Offutt looked, and marvelled that he had never noticed this place before since surely, covering assignments or on exploration jaunts, he must have passed it by a score of times. It stood midway of the block. On one side of it was a little pawnshop, its single grimy window filled with the strange objects which persons acquire, seemingly, for pawning purposes exclusively--sword-canes and mandolins with mother-of-pearl insets in them, and moss-agate cuff buttons. On the other side was a trunk store with half of its wares cluttering the narrow-door passage and signs everywhere displayed to inform the public that the proprietor was going out of business and must sell his stock at an enormous sacrifice, wherefore until further notice, perfectly ruinous prices would prevail. It appears to be a characteristic of all trunk-stores that their proprietors are constantly going out of business and that their contents, invariably, are to be had below cost. Between these two establishments gaped a recessed and cavernous entryway flanked by two big stone pillars of a dropsical contour and spanned over at the top by a top-heavy cornice ponderously and painfully Corinthian in aspect. The outjutting eaves rested flat on the coping stones and from there the roof gabled up sharply. Old gates, heavily chained and slanting inward, warded the opening between the pair of pillars, so that the mouth of the place was muzzled with iron, like an Elizabethan shrew's. Above, the building was beetle-browed; below, it was dish-faced. A student of architectural criminology would pause before this facade and take notes. The space inclosed within the skewed and bent gate pickets was a snug harbour for the dust of many a gritty day. There were little grey drifts of it at the foot of each of the five steps that led up to the flagged floor level; secretions of grime covered the barred double doors on beyond the steps, until the original colour was only to be guessed at; scraps of dodgers, pieces of newspaper and tattered handbills adhered to every carved projection at the feet of the columns, like dead leaves about tree boles in the woods. On the frieze overhead might be made out, in lettering that once had been gold-leafed, the line: Scudder's Family Theatre. The words were scarcely decipherable now. Bill-posters had coated every available inch of space with snipes and sheets. Verba shook the gates until the hasps gritted and the chains clanged. "Nobody at home," he said. "I guess the sheriff locked her up when the lawsuits started and then threw away the key. Well, let's scout round. Somebody's sure to know our man; they told me Bateman was a neighbourhood character down here. A cop ought to be able to help us--only I don't see one. Maybe they don't have cops in this street." Speculatively his eyes ranged the vista up and down the block and opposite. He pointed to a saloon diagonally across the way, next door to the first corner south.