There were a couple of doormen in full livery, a species you seldom see anywhere in San Francisco these days except on Nob Hill; one of them took my card and the message that I was here about Kenneth and Leonard Purcell, and said he would see if Mrs. Prine was in. He used a house phone ten feet away, keeping an eye on me all the while. She was home, all right, because he was on there a good minute and a half, but when he hung up and came back to where I was he said, “Mrs. Prine isn’t available, sir.”
“I saw you talking to her.”
“I’m sorry, sir. She doesn’t wish to see you.”
“Did she say why?”
“No, sir. I’ll have to ask you to leave, please.”
I was getting tired of people asking me to leave places. But it wasn’t his fault—he was only doing his job—so I didn’t pick on him about it. I left with something else to wonder about now: Why had Margaret Prine refused to see me?
I hoofed it all the way back to union Square, not bothering with a cable car because there wasn’t one in sight when I got to California and Powell and because it was an easy walk downhill from there. I ransomed the car, drove over to the Civic Center, and stopped in at the main library, where I checked out a couple of books on the history of snuff and snuff containers. I knew next to nothing about the subject and I figured it would be a good idea if I boned up a little. The more you know about something, the better off you are—in my business especially.
When I got back to the office it was locked up tight. But there was a note on my desk from Eberhardt, typed because his handwriting is so bad you needed a cryptographer to decipher it. The note said:
3:15 P.M.
Ed Berg called. He got the dope on the Church of the Holy Mission and the Moral Crusade. Too involved to put down here, I’ll tell you when I see you. Back around five.
Thanks a lot, Eb, I thought. I crumpled the note, threw it into the wastebasket, and checked the answering machine. Two calls, one for Eberhardt, one for me that didn’t require immediate attention. So I dragged the reverse city directory out of my file cabinet and found an A. Ozimas in the index. He was a resident of one of those big, new high-rise apartment buildings in Pacific Heights. I knew the building—Pacific Heights is my neighborhood; my flat, in fact, was only a few blocks away, on the other side of the hill —and if Ozimas lived there, he was even wealthier than Melanie Purcell had led me to believe. All of the units were condos, and the cheapest would go for something around $250,000.
I considered driving over there, but it was after four and Eberhardt was due back pretty soon. I stayed put and rang up the Hall of Justice. Ben Klein and his partner, Walt Tucker, were still out; the cop I talked to didn’t know when they would be back. I would have to wait until tomorrow to find out what, if anything, the police knew about Alex Ozimas.
My second call was to Tom Washburn at his friend’s place. When I got him on the line I asked if he’d ever heard Leonard speak of Ozimas. He said, “No, I don’t think so. Who’s he?”
“Business acquaintance of Kenneth’s. The man you talked to on the phone—could his accent have been Filipino instead of Latin?”
He thought about that. “I’m not sure,” he said at length. “I don’t know any Filipinos, I don’t know what their accent sounds like.”
“Could sound Spanish, depending on the person speaking.”
“Do you think this man Ozimas might be the caller?”
“Not really. He seems to have quite a bit of money; he wouldn’t need to shake anybody down for a couple of thousand. But I don’t want to overlook any possibilities.”
Washburn wanted to know what I’d found out so far; he sounded pretty low, so I told him in detail how the day had gone. It didn’t do much to cheer him up, but then I wasn’t trying to cheer him up. I’m a detective, not a professional candy-striper. I asked him some questions about the Summerhayeses, but he had never met either of them and couldn’t remember Leonard ever saying much about them. He didn’t know anything about George Collins or Margaret Prine, either.
Directory Assistance gave me a telephone number for George Collins at the address I had in Atherton. I called the number, and a male voice informed me that Mr. Collins was out of town. I asked when he’d be back. The voice said it was not permitted to divulge that information. Thanks a lot, voice, I thought. I left my name and number and asked that Mr. Collins get in touch with me as soon as he returned.
So much for the telephone. I leaned back, put my feet up, and opened one of the books I’d got from the library. After half an hour and some fairly thorough spot-reading, I knew more about snuff and snuff containers than I would ever need to know. Not that the subject matter was dull; it was pretty absorbing stuff, in fact, once you got into it. I knew, for instance, that it had been neither Caucasians nor Orientals who had discovered snuff, but New World Indians; and that tobacco in general had been unknown in Europe until Columbus made his second voyage to the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. I knew that by the last quarter of the sixteenth century tobacco was used in one form or another in all the countries of the world, and “snuffing” was so popular throughout Europe that two Popes found it necessary to ban the practice during church services. I also knew that, according to legend, the first time Sir Walter Raleigh’s manservant saw tobacco smoke pouring out of his master’s mouth and nostrils, he chucked a jug of beer into his face because he feared Raleigh’s brains were on fire.