At the Nob Hill address Halstead had given me, I told my name to the boy at the switchboard and asked him to pass it on to Fitzstephan. I remembered Fitzstephan as a long, lean, sorrel-haired man of thirty-two, with sleepy gray eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes; a man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary.

I had met him five years before, in New York, where I was digging dirt on a chain of fake mediums who had taken a coal-and-ice dealer’s widow for a hundred thousand dollars. Fitzstephan was plowing the same field for literary material. We became acquainted and pooled forces. I got more out of the combination than he did, since he knew the spook racket inside and out; and, with his help, I cleaned up my job in a couple of weeks. We were fairly chummy for a month or two after that, until I left New York.

“Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up,” the switchboard boy said.

His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.

“By God,” he said, holding out a lean hand, “it is you!”

“None other.”

He hadn’t changed any. We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere—all just as it used to be in his New York rooms.

We sat down, found places for our feet between table-legs, and accounted roughly for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco for a little more than a year—except, he said, for week-ends, and two months hermiting in the country, finishing a novel. I had been there nearly five years. He liked San Francisco, he said, but wouldn’t oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.

“How’s the literary grift go?” I asked.

He looked at me sharply, demanding: “You haven’t been reading me?”

“No. Where’d you get that funny idea?”

“There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven’t met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?” He had always liked to talk that way.

“Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk.”

“On sherry—Elsa Donne’s sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished, and you said it was pretty. Sweet God, wasn’t she furious! You said it so vapidly and sincerely and as if you were so sure that she would like your saying it. Remember? She put us out, but we’d both already got plastered on her sherry. But you weren’t tight enough to take the books.”

“I was afraid I’d read them and understand them,” I explained, “and then you’d have felt insulted.”

A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine.

Fitzstephan said: “I suppose you’re still hounding the unfortunate evil-doer?”

“Yeah. That’s how I happened to locate you. Halstead tells me you know Edgar Leggett.”

A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in his gray eyes, and he sat up a little in his chair, asking: “Leggett’s been up to something?”

“Why do you say that?”

“I didn’t say it. I asked it.” He made himself limp in the chair again, but the gleam didn’t go out of his eyes. “Come on, out with it. Don’t try to be subtle with me, my son; that’s not your style at all. Try it and you’re sunk. Out with it: what’s Leggett been up to?”

“We don’t do it that way,” I said. “You’re a storywriter. I can’t trust you not to build up on what I tell you. I’ll save mine till after you’ve spoken your piece, so yours won’t be twisted to fit mine. How long have you known him?”

“Since shortly after I came here. He’s always interested me. There’s something obscure in him, something dark and inviting. He is, for instance, physically ascetic—neither smoking or drinking, eating meagerly, sleeping, I’m told, only three or four hours a night—but mentally, or spiritually, sensual—does that mean anything to you?—to the point of decadence. You used to think I had an abnormal appetite for the fantastic. You should know him. His friends—no, he hasn’t any—his choice companions are those who have the most outlandish ideas to offer: Marquard and his insane figures that aren’t figures, but the boundaries of areas in space that are the figures; Denbar Curt and his algebraism; the Haldorns and their Holy Grail sect; crazy Laura Joines; Farnham—”

“And you,” I put in, “with explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing. I hope you don’t think any of what you’ve said means anything to me.”

“I remember you now: you were always like that.” He grinned at me, running thin fingers through his sorrel hair. “Tell me what’s up while I try to find one-syllable words for you.”

I asked him if he knew Eric Collinson. He said he did; there was nothing to know about him except that he was engaged to Gabrielle Leggett, that his father was the lumber Collinson, and that Eric was Princeton, stocks and bonds, and hand-ball, a nice boy.

“Maybe,” I said, “but he lied to me.”

“Isn’t that like a sleuth?” Fitzstephan shook his head, grinning. “You must have had the wrong fellow—somebody impersonating him. The Chevalier Bayard doesn’t lie, and, besides, lying requires imagination. You’ve—or wait! Was a woman involved in your question?”

I nodded.

“You’re correct, then,” Fitzstephan assured me. “I apologize. The Chevalier Bayard always lies when a woman is involved, even if it’s unnecessary and puts her to a lot of trouble. It’s one of the conventions of Bayardism, something to do with guarding her honor or the like. Who was the woman?”

“Gabrielle Leggett,” I said, and told him all I knew about the Leggetts, the diamonds, and the dead man in Golden Gate Avenue. Disappointment deepened in his face while I talked.

“That’s trivial, dull,” he complained when I had finished. “I’ve been thinking of Leggett in terms of Dumas, and you bring me a piece of gimcrackery out of O. Henry. You’ve let me down, you and your shabby diamonds. But”—his eyes brightened again—“this may lead to something. Leggett may or may not be criminal, but there’s more to him than a two-penny insurance swindle.”

“You mean,” I asked, “that he’s one of these master minds? So you read newspapers? What do you think he is? King of the bootleggers? Chief of an international crime syndicate? A white-slave magnate? Head of a dope ring? Or queen of the counterfeiters in disguise?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “But he’s got brains, and there’s something black in him. There’s something he doesn’t want to think about, but must not forget. I’ve told you that he’s thirsty for all that’s dizziest in thought, yet he’s cold as a fish, but with a bitter-dry coldness. He’s a neurotic who keeps his body fit and sensitive and ready—for what?—while he drugs his mind with lunacies. Yet he’s cold and sane. If a man has a past that he wants to forget, he can easiest drug his mind against memory through his body, with sensuality if not with narcotics. But suppose the past is not dead, and this man must keep himself fit to cope with it should it come into the present. Well, then he would be wisest to anæsthetize his mind directly, letting his body stay strong and ready.”

“And this past?”

Fitzstephan shook his head, saying: “If I don’t know—and I don’t—it isn’t my fault. Before you’re through, you’ll know how difficult it is to get information out of that family.”

“Did you try?”

“Certainly. I’m a novelist. My business is with souls and what goes on in them. He’s got one that attracts me, and I’ve always considered myself unjustly treated by his not turning himself inside out for me. You know, I doubt if Leggett’s his name. He’s French. He told me once he came from Atlanta, but he’s French in outlook, in quality of mind, in everything except admission.”

“What of the rest of the family?” I asked. “Gabrielle’s cuckoo, isn’t she?”

“I wonder.” Fitzstephan looked curiously at me. “Are you saying that carelessly, or do you really think she’s off?”

“I don’t know. She’s odd, an uncomfortable sort of person. And, then, she’s got animal ears, hardly any forehead; and her eyes shift from green to brown and back without ever settling on one color. How much of her affairs have you turned up in your snooping around?”

“Are you—who make your living snooping—sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?”

“We’re different,” I said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

“That’s not different,” he said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

“Yeah, but what good does that do?”

“God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”

“Relieves congestion,” I said. “Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn’t have traffic problems. What do you know about this Gabrielle?”

“She hates her father. He worships her.”

“How come the hate?”

“I don’t know; perhaps because he worships her.”

“There’s no sense to that,” I complained. “You’re just being literary. What about Mrs. Leggett?”

“You’ve never eaten one of her meals, I suppose? You’d have no doubts if you had. None but a serene, sane soul ever achieved such cooking. I’ve often wondered what she thinks of the weird creatures who are her husband and daughter, though I imagine she simply accepts them as they are without even being conscious of their weirdness.”

“All this is well enough in its way,” I said, “but you still haven’t told me anything definite.”

“No, I haven’t,” he replied, “and that, my boy, is it. I’ve told you what I know and what I imagine, and none of it is definite. That’s the point—in a year of trying I’ve learned nothing definite about Leggett. Isn’t that—remembering my curiosity and my usual skill in satisfying it—enough to convince you that the man is hiding something and knows how to hide it?”

“Is it? I don’t know. But I know I’ve wasted enough time learning nothing that anybody can be jailed for. Dinner tomorrow night? Or the next?”

“The next. About seven o’clock?”

I said I would stop for him, and went out. It was then after five o’clock. Not having had any luncheon, I went up to Blanco’s for food, and then to darktown for a look at Rhino Tingley.

I found him in Big-foot Gerber’s cigar-store, rolling a fat cigar around in his mouth, telling something to the other Negroes—four of them—in the place.

“. . . says to him: ‘Nigger, you talking yourself out of skin,’ and I reaches out my hand for him, and, ’fore God, there weren’t none of him there excepting his footprints in the ce-ment pavement, eight feet apart and leading home.”

Buying a package of cigarettes, I weighed him in while he talked. He was a chocolate man of less than thirty years, close to six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds plus, with big yellow-balled pop eyes, a broad nose, a big blue-lipped and blue-gummed mouth, and a ragged black scar running from his lower lip down behind his blue and white striped collar. His clothes were new enough to look new, and he wore them sportily. His voice was a heavy bass that shook the glass of the showcases when he laughed with his audience.

I went out of the store while they were laughing, heard the laughter stop short behind me, resisted the temptation to look back, and moved down the street towards the building where he and Minnie lived. He came abreast of me when I was half a block from the flat.

I said nothing while we took seven steps side by side.

Then he said: “You the man that been inquiring around about me?”

The sour odor of Italian wine was thick enough to be seen.

I considered, and said: “Yeah.”

“What you got to do with me?” he asked, not disagreeably, but as if he wanted to know.

Across the street Gabrielle Leggett, in brown coat and brown and yellow hat, came out of Minnie’s building and walked south, not turning her face towards us. She walked swiftly and her lower lip was between her teeth.

I looked at the Negro. He was looking at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he had seen Gabrielle Leggett, or that the sight of her meant anything to him.

I said: “You’ve got nothing to hide, have you? What do you care who asks about you?”

“All the same, I’m the party to come to if you wants to know about me. You the man that got Minnie fired?”

“She wasn’t fired. She quit.”

“Minnie don’t have to take nobody’s lip. She—”

“Let’s go over and talk to her,” I suggested, leading the way across the street. At the front door he went ahead, up a flight of stairs, down a dark hall to a door which he opened with one of the twenty or more keys on his ring.

Minnie Hershey, in a pink kimono trimmed with yellow ostrich feathers that looked like little dead ferns, came out of the bedroom to meet us in the living-room. Her eyes got big when she saw me.

Rhino said: “You know this gentleman, Minnie.”

Minnie said: “Y-yes.”

I said: “You shouldn’t have left the Leggetts’ that way. Nobody thinks you had anything to do with the diamonds. What did Miss Leggett want here?”

“There been no Miss Leggetts here,” she told me. “I don’t know what you talking about.”

“She came out as we were coming in.”

“Oh! Miss Leggett. I thought you said Mrs. Leggett. I beg your pardon. Yes, sir. Miss Gabrielle was sure enough here. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t come back there. She thinks a powerful lot of me, Miss Gabrielle does.”

“That,” I said, “is what you ought to do. It was foolish, leaving like that.”

Rhino took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed the red end at the girl.

“You away from them,” he boomed, “and you stay away from them. You don’t have to take nothing from nobody.” He put a hand in his pants pocket, lugged out a thick bundle of paper money, thumped it down on the table, and rumbled: “What for you have to work for folks?”

He was talking to the girl, but looking at me, grinning, gold teeth shining against purplish mouth. The girl looked at him scornfully, said: “Lead him around, vino,” and turned to me again, her brown face tense, anxious to be believed, saying earnestly: “Rhino got that money in a crap game, mister. Hope to die if he didn’t.”

Rhino said: “Ain’t nobody’s business where I got my money. I got it. I got—” He put his cigar on the edge of the table, picked up the money, wet a thumb as big as a heel on a tongue like a bath-mat, and counted his roll bill by bill down on the table. “Twenty—thirty—eighty—hundred—hundred and ten—two hundred and ten—three hundred and ten—three hundred and thirty—three hundred and thirty-five—four hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and eighty-five—six hundred and five—six hundred and ten—six hundred and twenty—seven hundred and twenty—seven hundred and seventy—eight hundred and twenty—eight hundred and thirty—eight hundred and forty—nine hundred and forty—nine hundred and sixty—nine hundred and seventy—nine hundred and seventy-five—nine hundred and ninety-five—ten hundred and fifteen—ten hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and seventy. Anybody want to know what I got, that’s what I got—eleven hundred and seventy dollars. Anybody want to know where I get it, maybe I tell them, maybe I don’t. Just depend on how I feel about it.”

Minnie said: “He won it in a crap game, mister, up the Happy Day Social Club. Hope to die if he didn’t.”

“Maybe I did,” Rhino said, still grinning widely at me. “But supposing I didn’t?”

“I’m no good at riddles,” I said, and, after again advising Minnie to return to the Leggetts, left the flat. Minnie closed the door behind me. As I went down the hall I could hear her voice scolding and Rhino’s chesty bass laughter.

In a downtown Owl drug-store I turned to the Berkeley section of the telephone directory, found only one Freemander listed, and called the number. Mrs. Begg was there and consented to see me if I came over on the next ferry.

The Freemander house was set off a road that wound uphill towards the University of California.

Mrs. Begg was a scrawny, big-boned woman, with not much gray hair packed close around a bony skull, hard gray eyes, and hard, capable hands. She was sour and severe, but plain-spoken enough to let us talk turkey without a lot of preliminary hemming and hawing.

I told her about the burglary and my belief that the thief had been helped, at least with information, by somebody who knew the Leggett household, winding up: “Mrs. Priestly told me you had been Leggett’s housekeeper, and she thought you could help me.”

Mrs. Begg said she doubted whether she could tell me anything that would pay me for my trip from the city, but she was willing to do what she could, being an honest woman and having nothing to conceal from anybody. Once started, she told me a great deal, damned near talking me earless. Throwing out the stuff that didn’t interest me, I came away with this information:

Mrs. Begg had been hired by Leggett, through an employment agency, as housekeeper in the spring of 1921. At first she had a girl to help her, but there wasn’t enough work for two, so, at Mrs. Begg’s suggestion, they let the girl go. Leggett was a man of simple tastes and spent nearly all his time on the top floor, where he had his laboratory and a cubbyhole bedroom. He seldom used the rest of the house except when he had friends in for an evening. Mrs. Begg didn’t like his friends, though she could say nothing against them except that the way they talked was a shame and a disgrace. Edgar Leggett was as nice a man as a person could want to know, she said, only so secretive that it made a person nervous. She was never allowed to go up on the third floor, and the door of the laboratory was always kept locked. Once a month a Jap would come in to clean it up under Leggett’s supervision. Well, she supposed he had a lot of scientific secrets, and maybe dangerous chemicals, that he didn’t want people poking into, but just the same it made a person uneasy. She didn’t know anything about her employer’s personal or family affairs and knew her place too well to ask him any questions.

In August 1923—it was a rainy morning, she remembered—a woman and a girl of fifteen, with a lot of suit-cases, had come to the house. She let them in and the woman asked for Mr. Leggett. Mrs. Begg went up to the laboratory door and told him, and he came down. Never in all her born days had she seen such a surprised man as he was when he saw them. He turned absolutely white, and she thought he was going to fall down, he shook that bad. She didn’t know what Leggett and the woman and the girl said to one another that morning, because they jabbered away in some foreign language, though the lot of them could talk English as good as anybody else, and better than most, especially that Gabrielle when she got to cursing. Mrs. Begg had left them and gone on about her business. Pretty soon Leggett came out to the kitchen and told her his visitors were a Mrs. Dain, his sister-in-law, and her daughter, neither of whom he had seen for ten years; and that they were going to stay there with him. Mrs. Dain later told Mrs. Begg that they were English, but had been living in New York for several years. Mrs. Begg said she liked Mrs. Dain, who was a sensible woman and a first-rate housewife, but that Gabrielle was a tartar. Mrs. Begg always spoke of the girl as “that Gabrielle.”

With the Dains there, and with Mrs. Dain’s ability as a housekeeper, there was no longer any place for Mrs. Begg. They had been very liberal, she said, helping her find a new place and giving her a generous bonus when she left. She hadn’t seen any of them since, but, thanks to the careful watch she habitually kept on the marriage, death, and birth notices in the morning papers, she had learned, a week after she left, that a marriage license had been issued to Edgar Leggett and Alice Dain.