I grinned at the greed in her eyes and said:
“Not just yet, sister. We’ll have to see how it works out before we start scattering pennies around.”
She called me a damned nickel-nurser and reached for the gin.
“No more for me, thanks,” I told her, looking at my watch. “It’s getting along toward five a. m. and I’ve got a busy day ahead.”
She decided she was hungry again. That reminded me that I was. It took half an hour or more to get waffles, ham and coffee off the stove. It took some more time to get them into our stomachs and to smoke some cigarettes over extra cups of coffee. It was quite a bit after six when I got ready to leave.
I went back to my hotel and got into a tub of cold water. It braced me a lot, and I needed bracing. At forty I could get along on gin as a substitute for sleep, but not comfortably.
When I had dressed I sat down and composed a document:
Just before he died, Tim Noonan told me he had been shot by Max Thaler. Detective Bob MacSwain heard him tell me. I gave Detective MacSwain $200 and a diamond ring worth $1,000 to keep quiet and make it look like suicide.
With this document in my pocket I went downstairs, had another breakfast that was mostly coffee, and went up to the City Hospital.
Visiting hours were in the afternoon, but by flourishing my Continental Detective Agency credentials and giving everybody to understand that an hour’s delay might cause thousands of deaths, or words to that effect, I got to see Myrtle Jennison.
She was in a ward on the third floor, alone. The other four beds were empty. She could have been a girl of twenty-five or a woman of fifty-five. Her face was a bloated spotty mask. Lifeless yellow hair in two stringy braids lay on the pillow beside her.
I waited until the nurse who had brought me up left. Then I held my document out to the invalid and said:
“Will you sign this, please. Miss Jennison?”
She looked at me with ugly eyes that were shaded into no particular dark color by the pads of flesh around them, then at the document, and finally brought a shapeless fat hand from under the covers to take it.
She pretended it took her nearly five minutes to read the forty-two words I had written. She let the document fall down on the covers and asked:
“Where’d you get that?” Her voice was tinny, irritable.
“Dinah Brand sent me to you.”
She asked eagerly:
“Has she broken off with Max?”
“Not that I know of,” I lied. “I imagine she just wants to have this on hand in case it should come in handy.”
“And get her fool throat slit. Give me a pencil.”
I gave her my fountain pen and held my notebook under the document, to stiffen it while she scribbled her signature at the bottom, and to have it in my hands as soon as she had finished. While I fanned the paper dry she said:
“If that’s what she wants it’s all right with me. What do I care what anybody does now? I’m done. Hell with them all!” She sniggered and suddenly threw the bedclothes down to her knees, showing me a horrible swollen body in a coarse white nightgown. “How do you like me? See, I’m done.”
I pulled the covers up over her again and said:
“Thanks for this, Miss Jennison.”
“That’s all right. It’s nothing to me any more. Only”–her puffy chin quivered–“it’s hell to die ugly as this.”
XII. A New Deal
I went out to hunt for MacSwain. Neither city directory nor telephone book told me anything. I did the pool rooms, cigar stores, speakeasies, looking around first, then asking cautious questions. That got me nothing. I walked the streets, looking for bowed legs. That got me nothing. I decided to go back to my hotel, grab a nap, and resume the hunting at night.
In a far corner of the lobby a man stopped hiding behind a newspaper and came out to meet me. He had bowed legs, a hog jaw, and was MacSwain.