I stood up and a voice said:
“Sit down.”
It was a hoarse whispering voice—Thaler’s.
I turned to see him standing in the dining room doorway, a big gun in one of his little hands. A red-faced man with a scarred cheek stood behind him.
The other doorway—opening to the hall—filled as I sat down. The loose-mouthed chinless man I had heard Whisper call Jerry came a step through it. He had a couple of guns. The more angular one of the blond kids who had been in the King Street joint looked over his shoulder.
Dinah Brand got up from the chesterfield, put her back to Thaler, and addressed me. Her voice was husky with rage.
“This is none of my doing. He came here by himself, said he was sorry for what he had said, and showed me how we could make a lot of coin by turning Noonan up for you. The whole thing was a plant, but I fell for it. Honest to Christ! He was to wait upstairs while I put it to you. I didn’t know anything about the others. I didn’t—”
Jerry’s casual voice drawled:
“If I shoot a pin from under her, she’ll sure sit down, and maybe shut up. O.K.?”
I couldn’t see Whisper. The girl was between us. He said:
“Not now. Where’s Dan?”
The angular blond youngster said:
“Up on the bathroom floor. I had to sap him.”
Dinah Brand turned around to face Thaler. Stocking seams made s’s up the ample backs of her legs. She said:
“Max Thaler, you’re a lousy little—”
He whispered, very deliberately:
“Shut up and get out of the way.”
She surprised me by doing both, and she kept quiet while he spoke to me:
“So you and Noonan are trying to paste his brother’s death on me?”
“It doesn’t need pasting. It’s a natural.”
He curved his thin lips at me and said:
“You’re as crooked as he is.”
I said:
“You know better. I played your side when he tried to frame you. This time he’s got you copped to rights.”
Dinah Brand flared up again, waving her arms in the center of the room, storming:
“Get out of here, the whole lot of you. Why should I give a goddamn about your troubles? Get out.”
The blond kid who had sapped Rolff squeezed past Jerry and came grinning into the room. He caught one of the girl’s flourished arms and bent it behind her.
She twisted toward him, socked him in the belly with her other fist. It was a very respectable wallop—man-size. It broke his grip on her arm, sent him back a couple of steps.
The kid gulped a wide mouthful of air, whisked a blackjack from his hip, and stepped in again. His grin was gone.
Jerry laughed what little chin he had out of sight.
Thaler whispered harshly: “Lay off!”
The kid didn’t hear him. He was snarling at the girl.
She watched him with a face hard as a silver dollar. She was standing with most of her weight on her left foot. I guessed blondy was going to stop a kick when he closed in.
The kid feinted a grab with his empty left hand, started the blackjack at her face.
Thaler whispered, “Lay off,” again, and fired.
The bullet smacked blondy under the right eye, spun him around, and dropped him backwards into Dinah Brand’s arms.
This looked like the time, if there was to be any.
In the excitement I had got my hand to my hip. Now I yanked the gun out and snapped a cap at Thaler, trying for his shoulder.
That was wrong. If I had tried for a bull’s-eye I would have winged him. Chinless Jerry hadn’t laughed himself blind. He beat me to the shot. His shot burnt my wrist, throwing me off the target. But, missing Thaler, my slug crumpled the red-faced man behind him.
Not knowing how badly my wrist was nicked, I switched the gun to my left hand.
Jerry had another try at me. The girl spoiled it by heaving the corpse at him. The dead yellow head banged into his knees. I jumped for him while he was off-balance.
The jump took me out of the path of Thaler’s bullet. It also tumbled me and Jerry out into the hall, all tangled up together.
Jerry wasn’t tough to handle, but I had to work quick. There was Thaler behind me. I socked Jerry twice, kicked him, butted him at least once, and was hunting for a place to bite when he went limp under me. I poked him again where his chin should have been—just to make sure he wasn’t faking—and went away on hands and knees, down the hall a bit, out of line with the door.
I sat on my heels against the wall, held my gun level at Thaler’s part of the premises, and waited. I couldn’t hear anything for the moment except blood singing in my head.
Dinah Brand stepped out of the door I had tumbled through, looked at Jerry, then at me. She smiled with her tongue between her teeth, beckoned with a jerk of her head, and returned to the living room. I followed her cautiously.
Whisper stood in the center of the floor. His hands were empty and so was his face. Except for his vicious little mouth he looked like something displaying suits in a clothing store window.
Dan Rolff stood behind him, with a gun-muzzle tilted to the little gambler’s left kidney. Rolff’s face was mostly blood. The blond kid—now dead on the floor between Rolff and me—had sapped him plenty.
I grinned at Thaler and said. “Well, this is nice,” before I saw that Rolff had another gun, centered on my chubby middle. That wasn’t so nice. But my gun was reasonably level in my hand. I didn’t have much worse than an even break.
Rolff said:
“Put down your pistol.”
I looked at Dinah, looked puzzled, I suppose. She shrugged and told me:
“It seems to be Dan’s party.”
“Yeah? Somebody ought to tell him I don’t like to play this way.”
Rolff repeated: “Put down your pistol.”
I said disagreeably:
“I’m damned if I will. I’ve shed twenty pounds trying to nab this bird, and I can spare twenty more for the same purpose.”
Rolff said:
“I’m not interested in what is between you two, and I have no intention of giving either of you—”
Dinah Brand had wandered across the room. When she was behind Rolff, I interrupted his speech by telling her:
“If you upset him now you’re sure of making two friends—Noonan and me. You can’t trust Thaler any more, so there’s no use helping him.”
She laughed and said:
“Talk money, darling.”
“Dinah!” Rolff protested. He was caught. She was behind him and she was strong enough to handle him. It wasn’t likely that he would shoot her, and it wasn’t likely that anything else would keep her from doing whatever she decided to do.
“A hundred dollars,” I bid.
“My God!” she exclaimed, “I’ve actually got a cash offer out of you. But not enough.”
“Two hundred.”
“You’re getting reckless. But I still can’t hear you.”
“Try,” I said. “It’s worth that to me not to have to shoot Rolff’s gun out of his hand, but no more than that.”
“You got a good start. Don’t weaken. One more bid, anyway.”
“Two hundred dollars and ten cents and that’s all.”
“You big bum,” she said, “I won’t do it.”
“Suit yourself.” I made a face at Thaler and cautioned him: “When what happens happens be damned sure you keep still.”
Dinah cried:
“Wait! Are you really going to start something?”
“I’m going to take Thaler out with me, regardless.”
“Two hundred and a dime?”
“Yeah.”
“Dinah,” Rolff called without turning his face from me, “you won’t—”
But she laughed, came close to his back, and wound her strong arms around him, pulling his arms down, pinning them to his sides.
I shoved Thaler out of the way with
my right arm, and kept my gun on him while I yanked Rolff’s weapons out of his hands. Dinah turned the lunger loose.
He took two steps toward the dining room door, said wearily, “There is no—” and collapsed on the floor.
Dinah ran to him. I pushed Thaler through the hall door, past the still sleeping Jerry, and to the alcove beneath the front stairs, where I had seen a phone.
I called Noonan, told him I had Thaler, and where.
“Mother of God!” he said. “Don’t kill him till I get there.”
14
MAX
The news of Whisper’s capture spread quickly. When Noonan, the coppers he had brought along, and I took the gambler and the now conscious Jerry into the City Hall there were at least a hundred people standing around watching us.
All of them didn’t look pleased. Noonan’s coppers—a shabby lot at best—moved around with whitish strained faces. But Noonan was the most triumphant guy west of the Mississippi. Even the bad luck he had trying to third-degree Whisper couldn’t spoil his happiness.
Whisper stood up under all they could give him. He would talk to his lawyer, he said, and to nobody else, and he stuck to it. And, as much as Noonan hated the gambler, here was a prisoner he didn’t give the works, didn’t turn over to the wrecking crew. Whisper had killed the chief’s brother, and the chief hated his guts, but Whisper was still too much somebody in Poisonville to be roughed around.
Noonan finally got tired of playing with his prisoner, and sent him up—the prison was on the City Hall’s top floor—to be stowed away. I lit another of the chief’s cigars and read the detailed statement he had got from the woman in the hospital. There was nothing in it that I hadn’t learned from Dinah and MacSwain.
The chief wanted me to come out to his house for dinner, but I lied out of it, pretending that my wrist—now in a bandage—was bothering me. It was really little more than a burn.
While we were talking about it, a pair of plain-clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with. It had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a back-door sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan’s men had picked him up in a doctor’s office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.
I got up and prepared to leave, saying:
“The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That’s why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it.”
The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.
“If you want her taken care of, that’s enough for me,” he assured me. “But if she had a hand in turning that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she’s got to do is name it.”
I said I’d tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o’clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conversation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.
I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver’s meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other’s was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper’s.
Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper’s car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ash-can to another.
What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody’s legs had a bowed look.
A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.
I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.
If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn’t armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.
Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow—a man going pell-mell away from me.
“Stop!” I bawled, pounding my feet after him. “Stop, or I’ll plug you, MacSwain.”
He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.
“Yeah,” I confessed. “What are all you people doing wandering around loose?”
“I don’t know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the hills. I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I just went along when she blew open.”
“Whisper was pinched this evening,” I told him.
“Hell! Then that’s it. Noonan had ought to know he’d never keep that guy screwed up—not in this burg.”
We were standing still in the alley where MacSwain had stopped running.
“You know what he was pinched for?” I asked.
“Uh-huh, for killing Tim.”
“You know who killed Tim?”
“Huh? Sure, he did.”
“You did.”
“Huh? What’s the matter? You simple?”
“There’s a gun in my left hand,” I warned him.
“But look here—didn’t he tell the broad that Whisper done it? What’s the matter with you?”
“He didn’t say Whisper. I’ve heard women call Thaler Max, but I’ve never heard a man here call him anything but Whisper. Tim didn’t say Max. He said MacS—the first part of MacSwain—and died before he could finish it. Don’t forget about the gun.”
“What would I have killed him for? He was after Whisper’s—”
“I haven’t got around to that yet,” I admitted, “but let’s see: You and your wife had busted up. Tim was a ladies’ man, wasn’t he? Maybe there’s something there. I’ll have to look it up. What started me thinking about you was that you never tried to get any more money out of the girl.”
“Cut it out,” he begged. “You know there ain’t any sense to it. What would I have hung around afterwards for? I’d have been out getting an alibi, like Whisper.”
“Why? You were a dick then. Close by was the spot for you—to see that everything went right—handle it yourself.”
“You know damned well it don’t hang together, don’t make sense. Cut it out, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t mind how goofy it is,” I said. “It’s something to put to Noonan when we get back. He’s likely all broken up over Whisper’s crush-out. This will take his mind off it.”
MacSwain got down on his knees in the muddy alley and cried:
“Oh, Christ, no! He’d croak me with his hands.”
“Get up and stop yelling,” I growled. “Now will you give it to me straight?”
He whined: “He’d croak me with his hands.”
“Suit yourself. If you won’t talk, I will, to Noonan. If you’ll come through to me, I’ll do what I can for you.”
“What can you do?” he asked hopelessly, and started sniveling again. “How do I know you’ll try to do anything?”
I risked a little truth on him:
“You said you had a hunch what I’m up to here in Poisonville. Then you ought to know that it’s my play to keep Noonan and Whisper split. Letting Noonan think Whisper killed Tim will keep them split. But if you don’t want to play with me, come on, we’ll play with Noonan.”
??
?You mean you won’t tell him?” he asked eagerly. “You promise?”
“I promise you nothing,” I said. “Why should I? I’ve got you with your pants down. Talk to me or Noonan. And make up your mind quick. I’m not going to stand here all night.”
He made up his mind to talk to me.
“I don’t know how much you know, but it was like you said, my wife fell for Tim. That’s what put me on the tramp. You can ask anybody if I wasn’t a good guy before that. I was this way: what she wanted I wanted her to have. Mostly what she wanted was tough on me. But I couldn’t be any other way. We’d have been a damned sight better off if I could. So I let her move out and put in divorce papers, so she could marry him, thinking he meant to.
“Pretty soon I begin to hear he’s chasing this Myrtle Jennison. I couldn’t go that. I’d given him his chance with Helen, fair and square. Now he was giving her the air for this Myrtle. I wasn’t going to stand for that. Helen wasn’t no hanky-panky. It was accidental, though, running into him at the Lake that night. When I saw him go down to them summer houses I went after him. That looked like a good quiet place to have it out.
“I guess we’d both had a little something to drink. Anyway, we had it hot and heavy. When it got too hot for him, he pulled the gun. He was yellow. I grabbed it, and in the tussle it went off. I swear to God I didn’t shoot him except like that. It went off while the both of us had our hands on it. I beat it back in some bushes. But when I got in the bushes I could hear him moaning and talking. There was people coming—a girl running down from the hotel, that Myrtle Jennison.
“I wanted to go back and hear what Tim was saying, so I’d know where I stood, but I was leary of being the first one there. So I had to wait till the girl got to him, listening all the time to his squawking, but too far away to make it out. When she got to him, I ran over and got there just as he died trying to say my name.
“I didn’t think about that being Whisper’s name till she propositioned me with the suicide letter, the two hundred, and the rock. I’d just been stalling around, pretending to get the job lined up—being on the force then—and trying to find out where I stood. Then she makes the play and I know I’m sitting pretty. And that’s the way it went till you started digging it up again.”