The Cleansing of Poisonville

by Dashiell Hammett

The

Cleansing of Poisonville

By Dashiell Hammett

In recent years there have been too many examples where civic politics has degenerated into a business for profit. This story is the first, complete, episode in a series dealing with a city whose administrators have gone mad with power and lust of wealth. It is, also, to our minds, the ideal detective story—the new type of detective fiction which Black Mask is seeking to develop. You go along with the detective, meeting action within, watching the development as the plot is unfolded, finding the clues as he finds them; and you have the feeling that you are living through the tense; exciting scenes rather than just reading a story. Poisonville is written by a master of his craft.

I first heard Personville called Poisonville in 1920, in the Big Ship in Butte, by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey. But he also called his short a shoit, so I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later, when I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same twist, I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. In 1927 I went to Personville and learned better.

Using one of the phones in the station, I called the Herald, asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived.

"Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?" He had a pleasantly crisp voice. "It's 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west."

I promised to do that. Then I went up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city.

It wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. But since then the smelters, whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south, had yellow-smoked everything into a uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of 40,000 people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood in the middle of Personville's main intersection—Broadway and Union Street—directing traffic with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up.

At nine-thirty I caught a Broadway car and followed the directions Donald Willsson had given me. His house was set in a hedged grass-plot on the corner. The maid who opened the door told me he wasn't home. While I was explaining that I had an appointment a slender blonde woman of something less than thirty, in green crepe, came to the door. When she smiled her blue eyes didn't lose their stoniness. I repeated my tale to her.

"My husband isn't in now." A barely noticeable accent slurred her s's. "But if he's expecting you he'll probably be home shortly."

She took me upstairs to a room on the Laurel Avenue side of the house, a square room with a lot of books in it. We sat in leather chairs, half facing each other, half facing a burning coal-grate, and she set about learning my business with her husband.

"Do you live in Personville?" she asked first.

"No—San Francisco."

"But this isn't your first visit?"

"Yes."

"Really? How do you like our city?"

"I haven't seen enough of it to know." That was a lie. I had. "I just got in this afternoon."

Her shiny eyes stopped prying while she said:

"I'm afraid you'll find it a dreary place." She shrugged and returned to her digging with: "I suppose all mining towns are like this. Are you engaged in mining?"

"Not just now."

She looked at the clock over the fire and said:

"It's inconsiderate of Donald to bring you out here and then keep you waiting, at this time of night, long after business hours."

I said that was all right.

"Though perhaps it isn't a business matter," she suggested.

I didn't say anything. She laughed—a brief laugh with something sharp in it.

"I'm ordinarily not curious about other people's affairs, really," she said gaily. "But you're so excessively secretive that you goad me on. You aren't a bootlegger, are you? Donald changes them so often."

I let her get whatever she could out of a grin. Downstairs a telephone bell rang. Mrs. Willsson stretched her green-slippered feet out toward the burning coal and pretended she hadn't heard the bell. I didn't know why she thought that necessary.

She began: "I'm afraid I'll ha—" and stopped to look at the maid in the doorway. The maid said Mrs. Willsson was wanted at the phone. She excused herself and followed the maid out. She didn't go downstairs, but spoke over an extension within earshot of my seat.

I heard: "Mrs. Willsson speaking ... Yes ... I beg your pardon? ... Who? ... Can't you speak a little louder? ... What? ... Yes ... Yes ... Who is this? ... Hello! Hello!" The telephone hook rattled. Then her quick steps sounded down the hallway.

I set fire to a cigarette and stared at it until I heard her going downstairs. Than I went to a window, lifted the edge of the blind, and looked out at Laurel Avenue and at the small white garage that stood in the rear of the house on that side. Presently a slender woman in dark coat and hat came into sight, hurrying from house to garage. She drove away in a Buick coupé. It was Mrs. Willsson. I went back to my chair and waited.

Three quarters of an hour went by. At five minutes past eleven automobile brakes screeched outside. Two minutes later Mrs. Willsson came into the room. She had taken off hat and coat. Her face was white, her eyes almost black.

"I'm awfully sorry." Her little tightlipped mouth moved jerkily. "You've had all this waiting for nothing. My husband won't be home tonight."

I said I would get in touch with him at the Herald in the morning and went away—wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.

II

I walked over to Broadway and got into a street car. Three blocks north of my hotel I got off to see what the crowd was doing around a side entrance of the City Hall. Thirty or forty men and a sprinkling of women stood on the sidewalk looking at a door marked Police Department—a mixed crowd—men from mines and smelters still in their working clothes, gaudy boys from poolrooms and dance-halls, sleek men with cunning pale faces, men with the dull look of respectable fathers of families, a few just as respectable and dull women, and some ladies of the night.

On the edge of this congregation I stopped beside a square-set man in rumpled gray clothes. His face was grayish, too, even to the thick lips, though he didn't look much more than thirty—a broad, thick-featured face with intelligence in it. For color he depended on a red Windsor tie that blossomed over his gray flannel shirt.

"What's the rumpus?" I asked this fellow.

He looked at me carefully before he answered, as if to make sure that the information was going into safe hands. His eyes were as gray as his shirt, but not so soft.

"Don Willsson's gone to sit on the right hand of God—if God don't mind looking at the bullet holes in him."

"Who put them there?"

The gray man scratched the side of his neck and said: "Somebody with a gun."

I would have tried to find a less witty informant in the crowd if the red tie hadn't interested me.

"Sure. I'm a stranger in town," I said. "Hang the Punch and Judy on me—That's what strangers are for."

"Mr. Donald Willsson, publisher of the Morning and Evening Heralds, son of the well-known Mr. Elihu Willsson," he recited in a rapid sing-song, "was found lying in Hurricane Street a little while ago, very dead, having been shot several places. Does that keep your feelings from being hurt?"

"Yeah. Thanks." I put out a finger and touched a loose end of his tie. "Mean anything? Or just wearing it?"

"I'm Bill Quint."

"The hell you are!" I exclaimed, trying to placing the name. "By gad, I'm glad to meet you!"

I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another. The red card was the one I wanted. It identified my as Henry F. Brannan (a lie), member in good standing of Industrial Workers of the World, Seaman's No.----. I passed it to Bill Quint. He read it carefully, front and back, returned it to me, and looked me over from hat to shoes—not trustfully.

"He's not going to die again," he said. "Which way are you going?"

"Any."

We walked down the street together, turned a corner, strolled along—aimlessly so far as I knew.

"What brought you in here, if you're a sailor?" he asked casually.

"Where'd you get that idea?"

"There's the card."

"Yeah. I got another that proves I'm a timber-beast. If you want me to be a miner I'll get one for that tomorrow."

"No, you won't. I run 'em here."

"Suppose you got a wire from Chi?" I asked.

"To hell with Chi. I run 'em here. Drink?"

"Only when I can get it."

We went through a restaurant, up a flight of stairs, and into a narrow room with a long bar and a row of tables. Bill Quint nodded and said, "Hello," to some of the boys and girls at the tables and bar and guided me into one of the booths that line the opposite wall. We spent. the next two hours drinking whiskey and talking.

The gray man didn't think I was a good Wobbly, didn't think I had any right to the red card I had shown him and the other one I had mentioned. As chief muckademuck of the I. W. W. in Personville he considered it his duty to find out how-come, and not to let himself be pumped about radical affairs while he was doing it. That was all right with me. I was more interested in Personville affairs. He didn't mind discussing them. They were something he could hide behind between casual pokings into my business with the red cards, my radical status.

What I got out of him amounted to this:

For forty years old Elihu Willsson had owned Personville heart, skin, guts and soul. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the Morning Herald and the Evening Herald, the city's only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance in the city. Along with this other property he owned a United States Senator, a couple of Representatives and most of the State Legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.

Back in the war days, when the I. W. W. was blooming, they had lined up a lot of the Personville Mining Corporation's help. The help hadn't been pampered, and they used their new strength to demand the things they wanted. Old Elihu gave in to them and bided his time. In 1919 it came. Business was slack. He didn't care whether he head to shut down for a while or not. He cut wages, lengthened hours, generally kicked the help back into their old place.

Of course the help had yelled for action. Bill Quint had been sent out from Chicago to give it to them. He had been against a strike—a walk-out. What he advised was the old sabotage racket, staying on the job and gumming things up from the inside. But the Personville crew wouldn't listen to him. They wanted to put themselves on the map, make labor history. So they struck.

The strike lasted eight months. Both sides bled plenty. The Wobblies had to do their own bleeding. Old Elihu could hire strike-breakers, gunmen, National Guardsmen and even parts of the regular army to do his. When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker. 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. The police found that six shots had been fired at Willsson. The two that had missed him had hit a vacant house in front of which he head been shot. Tracing the course of the bullets from those two shot,s the police had learned that the shooting had been done from a narrow alley across the street. Outside of that nobody knew anything.

Editorially, the Morning Herald gave a brief summary of the head man's short career as a civic reformer and expressed its belief that he had been removed by some of the people who didn't want Personville cleaned up. The Herald said that the chief of police could best show his own innocence by speedily catching the murderer. The editorial was both blunt and bitter.

I finished it with my breakfast coffee, jumped a Broadway car, dropped off at Laurel Avenue, and turned don toward the dead man's house. I was half a block from it when something changed my mind.

A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me, showing a dark profile that was pretty—Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown-covered rear leg vanishing into the lat Donald Willsson's vestibule.

I went back to Broadway, found a drug-store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson's residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be Elihu's secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father. When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to present myself.

The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary—a noiseless, slim, sharp-eyed man of forty—brought me into the bedroom.

The old man's head was small and almost perfectly round under its thick crop of close-cut white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too close to his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square, meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers—a short, compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered, blunt, pink hand. His eyes were round, blue, small, and watery, But they looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and under the bushy white eyebrows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn't the sort of man whose pocket you'd try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.

He ordered me into a bed-side chair with a two-inch jerk of his round head, chased the secretary away with another, and said:

"What was is this about my son?" His voice was harsh. His chest had too much and his mouth not enough to do with his words for them o be very clear.

"I'm with the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch," I told him. "We got a five hundred dollar check from your son and a letter asking that a man be sent over to do some work for him. I'm the man. I called him up when I got in yesterday afternoon. He told me to come to his house last night. I went there. He didn't show up. When I got downtown I learned he had been killed."

Elihu Willsson regarded me suspiciously and asked:

"Well, what of it?"

"While I was waiting your daughter-in-law got a phone message, went out, came back with what looked like blood on her shoe, and told me it was no use waiting, her husband wouldn't be home."

He sat straight up in bed and called Mrs. Willsson a flock of things. When he ran out of words of that sort he still had some breath left, so he used it to shout at me: "Is she in jail?"

I said I didn't think so.

"What the hell are you waiting for, damn you?" was his response to that.

When a man, who is too old or too sick to be smacked, curses you, you can either curse back or laugh. I laughed and said:

"Evidence."

"Evidence! What do you want? You—"

"Don't be such a chump," I interrupted his bawling. "Why should she have killed him?"

"Because she's a French hussy! Because—"

The noiseless secretary's frightened face appeared at the door.

"Get out o' here!" the old man roared at it, and the face went.

"She jealous?" I asked before he could go on with his ranting. "And if you don't yell maybe I'll be able to hear you anyway. My deafness is a lot better since I've been eating yeast."

He put a first on top of each hump his thighs made in the covers and pushed his square chin at me.

"Old as I am and sick as I am," he said very deliberately, "I've a mind to get up and kick you down the stairs—"

I paid no attention to that and repeated:

"Was she jealous?"

"She was," he said, not shouting now, "and she's domineering, and spoiled, and suspicious, and greedy, and mean, and unscrupulous, and deceitful, and selfish, and damned bad—altogether damned bad."

"Any reason for her jealousy?"

"I hope so," he said bitterly. "I'd hate to think a son of mine would be faithful to her. Though likely enough he was. He'd do things like that."

"But you don't know any reason why she should have killed him?"

"Don't know any?" He was bellowing again. "Haven't I just been telling you that—"

"Yeah. But none of that means anything. It's kind of childish."

The old man flung the covers back from his legs and started to get out of bed. Then he thought better of it, raised his red face, and roared:

"Stanley!"

The door slid open to let the secretary pop silently in.

"This this ---- out!" his master ordered, waving a fist at me.

The secretary turned to me. I shook my head and suggested: "Better get help."

He frowned. We were about the same age. He was weedy, nearly a head taller than I, but fifty pounds lighter. Some of my hundred and ninety pounds were fat, but not all of them. The Secretary fidgeted, smiled apologetically, and ran out to follow my advice.

"What I was about to say," I told the old man. "I intended talking to your son's wife again this morning, but I saw Thaler go in there, so I put off my call."

Elihu Willsson carefully pulled the covers up over his legs again, learned his head back on the pillows, screwed his eyes up at the ceiling, and said:

"Hm-m-m, so that's the way it is, is it?"

"Mean anything?"

"She killed him," he said emphatically. "That's what it means."

Feet made noises in the hall, huskier feet than the secretary's. I waited until they were just outside the door and then started a sentence:

"You were using your son to dig up dirt on—"

"Get out o' here!" the old man yelled at those in the doorway. "And keep that damned door closed!"

"Now what was I using my son for?" he demanded when we were alone again.

"To knife Thaler, Yard and the Finn."

"That's a lie. I have the boy the papers. He did what he liked with them."

"You ought to explain that to the gang. They'd believe you—oh, yeah!" "Whatever they believe, what I'm telling you is so."

"Well, what of it? Your son won't come back to life just because he was killed by mistake—if he was."

"That woman killed him!"

"Maybe."

"Damn you and your maybes! She did! If you're going to fool around with any other numbskull ideas you might just as well go back to 'Frisco now. You and your damned—"

"I'll go back to San Francisco when I'm ready," I said unpleasantly. "And it won't be just now. I'm at the Great Western Hotel. Don't bother me unless you want to talk sense for a change."

His curses followed me down the stairs. The secretary hovered around the bottom step, smiling apologetically.

"A fine old rowdy," I growled.

"A remarkably vital personality," the secretary murmured.

IV

From the old man's house I went down to the Herald and hunted up the murdered man's secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.

She said she hadn't known about the check and letter that had brought me from San Francisco.

"But then," she explained, "Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was—I—I don't think he trusted anybody here—completely."

"Not you?"

She flushed and said: "No. But of course he didn't know any of us very well. He had been here only such a short time."

"There must have been more to it than that," I protested.

"Well," she bit her lip and made a row of forefinger prints down the polished edge of the dead man's desk top, "his father wasn't—wasn't in sympathy with what he was doing, and his father really owned the papers, so I guess it was natural for Mr. Donald to think some of the employes might be more loyal to Mr. Elihu than to him."

"The old man wasn't in favor of the clean-up campaign? Then why did he stand for it, if the papers were his?"

She bent her head to study the fingerprints she had made, and her voice was sol low that I had to lean closer to catch the words.

"It's—it's not easy to understand unless you know— The last time Mr. Elihu was taken sick he sent for Donald—Mr. Donald. Mr. Donald had lived in Europe most of his life, you know. Dr. Pride had told Mr. Elihu that he'd have to turn all his business affairs over to someone else, so he cabled his son to come home. But when he got here Mr. Elihu couldn't make up his mind to let go of everything. But he wanted Mr. Donald to stay, so he made him publisher of the papers. Mr. Donald liked that because he had been interested in journalism in Paris, and when he found out how terrible everything was herein civic affairs and so on—he started that reform campaign. He didn't know—he had been away since he was a boy—and he didn't know—he didn't—"

"He didn't know his father was in it as deep as anybody else," I helped her along.

She squirmed a little over her examination of the fingerprints on the desk, nodded reluctantly, and went on:

"Mr. Elihu and he had a quarrel. Mr. Elihu told him to stop stirring things up, but Mr. Donald wouldn't. Maybe he would have if he had known—all there was to know. But I don't suppose it would ever have occurred to him that his father could have been really—deep in it. And Mr. Elihu wouldn't tell him. I guess it would be hard for a father to tell a son a thing like that. He threatened to take the papers away from him. But Mr. Donald said he'd start one of his own, and he said then he'd know his father had reasons for not wanting the light turned on Personville. He got terribly angry. I don't think Mr. Elihu was going to do anything, but he got sick again, and things went along like they did."

"Donald Willsson didn't confide in you?"

"No." It was almost a whisper.

"Then you learned this—where?"

"I'm trying—trying to help you find the murderers," she said earnestly, looking at me with chestnut eyes that had pleas in them. "You've no right to—"

"Just now you'll help me most by telling me where you got this dope."

She stared at the desk again, chewing her lower lip. I waited. Presently she said:

"My father is Mr. Elihu's secretary."

"Thanks."

"But you mustn't think that we—"

"It's nothing to me," I assured her. "What was Willsson doing in Hurricane Street last night at a time when he had a date with me at his house?"

She said she didn't know. I asked her if she had been with him when he told me, over the phone, to come to his house at ten o'clock. She had.

"What did he do after that? Try to remember every least thing that was said and done from then until you left at the end of the day."

She leaned back in her chair, shut her eyes and wrinkled her forehead.

"You called up—if it was you he told to come to his house—around two o'clock. Mr. Donald dictated some letters after that—one to a paper mill, one to Senator Keefer about some changes in post office regulations and— Oh, yes! He went out for about twenty minutes, a little before three o'clock. But just before he went he wrote out a check."

"For whom?"

"I don't know, but I saw him writing it."

"Where's his check book? Carry it with him?"

"No, it's here." She jumped up, went around to the front of his desk and tried the center drawer. "Locked."

I joined her in front of the drawer, straightened out a wire clip, and with that and a blade of my knife fiddled the drawer open. The girl took out a thin flat First National Bank check book. The last used stub was marked $5,000. Nothing else. No name. No explanation.

"He went out with this check," I said, "and was gone twenty minutes. Long enough to get to the bank and back?"

"It wouldn't take him more than five minutes to get there."

"What else happened just before he wrote the check? Did he get any mail, any messages, any phone calls?"

"Let's see." She shut her eyes again. "He was dictating a letter and— Oh, how stupid of me! He did have a phone call, and he said, 'Yes, I can be there at ten, but I shall have to hurry away to keep an engagement.' Then again he said, 'Very well, at ten.' That was all he said except, 'Yes, yes.' several times."

"Man or woman he was talking to?"

"I don't know."

"Think. There'd be a difference in his tone."

She thought and said: "Then it was a woman."

"Did Willsson leave before you did in the evening?"

"No. He— I told you my father is Mr. Elihu's secretary. He and Mr. Donald had an engagement for that evening—something about the papers' finances. My father came in a little after five. They were going to dinner together after they left here, I think."

That's all the Lewis girl could give me. The rest of my pumping brought up nothing. We frisked the dead man's desk—nothing. I went up against the girl at the switchboard—nothing. I put in half an hour working on city editors and the like—nothing.

I went away from the Herald tickling my brains with the information I had got from the girl. Not a bad haul—if a fair share of it happened to be true.

V

In the First National Bank I got hold of an assistant cashier named Albury, a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so.

"I certified the check for Willsson," he said after I had unloaded my story. "It was drawn to the order of Dinah Brand—$5,000."

"Dinah Brand—know who she is?"

"Oh yes, I know her."

"Mind telling me what you know about her?"

"Not at all. I'd be glad to, but I'm already eight minutes overdue at a meeting with—"

"Suppose you had dinner with me this evening?"

"Glad to," he said.

"Seven, at the Great Western?"

"Righto."

"I'll run along then," I said, "but tell me, has she an account here?"

"Yes, and she deposited the check this morning. The police have it now."

"And where does she live?"

"1232 Hurricane Street."

I said, "Well, well!" and, "See you tonight," and went away.

My next stop was in the office of the chief of police in the City Hall. Noonan, the chief, was a fat man with twinkling greenish eyes set in a round, red, jovial face. When I told him what I was doing in his city he seemed glad of it, and gave me a hand-shake, a cigar and a comfortable chair.

"Now," he said when we were settled, "tell me who killed the man."

"His secret's safe with me."

"You and me both," the chief said cheerfully through smoke. "But what do you guess?"

"You know more about it than I do. Tell me what you know and I'll tell you what I guess."

"Fair enough. 'T won't take long to tell. Willsson got a $5,000 check in Dinah Brand's nae certified yesterday afternoon. Last night he was shot and killed by bullets from a .32 pistol less than a block from her house. People that heard the shooting saw a man and a woman bending over the remains. Bright and early this morning the said Dinah Brand deposits the said check in the bank. Well?"

"Who is this Dinah Brand?"

The chief dumped the ash off his cigar in the center of his desk, flourished the cigar in his at hand, and said:

"A soiled dove, as the fellow says, a de luxe hustler, a big-league golddigger."

"Gone up against her yet?"

"Nope. There's a couple of angles to be gathered in. So we're just keeping an eye on this baby and waiting. This I've told you is under the hat."

"Yeah. Now listen to this." And I told him what I had seen and heard while waiting in Donald Willsson's house the previous night.

When I had finished the chief bunched his fat mouth, whistled softly, and exclaimed:

"Man, that's an interesting thing you've been telling me. So it was blood on her slipper, was it? And she said her husband wouldn't be home, did she?"

"That's what I took it for," I replied to the first question, and, "Yeah," to the second.

"And have you talked to her since then?" he asked.

"No. I was up that way this morning, but a young fellow named Thaler went into the house ahead of me, so I put off my visit."

"Grease us twice! Are you telling me the Whisper was there?" His greenish eyes glittered happily.

"Yeah."

He threw his cigar on the floor, stood up, planted his fat hands on the desk top and leaned over them toward me, oozing delight from every pore.

"Man, man, you've done something!" he purred. "Dinah Brand is this Whisper's woman! Let's me and you just go out and kind of talk to the widow."

VI

We climbed out of a police department touring car in front of Mrs. Willsson's. The chief stopped for a second with one foot on the bottom step to look at the black crepe hanging over the bell. Then he said: "Well, what's got to be done has got to be done," and we went up the steps.

Mrs. Willsson wasn't anxious to see us, but people usually see the chief of police if he insists. This one did. We were taken upstairs to where our lady sat in the library. She was dressed in black. Her blue eyes had frost in them.

Noonan and I took turns mumbling condolences, and then he began:

"We just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. For instance, like where'd you go last night?"

She looked disagreeably at me, then back to the chief, frowned, and spoke haughtily:

"May I ask why I am being questioned in this manner?"

I wondered how many times I had heard that question asked while the chief, disregarding it, went on amiably:

"And then there was something about one of your shoes being stained. The right one, or maybe the left. Anyway it was one or the other."

A muscle began to twitch in her upper lip.

"Was that all?" the chief asked me. Before I could reply he made a clucking noise with his tongue and turned his genial face to the woman again. "I almost forgot—there was a matter of how you knew your husband wouldn't be home."

She rose a little unsteadily, holding the back of her chair with one hand.

"Under the circumstances, I'm sure you'll excuse—" "'S all right." The chief made a big-hearted gesture with one beefy paw. "We don't want to bother you. Just where you went, and about the shoe, and how you knew he wouldn't be home. And, come to think of it, there's another—what Thaler wanted here this afternoon."

The woman sat down again, very rigidly. The chief looked at her—a tender smile making funny curves and lines in his fat face. After a little while her shoulders began to relax, her chin went lower, a curve came into her back. I moved a chair over to face her and sat in it.

"You'll have to tell us, Mrs. Willsson," I said, making it as gravely sympathetic as I could. "It's all hopelessly muddled without these things explained."

Her body jerked stiff and straight in the chair again, and if her eyes were half so hard as they looked you could have cut diamonds with them.

"Do you think I have anything to conceal?" She turned each word out very precisely, except that the slight foreign accent slurred the "s" sound. "I did go out. The stain was blood. I knew my husband was dead. Thaler came to see me about my husband's death. Are your question's answered now?"

"Not fully." I shook my head. "We knew all that. Please, Mrs. Willsson, this is as distasteful to us as to you. Won't you help us get it over with?"

"Very well!" Her blue eyes looked cold defiance into mine. She took a deep breath and spat out words like rain pattering on a tin roof. "While we were waiting for Donald I had a phone call. It was a man who wouldn't give his name. He said Donald had gone to the house of a woman named Dinah Brand with a five-thousand dollar check. He gave me her address. I drove out there and waited down the street in the machine until Donald came out.

"While I was waiting I saw Thaler, whom I knew by sight. He went to that woman's house, but did not go in. He went away. Then Donald came out and walked down the street. I intended to drive home before he could get there. I had just started the engine when I heard the shots, and I saw Donald fall. I ran over to him. He was dead. I was frantic. Then Thaler came. He said if I was found there they would say I had killed him. He made me hurry back to the car and drive home. Is that enough?"

"Practically," Noonan assured her. "What did Thaler say this afternoon?"

"He urged me not to say anything." Her voice had suddenly become very small and flat. "He said either of us would be suspected if anyone knew we were there, because Donald had been killed coming from that woman's house after giving her money."

"Where did the shots come from?"

"I don't know. I saw nothing—except when I looked up—Donald falling."

"Did Thaler fire them?"

"No," she said quickly, and then mouth and eyes spread. She put a hand to her breast. "I don't know. I didn't think so, and he said he didn't. I don't know where he was. I don't know why I thought he hadn't."

"What do you think now?"

"He—he may have."

The chief winked at me, an athletic sort of wink in which all his facial muscles took part, and cast back a little farther:

"And you don't know who called you up?"

"He wouldn't give his name."

"Didn't recognize his voice?"

"No."

"What kind of voice was it?"

"He spoke in an undertone, as if afraid of being overheard. I had trouble understanding him."

"He whispered?" The chief's mouth hung open as the last sound had left it, and his greenish eyes sparkled greedily between their pads of fat.

"Yes—a hoarse whisper."

The chief shut his mouth with a click, opened it again to say persuasively:

"You've heard Thaler talk…"

She raised her head and looked at the chief.

"It was he!" she cried. "It was he!"

Noonan turned his broad back on her and beckoned me over to a window.

"We'll take her down to the Hall and have her go over it again with the Prosecuting Attorney and a stenog," he muttered triumphantly.

"All right." I looked at my watch. "But I've got a date for seven. I'm going to run along. I'll see you in the morning, or you can get me at the Great Western if anything turns up."

"Well, be good," he said.

VII

The assistant cashier, young Albury, was sitting in the lobby when I reached the hotel. We went up to my room, had some ice-water brought, used its ice to put chill in Scotch, lemon-juice and grenadine, and then went down to the dining-room.

"Now tell me about the lady," I said when we were working on the soup.

"Have you seen her yet?" he asked.

"Not yet."

"But you've heard something about her?"

"Only that she's an expert in her line."

"She is," he agreed. "You'll go see her, of course. You'll be disappointed at first. Then, without being able to say how or when it happened, you'll find you've forgotten your disappointment, and the first thing you know you'll be telling her your life's history, and all your troubles and hopes." He laughed with boyish ruefulness. "And then you're caught—absolutely caught."

"Thanks for the warning. How'd you come by the information?" He grinned shamefacedly across his suspended soup spoon and confessed:

"Bought it."

"Then I suppose you paid plenty. I hear the lady likes dinero."

"She's money-mad, all right, but somehow you don't mind it. She's so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there's nothing disagreeable about it. You'll understand what I mean when you get to know her."

"Maybe. Mind telling me how you came to part with her?"

"No, I don't mind. I spent it all, that's how."

"Cold-blooded like that?"

His face flushed a little. He nodded.

"You seemed to have taken it well, anyway," I said.

"There's nothing else to do." The flush in his pleasant young face deepened and he spoke hesitantly. "And it happens I owe her a lot for it. She—I'm going to tell you this—I want you to see this side of her. I had a little money. After that was gone—you must remember I'm not very old and I was head over heels—there was the bank's money. I had— You don't care whether I had actually done anything or just thinking about it. Anyhow, she found it out. I never could hide anything from her. And that was the end."

"She gave you the air?"

"Yes, she did. So if it hadn't been for her you might have been hunting for me now. I owe her that!" He wrinkled his forehead earnestly. "You won't say anything about this—you know what I mean. I just wanted you to know that she had her good side, too."

"Maybe she has. Or maybe it was that she didn't think she'd get enough to pay for the chance of being caught in a jam."

He turned that over in his mind for a minute and shook his head.

"How about Dan Rolff?" he objected.

"Who's he?"

"A down-and-outer—t. b. He's supposed to be her brother, or half-brother, or something of the sort. He lives there. She keeps him. She's not in love with him or anything of the sort. She just found him somewhere and took him in."

"Mark one up for here. Any more?"

"There was that radical chap she used to play with. It's a cinch she never got much money out of him."

"What radical chap was this?"

"The chap who came here in 1919 to run the strike—Quint."

"So he's still on her list?"

"That's supposed to be the reason he stayed after the strike was over."

"So he's still on her list?"

"No. She told me she was afraid of him—he had threatened to kill her."

"Has she had everybody in town on her string at one time or another?" I asked.

"Everybody she wanted," he said, and he said it seriously.

"Well, what about her and Donald Willsson?"

"I don't know a thing about that—absolutely nothing. He had never issued any checks to her before, that I know of."

"Then he was probably recent?"

"Probably—but why did he have the check certified?"

I didn't know. I could have made some guesses, but none that I wanted to put into words. During the rest of the dinner we talked back and forth over the ground we had already covered, and I picked up nothing else of any value. A eight-thirty young Albury ran off to keep a date.

Bill Quint had told me he was living in the Miners' Hotel in Forest Street. I waled down that way and was lucky enough to run into him in the street half a block or so from the hotel.

"Hello," I hailed him, "I was just coming down to see you."

He stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, growled, "So you're a lousy gum-shoe," pursed his gray lips, and by forcing breath out through them made a noise like a rag tearing.

"That's the bunk!" I complained. "I come all the way down here to rope you and you're smarted up!"

"What'd you want to know this time?" he demanded.

"I'll save my breath. You'd only lie to me. So long." I walked back to Broadway, found a taxi, and told the driver to take me to 1232 Hurricane Street.

VIII

My destination was a gray frame cottage with an iron picket fence around it. When I rang the bell the door was opened by a very thin man with a very tired face that had no color in it except a red spot the size of a half-dollar high on each cheek. This, I thought, is the lunger, Dan Rolff.

"I'd like to see Miss Brand," I told him.

"What name shall I tell her?" His voice was a sick man's voice, also an educated man's.

"It wouldn't mean anything to her. I want to see her about Willsson's death."

He looked at me with level, tired, dark eyes and said: "Yes?"

"I'm from the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. We're interested in the murder."

"That's nice of you," he said ironically. "Come in."

I went in—into a ground-floor room where a young woman sat at a table with a lot of papers on it. The room was disorderly, cluttered up. There were too many pieces of furniture in it, and none of them seemed to be in its proper place.

"Dinah," the lunger introduced me, "this gentleman has come from San Francisco to inquire into the late Mr. Willsson's demise on behalf of the Continental Detective Agency."

The young woman got up from the table, kicked a couple of newspapers out of her way, and came toward me with one hand out.

She was a couple of inches taller than I, which would make her about five feet eight, with a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five, already

beginning to show signs of wear. Little lines ran across the corners of her big ripe mouth. Other lines made nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue, and a bit blood-shot. Her coarse brown hair needed trimming and was parted crookedly. Her upper lip had been rouged higher on one side than the other. She wore a dress of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners, or they had popped open. There was a run in the front of her left stocking.

This was Dinah Brand, Poisonville's Cleopatra, if there was any truth in what I had been told.

"His father sent for you, of course," she said as she moved a pair of lizard-skin slippers and a cup and saucer off a chair to make room for me. Her voice was soft, lazy.

I told her the truth:

"Donald Willsson sent for me. I was waiting to see him when he was out becoming killed."

"Don't go away, Dan," she called to Rolff. He came back into the room. She returned to her place at the table. He sat on the opposite side, leaning his thin face on a thinner hand, staring at me without interest. She drew her brows together, making two creases between them, and asked: "You mean he knew someone was going to try to kill him?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "He didn't say what he wanted—maybe just help in the clean-up."

"But do you—?"

I made a complaint:

"It's no fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff—does all the asking."

"I like to find out what's going on," she said, with a little laugh gurgling down in her throat.

"I'm that way, too," I replied. "For instance, I'd like to know why you made him have the check certified."

Very casually, Dan Rolff shifted in his chair, leaning back, lowering his thin hands out of sight below the table's edge.

"So you found out about that?" She crossed left leg over right and looked down. Her eyes focused on the run in her stocking. I'm going to stop wearing 'em! I paid five bucks for these socks yesterday. Now look at the damned things! Every day—runs! runs! runs!"

"It's no secret," I said. "I mean the check, not the runs. Noonan's got it."

She looked at Rolff, who stopped watching me long enough to nod once.

"If you talked my language," she drawled, looking at me through narrowed lashes, "maybe I could give you some help."

"Maybe I could talk it if I knew what it was."

"Money," she explained. "The more the better. I like it."

I got proverbial:

"Money saved is money earned. I can save you trouble and dough."

"I can save my own. What I need is more."

"Giving it to lawyers isn't saving it."

"That doesn't mean anything to me," she said.

"The police haven't told or asked you anything about the check?"

She shook her head no.

"I thought not," I said. "Noonan's figuring on hanging the rap on you as well as Whisper."

"Don't scare me," she lisped, "I'm only a child."

"Noonan knows that Thaler knew Willsson brought the check here, that Thaler, came while he was here but didn't get in, that Thaler was hanging around the neighborhood when Willsson was shot, and that Thaler and a woman were seen bending over the dead man."

The girl picked a pencil up from the table and thoughtfully scratched her cheek with it. It made little black lines over the rouge. Rolff's eyes had suddenly lost their weariness. They were bright, feverish, fixed on mine. He leaned forward, but kept his hands out of sight below the table.

"Those things," he said softly, "concern Thaler, not Miss Brand."

"Thaler and Miss Brand are not strangers," I pointed out. "Willsson brought a five thousand dollar check here and was killed leaving. That way, Miss Brand might have had trouble cashing it—if Willsson hadn't been thoughtful enough to have it certified."

"Say!" the girl objected, "if I'd been going to kill him I'd have done it in here where nobody could have seen it! Or waited till he got out of sight of the house! What kind of dumb onion do you take me for?"

"I'm not altogether satisfied you killed him," I assured her. "I'm just telling you that the fat chief means to hang it on you."

"What are you trying to do?"

"Learn who killed him—not who might have or could have—who did."

"I could give you some help," she said, "but there'd have to be something in it for me."

"Safety," I reminded her, but she shook her head.

"I mean it would have to get me something in a financial way," she went into details. "It'd be worth something to you, and you ought to pay, even if not a lot."

"Can't be done." I grinned at her. "Forget your bank roll for one and go in for charity. Pretend I'm Bill Quint."

Dan Rolff started up from his chair, his lips white as the rest of his face, his eyes burning. He sat down again when the girl laughed, a lazy, good-natured laugh.

"He thinks I didn't make any profit out of Bill, Dan!" She leaned forward and put a hand on my knee. "Listen, old timer. Suppose you knew far enough ahead that a company's employees were going to strike, and when, and then far enough ahead when they were going to call the strike off. Could you take that information and some capital to the stock market and do yourself some good playing with the company's stock? You bet you could!" she wound up triumphantly. "So don't go round thinking Billy boy didn't pay his way."

"Well, you've been spoiled. I'm not going to make you worse."

"What's the use of being so tight?" she demanded. "It's not like it had to come out of your own pocket. You've got an expense account to charge it to, haven't you?"

I said nothing. She frowned at me, at the run in her stocking, and at Rolff. Then she said to him:

"Maybe he'd loosen up if he had a drink."

The thin man got up and went out of the room.

IX

Dinah Brand pouted at me, prodded my shin with her toe, and explained:

"It's not so much the money. It's he principle of the thing. If a girl's got something that's worth something to somebody, she's a boob if she doesn't collect."

I grinned.

"Why don't you be a good guy?" she coaxed.

Dan Rolff came in with a siphon, a bottle of gin, some lemons, and a bowl of cracked ice. We had a drink apiece. The lunger went away. The girl and I wrangled over the money question while we had more drinks. I kept trying to bring the talk around to Thaler and Willsson. She kept bringing it back to the money she deserved. It went on like that until the gin-bottle was empty. My watch said it was a quarter after one.

She chewed a piece of lemon peel and said for the thirtieth or fortieth time:

"it won't come out of your pocket. What do you care?"

"It's not the money," I assured her. "It's the principle of the thing."

She made a face at me and set her glass where she thought the table was. She was eight inches wrong. I don't remember whether the glass broke when it hit the floor, or what happened to it. But I do remember that I took her missing the table for my cue to launch another attack.

"Another thing," I opened up, "I'm not dead sure I really need what you can tell me. I'd like to have it, but maybe I can get along without it."

"It'll be nice if you can," she replied, "but don't forget I'm the last person who saw him alive, besides the murderers."

Neither of us was talking as clear as it looks here.

"You're mistaken, my dear," I said. "His wife saw him come out, walk away and get shot."

"His wife?"

"Yeah. She was sitting in a machine across the street."

"How did she know he was here?"

"She says Thaler phoned her that Willsson was coming here—or had come—with a five thousand dollar check."

"You're trying to kid me. Max couldn't have known it!"

"I'm telling you what she told Noonan and me."

The girl spit what was left of the lemon peel out on the floor, further disarranged her hair by running her fingers through it, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and then slapped the table.

"All right, Mr. Knowitall, I'm going to play with you! You can think it's not going to cost you anything, but I'll get mine before we're through. You think I won't?" she challenged me, peering at me as if I were a block distant.

This was no time to start an argument, so I said, "I hope you do." I think I said it three or four times, very earnestly.

"I will. Now listen to me. You're drunk and I'm drunk, and I'm just drunk enough to tell the truth. I'll tell you anything that you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. If I like a person I'll tell 'em anything they want to know. Just ask me! Go ahead, ask me!"

I did: "What did Willsson give you five thousand dollars for?"

"For fun!" She leaned back and laughed heartily. Then: "Listen to this, old darling, it's a humdinger and I want you to get it the first time. Donald was hunting for scandal on the home talent. I had some stuff stuck away, some affidavits and things that I thought might be good for some jack some day. I'm a girl that likes to pick up a piece of change when she can. So I put these affidavits and things away in the old sock.

"So when this Donald began putting the boys on the pan for hunching, I let him know that I had some dirt on them, and it was for sale. He came to bargain and I gave him enough of a look at some of them to let them know they were good. And they were good! Then we talked how much. He wasn't as tight as you—nobody ever was—but he was a little bit close. So the deal hung fire, till yesterday.

"Then I gave him the rush—phoned him and told him I had another customer for the stuff, and that if he wanted it he could have it by showing up at ten that night with five thousand smacks—either cash or a certified check. That was hooey, but he fell for it. He was a nice boy in his way, but he didn't know much. You want to know why it had to be cash or a certified check, huh? All right, I'll tell you. I'll tell you anything you want to know. That's the kind of girl I am. Always was."

She went on for five o more minutes telling me in detail just exactly what and which sort of girl she was and always had been, and why. I finally cut in:

"I knew you were regular as soon as I saw you. A good girl, I told myself, a good girl. Now why did it have to be cash or a certified check?"

She shut one eye, waggled a forefinger at me, and said:

"So he couldn't stop payment. Because he couldn't use the stuff I sold him. It would have put his old man in jail along with the rest of 'em." She thumped my knee and laughed hilariously. "A good one, huh? The stuff I sold him would have nailed old Elihu tighter than anybody else!"

I laughed with her while I fought to keep my head above the gin I had guzzled.

"Who else would it nail?"

"The whole damned gang of 'em." She waved a hand in the air. "Max and Lew Yard and Noonan and Pete the Finn and old Elihu—the whole blooming crew!"

"Did Max know what you were doing?"

"Of course not—nobody knew but Willsson and me."

"Sure of that?"

"Sure I'm sure. You don't think I was going to brag about it ahead of time, do you?"

"Who do you think knows about it now?"

"I don't care," she said. "It was only a joke on him. That's all I meant it for."

"Yeah. But the gents whose secrets you sold won't see anything funny in it. Noonan's trying to hang the killing on you and Thaler. What means he found the stuff in Willsson's pocket. The rest of the gang already thought that old Elihu was using his son to chase them out of the city with that clean-up campaign, didn't they?"

"Yes, sir!" she said. "And I'm another one that thinks it!"

"You're probably wrong, but hat doesn't matter. Now if Noonan found your stuff in young Willsson's pocket, and found out about the check, why shouldn't he add 'em up to mean that you and Thaler had gone over to old Elihu's side. See? That's why he's pointing the rap at you and Thaler."

"I don't care what he thinks," she said obstinately. "It was only a joke. That's all I meant it for. Willsson wouldn't have found out he couldn't use the stuff without hurting the old man. It was only a joke—that's all it was."

"That's good. You can go to the gallows with a clear conscience. Just what was this stuff you sold him?"

But she had gone stubborn on me.

"I've told you enough," she said. "I've told you too much."

"Haven't you seen Thaler since the murder?"

"No. But Max didn't kill him, even if he was around."

"Why?"

"Lots of reasons. First place, Max wouldn't have done it himself. He'd have had somebody else do it, and he'd have been off some place else with an alibi nobody could shake. Second place, Max packs a .38, and anybody he sent on the job would have had that much gun or more. What kind of a gunman would use a .32?"

"Then who did kill him?"

"I've told you all I know. And remember, it's going to cost you something before you're through. I'm going to cash in somewhere."

"I hope you do," I said as I stood up. "You deserve it. You've practically cleaned up the job for me."

"You mean that you know who killed him?"

"Yes, thanks, though there are a couple of things I"ll have to cover before I make the pinch."

"Who? Who?" She stood up, suddenly almost sober, tugging at my lapels. "Who did it? Tell me!"

"No, I won't do that."

She let go my lapels, put her hands behind her, and laughed in my face.

"All right. Try to figure out which part of what I've told you is true."

I thought Albury had been right when he said that after you had been with this girl a while you forgot to be disappointed in her. I said:

"Thanks for the part that is, anyway. Don't let Noonan job you, and if Max means anything to you you ought to pass him the tip. And thanks for the gin."

X

It must have been close to two o'oclock of a crips morning when I said, "Goodnight," to Dinah Brand at her door and started to foot it down-town to my hotel. The first half a block of the distance went very nicely. Then somebody shot at me—twice.

I dived into a dark doorway.

I wasn't exactly sober, but my head was clear enough for me to know that it was close to my present location that Donald Willsson had died the previous night, and that the present shooter had a heavier gun than a .32.

I wasn't exactly drunk, but I had too much gin in me for effective gun-fighting in the dark with somebody I couldn't see.

I crowded myself back into a corner of my dark vestibule and wondered what I ought to do about it. My foot upset a milk-bottle. A window was lifted squeakily down the street. The two things clicked together in my mind.

I picked up the milk-bottle, swung it underhand, let it go at the front of the house across the street. It smashed through the glass of a second-story window. That was capital!

I put a hand around the front of my crouching-place, found a bell-button, pushed it. Behind me the bell made a jangling clamor in the house.

I made a megaphone of my hands pointed it at the street, and bellowed:

"Help! Help! Police! Help! Help!"

Windows began to go up along the street. In the house whose doorway I occupied a man's voice, shrill with fright, whined: "Go away from there! Go away, or I'll call the police!"

I thought that a swell idea.

"Do that," I encouraged him, "and the fire department and the public health service."

The whining voice made no reply. On hands and knees I peeped out into the street. The occupants of most of the houses seemed to be looking out, up and down the street, hunting for a repetition of last night's murder. That was fine! I didn't think anybody wanted my life badly enough to assassinate me in front of all these witnesses.

I jumped up, trotted down the front steps, waved my hand gratefully at the audience, and went away from the neighborhood. I turned most of the corners I came to, making sure that nobody turned them after me. Presently I got lost, but I kept on turning corners. After a while I found myself down in Union Street, four or five blocks from my hotel. I got back to it without anything happening to me.

With my key the night clerk gave me a memorandum that asked me to call Poplar 605. I knew the number, had called it earlier, it was Elihu Willsson's.

"How long has it been here?" I asked.

"Since a little after one o'clock."

That sounded urgent. I went back to a booth and put in the call. The secretary answered, and told me the old man desired my company at once. I promised to hustle, asked the night clerk to get me a taxi, and went up to my room for a couple of shots of Scotch. I would rather have been clod sober. But I wasn't, and if the night held more work for me I didn't want it to catch me in the raggedy condition that sobering-up brings. Two snifters revived me a lot. I poured more of the King George into a flask, pocketed it, and went down to the taxi.

Elihu Willsson's house was lighted from top to bottom. The secretary opened the door before I could get my finger on the button. His thin body was shivering in pale blue pajamas and dark blue bathrobe. His face was full of excitement.

"Hurry!" he begged. "Mr. Willsson is waiting." His dark eyes had something horrified in them. "And please, will you try to persuade him to let us remove the body!"

I nodded and followed him up to the old man's bathroom. He was in bed as before, but now a black automatic pistol lay on the covers under one of his hands.

As soon as I appeared he took his head off the pillows, leaned forward, and barked at me:

"Have you got as much guts as you've got gall?"

His face was an unhealthy dark red. The film was gone from his eyes. They were hard and hot.

I let his question wait while I looked at the corpse on the floor between door and bed. A short thick-set man in brown, half on his side, half on his back, with dead eyes staring at the ceiling from under the visor of a gray cap. A piece of his jaw had been knocked off. His chin was tilted to show where another bullet had gone through tie and collar to make a hole in his neck. One hand was bent under him. The other still held a blackjack as big as a milk bottle. There was a lot of blood.

I looked up from this mess at the old man again. His grin was both vicious and idiotic.

"You're a great talker, he said. "I know that. A two-fisted, you-be-damned man with your words! But have you got anything else? Have you got the guts to match your gall? Or is it just the gab you've got?"

There was no use trying to get along with the old boy. I scowled and reminded him:

"Didn't I tell you not to bother me unless you wanted to talk sense for a change?"

"You did, my boy!" There was a foolish sort of triumph in his sneer. "And I'll talk you your sense. I want a an to clean this pig-sty of a Personville for me, to smoke out the big rats and the little ones. It's a man's job. Are you a man?"

"What's the use of getting poetic about it?" I growled. "If you've got an honest job to be done, and want to pay an honest price for it, maybe I'll take it. But a lot of howling about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything."

"All right. I want Personville emptied of crooks and grafters. Is that plain enough language for you?"

"You didn't want that last week," I said. "Why do you want it this week?"

"Nobody that ever lived can tell Elihu Willsson where he's got to get on and where he's got to get off," he blustered at the top of his voice. "That's why!" He turned loose a cloud of profanity. "While they keep their places I let 'em alone. But when they begin to think Personville belongs to them, and that they can tell me what I've got to do, then it's time to show them, the -----, who Personville does belong to. I built this city with my own hands, and I'll keep it or I'll wipe it off the side of the mountain." More cursing. "I'll show them what they'll get out of their threats!" He pointed at the dead body on the floor. "I'll show 'em there's still a sting in the old man!"

I wished I was sober. The old man's clowning puzzled me. I couldn't put my finger on the something under it.

"Was he from your friends?" I asked, nodding at the corpse.

"I only talked to him with this," he boasted, patting the gun on the bed, "but I reckon he was."

"How did it happen?"

"It happened simple enough. I heard the door opening, and I switched on the light, and there he was, and I shot him, and there he is."

"What time?"

"It was about one o'clock."

"And you've let him lie there all this time?"

"Yes, that I have!" The old man laughed savagely and began blustering again: "Does the sight of a dead man turn your stomach? Or is it his ghost you're afraid of?"

I looked at him and laughed. I had it. The old boy was scarred—scarred stiff. That's why he blustered. That's why he hadn't let them take the corpse away. He wanted it there to look at, to keep panic away—visible proof of his ability to defend himself. Now I knew where I stood.

"You really want the burg cleaned up?" I asked.

"I said I did and I do."

"I'll have to have an absolutely free hand—no favors to anybody—handle the job as I please. And I'll have to have a ten-thousand-dollar retainer to cover expenses and service charges."

"Ten-thousand-dollar retainer! Why in hell should I pay that much money to a man I don't know from Adam, a man who's done nothing I know of but talk?"

"Be serious. When I say, "Me,' I mean the Continental Detective Agency."

"You do, do you? Well, if I know your Continental Detective Agency, then they ought to know me, and they ought to know I'm good for—"

"That's not the idea! These people you want taken to the cleaners were your friends last week. Maybe they will be again next week. I don't care about that. But we're not going to play politics for you. We're not starting a job and having it blow up on us. If you really want the burg ventilated you'll plank down enough cash to pay for a complete job. Any that's left over will be returned. That's the way it'll have to be. Take it or leave it."

"I'll damned well leave it," he bawled.

He let me get half-way down the stairs before he yelled for me. I went back.

"I'm an old man," he grumbled. "If I was ten years younger, I'd—" He glared at me and worked his lips together. "I'll give you your damned check."

"And a free hand?"

"And a free hand."

"We'll get it done now. Where's your secretary?"

Willsson pushed a button on his bedside table and the secretary silently appeared from wherever he had been hiding. I told him: "Mr. Willsson wants to draw a ten-thousand dollar check to the order of the Continental Detective Agency. Also he wants to write a letter to them, saying that the ten thousand dollars are to be used in investigating crime and so forth in Personville, and giving the Agency full power to conduct the investigation as they see fit."

The secretary looked questioningly at the old man, who scowled and nodded his round white head.

"But first," I told the secretary as he moved to the door, "you'd better phone the police that we've a dead burglar here. And call Mr. Willsson's doctor."

The old man flared up:

"I don't want any damned doctors!"

"You're going to have a nice shot in the arm so you can sleep," I promised him, stepping over the corpse to take the black gun from the bed.

He said he wouldn't, making a long and profane story of it. He was still going strong when the secretary returned with the check and a typed letter. The old man gave up his cursing long enough to put a shaky signature on each. I had them folded in my pocket when the police arrived.

XI

The first copper into the room was the chief himself, fat Noonan. He nodded amiably at Willsson, shook hands with me, and looked at the dead man with twinkling green eyes.

"Well, well," he said. "It's a good job he did, whoever did it—Yakima Shorty. And will you look at the sap he's toting?" He kicked the big blackjack out of the dead man's hand. "Big enough to sink a battleship. You drop him?" he asked me.

"No, Mr. Willsson."

"Well, that certainly is fine," he congratulated the old man. "You saved a lot of people a lot of troubles, including me. Pack him out, boys," he said to the four men behind him.

The two in uniform picked Yakima Shorty's remains up by legs and armpits and went away with him, while one of the others gathered up the blackjack and a flashlight that had been under the body.

"If everybody did that to their prowlers, it would certainly be fine," the chief babbled on. He produced three cigars, stuck one at me, threw one over on old Elihu's bed, and put the other in his own mouth. "I was just wondering where I could get hold of you," he told me as we lighted up. "I got a little job ahead that I thought maybe you'd like to be in on." He put his mouth close to my ear and whispered: "Going to pick up Whisper. Want to go along?"

"I do."

"I thought you would. Hello, Doc!" He should hands with a man the secretary had just ushered in—a little plump man with a tired round face and eyes that still had sleep in them.

The doctor went over to the bed, where one of Noonan's men was asking Willsson all about the shooting. I followed the secretary out into the hallway and asked him:

"Any men in the house besides you?"

"Yes—a chauffeur, the gardener, and the Chinese cook."

"Let one of 'em stay in the old man's room tonight. I don't think you'll have any more excitement, but no matter what happens don't leave the old man alone. And don't leave him alone with Noonan or any of Noonan's men."

The secretary's mouth and eyes popped wide.

"What time did you leave Donald Willsson the night he was killed?" I asked.

"At precisely ten minutes after nine." He seemed to have been expecting the question.

"You were with him from five o'clock till then?"

"From about a quarter after five. We went over some financial statements and that sort of thing in his office until seven o'clock. Then we went to Bayard's and finished our business over our dinners. He left at ten minutes after nine, saying he had an engagement."

"What else did he say about this engagement?"

"Not a thing."

"Didn't give you any hint of where he was going, who he was going to meet?

"He only said he had an engagement."

"And you didn't know anything about it?"

"No. Why? Did you think I did?"

"I thought he might have said something." I switched back to tonight's doings: "What visitors did Willsson have today—not counting the one he shot?"

"You'll have to pardon me." The secretary shifted his feet, smiling apologetically. "I can't tell you that without Mr. Willsson's permission. I'm sorry."

"Weren't some of the local powers here—say, Lew Yard, Pete the Finn, and—?"

The secretary shook his head, repeating: "I'm sorry."

I gave it up, said, "We won't fight about it," and started back toward the bedroom door. The doctor came trotting out, buttoning his overcoat.

"He will sleep now," he said hurriedly. "Someone should stay with him. I shall be in early in the morning." And he ran down the stairs.

I went into the bedroom. The chief and the man who had question Willsson where standing beside his bed. The chief grinned as if he were glad to see me. The other man scowled. Willsson was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.

"That's about all there is here," Noonan said cheerfully. "What say we mosey along?"

I agreed and said, "Goodnight," to the old man. He said, "Goodnight," without looking at me. The secretary came in with a tall sunburned young man who looked like a chauffeur. The chief, the other sleuth and I went downstairs and out to a black touring car at the curb. The other man—Noonan called him McGraw—drove. The chief and I sat in the back seat.

"We'll make the pinch along about daylight," the chief explained to me as we rode. "Whisper's got a joint over on King Street. He generally leaves there about daylight. We could crash the place, but that'd mean gun-play, and it's just as well to take it easy. So we'll pick him up when he leaves."

I wondered if he meant to pick him up or pick him off. I asked:

"You've got enough on him to make the rap stick?"

"Enough?" He laughed good-naturedly. "If what the Willsson dame gave us ain't enough to swing him I'm a pickpocket."

I thought of a couple of wise-crack answers to that, but kept them to myself.

Our ride lasted half an hour. The chief didn't ask any questions bout my progress, about what I had done since I left him with Mrs. Willsson. That was clumsy. He had told me he was keeping an eye on Dinah Brand. I had been snhot at leaving her house. My guess was that I had been shot at by one of Noonan's bulls. Otherwise, how-come none of the men he had watching the house had come to my rescue? The chief's silence now made my guess look better—just as too many questions would have made it look better. I wondered why he was getting careless.

While I was wondering our machine came to rest under a line of trees in a dark street. We got out and walked down to the corner. A burly man in a gray overcoat, with a gray hat pulled far down over his eyes, came to meet us.

"Whisper phoned Donohoe that he's in his joint and going to stay there," the burly man told the chief. "If you think you can pull him out, he says, try it."

Noonan chuckled, scratched an earlobe, and asked pleasantly: "How many would you say was in there with him?"

"Fifty, anyhow."

"Aw, now! There wouldn't be that many this time of morning."

"The hell there wouldn't!" the burly man snarled. "They've been drifting in since midnight."

"Is that so? A leak somewhere. Maybe you oughtn't to have let 'em in."

"Maybe I oughtn't!" The burly man was mad. "But I did what you told me. You said to let anybody go in or out that wants to, but when Whisper showed to—"

"To arrest him," the chief said.

"Well, yes," the burly man agreed, and looked savagely at me.

More men joined us and we held a talk-fest. Everybody was in bad humor except the chief. He seemed to enjoy it all. I didn't know why.

Whisper's joint was a three-story brick building in the middle of the block, between two two-story buildings. The ground floor of his joint was occupied by a cigar store that served as entrance and cover for the gambling establishment upstairs. Inside, if the burly man's information was to be depended on, Whisper had collected half a hundred friends, presumably loaded for a fight. Outside, Noonan's force was spread around the building, in the street in front, in the alley in back, and on adjoining roofs.

"Well, boys," the chief said amiably after the talk had gone around in circles for a while, "I don't reckon Whisper wants trouble any more than we do, or he'd have tried to shoot his way out before this, if he's got that many with him, though I don't mind saying I don't think he has—not that many."

The burly man said: "The hell he ain't!"

"So if he don't want trouble," Noonan went on, "maybe talking might do some good. You run over, Nick, and see if you can't argue him into being peaceable."

The burly man said: "The hell I will!"

"Phone him then," the chief suggested.

The burly Nick growled, "That's more like it," and went away. When he came back he looked completely satisfied with his message.

"He says," he reported, "'Go to hell!'"

"Get the rest of the boys down here," Noonan said cheerfully. We'll knock it over as soon as it gets light."

XII

The burly Nick and I went around with the chief while he placed his men. I didn't think much of them—a shabby, shifty-eyed lot with no enthusiasm for the job ahead of them.

The sky became a faded gray. The chief, Nick and I had stopped in a plumber's doorway diagonally across the street from our target. Whisper's joint was dark, blank, with the cigar store blinds down over window and door, all upper windows curtained.

"I hate to star this without giving Whisper a chance," Noonan said. "He's not a bad kid. But there's no use o' me trying to talk to him. He never did like me much."

He looked at me. I said nothing.

"You wouldn't want to make a stab at it?" he asked.

"I'll try it."

"That's fine of you! I'll appreciate that, if you will. You just see if you can't talk him into coming along peaceable. You know what to say—for his own good and all that—like it is."

"Yeah," I said, and started across the street toward the cigar store, taking pains to let my hands be seen swinging empty at my sides.

Day was still a little way off. The street was the color of smoke. My feet seemed to be making a lot of noise on the paving. I stopped in front of the door and knocked the glass with a knuckle, not heavily. The green blind down inside the door made a mirror of the glass. In it I saw two men moving up the other side of the street.

No sound came from inside. I knocked louder, then slid my hand down to rattle the knob.

Advice came from indoors:

"Get away from there while you're able."

It was a muffled voice, but probably not Thaler's because it wasn't a whisper.

"I want to talk to Thaler," I said.

"Go talk to the fat----that sent you!"

"I'm not talking for Noonan. Is Thaler where he can hear me?"

A pause. Then the muffled voice "Yes."

"Listen, Thaler: I'm the Continental op who tipped Dinah Brand off that the chief was framing you. I want five minutes' talk with you. I've got nothing to do with Noonan except to queer his game if I can. I'm alone. I'll drop my gun in the street if you say so. Let me in."

I waited. It depended on whether the girl had got to him with the story of my call. I waited what seemed a long time. Then the muffled voice came:

"When we open, come in quick! And no stunts!"

"All set!" I said.

The latch clicked.

I plunged in with the door.

Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and windows tinkled everywhere.

Somebody tripped me. As I fell I twisted around to face the door. My gun was in my hand before I hit the floor.

Fear gave me three brains and half a dozen eyes. These bird couldn't help thinking I was taking part in a trick of Noonan's.

Across the street the burly Nick had stepped out of a doorway to pump lead at us with both hands.

I steadied my gun-hand wrist on the floor. The detective's burly body showed over the front sight. I squeezed.

Nick stopped shooting. He put both hands tight to his belly and piled down on his face.

Hands on my ankles dragged me back. The floor scraped pieces off my chin. The door slammed shut. Some comedian said:

"Uh-huh, people don't like you."

"I wasn't in on that," I said earnestly through the racket.

A husky whisper came through the darkness:

"Dropping Big Nick squares you. Hank, you and Slats keep an eye on things down here. The rest of us might as well go upstairs."

We went back through another room, into a passageway, up a flight of carpeted stairs, and into a large room that held a green-topped table banked for crap-shooting. This room was lighted, and had no windows.

There were five of us. Thaler sat down and lighted a cigarette—a small, dark young man with a face that was pretty in a chorus-man way until you took another look at the thin, hard mouth. An angular blond kid of hardly more than twenty, in tweeds, sprawled on his back on a couch and blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. Another boy, just as blond and just as young, but not so angular, was busy straightening his tie, smoothing down his yellow hair. A thin-faced man of thirty, with little or no chin under a wide, loose mouth, wandered up and down the room humming Rosy Cheeks and looking bored.

The gunfire had stopped.

"How long is Noonan going to keep this up?" Thaler asked. His voice was a hoarse whisper, but there was no great amount of emotion in it—just a little annoyance.

"He's after you this trip," I gave my opinion. "He means to see it through." Thaler smiled a thin, contemptuous smile.

"Maybe he thinks so now, but the longer he thinks it over the smaller his chance of hanging a one-legged rap like that on me will look." "He's not figuring on proving anything in court."

"What, then?"

"You're to be knocked off resisting arrest or trying to escape. He won't need much of a case after that."

The thin lips twisted themselves into another contemptuous smile. This lad didn't seem to think much of the fat man's deadliness.

"He's getting though in his old age. Any time he rubs me out I deserve rubbing. What's he got against you?"

"I'm getting to be a nuisance around town, too."

"Too bad," Thaler said. "Dinah told me you were a pretty good guy—except kind of Scotch with the roll."

"I had a nice visit. Will you tell me what you know about Donald Willsson's killing?"

"Sure," he said coolly. "His wife turned the trick."

"You saw her?"

"Saw her the next second—with the rod in her hand."

"That's no good to me, Thaler. And it's no good to you. If you've got it rigged right maybe it would work in court, but you're never going to tell it there. If Noonan takes you at all he'll take you stiff. Give me low-down I only need your angel to clean up the job."

He leaned forward, his dark eyes seeming to draw together.

"Are you that hot?"

"With your story I'll be ready to make the pinch—if I can get out."

He dropped his cigarette on the floor, mashed it under his foot, lighted another, and studied its red end.

"Mrs. Willsson said it was me that phoned her about the check?" he asked.

"She said that after Noonan had persuaded her. But she believes it now—maybe."

He put some smoke in and out of his lungs, brushed a flake or two of ash off his black suit with a hand that was very small and very manicured, nodded to himself, and said:

"A man phoned me that night. I don't know who he was. Said Willsson had gone to Dinah's with a check for five grand. What the hell did I care? But, see, it was funny that somebody I didn't know phoned me about it. So I went around. Dan stalled me away from the door. That was all right. But still it was funny that guy phoned me. I went up and took a plant in a doorway. I saw Mrs. Willsson's car down the street, but didn't know it was her in it then.

"Willsson came out and walked down the street. I didn't see the shots, but I heard 'em. Then this woman jumps out of the car and runs over to him. I knew she hadn't done the shooting. I ought to have beat it. But curiosity got me. When I saw it was Mrs. Willsson I went over. That was a bull, see? So I had to make an out for myself, in case something slipped. I strung the woman. That's all there was to it—on the level."

"Thanks," I said. "That's what I came for. Now the trick is to get out of here without being mowed down by Noonan's crew."

"No trick at all," Thaler assured me. "We go any time we want to."

"Well, I'm ready now. And if I were you, I'd go, too. You don't think much of Noonan, but he might pull something. And if you'll take a sneak and hide out till noon his frame-up will be a wash-out."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Thaler put a hand in his pants pocket and dragged out a fat roll of bills. He counted of a hundred or two, some fifties, twenties, tens, and then held them out to the chinless man.

"Buy us a getaway, Jerry," he ordered. "And you don't have to give anybody any more dough than they're used to."

Jerry took the sheaf of bills, picked up a hat from the table, and strolled out. Half an hour later he strolled in again and returned part of the sheaf to Thaler, saying casually:

"We wait in the kitchen until we get the office."

We went down to the kitchen. It was dark there. More men joined us.

Presently something hit the door.

Jerry opened it and we went down three steps into the back yard. It was almost full daylight. There were ten of us in the party.

"This all?" I asked Thaler.

He nodded.

"Nick said there were fifty of you."

"Fifty to stand off that crummy force?" he asked scornfully.

A copper in uniform held the back gate open for us, muttering nervously:

"Hurry it up a little, boys, please!"

I was willing to oblige him, but everybody else ignored the request. We crossed the alley, were beckoned through another gate by a beefy man in brown, passed through a house, out into the next street, and climbed into a touring car that stood at the curb.

One of the blond boys drove. He knew what speed was.

"I want to be dropped off near the Great Western," I said.

The blond driver looked at Whisper, who nodded. We turned the next corner, and five minutes later I got out in front of my hotel.

"See you later," Thaler said, and the car slid away. The last I saw of it was its police department license plate vanishing around a corner.

XIII

It was half-past five. I wet up Broadway to where an unlighted electric sign said Hotel Windom, mounted a flight of steps to the second floor office, left a call for ten o'clock, was shown into a shabby room, moved some of the Scotch from my flask to my stomach, and took Elihu Willsson's ten-thousand dollar check and my gun to bed with me.

When my call roused me I dressed, went up to the First National Bank, found young Albury, and asked him to certify the old man's check for me. He kept me waiting a while, so I supposed he phoned Willsson's residence to find out of the check was on the up-and-up. Finally he brought it back to me, properly scribbled on.

I sponged an envelope, put Willsson's letter and check in it, addressed it to the Agency in San Francisco, stuck a stamp on it and went out to drop it in the mail-box on the corner.

Then I returned to the bank and said to the boy:

"Now, sonny, tell me why you killed him."

"Cock Robin or President Lincoln?" he asked, smiling.

"You're not going to admit off-hand that you killed Willsson?"

"I don't want to be disagreeable," he laughed, "but I'd rather not."

"That makes it bad," I complained. "We can't stand here and talk very long without being interrupted. Who's the stout party with the cheaters coming this way?"

The boy's face pinkened, and he said: "Mr. Dutton, the cashier."

"Introduce me."

The boy looked uncomfortable, but he called the cashier's name. Dutton—a large man with a smooth pink face, a fringe of white hair around an almost totally bald pink head, and rimless nose-glasses came over to us. The assistant cashier mumbled the introduction. I shook Dutton's hand without losing sight of the boy.

"I was just saying," I addressed Dutton, "that we ought to have a more private place for our talk. He probably won't confess till I've worked on him a while, and I don't want everybody in the bank to hear me yelling at him."

"Confess?" The cashier's tongue showed between his lips.

"Sure." I kept my voice and manner bland, mimicking Noonan. "Didn't you know that Albury is the fellow who killed Donald Willsson?"

A polite smile at what he thought a foolish joke started in back of the cashier's glasses—changed to puzzlement when he looked at his assistant. The boy was rouge-red and the grin he was forcing his mouth into was a terrible thing.

Dutton cleared his throat and said heartily:

"It's a splendid morning. Splendid weather."

"But isn't there a private room where we can talk?" I insisted.

Dutton jumped nervously and questioned the boy:

"What—what is this?"

Young Albury mumbled something unintelligible.

"If there isn't," I said, "I'll have to take him down to the City Hall."

Dutton caught his glasses as they slid down his nose, jammed them back in place, sputtered:

"Come back here!"

We followed him down the length of the lobby, through a gate, and into an office whose door was marked President. Old Elihu's office. Nobody was there. I motioned Albury into one chair and picked another for myself. The cashier fidgeted with his back against the desk, facing us.

"Now, sir, will you please explain this," he said, but his words weren't as impressive as they were meant to be.

"We'll get around to that, I hope," I told him and turned to Albury. "You're the only person I've run across who knew Dinah Brand intimately, and who knew about the check in time to phone Mrs. Willsson and Thaler. You were in love with Dinah and were given the gate. Willsson was shot with a .32. Banks like that caliber. I'm going to have a gun-sharp compare the bank's guns with the bullets taken out of Willsson. Maybe the gun you used wasn't a bank gun. I think it was. Maybe you didn't put it back. Then there'll be one missing, but I think you returned it to its place next morning."

The boy had his control back. He looked boldly at me and said nothing. That wouldn't do.

"I know you were nuts about this girl," I said, "because you confessed to me that it was only because she refused to be tangled up in it that you didn't help yourself to—"

"Don't! Please don't!" The boy's face was sick white. My murderer didn't like being labeled Thief in front of his boss.

I looked at the boy, making myself sneer until his eyes went down. Then I let him have the other barrel:

"You know you killed him. You know if you used a bank gun—and if you put it back. If you did, you're nailed right now, without an out. An expert with a microscope and a micrometer can prove absolutely that a certain bullet was fired from a certain gun. And an expert is going to look at the bank guns. If you didn't use a bank gun, I'm going to nail you anyhow. If you did, you're nailed now!

"All right. I don't have to tell you whether you've got a chance or not. You know! But here's something. Noonan is framing Thaler for the job. He can't convict him, but the frame-up is strong enough that if Thaler is killed resisting arrest, the chief will be in the clear. That's what he means to do. Thaler stood off the whole force all right in his King Street joint. He's standing them off now, unless they've got to him. The first copper that gets to him—exit Thaler. If you figure you've got a chance to beat your rap—and you want to let Thaler be killed for you—that's your business. But if you know that you haven't got a chance—and you haven't if the gun can be found—for God's sake give Thaler one by clearing him!"

"I'd like—" Albury didn't look up and his voice was as an old man's. "You'll find the gun in Harper's cage. I didn't—" He looked up, saw Dutton, and stopped. I scowled at the cashier and asked him:

"Will you get the gun?"

He ran out as if he was glad to go.

"I didn't mean to kill him," the boy said. "I don't think I did—though I took the gun with me. I was—what did you say?—nuts about Dinah. It was worse some days than others. The day Willsson came in with the check was one of the bad ones. All I could think about was that I lost her because I had no more money, and he was taking five thousand dollars to her. I watched her house that night and saw him go in. I had the gun in my pocket and was afraid of what I might do.

"Believe me when I say I didn't want to do anything. But it was one of the bad days, and I couldn't think straight—couldn't think of anything except that I had lost her because my money was gone, and he had taken five thousand dollars to her. And there was the bank gun in my pocket, and I was afraid of what I might do.

"I knew Willsson's wife was jealous—everybody knew that. I thought if I called her up and told her—I don't know what I thought then, but I went and called her up. And then I called Thaler. I didn't know whether he was—I only knew that I had heard that he and Dinah—were—you know—so I called him up. Then I went back and watched her house again. I saw Mrs. Willsson come, and then Thaler, and saw them both stay watching the house. I was glad of that.

"Then Willsson came out and walked down the street. I looked up at where Mrs. Willsson and Thaler were. Neither did anything, and he was walking away. I knew then why I had wanted them there. I had thought that maybe they would do something, and I wouldn't have to. But they didn't do anything. And he was walking down the street—away. Maybe if one of them had gone over and said something to him, or even followed him, I wouldn't have done anything. But they didn't. I remember taking the gun out of my pocket. I don't remember anything else until I was running up the alley. When I got home I found the gun was empty—all the cartridges had been fired. I cleaned it and reloaded it and put it back in the paying teller's cage the next morning."

"Well," I said, "you're certainly a swell actor. Nobody would have guessed you were still in love with the girl from the way you talked to me about her."

He winced.

"That wasn't acting," he said slowing. "After—after I was in danger—facing the gallows—she—she didn't seem so—so important. I couldn't understand why I had—you know and that spoiled the whole thing—made it—and me—cheap."

XIV

I took Albury and the gun down to the City Hall in a taxicab. In the chief's office we found one of the men who had been along on the storming party last night—a red-faced lieutenant named Biddle. He goggled at me with fishy blue eyes, but asked no questions about my part in last night's doings.

Biddle called in the Prosecuting Attorney. The boy was repeating his story to these officials when the chief of police arrived, looking as if he had just crawled out of bed.

"Well, it certainly is fine to see you!" Noonan pumped my hand up and down while patting my back jovially with his other hand. "You had a narrow one last night—the rats! I was sure they'd got you till we kicked in the doors and found the place empty. Tell he how those son-of-a-guns got out of there!"

"One of your men let them out the back door and sent them away in a department car. They took me along so I couldn't tip you off."

"One of my men did that?" He didn't seem very surprised. "Well, well! If I line 'em up in front of you, will you pick him out for me?" "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.