Leggett sat on a corner of the kitchen table and asked: "You suspect someone in this house?"
"Somebody who's been in it, yeah."
"Whom?"
"Nobody yet."
"That"-he smiled, showing white teeth almost as small as his daughter's-"means everybody-all of us?"
"Let's take a look at the lawn," I suggested. "If we find any more diamonds I'll say maybe I'm mistaken about the inside angle."
Half-way through the house, as we went towards the front door, we met Minnie Hershey in a tan coat and violet hat, coming to say good-bye to her mistress. She wouldn't, she said tearfully, work anywhere where anybody thought she had stolen anything. She was just as honest as anybody else, and more than some, and just as much entitled to respect, and if she couldn't get it one place she could another, because she knew places where people wouldn't accuse her of stealing things after she had worked for them for two long years without ever taking so much as a slice of bread.
Mrs. Leggett pleaded with her, reasoned with her, scolded her, and commanded her, but none of it was any good. The brown girl's mind was made up, and away she went.
Mrs. Leggett looked at me, making her pleasant face as severe as she could, and said reprovingly: "Now see what you've done."
I said I was sorry, and her husband and I went out to examine the lawn. We didn't find any more diamonds.
II.Long-nose
I put in a couple of hours canvassing the neighborhood, trying to place the man Mrs. and Miss Leggett had seen. I didn't have any luck with that one, bnt I picked up news of another. A Mrs. Priestly-a pale semi-invalid who lived three doors below the Leggetts-gave me the first line on him.
Mrs. Priestly often sat at a front window at night when she couldn't sleep. On two of these nights she had seen the man. She said he was a tall man, and young, she thought, and he walked with his head thrust forward. The street was too poorly lighted for her to describe his coloring and clothes.
She had first seen him a week before. He had passed up and down on the other side of the street five or six times, at intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes, with his face turned as if watching something-or looking for something-on Mrs. Priestly's-and the Leggetts'-side of the street. She thought it was between eleven and twelve o'clock that she had seen him the first time that night, and around one o'clock the last. Several nights later-Saturday-she had seen him again, not walking this time, but standing on the corner below, looking up the street, at about midnight. He went away after half an hour, and she had not seen him again.
Mrs. Priestly knew the Leggetts by sight, but knew very little about them, except that the daughter was said to be a bit wild. They seemed to be nice people, but kept to themselves. He had moved into the house in 1921, alone except for the housekeeper-a Mrs. Begg, who, Mrs. Priestly understood, was now with a family named Freemander in Berkeley. Mrs. Leggett and Gabrielle had not come to live with Leggett until 1923.
Mrs. Priestly said she had not been at her window the previous night and therefore had not seen the man Mrs. Leggett had seen on the corner.
A man named Warren Daley, who lived on the opposite side of the street, down near the corner where Mrs. Priestly had seen her man, had, when locking up the house Sunday night, surprised a man-apparently the same man-in the vestibule. Daley was not at home when I called, but, after telling me this much, Mrs. Daley got him on the phone for me.
Daley said the man had been standing in the vestibule, either hiding from or watching someone up the street. As soon as Daley opened the door, the man ran away, down the street, paying no attention to Daley's "What are you doing there?" Daley said he was a man of thirty-two or three, fairly well dressed in dark clothes, and had a long, thin, and sharp nose.
That was all I could shake the neighborhood down for. I went to the Montgomery Street offices of Spear, Camp and Duffy and asked for Eric Collinson.
He was young, blond, tall, broad, sunburned, and dressy, with the good-looking unintelligent face of one who would know everything about polo, or shooting, or flying, or something of that sort-maybe even two things of that sort-but not much about anything else. We sat on a fatted leather seat in the customers' room, now, after market hours, empty except for a weedy boy juggling numbers on the board. I told Collinson about the burglary and asked him about the man he and Miss Leggett had seen Saturday night.
"He was an ordinary-looking chap, as far as I could see. It was dark. Short and chunky. You think he took them?"
"Did he come from the Leggett house?" I asked.
"From the lawn, at least. He seemed jumpy-that's why I thought perhaps he'd been nosing around where he shouldn't. I suggested I go after him and ask him what he was up to, but Gaby wouldn't have it. Might have been a friend of her father's. Did you ask him? He goes in for odd eggs."
"Wasn't that late for a visitor to be leaving?"
He looked away from me, so I asked: "What time was it?"
"Midnight, I dare say."
"Midnight?"
"That's the word. The time when the graves give up their dead, and ghosts walk."
"Miss Leggett said it was after three o'clock."
"You see how it is!" he exclaimed, blandly triumphant, as if he had demonstrated something we had been arguing about. "She's half blind and won't wear glasses for fear of losing beauty. She's always making mistakes like that. Plays abominable bridge-takes deuces for aces. It was probably a quarter after twelve, and she looked at the clock and got the hands mixed."
I said: "That's too bad," and "Thanks," and went up to Halstead and Beauchamp's store in Geary Street.
Watt Halstead was a suave, pale, bald, fat man, with tired eyes and a too tight collar. I told him what I was doing and asked him how well he knew Leggett.
"I know him as a desirable customer and by reputation as a scientist. Why do you ask?"
"His burglary's sour-in spots anyway."
"Oh, you're mistaken. That is, you're mistaken if you think a man of his caliber would be mixed up in anything like that. A servant, of course; yes, that's possible: it often happens, doesn't it? But not Leggett. He is a scientist of some standing-he has done some remarkable work with color-and, unless our credit department has been misinformed, a man of more than moderate means. I don't mean that he is wealthy in the modern sense of the word, but too wealthy for a thing of that sort. And, confidentially, I happen to know that his present balance in the Seaman's National Bank is in excess of ten thousand dollars. Well-the eight diamonds were worth no more than a thousand or twelve or thirteen hundred dollars."
"At retail? Then they cost you five or six hundred?"
"Well," smiling, "seven fifty would be nearer."
"How'd you come to give him the diamonds?"
"He's a customer of ours, as I've told you, and when I learned what he had done with glass, I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if the same method could be applied to diamonds. Fitzstephan-it was largely through him that I learned of Leggett's work with glass-was skeptical, but I thought it worth trying-still think so-and persuaded Leggett to try."
Fitzstephan was a familiar name. I asked: "Which Fitzstephan was that?"
"Owen, the writer. You know him?"
"Yeah, but I didn't know he was on the coast. We used to drink out of the same bottle. Do you know his address?"
Halstead found it in the telephone book for me, a Nob Hill apartment.
From the jeweler's I went to the vicinity of Minnie Hershey's home. It was a Negro neighborhood, which made the getting of reasonably accurate information twice as unlikely as it always is.
What I managed to get added up to this: The girl had come to San Francisco from Winchester, Virginia, four or five years ago, and for the last half-year had been living with a Negro called Rhino Tingley. One told me Rhino's first name was Ed, another Bill, but they agreed that he was young, big, and black and could easily be recognized by the scar on his chin. I was also told that he depended for his living on Minnie and pool; that he was not bad except when he got mad-then he was supposed to be a holy terror; and that I could get a look at him the early part of almost any evening in either Bunny Mack's barber-shop or Big-foot Gerber's cigar-store.
I learned where these joints were and then went downtown again, to the police detective bureau in the Hall of Justice. Nobody was in the pawnshop detail office. I crossed the corridor and asked Lieutenant Duff whether anybody had been put on the Leggett job.
He said: "See O'Gar."
I went into the assembly room, looking for O'Gar and wondering what he-a homicide detail detective-sergeant-had to do with my job. Neither O'Gar nor Pat Reddy, his partner, was in. I smoked a cigarette, tried to guess who had been killed, and decided to phone Leggett.
"Any police detectives been in since I left?" I asked when his harsh voice was in my ear.
"No, but the police called up a little while ago and asked my wife and daughter to come to a place in Golden Gate Avenue to see if they could identify a man there. They left a few minutes ago. I didn't accompany them, not having seen the supposed burglar."
"Whereabouts in Golden Gate Avenue?"
He didn't remember the number, but he knew the block-above Van Ness Avenue. I thanked him and went out there.
In the designated block I found a uniformed copper standing in the doorway of a small apartment house. I asked him if O'Gar was there.
"Up in three ten," he said.
I rode up in a rickety elevator. When I got out on the third floor, I came face to face with Mrs. Leggett and her daughter, leaving.
"Now I hope you're satisfied that Minnie had nothing to do with it," Mrs. Leggett said chidingly.
"The police found your man?"
"Yes."
I said to Gabrielle Leggett: "Eric Collinson says it was only midnight, or a few minutes later, that you got home Saturday night."
"Eric," she said irritably, passing me to enter the elevator, "is an ass."
Her mother, following her into the elevator, reprimanded her amiably: "Now, dear."
I walked down the hall to a doorway where Pat Reddy stood talking to a couple of reporters, said hello, squeezed past them into a short passage-way, and went through that to a shabbily furnished room where a dead man lay on a wall bed.
Phels, of the police identification bureau, looked up from his magnifying glass to nod at me and then went on with his examination of a mission table's edge.
O'Gar pulled his head and shoulders in the open window and growled: "So we got to put up with you again?"