedtime, demanding every few minutes that we, the detectives in the case, do something besides sit around like a lot of damned mummies. O’Gar, Lusk and Thode were out in the street, keeping an eye on the house and neighborhood.
At midnight Harvey Gatewood went to bed. I declined a bed in favor of the library couch, which I dragged over beside the telephone, an extension of which was in Gatewood’s bedroom.
At two-thirty the bell rang. I listened in while Gatewood talked from his bed.
A man’s voice, crisp and curt: “Gatewood?”
“Yes.”
“Got the dough?”
“Yes.”
Gatewood’s voice was thick and blurred—I could imagine the boiling that was going on inside him.
“Good!” came the brisk voice. “Put a piece of paper around it, and leave the house with it, right away! Walk down Clay Street, keeping on the same side as your house. Don’t walk too fast and keep walking. If everything’s all right, and there’s no elbows tagging along, somebody’ll come up to you between your house and the waterfront. They’ll have a handkerchief up to their face for a second, and then they’ll let it fall to the ground.
“When you see that, you’ll lay the money on the pavement, turn around and walk back to your house. If the money isn’t marked, and you don’t try any fancy tricks, you’ll get your daughter back in an hour or two. If you try to pull anything—remember what we wrote you about the Chink! Got it straight?”
Gatewood sputtered something that was meant for an affirmative, and the telephone clicked silent.
I didn’t waste any of my precious time tracing the call—it would be from a public telephone, I knew—but yelled up the stairs to Gatewood:
“You do as you were told, and don’t try any foolishness!”
Then I ran out into the early morning air to find the police detectives and the post office inspector.
They had been joined by two plainclothes men, and had two automobiles waiting. I told them what the situation was, and we laid hurried plans.
O’Gar was to drive in one of the machines down Sacramento Street, and Thode, in the other, down Washington Street. These streets parallel Clay, one on each side. They were to drive slowly, keeping pace with Gatewood, and stopping at each cross street to see that he passed.
When he failed to cross within a reasonable time they were to turn up to Clay Street—and their actions from then on would have to be guided by chance and their own wits.
Lusk was to wander along a block or two ahead of Gatewood, on the opposite side of the street, pretending to be mildly intoxicated, and keeping his eyes and ears open.
I was to shadow Gatewood down the street, with one of the plainclothes men behind me. The other plainclothes man was to turn in a call at headquarters for every available man to be sent to Clay Street. They would arrive too late, of course, and as likely as not it would take them some time to find us; but we had no way of knowing what was going to turn up before the night was over.
Our plan was sketchy enough, but it was the best we could do—we were afraid to grab whoever got the money from Gatewood. The girl’s talk with her father that afternoon had sounded too much as if her captors were desperate for us to take any chances on going after them roughshod until she was out of their hands.
We had hardly finished our plans when Gatewood, wearing a heavy overcoat, left his house and turned down the street.
Farther down, Lusk, weaving along, talking to himself, was almost invisible in the shadows. There was no one else in sight. That meant that I had to give Gatewood at least two blocks’ lead, so that the man who came for the money wouldn’t tumble to me. One of the plainclothes
