Red Harvest (23 page)

Mickey asked, “What the hell?” got no answer, and moved his loose-jointed bulk toward the elevators.

I went around to the Shannon Hotel, registered my alias, paid my day’s rent, and was taken to room 321.

An hour passed before the phone rang.

Dick Foley said he was coming up to see me.

He arrived within five minutes. His thin worried face was not friendly. Neither was his voice. He said:

“Warrants out for you. Murder. Two counts—Brand and Dawn. I phoned. Mickey said he’d stick. Told me you were here. Police got him. Grilling him now.”

“Yeah, I expected that.”

“So did I,” he said sharply.

I said, making myself drawl the words:

“You think I killed them, don’t you, Dick?”

“If you didn’t, it’s a good time to say so.”

“Going to put the finger on me?” I asked.

He pulled his lips back over his teeth. His face changed from tan to buff.

I said:

“Go back to San Francisco, Dick. I’ve got enough to do without having to watch you.”

He put his hat on very carefully and very carefully closed the door behind him when he went out.

At four o’clock, I had some lunch, cigarettes, and an
Evening Herald
sent up to me.

Dinah Brand’s murder, and the newer murder of Charles Proctor Dawn, divided the front page of the
Herald,
with Helen Albury connecting them.

Helen Albury was, I read, Robert Albury’s sister, and she was, in spite of his confession, thoroughly convinced that her brother was not guilty of murder, but the victim of a plot. She had retained Charles Proctor Dawn to defend him. (I could guess that the late Charles Proctor had hunted her up, and not she him.) The brother refused to have Dawn or any other lawyer, but the girl (properly encouraged by Dawn, no doubt) had not given up the fight.

Finding a vacant flat across the street of Dinah Brand’s house, Helen Albury had rented it, and had installed herself therein with a pair of field glasses and one idea—to prove that Dinah and her associates were guilty of Donald Willsson’s murder.

I, it seems, was one of the “associates.” The
Herald
called me “a man supposed to be a private detective from San Francisco, who has been in the city for several days, apparently on intimate terms with Max (‘Whisper’) Thaler, Daniel Rolff, Oliver (‘Reno’) Starkey, and Dinah Brand.” We were the plotters who had framed Robert Albury.

The night that Dinah had been killed, Helen Albury, peeping through her window, had seen things that were, according to the
Herald,
extremely significant when considered in connection with the subsequent finding of Dinah’s dead body. As soon as the girl heard of the murder, she took her important knowledge to Charles Proctor Dawn. He, the police learned from his clerks, immediately sent for me, and had been closeted with me that afternoon. He
had later told his clerks that I was to return the next—this—morning at ten. This morning I had not appeared to keep my appointment. At twenty-five minutes past ten, the janitor of the Rutledge Block had found Charles Proctor Dawn’s body in a corner behind the staircase, murdered. It was believed that valuable papers had been taken from the dead man’s pockets.

At the very moment that the janitor was finding the dead lawyer, I, it seems, was in Helen Albury’s flat, having forced an entrance, and was threatening her. After she succeeded in throwing me out, she hurried to Dawn’s offices, arriving while the police were there, telling them her story. Police sent to my hotel had not found me there, but in my room they had found one Michael Linehan, who also represented himself to be a San Francisco private detective. Michael Linehan was still being questioned by the police. Whisper, Reno, Rolff and I were being hunted by the police, charged with murder. Important developments were expected.

Page two held an interesting half-column. Detectives Shepp and Vanaman, the discoverers of Dinah Brand’s body, had mysteriously vanished. Foul play on the part of us “associates” was feared.

There was nothing in the paper about last night’s hijacking, nothing about the raid on Peak Murry’s joint.

I went out after dark. I wanted to get in touch with Reno.

From a drug store I phoned Peak Murry’s pool room.

“Is Peak there?” I asked.

“This is Peak,” said a voice that didn’t sound anything at all like his. “Who’s talking?”

I said disgustedly, “This is Lillian Gish,” hung up the receiver, and removed myself from the neighborhood.

I gave up the idea of finding Reno and decided to go calling on my client, old Elihu, and try to blackjack him into good behavior with the love letters he had written Dinah Brand, and which I had stolen from Dawn’s remains.

I walked, keeping to the darker side of the darkest streets. It
was a fairly long walk for a man who sneers at exercise. By the time I reached Willsson’s block I was in bad enough humor to be in good shape for the sort of interviews he and I usually had. But I wasn’t to see him for a little while yet.

I was two pavements from my destination when somebody
S-s-s-s-s
’d at me.

I probably didn’t jump twenty feet.

“’S all right,” a voice whispered.

It was dark there. Peeping out under my bush—I was on my hands and knees in somebody’s front yard—I could make out the form of a man crouching close to a hedge, on my side of it.

My gun was in my hand now. There was no special reason why I shouldn’t take his word for it that it was all right.

I got up off my knees and went to him. When I got close enough I recognized him as one of the men who had let me into the Ronney Street house the day before.

I sat on my heels beside him and asked:

“Where’ll I find Reno? Hank O’Marra said he wanted to see me.”

“He does that. Know where Kid McLeod’s place is at?”

“No.”

“It’s on Martin Street above King, corner the alley. Ask for the Kid. Go back that-away three blocks, and then down. You can’t miss it.”

I said I’d try not to, and left him crouching behind his hedge, watching my client’s place, waiting, I guessed, for a shot at Pete the Finn, Whisper, or any of Reno’s other un-friends who might happen to call on old Elihu.

Following directions, I came to a soft drink and rummy establishment with red and yellow paint all over it. Inside I asked for Kid McLeod. I was taken into a back room, where a fat man with a dirty collar, a lot of gold teeth, and only one ear, admitted he was McLeod.

“Reno sent for me,” I said, “Where’ll I find him?”

“And who does that make you?” he asked.

I told him who I was. He went out without saying anything. I waited ten minutes. He brought a boy back with him, a kid of fifteen or so with a vacant expression on a pimply red face.

“Go with Sonny,” Kid McLeod told me.

I followed the boy out a side door, down two blocks of back street, across a sandy lot, through a ragged gate, and up to the back door of a frame house.

The boy knocked on the door and was asked who he was.

“Sonny, with a guy the Kid sent,” he replied.

The door was opened by long-legged O’Marra. Sonny went away. I went into a kitchen where Reno Starkey and four other men sat around a table that had a lot of beer on it. I noticed that two automatic pistols hung on nails over the top of the door through which I had come. They would be handy if any of the house’s occupants opened the door, found an enemy with a gun there, and were told to put up their hands.

Reno poured me a glass of beer and led me through the dining room into a front room. A man lay on his belly there, with one eye to the crack between the drawn blind and the bottom of the window, watching the street.

“Go back and get yourself some beer,” Reno told him.

He got up and went away. We made ourselves comfortable in adjoining chairs.

“When I fixed up that Tanner alibi for you,” Reno said, “I told you I was doing it because I needed all the friends I could get.”

“You got one.”

“Crack the alibi yet?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“It’ll hold,” he assured me, “unless they got too damned much on you. Think they have?”

I did think so. I said:

“No. McGraw’s just feeling playful. That’ll take care of itself. How’s your end holding up?”

He emptied his glass, wiped his mouth on the back of a hand, and said:

“I’ll make out. But that’s what I wanted to see you about. Here’s how she stacks up. Pete’s throwed in with McGraw. That lines coppers and beer mob up against me and Whisper. But hell! Me and Whisper are busier trying to put the chive in each other than bucking the combine. That’s a sour racket. While we’re tangling, them bums will eat us up.”

I said I had been thinking the same thing. He went on:

“Whisper’ll listen to you. Find him, will you? Put it to him. Here’s the proposish: he means to get me for knocking off Jerry Hooper, and I mean to get him first. Let’s forget that for a couple of days. Nobody won’t have to trust nobody else. Whisper don’t ever show in any of his jobs anyways. He just sends the boys. I’ll do the same this time. We’ll just put the mobs together to swing the caper. We run them together, rub out the damned Finn, and then we’ll have plenty of time to go gunning among ourselves.

“Put it to him cold. I don’t want him to get any ideas that I’m dodging a rumpus with him or any other guy. Tell him I say if we put Pete out of the way we’ll have more room to do our own scrapping in. Pete’s holed-up down in Whiskeytown. I ain’t got enough men to go down there and pull him out. Neither has Whisper. The two of us together has. Put it to him.”

“Whisper,” I said, “is dead.”

Reno said, “Is that so?” as if he thought it wasn’t.

“Dan Rolff killed him yesterday morning, down in the old Redman warehouse, stuck him with the ice pick Whisper had used on the girl.”

Reno asked:

“You know this? You’re not just running off at the head?”

“I know it.”

“Damned funny none of his mob act like he was gone,” he said, but he was beginning to believe me.

“They don’t know it. He was hiding out, with Ted Wright
the only one in on the where. Ted knew it. He cashed in on it. He told me he got a hundred or a hundred and fifty from you, through Peak Murry.”

“I’d have given the big umpchay twice that for the straight dope,” Reno grumbled. He rubbed his chin and said: “Well, that settles the Whisper end.”

I said: “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“If his mob don’t know where he is,” I suggested, “let’s tell them. They blasted him out of the can when Noonan copped him. Think they’d try it again if the news got around that McGraw had picked him up on the quiet?”

“Keep talking,” Reno said.

“If his friends try to crack the hoosegow again, thinking he’s in it, that’ll give the department, including Pete’s specials, something to do. While they’re doing it, you could try your luck in Whiskeytown.”

“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe we’ll try just that thing.”

“It ought to work,” I encouraged him, standing up. “I’ll see you—”

“Stick around. This is as good a spot as any while there’s a reader out for you. And we’ll need a good guy like you on the party.”

I didn’t like that so much. I knew enough not to say so. I sat down again.

Reno got busy arranging the rumor. The telephone was worked overtime. The kitchen door was worked as hard, letting men in and out. More came in than went out. The house filled with men, smoke, tension.

At half-past one Reno turned from answering a phone call to say:

“Let’s take a ride.”

He went upstairs. When he came down he carried a black valise. Most of the men had gone out the kitchen door by then.

Reno gave me the black valise, saying:

“Don’t wrastle it around too much.”

It was heavy.

The seven of us left in the house went out the front door and got into a curtained touring car that O’Marra had just driven up to the curb. Reno sat beside O’Marra. I was squeezed in between men in the back seat, with the valise squeezed between my legs.