San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.
To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.
We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry—trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder—brought results of another kind.
At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a Negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The Negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.
The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.
That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.
Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the Negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.
The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph—without the mustache—and description were Henry Somerton’s.