The Essential Noir Bundle, page 8
I pretended the idea was ridiculous.
The preliminary bouts got going, four-round affairs between assorted hams. I kept looking for Thaler, but couldn’t see him. The girl squirmed beside me, paying little attention to the fighting, dividing her time between asking me where I had got my information and threatening me with hell-fire and damnation if it turned out to be a bust.
The semi-final was on when Rolff came back and gave the girl a handful of tickets. She was straining her eyes over them when I left for my own seat. Without looking up she called to me:
“Wait outside for us when it’s over.”
Kid Cooper climbed into the ring while I was squeezing through to my seat. He was a ruddy straw-haired solid-built boy with a dented face and too much meat around the top of his lavender trunks. Ike Bush, alias Al Kennedy, came through the ropes in the opposite corner. His body looked better—slim, nicely ridged, snaky—but his face was pale, worried.
They were introduced, went to the center of the ring for the usual instructions, returned to their corners, shed bathrobes, stretched on the ropes, the gong rang, and the scrap was on.
Cooper was a clumsy bum. He had a pair of wide swings that might have hurt when they landed, but anybody with two feet could have kept away from them. Bush had class—nimble legs, a smooth fast left hand, and a right that got away quick. It would have been murder to put Cooper in the ring with the slim boy if he had been trying. But he wasn’t. That is, he wasn’t trying to win. He was trying not to, and had his hands full doing it.
Cooper waddled flat-footed around the ring, throwing his wide swings at everything from the lights to the corner posts. His system was simply to turn them loose and let them take their chances. Bush moved in and out, putting a glove on the ruddy boy whenever he wanted to, but not putting anything in the glove.
The customers were booing before the first round was over. The second round was just as sour. I didn’t feel so good. Bush didn’t seem to have been much influenced by our little conversation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dinah Brand trying to catch my attention. She looked hot. I took care not to have my attention caught.
The room-mate act in the ring was continued in the third round to the tune of yelled Throw-em-outs, Why-don’t-you-kiss-hims and Make-em-fights from the seats. The pugs’ waltz brought them around to the corner nearest me just as the booing broke off for a moment.
I made a megaphone of my hands and bawled:
“Back to Philly, Al.”
Bush’s back was to me. He wrestled Cooper around, shoving him into the ropes, so he—Bush—faced my way.
From somewhere far back in another part of the house another yelling voice came:
“Back to Philly, Al.”
MacSwain, I supposed.
A drunk off to one side lifted his puffy face and bawled the same thing, laughing as if it were a swell joke. Others took up the cry for no reason at all except that it seemed to disturb Bush.
His eyes jerked from side to side under the black bar of his eyebrows.
One of Cooper’s wild mitts clouted the slim boy on the side of the jaw.
Ike Bush piled down at the referee’s feet.
The referee counted five in two seconds, but the gong cut him off.
I looked over at Dinah Brand and laughed. There wasn’t anything else to do. She looked at me and didn’t laugh. Her face was sick as Dan Rolff’s, but angrier.
Bush’s handlers dragged him into his corner and rubbed him up, not working very hard at it. He opened his eyes and watched his feet. The gong was tapped.
Kid Cooper paddled out hitching up his trunks. Bush waited until the bum was in the center of the ring, and then came to him, fast.
Bush’s left glove went down, out—practically out of sight in Cooper’s belly. Cooper said, “Ugh,” and backed away, folding up.
Bush straightened him with a right-hand poke in the mouth, and sank the left again. Cooper said, “Ugh,” again and had trouble with his knees.
Bush cuffed him once on each side of the head, cocked his right, carefully pushed Cooper’s face into position with a long left, and threw his right hand straight from under his jaw to Cooper’s.
Everybody in the house felt the punch.
Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.
When the referee had finally stalled through the count, he raised Bush’s hand. Neither of them looked happy.
A high twinkle of light caught my eye. A short silvery streak slanted down from one of the small balconies.
A woman screamed.
The silvery streak ended its flashing slant in the ring, with a sound that was partly a thud, partly a snap.
Ike Bush took his arm out of the referee’s hand and pitched down on top of Kid Cooper. A black knife-handle stuck out of the nape of Bush’s neck.
CHAPTER 10: CRIME WANTED—MALE OR FEMALE
Half an hour later, when I left the building, Dinah Brand was sitting at the wheel of a pale blue little Marmon, talking to Max Thaler, who stood in the road.
The girl’s square chin was tilted up. Her big red mouth was brutal around the words it shaped, and the lines crossing its ends were deep, hard.
The gambler looked as unpleasant as she. His pretty face was yellow and tough as oak. When he talked his lips were paper-thin.
It seemed to be a nice family party. I wouldn’t have joined it if the girl hadn’t seen me and called:
“My God, I thought you were never coming.”
I went over to the car. Thaler looked across the hood at me with no friendliness at all.
“Last night I advised you to go back to Frisco.” His whisper was harsher than anybody’s shout could have been. “Now I’m telling you.”
“Thanks just the same,” I said as I got in beside the girl.
While she was stirring the engine up he said to her:
“This isn’t the first time you’ve sold me out. It’s the last.”
She put the car in motion, turned her head back over her shoulder, and sang to him:
“To hell, my love, with you!”
We rode into town rapidly.
“Is Bush dead?” she asked as she twisted the car into Broadway.
“Decidedly. When they turned him over the point of the knife was sticking out in front.”
“He ought to have known better than to double-cross them. Let’s get something to eat. I’m almost eleven hundred ahead on the night’s doings, so if the boy friend doesn’t like it, it’s just too bad. How’d you come out?”
“Didn’t bet. So your Max doesn’t like it?”
“Didn’t bet?” she cried. “What kind of an ass are you? Whoever heard of anybody not betting when they had a thing like that sewed up?”
“I wasn’t sure it was sewed up. So Max didn’t like the way things turned out?”
“You guessed it. He dropped plenty. And then he gets sore with me because I had sense enough to switch over and get in on the win.” She stopped the car violently in front of a Chinese restaurant. “The hell with him, the little tin-horn runt!”
Her eyes were shiny because they were wet. She jabbed a handkerchief into them as we got out of the car.
“My God, I’m hungry,” she said, dragging me across the sidewalk. “Will you buy me a ton of chow mein?”
She didn’t eat a ton of it, but she did pretty well, putting away a piled-up dish of her own and half of mine. Then we got back into the Marmon and rode out to her house.
Dan Rolff was in the dining room. A water glass and a brown bottle with no label stood on the table in front of him. He sat straight up in his chair, staring at the bottle. The room smelled of laudanum.
Dinah Brand slid her fur coat off, letting it fall half on a chair and half on the floor, and snapped her fingers at the lunger, saying impatiently:
“Did you collect?”
Without looking up from the bottle, he took a pad of paper money out of his inside pocket and dropped it on the table. The girl grabbed it, counted the bills twice, smacked her lips, and stuffed the money in her bag.
She went out to the kitchen and began chopping ice. I sat down and lit a cigarette. Rolff stared at his bottle. He and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. Presently the girl brought in some gin, lemon juice, seltzer and ice.
We drank and she told Rolff:
“Max is sore as hell. He heard you’d been running around putting last-minute money on Bush, and the little monkey thinks I double-crossed him. What did I have to do with it? All I did was what any sensible person would have done—get in on the win. I didn’t have any more to do with it than a baby, did I?” she asked me.
“No.”
“Of course not. What’s the matter with Max is he’s afraid the others will think he was in on it too, that Dan was putting his dough down as well as mine. Well, that’s his hard luck. He can go climb trees for all I care, the lousy little runt. Another drink would go good.”
She poured another for herself and for me. Rolff hadn’t touched his first one. He said, still staring at the brown bottle:
“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”
The girl scowled and said disagreeably:
“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”
“Yeah.”
Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.
“And if I help you will I get some of the ten—?”
“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”
The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:
“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”
“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.
Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded:
“So I’m too utterly filthy for you now, am I?”
He said evenly:
“I said to betray your friends to this chap would be utterly filthy, and it would.”
She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t.
She let go his wrist, turned her back to him, and reached for gin and seltzer. She was smiling. I didn’t like the smile.
He got up, blinking. His wrist was red where she had held it, his face bruised. He steadied himself upright and looked at me with dull eyes.
With no change in the blankness of his face and eyes, he put a hand under his coat, brought out a black automatic pistol, and fired at me.
But he was too shaky for either speed or accuracy. I had time to toss a glass at him. The glass hit his shoulder. His bullet went somewhere overhead.
I jumped before he got the next one out—jumped at him—was close enough to knock the gun down. The second slug went into the floor.
I socked his jaw. He fell away from me and lay where he fell.
I turned around.
Dinah Brand was getting ready to bat me over the head with the seltzer bottle, a heavy glass siphon that would have made pulp of my skull.
“Don’t,” I yelped.
“You didn’t have to bust him like that,” she snarled.
“Well, it’s done. You’d better get him straightened out.”
She put down the siphon and I helped her carry him up to his bedroom. When he began moving his eyes, I left her to finish the work and went down to the dining room again. She joined me there fifteen minutes later.
“He’s all right,” she said. “But you could have handled him without that.”
“Yeah, but I did that for him. Know why he took the shot at me?”
“So I’d have nobody to sell Max out to?”
“No. Because I’d seen you maul him around.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “I was the one who did it.”
“He’s in love with you, and this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. He acted like he had learned there was no use matching muscle with you. But you can’t expect him to enjoy having another man see you slap his face.”
“I used to think I knew men,” she complained, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”
“So I poked him to give him back some of his self-respect. You know, treated him as I would a man instead of a down-and-outer who could be slapped around by girls.”
“Anything you say,” she sighed. “I give up. We ought to have a drink.”
We had the drink, and I said:
“You were saying you’d work with me if there was a cut of the Willsson money in it for you. There is.”
“How much?”
“Whatever you earn. Whatever what you do is worth.”
“That’s uncertain.”
“So’s your help, so far as I know.”
“Is it? I can give you the stuff, brother, loads of it, and don’t think I can’t. I’m a girl who knows her Poisonville.” She looked down at her gray-stockinged knees, waved one leg at me, and exclaimed indignantly: “Look at that. Another run. Did you ever see anything to beat it? Honest to God! I’m going barefoot.”
“Your legs are too big,” I told her. “They put too much strain on the material.”
“That’ll do out of you. What’s your idea of how to go about purifying our village?”
“If I haven’t been lied to, Thaler, Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Noonan are the men who’ve made Poisonville the sweet-smelling mess it is. Old Elihu comes in for his share of the blame, too, but it’s not all his fault, maybe. Besides, he’s my client, even if he doesn’t want to be, so I’d like to go easy on him.
“The closest I’ve got to an idea is to dig up any and all the dirty work I can that might implicate the others, and run it out. Maybe I’ll advertise—Crime Wanted—Male or Female. If they’re as crooked as I think they are I shouldn’t have a lot of trouble finding a job or two that I can hang on them.”
“Is that what you were up to when you uncooked the fight?”
“That was only an experiment—just to see what would happen.”
“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.”
“Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.”
“That ought to be good for another drink,” she said.
CHAPTER 11: THE SWELL SPOON
We had another drink.
She put her glass down, licked her lips, and said:
“If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you. Did you ever hear of Noonan’s brother Tim, the one who committed suicide out at Mock Lake a couple of years ago?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have heard much good. Anyway, he didn’t commit suicide. Max killed him.”
“Yeah?”
“For God’s sake wake up. This I’m giving you is real. Noonan was like a father to Tim. Take the proof to him and he’ll be after Max like nobody’s business. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got proof?”
“Two people got to Tim before he died, and he told them Max had done it. They’re both still in town, though one won’t live a lot longer. How’s that?”
She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed women, that doesn’t always mean anything.
“Let’s listen to the rest of it,” I said. “I like details and things.”
“You’ll get them. You ever been out to Mock Lake? Well, it’s our summer resort, thirty miles up the canyon road. It’s a dump, but it’s cool in summer, so it gets a good play. This was summer a year ago, the last week-end in August. I was out there with a fellow named Holly. He’s back in England now, but you don’t care anything about that, because he’s got nothing to do with it. He was a funny sort of old woman—used to wear white silk socks turned inside out so the loose threads wouldn’t hurt his feet. I got a letter from him last week. It’s around here somewhere, but that doesn’t make any difference.
“We were up there, and Max was up there with a girl he used to play around with—Myrtle Jennison. She’s in the hospital now—City—dying of Bright’s disease or something. She was a classy looking kid then, a slender blonde. I always liked her, except that a few drinks made her too noisy. Tim Noonan was crazy about her, but she couldn’t see anybody but Max that summer.
“Tim wouldn’t let her alone. He was a big good-looking Irishman, but a sap and a cheap crook who only got by because his brother was chief of police. Wherever Myrtle went, he’d pop up sooner or later. She didn’t like to say anything to Max about it, not wanting Max to do anything to put him in wrong with Tim’s brother, the chief.
“So of course Tim showed up at Mock Lake this Saturday. Myrtle and Max were just by themselves. Holly and I were with a bunch, but I saw Myrtle to talk to and she told me she had got a note from Tim, asking her to meet him for a few minutes that night, in one of the little arbor things on the hotel grounds. He said if she didn’t he would kill himself. That was a laugh for us—the big false alarm. I tried to talk Myrtle out of going, but she had just enough booze in her to feel gay and she said she was going to give him an earful.
The preliminary bouts got going, four-round affairs between assorted hams. I kept looking for Thaler, but couldn’t see him. The girl squirmed beside me, paying little attention to the fighting, dividing her time between asking me where I had got my information and threatening me with hell-fire and damnation if it turned out to be a bust.
The semi-final was on when Rolff came back and gave the girl a handful of tickets. She was straining her eyes over them when I left for my own seat. Without looking up she called to me:
“Wait outside for us when it’s over.”
Kid Cooper climbed into the ring while I was squeezing through to my seat. He was a ruddy straw-haired solid-built boy with a dented face and too much meat around the top of his lavender trunks. Ike Bush, alias Al Kennedy, came through the ropes in the opposite corner. His body looked better—slim, nicely ridged, snaky—but his face was pale, worried.
They were introduced, went to the center of the ring for the usual instructions, returned to their corners, shed bathrobes, stretched on the ropes, the gong rang, and the scrap was on.
Cooper was a clumsy bum. He had a pair of wide swings that might have hurt when they landed, but anybody with two feet could have kept away from them. Bush had class—nimble legs, a smooth fast left hand, and a right that got away quick. It would have been murder to put Cooper in the ring with the slim boy if he had been trying. But he wasn’t. That is, he wasn’t trying to win. He was trying not to, and had his hands full doing it.
Cooper waddled flat-footed around the ring, throwing his wide swings at everything from the lights to the corner posts. His system was simply to turn them loose and let them take their chances. Bush moved in and out, putting a glove on the ruddy boy whenever he wanted to, but not putting anything in the glove.
The customers were booing before the first round was over. The second round was just as sour. I didn’t feel so good. Bush didn’t seem to have been much influenced by our little conversation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dinah Brand trying to catch my attention. She looked hot. I took care not to have my attention caught.
The room-mate act in the ring was continued in the third round to the tune of yelled Throw-em-outs, Why-don’t-you-kiss-hims and Make-em-fights from the seats. The pugs’ waltz brought them around to the corner nearest me just as the booing broke off for a moment.
I made a megaphone of my hands and bawled:
“Back to Philly, Al.”
Bush’s back was to me. He wrestled Cooper around, shoving him into the ropes, so he—Bush—faced my way.
From somewhere far back in another part of the house another yelling voice came:
“Back to Philly, Al.”
MacSwain, I supposed.
A drunk off to one side lifted his puffy face and bawled the same thing, laughing as if it were a swell joke. Others took up the cry for no reason at all except that it seemed to disturb Bush.
His eyes jerked from side to side under the black bar of his eyebrows.
One of Cooper’s wild mitts clouted the slim boy on the side of the jaw.
Ike Bush piled down at the referee’s feet.
The referee counted five in two seconds, but the gong cut him off.
I looked over at Dinah Brand and laughed. There wasn’t anything else to do. She looked at me and didn’t laugh. Her face was sick as Dan Rolff’s, but angrier.
Bush’s handlers dragged him into his corner and rubbed him up, not working very hard at it. He opened his eyes and watched his feet. The gong was tapped.
Kid Cooper paddled out hitching up his trunks. Bush waited until the bum was in the center of the ring, and then came to him, fast.
Bush’s left glove went down, out—practically out of sight in Cooper’s belly. Cooper said, “Ugh,” and backed away, folding up.
Bush straightened him with a right-hand poke in the mouth, and sank the left again. Cooper said, “Ugh,” again and had trouble with his knees.
Bush cuffed him once on each side of the head, cocked his right, carefully pushed Cooper’s face into position with a long left, and threw his right hand straight from under his jaw to Cooper’s.
Everybody in the house felt the punch.
Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.
When the referee had finally stalled through the count, he raised Bush’s hand. Neither of them looked happy.
A high twinkle of light caught my eye. A short silvery streak slanted down from one of the small balconies.
A woman screamed.
The silvery streak ended its flashing slant in the ring, with a sound that was partly a thud, partly a snap.
Ike Bush took his arm out of the referee’s hand and pitched down on top of Kid Cooper. A black knife-handle stuck out of the nape of Bush’s neck.
CHAPTER 10: CRIME WANTED—MALE OR FEMALE
Half an hour later, when I left the building, Dinah Brand was sitting at the wheel of a pale blue little Marmon, talking to Max Thaler, who stood in the road.
The girl’s square chin was tilted up. Her big red mouth was brutal around the words it shaped, and the lines crossing its ends were deep, hard.
The gambler looked as unpleasant as she. His pretty face was yellow and tough as oak. When he talked his lips were paper-thin.
It seemed to be a nice family party. I wouldn’t have joined it if the girl hadn’t seen me and called:
“My God, I thought you were never coming.”
I went over to the car. Thaler looked across the hood at me with no friendliness at all.
“Last night I advised you to go back to Frisco.” His whisper was harsher than anybody’s shout could have been. “Now I’m telling you.”
“Thanks just the same,” I said as I got in beside the girl.
While she was stirring the engine up he said to her:
“This isn’t the first time you’ve sold me out. It’s the last.”
She put the car in motion, turned her head back over her shoulder, and sang to him:
“To hell, my love, with you!”
We rode into town rapidly.
“Is Bush dead?” she asked as she twisted the car into Broadway.
“Decidedly. When they turned him over the point of the knife was sticking out in front.”
“He ought to have known better than to double-cross them. Let’s get something to eat. I’m almost eleven hundred ahead on the night’s doings, so if the boy friend doesn’t like it, it’s just too bad. How’d you come out?”
“Didn’t bet. So your Max doesn’t like it?”
“Didn’t bet?” she cried. “What kind of an ass are you? Whoever heard of anybody not betting when they had a thing like that sewed up?”
“I wasn’t sure it was sewed up. So Max didn’t like the way things turned out?”
“You guessed it. He dropped plenty. And then he gets sore with me because I had sense enough to switch over and get in on the win.” She stopped the car violently in front of a Chinese restaurant. “The hell with him, the little tin-horn runt!”
Her eyes were shiny because they were wet. She jabbed a handkerchief into them as we got out of the car.
“My God, I’m hungry,” she said, dragging me across the sidewalk. “Will you buy me a ton of chow mein?”
She didn’t eat a ton of it, but she did pretty well, putting away a piled-up dish of her own and half of mine. Then we got back into the Marmon and rode out to her house.
Dan Rolff was in the dining room. A water glass and a brown bottle with no label stood on the table in front of him. He sat straight up in his chair, staring at the bottle. The room smelled of laudanum.
Dinah Brand slid her fur coat off, letting it fall half on a chair and half on the floor, and snapped her fingers at the lunger, saying impatiently:
“Did you collect?”
Without looking up from the bottle, he took a pad of paper money out of his inside pocket and dropped it on the table. The girl grabbed it, counted the bills twice, smacked her lips, and stuffed the money in her bag.
She went out to the kitchen and began chopping ice. I sat down and lit a cigarette. Rolff stared at his bottle. He and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. Presently the girl brought in some gin, lemon juice, seltzer and ice.
We drank and she told Rolff:
“Max is sore as hell. He heard you’d been running around putting last-minute money on Bush, and the little monkey thinks I double-crossed him. What did I have to do with it? All I did was what any sensible person would have done—get in on the win. I didn’t have any more to do with it than a baby, did I?” she asked me.
“No.”
“Of course not. What’s the matter with Max is he’s afraid the others will think he was in on it too, that Dan was putting his dough down as well as mine. Well, that’s his hard luck. He can go climb trees for all I care, the lousy little runt. Another drink would go good.”
She poured another for herself and for me. Rolff hadn’t touched his first one. He said, still staring at the brown bottle:
“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”
The girl scowled and said disagreeably:
“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”
“Yeah.”
Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.
“And if I help you will I get some of the ten—?”
“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”
The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:
“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”
“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.
Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded:
“So I’m too utterly filthy for you now, am I?”
He said evenly:
“I said to betray your friends to this chap would be utterly filthy, and it would.”
She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t.
She let go his wrist, turned her back to him, and reached for gin and seltzer. She was smiling. I didn’t like the smile.
He got up, blinking. His wrist was red where she had held it, his face bruised. He steadied himself upright and looked at me with dull eyes.
With no change in the blankness of his face and eyes, he put a hand under his coat, brought out a black automatic pistol, and fired at me.
But he was too shaky for either speed or accuracy. I had time to toss a glass at him. The glass hit his shoulder. His bullet went somewhere overhead.
I jumped before he got the next one out—jumped at him—was close enough to knock the gun down. The second slug went into the floor.
I socked his jaw. He fell away from me and lay where he fell.
I turned around.
Dinah Brand was getting ready to bat me over the head with the seltzer bottle, a heavy glass siphon that would have made pulp of my skull.
“Don’t,” I yelped.
“You didn’t have to bust him like that,” she snarled.
“Well, it’s done. You’d better get him straightened out.”
She put down the siphon and I helped her carry him up to his bedroom. When he began moving his eyes, I left her to finish the work and went down to the dining room again. She joined me there fifteen minutes later.
“He’s all right,” she said. “But you could have handled him without that.”
“Yeah, but I did that for him. Know why he took the shot at me?”
“So I’d have nobody to sell Max out to?”
“No. Because I’d seen you maul him around.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “I was the one who did it.”
“He’s in love with you, and this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. He acted like he had learned there was no use matching muscle with you. But you can’t expect him to enjoy having another man see you slap his face.”
“I used to think I knew men,” she complained, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”
“So I poked him to give him back some of his self-respect. You know, treated him as I would a man instead of a down-and-outer who could be slapped around by girls.”
“Anything you say,” she sighed. “I give up. We ought to have a drink.”
We had the drink, and I said:
“You were saying you’d work with me if there was a cut of the Willsson money in it for you. There is.”
“How much?”
“Whatever you earn. Whatever what you do is worth.”
“That’s uncertain.”
“So’s your help, so far as I know.”
“Is it? I can give you the stuff, brother, loads of it, and don’t think I can’t. I’m a girl who knows her Poisonville.” She looked down at her gray-stockinged knees, waved one leg at me, and exclaimed indignantly: “Look at that. Another run. Did you ever see anything to beat it? Honest to God! I’m going barefoot.”
“Your legs are too big,” I told her. “They put too much strain on the material.”
“That’ll do out of you. What’s your idea of how to go about purifying our village?”
“If I haven’t been lied to, Thaler, Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Noonan are the men who’ve made Poisonville the sweet-smelling mess it is. Old Elihu comes in for his share of the blame, too, but it’s not all his fault, maybe. Besides, he’s my client, even if he doesn’t want to be, so I’d like to go easy on him.
“The closest I’ve got to an idea is to dig up any and all the dirty work I can that might implicate the others, and run it out. Maybe I’ll advertise—Crime Wanted—Male or Female. If they’re as crooked as I think they are I shouldn’t have a lot of trouble finding a job or two that I can hang on them.”
“Is that what you were up to when you uncooked the fight?”
“That was only an experiment—just to see what would happen.”
“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.”
“Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.”
“That ought to be good for another drink,” she said.
CHAPTER 11: THE SWELL SPOON
We had another drink.
She put her glass down, licked her lips, and said:
“If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you. Did you ever hear of Noonan’s brother Tim, the one who committed suicide out at Mock Lake a couple of years ago?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have heard much good. Anyway, he didn’t commit suicide. Max killed him.”
“Yeah?”
“For God’s sake wake up. This I’m giving you is real. Noonan was like a father to Tim. Take the proof to him and he’ll be after Max like nobody’s business. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got proof?”
“Two people got to Tim before he died, and he told them Max had done it. They’re both still in town, though one won’t live a lot longer. How’s that?”
She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed women, that doesn’t always mean anything.
“Let’s listen to the rest of it,” I said. “I like details and things.”
“You’ll get them. You ever been out to Mock Lake? Well, it’s our summer resort, thirty miles up the canyon road. It’s a dump, but it’s cool in summer, so it gets a good play. This was summer a year ago, the last week-end in August. I was out there with a fellow named Holly. He’s back in England now, but you don’t care anything about that, because he’s got nothing to do with it. He was a funny sort of old woman—used to wear white silk socks turned inside out so the loose threads wouldn’t hurt his feet. I got a letter from him last week. It’s around here somewhere, but that doesn’t make any difference.
“We were up there, and Max was up there with a girl he used to play around with—Myrtle Jennison. She’s in the hospital now—City—dying of Bright’s disease or something. She was a classy looking kid then, a slender blonde. I always liked her, except that a few drinks made her too noisy. Tim Noonan was crazy about her, but she couldn’t see anybody but Max that summer.
“Tim wouldn’t let her alone. He was a big good-looking Irishman, but a sap and a cheap crook who only got by because his brother was chief of police. Wherever Myrtle went, he’d pop up sooner or later. She didn’t like to say anything to Max about it, not wanting Max to do anything to put him in wrong with Tim’s brother, the chief.
“So of course Tim showed up at Mock Lake this Saturday. Myrtle and Max were just by themselves. Holly and I were with a bunch, but I saw Myrtle to talk to and she told me she had got a note from Tim, asking her to meet him for a few minutes that night, in one of the little arbor things on the hotel grounds. He said if she didn’t he would kill himself. That was a laugh for us—the big false alarm. I tried to talk Myrtle out of going, but she had just enough booze in her to feel gay and she said she was going to give him an earful.
