“No. You’re law. I’m thief. I’m staying on my side of the fence. Nobody can say—”
“All right! All right!” I surrendered. “But for God’s sake don’t make me listen to another of those ethical arguments. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Thanks, no.”
“There’s nothing you want to tell me?”
She shook her head.
“You’re all right now?”
“Yes. I was being shadowed, wasn’t I? Or you wouldn’t have known about it so soon.”
“I’m a detective—I know everything. Be a good girl.”
From the hospital I went up to the Hall of Justice, to the police detective bureau. Lieutenant Duff was holding down the captain’s desk. I told him about the Angel’s dive.
“Got any idea what she was up to?” he wanted to know when I had finished.
“She’s too far off center to figure. I want her vagged.”
“Yeah? I thought you wanted her loose so you could catch her.”
“That’s about played out now. I’d like to try throwing her in the can for thirty days. Big Flora is in waiting trial. The Angel knows Flora was one of the troupe that rubbed out her Paddy. Maybe Flora don’t know the Angel. Let’s see what will come of mixing the two babies for a month.”
“Can do,” Duff agreed. “This Angel’s got no visible means of support, and it’s a cinch she’s got no business running around jumping in people’s bays. I’ll put the word through.”
From the Hall of Justice I went up to the Ellis Street hotel at which Tom-Tom Carey had told me he was registered. He was out. I left word that I would be back in an hour, and used that hour to eat. When I returned to the hotel the tall swarthy man was sitting in the lobby. He took me up to his room and set out gin, orange juice and cigars.
“Seen Angel Grace?” I asked.
“Yes, last night. We did the dumps.”
“Seen her today?”
“No.”
“She jumped in the bay this afternoon.”
“The hell she did.” He seemed moderately surprised. “And then?”
“She was fished out. She’s OK.”
The shadow in his eyes could have been some slight disappointment.
“She’s a funny sort of kid,” he remarked. “I wouldn’t say Paddy didn’t show good taste when he picked her, but she’s a queer one!”
“How’s the Papadopoulos hunt progressing?”
“It is. But you oughtn’t have split on your word. You halfway promised you wouldn’t have me shadowed.”
“I’m not the big boss,” I apologized. “Sometimes what I want don’t fit in with what the headman wants. This shouldn’t bother you much—you can shake him, can’t you?”
“Uh-huh. That’s what I’ve been doing. But it’s a damned nuisance jumping in and out of taxis and back doors.”
We talked and drank a few minutes longer, and then I left Carey’s room and hotel, and went to a drugstore telephone booth, where I called Dick Foley’s home, and gave Dick the swarthy man’s description and address.
“I don’t want you to tail Carey, Dick. I want you to find out who is trying to tail him—and that shadower is the bird you’re to stick to. The morning will be time enough to start—get yourself dried out.”
And that was the end of that day.
VI
I woke to a disagreeable rainy morning. Maybe it was the weather, maybe I’d been too frisky the day before, anyway the slit in my back was like a foot-long boil. I phoned Dr. Canova, who lived on the floor below me, and had him look at the cut before he left for his downtown office. He rebandaged it and told me to take life easy for a couple of days. It felt better after he had fooled with it, but I phoned the agency and told the Old Man that unless something exciting broke I was going to stay on sick-call all day.
I spent the day propped up in front of the gas-log, reading, and smoking cigarettes that wouldn’t burn right on account of the weather. That night I used the phone to organize a poker game, in which I got very little action one way or the other. In the end I was fifteen dollars ahead, which was just about five dollars less than enough to pay for the booze my guests had drunk on me.
My back was better the following day, and so was the day. I went down to the agency. There was a memorandum on my desk saying Duff had phoned that Angel Grace Cardigan had been vagged—thirty days in the city prison. There was a familiar pile of reports from various branches on their operatives’ inability to pick up anything on Papadopoulos and Nancy Regan. I was running through these when Dick Foley came in.
“Made him,” he reported. “Thirty or thirty-two. Five, six. Hundred, thirty. Sandy hair, complexion. Blue eye. Thin face, some skin off. Rat. Lives dump in Seventh Street.”
“What did he do?”
“Tailed Carey one block. Carey shook him. Hunted for Carey till two in morning. Didn’t find him. Went home. Take him again?”
“Go up to his flophouse and find out who he is.”
The little Canadian was gone half an hour.
“Sam Arlie,” he said when he returned. “Been there six months. Supposed to be barber—when he’s working—if ever.”
“I’ve got two guesses about this Arlie,” I told Dick. “The first is that he’s the gink who carved me in Sausalito the other night. The second is that something’s going to happen to him.”
It was against Dick’s rules to waste words, so he said nothing.
I called Tom-Tom Carey’s hotel and got the swarthy man on the wire.
“Come over,” I invited him. “I’ve got some news for you.”
“As soon as I’m dressed and breakfasted,” he promised.
“When Carey leaves here you’re to go along behind him,” I told Dick after I had hung up. “If Arlie connects with him now, maybe there’ll be something doing. Try to see it.”
Then I phoned the detective bureau and made a date with Sergeant Hunt to visit Angel Grace Cardigan’s apartment. After that I busied myself with paper work until Tommy came in to announce the
