“If you see Reno some time,” I told him, “you might let him know that Pete the Finn’s having his mob sworn in as special coppers.”
“I might,” Murry agreed.
Mickey Linehan was sitting in the lobby when I got back to my hotel. He followed me up to my room, and reported:
“Your Dan Rolff pulled a sneak from the hospital somewhere after midnight last night. The croakers are kind of steamed up about it. Seems they were figuring on pulling a lot of little pieces of bone out of his brain this morning. But him and his duds were gone. We haven’t got a line on Whisper yet. Dick’s out now trying to place Bill Quint. What’s what on this girl’s carving? Dick tells me you got it before the coppers.”
“It—”
The telephone bell rang.
A man’s voice, carefully oratorical, spoke my name with a question mark after it.
I said: “Yeah.”
The voice said:
“This is Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn speaking. I think you will find it well worth your while to appear at my offices at your earliest convenience.”
“Will I? Who are you?”
“Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn, attorney-at-law. My suite is in the Rutledge Block, 310 Green Street. I think you will find it well—”
“Mind telling me part of what it’s about?” I asked.
“There are affairs best not discussed over the telephone. I think you will find—”
“All right,” I interrupted him again. “I’ll be around to see you this afternoon if I get a chance.”
“You will find it very, very advisable,” he assured me.
I hung up on that.
Mickey said:
“You were going to give me the what’s what on the Brand slaughter.”
I said:
“I wasn’t. I started to say it oughtn’t to be hard to trace Rolff—running around with a fractured skull and probably a lot of bandages. Suppose you try it. Give Hurricane Street a play first.”
Mickey grinned all the way across his comedian’s red face, said, “Don’t tell me anything that’s going on—I’m only working with you,” picked up his hat, and left me.
I spread myself on the bed, smoked cigarettes end to end, and thought about last night—my frame of mind, my passing out, my dreams, and the situation into which I woke. The thinking was unpleasant enough to make me glad when it was interrupted.
Fingernails scratched the outside of my door. I opened the door.
The man who stood there was a stranger to me. He was young, thin, and gaudily dressed. He had heavy eyebrows and a small mustache that were coal-black against a very pale, nervous, but not timid, face.
“I’m Ted Wright,” he said, holding out a hand as if I were glad to meet him. “I guess you’ve heard Whisper talk about me.”
I gave him my hand, let him in, closed the door, and asked:
“You’re a friend of Whisper’s?”
“You bet.” He held up two thin fingers pressed tightly together. “Just like that, me and him.”
I didn’t say anything. He looked around the room, smiled nervously, crossed to the open bathroom door, peeped in, came back to me, rubbed his lips with his tongue, and made his proposition:
“I’ll knock him off for you for a half a grand.”
“Whisper?”
“Yep, and it’s dirt cheap.”
“Why do I want him killed?” I asked.
“He un-womaned you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah?”
“You ain’t that dumb.”
A notion stirred in my noodle. To give it time to crawl around I said: “Sit down. This needs talking over.”
“It don’t need nothing,” he said, looking at me sharply, not moving toward either chair. “You either want him knocked off or you don’t.”
“Then I don’t.”
He said something I didn’t catch, down in his throat, and turned to the door. I got between him and it. He stopped, his eyes fidgeting.
I said:
“So Whispers dead?”
He stepped back and put a hand behind him. I poked his jaw, leaning my hundred and ninety pounds on the poke.
He got his legs crossed and went down.
I pulled him up by the wrists, yanked his face close to mine, and growled:
“Come through. What’s the racket?”
“I ain’t done nothing to you.”
“Let me catch you. Who got Whisper?”
“I don’t know nothing a—”
I let go of one of his wrists, slapped his face with my open hand, caught his wrist again, and tried my luck at crunching both of them while I repeated:
“Who got Whisper?”
“Dan Rolff,” he whined. “He walked up to him and stuck him with the same skewer Whisper had used on the twist. That’s right.”
“How do you know it was the one Whisper killed the girl with?”
“Dan said so.”
“What did Whisper say?”
“Nothing. He looked funny as hell, standing there with the butt of the sticker sticking out his side. Then he flashes the rod and puts two pills in Dan just like one, and the both of them go down together, cracking heads, Dan’s all bloody through the bandages.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. I roll them over, and they’re a pair of stiffs. Every word I’m telling you is gospel.”
“Who else was there?”
“Nobody else. Whisper was hiding out, with only me to go between him and the mob. He killed Noonan hisself, and he didn’t want to have to trust nobody for a couple of days, till he could see what was what, excepting me.”
“So you, being a smart boy, thought you could run around to his enemies and pick up a little dough for killing him after he was dead?”
“I was clean, and this won’t be no place for Whisper’s pals when the word gets out that he’s croaked,” Wright whined. “I had to raise a get-away stake.”
“How’d you make out so far?”
“I got a century from Pete and a century and a half from Peak Murry—for Reno—with more promised from both when I turn the trick.” The whine changed into boasting as he talked. “I bet you I could get McGraw to come across too, and I thought you’d kick in with something.”
“They must be high in the air to toss dough at a woozy racket like that.”
“I don’t know,” he said superiorly. “It ain’t such a lousy one at that.” He became humble again. “Give me a chance, chief. Don’t gum it on me. I’ll give you fifty bucks now and a split of whatever I get from McGraw if you’ll keep your clam shut till I can put it over and grab a rattler.”
“Nobody but you knows where Whisper is?”
“Nobody else, except Dan, that’s as dead as he is.”
“Where are they?”
“The old Redman warehouse down on Porter Street. In the back, upstairs, Whisper had a room fixed up with a bed, stove, and some grub. Give me a chance. Fifty bucks now and a cut on the rest.”
I let go of his arm and said:
“I don’t want the dough, but go ahead. I’ll lay off for a couple of hours. That ought to be long enough.”
“Thanks, chief. Thanks, thanks,” and he hurried away from me.
I put on my coat and hat, went out, found Green Street and the Rutledge Block. It was a wooden building a long while past any prime it might ever have had. Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn’s establishment was on the second floor. There was no elevator. I climbed a worn and rickety flight of wooden steps.
The lawyer had two rooms, both dingy, smelly, and poorly lighted. I waited in the outer one while a clerk who went well with the rooms carried my name in to the lawyer. Half a minute later the clerk opened the door and beckoned me in.
Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn was a little fat man of fifty-something. He had prying triangular eyes of a very light color, a short fleshy nose, and a fleshier mouth whose greediness was only partly hidden between a ragged gray mustache and a ragged gray Vandyke beard. His clothes w
ere dark and unclean looking without actually being dirty.
He didn’t get up from his desk, and throughout my visit he kept his right hand on the edge of a desk drawer that was some six inches open.
He said:
“Ah, my dear sir, I am extremely gratified to find that you had the good judgment to recognize the value of my counsel.”
His voice was even more oratorical than it had been over the wire.
I didn’t say anything.
Nodding his whiskers as if my not saying anything was another exhibition of good judgment, he continued:
“I may say, in all justice, that you will find it the invariable part of sound judgment to follow the dictates of my counsel in all cases. I may say this, my dear sir, without false modesty, appreciating with both fitting humility and a deep sense of true and lasting values, my responsibilities as well as my prerogatives as a—and why should I stoop to conceal the fact that there are those who feel justified in preferring to substitute the definite article for the indefinite?—recognized and accepted leader of the bar in this thriving state.”
He knew a lot of sentences like those, and he didn’t mind using them on me. Finally he got along to:
“Thus, that conduct which in a minor practitioner might seem irregular, becomes, when he who exercises it occupies such indisputable prominence in his community—and, I might say, not merely the immediate community—as serves to place him above fear of reproach, simply that greater ethic which scorns the pettier conventionalities when confronted with an opportunity to serve mankind through one of its individual representatives. Therefore, my dear sir, I have not hesitated to brush aside scornfully all trivial considerations of accepted precedent, to summon you, to say to you frankly and candidly, my dear sir, that your interests will best be served by and through retaining me as your legal representative.”
I asked:
“What’ll it cost?”
“That,” he said loftily, “is of but secondary importance. However, it is a detail which has its deserved place in our relationship, and must be not overlooked or neglected. We shall say, a thousand dollars now. Later, no doubt—”
He ruffled his whiskers and didn’t finish the sentence.
I said I hadn’t, of course, that much money on me.
“Naturally, my dear sir. Naturally. But that is of not the least importance in any degree. None whatever. Any time will do for that, any time up to ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“At ten tomorrow,” I agreed. “Now I’d like to know why I’m supposed to need legal representatives.”
He made an indignant face.
“My dear sir, this is no matter for jesting, of that I assure you.”
I explained that I hadn’t been joking, that I really was puzzled.
He cleared his throat, frowned more or less importantly, said:
“It may well be, my dear sir, that you do not fully comprehend the peril that surrounds you, but it is indubitably preposterous that you should expect me to suppose that you are without any inkling of the difficulties—the legal difficulties, my dear sir—with which you are about to be confronted, growing, as they do, out of occurrences that took place at no more remote time than last night, my dear sir, last night. However, there is no time to go into that now. I have a pressing appointment with Judge Leffner. On the morrow I shall be glad to go more thoroughly into each least ramification of the situation—and I assure you they are many—with you. I shall expect you at ten tomorrow morning.”
I promised to be there, and went out. I spent the evening in my room, drinking unpleasant whiskey, thinking unpleasant thoughts, and waiting for reports that didn’t come from Mickey and Dick. I went to sleep at midnight.
23
MR. CHARLES
PROCTOR DAWN
I was half dressed the next morning when Dick Foley came in. He reported, in his word-saving manner, that Bill Quint had checked out of the Miners’ Hotel at noon the previous day, leaving no forwarding address.
A train left Personville for Ogden at twelve-thirty-five. Dick had wired the Continental’s Salt Lake branch to send a man up to Ogden to try to trace Quint.
“We can’t pass up any leads,” I said, “but I don’t think Quint’s the man we want. She gave him the air long ago. If he had meant to do anything about it he would have done it before this. My guess is that when he heard she had been killed he decided to duck, being a discarded lover who had threatened her.”
Dick nodded and said:
“Gun-play out the road last night. Hijacking. Four trucks of hooch nailed, burned.”
That sounded like Reno Starkey’s answer to the news that the big bootlegger’s mob had been sworn in as special coppers.
Mickey Linehan arrived by the time I had finished dressing.
“Dan Rolff was at the house, all right,” he reported. “The Greek grocer on the corner saw him come out around nine yesterday morning. He went down the street wobbling and talking to himself. The Greek thought he was drunk.”
“Howcome the Greek didn’t tell the police? Or did he?”
“Wasn’t asked. A swell department this burg’s got. What do we do: find him for them and turn him in with the job all tacked up?”
“McGraw has decided Whisper killed her,” I said, “and he’s not bothering himself with any leads that don’t lead that way. Unless he came back later for the ice pick, Rolff didn’t turn the trick. She was killed at three in the morning. Rolff wasn’t there at eight-thirty, and the pick was still sticking in her. It was—”
Dick Foley came over to stand in front of me and ask:
“How do you know?”
I didn’t like the way he looked or the way he spoke. I said:
“You know because I’m telling you.”
Dick didn’t say anything. Mickey grinned his half-wit’s grin and asked:
“Where do we go from here? Let’s get this thing polished off.”
“I’ve got a date for ten,” I told them. “Hang around the hotel till I get back. Whisper and Rolff are probably dead—so we won’t have to hunt for them.” I scowled at Dick and said: “I was told that. I didn’t kill either of them.”
The little Canadian nodded without lowering his eyes from mine.
I ate breakfast alone, and then set out for the lawyer’s office.
Turning off King Street, I saw Hank O’Marra’s freckled face in an automobile that was going up Green Street. He was sitting beside a man I didn’t know. The long-legged youngster waved an arm at me and stopped the car. I went over to him.
He said:
“Reno wants to see you.”
“Where will I find him?”
“Jump in.”
“I can’t go now,” I said. “Probably not till afternoon.”
“See Peak when you’re ready.”
I said I would. O’Marra and his companion drove on up Green Street. I walked half a block south to the Rutledge Block.
With a foot on the first of the rickety steps that led up to the lawyer’s floor, I stopped to look at something.
It was barely visible back in a dim corner of the first floor. It was a shoe. It was lying in a position that empty shoes don’t lie in.
I took my foot off the step and went toward the shoe. Now I could see an ankle and the cuff of a black pants-leg above the shoe-top.
That prepared me for what I found.
I found Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn huddled among two brooms, a mop and a bucket, in a little alcove formed by the back of the stairs and a corner of the wall. His Vandyke beard was red with blood from a cut that ran diagonally across his forehead. His head was twisted sidewise and backward at an angle that could only be managed with a broken neck.
I quoted Noonan’s “What’s got to be done has got to be done” to myself, and, gingerly pulling one side of the dead man’s coat out of the way, emptied his inside coat pocket, transferring a black book and a sheaf of papers to my own pocket. In two of his other pockets I found nothing I wanted. The rest
of his pockets couldn’t be got at without moving him, and I didn’t care to do that.
Five minutes later I was back in the hotel, going in through a side door, to avoid Dick and Mickey in the lobby, and walking up to the mezzanine to take an elevator.
In my room I sat down and examined my loot.
I took the book first, a small imitation-leather memoranda book of the sort that sells for not much money in any stationery store. It held some fragmentary notes that meant nothing to me, and thirty-some names and addresses that meant as little, with one exception:
Helen Albury
1229A Hurricane St.
That was interesting because, first, a young man named Robert Albury was in prison, having confessed that he shot and killed Donald Willsson in a fit of jealousy aroused by Willsson’s supposed success with Dinah Brand; and, second, Dinah Brand had lived, and had been murdered, at 1232 Hurricane Street, across the street from 1229A.
I did not find my name in the book.
I put the book aside and began unfolding and reading the papers I had taken with it. Here too I had to wade through a lot that didn’t mean anything to find something that did.
This find was a group of four letters held together by a rubber band.
The letters were in slitted envelopes that had postmarks dated a week apart, on the average. The latest was a little more than six months old. The letters were addressed to Dinah Brand. The first—that is, the earliest—wasn’t so bad, for a love letter. The second was a bit goofier. The third and fourth were swell examples of how silly an ardent and unsuccessful wooer can be, especially if he’s getting on in years. The four letters were signed by Elihu Willsson.
I had not found anything to tell me definitely why Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn had thought he could blackmail me out of a thousand dollars, but I had found plenty to think about. I encouraged my brain with two Fatimas, and then went downstairs.
“Go out and see what you can raise on a lawyer named Charles Proctor Dawn,” I told Mickey. “He’s got offices in Green Street. Stay away from them. Don’t put in a lot of time on him. I just want a rough line quick.”
I told Dick to give me a five-minute start and then follow me out to the neighborhood of 1229A Hurricane Street.