II + 

Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things⁠—the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year⁠—but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-a-million-dollar business and a pretty place in local politics. “A roughneck with a manicure,” somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy. + 

Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable-car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head.⁠ ⁠… + 

I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives’ assembly-room I found O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who goes in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet head aren’t handicapped by the trick headgear. + 

“I want some dope on the Gilmore killing,” I told him. + 

“So do I,” he came back. “But if you’ll come along I’ll tell you what little I know while I’m eating. I ain’t had lunch yet.” + 

Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn’t much. + 

“One of the boys, Kelly, was walking his beat early Tuesday morning, coming down the Jones Street hill from California Street to Pine. It was about three o’clock⁠—no fog or nothing⁠—a clear night. Kelly’s within maybe twenty feet of Pine Street when he hears a shot. He whisks around the corner, and there’s a man dying on the north sidewalk of Pine Street, halfway between Jones and Leavenworth. Nobody else is in sight. Kelly runs up to the man and finds it’s Gilmore. Gilmore dies before he can say a word. The doctors say he was knocked down and then shot; because there’s a bruise on his forehead, and the bullet slanted upward in his chest. See what I mean? He was lying on his back when the bullet hit him, with his feet pointing toward the gun it came from. It was a .38.” + 

“Any money on him?” + 

O’Gar fed himself two spoons of chowder and nodded. + 

“Six hundred smacks, a coupla diamonds and a watch. Nothing touched.” + 

“What was he doing on Pine Street at that time in the morning?” + 

“Damned if I know, brother. Chances are he was going home, but we can’t find out where he’d been. Don’t even know what direction he was walking in when he was knocked over. He was lying across the sidewalk with his feet to the curb; but that don’t mean nothing⁠—he could of turned around three or four times after he was hit.” + 

“All apartment buildings in that block, aren’t there?” + 

“Uh-huh. There’s an alley or two running off from the south side; but Kelly says he could see the mouths of both alleys when the shot was fired⁠—before he turned the corner⁠—and nobody got away through them.” + 

“Reckon somebody who lives in that block did the shooting?” I asked. + 

O’Gar tilted his bowl, scooped up the last drops of the chowder, put them in his mouth, and grunted. + 

“Maybe. But we got nothing to show that Gilmore knew anybody in that block.” + 

“Many people gather around afterward?” + 

“A few. There’s always people on the street to come running if anything happens. But Kelly says there wasn’t anybody that looked wrong⁠—just the ordinary night crowd. The boys gave the neighborhood a combing, but didn’t turn up anything.” + 

“Any cars around?” + 

“Kelly says there wasn’t, that he didn’t see any, and couldn’t of missed seeing it if there’d been one.” + 

“What do you think?” I asked. + 

He got to his feet, glaring at me. + 

“I don’t think,” he said disagreeably; “I’m a police detective.” + 

I knew by that that somebody had been panning him for not finding the murderer. + 

“I have a line on a woman,” I told him. “Want to come along and talk to her with me?” + 

“I want to,” he growled, “but I can’t. I got to be in court this afternoon⁠—in half an hour.” + 