He nodded and reached for his telephone. “I think so. I’ll have Lieutenant Fielding and perhaps someone from the District Attorney’s office come up here and we’ll lay the whole thing before them.”
Fielding and an Assistant District Attorney named McPhee came up. At first they were all for making the Turk-and-Larkin-Street-brick-pile a midnight target for half the San Francisco police force, but we finally persuaded them to listen to reason. We dug up the history of kidnapping from Ross to Parker and waved it in their faces and showed them that the statistics were on our side: more success and less grief had come from paying what was asked and going hunting afterwards than from trying to nail the kidnappers before the kidnapped were released.
At half past eleven o’clock that night Chappell left his house, alone, with five thousand dollars wrapped in a sheet of brown paper in his pocket. At twenty minutes past twelve he returned.
His face was yellowish and wet with perspiration and he was trembling.
“I put it there,” he said difficultly. “I didn’t see anybody.”
I poured out a glass of his whiskey and gave it to him.
He walked the floor most of the night. I dozed in a sofa. Half a dozen times at least I heard him go to the street door to open it and look out. Detective-sergeants Muir and Callahan went to bed. They and I had planted ourselves there to get any information Mrs. Chappell could give us as soon as possible.
She did not come home.
At nine in the morning Callahan was called to the telephone. He came away from it scowling.