“Well, now,” the fat man said. “I hope you’re not going to be obstinate, Mr. Lam. I certainly do hope you’re not going to be obstinate.”

I remained silent. The man with the battered face moved a step closer.

“Now just a minute, Fred,” the chief said. “Don’t get impulsive. Let’s let Mr. Lam tell this in his own way. Don’t bother to interrupt him. Don’t try to hurry him. Now let’s just begin at the beginning, Mr. Lam.”

I said courteously, “Would you mind telling me just what you want to know, and why you want to know it?”

“Now that’s the spirit,” the chief said, beaming all over his face, his little protruding gray eyes looking for all the world as though they’d been crowded out by the layers of fat which had been deposited on his cheeks. “That’s exactly the spirit! We’ll tell you anything you want to know, and you tell us what we want to know. You see, Mr. Lam, we’re business men. We’ve been associated with Morgan Birks, and Morgan Birks has certain—well, you might call them liabilities—certain obligations to us. We don’t want him to forget those obligations. We’re anxious to see that he’s reminded of them. Now you’re employed to serve papers, and we wouldn’t interfere with that for anything on earth, would we, Fred? Would we, John? That’s right. The boys agree with me. We wouldn’t interfere with your work at all, Mr. Lam; but after your work is finished, we want to know where Mr. Birks is.”

“Well,” I said, “I see no reason why I can’t help you—if Mrs. Cool says it’s all right. Of course, she’s my boss, and I wouldn’t want to do anything without her.”

The tall man said, “You’d better let Fred soften him up a bit, Chief. From all we can figure, things are getting hot. It looks as though he’d expected Morgan Birks at the Perkins Hotel. The whole gang moved in there. Sandra Birks, her brother who came out from the East—and had his nose broken in an automobile accident, a bird who said at the desk his name was Holoman, who doesn’t figure in the picture anywhere that we can see, Alma Hunter, Bertha Cool, and this guy. He took Bertha Cool out of the hotel and put her in a taxicab. He was turning around to go back to the hotel when we picked him up.”

The chief said, “You’d better tell us, Mr. Lam, because it’s really important to us, and sometimes my boys get impulsive. No one deplores it more than I do, but you know how boys are. They just will be boys!”