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“Any trouble with them or anything against them except that they were Wobblies?”

“No — they were pretty good workers.”

“Any trouble with them after he fired them?” I asked.

“No real trouble, though they were pretty hot. They made red speeches all over the place before they left.”

“Remember what day that was?”

“Wednesday of last week, I think. Yes, Wednesday, because I hired two new men on Thursday.”

“How many men do you work?”

“Three, besides myself.”

“Was Mr. Newhouse sick very often?”

“Not sick enough to stay away very often, though every now and then his heart would go back on him, and he’d have to stay in bed for a week or ten days. He wasn’t what you could call real well at any time. He never did anything but the office work — I run the shop.”

“When was he taken sick this last time?”

“Mrs. Newhouse called up Tuesday morning and said he had had another spell, and wouldn’t be down for a few days. He came in yesterday — which was Thursday — for about ten minutes in the afternoon, and said he would be back on the job this morning. He was killed just after he left.”

“How did he look — very sick?”

“Not so bad. He never looked well, of course, but I couldn’t see much difference from usual yesterday. This last spell hadn’t been as bad as most, I reckon — he was usually laid up for a week or more.”

“Did he say where he was going when he left? The reason I ask is that, living out on Sacramento Street, he would naturally have taken a car at that street if he had been going home, whereas he was run down on Clay Street.”

“He said he was going up to Portsmouth Square to sit in the sun for half an hour or so. He had been cooped up indoors for two or three days, he said, and he wanted some sunshine before he went back home.”

“He had a piece of foreign money in his hand when he was hit. Know anything about it?”

“Yes. He got it here. One of our customers — a man named Van Pelt — came in to pay for some work we had done yesterday afternoon while the boss was here. When Van Pelt pulled out his wallet to pay his bill, this piece of Holland money — I don’t know what you call it — was among the bills. I think he said it was worth something like thirty-eight dollars. Anyway, the boss took it, giving Van Pelt his change. The boss said he wanted to show the Holland money to his boys — and he could have it changed back into American money later.”

“Who is this Van Pelt?”

“He’s a Hollander — is planning to open a tobacco importing business here in a month or two. I don’t know much about him outside of that.”

“Where’s his home, or office?”

“His office is on Bush Street, near Sansome.”

“Did he know that Newhouse had been sick?”

“I don’t think so. The boss didn’t look much different from usual.”

“What’s this Van Pelt’s full name?”

“Hendrik Van Pelt.”

“What does he look like?”

Before Soules could answer, three evenly spaced buzzes sounded above the rattle and whirring of the presses in the back of the shop.

I slid the muzzle of my gun — I had been holding it in my lap for five minutes — far enough over the edge of the desk for Ben Soules to see it.

“Put both of your hands on top of the desk,” I said.

He put them there.

The pressroom door was directly behind him, so that, facing him across the desk, I could look over his shoulder at it. His stocky body served to screen my gun from the view of whoever came through the door, in response to Soules’s signal.