“Damn the rock,” Noonan barked. “And stop bleeding on my rug.”
MacSwain hunted in his pocket for a dirty handkerchief, mopped his nose and mouth with it, and jabbered on:
“That’s the way it was, chief. Everything else was like I said at the time, only I didn’t say anything about hearing him say Max done it. I know I hadn’t ought to–”
“Shut up,” Noonan said, and pressed one of the buttons on his desk.
A uniformed copper came in. The chief jerked a thumb at MacSwain and said:
“Take this baby down cellar and let the wrecking crew work on him before you lock him up.”
MacSwain started a desperate plea, “Aw, chief!” but the copper took him away before he could get any farther.
Noonan stuck a cigar at me, tapped the document with another and asked:
“Where’s this broad?”
“In the City Hospital, dying. You’ll have the ‘cuter get a stiff out of her? That one’s not so good legally–I framed it for effect. Another thing– I hear that Peak Murry and Whisper aren’t playmates any more. Wasn’t Murry one of his alibis?”
The chief said, “He was,” picked up one of his phones, said, “McGraw,” and then: “Get hold of Peak Murry and ask him to drop in. And have Tony Agosti picked up for that knife-throwing.”
He put the phone down, stood up, made a lot of cigar smoke, and said through it:
“I haven’t always been on the up-and-up with you.”
I thought that was putting it mildly, but I didn’t say anything while he went On:
“You know your way around. You know what these jobs are. There’s this one and that one that’s got to be listened to. Just because a man’s chief of police doesn’t mean he’s chief. Maybe you’re a lot of trouble to somebody that can be a lot of trouble to me. Don’t make any difference if I think you’re a right guy. I got to play with them that play with me. See what I mean?”
I wagged my head to show I did.
“That’s the way it was,” he said. “But no more. This is something else, a new deal. When the old woman kicked off Tim was just a lad. She said to me, ‘Take care of him, John,’ and I promised I would. And then Whisper murders him on account of that tramp.” He reached down and took my hand. “See what I’m getting at? That’s a year and a half ago, and you give me my first chance to hang it on him. I’m telling you there’s no man in Personville that’s got a voice big enough to talk you down. Not after today.”
That pleased me and I said so. We purred at each other until a lanky man with an extremely up-turned nose in the middle of a round and freckled face was ushered in. It was Peak Murry.
“We were just wondering about the time when Tim died,” the chief said when Murry had been given a chair and a cigar, “where Whisper was. You were out to the Lake that night, weren’t you?”
“Yep,” Murry said and the end of his nose got sharper.
“With Whisper?”
“I wasn’t with him all the time.”
“Were you with him at the time of the shooting?”
“Nope.”
The chief’s greenish eyes got smaller and brighter. He asked softly:
“You know where he was?”
“Nope.”
The chief sighed in a thoroughly satisfied way and leaned back in his chair.
“Damn it, Peak,” he said, “you told us before that you were with him at the bar.”
“Yep, I did,” the lanky man admitted. “But that don’t mean nothing except that he asked me to and I didn’t mind helping out a friend.”
“Meaning you don’t mind standing a perjury rap?”
“Don’t kid me.” Murry spit vigorously at the cuspidor. “I didn’t say nothing in no court rooms.”
“How about Jerry and George Kelly and O’Brien?” the chief asked. “Did they say they were with him just because he asked them to?”
“O’Brien did. I don’t know nothing about the others. I was going out of the bar when I run into Whisper, Jerry and Kelly, and went back to have a shot with them. Kelly told me Tim had been knocked off. Then Whisper says, ‘It never hurts anybody to have an alibi. We were here all the time, weren’t we?’ and he looks at O’Brien, who’s behind the bar. O’Brien says, ‘Sure you was,’ and when Whisper looks at me I say the same thing. But I don’t know no reasons why I’ve got to cover him up nowadays.”