Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)

Kenny O’Hara new press agent for the Hotel Diplomat, was doing a bang-up job. In his very first week, with a mere murder to work on, he was getting the hostelry’s name in all the local rags. Wonderful publicity — if only they catered to a clientele of corpses!

Chapter One Hotel Homicide

The four men in 907 didn’t look to O’Hara like members of the Loyal Order of Bears, and, having had two days of press-agenting the L.O.B. convention for the Hotel Diplomat, O’Hara felt he was an expert on the subject of Bears.

The quartet, in his opinion, looked much more like characters in whom the District Attorney’s racket squad would be much interested.

There was a fat man with eyes cut out of polished green rock who sat in a chair by the windows and mopped sweat from the rolls at the back of his neck. There was a wiry young man, very elegant in thin black mustache and tropical white suit. He leaned against a bureau and eyed O’Hara with a cold but interested stare. Astride a straight chair, his arms hugging the back, was a small man, jockey size, who had pink cheeks and crisp graying hair against a background of plaid suit and very yellow shoes. The fourth man lounged on the bed and gazed across one narrow shoulder at the doorway without a recognizable emotion on his dark square face or in his small, dusty-black eyes. He was in his shirt sleeves and his vest, sagging, showed the brown leather strap of a shoulder holster.

The wiry man kept staring at O’Hara and at the open door behind O’Hara. He said: “And what can we do for you?”

“Excuse it, please,” O’Hara said. He flipped a large hand in a deprecatory gesture and his brown, rugged face was apologetic. “I’m looking for a photographer. A photog named Clancy. I see he isn’t here.”

The jockey-sized man giggled, said in a high-pitched voice: “He’s just looking for a photog named Clancy.”

“What made you think he’d be in here?” said the fat man. He had a husky, rolling voice and his belly moved when he talked.

“Clancy,” O’Hara said, “is the kind of a guy who is every place except where he’s supposed to be.”

The dark man on the bed rolled over, got his feet on the floor while the wiry man by the bureau said: “When you want to find Clancy, I suppose you just go around knocking on doors?”

O’Hara grinned a little. “With a convention on and drinks in every room, it’s the only sure way. As a matter of fact, one of the hops said he’d seen Clancy on this floor. Thanks, fellows, and excuse me for intruding.”

The dark man said: “Wait a minute, friend.” He moved fast but with an elusive appearance of taking his time and put himself between O’Hara and the doorway.

“Take it easy, Ernie,” said the fat man.

“I wanta find out who this guy is.”

“That’s an easy one,” said O’Hara. “I’m press agent for the Diplomat.”

“A newspaper guy, huh?” said Ernie.

O’Hara smiled a little wryly. “Real newspapermen would give you an argument about that.”

The dusty-black eyes rested on O’Hara with a sort of chill speculation. O’Hara didn’t think he had anything to worry about but, even so, the man’s blank, unimpassioned stare brought a faint breath of menace into the silent room.

Ernie put out a hand toward the door to close it but before his fingers touched the knob a very small man appeared in the frame of the doorway. He had the face of an elderly dyspeptic monkey and his brown suit was sloppy, stained in front with hypo. That was Clancy and Clancy was no drunker than he had been two hours before, which was pretty drunk. But, drunk or sober, he knew what to do with a camera.

He said in a fast, nearly undecipherable mumble: “Heard you were paging me, Kenny. ’Nother picture, huh? O.K., boys — just look pretty.”

The camera which had been dangling in his right hand was up in front of his face before he’d finished his mumble. The flash bulb in its holder spat a white flare of light into the room and Clancy said: “Thank you, boys, thank you and thank you,” and was already weaving backward into the hall.

It had all happened so fast that none of the four men had made a move. But O’Hara did. He took two long steps, said, “So long, fellows,” as he went through the door. He pulled the door shut after him, grabbed Clancy by one pipe-stem arm and hauled him along the corridor toward the elevator.

Clancy said: “Cripes, Kenny, what’s the hurry? We got the rest of the afternoon to make pix and me, I can shoot pix so fast you think my flashbulbs is a guy with a lantern running behind a picket fence. Why, once when I am on the Omaha Bee, I established a world’s record by shooting two hundred pix at the livestock show in one day.”

A down elevator showed yellow light behind the glass squares in the door and O’Hara said: “What’d the Bee do — award you the Blue Ribbon?”

He was thinking that if he was only still with the Los Angeles Tribune and not a hotel press agent, he could have some fun with that picture. Four hot lads from somewhere didn’t get together in a hotel room out on the Coast without there being a Page One story in it. But when you were a hotel press agent, you didn’t put out stories on your hotel like that; you got the picture developed and turned it over to the cops and the cops either tossed the guys in the can without undue publicity or else ran them out of town in the same way.

O’Hara had quit the Tribune a week before but it already seemed like a month. It was a swell job he had now; a hundred and fifty bucks a week and regular hours and a hotel room and half-rate meals thrown in made a reporter’s job look like small change.

It was a swell job, all right; only it wasn’t fun.

They got down to the lobby and stepped out into a mob of eddying, sweating, convention-enjoying humanity.

O’Hara said: “Look, Clancy, can you stay put right by the newsstand for five minutes?”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” said Clancy. “I’m always around.”

“Yeah,” O’Hara said. “But where? I’ve had the newly-elected officers rounded up twice and lost ’em each time because I had to hunt you. I’m going to do it again and if you’re missing this time, Mister Clancy, I’ll drown you in a tray of your own developer.”

Clancy looked at Miss Melba, the girl behind the newsstand, with drunken admiration. “Don’t worry about me leaving here — I like that blond scenery.”

O’Hara bumped, threaded, elbowed his way through the jammed lobby. He found the new president in the barber shop, just winding up a manicure. He dug two vice-presidents and a recording secretary out of the coffee shop; he hauled the membership secretary and the treasurer out of a crap game in Room 301. And he shooed them all toward Room A, off the ballroom.

He went back to the lobby. A small, trim girl with wide-set hazel eyes and a quirk to her mouth intercepted him.

She said: “Hi, space grabber!”

O’Hara said severely: “Public relations counsel to you, Miss Ames.”

Tony Ames said: “How goes it, Ken?”

“Swell, kitten. This job is the nuts.”

She looked at him shrewdly, shook her head. “You can take your hair down with mama. You hate the job, don’t you? It’s put more wrinkles in your forehead in a week than you got in seven years at the Trib. Why don’t you come back with us, Ken?”

“And have that gang down there give me the horse-laugh for a year? Braddock told me it wouldn’t be a month before I’d sneak up to him at the city desk and beg for my job back. Anyway, this is a swell deal I have here. How about dinner here with me tonight, kitten? You can eat twice as much as usual on account of I get half rates.”

“O.K., mule. But business before calories.” From her pocketbook she took the Diplomat press release that O’Hara had sent out the previous night. She said: “I note that this dive of yours—”

Interrupting, O’Hara made a grimace of horror. “Please, please — the Diplomat is not a dive. At the very worst, it’s only a joint. Proceed.”

“Staying at the Diplomat dump is one Rex Miller of Midland City, who is — in your words — a noted gang buster. What gang did he ever bust?”

“There’s a great story in him, angel face,” said O’Hara. “It seems that back in Midland City vice has been rampant, as the editorial writers would say. So the good citizens, including most of the ministers in town, formed a committee to force the city administration to clamp down and kick the racket boys out. Not long after that, one of the ministers on the committee got into his car, stepped on the starter and was blown to bits. That was carrying things a bit too far. The state attorney general stepped in and appointed a special prosecutor to handle the investigation. Rex Miller is that individual. You ought to get a swell interview out of him. By ‘swell’ I mean one that mentions the Diplomat at least three times.”

“Braddock said two hundred words and the Diplomat gets one mention if it doesn’t slip my mind. Why is Miller out here?”

“He mentioned something about visiting a sister who’s at college out here. Come on — I’ll try to locate him for you.” He turned, took a few steps and stopped. A lean and youngish man was edging his way through the crowd. He had a bony face, curt lips, a good jaw and a clear direct gaze. It all added up to a not unpleasant total. O’Hara said: “There’s the lad now.”

With Tony trailing him, O’Hara angled across the lobby and intercepted the lean, youngish man. “Mr. Miller—”

Miller halted, faced around. “Hello, O’Hara.”

O’Hara did the introductions and Tony Ames said: “We’ve heard about your fine work in Midland City, Mr. Miller. If you have a little time—”

The curt-lipped young man glanced at his wrist watch, seemed for a moment hesitant. Then he said: “I can give you only a very few minutes. Let’s find a spot out of this traffic.”

Tony clicked high heels alongside Miller toward an alcove and O’Hara turned and jammed his way over to the newsstand to collect Clancy. Clancy wasn’t there.

“Hell’s bells,” said O’Hara. He bit off other words that might — or might not — have shocked the newsstand blonde. “Where is that guy, Melba?”

Melba said: “Who — Clancy?”

“Yeah, where’s Clancy?”

A fat man who was buying cigars seemed to think this was very humorous. He chuckled, sending out a wave of bourbon fog, and said: “It sounds like Clancy’s missing, friends.”

Melba said: “He was here a minute ago, Ken. Wait a second.” She waved at a passing bellboy, sang out: “Mike, where’s Clancy?”

The fat drunk thought that was even funnier. He said: “Lemme find Clancy for you, sister.” He raised his voice and it wasn’t a small voice. “Where’s Clancy?” he yelled.

Somebody over on the other side of the lobby thought it was funny, also. He yelled back: “Where’s Clancy?”

A lot more of the delegates decided they had something there and wanted to know where Clancy was and inside of thirty seconds the idea had captured most of the conventioneers in the lobby as something screamingly comic.

“Where’s Clancy?” they demanded separately in chorus.

Melba held her hands over her ears and grimaced at O’Hara.

Dahlman, the assistant manager, popped out of his office near the newsstand. He was a dandified, precise little man and he looked as though the noise was tearing his nerves into little strips. He shouted: “What is this? What’s going on? Who started this pandemonium?”

Melba pointed mutely at O’Hara and Dahlman screamed above the din: “What do you mean, O’Hara, by starting an uproar like this?”

O’Hara scowled at the pretty little man and said: “Nuts, Mr. Dahlman, I didn’t—”

“And is that any way to speak to your superior?”

A bellhop erupted from the jam and said: “Hey, O’Hara, I seen Clancy.”

“Where?”

“He was going downstairs to the men’s lounge with a guy about five minutes ago, a kinda hard-looking mug. He was carrying his plate case and camera.”

O’Hara said, “Thanks, kid,” and ducked around the newsstand, leaving Dahlman with his mouth open ready to say more.

The stairs to the washroom went down in smooth, marble terraces besides the elevator shaft. O’Hara had a hunch and he took the marble steps three at a time.

He slapped the leather-padded swing doors out of the way and went into the outer room of the lounge. There wasn’t anyone there, not even Hamfoot, the shoeshine boy.

He slammed through a second set of leather-padded doors and there were three guys there. One of them was Clancy, who didn’t seem to know or care where he was. He was on his back with his head beneath one of the washbowls. Blood and saliva drooled out of his open mouth.

Ernie, the dark-faced man from 907, was crunching photographic plates under one heel very deliberately and methodically. He had already kicked Clancy’s camera to bits.

Hamfoot trembled and jittered in one corner and his black face was a pale gray.

Ernie looked coldly at O’Hara as he crunched the last plate on the floor. He had a gun in his hand and he said: “Hello, press agent. Get the hell outa my way!”

The dark-faced man apparently had been accustomed for a long time to the respect a gun should command. He took it for granted that O’Hara would get out of the way so he walked toward him, toward the door. O’Hara did step aside. But when Ernie came even with him, he kicked the gun out of Ernie’s hand in one fast whirl of movement, using the follow-through of the kick to bring his right popping at the swarthy jaw. The right went high, smacking Ernie on the temple; but it had enough steam to slam him against the wall.

O’Hara felt pretty sore about things. He didn’t like little Clancy being knocked around and he didn’t like guys to put guns on him. But, most of all, he was sore about trying and trying to get that picture of the new L.O.B. officers and never getting it.

Ernie bounced off the wall, spun into the swing doors and catapulted into the outer room of the lounge. The doors swung shut again and O’Hara dived for the gun, came back at the doors. When he got them out of his way, the dark-faced man had vanished up the stairs.

O’Hara didn’t follow him. Ernie had a head start and if O’Hara did grab the guy in the lobby, it might start a riot in which hotel patrons could get hurt. A hotel press agent had to think of those things.

He went back in to Clancy and pulled him from under the washbowl. Hamfoot, still a pale gray, got a towel wet wordlessly and draped it over Clancy’s forehead.

Clancy stirred and sat up. He scowled at O’Hara, said: “Where am I?”

“That,” O’Hara growled, “is what everybody was asking a few minutes ago.”

“Now I remember — a guy socked me. By cripes, I hope I catch him sometime.” Clancy’s look was ferocious and he waggled a skinny fist at the end of his pipestem arm. “If I catch him—”

“You’ll be unlucky twice in the same place. Why’d you waltz down here with him?”

“He comes up to me at the newsstand and shows me he has his hand on a gun in his pocket. Then he makes me get my plate case and my box and brung me down here and socked me.” Clancy looked around. “Hey, Kenny, look what he done to my stuff!”

“Where’s the plate you shot in 907?”

Clancy spat blood out of his mouth. “You think the guy was after that one?”

“I don’t think it, I know it.”

Clancy chuckled. “The guy is outa luck. I left that one and a couple others I shot since lunch at the newsstand.”

“Make me a print as fast as possible. Can you walk?”

“Can I walk! Say, Kenny, I took a lot worse beatings than that and still got my pix in. Why, one time I am on the Denver Post—”

“Sure, sure, Clancy.” O’Hara got the little man to his feet, got him started out.

Hamfoot pointed at the gun, which O’Hara had laid atop a cabinet. “You forgettin’ you gun, Mist’ O’Hara.”

“Not mine,” said O’Hara. “Maybe the owner’ll be back for it and you can give it to him — across his dome.”

O’Hara and Clancy went up the stairs. There wasn’t any sign of the dark-faced man in the thronged lobby.

The cries of “Where’s Clancy?” had given way to the strains of the convention pep song in half-a-dozen keys. Everyone — that is, almost everyone — was happy.

The exception was the bellhop who skated across the lobby, skidded to a stop before O’Hara. He was goggle-eyed.

He said, keeping his voice down: “Geez, O’Hara, a moider!”

“A what?”

“A moider — a dead guy on the ninth floor. Dahlman wants you up there fast. He’s gone up with the dicks and he said you was to keep the reporters from knowing about it.”

Chapter Two Closeted With a Corpse

The jockey-sized man was curled up at the bottom of the ninth-floor linen closet where a horrified maid had discovered him some fifteen minutes before. Kneeling beside the body, O’Hara saw, was Lieutenant Lenroot of Central Homicide. Lenroot unbuttoned the little man’s vest, lifted away a folded hotel towel from the shirtfront. Both towel and shirtfront were blood soaked.

Lenroot unbuttoned the shirt, using the towel to wipe away blood. “Stabbed dead center in the ticker,” he said. “Probably in one of the rooms on this floor.”

Dahlman objected shrilly. “You mean you’re going to intrude on our guests, Lieutenant? Why, we have eighty rooms on this floor — I won’t have you disturbing our guests like that!”

Lenroot said: “Don’t worry. We’ll handle everything nice.” He checked the little man’s pockets, found nothing got up off his knees. “Any idea who he is, Mr. Dahlman?”

“I never saw him before.”

O’Hara said: “I—”

Dahlman whipped around, noticed O’Hara for the first time. He shook a ladylike finger, said: “You certainly took your time getting up here, O’Hara. After this, when I send for you, you come hopping.”

Lenroot showed long yellow teeth in a grimace at O’Hara. He was a large stomachy man with a long, pale face and pale eyes. He said: “What’re you doing here, O’Hara? I thought you were out of the newspaper racket and — after many years — out of my hair.”

“He’s doing publicity for us,” Dahlman said. “I sent for you, O’Hara, to say that you positively must keep this thing away from the reporters—”

He broke off and stared past O’Hara, moaned softly: “Oh, my goodness, my goodness!”

O’Hara turned and there were five reporters and two photogs barging around the angle of the corridor, bearing down on them. Mason, the house dick, was borne along helplessly in their midst.

Kendall of the Times was in the lead and he chortled happily: “O’Hara, you’re a hotel press agent as is a press agent — you give us a swell murder in your first week here!”

Dahlman sputtered up at O’Hara: “You did that?”

“Did what?”

“You tipped off these reporters! Why, you... you—”

O’Hara might have had a chance to straighten matters out if at that moment it hadn’t occurred to Clancy that his contribution was needed. He shoved between O’Hara and Dahlman.

He waggled a puny fist in Dahlman’s face, growled: “Pull up your panty-waist, sister. You can’t shove my pal around.”

At that Dahlman went to pieces in earnest. He screamed: “You’re fired, Clancy. And you, O’Hara, you’re fired, too. Get out — get out! Both of you! Before I go crazy!”

Clancy said consolingly: “Well, sister, you ain’t got far to travel.”

Back of O’Hara the reporters guffawed and Dahlman wrung his hands, quivered. He darted a finger at O’Hara, at Clancy, and said hotly: “Lieutenant, get these men out of here. Get them out, please.”

Lenroot grinned at O’Hara. He said: “It’ll be a pleasure, Mr. Dahlman, a positive pleasure.”

He got O’Hara’s arm in a hard grip, grabbed Clancy by the shoulder. He said: “On your way, bums.”

O’Hara said hotly: “Listen, you fathead—”

“Nah,” said Lenroot. “I don’t have to listen. Get going. I been waiting a long time, O’Hara, to put you in your place.”

O’Hara’s eyes were humid, red was creeping up the back of his neck. He said: “If you’ll give your ears a chance instead of your mouth—”

Lenroot was marching them down the hall and he said: “When you had the Tribune behind you, I had to listen to your gab. But you’re just a tramp out of a job now. Shut up and scram!”

Clancy said: “You want me to take a poke at this mug, Kenny?”

O’Hara suddenly shrugged, stopped resisting Lenroot’s hand. He said: “O.K., Lenroot, but you’re going to regret this.”

“Yeah,” Lenroot grinned. He got them to the stairs and shoved and O’Hara skidded down two steps and Clancy went rubber-kneed down six steps to a landing. Lenroot dusted his hands and said: “Don’t let me catch you guys around up here any more. Goom-bye, O’Hara, and thanks for the most pleasure I’ve had since the first time I met you.”

He went back along the corridor.

Clancy said: “Come on, Kenny, leave you and me go back there and bounce that guy off the floor.”

O’Hara shook his head, came down the stairs to the landing, saying nothing, His face was dour, tight-muscled at the corners of the jaw and his eyes were dark and angry.

Clancy said: “Don’t take it so hard, Kenny. Hell, I been fired off lots better jobs than this. I been fired off the St. Looie Post-Dispatch, the Cincy Inquirer, the Newark Ledger, the Frisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Constitution, the—”

O’Hara managed a grin. “Quit bragging.”

“No kidding, I been fired off—”

“Never mind. Where can you develop that shot you took in 907?”

“Right in the hotel darkroom I can do it.”

“We don’t work for the hotel. Remember?”

“I know a commercial photog over on Hope Street. I can use his joint.”

“Go to it. And make me three prints. I’ll be around the hotel waiting for you.”

Clancy went away and O’Hara remained, an island of silent thoughtfulness in the sea of noise that was the lobby. Presently he made his way to the desk; he figured that the news that he had been fired wouldn’t have reached there yet. He was right.

A glossy-haired clerk readily acceded to a request for information on 907. “Certainly, O’Hara. The occupant of Room 907 was a Mr. W. J. Herman of Seattle.”

“Was?”

The clerk nodded. “He turned in his key and paid his bill not ten minutes ago.”

“What’d he look like?”

“A rather stout man. In fact, I might say very fat.”

“Thanks,” said O’Hara.

At the Diplomat the motor entrance is a floor below the lobby and the stairs that reach it are across the wide expanse from the desk. O’Hara fought his way slowly through the convention crowds and reached the top of the stairs.

He saw the angular brisk back of Rex Miller of Midland City halfway down the flight. Miller was hurrying, his well-shined black shoes twinkling from step to step. O’Hara matched his hurry, although not with the thought of wasting any time on Miller at the moment. If Mr. W. J. Herman of Seattle had checked out only ten minutes before, it was possible that he’d still be at the motor entrance, waiting for a cab. O’Hara didn’t know exactly what he’d do about it if that was so; but at least he could note the number of the cab and talk to the hacker later.

O’Hara swore at Lenroot silently. If Lenroot hadn’t been such a jerk and hadn’t roused O’Hara’s Irish, the fat man could have been grabbed before he so much as tried to check out. O’Hara swore at himself, too. He could have handled the big homicide dick if the O’Hara temper hadn’t slipped its leash.

Miller turned into the corridor that opened onto the motor court and for a moment was out of sight. O’Hara got to the corridor and halted abruptly. The special prosecutor from Midland City had stopped just inside the doorway and was in earnest but hurried consultation with the wiry young man whom O’Hara had last seen in 907.

The tableau lasted no more than a few seconds. Miller nodded and stepped to the sidewalk. The wiry young man followed.

A low, pale-green Cadillac, driven by Ernie, the dark-faced man, slid into view and stopped. The fat man, who was Mr. Herman of Seattle — at least, on the Diplomat register — was in the front seat beside Ernie. O’Hara saw Rex Miller reach for the rear door of the Cad, open it. Miller climbed into the car quickly, the wiry young man popped in after him. The Cad rolled away.

O’Hara got to the curb in time to see the Cad swinging around the corner of the boxwood hedge outlining the motor court. He got a glimpse of an Illinois license plate, a glimpse that gave him only two of the numbers, and then the Cad was gone.

He went back and up the stairs toward the lobby and the telephone booths. He was thinking about Lieutenant Lenroot whose face was going to be very red when he saw in the Tribune the 907 picture and read that one Rex Miller, special prosecutor in the Midland City case, had driven hurriedly away from the Diplomat with three prize suspects in the linen-closet killing.

He knew that Lenroot would try to land on him like a ton of brickbats for holding out. O’Hara had the comeback for that one, something about leading a mule to the information trough but not being able to force the mule to have any.

Wedging himself into a phone booth, he dialed the number of the Tribune and got through to the city desk.

A crisp, brusque voice said: “Hello, hello.”

O’Hara said: “Brad, this is Ken O’Hara.”

At the other end of the wire Braddock began to laugh. “Well, hello, black sheep. I hear you got fired.”

“O.K., I got fired.”

“I gave you a month to lose the spot and you made it in a week and now I suppose you want your job back.” He laughed again.

“That’s right — laugh!”

“O.K., boy, I’m laughing and I don’t know why I shouldn’t. I told you not to take that job, I said you were a reporter and not a press agent but, no, you knew it all and Uncle Braddock could go jump in the lake. And now you come around begging for your job back—”

O’Hara said hotly: “Who said I was begging for my job?”

“Oh, you don’t want it back?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Braddock had been burned when O’Hara had walked out on him. He still sounded burned. He said: “When you make up your mind, come around and see me. Right now, Irish, I’m busy.”

The line went dead in O’Hara’s ear and he said under his breath, but not very far under: “Then nuts to you, too.”

He had pronged the receiver and was stepping out of the booth as he said it, practically into the face of a pompous man with reached gray hair who stood waiting.

The pompous man said indignantly: “I beg your pardon, sir?”

O’Hara muttered: “Sorry. Just send the nuts back.”

O’Hara moved off through the lobby toward the entrance of the cocktail room and the pompous man decided the fellow must be crazy or drunk or both and let it go at that.

O’Hara was making wet, moody circles on the bar with his highball glass when Tony Ames found him thirty minutes later. He gave her a windy, up-from-under look.

She said: “You don’t have to bite me, too. I’m sorry, Ken. And if you want me to, I’ll go kick Mr. Dahlman in the face.”

O’Hara managed a grin. “Excuse, kitten. Let’s park and I’ll buy you a drink.”

They found a booth and ordered, O’Hara’s Scotch being his third. He stared at the table for seconds, finally said: “What I hate about that guy, Braddock, is he’s always right. He said I was ruining a fair reporter to make a lousy press agent and, by God, that’s just what I did. I guess it turned me into a mouse, Tony. I let that daisy-chain assistant manager fire me and then Lenroot gave me the bum’s rush and just a while ago Braddock had me back on my heels. And, cripes, I couldn’t think of a comeback to any of them.”

Tony Ames’ wide-spaced hazel eyes were sorry. “Aw, cheer up, Ken.”

“I’ll cheer up when I get my self-respect back. And, kitten, I’ll get it back.”

“You’re silly to let it get you down.”

“Quit trying to buck me up, Miss Ames. I’m not going to be a happy Irishman until I’ve made more of a monkey out of Lenroot than he made out of me — and until Brad begs me to come back. And, by cripes, I’ll put it over.”

Tony looked interested. “You mean on this Diplomat murder?”

O’Hara grinned. “That, you Tribune minion, would be telling. You working on it?”

“I was up there helping Shep Carter from the police beat for a while.”

“Lenroot getting anywhere?”

“He hadn’t up to the time I left. There was no identification on the body. None of the hotel employees questioned so far had seen the man before, with the exception of an elevator operator who said he took him to eight early in the afternoon.” She stopped and then said slowly: “Ken, you know things about this murder that you’re not telling.”

For a moment O’Hara didn’t answer. Then he said: “Tony, I’m going to put you in a spot I’ve been in many times. If I tell you something in confidence, I know you’re not going to violate my confidence by tipping off Brad or the cops. I know a little something about this killing. I’m going to find out more and then I’m going to hang it on Brad and Lenroot like a horsecollar on a jackass.”

Tony looked worried. She said: “Ken, this is a murder. Do you think you ought to hold out?”

“Hold out?” said O’Hara. “Hold out? All afternoon I’ve been trying to tell those two guys what I know. And what do I get out of it? Insults, a kicking around!”

Tony sighed: “Some time I’d like to find an Irishman who could be sore but sensible.”

“He died and went to heaven a thousand years ago.”

Clancy peered in at the entrance of the cocktail room and O’Hara got up. He said: “I’ll be seeing you, kitten.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tony, smiling a little.

He went out and herded Clancy to the comparative quiet of an alcove. There he studied one of the prints that Clancy produced. The little photog hadn’t lied; drunk or sober he could shoot swell pix and this sample was no exception.

The fat man was in the center like a Buddha in a sweat-stained shirt. The wiry mustached man lounged gracefully against the bureau and Ernie was frozen into a pose of startled motion. The jockey-sized man grinned straight into the camera and O’Hara thought it a little ironic that he seemed the happiest guy in the picture and had wound up dead within minutes of that moment.

The picture supplied other details that O’Hara hadn’t noticed when he’d been in 907 because his attention had been occupied exclusively by four hot characters. The fat man’s coat was hanging on a post of the bed and there was a folded newspaper sticking from one of the pockets. There were three empty beer bottles on the bureau and two unopened bottles. On the writing desk was a folded document of some sort. O’Hara thought he could distinguish lines and markings of some kind on it.

Even with his naked eyes, O’Hara could read the letters, MIDLAND NEWS at the top of the newspaper.

Clancy yawned. He was getting bored. He was also getting sober, which was worse. He said: “Leave us get a drink, Kenny.”

“You go get one,” O’Hara said.

Clancy ambled away and O’Hara headed for the corridor that housed a half-dozen specialty shops. In the jewelry shop O’Hara borrowed a jeweler’s glass from the slinky brunette behind the counter. He screwed it into his eye and bent over the picture.

The indistinct lines on what had looked at first like a folded document jumped up blackly and O’Hara saw that it was not a document but a road map. A highway had been paralleled in crayon and the marking led to the town name “Alkali Center” near the edge of the fold.

O’Hara returned the glass to the slinky brunette and went back toward the lobby, more puzzled now than he had been before. In the beginning he hadn’t seen any more to the killing of the jockey-sized man than a simple and sordid disagreement between thugs. It seemed apparent now that it stemmed somehow from the Midland City racket case. But how? And why had Rex Miller, special prosecutor in that case, waltzed off with three hoodlums, one of whom must certainly have committed the murder?

For a moment O’Hara toyed with the thought that the Midland City organization had put the snatch on the man who was fighting them. But, reconstructing the scene, O’Hara discarded the idea. Talking with the wiry man at the motor entrance, Miller had given no indication of being fearful or even startled; and, if he had been intercepted unexpectedly by the wiry man, he would at least have been startled. Too, he had hurried across the walk and climbed into the Cadillac with no hint of hesitancy or unwillingness.

It wasn’t entirely unknown for a battle to be framed, for a state administration to pick a special prosecutor who’d put up just enough fight to make the public think something was being done about its troubles.

But that didn’t explain the dead man on nine. Nor a road map marked as far as Alkali Center. Set in the middle of the bleak Mojave Desert, ringed in by hot rugged mountains as barren as the surface of the moon, the small town of Alkali Center would seem to hold little interest for racketeers from the lush civilized flatlands of the midwest.

O’Hara sat down at a writing desk, scribbled a few terse notes on a sheet of Diplomat stationery, sealed the notes and a print of the picture in an envelope. He wrote his name on the envelope, slipped it into his pocket and went to find Clancy.

He dug Clancy out of the barroom and together they headed for the basement garage where O’Hara’s unwashed coupe sat like an unashamed leper among the proud and shiny cars of the Diplomat trade. Clancy didn’t ask why; he just went along.

O’Hara said: “I’m taking a ride out into the desert, Clancy. I could use some help maybe.”

“O.K., Kenny.”

“There’s maybe one chance in ten we might run into trouble. I just wanted you to know.”

Clancy yawned. “Well, I got nothing else to do and I’d kinda like to see the desert. It must be the sheik in me.”

“Got a camera to take the place of the busted one?”

“Yeah. Drive by my place and we’ll pick it up.”

They angled around an impressive town car and O’Hara pulled open the door of his coupe.

Tony Ames grinned at him from the seat. She said: “I’d been wondering how much longer you’d be.”

“What’s the idea?” O’Hara said. “If any.”

Tony shrugged. “I haven’t anything interesting to do tonight and—”

“Me, too,” said O’Hara. “But we won’t be doing anything interesting together tonight, kitten.”

“Now look,” said Tony firmly, “I can always tell when you’re getting wound up to do something wacky. You get that Battle-of-the-Boyne look in your eyes. All right, let’s go and do it and get it off your mind and then you and Brad can kiss and make up and life can go on.”

“I hadda babe like her once,” Clancy observed. “She useta follow me around while I shot pix — she thought it was romantic. But I got rid of her.”

“And how did you do that, little man?” said Tony.

“I married her and she got sick of looking at me and six weeks later ran away with a Marine. I think her name was Gladys.”

O’Hara climbed under the wheel and Clancy climbed in at the other side of Tony Ames. O’Hara tooled the coupe out of the garage. He drove three blocks north and six blocks west and stopped in front of an apartment building.

He said: “Here’s your hacienda, hon. Help the lady out, Clancy.”

“I don’t think I like you, O’Hara,” said Tony. “You do this to me after all the stories we’ve worked on together.”

O’Hara patted her hand. “This time it’s different, Tony. You’re working for Braddock. If you go out on this with me and don’t report in, he’ll fire you. If you do report in, you violate my confidence. Your place tonight is by your own fireside.”

Tony gave in. When she was on the sidewalk she said: “I’ll bet you’ll be sorry. I’ll bet before it’s over you’ll be wishing you had my help.”

Clancy said: “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll take care of O’Hara.”

“Sure,” said Tony. “But who’ll take care of you?”

Chapter Three Desert Party

They made two more stops in the city — one at Clancy’s apartment to pick up his spare equipment and the other at Mike’s Grill where O’Hara left the sealed envelope with Mike — and at midnight the coupe jogged along the desert highway under high, sharp and very quiet stars. For the last hundred miles O’Hara had pulled into every open filling station, of which there hadn’t been very many, to check for a trace of the pale-green Cad. The Cad had been unreported by one and all.

O’Hara and Clancy hadn’t talked for a long time. Now O’Hara broke the silence. He said reflectively: “Sometimes I think I’m nuts, Clancy.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid. The nicest guy I ever knew was a cop that cut his wife’s throat.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Well, this guy had known for ten years he was loony but he was smart enough to fool everybody. Then one night his wife and him have a little argument and she says like a wife does, ‘Oh, Albert, you’re crazy’ and he hops up and yells, ‘You been peeking’, and cuts her from ear to ear. He was a swell guy, everybody liked him.”

“If I had sense,” O’Hara said, “I’d have shoved that picture and as much information as I had down Braddock’s throat and the cops could now be doing this job and I could be getting some sleep. But, no, I have to get sore.”

“Uh-huh.”

They drove on another mile. O’Hara demanded: “Well, I had a right to get sore, didn’t I?”

“Sure, kid.”

“Anyway, if I’d handed the picture to Braddock, he’d have printed it and that would have tipped off these guys that they’re jammed. And if I’d given it to Lenroot first, it would have cost me the scoop I need to hang on Braddock.”

Clancy yawned and settled down in the corner of the coupe. He said: “Whichever one of your personalities wins the argument, Kenny, wake me up and leave me know.”

Presently they pulled into Alkali Center, roused a hotel proprietor and he yawned them to a cabin. At six in the morning O’Hara hauled Clancy out of the blankets into the chill morning air. Clancy complained that it was practically the middle of the night.

“Besides, Kenny, this desert ain’t like I hear about deserts. It’s an ice-box. I’m freezing.”

“You’ll warm up.”

By nine o’clock O’Hara had covered the filling stations, garages, auto courts and restaurants of Alkali City without digging up any information about the pale-green Cad or its occupants. It was beginning to warm up as he and Clancy started out to cover the skein of desert roads radiating from the town.

When noon came O’Hara was at his tenth stop. He came out of a ’dobe shack beside an oldster who looked as though he had died, been dehydrated and then set in motion by springs and wheels inside his leathery skin. A sign above the shack said, Jawbone Flats Super-Service. One decrepit gas pump stood in front of the place.

The oldster said: “No, sir, I been on this spot twenty years and ain’t seen such a Cadillac pass in all that time. Nor I ain’t seen any of those hombres in that picture you showed me.”

O’Hara patted sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief that was a damp ball. He said: “Thanks, Dad.”

By now the desert was a huge hot mirror, reflecting the sunlight with a dazzling violence that assaulted the eyes and fried the brain. A mile away to the east there was a round cool-looking lake which O’Hara knew wasn’t there because they had just come that way through a blistering desolation of rock, sand and greasewood. Beyond the nonexistent lake rose a range of barren, chocolate-brown mountains.

O’Hara climbed under the wheel and the dusty washboard of desert road began to flow toward them hotly. He said gloomily: “Hell, this could be a wild goose chase, Clancy. Those guys might be five hundred miles from here.”

Clancy came feebly to life and muttered: “Yeah.” He mopped sweat. “If I was running this desert, I would put in a saloon every quarter mile. With plenty cold beer, maybe a guy could stand it.”

“Want to call it off.”

“Nah — I still got a pint of blood to be dehydrated.”

An hour later they were back in Alkali Center, pulling up before a green-fronted restaurant with a sign that said: Hot Meals — Cold Drinks — Air Conditioning.

Clancy climbed out, staggered around the sidewalk on rubber legs for a moment. He said: “If that sign don’t tell the truth I’ll sue.”

Inside they chose a booth and Clancy expanded in the chilled air. A waitress came over and he said: “Just gimme some ice, sister — and pour bourbon around it.”

O’Hara ordered beer and they both ordered steaks. While the drinks and the steaks were coming, Clancy said: “Kenny, it ain’t like me to be curious but I been kinda wondering. Whatta we do if we catch up with these guys?”

“The first thing is to locate them if possible. Then we call in some desert law for a round-up. After that we try to dig out of them the who and the why of the hotel killing and just where the boy prosecutor stands in the whole business. If he stands where I suspect, it’s a story that’s going to shake some underpinnings back in Midland City.”

“Do we run in circles out in this subdivision of hell until we find them?”

O’Hara shook his head moodily. “If we haven’t cut their trail by evening, I’ll have to crack loose with the picture and what information I have.”

By the time they had finished the steaks the air-conditioning had Clancy’s teeth chattering. He said: “Leave us get out where I can defrost.”

They went out and sat in the coupe while O’Hara checked maps. All up and down the street they were the only humans who were foolish enough to be outside braving the heat. A liver-colored dog came around the corner, folded up in the shadow of the car and began to pant, a pink tongue lolling out at a mouth corner. The dog was too much for Clancy.

He panted like the dog and said: “I gotta go back in there and get a cold drink even if the air-conditioning freezes me stiff. Yell for me when you’re ready.”

He weaved back into the restaurant and O’Hara concentrated on the map. He didn’t seem to mind the heat so much any longer; he thought that probably his nerve ends had been destroyed by it. He was putting the maps back in their case when movement attracted his eyes.

He focused and saw that the movement was at the doorway of a liquor store at the end of the block. The door completed its outward swing. The wiry man he had last seen at the Diplomat emerged, climbed into a battered station wagon. The station wagon swung in a U-turn, went north on the highway and out of town.

O’Hara honked, looked toward the restaurant. Nothing happened. He climbed out, took long strides to the door and hauled it open. Clancy was not in sight. O’Hara muttered a comment on Clancy’s ancestry and went back to the coupe. He got it rolling in the wake of the station wagon.

Angling away here and there from the highway as it ran arrow-straight across the desert were faintly-marked and little-used tracks that led to mining properties or homesteads. Given too much of a start, O’Hara knew, the wiry man could turn off on one of those and disappear again. Clancy would probably wonder why O’Hara had stranded him but he wouldn’t worry too much if he was stranded close enough to a bar.

The sun-bleached buildings of Alkali Center slid past and O’Hara hung the speedometer needle at sixty. Three miles ahead the station wagon was a crawling bug that jittered and shimmered in the heat ripples. O’Hara paced it, neither gaining nor dropping behind. Ten, fifteen miles drifted by.

The station wagon turned from the highway, began to raise a dustcloud that moved steadily across the wasteland toward the mountains. O’Hara slowed to a crawl and watched the dustcloud. He reached the twin ruts where the station wagon had turned off but he continued along the highway. If he could see the wiry man’s dusty wake, the wiry man wouldn’t miss one made by the coupe.

The cloud mounted higher ground and then stopped and disappeared at a spot that looked as though it might be from three to four miles off the highway. With the naked eye it was impossible to distinguish any habitation at that point but there must be something of the sort there. O’Hara pulled off the shoulder, stopped and checked his map. No county road was shown at that point, which indicated that the track gave access to some small mining property or homestead.

He debated the next move. There would be a township marshal or perhaps a deputy sheriff in Alkali Center. But it would take time to get back there, explain things and drive out again. Meanwhile the wiry man and his companions might be moving on. It would be smarter, O’Hara decided, to camp by the rathole and, if the rats ran, to run along with them.

A couple of centuries passed and finally the sun crept down to the jagged edge of mountains, suddenly took a dive the rest of the way. Fingers of darkness reached from the mountains and curved down onto the desert. At the far-off point where the dustcloud had dissolved, a yellow twinkle appeared.

O’Hara fiddled around with Clancy’s camera under the shine of the dashlight, setting exposure and shutter opening. Having dragged news photogs around with him for a dozen years, he had a fair working knowledge of the box. But he’d rather have had Clancy handling it. He got set with plate holders, stuffed three flashbulbs in his pockets. He was a little regretful now that he’d left Ernie’s gun in the Diplomat washroom.

But maybe it was just as well he didn’t have it because guns sometimes got a guy into gunfights. All he wanted was a picture of Mr. Rex Miller of Midland City with the three characters — if such a scene offered itself. He drove back to within a quarter mile of the side road, walked the rest of the way to the turnoff and struck out toward the twinkle of yellow light.

At eight o’clock by the green gleam of his wrist watch, he judged he was within a mile of the light, now a very defined square of orange in the blackness. O’Hara had cut that distance in half when twin lights, the night-eyes of an automobile, snapped on near the illumined window. They began to move, bore down directly on O’Hara.

He stepped off the track, crouched behind the circular bulk of a tumbleweed. A jackrabbit, startled from that cover, hopped out between the ruts, flopped his ears at the approaching lights and hopped away just in time to escape the wheels of the station wagon as it rushed

O’Hara was sure he could distinguish two figures in the car as its bulk blotted out briefly the star-dusted horizon. He swore softly; if one of the pair was Rex Miller all this heel-and-toe business across the desert would be largely wasted motion.

But at least someone was out there on the desert yet for the glowing window still hung in the night like a framed painting of fight. O’Hara plodded closer and closer until he was beginning to distinguish things in the room beyond the window.

He could see Ernie, the dark-faced man, seated at one end of a table. The other end was hidden from O’Hara until he worked himself off the road so that he could see into the room at an angle. He made a rough pleased sound in the back of his throat. Miller was at the other end of the table and he was shuffling a deck of cards. He pushed the deck out to the dark-faced man for a cut, took it back and began to deal. O’Hara could see him speak, laugh.

It was a nice sociable scene, just the thing that O’Hara would have ordered for the picture of the month.

He began to circle the building, which was flat-roofed and sprawling, a typical desert structure. He came upon a small derrick and windlass, propped over the black mouth of a mine shaft. He rounded a corner and almost bumped into the pale-green Cad. He devoted his attention to the car long enough to loosen the valve cores in two tires and leave them flattened. If he had to leave in a hurry, at least they wouldn’t be able to come after him any faster than their feet would carry them.

After that he hugged the wall of the building and worked his way slowly and silently to a point beside the lighted window.

Rex Miller’s crisp voice said: “Gin!”

Ernie swore. “Damn if you don’t have the damndest luck!”

Miller chuckled. “Science, my boy.”

There was the crisp snap of cards being shuffled. Ernie said: “Pour us some drinks, pal, while I shuffle. This lousy desert makes a guy dry.”

There was the click of glassware and O’Hara thought, this is it! He’d wanted to stall, to listen, to soak up any information they might drop in their conversation. But a picture like that was too good to lose, would be worth a thousand words he might overhear.

He slipped a bulb into the flashgun swiftly, fingered the shutter release, pivoted around to the window, holding the box chest high and at an angle to catch the whole table.

The flashbulb flared like lightning in the night.

The tableau was perfect. Rex Miller at the moment was pouring a drink in Ernie’s glass. Ernie was flipping a card to Miller. They had the relaxed smiling appearance of a couple of pals whiling away an evening at gin rummy.

The pose held for the instant it took to register on the plate and then sprang to pieces.

Miller dropped the bottle and jerked his face, wide open at the jaws, around toward the window. Ernie spun his cards away and all in the same smooth motion went for his gun, kicked the chair away from him and whirled toward O’Hara.

O’Hara flipped the hot flashbulb out of the holder at Ernie. Ducking back from the window, he saw Ernie jerking away from the arc of the flashbulb. A gun went off inside the room.

O’Hara made the corner of the building, rounded it and broke into a crouching run that took him off into the black wilderness of sage and sand. He headed for the highway, guided now and then by the swift passage of faraway sparks that were headlights.

He had put a quarter-mile between himself and the building when he saw the headlamps of the Cadillac go on. They went off again quickly. The Cad wasn’t going to roll for a while.

Chapter Four Hot Story

Braddock came on the wire in the Los Angeles Tribune office a couple of hundred miles from the Alkali City phone booth into which O’Hara had squeezed himself. He was sore.

He said: “You fatheaded Fenian, what’s the idea of you getting drunk and putting through collect long-distance calls to the Tribune? O’Hara doesn’t work here any more. Remember?”

“I’m not drunk,” O’Hara said virtuously. “And I just called to find put if you want me to come back to work.”

“Did you have to go two hundred miles out of town to put in the call?” Braddock yelled.

O’Hara chuckled. “Stick your head out the window, Brad, and we can save long-distance tolls. Anyway, I’ll come back to the Trib if you beg me to.”

“Beg you! After the way you walked out on me to become a lousy stinking press agent, I should beg you!”

“I’d hate to have to take a good story like this to the opposition.”

“Huh?” said Braddock. The loudness went out of his voice. “So you’ve got a story up your sleeve, huh?”

“Just an exclusive angle on that Diplomat killing.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say so, Ken? Shoot!”

“Am I working for the Trib?”

Braddock said: “Irish, I’d beat your ears off if you tried to work for any other sheet in town. I wasn’t sore at you so much as I was sort of hurt you wouldn’t listen to me and walked out on the Trib to be a... a—”

“A lousy stinking flack?” said O’Hara.

“Well, press agents are all right in their place but you weren’t cut out for one. I tried to tell you that but no, you wouldn’t listen. You had to — well, what the hell, welcome back, Irish.”

“It’s swell to be back, Brad.”

Braddock said briskly: “And now let’s skip the corn and get to the story. Shoot.”

“Yesterday,” said O’Hara, “I blundered into Room 907 at the Diplomat, looking for the hotel photog, a little guy named Clancy. Instead of Clancy, I walked in on four guys that looked hotter than a backfire. One of them was the jockey-sized guy who was found stabbed to death half an hour later in a linen closet on the ninth floor.”

“Mmm,” said Braddock in the monotone that indicated he was taking notes. “You got any identification on them?”

“No. By the way, have the cops identified the little guy?”

“Not yet. Let’s have a description of the other three.”

“I can give you better than a word picture. The missing Clancy arrived just about as these guys were about to have words with me about crashing the room. Clancy had the notion it was a convention group so he snapped a shot at them. While they were still looking startled, I got Clancy — and me — the hell out of there. Twenty minutes later one of the guys cornered Clancy in the washroom and kicked most of his plates to pieces. But it so happened he didn’t get the shot Clancy had made in 907. Send a copy boy over to Mike’s Grill and have him pick up an envelope I left there with Mike. There’s some notes in it and a print of the shot, showing all the guys that were in the room, including the prospective corpse.”

“Oke,” said Braddock. O’Hara could hear him yelling for a copy boy, telling the boy what to do and, for Pete’s sake, to get the lead out of his pants. “O.K., Ken, that’s swell. The story is sort of half-baked — we need identification, background, motive — but maybe your old pal, Lenroot, can get action on that once he has the picture. He’s going to be pretty sore you didn’t give him this photo yesterday — hey, what the hell am I saying? I’m sore, myself. Why didn’t you give me the picture yesterday? And what the hell’s the idea of you running off two hundred miles to call in about it?”

“To Query One,” said O’Hara, “I tried to give both you and Lenroot the dope and you both brushed me off and I said to myself, nuts to both those guys and I hope they hate nuts. To Query Two, there’s more to the story.”

“Well, what’re we wasting time on conversation for? Give.”

“You’ve heard of a guy named Rex Miller?”

“We had a story on him this morning. So what?”

“Yesterday afternoon I saw him ride off from the Diplomat with the three survivors from 907. For reasons I won’t go into now, I figured they were headed for somewhere around here. And tonight I tracked Miller down, found him being very social with one of the guys from 907 at a little mining camp about twenty miles out of Alkali Center. I have a hunch if you’ll Wirephoto that picture back to Midland City you’ll find out that the guys in 907 are the racket boys he’s supposedly prosecuting.”

“You mean you think he’s sold out to the other side?”

“Well, in almost the words of that Hoosier poet — the hoodlums’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”

“You’re sure on all this, Irish?”

“I got a picture of Miller and the hood playing cards and drinking together. I’m sending that plate in by a grease monkey from the local garage. He owns a hot rod and is yearning to let it out. The plate should be there by two-thirty, time for the second home edition. Oke?”

“Oke,” said Braddock. “What makes with you now?”

“Clancy and a couple deputy sheriffs and I are waltzing out to visit the mine. The deputies say it was sold to Easterners a while back but hasn’t been worked since the sale. Chances are we won’t find anyone hanging around out there now.”

O’Hara was right. When he, Clancy and the deputies got out to the flat-roofed shack, it was dark, deserted. The Cad was gone and O’Hara got some pleasure out of thinking how hard somebody had had to work to pump up those big tires by hand. The station wagon squatted by the mine shaft but the deputies learned little from looking it over except that it had been bought the day before in Riverside by, so the bill of sale said, one W. J. Herman. The fat man, O’Hara thought, had probably acquired it because running around the desert country in the pale-green Cad with the Illinois plates would draw too much attention.

O’Hara and Clancy pulled into the Tribune parking lot at eleven the next morning. O’Hara had had no sleep. His feet were sore from the long hike across the desert. His stomach was unhappy about the hamburgers he had forced on it in lieu of breakfast. A blanket of the famous Los Angeles smog overlay the downtown district and the acrid fumes bit his lungs and smarted his eyes.

But he felt fine. The thought that once more he had a desk in the city room on the third floor of the dingy gray Tribune Building was enough to make him feel dandy.

He went inside with Clancy at his heels. He stepped into the old and creaking elevator and slapped the bald, elderly operator on the shoulder. He said: “Hi, Otto. Beautiful day.”

Otto said: “Yes, Mr. O’Hara.” He didn’t glance directly at O’Hara. His face had a sort of embarrassed look, the look a man has for a friend who has done something unpardonable.

But O’Hara was too keyed up to notice it.

Otto rocked the car to a stop at the third floor and O’Hara took Clancy’s pipestem arm. “Come on, little man, and I’ll show you the place that’s going to be your home from now on.”

“You think they’ll give me a job, Kenny?”

“If I ask ’em to,” said O’Hara, “they’ll give you a couple of the presses. After last night, I figure I rate around here again.” He flipped a greeting at the blond receptionist. “Morning, Duchess.”

The receptionist said in a very restrained way: “Good morning, Mr. O’Hara,” and went back to sorting mail.

O’Hara thought she could have been more enthusiastic in welcoming back the prodigal but he guessed she was busy. He and Clancy went through the gate and past the partition into the city room, which was quiet, almost deserted, at this hour of the morning. A man on the rewrite battery was hammering out a story and Braddock sat at the city desk.

That wasn’t normal; Braddock should have been off and the chair should have been occupied by George Hale, day city editor. A faint sense of unease began to steal over O’Hara when he put Braddock’s presence together with the chill greetings he’d had from Otto and the receptionist.

He said: “Hi, Brad.”

Braddock said: “Morning, Ken.” His voice was level, noncommittal.

O’Hara frowned down at Braddock for a moment. Then he said: “What goes on here? The welcome I get from Otto and the Duchess and you, a guy would think I had bad breath or something.” Braddock was a small, bulldog-jawed man with keen blue eyes and, on occasion, a fiery temper. He didn’t vent the temper now. He said mildly: “Bad news certainly gets around an office.”

“What’s that crack mean?”

Braddock said: “Maury, let’s have what you’ve done on that story?”

The rewrite man pulled the sheet from his typewriter and flipped it to Braddock, who relayed it to O’Hara. The story led off:

O’Hara slammed the copy paper down on Braddock’s desk. His face had flushed a dark red, his jaw was tight. He said: “Brad, he’s lying from hell to breakfast. Miller went away with those guys all on his little own. And if that wasn’t gin rummy and drinks between pals at the shack last night, I’m blind. The picture will prove that. Where’s the shot I sent in?”

Braddock said flatly: “No picture, Irish. The plate you sent in was light-fogged — but bad.”

Clancy said: “Jeez, Kenny, I guess you didn’t know how to work my box.”

O’Hara was nearly speechless. “No picture?” He turned on Clancy. “Don’t tell me I don’t know how to work a box.”

“Well, mine’s kinda wacky,” said Clancy. “On account of I work left-handed, I got the exposure set up just backward.”

O’Hara shook his head as though he was trying to roll off a succession of punches. Then he said: “Brad, don’t let this Miller phony put it over on you. I know what I saw — he got in that car willingly—”

“Perhaps you know what you see, O’Hara,” said a crisp voice behind him. “But you don’t know how to interpret it.”

O’Hara swung around. Rex Miller and John Norman, publisher of the Tribune, had stepped out of Norman’s office. Miller’s left wrist was taped, one side of his face bore marks of brush burns. His eyes were red-rimmed with loss of sleep but they bored into O’Hara.

He said: “When I ran into Ernie Angelo at the hotel doorway, he told me he had a gun in his pocket and that he’d kill me on the spot if I didn’t get into that car.”

“Ernie wasn’t holding a gun on you last night to make you play cards and drink with him,” O’Hara snapped.

Miller snapped back: “You didn’t notice, I suppose, that my ankles were taped to the chair. There was nothing I could do at the moment but accept the situation and pass the time as well as I could.”

John Norman, gray, neat-haired, said: “Now, Mr. Miller, I trust that in view of our complete retraction, you’ll reconsider—”

“Sorry,” Miller said curtly. “I understand, of course, that O’Hara is primarily to blame for the whole disgraceful story — but the Tribune printed it and my only recourse is to sue. A retraction isn’t enough to undo the damage done to my reputation.”

“But, man,” said Norman. “A half-million dollars!”

Miller went away, hard-heeled, toward the city room door and Norman followed him and O’Hara scowled down at Braddock. He said: “Brad, you’re not going to fight, not going to back me up?”

“Ken,” said Braddock, “if we had a prayer, I’d back you to the limit. But everything points to the fact that you went off half-cocked on the story.” He shook his hard, round head regretfully. “Just one week as a press agent ruined you, got you to dreaming up yarns.”

O’Hara said: “Clancy, let’s get out of here. This appeasement atmosphere is beginning to gag me.”

Out on First Street, Clancy murmured: “I need a drink.”

“Do you think I don’t?” said O’Hara.

They started down the street toward Mike’s Grill and when they had gone half a block a rough hand grabbed O’Hara’s arm from behind and swung him around.

It was Lenroot’s hand and he bared his yellow teeth at O’Hara. He said: “So, you lousy hold-out—”

“Take that paw off me,” O’Hara said, his voice coming huskily from behind his teeth.

“If you’d given me that picture, I’d had those guys. I got a good mind to—”

O’Hara said in the back-of-the-teeth voice: “You haven’t got a good mind, Lenroot. And if you don’t take that mitt off my arm, so help me, I’ll slug you — if I go to the clink for it!”

Their eyes locked and presently Lenroot’s hand fell away. He said: “You should have given me that picture, O’Hara, and you know it.”

“Did I try to? And did you kick me downstairs for my try?”

O’Hara turned his back on Lenroot and, with Clancy leading the way eagerly, went into Mike’s Grill.

Tony Ames found O’Hara and Clancy in the third booth on the right at Mike’s when she came in at one o’clock.

Clancy was working on his sixth highball and he wasn’t sober. He said vaguely: “Sit down, babe. Have a drinkie?”

O’Hara didn’t greet Tony. He scowled down at the Scotch that represented his third encore. He wasn’t plastered but the alcohol, added to fatigue and frustration, had him fairly high.

Tony Ames sat down opposite him. “Ken, I just got to the office and heard about it.” Her clear hazel eyes were troubled.

O’Hara muttered: “Rub it in, kitten. If I’d taken you along like you wanted, you could have backed me up on the story.”

Tony let that slide. She said: “Is there anything I can do, anything you want me to do?”

“You could go back and tell Brad he’s got guts that’re tough like a dish of boiled tripe.”

“Brad’s in a spot. Norman hopes to smooth Miller over, escape a libel suit, get away with just a retraction. He won’t let Brad fight it. And anyway, Ken—” She hesitated.

O’Hara fixed her with a narrow, wounded stare. “You, too! You think I’m a dummy who’d—”

Tony said quickly: “Don’t say that, Ken. You know I think you’re tops as a reporter and as a guy. It’s just that I instinctively liked Miller, that’s it hard to see him as the kind who’d go crooked. Call it woman’s intuition and even a woman’s intuition could be wrong. All of which is aside from the real problem, which is to get you out of this jam by proving you’re right and Miller’s a crook. What can I do to help?”

O’Hara lit a cigarette, peered a little owlishly at Tony through the smoke cloud. “O.K., kitten. I’ve been wondering how Miller could fall out of a car that would be moving at least thirty-forty miles an hour and come up practically intact. Want to call that Bakersfield hospital for me and get an exact list of Miller’s injuries?”

“The office has that report. Brush burns on the left knee, left shoulder and face, a sprained left wrist.”

“Another thing I’ve been wondering. Why didn’t those guys just stop their car, back up and grab him again?”

“According to the story he told,” Tony said, “the motorist who found him was only a short distance behind. It scared them off.”

Clancy said brightly: “Did I ever tell you about when I was working for the Wichita Eagle and I was throwed out of a car in a traffic crash and came up standing, just in time to get a shot of both drivers sailing through the air? Did I ever tell you?”

“No,” said O’Hara.

“You wanta hear?”

“No.”

“O.K. Let’s have a drink.”

“Yes.”

Tony said: “Ken, I’ve got to get back to the office. Promise you’ll go home and get some sleep and then we’ll figure what to do.”

“Sure,” said O’Hara.

“Sure what?”

“Sure I’ll figure what to do.”

Tony shook her head hopelessly, patted O’Hara’s hand, went out without looking back.

The waiter came and took their order for more drinks. An hour later O’Hara squinted at Clancy. O’Hara wasn’t seeing double; there was only about one-and-a-half of the little man.

O’Hara said: “Let’s go out and ring doorbells, Clancy, specifically Mr. Miller’s doorbell.”

“Do we go out there and whap him, pappy? Or what?”

“Suppose,” said O’Hara, “I was to suddenly find out that I’d sent the wrong plate in from Alkali City, Clancy? Suppose I was to call on Mr. Miller and tell him about my mistake and say that the picture shows him to be in such a position in his chair that his ankles couldn’t have been taped to the legs? Suppose I told him I was sore at the way the Tribune had kicked me around and that if I could get together with his pals, I’d consider selling the picture?”

“What picture?” said Clancy.

“Oh, nuts — let’s go.”

They took a cab, partly because O’Hara didn’t like to drive when he had that much Scotch aboard and partly because he couldn’t recall at the moment where he had left the coupe.

Two blocks from the Diplomat, O’Hara stopped the cab and paid it off. He took Clancy into a diner and had three cups of black coffee for himself. Clancy disapproved. He said drinking coffee was a bad habit; he’d known a guy on the Washington Post who gave up liquor and started drinking coffee and was dead in three months.

“He walked in front of a sightseeing bus,” Clancy explained.

“What did that have to do with coffee?”

“If he hadn’t given up liquor,” said Clancy, “he would of, at that hour of the evening, been at the Press Club bar, licking up highballs safely out of the way of traffic.”

They walked to the Diplomat and O’Hara parked Clancy in the lobby. The coffee had brought O’Hara pretty well back to the point where he was walking on the ground; seen from that vantage point, his idea of running a bluff on Miller about a non-existent picture seemed a little thin. But it might get a reaction and he couldn’t think at the moment of a better idea. He took an elevator to seven and rapped on the door of 763. He rapped again.

There was movement inside and then the door came open a cautious four inches. Rex Miller’s bony, earnest face peered at him.

The face drew down into a frown. “Well, O’Hara, what do you want, coming here?”

“Talk to you.”

“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

“You could be wrong, couldn’t you?”

The look in Miller’s eyes said he didn’t think he could be wrong. In the room the telephone began to shrill. The sound pulled Miller back a little from the door involuntarily and O’Hara used the moment to shove the door wider and walk in. When it was done, Miller lifted his shoulders resignedly and crossed the room to the phone.

He uncradled the instrument, said: “Yes?”

O’Hara watched him. He thought the pale bony face went a shade more pallid.

Miller said: “No... No I tell you... Damn it, I’m busy. I’ll call you back.” He slammed the phone down, faced around. “Well?”

O’Hara had swiftly discarded his idea of talking about a fictitious picture. He said: “Look, Miller, I was a dope. I’m sorry. I apologize. Isn’t the apology and the retraction enough without a libel suit?”

Miller sneered. “Crawling now, are you? No, O’Hara, I’ll get a judgment that’ll take the gold fillings out of every tooth on the Tribune.”

For five minutes O’Hara crawled. It did no good. He finally slapped his hat on, and said: “O.K., if that’s the way you feel.”

“That’s how I feel and it’ll cost the Tribune half a million.”

O’Hara went out, closed the door in a quiet, dejected way and then took long, fast strides to the elevator bank. The elevators didn’t give him a break; it was two minutes before a down-car stopped and another three minutes before he hit the lobby. He angled across fast to the switchboard room and leaned on the railing there beside Mrs. Van Druten, the gray-haired and dignified head operator of the Diplomat.

He said: “Van, if there’s a call comes through from 763—”

Mrs. Van Druten said: “The call is through, O’Hara. And you smell like a distillery. Why don’t you ever buy me a drink?”

“I’ll buy you a million. What number did 763 call?”

“I can’t give out that information. Anyway, I couldn’t stand a million drinks, O’Hara, and you couldn’t buy that many. And I can’t give you that number.”

Mrs. Van Druten lifted a stack of telephone tabs, began to sort them. One slipped from her fingers and drifted out over the railing to the floor. She said: “O’Hara, be a gentleman and pick up that tab for me.”

O’Hara picked it up and engraved a phone number on his memory. He handed the tab back and said: “I’ll make that two million drinks.”

He went back to the lobby and stepped into a phone booth, got on the line with a telephone company special agent whom he knew.

When he finally hung up, he had the information that the telephone number Miller had called was listed to a residence, that of one D. Birkall, at an address on West Seventh.

O’Hara jotted the number down and went out to look for Clancy. Clancy had done his disappearing act again and O’Hara shrugged. He didn’t feel like nursing Clancy now, anyway.

Chapter Five Knives and Knaves

The address turned out to be a three-story brick structure between loft buildings. A store window at the ground floor had a “For Rent” sign in it. At one side of the show window was a plate glass door that apparently gave access to a stairway leading to apartments on the second and third floors. The windows were dark.

Dusk was settling down as O’Hara dismissed his cab at the nearest corner. He strolled in the gray light toward the three-story building. He gave the plate glass door a quick try as he passed and found that it was locked.

Rounding the corner of the next side street, he drifted down to the alley that paralleled Seventh Street and walked down the alley to the rear of the three-story building. He saw no rear stairs, no fire escape. But there was a panel truck parked in the areaway behind the vacant store and above the car the white fringe of a curtain fluttered in the draft from an open window.

When dusk had turned into darkness, O’Hara clambered to the top of the truck. The windowsill was still three inches too high. He jumped, caught the sill and hauled himself upward. A moment later he was inside a darkened room that had the odor of a kitchen. He found a swinging door, passed through it and struck a match. The match flare showed living room furniture, and, on a table by the wall, the shape of a phone. He crossed to it in the dying light of the match, struck another and saw that the number on the phone was the one that Rex Miller had called.

He decided it wouldn’t be smart to turn on lights. So he used a book of matches, prowling the living room and the single bedroom that lay off it. In the bedroom he found a man’s shirt on a rumpled bed, two suits hanging in the closet. The suits bore the label of a Midland City tailor. The name of the customer, inked on the label, was that of Arthur Vickers.

Back in the darkened living room, his hand on the phone, he debated whether to call Braddock first or Lenroot. Because this was it; it could be proved that Miller had called this number and a police stake-out would pick up Vickers here and Mr. Miller’s libel action and his fairy story about being kidnaped would be blown out of the water. O’Hara wished he didn’t have to depend on either Braddock or Lenroot; but he’d gone as far as he could alone.

While he was still undecided which call to make first, there was the distant click of the vestibule door. There were feet on the stairs. O’Hara swore briefly and bitterly and retreated to the bedroom. He heard the apartment door open and then lights sprang on in the living room. He flattened himself in a corner behind the door. He could see a segment of the living room through the tiny crack between the door and its frame.

The fat man — Tiny Waldon — passed down the room, shedding his coat, hitching pants higher on his paunch. He went out of sight, saying: “Boys, we got to do some fast figuring.” His voice was mellow, rolled smoothly up from his belly.

The wiry young man who was Arthur Vickers stopped by a cabinet radio to work a cigarette lighter that stood there. Through a cloud of smoke he said: “You’re not kidding, Tony. I’ve been in jams before but none as form-fitting as this one.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke and went out of O’Hara’s view.

Ernie’s voice was a snarl from somewhere in the room. “If Miller had used his head, we wouldn’t been jammed. Why the hell, Rex, did you pull a dumb caper like identifying us on the kidnaping? I oughta beat your brains out for that.”

There was a little silence and O’Hara waited for Miller’s voice. It didn’t come at once. Miller walked into the portion of the room that O’Hara could see. His face was tight and pale and there was anger in it. He picked the chair by the radio.

He said: “We agreed on the kidnap story and on the escape, didn’t we? And the Tribune had that picture made in 907 and had it identified by Midland City. So what could I do but back up the identification?”

“You coulda claimed you were blindfolded,” Ernie said.

“I had to tell my story before I knew O’Hara’s picture at the mine was a dud.” Miller cleared his throat harshly. “My opinion is that, for a supposedly smart mob, you fellows have acted like morons. If you hadn’t killed the little fellow in the hotel room, there wouldn’t have been any stink.”

Tiny’s voice rolled out placatingly. “Perhaps you don’t understand exactly what happened there, Rex. The little guy picked up Ernie the first night we got in. They got drunk together. He said he was a gun from Chi, he knew the names of a lot of Chicago loogans and things about them you’d ordinarily have to be a gun to know. And he seemed to know angles here. Well, maybe we were too gullible — but we could use a guy that knew local angles. And, first thing we knew, this little guy had learned plenty about us. But he made a mistake that afternoon in 907 — he took off his coat and went into the bathroom to wash. Vick prowled the coat just for the hell of it and found stuff that showed the guy was a Chicago private dick named Hanley. Well, we put the screws to him and he admitted he was working for the Citizens’ Committee. Seems they didn’t quite trust you so they had him working on us under cover and he tailed us to the Coast. We couldn’t let him walk out of that room so I let Ernie operate. We just had to do the best we could under the circumstances.”

Watching Miller’s face, O’Hara thought it turned a little sick. But he didn’t feel sorry for the guy; he couldn’t feel sorry for heels who sold out.

Miller said: “It was still a mistake to have killed him there. And that expedition to the desert was a piece of unnecessary stupidity!”

“Well, Vick wanted a look at that mine he’d bought and got suckered on and we all thought it’d be a good idea to get out of L.A. for a few days. As for dragging you along, we had to keep an eye on you until our deal was complete.”

“To hell with the arguing,” said Ernie’s voice. “We’re jammed. What do we do now?”

Waldon’s tone was still smooth. “We can salvage a lot out of it. Let’s take it point by point. First, I’ve just had word that Rex’s man back in Midland City has handed over the affidavits on the killing there to our man. That breaks the back of that case. This California killing is tougher because of that photograph in 907. But if we get out of the state and back home, they’ll need more proof than the picture to get us extradited with the connections we have. As for the kidnaping, Rex will refuse to sign a complaint.”

Miller said: “You know what that does to me. I’m washed up back home but good, now.”

“My boy,” said Waldon, “you’re getting enough dough out of it so you don’t have to worry about being washed up.”

Miller’s jaw worked and his voice went up, cracked a bit. “But I’ve got to know about—”

“Everything will be O.K. there. But first you get out of the state so we’ll know we’re clear on the snatch rap. Right, Vick?”

“I guess so,” said Vickers’ voice.

Ernie’s voice said: “What the hell’s wrong with you, Vick? Ain’t you interested in all this?”

“Sure, sure. I was just relaxing and I think I need a drink to help. Be with you guys in a minute.”

O’Hara heard footsteps crossing the living room. Vickers walked through his line of vision, started through the doorway, was lost to view. O’Hara flattened himself against the wall; with the door in its present position, he figured he had better than an even chance that Vickers wouldn’t see him.

Lights went on in the bedroom. The door whipped away from the wall and the wiry man was looking at him, smiling a little and holding a gun in line with O’Hara’s belt buckle.

“Hello, O’Hara,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here — still looking for Clancy? Come on out and join the party.”

O’Hara made an upward gesture with his hands, his shoulders, and marched out past Vickers to the living room. Ernie’s dark face was still gaping at this development but Tiny Waldon was chuckling, his belly rippling with every chuckle.

In his mellow voice he said: “Wonderful, Vick. Wonderful! How did you do it — with mirrors?”

The wiry man expanded a little. “I never use matches, I use a cigarette tighter. I saw burned matches in a couple of ashtrays so I figured somebody had been prowling in here since dark — and maybe they were still here. I checked the kitchen while you guys talked. Nothing. That left the bedroom. And after a bit I caught a twinkle of light a couple of times at the crack of the door. It must have been one of O’Hara’s buttons.”

“And now,” Ernie chortled, “we can use O’Hara to play button, button, let him have it on the button.”

O’Hara still said nothing. Little beads of perspiration began to pop out on his forehead and there was a vacant, cold feeling at the pit of his stomach. He looked at Rex Miller but Miller’s eyes were downcast, his face stony.

The fat man rubbed cushioned palms together. His smile was delighted, the green-rock eyes twinkling. He said: “Well, well, O’Hara, I suppose you heard everything from behind that door.”

“I couldn’t miss,” O’Hara said. His throat had gone dry and constricted and his voice was a little hoarse. Never one to kid himself, he knew he was in a bad spot; the fat man and Ernie and Vickers, he was sure, wouldn’t want to have him leave that room alive.

“Of course you couldn’t miss,” said Waldon. “And you know what it means.”

O’Hara nodded. “For my dough, fatty, it means I’m in a nest of rats whose first instinct is to lie and chisel and who’d just as soon commit murder as take a drink.”

“Self-preservation, my boy,” Waldon said unctuously, “is the first law of nature.”

Ernie had quietly and very smoothly drawn a long thin-bladed knife from somewhere under his coat. He felt the point delicately with his left thumb. His dusty-black eyes had expression in them now — eagerness. He said: “Why waste time talking, Tiny?”

Vickers said: “Don’t get blood around, Ernie. After all, I just borrowed this place from my brother-in-law and he won’t like blood around when he gets back from Vegas.”

“Did I get any blood around the hotel room?” Ernie said, sounding a little wounded. “Now, Tiny?”

“It might as well be now.”

Ernie got up easily and sinuously.

O’Hara said in a low, taut voice: “Miller, I can understand these guys. They’re rats, they know they’re rats and they don’t pretend to be anything else. But a guy like you, a guy that sells out his own side — the decent people — well, hell, compared to you the rat is the king of beasts. You must have started out as a right guy, Miller. There must have been a time in your life when you could look in a mirror and not hate what you saw. So are you going to sit there now and do nothing?”

Miller had a death’s-head look. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks suddenly gaunt. He strained out: “O’Hara, there’s nothing I can do. I’m not armed. I couldn’t help if I wanted to. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” said O’Hara. “You can dream about this on the long winter evenings.”

Ernie came across the room in a half-crouch, the shiny blade of the knife making an exclamation point in front of him. O’Hara cursed and took a step to meet him.

Vickers chopped his gun barrel down on O’Hara’s skull.

O’Hara fell and spun as he fell, trying to watch Ernie. He saw Ernie above him, saw the knife poised for a down-thrust.

Miller screamed: “Wait!” Again. “Wait, I tell you!”

The knife didn’t descend. O’Hara whipped around, got to one knee and saw Miller on his feet, bending over the fat man from behind, whispering into the fat man’s ear.

The fat man shook his head. “No, Rex. O’Hara knows too much, entirely too much. Take him, Ernie!”

Miller straightened. His right hand came away from behind Waldon, holding a gun, a short-barreled, shiny .32. He said thickly: “On your feet, O’Hara, and get out of here!”

For a moment the silence in the room had a stunned quality.

Then Waldon said persuasively: “Rex, don’t be a dummy. Knowing what he does, O’Hara can’t walk out of here. He’d dynamite all of us, you included. Now give me back that gun and, if you don’t like watching it, go for a stroll.” Miller breathed heavily, audibly. He didn’t seem too familiar with the handling of a gun. But he said: “Drop your gun, Vickers.”

“You damned fool,” snapped the wiry man. “You’re forgetting that we hold an ace.”

“You’ve all carried me along as far as I can go,” said Miller drearily. “There’ll be no killing here — unless it’s one of you that gets it. I — tell — you — drop that gun!”

Ernie, with an incredibly swift wrist motion, flicked the knife at Miller. His execution was perfect, his aim lousy. The slim blade missed Miller a foot but it made him jerk to one side, his hand convulsing on the gun.

The gun went off loudly and the fat man fell out of his chair, blood spurting from a temple that had magically disintegrated. Legs moved beside O’Hara and he tackled the legs, brought Vickers crashing down on him. Vickers’ gun exploded as he fell but O’Hara was untouched. He brought a vicious knee up into Vicker’s groin, saw an Adam’s apple bobbing in front of him and socked it. Vickers screamed brokenly but he continued to squirm, fight, kick and try to bring the gun inward at O’Hara. O’Hara made a grab for the gun, missed and grabbed again. This time he got his hand on it. The two men strained desperately, silently.

O’Hara was vaguely aware that somewhere outside of the apartment there was the sound of running feet. He was aware in the same foggy way that a gun — not Vickers’ — had spoken uproariously a couple of times. He concentrated on the wiry man’s wrist, forced it down and down, gave it a final bitter wrench. The gun banged and Vickers cried out, went rigid, relaxed into limpness. O’Hara took the gun from the boneless hand and shoved himself to his feet. The dark-faced man was on hands and knees in the middle of the room, his head hanging and wagging as though it belonged to some freak toy. Miller leaned against the wall and blood streamed from a long tear across one cheek. He dangled the .32 in one hand and watched Ernie inch his way slowly and painfully toward a gun that lay no more than a foot from his right hand. He didn’t make it. His arms and his legs collapsed and his face plowed into the rug and he lay still.

Miller shuddered and his eyes, a little dazed, came up to meet O’Hara’s stare. Then he shoved himself away from the wall and came toward O’Hara, the nickeled gun seeming to feel a way for him.

O’Hara said: “Guns down, Miller. Thanks for everything — but you’re still not in the clear.”

Miller’s eyes burned at O’Hara now. He muttered: “One side, O’Hara — get out of the way! I’ve got to talk to him before he dies.”

He barged past, went to his knees beside the wiry man. The wiry man flickered dull eyes at him.

“That was — really a — merry-go-round, Rex,” he gasped. He hiccuped and blood spurted past his lips, dyed his chin and his collar.

Miller said hoarsely: “Vickers, where is she? Man, you’re washed up — you’ve got to tell me before you die.”

The wiry man’s voice came from a great distance. “Yep, Rex — washed up. That’s me.”

“For God’s sake, where is she?”

“Upstairs. We had her upstairs — doped — a dame looking after — her.” The wiry man made an attempt to grin. “Sounded like — the dame — took a powder when — shooting started. Like — I’m taking — powder now—”

He choked on blood. The half-grin went away like a flame blown out and life went out of him at the same instant.

Miller was already off his knees, turning toward the door. O’Hara followed him, forehead corrugated and speculative. Miller jerked the hall door wide, turned and took stairs to the third floor several at a time. A door stood ajar at the head of the stairs and he thrust past it.

When O’Hara reached the door, he saw a lighted living room that matched the one below. Lights went on beyond the bedroom doorway and O’Hara crossed, not hurrying, and halted on the threshold.

Miller was bending over a girl on the bed, lifting one of the girl’s limp hands, feeling for a pulse. The girl was young, dark-haired, thin under the blanket that was tucked below a lax chin. She slept heavily, not moving. O’Hara could see more than a casual resemblance between her thin youthful face and the bony, anxious countenance of the man bending over her.

O’Hara said: “Sister?”

Miller nodded. “Thank God I’ve found her, O’Hara.”

“They put the snatch on her to handle you, huh?”

Miller took a deep breath of relief and stood up. He said: “Six days ago I got a message in Midland City that Linda had been kidnaped and that I was to come out here, register at the Diplomat and see Waldon, meanwhile keeping my mouth shut. I had no choice. I flew out here and Waldon put his proposal. He said the two key witnesses in the Midland City case had disappeared. I checked by phone. It was true. But I had affidavits from both of them. Waldon told me that if I’d arrange to have the affidavits turned over to his man back there, I’d get ten thousand dollars and Linda would be freed. Otherwise she’d be killed. I pretended to play along. I arranged for the affidavits to be turned over — but not until they had been photostated. I was to get the money tonight and be told where Linda was being held.”

O’Hara said: “And you took a chance on upsetting everything by keeping Ernie’s knife out of me.”

“I couldn’t stand there and see murder done.”

“Thanks,” said O’Hara. “And that, Miller, is not an empty word. Well, we’d better get an ambulance.” He started to turn, then said: “About the libel suit now—”

“Forget it. That was just part of the act I had to put on until they’d released Linda.”

O’Hara went back downstairs and got on the phone. He called the receiving hospital and reported merely that an ambulance was needed for a sick woman; he didn’t want any opposition reporters barging around for a while at least. After that he called the Tribune, got through to the city desk.

He said soberly: “Ken O’Hara, Brad.”

“Where,” said Braddock, “the hell have you been? We’ve got a regular Irish wake going on here for you.”

“Huh?”

“Your friend, Clancy, came in and said you’d got a line on the kidnapers and you’d disappeared. Your pal, Tony Ames, has been chewing her fingernails to the elbows. Even your sidekick, Lenroot, is hanging around trying to find out what mess you’ve been cooking up for the cops. So what have you been doing?”

“Settling that libel suit for you.”

“How come?”

“I’ve got the real story now, Brad, and it’s a lulu.”

“Shoot — we’ve got five minutes to the next deadline. I’ll make my apologies to you later, Irish.”

O’Hara talked at breackneck speed for a minute and a half. Then he said:

“That’ll hold you for now. Put Lenroot on.”

Lenroot came on and said: “Hello.”

“Hello, monkey.”

“All right, you made a monkey out of me.” Lenroot’s voice sounded unaccustomedly old, heavy. “And I guess the story you’ll write won’t make any less of a monkey out of me.”

“How does it feel?”

“It don’t feel good, Irish.”

“I didn’t like it, either, when you made an ape out of me the other day. Be seeing you, pal — out in the sticks.”

“O.K. — and I hope I catch you spittin’ on the sidewalk on my beat.” But his voice didn’t have the old bounce.

There was the sound of several voices faintly at the other end and then Clancy’s voice came clearly. “Hey, Kenny, I was looking for you all over. All over I was hunting.”

“That,” said O’Hara, “makes us even. I’ve been hunting you every five minutes for the last three days. Put my girl friend on.”

Presently Tony Ames’ voice came over the wire and O’Hara said: “Well, you were right, angel face — as always. Miller was leveling all the time.”

“I knew it, Ken. I was sure of it. When I get an intuition—”

“Sure, kitten. That intuition stuff is where you gals have it on us guys. We have to get our facts the hard way. Had dinner yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve got a date.” He was silent for a moment.

“Yes, Ken?”

“Put Lenroot back on, kitten.”

Lenroot’s voice said presently: “Ain’t you rubbed it in enough?”

“Get the lead out of your pants and get out here,” O’Hara growled. “How can I give you credit on the case if you’re not around?”

“Huh?” said Lenroot. Then he rumbled: “Hell with you— I don’t need any charity.”

“Nuts to charity,” O’Hara said. “How’re you and I going to dig up any good fights if you get sent to the sticks?”

“Yeah,” said Lenroot. “That’s right, ain’t it?” His voice began to have a lift to it again. “You got something there, Irish. I’m coming out — and, by cripes, I think when I get there I’ll bang one on your chin just for luck.”

“You,” O’Hara said, “and who else?”