The shooting was behind me, but not far enough. I did all I could to remedy that. I must have walked as many streets as I did in my dreams the night Dinah was killed.
My watch said it was three-thirty a. m. when I looked at it on Elihu Willsson’s front steps.
XXVI. Blackmail
I had to push my client’s doorbell a lot before I got any play on it.
Finally the door was opened by the tall sunburned chauffeur. He was dressed in undershirt and pants, and had a billiard cue in one fist.
“What do you want?” he demanded, and then, when he got another look at me: “It’s you, is it? Well, what do you want?”
“I want to see Mr. Willsson.”
“At four in the morning? Go on with you,” and he started to close the door.
I put a foot against it. He looked from my foot to my face, hefted the billiard cue, and asked:
“You after getting your kneecap cracked?”
“I’m not playing,” I insisted. “I’ve got to see the old man. Tell him.”
“I don’t have to tell him. He told me no later than this afternoon that if you come around he didn’t want to see you.”
“Yeah?” I took the four love letters out of my pocket, picked out the first and least idiotic of them, held it out to the chauffeur, and said: “Give him that and tell him I’m sitting on the steps with the rest of them. Tell him I’ll sit here five minutes and then carry the rest of them to Tommy Robins of the Consolidated Press.”
The chauffeur scowled at the letter, said, “To hell with Tommy Robins and his blind aunt!” took the letter, and closed the door.
Four minutes later he opened the door again and said:
“Inside, you.”
I followed him upstairs to old Elihu’s bedroom.
My client sat up in bed with his love letter crushed in one round pink fist, its envelope in the other.
His short white hair bristled. His round eyes were as much red as blue. The parallel lines of his mouth and chin almost touched. He was in a lovely humor.
As soon as he saw me he shouted:
“So after all your brave talking you had to conic back to the old pirate to have your neck saved, did you?”
I said I didn’t anything of the sort. I said if he was going to talk like a sap he ought to lower his voice so the people in Los Angeles wouldn’t learn what a sap he was.
The old boy let his voice out another notch, bellowing:
“Because you’ve stolen a letter or two that don’t belong to you, you needn’t think you–”
I put fingers in my ears. They didn’t shut out the noise, but they insulted him into cutting the bellowing short.
I took the fingers out and said:
“Send the flunkey away so we can talk. You won’t need him. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He said, “Get out,” to the chauffeur.
The chauffeur, looking at me without fondness, left us, closing the door.
Old Elihu gave me the rush act, demanding that I surrender the rest of the letters immediately, wanting to know loudly and profanely where I had got them, what I was doing with them, threatening me with this, that, and the other, but mostly just cursing me.
I didn’t surrender the letters. I said:
“I took them from the man you hired to recover them. A tough break for you that he had to kill the girl.”
Enough red went out of the old man’s face to leave it normally pink. He worked his lips over his teeth, screwed up his eyes at me, and said:
“Is that the way you’re going to play it?”
His voice came comparatively quiet from his chest. He had settled down to fight.
I pulled a chair over beside the bed, sat down, put as much amusement as I could in a grin, and said:
“That’s one way.”
He watched me, working his lips, saying nothing. I said:
“You’re the damndest client I ever had. What do you do? You hire me to clean town, change your mind, run out on me, work against me until I begin to look like a winner, then get on the fence, and now when you think I’m licked again, you don’t even want to let me in the house. Lucky for me I happened to run across those letters.”