Mickey yawned and said that was all right with him, never being one that had to run around a lot to keep his blood circulating, and asked if I knew we were getting nationally famous.
I asked him what he meant by that.
“I just ran into Tommy Robins,” he said. “The Consolidated Press sent him here to cover the doings. He tells me some of the other press associations and a big-city paper or two are sending in special correspondents, beginning to play our troubles up.”
I was making one of my favorite complaints–that newspapers were good for nothing except to hash things up so nobody could unhash them–when I heard a boy chanting my name. For a dime he told me I was wanted on the phone.
Dick Foley:
“She showed right away. To 310 Green Street. Full of coppers. Mouthpiece named Dawn killed. Police took her to the Hall.”
“She still there?”
“Yes, in the chief’s office.”
“Stick, and get anything you pick up to me quick.”
I went back to Mickey Linehan and gave him my room key and instructions:
“Camp in my room. Take anything that comes for me and pass it on. I’ll be at the Shannon around the corner, registered as J. W. Clark. Tell Dick and nobody.”
Mickey asked, “What the hell?” got no answer, and moved his loose-jointed bulk toward the elevators.
XXIV. Wanted
I went around to the Shannon Hotel, registered my alias, paid my day’s rent, and was taken to room 321.
An hour passed before the phone rang.
Dick Foley said he was coming up to see me.
He arrived within five minutes. His thin worried face was not friendly. Neither was his voice. He said:
“Warrants out for you. Murder. Two counts–Brand and Dawn. I phoned. Mickey said he’d stick. Told me you were here. Police got him. Grilling him now.”
“Yeah, I expected that.”
“So did I,” he said sharply.
I said, making myself drawl the words:
“You think I killed them, don’t you, Dick?”
“If you didn’t, it’s a good time to say so.”
“Going to put the finger on me?” I asked.
He pulled his lips back over his teeth. His face changed from tan to buff.
I said:
“Go back to San Francisco, Dick. I’ve got enough to do without having to watch you.”
He put his hat on very carefully and very carefully closed the door behind him when he went out.
At four o’clock I had some lunch, cigarettes, and an Evening Herald sent up to me.
Dinah Brand’s murder, and the newer murder of Charles Proctor Dawn, divided the front page of the Herald, with Helen Albury connecting them.
Helen Albury was, I read, Robert Albury’s sister, and she was, in spite of his confession, thoroughly convinced that her brother was not guilty of murder, but the victim of a plot. She had retained Charles Proctor Dawn to defend him. (I could guess that the late Charles Proctor had hunted her up, and not she him.) The brother refused to have Dawn or any other lawyer, but the girl (properly encouraged by Dawn, no doubt) had not given up the fight.
Finding a vacant flat across the street from Dinah Brand’s house, Helen Albury had rented it, and had installed herself therein with a pair of field glasses and one idea–to prove that Dinah and her associates were guilty of Donald Willsson’s murder.
I, it seems, was one of the “associates.” The Herald called me “a man supposed to be a private detective from San Francisco, who has been in the city for several days, apparently on intimate terms with Max (‘Whisper’) Thaler, Daniel Rolff, Oliver (‘Reno’) Starkey, and Dinah Brand.” We were the plotters who had framed Robert Albury.
The night that Dinah had been killed, Helen Albury, peeping through her window, had seen things that were, according to the Herald, extremely significant when considered in connection with the subsequent finding of Dinah’s dead body. As soon as the girl heard of the murder, she took her important knowledge to Charles Proctor Dawn. He, the police learned from his clerks, immediately sent for me, and had been closeted with me that afternoon. He had later told his clerks that I was to return the next–this–morning at ten. This morning I had not appeared to keep my appointment. At twenty-five minutes past ten, the janitor of the Rutledge Block had found Charles Proctor Dawn’s body in a corner behind the staircase, murdered. It was believed that valuable papers had been taken from the dead man’s pockets.