It was exactly 5 a.m. when I separated the sheets and crawled into my bed. I was asleep before the last draw of smoke from my good night Fatima was out of my lungs. The telephone woke me at 5:15.
Fiske was talking: “Mickey Linehan just phoned that your Red O’Leary came home to roost half an hour ago.”
“Have him booked,” I said, and was asleep again by 5:17.
With the help of the alarm clock I rolled out of bed at nine, breakfasted, and went down to the detective bureau to see how the police had made out with the redhead. Not so good.
“He’s got us stopped,” the captain told me. “He’s got alibis for the time of the looting and for last night’s doings. And we can’t even vag the son-of-a-gun. He’s got means of support. He’s salesman for Humperdickel’s Universal Encyclopaediac Dictionary of Useful and Valuable Knowledge , or something like it. He started peddling these pamphlets the day before the knock-over, and at the time it was happening he was ringing doorbells and asking folks to buy his durned books. Anyway, he’s got three witnesses that say so. Last night, he was in a hotel from eleven to four-thirty this morning, playing cards, and he’s got witnesses. We didn’t find a durned thing on him or in his room.”
I borrowed the captain’s phone to call Jack Counihan’s house.
“Could you identify any of the men you saw in the cars last night?” I asked when he had been stirred out of bed.
“No. It was dark and they moved too fast. I could barely make sure of my chap.”