The old lawyer’s eyes came out another inch.
“What road?” he gasped.
“You want the exact location?”
“Yeth!”
I pulled his phone over, called the agency, had Dick’s report read to me, gave the attorney the information he wanted.
It had an effect on him. He hopped out of his chair. Sweat was shiny along the ridges wrinkles made in his face.
“Mith Newhall ith down there alone! That plath ith only half a mile from her houth!”
I frowned and beat my brains together, but I couldn’t make anything out of it.
“Suppose I put a man down there to look after her?” I suggested.
“Exthellent!” His worried face cleared until there weren’t more than fifty or sixty wrinkles in it. “The would prefer to thtay there during her firth grief over her fatherth death. You will thend a capable man?”
“The Rock of Gibraltar is a leaf in the breeze beside him. Give me a note for him to take down. Andrew MacElroy is his name.”
While the lawyer scribbled the note I used his phone again to call the agency, to tell the operator to get hold of Andy and tell him I wanted him. I ate lunch before I returned to the agency. Andy was waiting when I got there.
Andy MacElroy was a big boulder of a man—not very tall, but thick and hard of head and body. A glum, grim man with no more imagination than an adding machine. I’m not even sure he could read. But I was sure that when Andy was told to do something, he did it and nothing else. He didn’t know enough not to.
I gave him the lawyer’s note to Miss Newhall, told him where to go and what to do, and Miss Newhall’s troubles were off my mind.
Three times that afternoon I heard from Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan. Tom-Tom Carey wasn’t doing anything very exciting, though he had bought two boxes of .44 cartridges in a Market Street sporting goods establishment.
The afternoon papers carried photographs of Big Flora Brace and Angel Grace Cardigan, with a story of their escape. The story was as far from the probable facts as newspaper stories generally are. On another page was an account of the discovery of the dead barber in the lonely road. He had been shot in the head and in the chest, four times in all. The county officials’ opinion was that he had been killed resisting a stickup, and that the bandits had fled without robbing him.
At five o’clock Tommy Howd came to my door.
“That guy Carey wants to see you again,” the freckle-faced boy said.
“Shoot him in.”
The swarthy man sauntered in, said “Howdy,” sat down, and made a brown cigarette.
“Got anything special on for tonight?” he asked when he was smoking.
“Nothing I can’t put aside for something better. Giving a party?”
“Uh-huh. I had thought of it. A kind of surprise party for Papadoodle. Want to go along?”
It was my turn to say, “Uh-huh.”
“I’ll pick you up at eleven—Van Ness and Geary,” he drawled. “But this has got to be a kind of tight party—just you and me—and him.”
“No. There’s one more who’ll have to be in on it. I’ll bring him along.”
“I don’t like that.” Tom-Tom Carey shook his head slowly, frowning amiably over his cigarette. “You sleuths oughtn’t outnumber me. It ought to be one and one.”
“You won’t be outnumbered,” I explained. “This jobbie I’m bringing won’t be on my side more than yours. And it’ll pay you to keep as sharp an eye on him as I do—and to see he don’t get behind either of us if we can help it.”
“Then what do you want to lug him along for?”
“Wheels within wheels,” I grinned.
The swarthy man frowned again, less amiably now.
“The hundred and six thousand reward money—I’m not figuring on sharing that with anybody.”
“Right enough,” I agreed. “Nobody I bring along will declare themselves in on it.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He stood up. “And we’ve got to watch this hombre, huh?”
“If we want everything to go all right.”
“Suppose he gets in the way—cuts up on us. Can we put it to him, or do we just say, ‘Naughty! Naughty!’?”
“He’ll have to take his own chances.”
“Fair enough.” His hard face was good-natured again as he moved toward the door. “Eleven o’clock at Van Ness and Geary.”
VIII
I went back into the operatives’ room, where Jack Counihan was slumped down in a chair reading a magazine.
“I hope you’ve thought up something for me to do,” he greeted me. “I’m getting bedsores from sitting around.”
“Patience, son, patience—that’s what you’ve got to learn if you’re ever going to be a detective. Why when I was a child of your age, just starting in with the agency, I was lucky—”
“Don’t start that,” he begged. Then his good-looking young face got earnest. “I don’t see why you keep me cooped up here. I’m the only one besides you who really got a good look at Nancy Regan. I should think you would have me out hunting for her.”
“I told the Old Man the same thing,” I sympathized. “But he is afraid to risk something happening to you. He says in all his fifty years of gumshoeing he’s never seen such a handsome op, besides being a fashion plate and a social butterfly and the heir to millions. His idea is we ought to keep you as a sort of show piece, and not let you—”
“Go to hell!” Jack said, all red in the face.
“But I persuaded him to let me take the cotton packing off you tonight,” I continued. “So meet me at Van Ness and Geary before eleven o’clock.”
“Action?” He was all eagerness.
“Maybe.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Bring your little popgun along.” An idea came into my head and I worded it. “You’d better be all dressed up—evening duds.”
“Dinner coat?”
“No—the limit—everything but the high hat. Now for your behavior: you’re not supposed to be an op. I’m not sure just what you’re supposed to be, but it doesn’t make any difference. Tom-Tom Carey will
