He slopped his feet up and down in the mud and added:
“Next week my wife got killed—an accident. Uh-huh, an accident. She drove the Ford square in front of No. 6 where it comes down the long grade from Tanner and stopped it there.”
“Is Mock Lake in this county?” I asked.
“No, Boulder County.”
“That’s out of Noonan’s territory. Suppose I take you over there and hand you to the sheriff?”
“No. He’s Senator Keefer’s son-in-law—Tom Cook. I might as well be here. Noonan could get to me through Keefer.”
“If it happened the way you say, you’ve got at least an even chance of beating the rap in court.”
“They won’t give me a chance. I’d have stood it if there’d been a chance in the world of getting an even break—but not with them.”
“We’re going back to the Hall,” I said. “Keep your mouth shut.”
Noonan was waddling up and down the floor, cursing the half a dozen bulls who stood around wishing they were somewhere else.
“Here’s something I found roaming around,” I said, pushing MacSwain forward.
Noonan knocked the ex-detective down, kicked him, and told one of the coppers to take him away.
Somebody called Noonan on the phone. I slipped out without saying, “Good-night,” and walked back to the hotel.
Off to the north some guns popped.
A group of three men passed me, shifty-eyed, walking pigeon-toed.
A little farther along, another man moved all the way over to the curb to give me plenty of room to pass. I didn’t know him and didn’t suppose he knew me.
A lone shot sounded not far away.
As I reached the hotel, a battered black touring car went down the street, hitting fifty at least, crammed to the curtains with men.
I grinned after it. Poinsonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn’t keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.
15
CEDAR HILL INN
Mickey Linehan used the telephone to wake me a little after noon.
“We’re here,” he told me. “Where’s the reception committee?”
“Probably stopped to get a rope. Check your bags and come up to the hotel. Room 537. Don’t advertise your visit.”
I was dressed when they arrived.
Mickey Linehan was a big slob with sagging shoulders and a shapeless body that seemed to be coming apart at all its joints. His ears stood out like red wings, and his round red face usually wore the meaningless smirk of a half-wit. He looked like a comedian and was.
Dick Foley was a boy-sized Canadian with a sharp irritable face. He wore high heels to increase his height, perfumed his handkerchiefs and saved all the words he could.
They were both good operatives.
“What did the Old Man tell you about the job?” I asked when we had settled into seats. The Old Man was the manager of the Continental’s San Francisco branch. He was also known as Pontius Pilate, because he smiled pleasantly when he sent us out to be crucified on suicidal jobs. He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.
“He didn’t seem to know much what it was all about,” Mickey said, “except that you had wired for help. He said he hadn’t got any reports from you for a couple of days.”
“The chances are he’ll wait a couple more. Know anything about this Personville?”
Dick shook his head. Mickey said:
“Only that I’ve heard parties call it Poisonville like they meant it.”
I told them what I knew and what I had done. The telephone bell interrupted my tale in the last quarter.
Dinah Brand’s lazy voice:
“Hello! How’s the wrist?”
“Only a burn. What do you think of the crush-out?”
“It’s not my fault,” she said. “I did my part. If Noonan couldn’t hold him, that’s just too bad. I’m coming downtown to buy a hat this afternoon. I thought I’d drop in and see you for a couple of minutes if you’re going to be there.”
“What time?”
“Oh, around three.”
“Right, I’ll expect you, and I’ll have that two hundred and a dime I owe you.”
“Do,” she said. “That’s what I’m coming in for. Ta-ta.”
I went back to my seat and my story.
When I had finished, Mickey Linehan whistled and said:
“No wonder you’re scared to send in any reports. The Old Man wouldn’t do much if he knew what you’ve been up to, would he?”
“If it works out the way I want it to, I won’t have to report all the distressing details,” I said. “It’s right enough for the Agency to have rules and regulations, but when you’re out on a job you’ve got to do it the best way you can. And anybody that brings any ethics to Poisonville is going to get them all rusty. A report is no place for the dirty details, anyway, and I don’t want you birds to send any writing back to San Francisco without letting me see it first.”
“What kind of crimes have you got for us to pull?” Mickey asked.
“I want you to take Pete the Finn. Dick will take Lew Yard. You’ll have to play it the way I’ve been playing—do what you can when you can. I’ve an idea that the pair of them will try to make Noonan let Whisper alone. I don’t know what he’ll do. He’s shifty as hell and he does want to even up his brother’s killing.”
“After I take this Finnish gent,” Mickey said, “what do I do with him? I don’t want to brag about how dumb I am, but this job is plain as astronomy to me. I understand everything about it except what you have done and why, and what you’re trying to do and how.”
“You can start off by shadowing him. I’ve got to have a wedge that can be put between Pete and Yard, Yard and Noonan, Pete and Noonan, Pete and Thaler, or Yard and Thaler. If we can smash things up enough—break the combination—they’ll have their knives in each other’s backs, doing our work for us. The break between Thaler and Noonan is a starter. But it’ll sag on us if we don’t help it along.
“I could buy more dope on the whole lot from Dinah Brand. But there’s no use taking anybody into court, no matter what you’ve got on them. They own the courts, and, besides, the courts are too slow for us now. I’ve got myself tangled up in something and as soon as the Old Man smells it—and San Francisco isn’t far enough away to fool his nose—he’s going to be sitting on the wire, asking for explanations. I’ve got to have results to hide the details under. So evidence won’t do. What we’ve got to have is dynamite.”
“What about our respected client, Mr. Elihu Willsson?” Mickey asked. “What are you planning to do with or to him?”
“Maybe ruin him, maybe club him into backing us up. I don’t care which. You’d better stay at the Hotel Person, Mickey, and Dick can go to the National. Keep apart, and, if you want to keep me from being fired, burn the job up before the Old Man tumbles. Better write these down.”
I gave them names, descriptions, and addresses when I had them, of Elihu Willsson; Stanley Lewis, his secretary; Dinah Brand; Dan Rolff; Noonan; Max Thaler, alias Whisper; his right-hand man, the chinless Jerry; Mrs. Donald Willsson; Lewis’s daughter, who had been Donald Willsson’s secretary; and Bill Quint, Dinah’s radical ex-boy-friend.
“Now hop to it,” I said. “And don’t kid yourselves that there’s any law in Poisonville except what you make for yourself.”
Mickey said I’d be surprised how many laws he could get along without. Dick said: “So long,” and they departed.
After breakfast I went over to the City Hall.
Noonan’s greenish eyes were bleary, as if they hadn’t been sleeping, and his face had lost some of its color. He pumped my hand up and down as enthusiastically as ever, and the customary amount of cordiality was in his voice and manner.
“Any line on Whisper?” I asked
when we had finished the glad-handing.
“I think I’ve got something.” He looked at the clock on the wall and then at his phone. “I’m expecting word any minute. Sit down.”
“Who else got away?”
“Jerry Hooper and Tony Agosti are the only other ones still out. We picked up the rest. Jerry is Whisper’s man-Friday, and the wop’s one of his mob. He’s the bozo that put the knife in Ike Bush the night of the fight.”
“Any more of Whisper’s mob in?”
“No. We just had the three of them, except Buck Wallace, the fellow you potted. He’s in the hospital.”
The chief looked at the wall clock again, and at his watch. It was exactly two o’clock. He turned to the phone. It rang. He grabbed it, said:
“Noonan talking…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. Right.”
He pushed the phone aside and played a tune on the row of pearl buttons on his desk. The office filled up with coppers.
“Cedar Hill Inn,” he said. “You follow me out with your detail, Bates. Terry, shoot out Broadway and hit the dump from behind. Pick up the boys on traffic duty as you go along. It’s likely we’ll need everybody we can get. Duffy, take yours out Union Street and around by the old mine road. McGraw will hold headquarters down. Get hold of everybody you can and send them after us. Jump!”
He grabbed his hat and went after them, calling over his thick shoulder to me:
“Come on, man, this is the kill.”
I followed him down to the department garage, where the engines of half a dozen cars were roaring. The chief sat beside his driver. I sat in back with four detectives.
Men scrambled into the other cars. Machine-guns were unwrapped. Arm-loads of rifles and riot-guns were distributed, and packages of ammunition.
The chief’s car got away first, off with a jump that hammered our teeth together. We missed the garage door by half an inch, chased a couple of pedestrians diagonally across the sidewalk, bounced off the curb into the roadway, missed a truck as narrowly as we had missed the door, and dashed out King Street with our siren wide open.
Panicky automobiles darted right and left, regardless of traffic rules, to let us through. It was a lot of fun.
I looked back, saw another police car following us, a third turning into Broadway. Noonan chewed a cold cigar and told the driver:
“Give her a bit more, Pat.”
Pat twisted us around a frightened woman’s coupé, put us through a slot between street car and laundry wagon—a narrow slot that we couldn’t have slipped through if our car hadn’t been so smoothly enameled—and said:
“All right, but the brakes ain’t no good.”
“That’s nice,” the gray-mustached sleuth on my left said. He didn’t sound sincere.
Out of the center of the city there wasn’t much traffic to bother us, but the paving was rougher. It was a nice half-hour’s ride, with everybody getting a chance to sit in everybody else’s lap. The last ten minutes of it was over an uneven road that had hills enough to keep us from forgetting what Pat had said about the brakes.
We wound up at a gate topped by a shabby electric sign that had said Cedar Hill Inn before it lost its globes. The roadhouse, twenty feet behind the gate, was a squat wooden building painted a moldy green and chiefly surrounded by rubbish. Front door and windows were closed, blank.
We followed Noonan out of the car. The machine that had been trailing us came into sight around a bend in the road, slid to rest beside ours, and unloaded its cargo of men and weapons.
Noonan ordered this and that.
A trio of coppers went around each side of the building. Three others, including a machine-gunner, remained by the gate. The rest of us walked through tin cans, bottles, and ancient newspaper to the front of the house.
The gray-mustached detective who had sat beside me in the car carried a red ax. We stepped up on the porch.
Noise and fire came out under a window sill.
The gray-mustached detective fell down, hiding the ax under his corpse.
The rest of us ran away.
I ran with Noonan. We hid in the ditch on the Inn side of the road. It was deep enough, and banked high enough, to let us stand almost erect without being targets.
The chief was excited.
“What luck!” he said happily. “He’s here, by God, he’s here!”
“That shot came from under the sill,” I said. “Not a bad trick.”
“We’ll spoil it, though,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll sieve the dump. Duffy ought to be pulling up on the other road by now, and Terry Shane won’t be many minutes behind him. Hey, Donner!” he called to a man who was peeping around a boulder. “Swing around back and tell Duffy and Shane to start closing in as soon as they come, letting fly with all they got. Where’s Kimble?”
The peeper jerked a thumb toward a tree beyond him. We could see only the upper part of it from our ditch.
“Tell him to set up his mill and start grinding,” Noonan ordered. “Low, across the front, ought to do it like cutting cheese.”
The peeper disappeared.
Noonan went up and down the ditch, risking his noodle over the top now and then for a look around, once in a while calling or gesturing to his men.
He came back, sat on his heels beside me, gave me a cigar, and lit one for himself.
“It’ll do,” he said complacently. “Whisper won’t have a chance. He’s done.”
The machine-gun by the tree fired, haltingly, experimentally, eight or ten shots. Noonan grinned and let a smoke ring float out of his mouth. The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was. Noonan blew another smoke ring and said:
“That’s exactly what’ll do it.”
I agreed that it ought to. We leaned against the clay bank and smoked while, farther away, another machine-gun got going, and then a third. Irregularly, rifles, pistols, shot-guns joined in. Noonan nodded approvingly and said:
“Five minutes of that will let him know there’s a hell.”
When the five minutes were up I suggested a look at the remains. I gave him a boost up the bank and scrambled up after him.
The roadhouse was as bleak and empty-looking as before, but more battered. No shots came from it. Plenty were going into it.
“What do you think?” Noonan asked.
“If there’s a cellar there might be a mouse alive in it.”
“Well, we could finish him afterwards.”
He took a whistle out of his pocket and made a lot of noise. He waved his fat arms, and the gun-fire began dwindling. We had to wait for the word to go all the way around.
Then we crashed the door.
The first floor was ankle-deep with booze that was still gurgling from bullet holes in the stacked-up cases and barrels that filled most of the house.
Dizzy with the fumes of spilled hooch, we waded around until we had found four dead bodies and no live ones. The four were swarthy foreign-looking men in laborers’ clothes. Two of them were practically shot to pieces.
Noonan said:
“Leave them here and get out.”
His voice was cheerful, but in a flashlight’s glow his eyes showed white-ringed with fear.
We went out gladly, though I did hesitate long enough to pocket an unbroken bottle labeled Dewar.
A khaki-dressed copper was tumbling off a motorcycle at the gate. He yelled at us:
“The First National’s been stuck up.”
Noonan cursed savagely, bawled:
“He’s foxed us, damn him! Back to town, everybody.”
Everybody except us who had ridden with the chief beat it for the machines. Two of them took the dead detective with them.
Noonan looked at me out of his eye-corners and said:
“This is a tough one, no fooling.”
I said, “Well,” shrugged, and sauntered over to his car, where the driver was sitting at the wheel. I stood with my back to the house, talking to Pat. I don’t remember what we ta
lked about. Presently Noonan and the other sleuths joined us.
Only a little flame showed through the open roadhouse door before we passed out of sight around the bend in the road.
16
EXIT JERRY
There was a mob around the First National Bank. We pushed through it to the door, where we found sour-faced McGraw.
“Was six of them, masked,” he reported to the chief as we went inside. “They hit it about two-thirty. Five of them got away clean with the jack. The watchman here dropped one of them, Jerry Hooper. He’s over on the bench, cold. We got the roads blocked, and I wired around, if it ain’t too late. Last seen of them was when they made the turn into King Street, in a black Lincoln.”
We went over to look at the dead Jerry, lying on one of the lobby benches with a brown robe over him. The bullet had gone under his left shoulder blade.
The bank watchman, a harmless looking old duffer, pushed up his chest and told us about it:
“There wasn’t no chance to do nothing at first. They were in ’fore anybody knew anything. And maybe they didn’t work fast. Right down the line, scooping it up. No chance to do anything then. But I says to myself. ‘All righty, young fellows, you’ve got it all your own way now, but wait till you try to leave.’
“And I was as good as my word, you bet you. I runs right to the door after them and cut loose with the old firearm. I got that fellow just as he was stepping into the car. I bet you I’d of got more of them if I’d of had more cartridges, because it’s kind of hard shooting down like that, standing in the—”
Noonan stopped the monologue by patting the old duffer’s back till his lungs were empty, telling him, “That certainly is fine. That certainly is fine.”
McGraw pulled the robe up over the dead man again and growled:
“Nobody can identify anybody. But with Jerry on it, it’s a cinch it was Whisper’s caper.”
The chief nodded happily and said:
“I’ll leave it in your hands, Mac. Going to poke around here, or going back to the Hall with me?” he asked me.
“Neither. I’ve got a date, and I want to get into dry shoes.”
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