I frowned and beat my brains together, but I couldn’t make anything out of it.
“Suppose I put a man down there to look after her?” I suggested.
“Exthellent!” His worried face cleared until there weren’t more than fifty or sixty wrinkles in it. “The would prefer to thtay there during her firth grief over her fatherth death. You will thend a capable man?”
“The Rock of Gibraltar is a leaf in the breeze beside him. Give me a note for him to take down. Andrew MacElroy is his name.”
While the lawyer scribbled the note I used his phone again to call the agency, to tell the operator to get hold of Andy and tell him I wanted him. I ate lunch before I returned to the agency. Andy was waiting when I got there.
Andy MacElroy was a big boulder of a man—not very tall, but thick and hard of head and body. A glum, grim man with no more imagination than an adding machine. I’m not even sure he could read. But I was sure that when Andy was told to do something, he did it and nothing else. He didn’t know enough not to.
I gave him the lawyer’s note to Miss Newhall, told him where to go and what to do, and Miss Newhall’s troubles were off my mind.
Three times that afternoon I heard from Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan. Tom-Tom Carey wasn’t doing anything very exciting, though he had bought two boxes of .44 cartridges in a Market Street sporting goods establishment.
The afternoon papers carried photographs of Big Flora Brace and Angel Grace Cardigan, with a story of their escape. The story was as far from the probable facts as newspaper stories generally are. On another page was an account of the discovery of the dead barber in the lonely road. He