Fingernails scratched the outside of my door. I opened the door.
The man who stood there was a stranger to me. He was young, thin, and gaudily dressed. He had heavy eyebrows and a small mustache that were coal-black against a very pale, nervous, but not timid, face.
“I’m Ted Wright,” lie said, holding out a hand as if I were glad to meet him. “I guess you’ve heard Whisper talk about me.”
I gave him my hand, let him in, closed the door, and asked:
“You’re a friend of Whisper’s?”
“You bet.” He held up two thin fingers pressed tightly together. “Just like that, me and him.”
I didn’t say anything. He looked around the room, smiled nervously, crossed to the open bathroom door, peeped in, came back to me, rubbed his lips with his tongue, and made his proposition:
“I’ll knock him off for you for half a grand.”
“Whisper?”
“Yep, and it’s dirt cheap.”
“Why do I want him killed?” I asked.
“He un-womaned you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah?”
“You ain’t that dumb.”
A notion stirred in my noodle. To give it time to crawl around I said: “Sit down. This needs talking over.”
“It don’t need nothing,” he said, looking at me sharply, not moving toward either chair. “You either want him knocked off or you don’t.”
“Then I don’t.”
He said something I didn’t catch, down in his throat, and turned to the door. I got between him and it. He stopped, his eyes fidgeting.
I said:
“So Whisper’s dead?”
He stepped back and put a hand behind him. I poked his jaw, leaning my hundred and ninety pounds on the poke.
He got his legs crossed and went down.
I pulled him up by the wrists, yanked his face close to mine, and growled:
“Come through. What’s the racket?”
“I ain’t done nothing to you.”
“Let me catch you. Who got Whisper?”
“I don’t know nothing a–”
I let go of one of his wrists, slapped his face with my open hand, caught his wrist again, and tried my luck at crunching both of them while I repeated:
“Who got Whisper?”
“Dan Rolff,” he whined. “He walked up to him and stuck him with the same skewer Whisper had used on the twist. That’s right.”
“How do you know it was the one Whisper killed the girl with?”
“Dan said so.”
“What did Whisper say?”
“Nothing. He looked funny as hell, standing there with the butt of the sticker sticking out his side. Then he flashes the rod and puts two pills in Dan just like one, and the both of them go down together, cracking heads, Dan’s all bloody through the bandages.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. I roll them over, and they’re a pair of stiffs. Every word I’m telling you is gospel.”
“Who else was there?”
“Nobody else. Whisper was hiding out, with only me to go between him and the mob. He killed Noonan hisself, and he didn’t want to have to trust nobody for a couple of days, till he could see what was what, excepting me.”
“So you, being a smart boy, thought you could run around to his enemies and pick up a little dough for killing him after he was dead?”
“I was clean, and this won’t be no place for Whisper’s pals when the word gets out that he’s croaked,” Wright whined. “I had to raise a getaway stake.”
“How’d you make out so far?”
“I got a century from Pete and a century and a half from Peak Murry–for Reno–with more promised from both when I turn the trick.” The whine changed into boasting as he talked. “I bet you I could get McGraw to come across too, and I thought you’d kick in with something.”
“They must be high in the air to toss dough at a woozy racket like that.”
“I don’t know,” he said superiorly. “It ain’t such a lousy one at that.” He became humble again. “Give me a chance, chief. Don’t gum it on me. I’ll give you fifty bucks now and a split of whatever I get from McGraw if you’ll keep your clam shut till I can put it over and grab a rattler.”