Red Harvest (21 page)

McGraw told me he had sent a pair of his dicks—Shepp and Vanaman—to see the girl that morning, to see how much help she could and would give the department in copping Whisper for
Noonan’s murder. The dicks got to her house at nine-thirty. The front door was ajar. Nobody answered their ringing. They went in and found the girl lying on her back in the dining room, dead, with a stab wound in her left breast.

The doctor who examined the body said she had been killed with a slender, round, pointed blade about six inches in length, at about three o’clock in the morning. Bureaus, closets, trunks, and so on, had apparently been skilfully and thoroughly ransacked. There was no money in the girl’s handbag, or elsewhere in the house. The jewel case on her dressing table was empty. Two diamond rings were on her fingers.

The police hadn’t found the weapon with which she had been stabbed. The fingerprint experts hadn’t turned up anything they could use. Neither doors nor windows seemed to have been forced. The kitchen showed that the girl had been drinking with a guest or guests.

“Six inches, round, slim, pointed,” I repeated the weapon’s description. “That sounds like her ice pick.”

McGraw reached for the phone and told somebody to send Shepp and Vanaman in. Shepp was a stoop-shouldered tall man whose wide mouth had a grimly honest look that probably came from bad teeth. The other detective was short, stocky, with purplish veins in his nose and hardly any neck.

McGraw introduced us and asked them about the ice pick. They had not see it, were positive it hadn’t been there. They wouldn’t have overlooked an article of its sort.

“Was it there last night?” McGraw asked me.

“I stood beside her while she chipped off pieces of ice with it.”

I described it. McGraw told the dicks to search her house again, and then to try to find the pick in the vicinity of the house.

“You knew her,” he said when Shepp and Vanaman had gone. “What’s your slant on it?”

“Too new for me to have one,” I dodged the question. “Give me an hour or two to think it over. What do you think?”

He fell back into sourness, growling, “How the hell do I know?”

But the fact that he let me go away without asking me any more questions told me he had already made up his mind that Whisper had killed the girl.

I wondered if the little gambler had done it, or if this was another of the wrong raps that Poisonville police chiefs liked to hang on him. It didn’t seem to make much difference now. It was a cinch he had—personally or by deputy—put Noonan out, and they could only hang him once.

There were a lot of men in the corridor when I left McGraw. Some of these men were quite young—just kids—quite a few were foreigners, and most of them were every bit as tough looking as any men should be.

Near the street door I met Donner, one of the coppers who had been on the Cedar Hill expedition.

“Hello,” I greeted him. “What’s the mob? Emptying the can to make room for more?”

“Them’s our new specials,” he told me, speaking as if he didn’t think much of them. “We’re going to have a augmented force.”

“Congratulations,” I said and went on out.

In his pool room I found Peak Murry sitting at a desk behind the cigar counter talking to three men. I sat down on the other side of the room and watched two kids knock balls around. In a few minutes the lanky proprietor came over to me.

“If you see Reno some time,” I told him, “you might let him know that Pete the Finn’s having his mob sworn in as special coppers.”

“I might,” Murry agreed.

Mickey Linehan was sitting in the lobby when I got back to my hotel. He followed me up to my room, and reported:

“Your Dan Rolff pulled a sneak from the hospital somewhere
after midnight last night. The croakers are kind of steamed up about it. Seems they were figuring on pulling a lot of little pieces of bone out of his brain this morning. But him and his duds were gone. We haven’t got a line on Whisper yet. Dick’s out now trying to place Bill Quint. What’s what on this girl’s carving? Dick tells me you got it before the coppers.”

“It—”

The telephone bell rang.

A man’s voice, carefully oratorical, spoke my name with a question mark after it.

I said: “Yeah.”

The voice said:

“This is Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn speaking. I think you will find it well worth your while to appear at my offices at your earliest convenience.”

“Will I? Who are you?”

“Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn, attorney-at-law. My suite is in the Rutledge Block, 310 Green Street. I think you will find it well—”

“Mind telling me part of what it’s about?” I asked.

“There are affairs best not discussed over the telephone. I think you will find—”

“All right,” I interrupted him again. “I’ll be around to see you this afternoon if I get a chance.”

“You will find it very, very advisable,” he assured me.

I hung up on that.

Mickey said:

“You were going to give me the what’s what on the Brand slaughter.”

I said:

“I wasn’t. I started to say it oughtn’t to be hard to trace Rolff—running around with a fractured skull and probably a lot of bandages. Suppose you try it. Give Hurricane Street a play first.”

Mickey grinned all the way across his comedian’s red face,
said, “Don’t tell me anything that’s going on—I’m only working with you,” picked up his hat, and left me.

I spread myself on the bed, smoked cigarettes end to end, and thought about last night—my frame of mind, my passing out, my dreams, and the situation into which I woke. The thinking was unpleasant enough to make me glad when it was interrupted.

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,” he 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 a 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 Whispers 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 get-away 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.”

“Nobody but you knows where Whisper is?”

“Nobody else, except Dan, that’s as dead as he is.”

“Where are they?”

“The old Redman warehouse down on Porter Street. In the back, upstairs, Whisper had a room fixed up with a bed, stove, and some grub. Give me a chance. Fifty bucks now and a cut on the rest.”

I let go of his arm and said:

“I don’t want the dough, but go ahead. I’ll lay off for a couple of hours. That ought to be long enough.”

“Thanks, chief. Thanks, thanks,” and he hurried away from me.

I put on my coat and hat, went out, found Green Street and the Rutledge Block. It was a wooden building a long while past any prime it might ever have had. Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn’s establishment was on the second floor. There was no elevator. I climbed a worn and rickety flight of wooden steps.

The lawyer had two rooms, both dingy, smelly, and poorly lighted. I waited in the outer one while a clerk who went well with the rooms carried my name in to the lawyer. Half a minute later the clerk opened the door and beckoned me in.

Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn was a little fat man of fifty-something. He had prying triangular eyes of a very light color, a short fleshy nose, and a fleshier mouth whose greediness was only partly hidden between a ragged gray mustache and a ragged gray Vandyke beard. His clothes were dark and unclean looking without actually being dirty.

He didn’t get up from his desk, and throughout my visit he kept his right hand on the edge of a desk drawer that was some six inches open.

He said:

“Ah, my dear sir, I am extremely gratified to find that you had the good judgment to recognize the value of my counsel.”

His voice was even more oratorical than it had been over the wire.

I didn’t say anything.

Nodding his whiskers as if my not saying anything was another exhibition of good judgment, he continued:

“I may say, in all justice, that you will find it the invariable part of sound judgment to follow the dictates of my counsel in all cases. I may say this, my dear sir, without false modesty, appreciating with both fitting humility and a deep sense of true and lasting values, my responsibilities as well as my prerogatives as a—and why should I stoop to conceal the fact that there are those who feel justified in preferring to substitute the definite article for the indefinite?—recognized and accepted leader of the bar in this thriving state.”

He knew a lot of sentences like those, and he didn’t mind using them on me. Finally he got along to:

“Thus, that conduct which in a minor practitioner might seem irregular, becomes, when he who exercises it occupies such indisputable prominence in his community—and, I might say, not merely the immediate community—as serves to place him above fear of reproach, simply that greater ethic which scorns the pettier conventionalities when confronted with an opportunity to serve mankind through one of its individual representatives. Therefore, my dear sir, I have not hesitated to brush aside scornfully all trivial considerations of accepted precedent, to summon you, to say to you frankly and candidly, my dear sir, that your interests will best be served by and through retaining me as your legal representative.”

I asked:

“What’ll it cost?”

“That,” he said loftily, “is of but secondary importance. However, it is a detail which has its deserved place in our relationship, and must be not overlooked or neglected. We shall say, a thousand dollars now. Later, no doubt—”

He ruffled his whiskers and didn’t finish the sentence.