Bill Quint and I were both fairly mellow by the time we had got this far. He emptied his glass again, pushed his hair out of his eyes and brought his history up to date:
“The strongest of ’em now is probably Pete the Finn. This stuff we’re drinking’s his. Then there’s Lew Yard. He’s got a loan shop down on Parker Street, does a lot of bail bond business, handles most of the burg’s hot stuff, so they tell me, and is pretty thick with Noonan, the chief of police. This kid Max Thaler–Whisper–has got a lot of friends too. A little slick dark guy with something wrong with his throat. Can’t talk. Gambler. Those three, with Noonan, just about help Elihu run his city–help him more than he wants. But he’s got to play with ’em or else–”
“This fellow who was knocked off tonight–Elihu’s son–where did he stand?” I asked.
“Where papa put him, and he’s where papa put him now.”
“You mean the old man had him–?”
“Maybe, but that’s not my guess. This Don just came home and began running the papers for the old man. It wasn’t like the old devil, even if he was getting close to the grave, to let anybody cop anything from him without hitting back. But he had to be cagey with these guys. He brought the boy and his French wife home from Paris and used him for his monkey–a damned nice fatherly trick. Don starts a reform campaign in the papers. Clear the burg of vice and corruption–which means clear it of Pete and Lew and Whisper, if it goes far enough. Get it? The old man’s using the boy to shake ’em loose. I guess they got tired of being shook.”
“There seems to be a few things wrong with that guess,” I said.
“There’s more than a few things wrong with everything in this lousy burg. Had enough of this paint?”
I said I had. We went down to the street. Bill Quint told me he was living in the Miners’ Hotel in Forest Street. His way home ran past my hotel, so we walked down together. In front of my hotel a beefy fellow with the look of a plain-clothes man stood on the curb and talked to the occupant of a Stutz touring car.
“That’s Whisper in the car,” Bill Quint told me.
I looked past the beefy man and saw Thaler’s profile. It was young, dark and small, with pretty features as regular as if they had been cut by a die.
“He’s cute,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” the gray man agreed, “and so’s dynamite.”
II. The Czar of Poisonville
The Morning Herald gave two pages to Donald Willsson and his death. His picture showed a pleasant intelligent face with curly hair, smiling eyes and mouth, a cleft chin and a striped necktie.
The story of his death was simple. At ten-forty the previous night he had been shot four times in stomach, chest and back, dying immediately. The shooting had taken place in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street. Residents of that block who looked out after hearing the shots saw the dead man lying on the sidewalk. A man and a woman were bending over him. The street was too dark for anyone to see anybody or anything clearly. The man and woman had disappeared before anybody else reached the street. Nobody knew what they looked like. Nobody had seen them go away.
Six shots had been fired at Willsson from a.32 calibre pistol. Two of them had missed him, going into the front wall of a house. Tracing the course of these two bullets, the police had learned that the shooting had been done from a narrow alley across the street. That was all anybody knew.
Editorially the Morning Herald gave a summary of the dead man’s short career as a civic reformer and expressed a belief that he had been killed by some of the people who didn’t want Personville cleaned up. The Herald said the chief of police could best show his own lack of complicity by speedily catching and convicting the murderer or murderers. The editorial was blunt and bitter.