place.

On the way down we speculated much on the possibility that we
might be going on a wild goose chase. But the very circumstances
of the call and the promptness with which the man who had called
had seemed to sense when something was wrong and to ring off
seemed to point to the fact that we had uncovered a good lead of
some kind.

After a quick run downtown through the deserted avenues, we
entered a series of narrow and sinuous streets that wound through
some pretty tough looking neighborhoods. On the street corners
were saloons that deserved no better name than common groggeries.
They were all vicious looking joints and uniformly seemed to
violate the law about closing. The fact was that they impressed
one as though it would be as much as one's life was worth even to
enter them with respectable looking clothes on.

The further we proceeded into the tortuous twists of streets that
stamp the old Greenwich village with a character all its own, the
worse it seemed to get. Decrepit relics of every style of
architecture from almost the earliest times in the city stood out
in the darkness, like so many ghosts.

"Anyone who would run a garage down here," remarked Garrick,
"deserves to be arrested on sight."

"Except possibly for commercial vehicles," I ventured, looking at
the warehouses here and there.