Day was still a little way off. The street was the color of smoke. My feet made a lot of noise on the pavement.
I stopped in front of the door and knocked the glass with a knuckle, not heavily. The green blind down inside the door made a mirror of the glass. In it I saw two men moving up the other side of the street.
No sound came from inside. I knocked harder, then slid my hand down to rattle the knob.
Advice came from indoors:
“Get away from there while you’re able.”
It was a muffled voice, but not a whisper, so probably not Whisper’s.
“I want to talk to Thaler,” I said.
“Go talk to the lard-can that sent you.”
“I’m not talking for Noonan. Is Thaler where he can hear me?”
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. Class 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 onelegged 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 getaway. He won’t need much of a case after that.”