I laughed at him. Now I had it. The old boy was scared stiff. Fright was the something behind his clowning. That was why he blustered, and why he wouldn’t let them take the body away. He wanted it there to look at, to keep panic away, visible proof of his ability to defend himself. I knew where I stood.
“You really want the town cleaned up?” I asked.
“I said I did and I do.”
“I’d have to have a free hand–no favors to anybody–run the job as I pleased. And I’d have to have a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”
“Ten thousand dollars! Why in hell should I give that much to a man I don’t know from Adam? A man who’s done nothing I know of but talk?”
“Be serious. When I say me, I mean the Continental. You know them.”
“I do. And they know me. And they ought to know I’m good for–”
“That’s not the idea. These people you want taken to the cleaners were friends of yours yesterday. Maybe they will be friends again next week. I don’t care about that. But I’m not playing politics for you. I’m not hiring out to help you kick them back in line–with the job being called off then. If you want the job done you’ll plank down enough money to pay for a complete job. Any that’s left over will be returned to you. But you’re going to get a complete job or nothing. That’s the way it’ll have to be. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll damned well leave it,” he bawled.
He let me get half-way down the stairs before he called me back.
“I’m an old man,” he grumbled. “If I was ten years younger–” He glared at me and worked his lips together. “I’ll give you your damned check.”
“And authority to go through with it in my own way?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll get it done now. Where’s your secretary?”
Willsson pushed a button on his bedside table and the silent secretary appeared from wherever he had been hiding. I told him:
“Mr. Willsson wants to issue a ten-thousand-dollar check to the Continental Detective Agency, and he wants to write the Agency–San Francisco branch–a letter authorizing the Agency to use the ten thousand dollars investigating crime and political corruption in Personville. The letter is to state clearly that the Agency is to conduct the investigation as it sees fit.”
The secretary looked questioningly at the old man, who frowned and ducked his round white head.
“But first,” I told the secretary as he glided toward the door, “you’d better phone the police that we’ve got a dead burglar here. Then call Mr. Willsson’s doctor.”
The old man declared he didn’t want any damned doctors.
“You’re going to have a nice shot in the arm so you can sleep,” I promised him, stepping over the corpse to take the black gun from the bed. “I’m going to stay here tonight and we’ll spend most of tomorrow sifting Poisonville affairs.”
The old man was tired. His voice, when he profanely and somewhat long-windedly told me what he thought of my impudence in deciding what was best for him, barely shook the windows.
I took off the dead man’s cap for a better look at his face. It didn’t mean anything to me. I put the cap back in place.
When I straightened up the old man asked, moderately:
“Are you getting anywhere in your hunt for Donald’s murderer?”
“I think so. Another day ought to see it finished.”
“Who?” he asked.
The secretary came in with the letter and the check. I gave them to the old man instead of an answer to his question. He put a shaky signature on each, and I had them folded in my pocket when the police arrived.
The first copper into the room was the chief himself, fat Noonan. He nodded amiably at Willsson, shook hands with me, and looked with twinkling greenish eyes at the dead man.
“Well, well,” he said. “It’s a good job he did, whoever did it. Yakima Shorty. And will you look at the sap he’s toting?” He kicked the blackjack out of the dead man’s hand. “Big enough to sink a battleship. You drop him?” he asked me.