"Sure."
"Fine! Now what's all this?" nodding his fat face at Albury, the Prosecuting Attorney and Biddle.
I told him briefly. He chuckled and said:
"Well, well, I did Whisper an injustice. I'll have to hunt him up and square myself. So you landed the boy? That certainly is fine! Congratulations and thanks!" He grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down again. "You'll not be leaving our city now, will you?"
"Not for a while."
"That's fine!" he assured me.
I hung around the office a little longer and then went out for breakfast-and-lunch. After that I treated myself to a shave and a hair-cut, hunted up a telegraph office, wired the Agency to send Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan to join me, and then went over to my hotel.
There was another telephone memorandum in my box. Elihu Willsson's number. I called it and was invited out by the secretary.
The old man, wrapped in blankets, was sitting in an armchair at a sunny window. He held out his stubby hand to me and thanked me for catching his son's murderer. I made some more or less appropriate reply.
"The check I gave you last night," he said, "is only fair pay for the work you've done."
"Your son's check more than covered that," I protested.
"Then call mine a reward or bonus."
"We've got a rule against taking rewards or bonuses."
His face began to redden.
"Well, damn it—"
"You haven't forgotten that your check was to cover the expense of investigating crime and corruption in Personville, have you?"
"That was damned nonsense!" he snorted. "We were excited last night. That's off."
"Not with me."
He exploded. First a string of profanity. Then:
"It's my money and I won't have it used for any such damned silliness. If you won't take it for what you've done, give it back to me! I'll stop payment on—"
"Stop yelling at me. You can't stop payment, because it's been certified. We made a bargain. You and your playmates each thought the other was trying to double-cross them. I suppose as soon as the word got out that your son had been killed by Albury you made peace again—deciding that there hadn't been any double-crossing. I expected something like that. That's why I got you sewed up. And you are sewed up.
"I've got ten thousand dollars of your money to work with and I'm going to use it to open Personville up from Adam's Apple to ankles. Your fat chief of police tried to assassinate me twice last night. That's at least once too many. Now I'm going to have my fun. I'll see that my reports are mailed to you regularly. I hope you enjoy reading them."
And I went out of the house with his curses sizzling around my head.
Crime Wanted—Male or Female, relates the further adventures
of the Continental detective in The Cleansing of
Poisonville, by Dashiell Hammett.
Crime Wanted is packed with action and is told as only Mr. Hammett can tell a story.
It will appear in the next issue of Black Mask—the December number.
