“I don’t exactly know yet,” I replied truthfully. “He just connected with a bird who is wrong, but this Maurois may be all right himself. I’ll give you a rap the minute I get anything solid on him.”
I couldn’t afford to tell Duran I had seen his guest snapping caps at a gunman under the eves of the City Hall in daylight. The Marquis Hotel goes in for respectability. They would have shoved the Frenchman out in the streets. It wouldn’t help me to have him scared up.
“Please do,” Duran said. “You owe us something for our help, you know, so please don’t withhold any information that might save us unpleasant notoriety.”
“I won’t,” I promised. “Now will you do me another favor? I haven’t had my teeth in anything except my mouth since seven-thirty this morning. Will you keep an eye on the elevators, and let me know if Maurois goes out? I’ll be in the grill, near the door.”
“Certainly.”
On my way to the grillroom I stopped at the telephone booths and called up the office. I gave the night office man the Cadillac’s license number.
“Look it up on the list and see whom it belongs to.”
The answer was: “ H. J. Paterson, San Pablo, issued for a Buick roadster.”
That about wound up that angle. We could look up Paterson, but it was safe betting it wouldn’t get us anything. License plates, once they get started in crooked ways, are about as easy to trace as Liberty Bonds.
All day I had been building up hunger. I took it into the grillroom and turned it loose. Between bites I turned the day’s events over in my mind. I didn’t think hard enough to spoil my appetite. There wasn’t that much to think about.