“Well,” Sandy told him grimly, “you may suspect plenty. But even you don’t know anything.” He started briskly across the room. “He looked perfectly all right to me.” He picked up the phone book and leafed through it. “Here it is—the Tobacco Mart. So that part of his story wasn’t invented, at least. It’s on Chatham Square. That’s down at the edge of Chinatown, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Ken agreed. “And he may even work there. Or, if he doesn’t, he’s made some arrangement for the company to vouch for him if anybody should make inquiries.”
“That what you’re planning to do?”
Ken considered the question seriously. “I don’t know at the moment.”
Sandy grinned. “But don’t tell me you’re not planning to do anything. That would be too good to be true.”
Ken looked at him for a moment and then he grinned back. “You don’t sound as convincing as you think you do. If I didn’t think up a plan of action, you would—and you know it.”
Sandy bristled for a moment and then gave it up. “O.K.,” he said. “I admit I’m curious about the whole business. And if Lausch has some interesting news for us in the morning—”
“But that won’t be until ten o’clock,” Ken pointed out. He walked toward the kitchen, with Sandy at his heels, and opened the refrigerator door. “And in the meantime,” Ken went on, putting milk and bread and ham and cheese on the table, and beginning to cut bread for sandwiches, “I’d like to keep an eye on Barrack’s rooming house in the morning when it’s time for him to leave for work. Maybe he’ll go down to the Tobacco Mart. Maybe he won’t.”
“Maybe he’ll start right out on his sales route.”
“Anything’s possible,” Ken agreed. “I just want to be there to see.”