down inside the coat and pull my hat over my face. There was a bus stop at the corner. I passed it and went on to the next one, two blocks away.
Several people were waiting here, and there was a newspaper rack. I dropped a dime in the box and picked up an Express. No one paid any attention to me.
Stedman’s murder was still on the front page. Three men answering my description had been picked up in skid-row flophouses and later released. I shivered slightly. My greatest danger was that there were at least half a dozen detectives on the force who might know me by sight from having seen me around the Sidelines Bar. If I ran into one of them, I was a dead duck.
I saw the blue Olds coming. It slid to a stop at the curb and I got in. There was a map of the city in the glove compartment. I spread it open, partly as an excuse to keep my face down.
“I know how to get there,” she said. “I sized it up pretty thoroughly on Saturday. Denton Street’s in an industrial area three or four blocks from the ship channel. You see it—there in back of the Municipal docks, about two miles from downtown and three or four miles up from the Southlands Refinery.”
“I see it now,” I said. We stopped for a traffic light.
“If we’re lucky enough to find a parking place near that diner, I think we can watch two bus stops at once.”
Traffic was growing heavier. She swung off the arterial, bypassing the downtown area, and in about fifteen minutes she turned into Denton in the 1200 block. “Four blocks now,” she said. “The. Comet Boat Company’s 1636.”
I looked at my watch. It was still twenty minutes before eight. The traffic was mostly buses and trucks. She backed into a parking place. I looked around. On this side 0f the street the whole block was taken up by the Comet plant, a long brick building enclosed by a steel mesh fence. Directly across from us was a low frame building with a number of small windows. The sign said GEORGE’S. That would be the lunchroom. Next to it was a large wholesale plumbing supply outfit.
She lighted a cigarette. “There’s another coffee place in the block behind us and one two blocks ahead. So if she came into George’s, there’s a good chance she works in the office of one of the four places in these two blocks. There’s Comet, the Hildebrand Plumbing Supply, and across the street in the next block is the Warren Paint Company. And directly ahead of us, beyond the next corner, is the Shiloh Machine Tool Company. It seems to be the largest.”
There was a bus zone almost in front of the diner on the other side and one at the corner ahead of us. We had a good view of both. The car parked ahead of us was a small foreign sedan and we could see over it. The sun was spilling into the street now, and the air was warmer. I rolled down the window.
“Here comes one,” she said. A bus passed us and pulled into the curb up ahead. Fifteen or twenty people got off, but they were all men carrying lunch boxes.
“It’s still too early for any of the office force,” she reminded me.
“Yes,” I said. I wondered how much further into left field we could go before we were up against the wall. We were looking for a girl we’d never seen. We weren’t even positive she existed. Red could have been mistaken. And if he weren’t, it was over a month ago. And there was no evidence at all that the girl he’d seen in the Sidelines had had anything to do with Stedman other than that he’d picked her up. He did that all the time.
More buses came by, still loaded with workmen. It was after eight now. I slipped out and put a nickel in the parking meter.
“That Shiloh Machine Tool Company,” she said musingly. “I keep thinking there’s something familiar about the name.”
“Wasn’t it a battle in the Civil War?” I asked.
She gestured impatiently. “Yes, of course. In April of sixty-two, just south of Pittsburgh Landing on the Tennessee, Grant and Buell against Johnston and Beauregard. It was a very bloody and disorganized affair, green troops hacking away at each other in isolated detachments lost in the thickets—” She broke off. “But I didn’t mean to