“You’ll get your ride, sister,” the ugly man rasped good-naturedly. “Nobody’s going to beat you out of it. But do you mind if I look around your place a little first?”
“Got anything with a judge’s name on it that says you can?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t get a peep!”
Alec Rush chuckled, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, and began to wander through the rooms, of which there were three. Presently he came out of the bedroom carrying a photograph in a silver frame.
“Who’s this?” he asked the girl.
“Try and find out!”
“I am trying,” he lied.
“You big bum!” said she. “You couldn’t find water in the ocean!”
Alec Rush laughed with coarse heartiness. He could afford to. The photograph in his hand was of Hubert Landow.
Twilight was around the gray stone church when the owner of the deserted coupe returned to it. The chunky girl — Polly Vanness was the name she had given — had been booked and lodged in a cell in the Southwestern Police Station. Quantities of stolen goods had been found in her flat. Her harvest of that afternoon was still on her person when Minnie and a police matron searched her. She had refused to talk. The detective had said nothing to her about his knowledge of the photograph’s subject, or of her meeting in the railroad station with the dark young man. Nothing found in her rooms threw any light on either of these
things.
Having eaten his evening meal before coming back to his car, Alec Rush now drove out to Charles-Street Avenue. Lights glowed normally in the Landow house when he passed it. A little beyond it he turned his coupe so that it pointed toward the city, and brought it to rest in a tree-darkened curbside spot within sight of the house.
The night went along and no one left or entered the
Landow house. „ ‘
‘ ‘
Finger nails clicked on the coupe’s glass door. A man stood there. Nothing could be said of him in the darkness except that he was not large, and that to have escaped the detective’s notice until now he must have stealthily stalked the car from the rear.
Alec Rush put out a hand and the door swung open.
“Got a match?” the man asked.
The detective hesitated, said, “Yeah,” and held out a
box.
A match scraped and flared into a dark young face: large
nose, high cheekbones: the young man Alec Rush had shadowed that afternoon.
But recognition, when it was voiced, was voiced by the dark young man.
“I thought it was you,” he said simply as he applied the flaming match to his cigarette. “Maybe you don’t know me, but I knew you when you were on the force.”
The ex-detective-sergeant gave no meaning at all to a husky “Yeah.”
“I thought it was you in the heap on Mount Royal this afternoon, but I couldn’t make sure,” the young man continued, entering the coupe, sitting beside the detective, closing the door. “Scuttle Zeipp’s me. I ain’t as well known as Napoleon, so if you’ve never heard of me there’s no hard feelings.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the stuff! When you once think up a good answer, stick to it.” Scuttle Zeipp’s face was a sudden bronze mask in the glow of his cigarette. “The same answer’ll do for my next question. You’re interested in these here Landows? Yeah,” he added in hoarse mimicry of the de^ tective’s voice.
Another inhalation lighted his face, and his words came smokily out as the glow faded.
“You ought to want to know what I’m doing hanging around ’em. I ain’t tight. I’ll tell you. I’ve been slipped half a grand to bump off the girl—-twice. How do you like that?”
“I hear you,” said Alec Rush. “But anybody can talk that knows the words.”
“Talk? Sure it’s talk,” Zeipp admitted cheerfully. “But so’s it talk when the judge says ‘hanged by the neck until dead and may God have mercy on your soul!’ Lots of things are talk, but that don’t always keep ’em from being real.” “Yeah?”
“Yeah, brother, yeah! Now listen to this: it’s one for the cuff. A certain party comes to me a couple of days ago with a knock-down from a party that knows me. See? This certain party asks me what I want to bump off a broad. I thought a grand would be right, and said so. Too stiff. We come together on five hundred. I got two-fifty down and get the rest when the Landow twist is cold. Not so bad for a soft trick — a slug through the side of a car — huh?”