I came back to the agency from running out one that had—until run out—looked good, to find a note on my desk asking me to call up Axford.
“Can you come down, to my office now?” he asked when I got him on the wire.
There was a lad of twenty-one or -two with Axford when I was ushered into his office: a narrow-chested, dandified lad of the sporting clerk type.
“This is Mr. Fall, one of my employees,” Axford told me. “He says he saw Burke Sunday night.”
“Where?” I asked Fall.
“Going into a roadhouse near Halfmoon Bay.”
“Sure it was him?”
“Absolutely! I’ve seen him come in here to Mr. Axford’s office to know him. It was him all right.”
“How’d you come to see him?”
“I was coming up from further down the shore with some friends, and we stopped in at the roadhouse to get something to eat. As we were leaving, a car drove up and Mr. Pangburn and a girl or woman—I didn’t notice her particularly—got out and went inside. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw in the paper last night that he hadn’t been seen since Sunday. So then I thought to myself that—”
“What roadhouse was this?” I cut in, not being interested in his mental processes.
“The White Shack.”
“About what time?”
“Somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, I guess.”
“He see you?”
“No. I was already in our car when he drove up. I don’t think he’d know me anyway.”
“What did the woman look like?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see her face, and I can’t remember how she was dressed or even if she was short or tall.”
That was all Fall could tell me.
We shooed him out of the office, and I used Axford’s telephone to call up “Wop” Healey’s dive in North Beach and leave word that when “Porky” Grout came in he was to call up “Jack.” That was a standing arrangement by which I got word to Porky whenever I wanted to see him, without giving anybody a chance to tumble to the connection between us.
“Know the White Shack?” I asked Axford, when I was through phoning.
“I know where it is, but I don’t know anything about it.”
“Well, it’s a tough hole. Run by ‘Tin-Star’ Joplin, an ex-yegg who invested his winnings in the place when Prohibition made the roadhouse game good. He makes more money now than he ever heard of in his piking safe-ripping days. Retailing liquor is a sideline with him; his real profit comes from acting as a relay station for the booze that comes through Halfmoon Bay for points beyond; and the dope is that half the booze put ashore by the Pacific rum fleet is put ashore in Halfmoon Bay.
“The White Shack is a tough hole, and it’s no place for your brother-in-law to be hanging around. I can’t go down there myself without stirring things up; Joplin and I are old friends. But I’ve got a man I can put in there for a few nights. Pangburn may be a regular visitor, or he may even be staying there. He wouldn’t be the first one Joplin had ever let hideout there. I’ll put this man of mine in the place for a week, anyway, and see what he can find.”
“It’s all in your hands,” Axford said. “Find Burke without scandal—that’s all I ask.”
X
From Axford’s office I went straight to my rooms, left the outer door unlocked, and sat down to wait for Porky Grout. I had waited an hour and a half when he pushed the door open and came in.
“ ’Lo! How’s tricks?”
He swaggered to a chair, leaned back in it, put his feet on the table and reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay there.
That was Porky Grout. A pasty-faced man in his thirties, neither large nor small, always dressed flashily—even if sometimes dirtily—and trying to hide an enormous cowardice behind a swaggering carriage, a blustering habit of speech, and an exaggerated pretense of self-assurance.
But I had known him for three years; so now I crossed the room and pushed his feet roughly off the table, almost sending him over backward.
“What’s the idea?” He came to his feet, crouching and snarling. “Where do you get that stuff? Do you want a smack in the—”
I took a step toward him. He sprang away, across the room.
“Aw, I didn’t mean nothin’. I was only kiddin’!”
“Shut up and sit down,” I advised him.
I had known this Porky Grout for three years, and had been using him for nearly that long, and I didn’t know a single thing that could be said in his favor. He was a coward. He was a liar. He was a thief, and a hophead. He was a traitor to his kind and, if not watched, to his employers. A nice bird to deal with! But detecting is a hard business, and you use whatever tools come to hand. This Porky was an effective tool if handled right, which meant keeping your hand on his throat all the time and checking up every piece of information he brought in.
His cowardice was—for my purpose—his greatest asset. It was notorious throughout the criminal Coast; and though nobody—crook or not—could possibly think him a man to be trusted, nevertheless he was not actually distrusted. Most of his fellows thought him too much the coward to be dangerous; they thought he would be afraid to betray them; afraid of the summary vengeance that crookdom visits upon the squealer. But they didn’t take into account Porky’s gift for convincing himself that he was a lionhearted fellow, when no danger was near. So he went freely where he desired and where I sent him, and brought me otherwise unobtainable bits of information upon matters in which I was interested.
For nearly three years I had used him with considerable success, paying him well, and keeping him under my heel. “Informant” was the polite word that designated him in
