CHAPTER THREEI got out to the Scylla Club affair about an hour or so after it was scheduled to begin, wanting to be sure that Maddigan, or at least Shulman or Roget, was there before I made my appearance.
The house was situated in an outlying section of town known as Brentwood after old Thomas W. Brent, our fair city’s first multimillionaire, who had made his dough back when millionaires did it the hard way. Brentwood was still in there pitching, but it had really been tops thirty or so years ago. The heavy moola crowd had moved further out; the almost-rich were left behind.
The Brentwood streetcar had taken me down East First Street to Gates Avenue; from there I walked over to number 404. It wasn’t one of those gigantic old relics—mansions, they called them—but it was larger than the av
