“Ain’t been in tonight.”
The girl went out of the dive, hurrying along on clicking heels to a hotel in Stockton Street.
While I looked through the glass front, she went to the desk and spoke to the clerk. He shook his head. She spoke again and he gave her paper and envelope, on which she scribbled with the pen beside the register. Before I had to leave for a safer position from which to cover her exit, I saw which pigeonhole the note went into.
From the hotel the girl went by streetcar to Market and Powell Streets, and then walked up Powell to O’Farrell, where a fat-faced young man in gray overcoat and gray hat left the curb to link arms with her and lead her to a taxi stand up O’Farrell Street. I let them go, making a note of the taxi number—the fat-faced man looked more like a customer than a pal.
It was a little shy of two in the morning when I turned back into Market Street and went up to the office. Fiske, who holds down the agency at night, said Jack Counihan had not reported, nothing else had come in. I told him to rouse me an operative, and in ten or fifteen minutes he succeeded in getting Mickey Linehan out of bed and on the wire.
“Listen, Mickey,” I said, “I’ve got the nicest corner picked out for you to stand on the rest of the night. So pin on your diapers and toddle down there, will you?”
In between his grumbling and cursing I gave him the name and number of the Stockton Street hotel, described Red O’Leary, and told him which pigeonhole the note had been put in.
“It mightn’t be Red’s home, but the chance is worth covering,” I wound up. “If you pick him up, try not to lose him before I can get somebody down there to take him off your hands.”
I hung up during the outburst of profanity this insult brought.