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told him:
    â€œThis fellow says his name’s Joe Wales, and the girl’s supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We’ve got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I’ve made a deal with them. I’m going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There’s a fire-escape in front of the window. The window’s locked now. I’d keep it that way. If the deal turns out O.K. we’ll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I’m gone there’s no reason why you can’t knock them around as much as you want.”
    MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.
    Joe Wales called:
    â€œHey, you’re not going to uncover me to Babe, are you? That’s got to be part of the deal.”
    â€œNot unless I have to.”
    â€œI’d just as leave stand the rap,” he said. “I’d be safer in jail.”
    â€œI’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”
    IV
    Walking over to the St. Martin—only half a dozen blocks from Wales’s place—I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stick-up in Alameda the previous week. He hadn’t been in on it—if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them—so it wasn’t likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.
    The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed, R. K. McCloor, 313 , as Wales and Peggy had told me.
    I pushed the bell button. Nothing happened. Nothing happened any of the four times I pushed it. I pushed the button labeled Manager.
    The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street door.
    â€œSome people named McCloor live here?” I asked.
    â€œThree-thirteen,” she said.
    â€œBeen living here long?”
    She pursed her fat mouth, looked intently at me, hesitated, but finally said: “Since last June.”
    â€œWhat do you know about them?”
    She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.
    I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.
    Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.
    â€œCome in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.
    I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œMaybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He’s done time for safe-burglary. I’m trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don’t know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph—front and profile, taken at Leavenworth—out of my pocket. “This him?”
    She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that’s him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that’s him, all right.”
    â€œHis wife is here with him?” I asked.
    She nodded vigorously.
    â€œI don’t know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”
    She described a girl who could have been Sue