My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine percent of detective work is a patient collecting of details—and your details must be got as nearly firsthand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.
Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to run around to the dead man’s printing establishment—only three blocks from the Hall of Justice—and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.
Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the press-room in the rear.
The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirtsleeves, checking of figures in a ledger, against others on a batch of papers before him.
I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk; pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.