The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, March 1926

I

Standing beside the cashier’s desk in the front office of the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch, I was watching Porter check up my expense account when the man came in. He was a tall man, raw-boned, hard-faced. Grey clothes bagged loosely from his wide shoulders. In the late afternoon sunlight that came through partially drawn blinds, his skin showed the color of new tan shoes.

He opened the door briskly, and then hesitated, standing in the doorway, holding the door open, turning the knob back and forth with one bony hand. There was no indecision in his face. It was ugly and grim, and its expression was the expression of a man who is remembering something disagreeable.

Tommy Howd, our freckled and snub-nosed office boy, got up from his desk and went to the rail that divided the office.

“Do you—?” Tommy began, and jumped back.

The man had let go the doorknob. He crossed his long arms over his chest, each hand gripping a shoulder. His mouth stretched wide in a yawn that had nothing to do with relaxation. His mouth clicked shut. His lips snarled back from clenched yellow teeth.

“Hell!” he grunted, full of disgust, and pitched down on the floor.

I heaved myself over the rail, stepped across his body, and went out into the corridor.

Four doors away, Agnes Braden, a plump woman of thirty-something who runs a public stenographic establishment, was going into her office.

“Miss Braden!” I called, and she turned, waiting for me to come up. “Did you see the man who just came in our office?”

“Yes.” Curiosity put lights in her green eyes. “A tall man who came up in the elevator with me. Why?”

“Was he alone?”

“Yes. That is, he and I were the only ones who got off at this floor. Why?”

“Did you see anybody close to him?”

“No, though I didn’t notice him in the elevator. Why?”

“Did he act funny?”

“Not that I noticed. Why?”

“Thanks. I’ll drop in and tell you about it later.”

I made a circuit of the corridors on our floor, finding nothing.

The raw-boned man was still on the floor when I returned to the office, but he had been turned over on his back. He was as dead as I had thought. The Old Man, who had been examining him, straightened up as I came in. Porter was at the telephone, trying to get the police. Tommy Howd’s eyes were blue half-dollars in a white face.

“Nothing in the corridors,” I told the Old Man. “He came up in the elevator with Agnes Braden. She says he was alone, and she saw nobody close to him.”

“Quite so.” The Old Man’s voice and smile were as pleasantly polite as if the corpse at his feet had been a part of the pattern in the carpet. Fifty years of sleuthing have left him with no more emotion than a pawnbroker. “He seems to have been stabbed in the left breast, a rather large wound that was staunched with this piece of silk” — one of his feet poked at a rumpled ball of red cloth on the floor — “which seems to be a sarong.”

Today is never Tuesday to the Old Man: it seems to be Tuesday.

“On his person,” he went on, “I have found some nine hundred dollars in bills of various denominations, and some silver; a gold watch and a pocket knife of English manufacture; a Japanese silver coin, 50 sen; tobacco, pipe and matches; a Southern Pacific timetable; two handkerchiefs without laundry marks; a pencil and several sheets of blank paper; four two-cent stamps; and a key labeled Hotel Montgomery, Room 540.

“His clothes seem to be new. No doubt we shall learn something from them when we make a more thorough examination, which I do not care to make until the police come. Meanwhile, you had better go to the Montgomery and see what you can learn there.”

In the Hotel Montgomery’s lobby the first man I ran into was the one I wanted: Pederson, the house copper, a blond-mustached ex-bartender who doesn’t know any more about gum-shoeing than I do about saxophones, but who does know people and how to handle them, which is what his job calls for.

“Hullo!” he greeted me. “What’s the score?”

“Six to one, Seattle, end of the fourth. Who’s in 540, Pete?”

“They’re not playing in Seattle, you chump! Portland! A man that hasn’t got enough civic spirit to know where his team—”

“Stop it, Pete! I’ve got no time to be fooling with your childish pastimes. A man just dropped dead in our joint with one of your room-keys in his pocket — 540.”

Civic spirit went blooey in Pederson’s face.

“540?” He stared at the ceiling. “That would be that fellow Rounds. Dropped dead, you say?”

“Dead. Tumbled down in the middle of the floor with a knife-cut in him. Who is this Rounds?”

“I couldn’t tell you much off-hand. A big bony man with leathery skin. I wouldn’t have noticed him excepting he was such a sour looking body.”

“That’s the bird. Let’s look him up.”

At the desk we learned that the man had arrived the day before, registering as H. R. Rounds, New York, and telling the clerk he expects to leave within three days. There was no record of mail or telephone calls for him. Nobody knew when he had gone out, since he had not left his key at the desk. Neither elevator boys nor bell-hops could tell us anything.

His room didn’t add much to our knowledge. His baggage consisted of one pigskin bag, battered and scarred, and covered with the marks of labels that had been scraped off. It was locked, but traveling bags locks don’t amount to much. This one held us up about five minutes.

Rounds’ clothes — some in the bag, some in the closet — were neither many nor expensive, but they were all new. The washable stuff was without laundry marks. Everything was of popular makes, widely advertised brands that could be bought in any city in the country. There wasn’t a piece of paper with anything written on it. There wasn’t an identifying tag. There wasn’t anything in the room to tell where Rounds had come from or why.

Pederson was peevish about it.

“I guess if he hadn’t got killed he’d of beat us out of a week’s bill! These guys that don’t carry anything to identify ’em, and that don’t leave their keys at the desk when they go out, ain’t to be trusted too much!”

We had just finished our search when a bell-hop brought Detective Sergeant O’Gar, of the police department Homicide Detail, into the room.

“Been down to the Agency?” I asked him.

“Yeah, just came from there.”

“What’s new?”

O’Gar pushed back his wide-brimmed black village-constable’s hat and scratched his bullet head.

“Not a heap. The doc says he was opened with a blade at least six inches long by a couple wide, and that he couldn’t of lived two hours after he got the blade — most likely not more’n one. We didn’t find any news on him. What’ve you got here?”

“His name is Rounds. He registered here yesterday from New York. His stuff is new, and there’s nothing on any of it to tell us anything except that he didn’t want to leave a trail. No letters, no memoranda, nothing. No blood, no signs of a row, in the room.”

O’Gar turned to Pederson.

“Any brown men been around the hotel? Hindus or the like?”

“Not that I saw,” the house copper said. “I’ll find out for you.”

“Then the red silk was a sarong?” I asked.

“And an expensive one,” the detective sergeant said. “I saw a lot of ’em the four years I was soldiering on the islands, but I never saw as good a one as that.”

“Who wears them?”

“Men and women in the Philippines, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, parts of India.”

“Is it your idea that whoever did the carving advertised himself by running around in the streets in a red petticoat?”

“Don’t try to be funny!” he growled at me. “They’re often enough twisted or folded up into sashes or girdles. And how do I know he was knifed in the street? For that matter, how do I know he wasn’t cut down in your joint?”

“We always bury our victims without saying anything about ’em. Let’s go down and give Pete a hand in the search for your brown men.”

That angle was empty. Any brown men who had snooped around the hotel had been too good at it to be caught.

I telephoned the Old Man, telling him what I had learned — which didn’t cost me much breath — and O’Gar and I spent the rest of the evening sharp-shooting around without ever getting on the target once. We questioned taxicab drivers, questioned the three Roundses listed in the telephone book, and our ignorance was as complete when we were through as when we started.

The morning papers, on the streets at a little after eight o’clock that evening, had the story as we knew it.

At eleven o’clock O’Gar and I called it a night, separating in the direction of our respective beds.

We didn’t stay apart long.

II

I opened my eyes sitting on the side of my bed in the dim light of a moon that was just coming up, with the ringing telephone in my hand.

O’Gar’s voice: “1856 Broadway! On the hump!”

“1856 Broadway,” I repeated, and he hung up.

I finished waking up while I phoned for a taxicab, and then wrestled my clothes on. My watch told me it was 12:55 A.M. as I went downstairs. I hadn’t been fifteen minutes in bed.

1856 Broadway was a three-story house set behind a pocket-size lawn in a row of like houses behind like lawns. The others were dark. 1856 shed light from every window, and from the open front door. A policeman stood in the vestibule.

“Hello, Mac! O’Gar here?”

“Just went in.”

I walked into a brown and buff reception hall, and saw the detective sergeant going up the wide stairs.

“What’s up?” I asked as I joined him.

“Don’t know.”

On the second floor we turned to the left, going into a library or sitting room that stretched across the front of the house.

A man in pajamas and bathrobe sat on a davenport there, with one bared leg stretched out on a chair in front of him. I recognized him when he nodded to me: Austin Richter, owner of a Market Street moving picture theater. He was a round-faced man of forty-five or so, partly bald, for whom the Agency had done some work a year or so before in connection with a ticket-seller who had departed without turning in the day’s receipts.

In front of Richter a thin white-haired man with doctor written all over him stood looking at Richter’s leg, which was wrapped in a bandage just below the knee. Beside the doctor, a tall woman in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown stood, a roll of gauze and a pair of scissors in her hands. A husky police corporal was writing in a notebook at a long narrow table, a thick hickory walking stick laying on the bright blue table cover at his elbow.

All of them looked around at us as we came into the room. The corporal got up and came over to us.

“I knew you were handling the Rounds job, sergeant, so I thought I’d best get word to you as soon as I heard they was brown men mixed up in this.”

“Good work, Flynn,” O’Gar said. “What happened here?”

“Burglary, or maybe only attempted burglary. They was four of them — crashed the kitchen door.”

Richter was sitting up very straight, and his blue eyes were suddenly excited, as were the brown eyes of the woman.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but is there — you mentioned brown men in connection with another affair — is there another?”

O’Gar looked at me.

“You haven’t seen the morning papers?” I asked the theatre owner.

“No.”

“Well, a man came into the Continental office late this afternoon, with a stab in his chest, and died there. Pressed against the wound, as if to stop the bleeding, was a sarong, which is where we got the brown men idea.”

“His name?”

“Rounds, H. R. Rounds.”

The name brought no recognition into Richter’s eyes.

“A tall man, thin, with dark skin?” he asked. “In a grey suit?”

“All of that.”

Richter twisted around to look at the woman.

“Molloy!” he exclaimed.

“Molloy!” she exclaimed.

“So you know him?”

Their faces came back toward me.

“Yes. He was here this afternoon. He left—”

Richter stopped, to turn to the woman again, questioningly.

“Yes, Austin,” she said, putting gauze and scissors on the table, and sitting down beside him on the davenport. “Tell them.”

He patted her hand and looked up at me again with the expression of a man who has seen a nice spot on which to lay down a heavy load.

“Sit down. It isn’t a long story, but sit down.”

We found ourselves chairs.

“Molloy — Sam Molloy — that is his name, or the name I have always known him by. He came here this afternoon. He’d either called up the theater or gone there, and they had told him I was home. I hadn’t seen him for three years. We could see — both my wife and I — that there was something the matter with him when he came in.

“When I asked him, he said he’d been stabbed, by a Siamese, on his way here. He didn’t seem to think the wound amounted to much, or pretended he didn’t. He wouldn’t let us fix it for him, or look at it. He said he’d go to a doctor after he left, after he’d got rid of the thing. That was what he had come to me for. He wanted me to hide it, to take care of it until he came for it again.

“He didn’t talk much. He was in a hurry, and suffering. I didn’t ask him any questions. I couldn’t refuse him anything. I couldn’t question him even though he as good as told us that it was illegal as well as dangerous. He saved our lives once — more than my wife’s life — down in Mexico, where we first knew him. That was in 1916. We were caught down there during the Villa troubles. Molloy was running guns over the border, and he had enough influence with the bandits to have us released when it looked as if we were done for.

“So this time, when he wanted me to do something for him, I couldn’t ask him about it. I said, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me the package. It wasn’t a large package: about the size of — well — a loaf of bread, perhaps, but quite heavy for its size. It was wrapped in brown paper. We unwrapped it after he had gone, that is, we took the paper off. But the inner wrapping was of canvas, tied with silk cord, and sealed, so we didn’t open that. We put it upstairs in the pack room, under a pile of old magazines.

“Then, at about a quarter to twelve tonight — I had only been in bed a few minutes, and hadn’t gone to sleep yet — I heard a noise in here. I don’t own a gun, and there’s nothing you could properly call a weapon in the house, but that walking stick” — indicating the hickory stick on the table — “was in a closet in our bedroom. So I got that and came in here to see what the noise was.

“Right outside the bedroom door I ran into a man. I could see him better than he could see me, because this door was open and he showed against the window. He was between me and it, and the moonlight showed him fairly clear. I hit him with the stick, but didn’t knock him down. He turned and ran in here. Foolishly, not thinking that he might not be alone, I ran after him. Another man shot me in the leg just as I came through the door.

“I fell, of course. While I was getting up, two of them came in with my wife between them. There were four of them. They were medium-sized men, brown-skinned, but not so dark. I took it for granted that they were Siamese, because Molloy had spoken of Siamese. They turned on the lights here, and one of them, who seemed to be the leader, asked me:

“‘Where is it?’

“His accent was pretty bad, but you could understand his words good enough. Of course I knew they were after what Molloy had left, but I pretended I didn’t. They told me, or rather the leader did, that he knew it had been left here, but they called Molloy by another name — Dawson. I said I didn’t know any Dawson, and nothing had been left here, and I tried to get them to tell me what they expected to find. They wouldn’t, though — they just called it ‘it.’

“They talked among themselves, but of course I couldn’t make out a word of what they were saying, and then three of them went out, leaving one here to guard us. He had a Luger pistol. We could hear the others moving around the house. The search must have lasted an hour. Then the one I took for the leader came in, and said something to our guard. Both of them looked quite elated.

“‘It is not wise if you will leave this room for many minutes,’ the leader said to me, and they left us — both of them — closing the door behind them.

“I knew they were going, but I couldn’t walk on this leg. From what the doctor says, I’ll be lucky if I walk on it inside of a couple of months. I didn’t want my wife to go out, and perhaps run into one of them before they’d got away, but she insisted on going. She found they’d gone, and she phoned the police, and then ran up to the pack room and found Molloy’s package was gone.”

“And this Molloy didn’t give you any hint at all as to what was in the package?” O’Gar asked when Richter had finished.

“Not a word, except that it was something the Siamese were after.”

“Did he know the Siamese who stabbed him?” I asked.

“I think so,” Richter said slowly, “though I am not sure he said he did.”

“Do you remember his words?”

“Not exactly, I’m afraid.”

“I think I remember them,” Mrs. Richter said. “My husband, Mr. Richter, asked him, ‘What’s the matter, Molloy? Are you hurt, or sick?’

“Molloy gave a little laugh, putting a hand on his chest, and said, ‘Nothing much. I run into a Siamese who was looking for me on my way here, and got careless and let him scratch me. But I kept my little bundle!’ And he laughed again, and patted the package.”

“Did he say anything else about the Siamese?”

“Not directly,” she replied, “though he did tell us to watch out for any Asiatics we saw around the neighborhood. He said he wouldn’t leave the package if he thought it would make trouble for us, but that there was always a chance that something would go wrong, and we’d better be careful. And he told my husband” — nodding at Richter — “that the Siamese had been dogging him for months, but now that he had a safe place for the package he was going to ‘take them for a walk and forget to bring them back.’ That was the way he put it.”

“How much do you know about Molloy?”

“Not a great deal, I’m afraid,” Richter took up the answering again. “He liked to talk about the places he had been and the things he had seen, but you couldn’t get a word out of him about his own affairs. We met him first in Mexico, as I have told you, in 1916. After he saved us down there and got us away, we didn’t see him again for nearly four years. He rang the bell one night, and came in for an hour or two. He was on his way to China, he said, and had a lot of business to attend to before he left the next day.

“Some months later I had a letter from him, from the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, asking me to send him a list of the importers and exporters in San Francisco. He wrote me a letter thanking me for the list, and I didn’t hear from him again until he came to San Francisco for a week, about a year later. That was in 1921, I think.

“He was here for another week about a year after that, telling us that he had been in Brazil, but, as usual, not saying what he had been doing there. Some months later I had a letter from him, from Chicago, saying he would be here the following week. However, he didn’t come. Instead, some time later, he wrote from Vladivostok, saying he hadn’t been able to make it. Today was the first we’d heard of him since then.”

“Where’s his home? His people?”

“He always says he has neither. I’ve an idea he was born in England, though I don’t know that he ever said so, or what made me think so.”

“Got any more questions?” I asked O’Gar.

“No. Let’s give the place the eye, and see if the Siamese left any leads behind ’em.”

The eye we gave the house was thorough. We didn’t split the territory between us, but went over everything together — everything from roof to cellar — every nook, drawer, corner.

The cellar did most for us: it was there, in the cold furnace, that we found the handful of black buttons and the fire-darkened garter clasps. But the upper floors hadn’t been altogether worthless: in one room we had found the crumpled sales slip of an Oakland store, marked 1 table cover; and in another room we had found no garters.

“Of course it’s none of my business,” I told Richter when O’Gar and I joined the others again, “but I think maybe if you plead self-defense you might get away with it.”

He tried to jump up from the davenport, but his shot leg failed him.

The woman got up slowly.

“And maybe that would leave an out for you,” O’Gar told her. “Why don’t you try to persuade him?”

“Or maybe it would be better if you plead the self-defense,” I suggested to her. “You could say that Richter ran to your help when your husband grabbed you, that your husband shot him and was turning his gun on you when you stabbed him. That would sound smooth enough.”

“My husband?”

“Uh-huh, Mrs. Rounds-Molloy-Dawson. Your late husband, anyway.”

Richter got his mouth far enough closed to get words out of it.

“What is the meaning of this damned nonsense?” he demanded.

“Them’s harsh words to come from a fellow like you,” O’Gar growled at him. “If this is nonsense, what do you make of that yarn you told us about creeping Siamese and mysterious bundles, and God knows what all?”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” I told O’Gar. “Being around movies all the time has poisoned his idea of what sounds plausible. If it hadn’t, he’d have known better than to see a Siamese in the moonlight at 11:45, when the moon was just coming up at somewhere around 12:45, when you phoned me.”

Richter stood up on his one good leg.

The husky police corporal stepped close to him.

“Hadn’t I better frisk him, sergeant?”

O’Gar shook his bullet head.

“Waste of time. He’s got nothing on him. They cleaned the place of weapons. The chances are the lady dropped them in the bay when she rode over to Oakland to get a table cover to take the place of the sarong her husband carried away with him.”

That shook the pair of them. Richter pretended he hadn’t gulped, and the woman had a fight of it before she could make her eyes stay still on mine.

O’Gar struck while the iron was hot by bringing the buttons and garters clasps we had salvaged out of his pocket, and letting them trickle from one hand to another. That used up the last bit of the facts we had.

I threw a lie at them.

“Never me to knock the press, but you don’t want to put too much confidence in what the papers say. For instance, a fellow might say a few pregnant words before he died, and the papers might say he didn’t. A thing like that would confuse things.”

The woman reared up her head and looked at O’Gar.

“May I speak to Austin alone?” she asked. “I don’t mean out of your sight.”

The detective sergeant scratched his head and looked at me. This letting your victims go into conference is always a ticklish business: they may decide to come clean, and then again, they may frame up a new out. On the other hand, if you don’t let them, the chances are they get stubborn on you, and you can’t get anything out of them. One way was as risky as another. I grinned at O’Gar and refused to make a suggestion. He could decide for himself, and, if he was wrong, I’d have him to dump the blame on. He scowled at me, and then nodded to the woman.

“You can over into that corner and whisper together for a couple of minutes,” he said, “but no foolishness.”

She gave Richter the hickory stick, took his other arm, helped him hobble to a far corner, pulled a chair over there for him. He sat with his back to us. She stood behind him, leaning over his shoulder, so that both their faces were hidden from us.

O’Gar came closer to me.

“What do you think?” he muttered.

“I think they’ll come through.”

“That shot of yours about being Molloy’s wife hit center. I missed that one. How’d you make it?”

“When she was telling us what Molloy had said about the Siamese she took pains both times she said ‘my husband’ to show that she meant Richter.”

“So? Well—”

The whispering in the far corner had been getting louder, so that the s’s had become sharp hisses. Now a clear emphatic sentence came from Rihter’s mouth.

“I’ll be damned if I will!”

Both of them looked furtively over their shoulders, and they lowered their voices again, but not for long. The woman was apparently trying to persuade him to do something. He kept shaking his head. He put a hand on her arm. She pushed it away, and kept on whispering.

He said aloud, deliberately:

“Go ahead, if you want to be a fool. It’s your neck. I didn’t put the knife in him.”

She jumped away from him, her eyes black blazes in a white face. O’Gar and I moved softly toward them.

“You rat!” she spat at Richter, and spun to face us.

“I killed him!” she cried. “This thing in the chair tried to and—”

Richter swung the hickory stick.

I jumped for it — missed — crashed into the back of his chair. Hickory stick, Richter, chair, and I sprawled together on the floor. The corporal helped me up. He and I picked Richter up and put him on the davenport again.

The woman’s story poured out of her angry mouth:

“His name wasn’t Molloy. It was Lange, Sam Lange. I married him in Providence in 1913 and went to China with him — to Canton, where he had a position with a steamship line. We didn’t stay there long, because he got into some trouble through being mixed up in the revolution that year. After that we drifted around, mostly around Asia.

“We met this thing” — she pointed at the now sullenly quiet Richter — “in Singapore, in 1919, I think — right after the World War was over. His name is Holley, and Scotland Yard can tell you something about him. He had a proposition. He knew of a gem-bed in upper Burma, one of many that were hidden from the British when they took the country. He knew the natives who were working it, knew where they were hiding their gems.

“My husband went in with him, with two other men that were killed. They looted the natives’ cache, and got away with a whole sackful of sapphires, topazes and even a few rubies. The two other men were killed by the natives and my husband was badly wounded.

“We didn’t think he could live. We were hiding in a hut near the Yunnan border. Holley persuaded me to take the gems and run away with them. It looked as if Sam was done for, and if we stayed there long we’d be caught. I can’t say that I was crazy about Sam anyway; he wasn’t the kind you would be, after living with him for a while.

“So Holley and I took it and lit out. We had to use a lot of the stones to buy our way through Yunnan and Kwangsi and Kwangtung, but we made it. We got to San Francisco with enough to buy this house and the movie theater, and we’ve been here since. We’ve been honest since we came here, but I don’t suppose that means anything. We had enough money to keep us comfortable.

“Today Sam showed up. We hadn’t heard of him since we left him on his back in Burma. He said he’d been caught and jailed for three years. Then he’d got away, and had spent the other three hunting for us. He was that kind. He didn’t want me back, but he did want money. He wanted everything we had. Holley lost his nerve. Instead of bargaining with Sam, he lost his head and tried to shoot him.

“Sam took his gun away from him and shot him in the leg. In the scuffle Sam had dropped a knife — a kris, I think. I picked it up, but he grabbed me just as I got it. I don’t know how it happened. All I saw was Sam staggering back, holding his chest with both hands — and the kris shining red in my hand.

“Sam had dropped his gun. Holley got it and was all for shooting Sam, but I wouldn’t let him. It happened in this room. I don’t remember whether I gave Sam the sarong we used for a cover on the table or not. Anyway, he tried to stop the blood with it. He went away then, while I kept Holley from shooting him.

“I knew Sam wouldn’t go to the police, but I didn’t know what he’d do. And I knew he was hurt bad. If he dropped dead somewhere, the chances are he’d be traced here. I watched from a window as he went down the street, and nobody seemed to pay any attention to him, but he looked so conspicuously wounded to me that I thought everybody would be sure to remember him if it got into the papers that he had been found dead somewhere.

“Holley was even more scared than I. We couldn’t run away, because he had a shot leg. So we made up that Siamese story, and I went over to Oakland, and bought the table cover to take the place of the sarong. We had some guns and even a few oriental knives and swords here. I wrapped them up in paper, breaking the swords, and dropped them off the ferry when I went to Oakland.

“When the morning papers came out we read what had happened, and then we went ahead with what we had planned. We burned the suit Holley had worn when he was shot, and his garters — because the pants had a bullet-hole in them, and the bullet had cut one garter. We fixed a hole in his pajama-leg, unbandaged his leg, — I had fixed it as well as I could, — and washed away the clotted blood until it began to bleed again. Then I gave the alarm.”

She raised both hands in a gesture of finality and made a clucking sound with her tongue.

“And there you are,” she said.

“You got anything to say?” I asked Holley, who was staring at his bandaged leg.

“To my lawyer,” he said without looking up.

O’Gar spoke to the corporal.

“The wagon, Flynn.”

Ten minutes later we were in the street, helping Holley and the woman into a police car.

Around the corner on the other side of the street came three brown-skinned men, apparently Malay sailors. The one in the middle seemed to be drunk, and the other two were supporting him. One of them had a package that could have held a bottle under his arm.

O’Gar looked from them to me and laughed.

“We wouldn’t be doing a thing to those babies right now if we had fallen for that yarn, would we?” he whispered.

“Shut up, you, you big heap!” I growled back, nodding at Holley, who was in the car by now. “If that bird sees them he’ll identify ’em as his Siamese, and God knows what a jury would make of it!”

We made the puzzled driver twist the car six blocks out of his way to be sure we’d miss the brown men. It was worth it, because nothing interfered with the twenty years apiece that Holley and Mrs. Lange drew.