Then when I got a little further away, I walked faster and faster, until I’d turned the corner out of sight. I didn’t dare look back, but something told me he’d stayed up there at that window the whole time looking at me.
It was pretty late, and this was miles from my own part of town, and I knew I’d better be getting back and put off anything else until tomorrow; At least I’d found out which house he lived in — 305 Decatur St. I could come around tomorrow with Scanny.
I got back into my room from the outside without any trouble, but Ma sure had a hard time getting me up for school the next morning. She had to call me about six times, and I guess she thought studying hard didn’t agree with me.
Scanlon and I got together the minute of three, and we left our books in our school lockers and started out right from there, without bothering to go home first. I told him what I’d found out. Then I said, “We’ll find out this, guy’s name first, and then we’ll find out if there’s anyone living around there who has a glass eye, and who hasn’t been seen lately.”
“Who’ll we ask?” he wanted to know.
“Who do you ask when you want to find out anything? The janitor.”
“But suppose he don’t want to tell us? Some people don’t like to answer questions asked by kids.”
I chopped my hand at his arm and said, “I just thought of a swell way! Wait’ll we get there. I’ll show you.”
When we got there I took him across the street first and showed him the window. “That’s it, up there on the top floor of the middle house.” I swatted his hand down just in time. “Don’t point, you dope. He might be up there watching behind the shade.”
We went over and started looking under the letter boxes in the vestibule for his name. I don’t think we would have found it so easy, it was hard to tell just which name went with which flat, only I happened to notice one that was a lot like the one he left his suit under at the tailor’s: Petersen. “That must be it,” I told Scanny. “He just changed the first part of it.”
“What do we do now?” he said.
I pushed the bell that said Janitor. “Now watch,” I said, “how I get it out of him.”
He was a cranky old codger. “What you boys want?” he barked.
I said, “We been sent over with a message for somebody that lives in this house, but we forgot the name. He’s got a glass eye.”
He growled, “There’s nobody here got a glass eye!”
“Maybe we got the wrong number. Is there anybody around here in the whole neighborhood got a glass eye?”
“Nobody! Now get out of here. I got vurk to do!”
We drifted back to the corner and hung around there feeling kind of disappointed. “It didn’t get us nothing,” I said. “If no one in his house has one, and if no one in the neighborhood has one, where’d he get it from?”
Scanlon was beginning to lose interest. “Aw, this ain’t fun no more,” he said. “Let’s go back and dig up a game of—”
“This isn’t any game,” I told him severely. “I’m doing this to help my old man. You go back if you want to, I’m going to keep at it. He says what every good detective has to have is preservance.”
“What’s ’at, some kind of a jam?” he started to ask, but all of a sudden I saw something and jumped out of sight around the corner.
“Here’s that guy now!” I whispered. “He just came out of the house. Duck!”
We got down in back of a stoop. There were plenty of people all around us, but nobody paid any attention to us, they thought we were just kids playing a game, I guess.
A minute later this Petersen got to the corner and stood there. I peeked up and got a good look at his face. It was just a face, it didn’t look any different from anybody else’s. I’d thought until now maybe a murderer ought to have a special kind of a face, but I’d never asked my old man about that, so I wasn’t sure. Maybe they didn’t, or maybe this guy wasn’t a murderer after all, and I was just wasting a lot of good ball time prowling around after him.
He looked around a lot, like he wanted to make sure nobody was noticing him, and then he finally stepped down off the curb, crossed over, and kept going straight along Decatur Street.
“Let’s follow him, see where he goes,” I said. “I think he saw me last night from the window, and he might remember me, so here’s how we better do it. You follow him, and then I’ll follow you. I’ll stay way back where he can’t see me, and just keep you in sight.”
We tried that for a while, but all of a sudden I saw Scanlon just standing there waiting for me ahead. “What’d you give up for?” I said when I got to him: “Now you lost him.”
“No, I didn’t. He just went in there to get somep’n to eat. You can see him sitting in there.”
He was sitting in a place with a big glass front, and he was facing our way, so we had to get down low under it and just stick the top of our heads up. We waited a long time. Finally I said, “He oughta be through by now,” and I took another look. He was still just sitting there, with that same one cup still in front of him. “He ain’t eating,” I told Scanlon, “he’s just killing time.”
“What do you suppose he’s waiting for?”
“Maybe he’s waiting for it to get dark.” I looked around and it pretty nearly was already. “Maybe he’s going some place that he don’t want to go while it’s still light, so no one can see him.”
Scanlon started to scuff his feet around on the sidewalk like he was getting restless. “I gotta get back soon or I’ll catch it,” he said. “I’m in Dutch already for trying to sneak out last night.”
“Yeah, and then when you do go back,” I told him bitterly, “you’ll get kept, in again like last night. You’re a heck of a guy to have for a partner!”
“No, tonight I can make it,” he promised. “It’s Thursday, and Ma wants to try for a new set of dishes at the movies.”
“All right, get back here fast as you can. And while you’re there, here’s what you do. Call up my house and tell my mother I’m staying for supper at your house. If she asks why, tell her we both got so much studying to do we decided to do it together. That way I won’t have to leave here. This guy can’t sit in there forever, and I want to find out where he goes when he does come out. If I’m not here when you come back, wait for me right here, where it says, Moe’s Coffee Spot’.”
He beat it for home fast and left me there alone. Just as I thought, he wasn’t gone five minutes when the guy inside came out, so I was glad one of us had waited. I flattened myself into a doorway and watched him around the corner of it.
It was good and dark now, like he wanted it to be, I guess, and he started up the street in the same direction he’d been going before — away from that room he lived in. I gave him a half a block start, and then I came out and trailed after him. We were pretty near the edge of town now, and big openings started to show between houses, then pretty soon there were more open places than houses, and finally there weren’t any more houses at all, just lots, and then fields, and further ahead some trees.
The street still kept on, though, and once in a while a car would come whizzing by, coming from the country. He would turn his face the other way each time one did, I noticed, like he didn’t want them to get a look at him.
That was one of the main things that kept me going after him. He hadn’t been acting right ever since I first started following him the night before away from the tailor shop. He was too watchful and careful, and he was always looking around too much, like he was afraid of someone doing just what I was doing. People don’t walk that way, unless they’d done something they shouldn’t. I know, because that was the way I walked after my baseball busted the candy-store window and I wanted to pretend it wasn’t me did it.