Ransom and Dickson had no relish for the story, three days old.
“Might as well try to galvanise a corpse,” grumbled Ransom. I turned over to them what matters I had that might bear watching, and was about to leave the office when the ’phone rang for me. Very fortunately, it was Lanagan; and I couldn’t forbear a sort of gulp, because I felt instinctively that he had wakened up somewhere out of his ten days’ lapse, with the knowledge that I was handling the Monteagle story and was getting badly beaten on it. I was right in that, too.
“Thought I would catch you before you left,” he said. His voice was throaty, and I judged that he had been seeing some hard days and nights. “Suppose that pickled jellyfish of a Sampson has been lacing you? You should be laced. Met Brady a few minutes ago and he said you were handling—or mishandling—the story. You ought to get a month’s lay-off for letting that crowd of two-by-four dubs, on the Times at least, get the best of you. Come on down. I want to talk things over.”
He was at Billy Connors’ “Buckets of Blood,” that famed barroom rendezvous by the Hall of Justice, where the thieves’ clans were wont to forgather. There was nothing of particular coincidence in his ringing me up just when he did; it was shortly after 1 o’clock, the hour when the local staff reported on, and he would be sure of finding me in.
He sat at the rear alcove table with “King” Monahan. “You know my friend the King, of course?” was his greeting. Monahan, one-time designated King of the Pick-pockets, after serving two terms, had retired from the active practice of that profession to establish himself, it was generally believed, not only as a “fence,” handling exclusively the precious stones, but also as a sort of local organiser, to whom any outside gang must report on or before beginning operations in San Francisco. There is system in crime these days as in all things else.
“Kind of stuck it in and broke it off, didn’t they?” he continued.
“I’ve stood one panning from Sampson; I don’t want another from you,” I retorted savagely.
“Norrie,” he said, “you overlooked a very vital point. The King and I have been talking it over,”—he had the three morning papers spread out before him—“and we have concluded that there was a woman in the case. And when two eminent criminologists, like Kid Monahan and Jack Lanagan, agree that there is a woman in a case, it at least is worthy of consideration.”
“A moll, sure,” vouchsafed Monahan in his diffident way. He had a manner as timorous as a girl, which possibly accounted for the success that he enjoyed while practising his profession. He was not one, on the crowded platform of a trolley car, who would be immediately suspected when some proletarian raised a cry of sneak thief and sought in vain for a stick pin, watch, or wallet.
“Stromberg may or may not be guilty,” said Lanagan, “but I don’t think much of the case the police have made against him. It, at least, doesn’t bar us from another line of speculation.