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“Where’d he live?”

“On Sacramento Street — way out. I got his address here somewhere.”

He turned over the pages of a grimy memoranda book, and I got the dead man’s house number, and the names and addresses of the witnesses to the accident that Coffee had questioned.

That exhausted the policeman’s information, so I left him.

III

My next play was to canvass the vicinity of where the car had been stolen and where it had been deserted, and then interview the witnesses. The fact that the police had fruitlessly gone over this ground made it unlikely that I would find anything of value; but I couldn’t skip these things on that account. Ninety-nine per cent of detective work is a patient collecting of details — and your details must be got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the territory before you.

Before starting on this angle, however, I decided to
run around to the dead man’s printing establishment — only three blocks from the Hall of Justice — and see if any of his employees had heard anything that might help me.

Newhouse’s establishment occupied the ground floor of a small building on California, between Kearny and Montgomery. A small office was partitioned off in front, with a connecting doorway leading to the pressroom in the rear.

The only occupant of the small office, when I came in from the street, was a short, stocky, worried-looking blond man of forty or thereabouts, who sat at the desk in his shirt-sleeves, checking off figures in a ledger against others on a batch of papers before him.

I introduced myself, telling him that I was a Continental Detective Agency operative, interested in Newhouse’s death. He told me his name was Ben Soules, and that he was Newhouse’s foreman. We shook hands, and then he waved me to a chair across the desk, pushed back the papers and book upon which he had been working, and scratched his head disgustedly with the pencil in his hand.

“This is awful!” he said. “What with one thing and another, we’re heels over head in work, and I got to fool with these books that I don’t know anything at all about, and —”

He broke off to pick up the telephone, which had jingled.

“Yes… This is Soules… We’re working on them now… I’ll give ’em to you by Monday noon at the least… I know! I know! But the boss’s death set us back. Explain that to Mr. Chrostwaite. And… And I’ll promise you that we’ll give them to you Monday morning, sure!”Soules slapped the receiver irritably on its hook and looked at me.

“You’d think that since it was his own car that killed the boss, he’d have decency enough not to squawk over the delay!”

“Chrostwaite?”

“Yes — that was one of his clerks. We’re printing some leaflets for him—promised to have ’em ready yesterday — but between the boss’s death and having a couple new hands to break in, we’re behind with everything. I’ve been here eight years, and this is the first time we ever fell down on an order — and every damned customer is yelling his head off. If we were like most printers they’d be used to waiting; but we’ve been too good to them. But this Chrostwaite! You’d think he’d have some decency, seeing that his car killed the boss!”

I nodded sympathetically, slid a cigar across the desk, and waited until it was burning in Soilless mouth before I asked:

“You said something about having a couple new hands to break in. How come?”

“Yes. Mr. Newhouse fired two of our printers last week — Fincher and Keys. He found that they belonged to the I. W. W. , so he gave them their time.”