Red Harvest (7 page)

A pause. Then the muffled voice said: “Yes.”

“I’m the Continental op who tipped Dinah Brand off that Noonan was framing you,” I said. “I want five minutes’ talk with you. I’ve got nothing to do with Noonan except to queer his racket. I’m alone. I’ll drop my rod in the street if you say so. Let me in.”

I waited. It depended on whether the girl had got to him with the story of my interview with her. I waited what seemed a long time.

The muffled voice said:

“When we open, come in quick. And no stunts.”

“All set.”

The latch clicked. I plunged in with the door.

Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and windows tinkled around us.

Somebody tripped me. Fear gave me three brains and half a dozen eyes. I was in a tough spot. Noonan had slipped me a pretty dose. These birds couldn’t help thinking I was playing his game.

I tumbled down, twisting around to face the door. My gun was in my hand by the time I hit the floor.

Across the street, burly Nick had stepped out of a doorway to pump slugs at us with both hands.

I steadied my gun-arm on the floor. Nick’s body showed over the front sight. I squeezed the gun. Nick stopped shooting. He crossed his guns on his chest and went down in a pile on the sidewalk.

Hands on my ankles dragged me back. The floor scraped pieces off my chin. The door slammed shut. Some comedian said:

“Uh-huh, people don’t like you.”

I sat up and shouted through the racket:

“I wasn’t in on this.”

The shooting dwindled, stopped. Door and window blinds were dotted with gray holes. A husky whisper said in the darkness:

“Tod, you and Slats keep an eye on things down here. The rest of us might as well go upstairs.”

We went through a room behind the store, into a passageway, up a flight of carpeted steps, and into a second-story room that held a green table banked for crap-shooting. It was a small room, had no windows, and the lights were on.

There were five of us. Thaler sat down and lit a cigarette, a small dark young man with a face that was pretty in a chorusman way until you took another look at the thin hard mouth. An angular blond kid of no more than twenty in tweeds sprawled on his back on a couch and blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. Another boy, as blond and as young, but not so angular, was busy straightening his scarlet tie, smoothing his yellow hair. A thin-faced man of thirty with little or no chin under a wide loose mouth wandered up and down the room looking bored and humming
Rosy Cheeks.

I sat in a chair two or three feet from Thaler’s.

“How long is Noonan going to keep this up?” he asked. There was no emotion in his hoarse whispering voice, only a shade of annoyance.

“He’s after you this trip,” I said. “I think he’s going through with it.”

The gambler smiled a thin, contemptuous smile.

“He ought to know what a swell chance he’s got of hanging a one-legged rap like that on me.”

“He’s not figuring on proving anything in court,” I said.

“No?”

“You’re to be knocked off resisting arrest, or trying to make a get-away. He won’t need much of a case after that.”

“He’s getting tough in his old age.” The thin lips curved in another smile. He didn’t seem to think much of the fat chief’s deadliness. “Any time he rubs me out I deserve rubbing. What’s he got against you?”

“He’s guessed I’m going to make a nuisance of myself.”

“Too bad. Dinah told me you were a pretty good guy, except kind of Scotch with the roll.”

“I had a nice visit. Will you tell me what you know about Donald Willsson’s killing?”

“His wife plugged him.”

“You saw her?”

“I saw her the next second—with the gat in her hand.”

“That’s no good to either of us,” I said. “I don’t know how far you’ve got it cooked. Rigged right, you could make it stick in court, maybe, but you’ll not get a chance to make your play there. If Noonan takes you at all he’ll take you stiff. Give me the straight of it. I only need that to pop the job.”

He dropped his cigarette on the floor, mashed it under his foot, and asked:

“You that hot?”

“Give me your slant on it and I’m ready to make the pinch—if I can get out of here.”

He lit another cigarette and asked:

“Mrs. Willsson said it was me that phoned her?”

“Yeah—after Noonan had persuaded her. She believes it now—maybe.”

“You dropped Big Nick,” he said. “I’ll take a chance on you. A man phoned me that night. I don’t know him, don’t know who he was. He said Willsson had gone to Dinah’s with a check for five grand. What the hell did I care? But, see, it was funny somebody I didn’t know cracked it to me. So I went around. Dan stalled me away from the door. That was all right. But still it was funny as hell that guy phoned me.

“I went up the street and took a plant in a vestibule. I saw Mrs. Willsson’s heap standing in the street, but I didn’t know then that it was hers or that she was in it. He came out pretty soon and walked down the street. I didn’t see the shots. I heard them. Then this woman jumps out of the heap and runs over to him. I knew she hadn’t done the shooting. I ought to have beat it. But it was all funny as hell, so when I saw the woman was Willsson’s
wife I went over to them, trying to find out what it was all about. That was a break, see? So I had to make an out for myself, in case something slipped. I strung the woman. That’s the whole damned works—on the level.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s what I came for. Now the trick is to get out of here without being mowed down.”

“No trick at all,” Thaler assured me. “We go any time we want to.”

“I want to now. If I were you, I’d go too. You’ve got Noonan pegged as a false-alarm, but why take a chance? Make the sneak and keep under cover till noon, and his frame-up will be a wash-out.”

Thaler put his hand in his pants pocket and brought out a fat roll of paper money. He counted off a hundred or two, some fifties, twenties, tens, and held them out to the chinless man, saying:

“Buy us a get-away, Jerry, and you don’t have to give anybody any more dough than he’s used to.”

Jerry took the money, picked up a hat from the table, and strolled out. Half an hour later he returned and gave some of the bills back to Thaler, saying casually:

“We wait in the kitchen till we get the office.”

We went down to the kitchen. It was dark there. More men joined us.

Jerry opened the door and we went down three steps into the back yard. It was almost full daylight. There were ten of us in the party.

“This all?” I asked Thaler.

He nodded.

“Nick said there were fifty of you.”

“Fifty of us to stand off that crummy force!” he sneered.

A uniformed copper held the back gate open, muttering nervously:

“Hurry it up, boys, please.”

I was willing to hurry, but nobody else paid any attention to him.

We crossed an alley, were beckoned through another gate by a big man in brown, passed through a house, out into the next street, and climbed into a black automobile that stood at the curb.

One of the blond boys drove. He knew what speed was.

I said I wanted to be dropped off somewhere in the neighborhood of the Great Western Hotel. The driver looked at Whisper, who nodded. Five minutes later I got out in front of my hotel.

“See you later,” the gambler whispered, and the car slid away.

The last I saw of it was its police department license plate vanishing around a corner.

It was half-past five. I walked around a few blocks until I came to an unlighted electric sign that said
Hotel Crawford,
climbed a flight of steps to the second-floor office, registered, left a call for ten o’clock, was shown into a shabby room, moved some of the Scotch from my flask to my stomach, and took old Elihu’s ten-thousand-dollar check and my gun to bed with me.

At ten I dressed, went up to the First National Bank, found young Albury, and asked him to certify Willsson’s check for me. He kept me waiting a while. I suppose he phoned the old man’s residence to find out if the check was on the up-and-up. Finally he brought it back to me, properly scribbled on.

I sponged an envelope, put the old man’s letter and check in it, addressed it to the Agency in San Francisco, stuck a stamp on it, and went out and dropped it in the mail-box on the corner.

Then I returned to the bank and said to the boy:

“Now tell me why you killed him.”

He smiled and asked:

“Cock Robin or President Lincoln?”

“You’re not going to admit off-hand that you killed Donald Willsson?”

“I don’t want to be disagreeable,” he said, still smiling, “but I’d rather not.”

“That’s going to make it bad,” I complained. “We can’t
stand
here and argue very long without being interrupted. Who’s the stout party with cheaters coming this way?”

The boy’s face pinkened. He said:

“Mr. Dritton, the cashier.”

“Introduce me.”

The boy looked uncomfortable, but he called the cashier’s name. Dritton—a large man with a smooth pink face, a fringe of white hair around an otherwise bald pink head, and rimless nose glasses—came over to us.

The assistant cashier mumbled the introductions. I shook Dritton’s hand without losing sight of the boy.

“I was just saying,” I addressed Dritton, “that we ought to have a more private place to talk in. He probably won’t confess till I’ve worked on him a while, and I don’t want everybody in the bank to hear me yelling at him.”

“Confess?” The cashier’s tongue showed between his lips.

“Sure.” I kept my face, voice and manner bland, mimicking Noonan. “Didn’t you know that Albury is the fellow who killed Donald Willsson?”

A polite smile at what he thought an asinine joke started behind the cashier’s glasses, and changed to puzzlement when he looked at his assistant. The boy was rouge-red and the grin he was forcing his mouth to wear was a terrible thing.

Dritton cleared his throat and said heartily:

“It’s a splendid morning. We’ve been having splendid weather.”

“But isn’t there a private room where we can talk?” I insisted.

Dritton jumped nervously and questioned the boy:

“What—what is this?”

Young Albury said something nobody could have understood.

I said: “If there isn’t I’ll have to take him down to the City Hall.”

Dritton caught his glasses as they slid down his nose, jammed them back in place and said:

“Come back here.”

We followed him down the length of the lobby, through a gate, and into an office whose door was labeled
President
—old Elihu’s office. Nobody was in it.

I motioned Albury into one chair and picked another for myself. The cashier fidgeted with his back against the desk, facing both of us.

“Now, sir, will you explain this,” he said.

“We’ll get around to that,” I told him and turned to the boy. “You’re an ex-boy-friend of Dinah’s who was given the air. You’re the only one who knew her intimately who could have known about the certified check in time to phone Mrs. Willsson and Thaler. Willsson was shot with a .32. Banks like that caliber. Maybe the gun you used wasn’t a bank gun, but I think it was. Maybe you didn’t put it back. Then there’ll be one missing. Anyway, I’m going to have a gun expert put his microscopes and micrometers on the bullets that killed Willsson and bullets fired from all the bank guns.”

The boy looked calmly at me and said nothing. He had himself under control again. That wouldn’t do. I had to be nasty. I said:

“You were cuckoo over the girl. You confessed to me that it was only because she wouldn’t stand for it that you didn’t—”

“Don’t—please don’t,” he gasped. His face was red again.

I made myself sneer at him until his eyes went down. Then I said:

“You talked too much, son. You were too damned anxious to make your life an open book for me. That’s a way you amateur criminals have. You’ve always got to overdo the frank and open business.”

He was watching his hands. I let him have the other barrel:

“You know you killed him. You know if you used a bank gun, and if you put it back. If you did you’re nailed now, without an out. The gun-sharks will take care of that. If you didn’t, I’m going to nail you anyhow. All right. I don’t have to tell you whether you’ve got a chance or not. You know.

“Noonan is framing Whisper Thaler for the job. He can’t convict him, but the frame-up is tight enough that if Thaler’s killed resisting arrest, the chief will be in the clear. That’s what he means to do—kill Thaler. Thaler stood off the police all night in his King Street joint. He’s still standing them off—unless they’ve got to him. The first copper that gets to him—exit Thaler.

“If you figure you’ve got a chance to beat your rap, and you want to let another man be killed on your account, that’s your business. But if you know you haven’t got a chance—and you haven’t if the gun can be found—for God’s sake give Thaler one by clearing him.”

“I’d like,” Albury’s voice was an old man’s. He looked up from his hands, saw Dritton, said, “I’d like,” again and stopped.