Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [170]
At that, Holmes told the driver to pull over to the side and stop for a moment. He dug two more silver coins from his apparently endless supply and whipped a five-dollar note out of his bill-fold, handing both coins and bill to the leader. “Mr Garcia, I shall have to ask you to leave us here for the time being. I should appreciate it if you would present yourself to the St Francis desk at nine o'clock tomorrow morning for a final accounting.”
The boy, naturally enough, protested, but Holmes was already propelling small and angry bodies out of the motor, assisted willingly by Hammett, and he overrode the protests. “Mr Garcia, if you wish to hear the details of what has taken place—all the details, even those in which you were not involved—you will appear at the hotel in the morning. If you continue protesting now, I shall give you nothing but your money and send you on your way.”
It has always amazed me, how Holmes the bachelor understood so thoroughly the workings of the childhood mind. Here yet again he hit on exactly the thing that got the boys out of the motor without another word of protest. The leader's eyes merely narrowed with consideration for a moment, then he climbed out of the motor. As we drove away from the five standing lads and two more approaching at a run, we heard Ricky's voice call, “If you don't give over, you'll be really sorry.”
Holmes brushed himself off and gave me a grin. “I shall, too.”
We quickly caught the trolley up, and Holmes had the driver pull just close enough for him to give a sharp whistle, then drop away again. The dangling boy looked around, spotted Holmes, and instantly let go his precarious hold to stand in the midst of the traffic waiting for us to catch him up. Hammett kicked the door open and the boy scrambled in, without the taxi actually coming to a halt. We continued after the trolley while Holmes interrogated his final Irregular.
“You're Rudy, yes? We just dropped your friends down the street. May I take it that the two people you've been following are in this street-car?”
We'd have been well and truly wrecked if the lad said he'd just decided to ride the street-car on a whim, I reflected, but he was nodding. “They got off down near Sixteenth, went into a hotel and walked right out again about two minutes later with a coupla bags, and got onto another trolley going the other way. I left Kurt there to tell Ricky.”
“He found us,” Holmes reassured him, handing over the shiniest coin yet, this one an entire silver dollar. “We'll let you out here, lad. And you tell your friends that they should bring their appetites with them in the morning. I'll buy you all the biggest breakfast the St Francis serves.”
The boy's expression indicated that he did not often dine in establishments such as the St Francis, and we left him on the pavement, staring in wonder at our retreating vehicle.
We had the driver dawdle far enough back from the trolley so that our coinciding stops and starts might not attract the attention of the passengers, yet near enough that, if the two spotted us and attempted to fade into the downtown crowds without their bags, we might see them. But no one resembling the man and woman in the photograph Flo had given me descended from the trolley, and it continued up the die-straight path of Market in the direction of the Ferry Building.
The street-car reached the wide boulevard of the Embarcadero, onto which all the piers opened, and entered the turn-around in front of the Ferry Building. The afternoon traffic made for a positive ant-hill of taxis, private cars, bicycles, hand-trucks, and pedestrians. We waited, holding our collective breath, until we saw a man and a woman step down to the street, each carrying