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nydus/Continental Op StoriesPublic

A collection of short stories about an unnamed agent of a detective agency in the early 1920s.

Page 79 of 1257
Table of Contents

It

“Got any photos of him?”

“Yes.”

He brought out two from a desk drawer⁠—one full-face, and the other a three-quarter view. They showed a man in the middle of his life, with shrewd eyes set close together in a hatchet face, under dark, thin hair. But the face was rather pleasant for all its craftiness.

“How about his relatives, friends, and so on⁠—particularly his feminine friends?”

“His only relative is the brother in Chicago. As to his friends: he probably has as many as any man in San Francisco. He was a wonderful mixer.

“Recently he has been on very good terms with a Mrs. Earnshaw, the wife of a real estate agent. She lives on Pacific Street, I think. I don’t know just how intimate they were, but he used to call her up on the phone frequently, and she called him here nearly every day. Then there is a girl named Eva Duthie, a cabaret entertainer, who lives in the 1100 block of Bush Street. There were probably others, too, but I know of only those two.”

“Have you looked through his stuff, here?”

“Yes, but perhaps you’d like to look for yourself.”

He led me into Rathbone’s private office: a small box of a room, just large enough for a desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs, with doors leading into the corridor, the outer office, and Zumwalt’s.

“While I’m looking around you might get me a list of the serial numbers of the missing bonds,” I said. “They probably won’t help us right away, but we can get the Treasury Department to let us know when the coupons come in, and from where.”

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