“You’ll take good care of them?” he asked.
I nodded.
Mrs. Alftmont walked across to give me the pressure of firm, strong fingers on my hand. “You’ve brought disturbing news,” she said, “yet I feel reassured. I want to protect Charles. As far as I’m concerned, I have no regrets. A true, deep love is all the marriage a woman needs. I have always felt married to Charles. If there’s to be a scandal, we have each other. As for the murder — you’ll have to handle that, Mr. Lam.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll have to handle that.”
Chapter Eight
It was late Saturday afternoon before I dug up the information I wanted in San Francisco — that the woman I wanted had been a hostess at one of the beach night spots. She’d gone under her maiden name, Amelia Sellar, and had lived at the Bickmere Hotel. It was Sunday night when I managed to locate “Let ’em Ride” Ranigan, who had operated the place and who had acquired his nick-name from a tendency to let his bets ride in the crap games.
Ranigan was a genial, age-mellowed soul who had put on a lot of weight, had flowing white hair, and liked nothing better than to smoke a cigar and talk of the “good old days.”
Ranigan sat at a corner table over some champagne that would be listed on Bertha Cool’s expense account as taxi fare, and became reminiscent.
“You’re a young chap,” he said. “You wouldn’t know about it, but I’m telling you in those days San Francisco was the greatest city in the world. None of the European cities could touch it. Paris couldn’t.
“It wasn’t because it was wide open. It was because it was tolerant. That’s the real spirit of San Francisco. People didn’t mind your business because they had business of their own to mind. That was the attitude of the city, the attitude of the people in it. The waterfront was crowded with shipping. There was a big trade with the Orient. No one had time to bother with petty things. It was only the big things that people thought about.