An hour later I walked off the boat in Sausalito. Jack Counihan pushed through the crowd and began talking:
“Coming down here on my way back—”
“Hold it till we get out of the mob,” I advised him. “It must be tremendous—the eastern point of your collar is bent.”
He mechanically repaired this defect in his otherwise immaculate costuming while we walked to the street, but he was too intent on whatever was on his mind to smile.
“Up this way,” he said, guiding me around a corner. “Hook’s lunchroom is on the corner. You can take a look at the girl if you like. She’s of the same size and complexion as Nancy Regan, but that is all. She’s a tough little job who probably was fired for dropping her chewing gum in the soup the last place she worked.”
“All right. That lets her out. Now what’s on your mind?”
“After I saw her I started back to the ferry. A boat came in while I was still a couple of blocks away. Two men who must have come in on it came up the street. They were Greeks, rather young, tough, though ordinarily I shouldn’t have paid much attention to them. But, since Papadopoulos is a Greek, we have been interested in them, of course, so I looked at these chaps. They were arguing about something as they walked, not talking loud, but scowling at one another. As they passed me the chap on the gutter side said to the other, ‘I tell him it’s been twenty-nine days.’
“Twenty-nine days. I counted back and it’s just twenty-nine days since we started hunting for Papadopoulos. He is a Greek and these chaps were