ing. I've often wondered what she thinks of the weird pair that is her husband and daughter, or if she simply accepts them as they are without being aware of their weirdness. I rather suppose she does."
"All this is well enough in its way," I said, "but you still haven't told me anything definite about them. Come on, loosen up."
"I've told you," he insisted, "everything I know. And that's the thing, my son, You know what ain your wordsa snooper and prierI am. Well, if, after a year of it, I know no more about a man who interests me than I do about Leggett, isn't that the most conclusive sort of evidence that he's hiding something, and that he is a hider of no mean sort?"
"Is it? I don't know. But I know I've wasted enough time here learning nothing that anybody can be jailed for."
It was a little after five o'clock when I left Fitzstephan's apartment. I stopped at a restaurant for some food, and then went out for a look at Minnie Hershey's man, Rhino Tingley.
I found him in Big-foot Gerber's cigar store, rolling a fat cigar around in his mouth, telling something to the other negroesfour of them in the place.
". . . says to him, 'Nigger, you talking yourself out of skin,' and I reaches out my hand for him, and, 'fore Gawd, there wasn't none of him there excepting his footprints in the cement pavement, eight feet apart and leading home."
Buying a package of cigarettes, I weighed him in while he talked. He was a chocolate man of not more than thirty years, close to six feet tall, and weighing two hundred pounds plus, with big yellow-balled pop eyes, a broad nose, a big mouth, and a ragged black scar running from his lower lip down behind his blue and white striped collar. His clothes were new enough to look new, and he wore them sportily. His voice was a heavy bass, and when he laughed with his audience after he had finished his story the glass of the showcases shook.
I went out of the store while they were laughing, heard his laughter stop short behind me, resisted the temptation to look back, and moved down in the direction of the building where he and Minnie lived. He came abreast of me when I was half a block from the flats.
I said nothing while we took seven steps. Then he said:
"You the man that been inquiring around about me?"
The sour odor of Italian red wine came thick enough to be seen.
I considered and replied:
"Yeah."
"What you got to do with me?" he asked, not disagreeably, but as if he wanted to know.
On the other side of the street, Gabrielle Leggett, in brown coat, brown and yellow hat, came out of Minnie's building and walked up the street, not turning her head toward us. She walked swiftly and her lower lip was between her teeth,
I looked at the negro. He was looking at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he had seen Gabrielle Leggett or that the sight of her meant anything to him. I said:
"You've got nothing to hide, have you? What do you care who asks about you?"
"All the same, I'm the party to come to if he wants to know about me, You the man that got Minnie fired?"
"She wasn't fired. She quit."
"Minnie don't have to take nobody's lip, She"
"Let's go over and talk to her," I suggested, leading the way across the street. At the door he went ahead, up a flight of steps, down a dark hall to a door that he opened with one of the twenty or more keys on his ring.
Minnie Hershey, in a pink kimono trimmed with yellow ostrich feathers that looked like little dead ferns, came out of the bedroom to meet us in the
