“Right. I’ll be in to see you this afternoon.”
At noon Mickey Linehan returned. “The first bloke,” he reported, “the one Dick saw with the girl, is named Benjamin Weel. He owns the Buick and lives in the Mars—room 410. He’s a salesman, though it’s not known what of. The other man is a friend of his who has been staying with him for a couple of days. I couldn’t get anything on him. He’s not registered. The two women in the Futurity are a couple of hustlers. They live in apartment 303. The larger one goes by the name of Mrs. Effie Roberts. The little blonde is Violet Evarts.”
“Wait,” I told Mickey, and went back into the file room, to the index-card drawers.
I ran through the W’s—“Weel, Benjamin, alias Coughing Ben, 36,312W.”
The contents of folder No. 36,312W told me that Coughing Ben Weel had been arrested in Amador County in 1916 on a highgrading charge and had been sent to San Quentin for three years. In 1922 he had been picked up again in Los Angeles and charged with trying to blackmail a movie actress, but the case had fallen through. His description fit the one Dick had given of the man in the Buick. His photograph—a copy of the one taken by the Los Angeles police in ’22—showed a sharp-featured young man with a chin like a wedge.
I took the photo back to my office and showed it to Mickey.
“This is Weel five years ago. Follow him around a while.”
When the operative had gone I called the police detective bureau. Neither Hacken nor Begg was in. I got hold of Lewis, in the identification department.
“What does Bunky Dahl look like?” I asked him.