"Tomorrow, then.
I'd like to give you a card, but you know how it is."
"Ye-es. I know how it is." She shivered a little more and made a faint sucking noise between her bright lips.
I went out of the store and west on the boulevard to the corner and north on the street to the alley which ran behind the stores.
A small black truck with wire sides and no lettering on it was backed up to Geiger's place.
The man in the very new overalls was just heaving a box up on the tailboard.
I went back to the boulevard and along the block next to Geiger's and found a taxi standing at a fireplug.
A fresh-faced kid was reading a horror magazine behind the wheel.
I leaned in and showed him a dollar: "Tail job?"
He looked me over.
"Cop?"
"Private."
He grinned. "My meat, Jack." He tucked the magazine over his rear view mirror and I got into the cab.
We went around the block and pulled up across from Geiger's alley, beside another fireplug.
There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in overalls closed the screened doors and hooked the tailboard up and got in behind the wheel.
"Take him," I told my driver.
The man in overalls gunned his motor, shot a glance up and down the alley and ran away fast in the other direction.
He turned left out of the alley.
We did the same.
I caught a glimpse of the truck turning east on Franklin and told my driver to close in a little.
He didn't or couldn't do it.
I saw the truck two blocks away when we got to Franklin.
We had it in sight to Vine and across Vine and all the way to Western. We saw it twice after Western. There was a lot of traffic and the freshfaced kid tailed from too far back.
I was telling him about that without mincing words when the truck, now far ahead, turned north again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany Place.
When we got to Brittany Place the truck had vanished.
The fresh-faced kid made comforting sounds at me through the panel and we went up the hill at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes.
Two blocks up, Brittany Place swung to the east and met Randall Place in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage opening on Brittany.
We were going past that and the fresh-faced kid was telling me the truck couldn't be far away when I looked through the arched entrance of the garage and saw it back in the dimness with its rear doors open again.
We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out.
There was nobody in the lobby, no switchboard.
A wooden desk was pushed back against the wail beside a panel of gilt mailboxes.
I looked the names over.
A man named Joseph Brody had Apartment 405.
A man named Joe Brody had received five thousand dollars from General Sternwood to stop playing with Carmen and find some other little girl to play with.
It could be the same Joe Brody.
I felt like giving odds on it.
I went around an elbow of wall to the foot of tiled stairs and the shaft of the automatic elevator.
The top of the elevator was level with the floor.
There was a door beside the shaft lettered "Garage."
I opened it and went down narrow steps to the basement.
The automatic elevator was propped open and the man in new overalls was grunting hard as he stacked heavy boxes in it.
I stood beside him and lit a cigarette and watched him.
He didn't like my watching him.
After a while I said:
"Watch the weight, bud.
She's only tested for half a ton.
Where's the stuff going?"
"Brody, four-o-five," he grunted. "Manager?"
"Yeah.
Looks like a nice lot of loot."