"Eric Collinson insists that it was only midnight, or a few minutes after, that you got home, and saw the man, Saturday night."
"Eric," she said irritably, walking past me to enter the elevator, "is an ass."
Her mother, following her into the elevator, reprimanded her amiably: "Now, dear!"
I closed the door for them and walked down the hall to a doorway where Pat Reddy stood talking to a couple of reporters, said "Hello" to them, squeezed past them into a short passage-way, and went through that to a shabbily furnished room where a dead man lay on a wall bed.
Phels of the Identification Bureau looked up from his magnifying glass to nod at me, and then went on examining the edge of a mission table that stood against one wall. O'Gar pulled his head and shoulders in the open window and growled:
"So we got to put up with you again?"
He was a burly, hard-faced, stolid man of fifty who wore wide-brimmed soft black hats of the movie village-constable sort. There were a lot of shrewd ideas in his grizzled bullet head and he was comfortable to work with.
I looked at the corpse—a man of forty or so, with a heavy face, short hair touched with gray, a scrubby dark mustache, thick shoulders and stocky arms and legs. There was a bullet-hole just above his navel, and another high in the left side of his chest.
"It's a man," O'Gar informed me as I put the blanket over him again. "He's dead."
"What else did somebody tell you?" I asked,
"Looks like him and another bimbo nicked Leggett for the ice and then the other bimbo decided to take a one-way split. The envelopes are here"—O'Gar took them out of his pocket and ruffled them with his thumb—"but the stuff ain't. Neither is the gun the two slugs came out of. It went down the fire escape with Mr. X a little while back. People saw him go down, but they lost him when he cut through the alley. Tall guy with a long nose. This one"—O'Gar pointed at the bed with the envelopes—"has been here a week. Name of Louis Upton. New York labels. We don't know him. Nobody in the dump 's ever seen him with anybody else. Nobody will say they know Mr, X,"
Pat Reddy, a big, jovial youngster with almost enough brains to make for his lack of experience came in. I told him and O'Gar what I had turned up on the diamond job so far.
"Long-nose and this bird taking turns watching Leggett's," Reddy suggested when I was through."
"Maybe," I admitted, "but there was an inside angle to the job."
"How about the yellow girl?"
"I'm going out for a look man tonight. You people are trying New York on this Upton?"
"Practically," O'Gar said.
III
At the Nob Hill address that Halstead had given me I told the boy at the switchboard my name, wondering if Fitzstephan would remember it. I had run into him five years ago, in New York City, where I had been digging dirt on a chain of fake mediums who had taken a coal-and-ice dealer's widow for a hundred thousand dollars. Fitzstephan was combing the same field for literary material, and, becoming acquainted, we had pooled forces. He knew the ghost racket inside and out. With his help I had cleaned up my job in a week or two. We kept up a fairly intimate friendship for a couple of months after that, until I left New York for the West.
At that time he had been in his early thirties—a long, lean, sorrel-haired man with sleepy gray eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes. He pretended to be lazier than he was,
