widely advertised just then with gaily printed plum-colored handbills. I got one of them and, at a stationery store, an envelope to match, and mailed it to Orrett at the Montgomery Hotel. There are concerns that make a practice of securing the names of arrivals at the principal hotels and mailing them advertisements. I trusted that Orrett, knowing this, wouldn’t be suspicious when my gaudy envelope, forwarded from the hotel, reached him through the General Delivery window.
Dick Foley—the agency’s shadow specialist—planted himself in the post office, to loiter around with an eye on the “O” window until he saw my plum-colored envelope passed out, and then to shadow the receiver.
I spent the next day trying to solve the mysterious J. J. Cooper’s game, but he was still a puzzle when I knocked off that night.
At a little before five the following morning Dick Foley dropped into my room on his way home to wake me up and tell me what he had done for himself.
“This Orrett baby is our meat!” he said. “Picked him up when he got his mail yesterday afternoon. Got another letter besides yours. Got an apartment on Van Ness Avenue. Took it the day after the killing, under the name of B. T. Quinn. Packing a gun under his left arm—there’s that sort of a bulge there. Just went home to bed. Been visiting all the dives in North Beach. Who do you think he’s hunting for?
“Who?”
“Guy Cudner.”
That was news! This Guy Cudner, alias “The Darkman,” was the most dangerous bird on the Coast, if not in the country. He had only been nailed once, but if he had been convicted of all the crimes that everybody