Red Harvest (18 page)

“Think Reno did it?”

Noonan winced, started to look up at me, changed his mind, and repeated:

“God knows.”

I went at him from another angle:

“Anybody knocked off in the battle at the Silver Arrow last night?”

“Only three.”

“Who were they?”

“A pair of Johnson-brothers named Blackie Whalen and Put Collings that only got out on bail around five yesterday, and Dutch Jake Wahl, a guerrilla.”

“What was it all about?”

“Just a roughhouse, I guess. It seems that Put and Blackie and the others that got out with them were celebrating with a lot of friends, and it wound up in smoke.”

“All of them Lew Yard’s men?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

I got up, said, “Oh, all right,” and started for the door.

“Wait,” he called. “Don’t run off like that. I guess they were.”

I came back to my chair. Noonan watched the top of his desk. His face was gray, flabby, damp, like fresh putty.

“Whisper’s staying at Willsson’s,” I told him.

He jerked his head up. His eyes darkened. Then his mouth twitched, and he let his head sag again. His eyes faded.

“I can’t go through with it,” he mumbled. “I’m sick of this butchering. I can’t stand any more of it.”

“Sick enough to give up the idea of evening the score for Tim’s killing, if it’ll make peace?” I asked.

“I am.”

“That’s what started it,” I reminded him. “If you’re willing to call it off, it ought to be possible to stop it.”

He raised his face and looked at me with eyes that were like a dog’s looking at a bone.

“The others ought to be as sick of it as you are,” I went on. “Tell them how you feel about it. Have a get-together and make peace.”

“They’d think I was up to some kind of a trick,” he objected miserably.

“Have the meeting at Willsson’s. Whisper’s camping there. You’d be the one risking tricks going there. Are you afraid of that?”

He frowned and asked:

“Will you go with me?”

“If you want me.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I—I’ll try it.”

All the other delegates to the peace conference were on hand when Noonan and I arrived at Willsson’s home at the appointed time, nine o’clock that night. Everybody nodded to us, but the greetings didn’t go any further than that.

Pete the Finn was the only one I hadn’t met before. The bootlegger was a big-boned man of fifty with a completely bald head. His forehead was small, his jaws enormous—wide, heavy, bulging with muscle

We sat around Willsson’s library table.

Old Elihu sat at the head. The short-clipped hair on his round pink skull was like silver in the light. His round blue eyes were hard, domineering, under their bushy white brows. His mouth and chin were horizontal lines.

On his right Pete the Finn sat watching everybody with tiny black eyes that never moved. Reno Starkey sat next to the bootlegger. Reno’s sallow horse face was as stolidly dull as his eyes.

Max Thaler was tilted back in a chair on Willsson’s left. The
little gambler’s carefully pressed pants legs were carelessly crossed. A cigarette hung from one corner of his tight-lipped mouth.

I sat next to Thaler. Noonan sat on my other side.

Elihu Willsson opened the meeting.

He said things couldn’t go on the way they were going. We were all sensible men, reasonable men, grown men who had seen enough of the world to know that a man couldn’t have everything his own way, no matter who he was. Compromises were things everybody had to make sometimes. To get what he wanted, a man had to give other people what they wanted. He said he was sure that what we all most wanted now was to stop this insane killing. He said he was sure that everything could be frankly discussed and settled in an hour without turning Personville into a slaughterhouse.

It wasn’t a bad oration.

When it was over there was a moment of silence. Thaler looked past me, at Noonan, as if he expected something of him. The rest of us followed his example, looking at the chief of police.

Noonan’s face turned red and he spoke huskily:

“Whisper, I’ll forget you killed Tim.” He stood up and held out a beefy paw. “Here’s my hand on it.”

Thaler’s thin mouth curved into a vicious smile.

“Your bastard of a brother needed killing, but I didn’t kill him,” he whispered coldly.

Red became purple in the chief’s face.

I said loudly:

“Wait, Noonan. We’re going at this wrong. We won’t get anywhere unless everybody comes clean. Otherwise we’ll all be worse off than before. MacSwain killed Tim, and you know it.”

He stared at me with dumbfounded eyes. He gaped. He couldn’t understand what I had done to him.

I looked at the others, tried to look virtuous as hell, asked:

“That’s settled, isn’t it? Let’s get the rest of the kicks squared.” I addressed Pete the Finn: “How do you feel about yesterday’s accident to your warehouse and the four men?”

“One hell of an accident,” he rumbled.

I explained:

“Noonan didn’t know you were using the joint. He went there thinking it empty, just to clear the way for a job in town. Your men shot first, and then he really thought he had stumbled into Thaler’s hideout. When he found he’d been stepping in your puddle he lost his head and touched the place off.”

Thaler was watching me with a hard small smile in eyes and mouth. Reno was all dull stolidity. Elihu Willsson was leaning toward me, his old eyes sharp and wary. I don’t know what Noonan was doing. I couldn’t afford to look at him. I was in a good spot if I played my hand right, and in a terrible one if I didn’t.

“The men, they get paid for taking chances,” Pete the Finn said. “For the other, twenty-five grand will make it right.”

Noonan spoke quickly, eagerly:

“All right, Pete, all right, I’ll give it to you.”

I pushed my lips together to keep from laughing at the panic in his voice.

I could look at him safely now. He was licked, broken, willing to do anything to save his fat neck, or to try to. I looked at him.

He wouldn’t look at me. He sat down and looked at nobody. He was busy trying to look as if he didn’t expect to be carved apart before he got away from these wolves to whom I had handed him.

I went on with the work, turning to Elihu Willsson:

“Do you want to squawk about your bank being knocked over, or do you like it?”

Max Thaler touched my arm and suggested:

“We could tell better maybe who’s entitled to beef if you’d give us what you’ve got first.”

I was glad to.

“Noonan wanted to nail you,” I told him, “but he either got word, or expected to get word, from Yard and Willsson here to let you alone. So he thought if he had the bank looted and
framed you for it, your backers would ditch you, and let him go after you right. Yard, I understand, was supposed to put his O.K. on all the capers in town. You’d be cutting into his territory, and gypping Willsson. That’s how it would look. And that was supposed to make them hot enough that they’d help Noonan cop you. He didn’t know you were here.

“Reno and his mob were in the can. Reno was Yard’s pup, but he didn’t mind crossing up his headman. He already had the idea that he was about ready to take the burg away from Lew.” I turned to Reno and asked: “Isn’t that it?”

He looked at me woodenly and said:

“You’re telling it.”

I continued telling it:

“Noonan fakes a tip that you’re at Cedar Hill, and takes all the coppers he can’t trust out there with him, even cleaning the traffic detail out of Broadway, so Reno would have a clear road. McGraw and the bulls that are in on the play let Reno and his mob sneak out of the hoosegow, pull the job, and duck back in. Nice thing in alibis. Then they got sprung on bail a couple of hours later.

“It looks as if Lew Yard tumbled. He sent Dutch Jake Wahl and some other boys out to the Silver Arrow last night to teach Reno and his pals not to take things in their own hands like that. But Reno got away, and got back to the city. It was either him or Lew then. He made sure which it would be by being in front of Lew’s house with a gun when Lew came out this morning. Reno seems to have had the right dope, because I notice that right now he’s holding down a chair that would have been Lew Yard’s if Lew hadn’t been put on ice.”

Everybody was sitting very still, as if to call attention to how still they were sitting. Nobody could count on having any friends among those present. It was no time for careless motions on anybody’s part.

If what I had said meant anything one way or the other to Reno he didn’t show it.

Thaler whispered softly:

“Didn’t you skip some of it?”

“You mean the part about Jerry?” I kept on being the life of the party. “I was coming back to that. I don’t know whether he got away from the can when you crushed out, and was caught later, or whether he didn’t get away, or why. And I don’t know how willingly he went along on the bank caper. But he did go along, and he was dropped and left in front of the bank because he was your right bower, and his being killed there would pin the trick to you. He was kept in the car till the get-away was on. Then he was pushed out, and was shot in the back. He was facing the bank, with his back to the car, when he got his.”

Thaler looked at Reno and whispered:

“Well?”

Reno looked with dull eyes at Thaler and asked calmly:

“What of it?”

Thaler stood up, said, “Deal me out,” and walked to the door.

Pete the Finn stood up, leaning on the table with big bony hands, speaking from deep in his chest:

“Whisper.” And when Thaler had stopped and turned to face him: “I’m telling you this. You, Whisper, and all of you. That damn gun-work is out. All of you understand it. You’ve got no brains to know what is best for yourselves. So I’ll tell you. This busting the town open is no good for business. I won’t have it any more. You be nice boys or I’ll make you.

“I got one army of young fellows that know what to do on any end of a gun. I got to have them in my racket. If I got to use them on you I’ll use them on you. You want to play with gunpowder and dynamite? I’ll show you what playing is. You like to fight? I’ll give you fighting. Mind what I tell you. That’s all.”

Pete the Finn sat down.

Thaler looked thoughtful for a moment, and went away without saying or showing what he had thought.

His going made the others impatient. None wanted to remain
until anybody else had time to accumulate a few guns in the neighborhood.

In a very few minutes Elihu Willsson and I had the library to ourselves.

We sat and looked at one another.

Presently he said:

“How would you like to be chief of police?”

“No. I’m a rotten errand boy.”

“I don’t mean with this bunch. After we’ve got rid of them.”

“And got another just like them.”

“Damn you,” he said, “it wouldn’t hurt to take a nicer tone to a man old enough to be your father.”

“Who curses me and hides behind his age.”

Anger brought a vein out blue in his forehead. Then he laughed.

“You’re a nasty talking lad,” he said, “but I can’t say you haven’t done what I paid you to do.”

“A swell lot of help I’ve got from you.”

“Did you need wet-nursing? I gave you the money and a free hand. That’s what you asked for. What more did you want?”

“You old pirate,” I said, “I blackmailed you into it, and you played against me all the way till now, when even you can see that they’re hell-bent on gobbling each other up. Now you talk about what you did for me.”

“Old pirate,” he repeated. “Son, if I hadn’t been a pirate I’d still be working for the Anaconda for wages, and there’d be no Personville Mining Corporation. You’re a damned little woolly lamb yourself, I suppose. I was had, son, where the hair was short. There were things I didn’t like—worse things that I didn’t know about until tonight—but I was caught and had to bide my time. Why since that Whisper Thaler has been here I’ve been a prisoner in my own home, a damned hostage!”

“Tough. Where do you stand now?” I demanded. “Are you behind me?”

“If you win.”

I got up and said:

“I hope to Christ you get caught with them.”

He said:

“I reckon you do, but I won’t.” He squinted his eyes merrily at me. “I’m financing you. That shows I mean well, don’t it? Don’t be too hard on me, son, I’m kind of—”

I said, “Go to hell,” and walked out.