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  With this document in my pocket I went downstairs, had another breakfast that was mostly coffee, and went up to the City Hospital.

  Visiting hours were in the afternoon, but by flourishing my Continental Detective Agency credentials and giving everybody to understand that an hour’s delay might cause thousands of deaths, or words to that effect, I got to see Myrtle Jennison.

  She was in a ward on the third floor, alone. The other four beds were empty. She could have been a girl of twenty-five or a woman of fifty-five. Her face was a bloated spotty mask. Lifeless yellow hair in two stringy braids lay on the pillow beside her.

  I waited until the nurse who had brought me up left. Then I held my document out to the invalid and said:

  “Will you sign this, please, Miss Jennison?”

  She looked at me with ugly eyes that were shaded into no particular dark color by the pads of flesh around them, then at the document, and finally brought a shapeless fat hand from under the covers to take it.

  She pretended it took her nearly five minutes to read the forty-two words I had written. She let the document fall down on the covers and asked:

  “Where’d you get that?” Her voice was tinny, irritable.

  “Dinah Brand sent me to you.”

  She asked eagerly:

  “Has she broken off with Max?”

  “Not that I know of,” I lied. “I imagine she just wants to have this on hand in case it should come in handy.”

  “And get her fool throat slit. Give me a pencil.”

  I gave her my fountain pen and held my notebook under the document, to stiffen it while she scribbled her signature at the bottom, and to have it in my hands as soon as she had finished. While I fanned the paper dry she said:

  “If that’s what she wants it’s all right with me. What do I care what anybody does now? I’m done. Hell with them all!” She sniggered and suddenly threw the bedclothes down to her knees, showing me a horrible swollen body in a coarse white nightgown. “How do you like me? See, I’m done.”

  I pulled the covers up over her again and said:

  “Thanks for this, Miss Jennison.”

  “That’s all right. It’s nothing to me any more. Only”—her puffy chin quivered—“it’s hell to die ugly as this.”

  12

  A NEW DEAL

  I went out to hunt for MacSwain. Neither city directory nor telephone book told me anything. I did the pool rooms, cigar stores, speakeasies, looking around first, then asking cautious questions. That got me nothing. I walked the streets, looking for bowed legs. That got me nothing. I decided to go back to my hotel, grab a nap, and resume the hunting at night.

  In a far corner of the lobby a man stopped hiding behind a newspaper and came out to meet me. He had bowed legs, a hog jaw, and was MacSwain.

  I nodded carelessly at him and walked on toward the elevators. He followed me, mumbling:

  “Hey, you got a minute?”

  “Yeah, just about.” I stopped, pretending indifference.

  “Let’s get out of sight,” he said nervously.

  I took him up to my room. He straddled a chair and put a match in his mouth. I sat on the side of the bed and waited for him to say something. He chewed his match a while and began:

  “I’m going to come clean with you, brother. I’m—”

  “You mean you’re going to tell me you knew me when you braced me yesterday?” I asked. “And you’re going to tell me Bush hadn’t told you to bet on him? And you didn’t until afterwards? And you knew about his record because you used to be a bull? And you thought if you could get me to put it to him you could clean up a little dough playing him?”

  “I’ll be damned if I was going to come through with that much,” he said, “but since it’s been said I’ll put a yes to it.”

  “Did you clean up?”

  “I win myself six hundred iron men.” He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead with the chewed end of his match. “And then I lose myself that and my own two hundred and some in a crap game. What do you think of that? I pick up six hundred berries like shooting fish, and have to bum four bits for breakfast.”

  I said it was a tough break but that was the kind of a world we lived in.

  He said, “Uh-huh,” put the match back in his mouth, ground it some more, and added: “That’s why I thought I’d come to see you. I used to be in the racket myself and—”

  “What did Noonan put the skids under you for?”

  “Skids? What skids? I quit. I come into a piece of change when the wife got killed in an automobile accident—insurance—and I quit.”

  “I heard he kicked you out the time his brother shot himself.”

  “Well, then you heard wrong. It was just after that, but you can ask him if I didn’t quit.”

  “It’s not that much to me. Go on telling me why you came to see me.”

  “I’m busted, flat. I know you’re a Continental op, and I got a pretty good hunch what you’re up to here. I’m close to a lot that’s going on on both sides of things in this burg. There’s things I could do for you, being an ex-dick, knowing the ropes both ways.”

  “You want to stool-pigeon for me?”

  He looked me straight in the eye and said evenly:

  “There’s no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.”

  “I’ll give you something to do, MacSwain.” I took out Myrtle Jennison’s document and passed it to him. “Tell me about that.”

  He read it through carefully, his lips framing the words, the match wavering up and down in his mouth. He got up, put the paper on the bed beside me, and scowled down at it.

  “There’s something I’ll have to find out about first,” he said, very solemnly. “I’ll be back in a little while and give you the whole story.”

  I laughed and told him:

  “Don’t be silly. You know I’m not going to let you walk out on me.”

  “I don’t know that.” He shook his head, still solemn: “Neither do you. All you know is whether you’re going to try to stop me.”

  “The answer’s yeah,” I said while I considered that he was fairly hard and strong, six or seven years younger than I, and twenty or thirty pounds lighter.

  He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes.

  I used part of the time measuring the distance between us, figuring out how, by throwing my body back on the bed and turning on my hip, I could get my heels in his face if he jumped me. He was too close for me to pull the gun. I had just finished this mental map-making when he spoke:

  “That lousy ring wasn’t worth no grand. I did swell to get two centuries for it.”

  He shook his head again and said:

  “First I want to know what you’re meaning to do about it.”

  “Cop Whisper.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean with me.”

  “You’ll have to go over to the Hall with me.”

  “I won’t.

  “Why not? You’re only a witness.”

  “I’m only a witness that Noonan can hang a bribe-taking, or an accomplice after the act rap on, or both. And he’d be tickled simple to have the chance.”

  This jaw-wagging didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. I said:

  “That’s too bad. But you’re going to see him.”

  “Try and take me.”

  I sat up straighter and slid my right hand back to my hip.

  He grabbed for me. I threw my body back on the bed, did the hip-spin, swung my feet at him. It was a good trick, only it didn’t work. In his hurry to get at me he bumped the bed aside just enough to spill me off on the floor.

  I landed all sprawled out on my back. I kept dragging at my gun while I tried to roll under the bed.

  Missing me, his lunge carried him over the low footboard, over the side of the bed. He came down beside me, on the back of h
is neck, his body somersaulting over.

  I put the muzzle of my gun in his left eye and said:

  “You’re making a fine pair of clowns of us. Be still while I get up or I’ll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

  I got up, found and pocketed my document, and let him get up.

  “Knock the dents out of your hat and put your necktie in front, so you won’t disgrace me going through the streets,” I ordered after I had run a hand over his clothes and found nothing that felt like a weapon. “You can suit yourself about remembering that this gat is going to be in my overcoat pocket, with a hand on it.”

  He straighted his hat and tie and said:

  “Hey, listen: I’m in this, I guess, and cutting up won’t get me nothing. Suppose I be good. Could you forget about the tussle? See—maybe it’d be smoother for me if they thought I come along without being dragged.”

  “O.K.”

  “Thanks, brother.”

  Noonan was out eating. We had to wait half an hour in his outer office. When he came in he greeted me with the usual How are you? … That certainly is fine…. and the rest of it. He didn’t say anything to MacSwain—simply eyed him sourly.

  We went into the chief’s private office. He pulled a chair over to his desk for me and then sat in his own, ignoring the ex-dick.

  I gave Noonan the sick girl’s document.

  He gave it one glance, bounced out of his chair, and smashed a fist the size of a cantaloup into MacSwain’s face.

  The punch carried MacSwain across the room until a wall stopped him. The wall creaked under the strain, and a framed photograph of Noonan and other city dignitaries welcoming somebody in spats dropped down to the floor with the hit man.

  The fat chief waddled over, picked up the picture and beat it to splinters on MacSwain’s head and shoulders.

  Noonan came back to his desk, puffing, smiling, saying cheerfully to me:

  “That fellow’s a rat if there ever was one.”

  MacSwain sat up and looked around, bleeding from nose, mouth and head.

  Noonan roared at him:

  “Come here, you.”

  MacSwain said, “Yes, chief,” scrambled up and ran over to the desk.

  Noonan said: “Come through or I’ll kill you.”

  MacSwain said:

  “Yes, chief. It was like she said, only that rock wasn’t worth no grand. But she give me it and the two hundred to keep my mouth shut, because I got there just when she asks him, ‘Who did it, Tim?’ and he says, ‘Max!’ He says it kind of loud and sharp, like he wanted to get it out before he died, because he died right then, almost before he’d got it out. That’s the way it was, chief, but the rock wasn’t worth no—”

  “Damn the rock,” Noonan barked. “And stop bleeding on my rug.”

  MacSwain hunted in his pocket for a dirty handkerchief, mopped his nose and mouth with it, and jabbered on:

  “That’s the way it was, chief. Everything else was like I said at the time, only I didn’t say anything about hearing him say Max done it. I know I hadn’t ought to—”

  “Shut up,” Noonan said, and pressed one of the buttons on his desk.

  A uniformed copper came in. The chief jerked a thumb at MacSwain and said:

  “Take this baby down cellar and let the wrecking crew work on him before you lock him up.”

  MacSwain started a desperate plea, “Aw, chief!” but the copper took him away before he could get any farther.

  Noonan stuck a cigar at me, tapped the document with another and asked:

  “Where’s this broad?”

  “In the City Hospital, dying. You’ll have the ’cuter get a stiff out of her? That one’s not so good legally—I framed it for effect. Another thing—I hear that Peak Murry and Whisper aren’t playmates any more. Wasn’t Murry one of his alibis?”

  The chief said, “He was,” picked up one of his phones, said, “McGraw,” and then: “Get hold of Peak Murry and ask him to drop in. And have Tony Agosti picked up for that knife-throwing.”

  He put the phone down, stood up, made a lot of cigar smoke, and said through it:

  “I haven’t always been on the up-and-up with you.”

  I thought that was putting it mildly, but I didn’t say anything while he went on:

  “You know your way around. You know what these jobs are. There’s this one and that one that’s got to be listened to. Just because a man’s chief of police doesn’t mean he’s chief. Maybe you’re a lot of trouble to somebody that can be a lot of trouble to me. Don’t make any difference if I think you’re a right guy. I got to play with them that play with me. See what I mean?”

  I wagged my head to show I did.

  “That’s the way it was,” he said. “But no more. This is something else, a new deal. When the old woman kicked off Tim was just a lad. She said to me, ‘Take care of him, John,’ and I promised I would. And then Whisper murders him on account of that tramp.” He reached down and took my hand. “See what I’m getting at? That’s a year and a half ago, and you give me my first chance to hang it on him. I’m telling you there’s no man in Personville that’s got a voice big enough to talk you down. Not after today.”

  That pleased me and I said so. We purred at each other until a lanky man with any extremely up-turned nose in the middle of a round and freckled face was ushered in. It was Peak Murry.

  “We were just wondering about the time when Tim died,” the chief said when Murry had been given a chair and a cigar, “where Whisper was. You were out to the Lake that night, weren’t you?”

  “Yep,” Murry said and the end of his nose got sharper.

  “With Whisper?”

  “I wasn’t with him all the time.”

  “Were you with him at the time of the shooting?”

  “Nope.”

  The chief’s greenish eyes got smaller and brighter. He asked softly:

  “You know where he was?”

  “Nope.”

  The chief sighed in a thoroughly satisfied way and leaned back in his chair.

  “Damn it, Peak,” he said, “you told us before that you were with him at the bar.”

  “Yep, I did,” the lanky man admitted. “But that don’t mean nothing except that he asked me to and I didn’t mind helping out a friend.”

  “Meaning you don’t mind standing a perjury rap?”

  “Don’t kid me.” Murry spit vigorously at the cuspidor. “I didn’t say nothing in no court rooms.”

  “How about Jerry and George Kelly and O’Brien?” the chief asked. “Did they say they were with him just because he asked them to?”

  “O’Brien did. I don’t know nothing about the others. I was going out of the bar when I run into Whisper, Jerry and Kelly, and went back to have a shot with them. Kelly told me Tim had been knocked off. Then Whisper says, ‘It never hurts anybody to have an alibi. We were here all the time, weren’t we?’ and he looks at O’Brien, who’s behind the bar. O’Brien says, ‘Sure you was,’ and when Whisper looks at me I say the same thing. But I don’t know no reasons why I’ve got to cover him up nowadays.”

  “And Kelly said Tim had been knocked off? Didn’t say he had been found dead?”

  “‘Knocked off’ was the words he used.”

  The chief said:

  “Thanks, Peak. You oughtn’t to have done like you did, but what’s done is done. How are the kids?”

  Murry said they were doing fine, only the baby wasn’t as fat as he’d like to have him. Noonan phoned the prosecuting attorney’s office and had Dart and a stenographer take Peak’s story before he left.

  Noonan, Dart and the stenographer set out for the City Hospital to get a complete statement from Myrtle Jennison. I didn’t go along. I decided I needed sleep, told the chief I would see him later, and returned to the hotel.

  13

  –$200.10–

  I had my vest unbuttoned when the telephone bell rang.

  It was Dinah Brand, complaining that she had been trying to get
me since ten o’clock.

  “Have you done anything on what I told you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been looking it over. It seems pretty good. I think maybe I’ll crack it this afternoon.”

  “Don’t. Hold it till I see you. Can you come up now?”

  I looked at the vacant white bed and said, “Yes,” without much enthusiasm.

  Another tub of cold water did me so little good that I almost fell asleep in it.

  Dan Rolff let me in when I rang the girl’s bell. He looked and acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened the night before. Dinah Brand came into the hall to help me off with my overcoat. She had on a tan woolen dress with a two-inch rip in one shoulder seam.

  She took me into the living room. She sat on the chesterfield beside me and said:

  “I’m going to ask you to do something for me. You like me enough, don’t you?”

  I admitted that. She counted the knuckles of my left hand with a warm forefinger and explained:

  “I want you to not do anything more about what I told you last night. Now wait a minute. Wait till I get through. Dan was right. I oughtn’t sell Max out like that. It would be utterly filthy. Besides, it’s Noonan you chiefly want, isn’t it? Well, if you’ll be a nice darling and lay off Max this time, I’ll give you enough on Noonan to nail him forever. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you? And you like me too much to want to take advantage of me by using information I gave you when I was mad at what Max had said, don’t you?”

  “What is the dirt on Noonan?” I asked.

  She kneaded my biceps and murmured: “You promise?”

  “Not yet.”

  She pouted at me and said:

  “I’m off Max for life, on the level. You’ve got no right to make me turn rat.”

  “What about Noonan?”

  “Promise first.”

  “No.”

  She dug fingers into my arm and asked sharply:

  “You’ve already gone to Noonan?”

  “Yeah.”

  She let go my arm, frowned, shrugged, and said gloomily:

  “Well, how can I help it?”