Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things—the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year—but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-a-million-dollar business and a pretty place in local politics. “A roughneck with a manicure,” somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.
Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable-car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head. …
I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives’ assembly-room I found O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who goes in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet head aren’t handicapped by the trick headgear.
“I want some dope on the Gilmore killing,” I told him.
“So do I,” he came back. “But if you’ll come along I’ll tell you what little I know while I’m eating. I ain’t had lunch yet.”
Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn’t much.