But, said Bill Quint, old Elihu didn't know his Machiavelli. He had gone the strike, but he had lost his hold on city and state affairs. To beat the Wobblies he had had to let his lieutenants run wiled. When the fight was over he couldn't shake them off. Personville looked good to them and they took it over. Elihu was an enfeebled czar. He had given his city to his hired thugs, and now he wasn't strong enough to take it away from them. They had won his strike for him and now they took his city for their spoils. He couldn't openly break with them because he was responsible for all they had done during the strike. They had too much on him.
"They?" I asked. "Have they got names?"
"Uh-huh." Quint emptied his glass and pushed his hair out of his eyes. We were both fairly mellow by the time we had got this far. "The strongest of 'em is probably Pete the Finn. Then there's Lew Yard. He's got a lot of bail business, maybe handles hot stuff, and is pretty thick with Noonan, the chief of police. This kid Max Thaler has got a lot of friends, too. Little, slick dark guy with something wrong with his throat—a gambler. They call him Whisper because he does, which is a pretty good reason. Those three about help Elihu run his city, help him more than he wants. But he has to play with them or else."
"This fellow who was knocked off tonight—Elihu's son—where did he stand?"
"Where Papa put him, and he's where Papa put him now."
"You mean his old man had him—?"
"Maybe, at that, but it's not my guess. This Don just came home and began running the papers for the old man. It wasn't like old Elihu, even if he is getting along in years, to let anybody take his city away from him. But he had to be cagey. He brought the boy and his French wife home from Paris and used him as his monkey—a nice fatherly trick. Don starts a clean-up campaign in his papers—clear the city of vice and corruption, which means clear it of Pete and Lew and Max, if it goes far enough. See? The old man's using the boy to pry 'em loose. Well, I guess they got tired of being pried."
"I could find things wrong with that guess," I said.
"Uh-huh, you could find things wrong with everything in Poisonville. Had enough of this gut-paint?"
I said I had and we went down to the street. Bill Quint walked as fair as my hotel with me. In front of it a beefy man with a look of a copper in civvies stood on the curb talking to a main in a Stutz touring car.
"That's Whisper in the car," Quint told me.
I looked past the beefy man and saw Thaler's profile, young, dark, small, with features as regular as if they had been cut with a die—pretty features.
"He's cute," I said.
"Uh-huh," the gray man agreed. "So's dynamite."
III
The Morning Herald gave two pages to Donald Willsson and his death. His picture showed a pleasant, intelligent face with curly hair, smiling eyes and a mouth, a cleft chin and a striped necktie. The story of his death was simple. At ten-thirty-five the previous night he had been shot four times with .32 pistol bullets in stomach, chest and back, in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street and had been dead before anyone reached him.
Residents of the neighborhood who had looked out their windows after hearing the shooting had seen him lying on the sidewalk with a man and a woman bending over him. But he street was too dark for anyone to see anything or anybody clearly. The man and woman had disappeared before any of the neighbors had reached the street, and nobody knew exactly how or in what direction they had gone.
