We went to the desk, the switchboard, the captain of bellhops, and upstairs to question a couple of chambermaids. The occupant of 761 had arrived two weeks ago, had registered as “Edouard Maurois, Dijon, France,” had frequent telephone calls, no mail, no visitors, kept irregular hours and tipped freely. Whatever business he was in or had was not known to the hotel people.
“What is the occasion of your interest in him, if I may ask?” Duran inquired after we had accumulated these facts. He talks like that.
“I don’t exactly know yet,” I replied truthfully. “He just connected with a bird who is wrong, but this Maurois may be all right himself. I’ll give you a rap the minute I get anything solid on him.”
I couldn’t afford to tell Duran I had seen his guest snapping caps at a gunman under the eves of the City Hall in daylight. The Marquis Hotel goes in for respectability. They would have shoved the Frenchman out in the streets. It wouldn’t help me to have him scared up.
“Please do,” Duran said. “You owe us something for our help, you know, so please don’t withhold any information that might save us unpleasant notoriety.”
“I won’t,” I promised. “Now will you do me another favor? I haven’t had my teeth in anything except my mouth since seven-thirty this morning. Will you keep an eye on the elevators, and let me know if Maurois goes out? I’ll be in the grill, near the door.”
“Certainly.”
On my way to the grillroom I stopped at the telephone booths and called up the office. I gave the night office man the Cadillac’s license number.
“Look it up on the list and see whom it belongs to.”
The answer was: “H. J. Paterson, San Pablo, issued for a Buick roadster.”
That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.
All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.
The Whosis Kid lived in a joint from which some of the McAllister Street apartments could be watched. He visited the apartment building furtively. Leaving, he was shot at, from a car that must have been waiting somewhere in the vicinity. Had the Frenchman’s companion in the Cadillac—or his companions, if more than one—been the occupant of the apartment the Kid had visited? Had they expected him to visit it? Had they tricked him into visiting it, planning to shoot him down as he was leaving? Or were they watching the front while the Kid watched the rear? If so, had either known that the other was watching? And who lived there?
I couldn’t answer any of these riddles. All I knew was that the Frenchman and his companions didn’t seem to like the Whosis Kid.
Even the sort of meal I put away doesn’t take forever to eat. When I finished it, I went out to the lobby again.
Passing the switchboard, one of the girls—the one whose red hair looks as if it had been poured into its waves and hardened—gave me a nod.
I stopped to see what she wanted.
“Your friend just had a call,” she told me.
“You get it?”
“Yes. A man is waiting for him at Kearny and Broadway. Told him to hurry.”
“How long ago?”
“None. They’re just through talking.”
“Any names?”
“No.”
“Thanks.”
I went on to where Duran was stalling with an eye on the elevators.
“Shown yet?” I asked.
“No.”
“Good. The redhead on the switchboard just told me he had a phone call to meet a man at Kearny and Broadway. I think I’ll beat him to it.”
Around the corner from the hotel, I climbed into my coupe and drove down to the Frenchman’s corner.
The Cadillac he had used that afternoon was already there, with a new license plate. I passed it and took a look at its one occupant—a thickset man of forty-something with a cap pulled low over his eyes. All I could see of his features was a wide mouth slanting over a heavy chin.
I put the coupe in a vacant space down the street a way. I didn’t have to wait long for the Frenchman. He came around the corner afoot and got into the Cadillac. The man with the big chin drove. They went slowly up Broadway. I followed.
IV
We didn’t go far, and when we came to rest again, the Cadillac was placed conveniently for its occupants to watch the Venetian Café, one of the gaudiest of the Italian restaurants that fill this part of town.
Two hours went by.
I had an idea that the Whosis Kid was eating at the Venetian. When he left, the fireworks would break out, continuing the celebration from where it had broken off that afternoon on McAllister Street. I hoped the Kid’s gun wouldn’t get caught in his coat this time. But don’t think I meant to give him a helping hand in his two-against-one fight.
This party had the shape of a war between gunmen. It would be a private one as far as I was concerned. My hope was that by hovering on the fringes until somebody won, I could pick up a little profit for the Continental, in the form of a wanted crook or two among the survivors.
My guess at the Frenchman’s quarry was wrong. It wasn’t the Whosis Kid. It was a man and a woman. I didn’t see their faces. The light was behind them. They didn’t waste any time between the Venetian’s door and their taxicab.
The man was big—tall, wide, and thick. The woman looked small at his side. I couldn’t go by that. Anything weighing less than a ton
