There was some truth in that, so I put Tommy out of the coupe into the rain.
“One tongue sandwich, one ham, one bottle of milk. And make it sudden.”
But I wasn’t there when he came back with the food. He had barely gone out of sight when the Whosis Kid, his overcoat collar turned up against the rain that was driving down in close-packed earnest just now, came out of the rooming-house doorway.
He turned south on Van Ness.
When the coupe got me to the corner he was not in sight. He couldn’t have reached McAllister Street. Unless he had gone into a building, Redwood Street—the narrow one that split the block—was my best bet. I drove up Golden Gate Avenue another block, turned south, and reached the corner of Franklin and Redwood just in time to see my man ducking into the back door of an apartment building that fronted on McAllister Street.
I drove on slowly, thinking.
The building in which the Kid had spent the night and this building into which he had just gone had their rears on the same back street, on opposite sides, a little more than half a block apart. If the Kid’s room was in the rear of his building, and he had a pair of strong glasses, he could keep a pretty sharp eye on all the windows—and probably much of the interiors—of the rooms on that side of the McAllister Street building.
Last night he had ridden a block out of his way. Having seen him sneak into the back door just now, my guess was that he had not wished to leave the street car where he could be seen from this building. Either of his more convenient points of departure from the car would have been in