Chapter 4
THE Metropole had never been a first-class hostelry, and now, after twenty or thirty years of serving traveling salesmen and theatrical second-raters, it would have had an awful argument making even the third team. But it was still patronized well enough to support a house d**k. It was he who furnished McCord and Regan most of the meagre details on the shooting of Gus Hammerschlag.
The night clerk contributed nothing beyond the fact that the girl had come in around seven-thirty, got her key and apparently gone up to her room. Shortly after that the clerk had seen her picture in the papers and had called in. On Hammerschlag’s arrival he had given him the girl’s room number. No, he had not heard the shots, nor had he seen the girl go out again.
The house d**k was a short, thick-
