Lew never kept his promise. A prowler killed him in an Audubon Road residence a month later.
A week or two after this conversation I left the Boston branch of the Continental Detective Agency to try army life. When the war was over I returned to the agency payroll in Chicago, stayed there for a couple of years, and got transferred to San Francisco.
So, all in all, it was nearly eight years later that I found myself sitting behind the Whosis Kid’s crinkled ears at the Dreamland Rink.
Friday night is fight night at the Steiner Street house. This particular one was my first idle evening in several weeks. I had gone up to the rink, fitted myself to a hard wooden chair not too far from the ring, and settled down to watch the boys throw gloves at one another. The show was about a quarter done when I picked out this pair of odd and somehow familiar ears two rows ahead of me.
I didn’t place them right away. I couldn’t see their owner’s face. He was watching Kid Cipriani and Bunny Keogh assault each other. I missed most of that fight. But during the brief wait before the next pair of boys went on, the Whosis Kid turned his head to say something to the man beside him. I saw his face and knew him.
He hadn’t changed much, and he hadn’t improved any. His eyes were duller and his mouth more wickedly sullen than I had remembered them. His face was as pasty as ever, if not so pimply.
He was directly between me and the ring. Now that I knew him, I didn’t have to pass up the rest of the card. I could watch the boys over his head without being afraid he would get out on me.
So far as I knew, the Whosis Kid wasn’t wanted anywhere—not by the Continental, anyway—and if he had been a pickpocket, or a con man, or