“Three o’clock,” he said. “Got a game of golf for three-thirty.” He picked up his hat and gloves from the desk. “Find ’em, will you? Damned nuisance going to jail!”
And he waddled out.
II
From the attorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhouse had been knocked down.
“I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman—a big sandy-haired man named Coffee—told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ’em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. They was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”
“In what direction was Newhouse walking?”
“North along Kearny Street, and he was about three-quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car—according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money—paper money—in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money—a hundred florin note, he says.”
“Found out anything about the men in the car?”
“Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighborhood of California and Kearny Streets—where the car was stolen from—and around Clay and Montgomery Streets—where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it—it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe they was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two- or three-day-old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had a attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days—just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”
“Where’d he live?”
“On Sacramento Street—way out. I got his address here somewhere.”
He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.
That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.
III
My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine percent of detective work is a patient collecting of details—and your details must be got as nearly firsthand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.
Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment—only three blocks from the Hall of Justice—and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.
Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the press-room in the rear.
The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirtsleeves, checking of figures in a ledger, against others on a batch of papers before him.
I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk; pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.
“This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and—”
He broke of to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.
“Yes. … This is Soules. … We’re working on them now. I’ll give ’em to you by Monday noon at the least. … I know we promised them for yesterday, but … I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And … And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”
Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.
“You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”
“Chrostwaite?”
“Yes—that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him—promised to have ’em ready yesterday—but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order—and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”
I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited
