The lining of the boy’s pockets stuck out. The skull-cracker had turned them out. I went through his clothes, but with no better luck than I expected—the killer had taken everything. The room gave me nothing—a few clothes, but not a thing out of which information could be squeezed.
My prying done, I stood in the center of the floor scratching my chin and considering. In the hall a floorboard creaked. Three backward steps on my rubber heels put me in the musty closet, dragging the door all but half an inch shut behind me.
Knuckles rattled on the room door as I slid my gun off my hip. The knuckles rattled again and a feminine voice said, “Kid, oh, Kid!” Neither knuckles nor voice was loud. The lock clicked as the knob was turned. The door opened and framed the shifty-eyed girl who had been called Sylvia Yount by Angel Grace.
Her eyes lost their shiftiness for surprise when they settled on the boy.
“Holy hell!” she gasped, and was gone.
I was half out of the closet when I heard her tiptoeing back. In my hole again, I waited, my eye to the crack. She came in swiftly, closed the door silently, and went to lean over the dead boy. Her hands moved over him, exploring the pockets whose linings I had put back in place.
“Damn such luck!” she said aloud when the unprofitable frisking was over, and went out of the house.
I gave her time to reach the sidewalk. She was headed toward Kearny Street when I left the house. I shadowed her down Kearny to Broadway, up Broadway to Larrouy’s. Larrouy’s was busy, especially near the door, with customers going and coming. I was within five feet of the girl when she stopped a waiter and asked, in a whisper that was excited enough to carry, “Is Red here?”
The waiter shook his head.
“Ain’t been in tonight.”
The girl went out of the dive, hurrying along on clicking heels to a hotel in Stockton Street.
While I looked through the glass front, she went to the desk and spoke to the clerk. He shook his head. She spoke again and he gave her paper and envelope, on which she scribbled with the pen beside the register. Before I had to leave for a safer position from which to cover her exit, I saw which pigeonhole the note went into.
From the hotel the girl went by streetcar to Market and Powell Streets, and then walked up Powell to O’Farrell, where a fat-faced young man in gray overcoat and gray hat left the curb to link arms with her and lead her to a taxi stand up O’Farrell Street. I let them go, making a note of the taxi number—the fat-faced man looked more like a customer than a pal.
It was a little shy of two in the morning when I turned back into Market Street and went up to the office. Fiske, who holds down the agency at night, said Jack Counihan had not reported, nothing else had come in. I told him to rouse me an operative, and in ten or fifteen minutes he succeeded in getting Mickey Linehan out of bed and on the wire.
“Listen, Mickey,” I said, “I’ve got the nicest corner picked out for you to stand on the rest of the night. So pin on your diapers and toddle down there, will you?”
In between his grumbling and cursing I gave him the name and number of the Stockton Street hotel, described Red O’Leary, and told him which pigeonhole the note had been put in.
“It mightn’t be Red’s home, but the chance is worth covering,” I wound up. “If you pick him up, try not to lose him before I can get somebody down there to take him off your hands.”
I hung up during the outburst of profanity this insult brought.
The Hall of Justice was busy when I reached it, though nobody had tried to shake the upstairs prison loose yet. Fresh lots of suspicious characters were being brought in every few minutes. Policemen in and out of uniform were everywhere. The detective bureau was a beehive.
Trading information with the police detectives, I told them about the Armenian boy. We were making up a party to visit the remains when the captain’s door opened and Lieutenant Duff came into the assembly room.
“Allez! Oop!” he said, pointing a thick finger at O’Gar, Tully, Reeder, Hunt and me. “There’s a thing worth looking at in Fillmore.”
We followed him out to an automobile.
VI
A gray frame house in Fillmore Street was our destination. A lot of people stood in the street looking at the house. A police-wagon stood in front of it, and police uniforms were indoors and out.
A red-mustached corporal saluted Duff and led us into the house, explaining as we went, “ ’Twas the neighbors give us the rumble, complaining of the fighting, and when we got here, faith, there weren’t no fight left in nobody.”
All the house held was fourteen dead men.
Eleven of them had been poisoned—overdoses of knockout drops in their booze, the doctors said. The other three had been shot, at intervals along the hall. From the looks of the remains, they had drunk a toast—a loaded one—and those who hadn’t drunk, whether because of temperance or suspicious natures, had been gunned as they tried to get away.
The identity of the bodies gave us an idea of what their toast had been. They were all thieves—they had drunk their poison to the day’s looting.
We didn’t know all the dead men then, but all of us knew some of them, and the records told us who the others were later. The completed list read like Who’s Who in Crookdom.
There was the Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had crushed out
