I nodded carelessly at him and walked on toward the elevators. He followed me, mumbling:
“Hey, you got a minute?”
“Yeah, just about.” I stopped, pretending indifference.
“Let’s get out of sight,” he said nervously.
I took him up to my room. He straddled a chair and put a match in his mouth. I sat on the side of the bed and waited for him to say something. He chewed his match a while and began:
“I’m going to come clean with you, brother. I’m–”
“You mean you’re going to tell me you knew me when you braced me yesterday?” I asked. “And you’re going to tell me Bush hadn’t told you to bet on him? And you didn’t until afterwards? And you knew about his record because you used to be a bull? And you thought if you could get me to put it to him you could clean up a little dough playing him?”
“I’ll be damned if I was going to come through with that much,” he said, “but since it’s been said I’ll put a yes to it.”
“Did you clean up?”
“I win myself six hundred iron men.” He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead with the chewed end of his match. “And then I lose myself that and my own two hundred and some in a crap game. What do you think of that? I pick up six hundred berries like shooting fish, and have to bum four bits for breakfast.”
I said it was a tough break but that was the kind of a world we lived in.
He said, “Uh-huh,” put the match back in his mouth, ground it some more, and added: “That’s why I thought I’d come to see you. I used to be in the racket myself and–”
“What did Noonan put the skids under you for?”
“Skids? What skids? I quit. I come into a piece of change when the wife got killed in an automobile accident–insurance–and I quit.”
“I heard he kicked you out the time his brother shot himself.”
“Well, then you heard wrong. It was just after that, but you can ask him if I didn’t quit.”
“It’s not that much to me. Go on telling me why you came to see me.”
“I’m busted, flat. I know you’re a Continental op, and I got a pretty good hunch what you’re up to here. I’m close to a lot that’s going on on both sides of things in this burg. There’s things I could do for you, being an ex-dick, knowing the ropes both ways.”
“You want to stool-pigeon for me?”
He looked me straight in the eye and said evenly:
“There’s no sense in a man picking out the worst name he can find for everything.”
“I’ll give you something to do, MacSwain.” I took out Myrtle Jennison’s document and passed it to him. “Tell me about that.”
He read it through carefully, his lips framing the words, the match wavering up and down in his mouth. He got up, put the paper on the bed beside me, and scowled down at it.
“There’s something I’ll have to find out about first,” he said, very solemnly. “I’ll be back in a little while and give you the whole story.”
I laughed and told him:
“Don’t be silly. You know I’m not going to let you walk out on me.”
“I don’t know that.” He shook his head, still solemn. “Neither do you. All you know is whether you’re going to try to stop me.”
“The answer’s yeah,” I said while I considered that he was fairly hard and strong, six or seven years younger than I, and twenty or thirty pounds lighter.
He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes.
I used part of the time measuring the distance between us, figuring out how, by throwing my body back on the bed and turning on my hip, I could get my heels in his face if he jumped me. He was too close for me to pull the gun. I had just finished this mental map-making when he spoke: