“And Kelly said Tim had been knocked off? Didn’t say he had been found dead?”
“‘Knocked off’ was the words he used.”
The chief said:
“Thanks, Peak. You oughtn’t to have done like you did, but what’s done is done. How are the kids?”
Murry said they were doing fine, only the baby wasn’t as fat as he’d like to have him. Noonan phoned the prosecuting attorney’s office and had Dart and a stenographer take Peak’s story before he left.
Noonan, Dart and the stenographer set out for the City Hospital to get a complete statement from Myrtle Jennison. I didn’t go along. I decided I needed sleep, told the chief I would see him later, and returned to the hotel.
XIII. –$200.10–
I had my vest unbuttoned when the telephone bell rang.
It was Dinah Brand, complaining that she had been trying to get me since ten o’clock.
“Have you done anything on what I told you?” she asked.
“I’ve been looking it over. It seems pretty good. I think maybe I’ll crack it this afternoon.”
“Don’t. Hold it till I see you. Can you come up now?”
I looked at the vacant white bed and said, “Yes,” without much enthusiasm.
Another tub of cold water did me so little good that I almost fell asleep in it.
Dan Rolff let me in when I rang the girl’s bell. He looked and acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened the night before. Dinah Brand came into the hall to help me off with my overcoat. She had on a tan woolen dress with a two-inch rip in one shoulder seam.
She took me into the living room. She sat on the Chesterfield beside me and said:
“I’m going to ask you to do something for me. You like me enough, don’t you?”
I admitted that. She counted the knuckles of my left hand with a warm forefinger and explained:
“I want you to not do anything more about what I told you last night. Now wait a minute. Wait till I get through. Dan was right. I oughtn’t sell Max out like that. It would be utterly filthy. Besides, it’s Noonan you chiefly want, isn’t it? Well, if you’ll be a nice darling and lay off Max this time, I’ll give you enough on Noonan to nail him forever. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you? And you like me too much to want to take advantage of me by using information I gave you when I was mad at what Max had said, don’t you?”
“What is the dirt on Noonan?” I asked.
She kneaded my biceps and murmured: “You promise?”
“Not yet.”
She pouted at me and said:
“I’m off Max for life, on the level. You’ve got no right to make me turn rat.”
“What about Noonan?”
“Promise first.”
“No.”
She dug fingers into my arm and asked sharply:
“You’ve already gone to Noonan?”
“Yeah.”
She let go my arm, frowned, shrugged, and said gloomily:
“Well, how can I help it?”
I stood up and a voice said:
“Sit down.”
It was a hoarse whispering voice–Thaler’s.
I turned to see him standing in the dining room doorway, a big gun in one of his little hands. A red-faced man with a scarred cheek stood behind him.
The other doorway–opening to the hall–filled as I sat down. The loose-mouthed chinless man I had heard Whisper call Jerry came a step through it. He had a couple of guns. The more angular one of the blond kids who had been in the King Street joint looked over his shoulder.
Dinah Brand got up from the Chesterfield, put her back to Thaler, and addressed me. Her voice was husky with rage.
“This is none of my doing. He came here by himself, said he was sorry for what he had said, and showed me how we could make a lot of coin by turning Noonan up for you. The whole thing was a plant, but I fell for it. Honest to Christ! He was to wait upstairs while I put it to you. I didn’t know anything about the others. I didn’t–”
Jerry’s casual voice drawled:
“If I shoot a pin from under her, she’ll sure sit down, and maybe shut up. 0. K.?”