“But, Mrs. Gilmore,” I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, “you must—”
“I know! I know!” she broke in. “But they have done nothing, I tell you—nothing. I don’t believe they’ve made the slightest effort. I don’t believe they want to find h‑him!”
“Him?” I asked, because she had started to say her. “You think it was a man?”
She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.
“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly; “it might have—”
Her face spun toward me—a twitching face—and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.
“I’ll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn’t faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn’t the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarreled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn’t. But if he did, I wouldn’t put it past her—A woman like that would do anything—anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!”
“And you think the police don’t want to arrest her?”
“I didn’t mean exactly that. I’m all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might—I don’t know just what I mean. I’m a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions.” She stretched a thin hand out to me. “Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!”
I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.
“Do you know this Kenbrook woman?” I asked.
“I’ve seen her on the street, and that’s enough to know what sort of person she is!”
“Did you tell the police about her?”
“No‑o.” She looked out of the window again, and then, as I waited, she added, defensively: “The police detectives who came to see me acted as if they thought I might have killed Bernard. I was afraid to tell them that I had cause for jealousy. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept quiet about that woman, but I didn’t think she had done it until afterward, when the police failed to find the murderer. Then I began to think she had done it; but I couldn’t make myself go to the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they’d think. So I—You can twist it around so it’ll look as if I hadn’t known about the woman, can’t you?”
“Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. That right?”
“Yes.”
“Where was he going?”
“Coming home, I suppose; but I don’t know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven’t found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half-past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours.
“Wasn’t that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?”
“Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight.”
“Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?”
She shook her head with emphasis.
“No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don’t seem to know where he went that night.”
That wasn’t unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company’s work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn’t altogether unheard-of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician-contractor doesn’t always move in the open.
“How about enemies?” I asked.
“I don’t know anybody that hated him enough to kill him.”
“Where does this Kenbrook woman live, do you know?”
“Yes—in the Garford Apartments on Bush Street.”
“Nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me, is there?” I asked, stressing the me a little.
“No, I’ve told you everything I know—every single thing.”
II
Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things—the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year—but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-a-million-dollar business and a pretty place in local politics. “A roughneck with a manicure,” somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.
Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable-car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head. …
I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives’ assembly-room I found O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who goes in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet head aren’t handicapped by the trick headgear.
“I want some dope on the Gilmore killing,” I told him.
“So do I,” he came back. “But if you’ll come along I’ll tell you what little I know while I’m eating. I ain’t had lunch yet.”
Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn’t much.
“One of the
