Eight o’clock was striking as I went into the Montgomery lobby the next morning and picked out a chair, this time, within eye-range of the elevators.
At 10:30 Mrs. Estep left the hotel, with me in her wake. Her denial that a letter from her husband, written immediately before his death, had come to her didn’t fit in with the possibilities as I saw them. And a good motto for the detective business is, “When in doubt—shadow ’em.”
After eating breakfast at a restaurant on O’Farrell Street, she turned toward the shopping district; and for a long, long time—though I suppose it was a lot shorter than it seemed to me—she led me through the most densely packed portions of the most crowded department stores she could find.
She didn’t buy anything, but she did a lot of thorough looking, with me muddling along behind her, trying to act like a little fat guy on an errand for his wife; while stout women bumped me and thin ones prodded me and all sorts got in my way and walked on my feet.
Finally, after I had sweated off a couple of pounds, she left the shopping district, and cut up through Union Square, walking along casually, as if out for a stroll.
Three-quarters way through, she turned abruptly, and retraced her steps, looking sharply at everyone she passed. I was on a bench, reading a stray page from a day-old newspaper, when she went by. She walked on down Post Street to Kearny, stopping every now and then to look—or to pretend to look—in store windows; while I ambled along sometimes beside her, sometimes almost by her side, and sometimes in front.