“Bungled the damn thing again! I won’t pay your agency a nickel, and I’ll see that some of these so-called detectives get put back in a uniform and set to walking beats!”
“What’d the woman look like?” I asked him.
“I don’t know! I thought you were hanging around to take care of her! She was old and bent, kind of, I guess, but I couldn’t see her face for her veil. I don’t know! What the hell were you men doing? It’s a damned outrage the way …”
I finally got him quieted down and took him home, leaving the city men to keep the neighborhood under surveillance. There was fourteen or fifteen of them on the job now, and every shadow held at least one.
The girl would naturally head for home as soon as she was released and I wanted to be there to pump her. There was an excellent chance of catching her abductors before they got very far if she could tell us anything at all about them.
Home, Gatewood went up against the whiskey bottle again, while I kept one ear cocked at the telephone and the other at the front door. O’Gar or Thode phoned every half hour or so to ask if we’d heard from the girl. They had still found nothing.
At nine o’clock they, with Lusk, arrived at the house. The woman in black had turned out to be a man, and had gotten away.
In the rear of one of the apartment buildings that touched the alley—just a foot or so within the backdoor—they found a woman’s skirt, long coat, hat and veil—all black. Investigating the occupants of the house, they had learned that an apartment had been rented to a young man named Leighton three days before.
Leighton was not at home when they went up to his apartment. His rooms held a lot of cold cigarette butts, and an empty bottle, and