Dunnigan had a sneaking feeling there was much more behind all this than I was telling him. I could see that plainly on his big, square-shaped face. He said so.
I told him he must have been reading too many detective stories, and could I go now as I had a lot of work to do?
But he starred in from the beginning again, probing, asking questions, wasting a lot of time, and finally finishing up just where he had started. He looked like a baffled bull as he sat glaring at me.
Luckily the Wop had taken Freedlander’s money and his gold watch: the only things of value in the apartment, so it was a perfect set-up for a routine shoot-and-run stick-up. Finally, Dunnigan decided to let us go.
“Maybe it was a stick-up,” he said heavily. “If you two birds hadn’t been in on it, it would have been a stick-up, but you being there makes me wonder.”
Kerman said if he worried about a little case like this, he would be an old man and retired before he got to the big cases.
“Never mind,” Dunnigan said sourly. “I don’t know what it is about you guys. Whenever you show your faces in this City, trouble starts, and it usually starts for me. I wish you’d keep out. I’ve got all the work I want without you coming here and making me more.”
We both laughed politely, shook hands, promised we would attend the inquest and left him.
We didn’t say a word until we were in the Buick, and driving along Oakland Bay Bridge, heading for home. Then Kerman said gently, “If that guy ever finds out the Wop was the one who kidnapped Stevens, I have a feeling life may he a little difficult for you.”
“It’s difficult enough as it is. We’re now landed with Anona.” I drove along for a mile or so before saying, “You know, this is a hell of a case. All along I have had the feeling that someone is trying very hard to keep a big, strong cat from getting out of the bag. We’re missing something. We’re looking at the bag, and not at the cat, and the cat is the key to the whole set-up. It has to be. Everyone who has caught sight of it has been silenced: Eudora Drew, John Stevens, Nurse Gurney, and now Freedlander. And I have an idea that Anona Freedlander knows about the cat, too. Somehow we have to get her memory going again: and fast.”