Course, if I hadn't knocked around a newspaper office more or less, I wouldn't have known where to begin any more than—well, than the average private sec would. But them two years I spent outside the Sunday editor's door wa'n't all wasted. For instance, that's where I got to know Whitey Weeks. And now my first move is to pike down to old Newspaper Row and locate him. Inside of half an hour we'd done a lot too. We'd called up their headquarters' man on the 'phone and had him sketch off the case against one Allston, a butler.
"Yep, grand larceny," says Whitey, his ear to the receiver. "We know that. How much? Eh? Twenty thousand!"
"Ah, tell him to turn over: he's on his back!" says I. "Not twenty thousand cash?"
"That's what he says," insists Whitey, "all in hundreds. Lifted out of a secret wall safe."
"Ask him where this guy was buttling,—in a bank," says I, "or at the Subtreasury?"
And Whitey reports that Allston was workin' for a Mrs. Murtha, West 76th Street; "Mrs. Connie Murtha, you know," he goes on, "the big poolroom backer, and one of the flossiest, foxiest widows in New York."
"Then that accounts for the husky wad," says I. "Twenty thousand! No piker, was he? Ask your man who's on the case?"
"Rusitelli & Donahue," says Whitey. "Mike's a friend of mine too; but he never talks much."
"Let's have a try, anyway," says I.
So we runs this partic'lar detective sergeant down, drags him away from a penuchle game, and Whitey begins by suggestin' that we hear how he's done some clever work on the Allston case.