“Was it there last night?” McGraw asked me.
“I stood beside her while she chipped off pieces of ice with it.”
I described it. McGraw told the dicks to search her house again, and then to try to find the pick in the vicinity of the house.
“You knew her,” he said when Shepp and Vanaman had gone. “What’s your slant on it?”
“Too new for me to have one,” I dodged the question. “Give me an hour or two to think it over. What do you think?”
He fell back into sourness, growling, “How the hell do I know?”
But the fact that he let me go away without asking me any more questions told me he had already made up his mind that Whisper had killed the girl.
I wondered if the little gambler had done it, or if this was another of the wrong raps that Poisonville police chiefs liked to hang on him. It didn’t seem to make much difference now. It was a cinch he had–personally or by deputy–put Noonan out, and they could only hang him once.
There were a lot of men in the corridor when I left McGraw. Some of these men were quite young–just kids–quite a few were foreigners, and most of them were every bit as tough looking as any men should be.
Near the street door I met Donner, one of the coppers who had been on the Cedar Hill expedition.
“Hello,” I greeted him. “What’s the mob? Emptying the can to make room for more?”
“Them’s our new specials,” he told me, speaking as if he didn’t think much of them. “We’re going to have a augmented force.”
“Congratulations,” I said and went on out.
In his pool room I found Peak Murry sitting at a desk behind the cigar counter talking to three men. I sat down on the other side of the room and watched two kids knock balls around. In a few minutes the lanky proprietor came over to me.
“If you see Reno some time,” I told him, “you might let him know that Pete the Finn’s having his mob sworn in as special coppers.”
“I might,” Murry agreed.
Mickey Linehan was sitting in the lobby when I got back to my hotel. He followed me up to my room, and reported:
“Your Dan Rolff pulled a sneak from the hospital somewhere after midnight last night. The croakers are kind of steamed up about it. Seems they were figuring on pulling a lot of little pieces of bone out of his brain this morning. But him and his duds were gone. We haven’t got a line on Whisper yet. Dick’s out now trying to place Bill Quint. What’s what on this girl’s carving? Dick tells me you got it before the coppers.”
“It–”
The telephone bell rang.
A man’s voice, carefully oratorical, spoke my name with a question mark after it.
I said: “Yeah.”
The voice said:
“This is Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn speaking. I think you will find it well worth your while to appear at my offices at your earliest convenience.”
“Will I? Who are you?”
“Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn, attorney-at-law. My suite is in the Rutledge Block, 310 Green Street. I think you will find it well–”
“Mind telling me part of what it’s about?” I asked.
“There are affairs best not discussed over the telephone. I think you will find–”
“All right,” I interrupted him again. “I’ll be around to see you this afternoon if I get a chance.”
“You will find it very, very advisable,” he assured me.
I hung up on that.
Mickey said:
“You were going to give me the what’s what on the Brand slaughter.”
I said:
“I wasn’t. I started to say it oughtn’t to be hard to trace Rolff– running around with a fractured skull and probably a lot of bandages. Suppose you try it. Give Hurricane Street a play first.”
Mickey grinned all the way across his comedian’s red face, said, Don’t tell me anything that’s going on–I’m only working with you,” picked up his hat, and left me.
I spread myself on the bed, smoked cigarettes end to end, and thought about last night–my frame of mind, my passing out, my dreams, and the situation into which I woke. The thinking was unpleasant enough to make me glad when it was interrupted.