ance in excess of ten thousand dollars."
"What were the diamonds worth?"'
"Not more than fifteen hundred dollars at retail."
"That would be seven hundred at cost?"
"Well," smiling, "eight-fifty would be closer."
"How did you come to give him the diamonds?"
"I knew him as a customer, and then, when Fitzstephan told me of his work with glass, it occurred to me that the same sort of treatment applied to diamonds might be of great value. So I persuaded Leggett to try it."
"What Fitzstephan?" I asked.
"Owen, the novelist."
"I've met him," I said, "but I didn't know he was on the Coast. Have you his address?"
Halstead gave it to me—a Nob Hill apartment building.
From the jeweler's I went out to the vicinity of the Geary Street address Minnie Hershey had given me. It was a negro neighborhood, which made the getting of reasonably accurate information even more difficult than it always is.
What I got added up to this: The girl had lived in San Francisco for four or five years, coming from Winchester, Virginia. For the last half-year she had been living in a flat at her present address, with a negro called Rhino Tingley. One informant told me Tingley's first name was Ed, another Bill, but both descriptions agreed; he was young, big, black, and could readily be recognized by his scarred chin and his tie pin, pearls grouped to make a cluster of grapes; he was rather shiftless, living on Minnie and pool, but not bad except when he got mad—then he was a holy terror.
I was told that I could get a look at him the early part of almost any evening in either Bunny Mack's barber shop or Big-foot Gerber's cigar store. I learned where there establishments were located, and then went downtown again, to the police detective bureau in the Hall of Justice.
Nobody was in the Pawnshop Detail office. I crossed the corridor and asked Lieutenant Duff whether any one had been assigned to the Leggett job.
"See O'Gar," he said.
I went into the assembly room, looking for O'Gar and wondering what he—a detective-sergeant attached to the Homicide Detail—had to do with it. Neither O'Gar nor his partner, Pat Reddy, was in. I smoked a cigarette, worried about homicide men being mixed up in my job, and decided to phone Leggett and see if anything had happened out there.
"Have any of the police detectives been in to see you since I left?" I asked when Leggett's harsh voice was in my ear.
"No, but the police called up a little while ago and asked my wife and daughter to come to a house in Golden Gate Avenue to see if they could identify a man who had been killed there. They left a few minutes ago. I didn't accompany them, since I hadn't seen the supposed burglar."
"What was the address?"
He didn't remember the exact number, but he knew the block, one near Van Ness Avenue. I thanked him and went out there.
A uniformed policeman standing in the doorway of a small apartment house guided me to my goal when I reached the designated block. I asked him if O'Gar was there, and where.
"Three-ten," he said.
I went up in a rickety elevator. When I got out of it on the third floor I came face to face with Mrs. Leggett and her daughter, leaving.
"Now I hope you're satisfied that Minnie had nothing to do with it," Mrs. Leggett said chidingly.
"Was he the man you saw?"
"Yes. And the envelopes the diamonds were in are there,"
I turned to Gabrielle Leggett and said:
