Walking over to the St. Martin—only half a dozen blocks from Wales’s place—I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stickup in Alameda the previous week. He hadn’t been in on it—if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them—so it wasn’t likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.
The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed, R. K. McCloor, 313 , as Wales and Peggy had told me.
I pushed the bell button. Nothing happened. Nothing happened any of the four times I pushed it. I pushed the button labeled Manager.
The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street door.
“Some people named McCloor live here?” I asked.
“Three-thirteen,” she said.
“Been living here long?”