Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 10 — January 1939)

All-American Menace by H. H. Stinson

O’Hara tackles some killers and makes a football out of their racket.

Even the padded leather doors of the washroom couldn’t keep out the sound of splintering furniture. O’Hara said, “My cockeyed aunt,” under his breath, threw a wadded paper towel at the waste box and batted the swinging doors out of his way.

Barging up the steps that led to the main floor of the Club Bolero, his brown, angular face wore a look, half of apprehension and half of exasperation. He was resplendent in a dinner jacket, a half acre of white shirt front, all of which didn’t go with the shagginess of his hair and the breadth and careless swing of his shoulders.

He hit the top step, shoved past velvet hangings and came into the lounge of the Bolero. At the far end of the bar a flying wedge of waiters was engulfing a large young man with blond hair and the light of battle in blue eyes. The flying wedge went up and over the blond young man and the young man rose through it, shedding waiters right and left.

He ducked, reversed his field and slung a punch enthusiastically at a tall, black-haired man with a smooth old-young face who was sidling down the bar. The punch took the black-haired man on the ear but he shook it off, didn’t go down. The waiters pounced on the blond young man again.

A redheaded girl stood on the bar, powdering her nose and looking things over with interest.

O’Hara dove into the melee and came out the other side, shoving the blond young man who took a wild punch at him. O’Hara said, “Dead ball, Eddie.”

You could have taken an alcohol rub in Eddie’s breath. He squinted at O’Hara, said, “Hi, Ken.”

A waiter threw a punch at O’Hara and missed and Eddie said, “Hey, is that guy trying to pick a fight?”

O’Hara pushed him at a door beyond the end of the bar, fended off more waiters with his back and said, “Beat it, nitwit. Wait for me on the corner.”

“If you need any help, jus’ yell,” said Eddie and went out through the door.

The waiters surged past O’Hara after Eddie and O’Hara tripped the first one and the others piled up over the man. O’Hara, his shirt front bulging and his collar flaring around his ears, walked away from the pile-up toward the front of the bar and a man with roached gray hair and quizzical eyes above heavy pouches said, “Hello, Ken.”

“Hello, Mat,” said O’Hara. “How much will the damage be?”

Mat Wyman surveyed two broken tables, a scattering of broken chairs, broken glass, two waiters who had coats ripped up the back and another whose underwear showed where his dickey had been torn off. The redheaded girl was climbing down from the bar, assisted by the man with the young-old face, and Mat looked her legs over.

“A hundred bucks ought to cover it,” said Mat. “You better fix your collar, Ken.”

O’Hara peeled two fifties off a respectable roll and gave them to Mat. Mat tucked them into a pocket of his vest and said, “Thanks, kid. Your collar’s kind of haywire.”

“Sorry about the uproar,” said O’Hara.

“That’s all right. Only don’t bring your pal back here, kid. Fun’s fun but there’s such a thing as too much trouble.”

“Trouble?” O’Hara said. “My friend, you don’t know what trouble is. You had him for fifteen minutes and me, I’ve been with him for twelve hours.”

“What is he — something special?”

“He’s a nephew of Old Man Randall, publisher of the Tribune. The Old Man’s in the East and this kid arrived today with a letter of introduction with him, saying the kid figures he’ll be a newspaperman when he finishes college and to show him the works in operation while the kid’s out here on his midwinter vacation. So my city editor hands me a lot of expense dough and the job of nursemaiding the kid and keeping him out from under everybody’s feet.”

“From what I’ve seen, I don’t envy you the job.”

“Ah,” said O’Hara, “he’s a nice kid. Just a little too enthusiastic. What started it this time?”

“He was making a play for the redheaded gal and the black-haired guy didn’t like it.”

O’Hara said, “Ouch, that guy!”

Mat looked curious. “Anything unusual about that guy?”

“It depends on what you call unusual. He happens to be a very, very tough egg from New York.”

“Is that so?” said Wyman. “I’ll have to keep an eye on him.” O’Hara started to move away and Wyman clapped him on the shoulder, said, “Drop around again, Ken — alone.”

O’Hara went out through the lounge toward the foyer, past a dozen couples who were eating and drinking. Most of them were drunk and seemed to have thought the fight was part of the floor show, only better. O’Hara slapped a hat check and a quarter in front of the dark girl at the check room and the dark girl gave him his hat.

She said, “Thanks. And, mister, your collar is undid.”

O’Hara went out, trying to fix his collar. The buttonholes were torn and he couldn’t fix it so he let it go and forgot about it.

The long, sinuous, black pavement of Sunset Boulevard shone empty under early-morning street lights. The Club Bolero was on the “Strip,” that small segment of county territory that lay between restless Hollywood and sedate Beverly Hills. The lights of the Troc glowed softly down the block and the Wilshire district lay spread out below and beyond like a huge field of paralyzed fireflies.

O’Hara went down the block to the corner, his feet slapping the pavement in the emptiness. When he got to the corner, Eddie wasn’t around and O’Hara swore. He scratched an ear and went back toward the Bolero. There were two cabs parked in the graveled lot next to the club.

O’Hara said to one of the drivers, “You see a blond fella come out the back door a few minutes back?”

“Was he kinda drunk?” said the driver.

“Yeah.”

“I mean very drunk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said O’Hara. “Very kinda drunk. Which way’d he go?”

“I didn’t see him,” the driver said.

“For the love of—”

“I was asleep. The other hacker seen him,” the driver said. “Supposin’ you ask him.”

The driver of the other cab leaned out from under his wheel. He said, “The blond kid come out through the lot, mister, and he met two guys in front of the club and they all went back through the lot. And, hey, mister, your collar’s loose.”

“Nuts,” said O’Hara irritably and headed for the rear of the club.

“Nuts or not,” the driver said, “it is loose, mister.”

O’Hara went around the corner of the club, sidestepped a couple of huge garbage cans and stopped when a small man in a black hat popped in front of him. The small man’s hand pressed something gently against O’Hara’s stomach.

He looked up at O’Hara and pressed the gun harder. He said, “And what were your plans for the evening, pal?”

O’Hara’s eyes went over the small man’s shoulder and saw Eddie lying on his face on the concrete that surfaced the service yard of the club. Eddie wasn’t dead because he was managing to moan, although not very loudly. There was a second man, standing above him, with a blackjack dangling by its thong from his hand.

O’Hara said, “If you’ve slammed that kid too hard—”

His right hand came up between him and the small man and batted the gun away from his belly. His left hand crossed very fast to the small man’s face and the small man banged into one of the garbage cans and went over along with it with a lot of clatter.

O’Hara’s lunge carried him at the man standing over Eddie and the man backed away in a spasm of indecision whether to cut at O’Hara with the blackjack or try with the gun he was hauling from a shoulder holster. O’Hara cocked his right and somebody grabbed him by one of the loose ends of his collar, jerked hard.

The collar tore loose but the jerk pulled O’Hara off balance, made him miss his swing at the man with the blackjack. By then the man had his gun out and he covered O’Hara with it.

O’Hara, turning his head, saw the black-haired man standing outside the back door, holding the collar. The redheaded girl was helping the small man out of the mess that had spilled from the garbage can.

The black-haired man said, “Sorry, friend, but I seem to have torn your color off.”

“Thanks,” O’Hara said. “I was getting tired of having people tell me it was loose. Now suppose you call your muggs off, Philippi, and let me get the kid into a cab and take him to be patched up.” “You seem to know who I am,” said Philippi, smiling.

“Why not?” said O’Hara.

“Hmm,” Philippi said, “I’d like to talk to you.” He walked a half-dozen steps away from the others and seemed to be expecting O’Hara to follow him. The small man was cursing violently while he climbed out of the garbage and the man with the blackjack watched O’Hara with flat, hostile eyes. The redheaded girl moved along with Philippi and Philippi said, “Seena, you go back and brush the broccoli off Sam.”

He said to O’Hara, “What else do you know about me besides the name?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m curious, friend.”

O’Hara shrugged. “I know you left New York in 1937 A.D. — After Dewey — and that you’ve been fiddling around in Florida and that you got out to the Coast several weeks ago.”

“What are you — a dick?”

“A newspaper reporter.”

Philippi didn’t seem to like that. His eyes got narrow and pointed and the smile went away from his face. He said, “I suppose you’re going to plaster me all over your sheet.”

“What makes you think,” O’Hara said, “that you’re news?”

“I’ve been in the papers.”

O’Hara chuckled. “This is a town where you have to earn your way into the news columns — you get lots of competition from movie queens and the Chamber of Commerce. Now how about calling this off and letting me get the kid to a doctor?”

Philippi’s dark eyes swiveled sulkily toward the prostrate figure of Eddie, who was squirming a little now. He said, “The guy’s a fresh punk and I don’t like fresh punks on the make for my girl friends. Or taking socks at me. I ought to have the boys mess you both up.”

“Be big,” O’Hara said. “He’s fresh but it’s all in fun. He’s Eddie Mullen, a tackle or something from Brand University, and he’s just having himself a time on his vacation.”

Philippi said, “I thought he looked sort of familiar. I saw Brand play Columbia last fall and I probably saw him play. Well, cart him away but keep him out of my hair after this.”

O’Hara said, “I wish someone would do as much for me.”

He walked over to Eddie Mullen, who was swaying around on his knees. The redhead gave O’Hara the eye covertly but O’Hara didn’t let her have a tumble. He pulled Eddie to his feet.

The small man who was a mess from the garbage said violently, “Listen, Vic, le’me have these two muggs for a couple minutes.”

“Skip it, Sam,” said Philippi.

“But look at me, Vic, all over mayonnaise!”

O’Hara chuckled, said, “Cheer up. Sam. I’ll send you a head of lettuce to sit on.”

Sam shook with rage, cursed viciously. He said, “If it wasn’t for Vic, I’d level on you punks. And if I catch you around again by Gaw, I will fix you up. Beat it!”

O’Hara loaded Eddie into one of the cabs, said, “The Belmont Turkish Baths, skipper.”

The cab got under way and Eddie swayed around on the seat, mumbling and groaning with his eyes closed. The cab rounded a corner fast and threw Eddie against the side. He bounced back and gurgled, “Who you pushing, you slug?” and aimed a roundhouse punch at O’Hara.

O’Hara caught the punch in his palm, said tolerantly, “Hey, hey, Eddie, you’re running the wrong way with the ball.”

Across a table at the Little Bit O’Denmark the next evening, O’Hara said, “Can you handle this blond ape for a while, Tony?”

Tony Ames let her hazel eyes rest on Eddie Mullen for a moment, smiled at him. She was small, trim in a brown tailored suit and a new hat that rode pertly on the waves of her brown hair.

She said, “I’ll try anything once.”

Eddie Mullen reached over and patted her hand with a paw the size of a Virginia ham. He looked fresh, clean and happy except for a shaved spot and a strip of tape above his left car. He laughed and said, “Ken, I would jump through hoops for this little citizeness here.”

“O.K.,” said O’Hara, getting up. “I’ll be back. Tony, this ape has had one drink so far today. He can have one more — and that’s all. I’ve spent most of the night and day boiling him out and sleeping him up and I don’t want my work ruined.” To Eddie he said, “And don’t forget, laddie, this girl is my girl.”

“Poor girl,” said Eddie. “I’ll see what I can do about it. Don’t hurry back, Ken.”

O’Hara walked from Eighth and Hope to the offices of the Tribune and went upstairs to the city room. He nodded to Joe Hawke, who was sitting in at the desk for Braddock, the city editor, and went to a typewriter at the back of the big, barnlike city room. He wrote half a dozen lines and then tossed his cigarette into a waste basket when he saw a man with a round, pug-dog face come in the door of the city room. He went over to the desk where the man was inserting himself into the city editor’s chair.

“What the hell are you doing around here?” said Braddock, his pug-dog face peevish. “I assigned you to keep the Mullen kid out of mischief. If we don’t send him back to college right side up, we’ll probably all lose our jobs.” He scratched his square chin, scowled. “Hell, if the old man can’t dig up more unknown relatives and unload ’em on the city room! How you getting along with him?”

“I must be getting old,” said O’Hara. “I handle three-alarm fires, floods, quakes, triple murders and society on the side without a breathing spell. But I’m getting too feeble to body-guard a college football player all night and all day. Be a pal and send three strong men to take my place.”

Braddock’s scowl changed into a grin. “What’s the matter. Irish, is the boy sort of active?”

“Active?” said O’Hara. “I met him yesterday noon and since then he’s had four fights with citizens, borrowed a police squad car so he could play with the siren, wrecked two bars and a night club—”

Joe Hawke interrupted, said, “I’m going to eat, Brad. All quiet except Ben Tyndall’s out with the cops on a shooting of some kind. He should be calling in soon.”

Hawke rolled his sleeves down and went away and O’Hara said, “Where was I? Oh, yes. The kid winds up by trying to make Vic Philippi’s girl, socking Philippi and getting blackjacked by Philippi’s hooligans. I got him out of it whole but it was just luck.”

“Vic Philippi, eh? What’s he doing out here?”

“I’d heard he was out here but not why. He may be vacationing or he may have business ideas. He was first lieutenant to Luck Hauser when Luck was running the cleaners’ and dyers’ racket in New York. And when Luck got himself bumped off, Philippi fell heir to the racket and also to Luck’s sweetiepie, Seena Vance. That was the redhead the kid was on the make for last night, although I didn’t realize who she was until I heard Philippi call her ‘Seena.’ ”

“What makes you think he might have business ideas?”

“He’s been washed up in New York since Dewey began throwing his weight around there and this town is ripe for a cleaners’ and dyers’ shakedown. Harry Atkins and his boys have operated it a bit but they’ve been too busy with their gambling spots to pay much attention to it. But there’ll be plenty of fireworks just the same if Philippi tries to horn in on it because there’s a lot of dough in protecting all the little cleaning stores. So I wrote you a memo on it and you can stick one of your reporters on it.”

Braddock read the memo swiftly, said, “What’s the matter with you handling it, Irish?”

O’Hara grinned. “I’m no reporter. I’m a nursemaid now.”

One of the city desk phones cut in with a peremptory jangle and Braddock picked it up, listened a moment, said, “O.K. Ben, I’ll send you a photog.”

He hung up, said, “A guy shot to death in a car near Eighth and Hope. Witnesses said a young blond guy jumped out of the car with a gun and beat it and a gal chased after him.”

O’Hara growled in his throat, said, “That tears it.” He reached in a hurry for the limp felt he had tossed on the desk.

“Huh?” Braddock said.

“I left the Mullen kid in a restaurant at Eighth and Hope.”

“You think it might be—”

“If it isn’t, I’ll eat the Old Man’s toupee, and be glad to.” O’Hara was already heading for the door.

Braddock yelled after him, “I— Hey, listen...” But O’Hara was gone.

At Seventh and Hope O’Hara could see the crowd a block ahead, overflowing across the curb, jostling around a glossy, black sedan. His cab nosed into the fringe of the crowd, brakes shrieking, and O’Hara tossed silver at the driver and piled out. He used his shoulders freely through the mob, got to the center and brought up against Ben Tyndall, who was sitting on a fender of the dark sedan, whistling cheerfully through his teeth and attending to his nails. There were half a dozen uniformed cops trying to keep the crowd back and two Homicide dicks, Hal Clark and George Sanderson, were poking around at the door of the car.

Tyndall said, “Quit shoving, guy,” and then looked up and saw it was O’Hara. He said, “Hi, Ken. I thought you were governessing Eddie Whatshisname.”

“Smile when you say that, Bennie,” said O’Hara. “I don’t suppose you’ve found out yet what happened here.”

“I’ll give you nice odds on that. A young guy with blond hair shot a guy named S. Ticino of New York three times in the head. The blond guy hopped out of the car and beat it on foot, west on Eighth. He was waving a gun and a gal was chasing him. Looks to me like one of these here triangle things.”

“Probably,” O’Hara said. He went to the door of the car and looked in over the shoulders of thin Hal Clark. Clark was holding a flash on the face of the dead man, who was sprawled across the front seat, and the face was that of the small man who had stuck a gun in O’Hara’s belly behind the Bolero the night before. The small man’s coat was flung open, showing a small belt holster clipped just below his vest at one hip, but there was no gun in the holster.

Clark recognized O’Hara, bobbed his head at him.

Sanderson straightened up, said, “Hello, Ken. No gun around, Hal. The blond guy must have used this mugg’s rod for the job.”

“Got any line on who this lad is?” O’Hara said.

“S. Ticino, whoever the hell that is,” Sanderson said.

A coroner’s wagon came through the crowd, scattering it, and stopped by the sedan. O’Hara stepped back, oozed through the crowd and, when he came out on the other side, made a beeline for the Little Bit O’ Denmark. Inside the door, O’Hara ran his eye over the restaurant, saw two elderly women at the table where he had left Tony Ames and All-American Eddie.

He headed for a phone booth at the rear of the place, dialed the Tribune and snapped, “Braddock. Duchess,” when the operator at the paper came on. He hardly waited for Braddock to speak.

“O’Hara, Brad. It was the fair-haired boy, all right.”

“What d’you mean, all right?” Braddock snarled.

“I’m just trying to tell you—”

“I’m way ahead of you. Tony Ames is at a drugstore at Third and Alvarado. She’s a good enough reporter to phone in. Beat it out there and pick her up and then find this kid. Don’t stick your nose in this office until you’ve got him hog-tied. Who’d he shoot?”

“A slug named S. Ticino.”

“And who is that?”

“One of Vic Philippi’s punks who sapped the kid around last night. He was good at bombing the stores that didn’t want protection.”

Braddock swore feelingly. “When the Old Man hears about this, we’ll all be on the street. The cops got any line on the kid?”

“Only a vague description so far.”

“All right, pick up Tony and then round up the kid quick and let me know. I’ll be figuring what we can do about it.”

In a cab, headed for Third and Alvarado, O’Hara sucked at an unlit cigarette unthinkingly. He was sore, sore at himself for having left a screwball like Eddie Mullen on Tony Ames’ hands and sore at the blond kid for being a screwball.

He had a pretty fair notion of what had happened. Philippi’s punk, still smarting from the night before, had run across the kid, put a gun on him and started to take him some place where he could finish what had been started in the service yard of the Bolero. And the kid somehow had got the gun away and turned it loose.

Only that didn’t make very good sense, either, when he thought it over a second time. It didn’t seem reasonable that the guy, Sam, would have snatched the kid out of a crowded restaurant just to take him some place and hand him a slugging. And, too, he had noticed that Sam had been shot only in the head. If there had been a struggle for the gun one shot might have landed there but it wasn’t probable that all three of them would.

He shrugged. After all, there wasn’t much profit in trying to guess. When he located the crazy kid, he’d find out quickly enough what had happened.

At Third and Alvarado the cab slid in toward the curb under the crimson glow of a huge soft-drink sign. Tony Ames stepped from the drugstore doorway into the neon radiance. She looked upset and ruffled, which wasn’t in character for her.

She got into the cab, said, “Club Bolero, please,” to the driver through the window and then shut the window.

“I regret at times,” she said, “that I was raised to be a lady. There’re so many words I’d like to use right now.”

“I’ve said ’em all,” O’Hara grinned sourly. “Give, kitten.”

“After you left, we were nibbling smorgasbord and Eddie was talking about making passes and I was telling him I had a swell stiffarm and then he looked across the restaurant and said there was a pal of his he wanted to talk to. He went to a table near the door and sat down with a man there, a small, dark man.”

“That’d be one of the guys who were sapping Eddie last night. Well, he won’t sap anybody else.”

“He was the man that was shot?”

O’Hara nodded. “How’d the kid get away?”

“Paul Akely of Paramount came in and sat down at my table and started to talk. A few minutes later I looked at the other table and no Eddie and no other man. There was only one place they could have gone — out. So I jumped up — Akely probably has his mouth propped open yet — and started out, myself. I just got to the door when I heard some shots, not very loud, and when I reached the sidewalk, I saw Eddie running down the street with a gun in his hand.”

“So you ran after him?”

“I didn’t walk. He turned west on Eighth and when I got to the corner he was at Figueroa, jumping into a cab there. I found another one and kept after him — this far. A flat tire on my cab ended that, so I called to see if I could get you and Brad told me there’d been a man shot. Ken, do you think the kid would do anything like that?”

“Sweetheart, I’ll pick long shots at the track or guess what the weather’ll be a week from now, but I refuse to predict what our All-American nitwit will do from moment to moment.”

“But he’s a nice kid even if he’s a little wild.”

“Thank God he’s only a little wild. Why the Club Bolero?”

“I got the number of his cab and called the cab company. They said the driver had just reported in from there to take another call. So maybe we can find him there.”

“All I hope,” O’Hara growled, “is that the place isn’t on fire when we arrive. Arson is the only thing Eddie hasn’t committed so far and all he needs is time. Tony, you wait in the cab for me.”

By eight o’clock in the evening the Club Bolero was between its dinner-time crowd and its late-in-the-evening mob. It was quiet, so quiet in fact, that O’Hara said, “Eddie can’t be here, kitten. The walls aren’t shaking and the roof isn’t sliding off. Wait for me.”

He had the cab park, not in the parking lot, but a half-block away along the curving length of Sunset. He walked down to the club past antique shops, swank travel agencies and interior decorators’ studios, and turned in under the awning. The doors of the Bolero were of tooled leather, each with a round pane of plate glass, resembling a porthole.

There was a long tear in the leather of one door and one of the plate-glass panes were cracked across the middle. A very tall doorman was looking at the wrecked door in a displeased way.

O’Hara said, “Hello. A truck try to use this entrance?”

“Some fresh kid,” the doorman said. “We hadda throw him out. He was prowling around like he was looking for somebody and he was bothering people so we hadda throw him out.”

“You should have tried opening the door before you threw him.”

Ike looked at O’Hara and a remembering gleam came into his eyes. He said, “Hey, I think it was you who brung him here last night.”

“He sounds like the same enthusiastic type. Where’d he go from here?”

“The third time we tossed him out he went away. I wouldn’t know where he went.”

“And he seemed to be looking for somebody, eh?”

“Now, listen, Mr. O’Hara,” said Ike in a worried way. “You ain’t got any idea of making trouble, have you?”

“Not me. I’m past my pugilistic days by about ten years.”

O’Hara went past the scarred door and down shallow steps to the cocktail room. He couldn’t begin to fathom why the kid had made for the Bolero or whom, if anyone, he had been prowling around and looking for. He knew that if Eddie Mullen had shot the guy called Sam, the Tribune couldn’t cover him even for the sake of the Old Man. But it would help immeasurably if he could locate the kid before the cops pounced on him, could get his story and know what it was all about. Maybe if he could discover why the kid had headed for the Bolero, it might give him a notion where he could find him now. So he looked the Bolero patrons over casually, taking his time.

There were four men lounging on stools in front of the bar, two bartenders behind it. At a table a girl with platinum hair was listening to the life story of an elderly drunk and yawning.

O’Hara knew only one of the men at the bar. The man was tall and rawboned with a high-colored face. He looked a lot like a farmer but wasn’t a farmer. He was Deke Hanna, who body-guarded for Harry Atkins. He didn’t have much brains, O’Hara suspected, but he was one of the main reasons why Harry Atkins could say “yes” and “no” on gambling matters and other rackets in the county without much competition.

Hanna nodded to O’Hara and drowsed over his small beer. O’Hara ordered Scotch and soda, drank half of it, wandered with the glass in his hand to the dining-room. There were scattered diners but he didn’t know any of them. He took stairs to the second floor where the gambling rooms were but the games were closed and there were only two dealers there, cutting each other’s throat at high card. There wasn’t any one in the entire place, so far as O’Hara could tell, whose presence would have explained the kid’s coming there.

But if he had been drawn to the Bolero once this evening, O’Hara reasoned, he might wind up there again and that gave O’Hara an idea. He went back to the cocktail room and into a corridor at the back.

He hadn’t gone very far when quick, light feet stepped along behind him. Deke Hanna grabbed his arm from the back and said, “Hey, Irish, where you think you’re heading?”

“Hello, Deke,” said O’Hara. “You body-guarding Mat Wyman now, too?”

“Never mind,” Hanna said. “You better come on back to the bar, pal, and not bother nobody.”

“Suppose I feel like seeing if Mat’s in his office, instead?”

“You don’t feel like that, Irish.”

A door at the end of the corridor opened wide and Mat Wyman looked out. Through the vista of the door O’Hara saw a tall, starkly thin man lounging on a leather divan.

Mat said, “Hello, Ken. What’s the matter?” He had a nervous, worried look on his sagging face.

O’Hara shrugged. “I had an idea I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oke, kid. Just as soon as I’m free.”

He shut the door on his worried look and Deke Hanna let go of O’Hara’s arm.

“Sorry, Deke,” O’Hara said, not looking particularly apologetic. “I should have known your boss was in there.”

“Yeah,” Hanna said expressionlessly. He stood aside and let O’Hara precede him back to the bar.

There Hanna went back to his beer which seemed never appreciably to lower in the glass. O’Hara ordered another Scotch and soda and made that last, too.

It was twenty minutes before Mat Wyman showed up. When he came out of the corridor into the cocketail room, he was alone and he still looked unhappy, darkly disturbed. He stopped by Deke Hanna and said, jerking his thumb toward his office, “He wants to see you, Deke.”

Hanna thriftily finished his beer and disappeared. Mat came down the bar and stood by O’Hara. “What’s on your mind, pal?”

“You recall my blond boy friend?”

Wyman rubbed the pouches under his eyes with tentative forefingers, squinted at himself in the glass behind the bar. His gaze was abstracted, vacant. He said as though he was thinking about some-think else, “Who?”

“The kid that raised all the stink here last night.”

Wyman brought himself back from wherever he was, said to a passing bartender, “Double brandy, Chet.” To O’Hara he said, “Yeah, I remember that kid. They said he was back here tonight raising hell so they had to throw him out. Why the hell can’t he pick on some other spot for a while? I’ve got enough trouble.”

“Harry Atkins?”

Wyman downed the brandy without any preliminary sniffing. He stared morosely at O’Hara, said. “Hell, all I want to do is run a nice, quiet food spot, and what do I have to do but stick in tables and a wheel because Atkins tells me to.”

Deke Hanna came out of the corridor and back to the bar and Wyman, after one glance at the raw-boned man, lowered his voicee. It still had the note of injury to it. “And after I do that for Atkins, I get cursed and growled at because the place happens to attract gamblers.”

“I don’t get it,” O’Hara said.

“That guy last night.”

“Vic Philippi?”

Wyman nodded. “He’s been giving the Bolero some play but I didn’t know who he was. As a matter of fact, I don’t give the upstairs much attention but when you made that crack last night, I asked around.”

O’Hara said dryly, “And Philippi has Atkins worried.”

“Plenty. Atkins has had things his way in this town for so long he’s gone soft. He’s afraid Philippi is going to take his candy away from him and seems to think that because Philippi has been here a few times, I’m playing with him. So I get shoved around for it. Cripes, if I could get my dough out of this joint, I’d quit and run a hamburger stand.”

“Is Atkins going to do anything about it?”

“I doubt it. He’s lost his old-time guts. But if he was driven into a corner, I don’t know.” Wyman shrugged dispiritedly.

“Have Atkins and Hanna been out here long this evening?”

“They had dinner here. Why?”

“They didn’t give you any idea trouble had already started?”

Wyman shook his head. “Not a peep. The last trouble I’ve had or heard about was the uproar your pal started last night.” He stopped and his pouched eyes widened. “Listen, kid, that blond guy tying into Philippi last night didn’t have anything to do with angles, did it? Because I don’t want my place mixed up.”

“No. That was just a friendly barroom fracas.”

Hanna, carrying another small beer, ambled by toward a table.

Wyman asked him, “Is Harry still back there, Dike?”

Hanna flicked a pale-eyed glance at Wyman, at O’Hara, and said, “He left by the back way and went home.” He went on.

“That mug,” Wyman said, “sets my teeth on edge. I wish to God all I owned was a hot-dog stand.”

O’Hara finished his highball. He said, “What I really wanted to ask, Mat, is for you to keep an eye out for my pal. If he shows here again, let him in and feed him a mickey. Then hold until called for. I’ll give you a ring from time to time.”

“Anything to oblige,” Wyman grinned. “I’ll even slip him an extra mickey on my own account.”

Out on Sunset again, O’Hara turned toward where he had left the cab and Tony Ames. When he reached the spot there wasn’t any cab nor was there any cab in sight along the Strip. There wasn’t any Tony, either. He went back to the Bolero parking lot and looked but none of the three cabs squatting on the gravel was the one he had left his girl in.

He said, “Hell’s fire,” and stood irresolutely on the sidewalk up from the Bolero. He was still there a couple of minutes later when a cab swerved out of a side street into the boulevard, cut in toward the curb and suddenly changed course to head for where O’Hara stood under a street lamp. It pulled up beside him and Tony Ames stuck her face at the window.

She said, “Hello, everybody.”

“And I suppose you just went for a ride through the park?”

She opened the door, said, “Climb in, crosspatch.”

O’Hara got in and Tony said to the driver, “Same route, Oscar.”

The cab went down a block and shot away from Sunset to the north.

“He got away again,” Tony said. “Eddie?”

“Eddie. If he’s as slippery on a gridiron as he is in a taxi, they ought to put him on the All-American. While I was waiting for you, I saw a cab pull out from down the street. Eddie was in it, leaning forward and talking to the driver. By the time Oscar got his hack turned around, Eddie’s cab had turned down here and then onto Franklin and toward Hollywood. They gave us a run but we managed to get within half a block of them at Franklin and La Brea. Then a kid in a cut-down Ford snaked in front of us and we went lickety-slam up on somebody’s lawn. When we got out of that, the other cab was out of sight. I had Oscar roam around for fifteen minutes up in that section but there wasn’t any further sign of Eddie. What’s the idiot up to, anyway?”

“Kitten,” said O’Hara, “I wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care. All I’m asking is that when we catch up with him. I have a monkey wrench handy.”

“A monkey wrench?”

“A bung starter would do just as well. Because I’m going to tap him to sleep, and start him back east before he comes to.”

“But if the cops find out he shot that man and you helped him get away, Ken, they could be nasty.”

“I can take it from the cops. But Eddie defeats me.”

“Here’s where we lost him,” Tony said.

The driver slid open the panel behind his head and said, “Up and down again, lady?”

“Up and down.”

The cab went a block east, dawdled down El Cerrito to Hollywood Boulevard, went another block east and turned up Sycamore to Franklin again. In that fashion they dissected virtually all that part of Hollywood that lay above the boulevard. In all the length and breadth of the streets there was no sign of Eddie.

O’Hara said, “Back to the Bolero, Oscar.” To Tony Ames, he said, “It’s our best chance. The joint seems to have a fascination for our blond pal. And if he gets away next time, he’ll be good.”

They turned west on Franklin, hummed up over the hill to cross Vine. They went a block beyond and O’Hara, scowling glumly out of the window at his side, saw a doorman in an elegant uniform, standing under the awning before a tall apartment house. There wasn’t anything unusual about that but about the doorman there was something distinctly out of the ordinary. Blood had dripped down over the gaudy front of his uniform coat and one eye was nearly closed and his nose and lips looked too big to belong to his face.

O’Hara said, “Ha!” suddenly and when Tony Ames and Oscar looked around at him, he said, “Set her down, Oscar.”

Oscar cut into the curb with a squeal of brakes and Tony Ames said, “Now what?”

“Now a black eye and a bloody nose,” O’Hara grinned. “Virtually a signboard saying Eddie has passed this way. You wait here, honey.”

“Oh, sure,” Tony said. “That’s all I do.”

O’Hara got out, crossed the street and walked back to the apartment house. The doorman had his handkerchief out, patting at his nose tenderly. He looked as though he might usually be good-natured but he wasn’t good-natured now.

O’Hara said, “Look, captain, did you see a young blond guy?”

The doorman glared at O’Hara bale-fully. He took two catlike steps and grabbed O’Hara by the front of the coat. He said, “You a friend of that guy?”

“He’s a hard guy to be friends with,” O’Hara said diplomatically.

“You’re telling me?” snarled the doorman. “So this guy comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, gorgeous, who was that I just seen come in here?’ and I tell him who does he think he is and I don’t go for that gorgeous stuff and if he ain’t careful I’ll sock him and—”

“And,” O’Hara said, lifting the doorman’s grip off his lapels, “he took the first sock.”

“For nothing at all, too,” said the doorman aggrievedly. “And I wasn’t looking, neither. And when I come to, he was gone or I’d of... I’d of—”

“Sure,” O’Hara said soothingly. “You haven’t seen him since?”

“Just leave me see that guy once again.”

“I’ll bet. Incidentally, who was the guy our friend was so interested in, the guy that had come in here just before?”

“Oh, you wanta know things, too?” said the doorman. “Well, who comes and who goes here ain’t the public’s business. Now beat it before I sock you — and call the cops, too.”

O’Hara grinned. “If I had your fight record, I’d call the cops first.”

The doorman snarled, “Izzatso?” and started at O’Hara. He began a swing and as he did so, a cab slanted in toward the awning and the doorman pulled his swing, missed O’Hara’s blocking arm by two feet and let his hand grab for the door of the cab instead. He opened the door and the redheaded girl O’Hara had last seen at the Bolero the night before tumbled out into the doorman’s arms. She was gloriously drunk and she put her arms around the doorman’s neck and pulled herself up straight.

She said, “Hi yah, toots?”

The doorman said, “I’m fine, Miss. Now take it easy.”

He threw a nasty look at O’Hara and the redhead followed the look with one of hers that wasn’t nasty.

She said to O’Hara, “Hi yah, ya old handsome brute. Say, toots, how’s to introduce me to old handsome brute here?”

“Now, Miss,” the doorman said, beginning to haul her inside, “just take it easy. Easy.”

At the door the redhead rolled her eyes at O’Hara but she didn’t offer any resistance to being dragged in. O’Hara watched the doorman get her into an elevator. The door clanged and whirring noises came from inside the shaft. O’Hara went in and watched the indicator spin until it stopped at six.

There were stairs at the rear of the lobby and O’Hara went inside, threaded his way between potted plants, went up the stairs. He went quietly and when he was at the third floor he heard the rumble of the descending elevator.

Each floor had three apartments, one that ran across the front of the building and one each along the sides. At the sixth floor O’Hara stepped along the hall on soft carpeting. There was a lot of noise somewhere on the floor and it didn’t take long to locate it in the front apartment. The noise included all the ingredients of a Hollywood party and O’Hara skipped that apartment.

At the rear of the hall the globe of a fire-escape light glowed ruddily. O’Hara padded down the carpet to the window beneath the light, got the window open and poked his head out. A row of windows flanked the fire-escape at either side. One side was dark; from the other, light poured into the night. O’Hara climbed out on the fire-escape landing, found the nearest window was still three feet out of reach.

He scowled at the window in frustration and while he was scowling someone inside blocked the light for a moment, passed on.

After a little O’Hara snapped his fingers noiselessly, surveyed the hall and, seeing it still empty, climbed inside again. He went to the elevator shaft, wrestled with the small mirror that was hinged at the edge of the door frame and wrenched it off the hinge. A brass strip held down the carpeting at the elevator entrance and he got his fingers under one end of the strip and ripped it up.

Back on the fire escape, he slid the end of the brass strip into the slot that had held the mirror to the hinge. Bending the strip of brass, he got a satisfactory angle to the mirror and extended it toward the lighted window. The brass strip, none too stout, quivered in his hand and the mirror shimmered light at him, showing small quivering figures inside the lighted room.

He steadied the mirror and the figures stopped quivering, became three men and a woman. The woman was the redheaded girl and one of the men was Vic Philippi. One of the other two men was the hoodlum who had been with Philippi the night before and O’Hara didn’t know the third man. The mirror showed them only from the knees up because they were fairly close to the window but he could see them looking at something on the floor. By moving the mirror up and down a bit O’Hara managed to get a look at the floor of the room at the far side of the room. He worked on it for a couple of minutes.

The best he could get in the mirror was something that looked at first like a pair of feet. He steadied the mirror and saw that the something actually was a pair of feet. He got a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach and then it went away because the feet were clad in gray, suede shoes. And Eddie Mullen had worn sturdy and expensive affairs of imported Scotch grain.

The feet in the gray suede shoes were so awkwardly inanimate that O’Hara had a hunch they’d never wear out any more shoe leather. He wondered who the owner of the feet might be and while he was working the mirror around, trying to get an image of the rest of the body, the glass wiggled at the end of the brass strip and suddenly slid off and went down into darkness. In its flight it flashed light up at him once as it passed a third-floor window and then there was a tiny explosion of breaking glass in the yard below.

O’Hara swore, not because he was superstitious about breaking mirrors, but because he had been just on the point of finding out who wore those very quiet suede shoes and now, before he could do that, he’d have to go to the fifth floor or the seventh and help himself to another mirror. However, as long as the elevator mirrors held out, he could hold out.

The hall was empty when O’Hara climbed off the fire escape. The party in the front apartment was going stronger than ever and somebody there was singing about the “Butcher Boy” very loudly while the radio was concentrating on “Says My Heart.” O’Hara walked toward the stairway, came even with the doors of the two rear apartments.

One of the doors opened and the redheaded girl came out, staggering and rubber-kneed, while a man behind her grabbed at her vainly. The redhead barged into O’Hara, wound herself around him. Her breath washed up at him in a warm, beery wave.

She said, “H’yah, toots,” and then got a good look at O’Hara. “Ha, it’s old handsome brute.”

O’Hara tried to look nonchalant while he unwound the girl’s arms from around his neck and the man behind her got her around the waist. The man, O’Hara thanked his lucky stars, was the man he didn’t know and who, presumably, didn’t know him.

The man had a large, round, oily face with a small cupid’s bow mouth that was very displeased now. He said, “Cripes, Seena, d’you have to go on the make for every stranger you run into? Come on — and, mister, will you excuse it?”

He tugged at the girl and O’Hara tried to move out of her embrace, grinning at the oily-faced man. He said, “Think nothing of it. I’ve had ’em go tight on me, too.”

“He’s no stranger, Rig,” the redhead burped, clinging closer. “This’s ol’ handsome brute — been following me round since last night.” She kissed O’Hara enthusiastically, if sloppily, on the neck and said, “Haven’t you been following me round, ol’ handsome brute?”

The brown eyes of the man named Rig got very sharp and narrow suddenly. They bored at O’Hara, left him and flicked sidewise down the hall to where the fire-escape window stood open. He said, “He’s been tailing you, has he?” in a soft, inquiring voice.

The redhead suddenly lost her hold on O’Hara and sat down on the floor where she seemed perfectly satisfied. O’Hara took a step away from her and the right hand of the oily-faced man slid under his lapel with lightning speed and came out again, holding a well worn, useful-looking automatic.

O’Hara made his face surprised, startled. He said, “Now wait, fella, this is all wrong. The gal’s so tight she’s having delusions. I haven’t been following her around and there’s no reason for playing with guns.”

The redhead cooed from the floor, “Ol’ handsome brute’s kidding, Rig. S-sure he’s been—”

“Never mind, Seena,” Rig said, still in the soft voice. “We’ll find out about this, pal. Pick the gal up and bring her back into the apartment.”

O’Hara swore silently but he kept the injured and nervous look on his face and he didn’t have to work very hard for the nervous look. He didn’t like the oily-faced man’s soft voice or hard eyes and he knew that if he once got into that apartment with Vic Philippi and the other hoodlum, things would start working out very, very badly.

He stooped, picked the redhead up and she cuddled to him. He figured, maybe that with her in his arms, covering him from Rig’s gun, he might work out something. But Rig was smart, too; while O’Hara was leaning over, getting a grab on the redhead in various places, he moved around, got his gun into O’Hara’s back.

He said, “March, pal.”

They went through the door into a good-sized foyer and the oily-faced man heeled the door shut behind him, called, “Vic! Hey, Vic!”

Draperies between the foyer and the next room went aside suddenly and Vic Philippi came past them. O’Hara didn’t think he’d ever seen so great a change in a man in the short space of twenty-four hours as he saw in Philippi. The man’s face had been smooth and youngish although you knew it wasn’t really young; now it was old without any qualifications, lined, shadowed. The dark eyes were staring pinpoints and Philippi’s mouth was tight and strained.

“Look, Vic,” said Rig, “I found this slug snooping around outside. Seena says he’s been tailing her and the fire-escape window was open, like he’d been trying to be nosy.”

Philippi didn’t even look at Rig or seem to hear him. He took three quick steps across the foyer and his hand, pulling into a fist, slammed O’Hara across the jaw. A large seal ring tore flesh off O’Hara’s chin and O’Hara, already overbalanced by the redhead’s weight, went backward into the wall. The redhead fell out of his arms and lit flat on her back. She said, “Ow!” and began a steady stream of violent language.

Philippi said between his teeth, “You—”

“You know him?” said Rig.

Philippi said, “Bring him in here.”

“Not in there, Vic.”

“I said bring him in!”

“Mistake,” Rig said briefly but he took his cue from Philippi’s harsh, threatening voice. He hauled O’Hara away from the wall and manhandled him into the room off the foyer and O’Hara made no resistance but his eyes were sultry, his nostrils pinched in and his mouth a thin line. He looked as though he were wishing he could have Rig alone somewhere and minus the gun.

The room O’Hara was shoved into was the one he had seen in the mirror. The man who wore the gray suede shoes lay on his back near the window, tall and thin and bony and yet oddly limp for all his boniness. He was — or had been — Harry Atkins, the town’s racket head. He had been shot twice, once through the throat just below the chin and once high in the left cheek; blood made a mess on the taupe rug around his shoulders. Beyond the body, the hoodlum who had been beating Eddie Mullen the night before, lounged in a chair and gloomed at O’Hara.

Philippi said in a half-strangled voice, “You see that, you lousy son?”

O’Hara nodded, said, “I couldn’t exactly miss it, could I?”

If he’d been perplexed, muddled before by the night’s chain of screwy circumstances, he was doubly so now. By all the rules Philippi ought to be covering up a murder which was bound to kick back at him, if only because it removed the main obstacle to his moving in locally and starting up a first-class protection racket. And it didn’t add up, either, that Philippi was so overwrought, almost beside himself. O’Hara had run across a lot of racketeers, mobsters, in his day and he’d never seen one yet that seemed to take somebody else’s murder quite so hard.

Philippi snarled, “Smart, hah?” and swung at O’Hara.

O’Hara ducked this time and Philippi missed. But Rig didn’t miss. His gun clunked across O’Hara’s skull behind the ear and O’Hara went, slack-kneed, against a chair and down on the taupe rug. Philippi’s foot slammed him hard in the stomach and Philippi’s face, enraged, bent over him.

Philippi said from back in his throat, “So that punk you had with you last night was just a college boy, was he?”

O’Hara’s head was buzzing, his ribs felt as though they’d been caved in. His voice came out dully, “What else would he be?”

“Where’s he holed up at?”

“I don’t know, Philippi — that’s the God’s honest.”

Rig hauled O’Hara up and held him. He said, “You’ll sure wish you knew, fella, before the boss finishes with you.”

O’Hara wagged his head, tried to clear it. He blinked at Philippi’s pallid, menacing face and muttered, “This is all Greek to me, guy. What’s the kid done that you’re blowing your top about?”

Philippi threw his hands in the air. He said bitterly, “He asks what the punk’s done, he asks that! The punk kills my boy Sam and he kills Atkins here, messing up a million-buck deal, and he asks what the punk’s done.”

O’Hara still didn’t quite get it. He said so. He said, “You’re still over my head. Philippi. If he killed Atkins, he probably saved you a lot of dough and trouble. And as for the guy, Sam, it was probably self-defense and, anyway, guys like Sam are a dime a dozen in any racket.”

Philippi bellowed and flung himself at O’Hara. O’Hara blocked with his el-lows, let a punch slide over his shoulder and stopped Philippi with a short right to the belly. His fist was still in Philippi’s vest pocket when Rig cut things short by whamming O’Hara across the back of the head again with his gun barrel.

When he picked O’Hara off the floor and slung him into a chair, he said reprovingly, “You damn fool, that’s no way to talk about Sam to the toss. Sam was the boss’s half-brother, you damn fool.”

Philippi was gagging, catching his breath. He looked at O’Hara balefully, but didn’t make any more moves toward him. After a little he said, panting, “Rig, you and Max go get me that young punk. You go get him if it takes you a week and bring him to me.”

“What about this guy?” Rig said practically. “And what about the stiff?”

“Get rid of them both first. And then bring me the punk. I’ll find out first what makes him tick and then I’ll burn him down personally if it’s the last thing I do.”

Max, who had been standing at the other side of the tall, bony figure on the floor, said, “What’ll we do with the lug and the stiff, Vic?”

“Do I have to tell you everything?”

“I’ll handle it, boss,” Rig said soothingly. “Max, you go empty Seena’s wardrobe trunk and bring it here. And, boss, you better get Seena away from the door into bed. We ain’t got time now to cart her down to the Turkish baths.”

Philippi was getting hold of himself. He nodded, went out to the foyer. Max went through another door, humming, “It’s off to work we go,” and Rig wagged his head at O’Hara.

He said, “That blond pal of yours is a killer-diller, guy. Two bump-offs in a couple of hours is pretty near a amateur record.”

O’Hara cursed Eddie Mullen in his soul and wished he’d never seen, never even heard of, him. He said, “What makes you so sure he killed Atkins?”

“We practically seen him do it. He was standing over Atkins with the gun still in his hand when we got here. Naturally it was a nice, big surprise, us not expecting anything like that, and he had the drop on us so he got away. And is the boss burned up! He thought a lot of Sam and then Atkins getting himself bumped here messes things up, too.”

“What was Atkins doing here?”

Rig shrugged. “I dunno. We found the back door unlocked but you could open that with a hairpin anyway. Maybe he sneaked over here to see the boss without any of his boys getting wise to it. He was going to sell out the numbers racket here to Vic and maybe he didn’t figure on cutting the deal with any of his boys. What I’d like to know, fella, is where this pal of yours comes in. What’s his angle in knocking off Sam and Atkins?”

“I don’t know,” O’Hara said and meant it.

“Close-mouthed, huh?”

Philippi came back from the foyer. The redhead was like a sack of flour across his shoulder, passed out cold. He carried her into the bedroom and then he and Max came out with a wardrobe trunk bulkily between them. They put the trunk down on the floor beside Atkin’s body and Philippi came across to Rig, took Rig’s gun.

He said, “I’ll watch him.”

He watched O’Hara silently, with cold virulence. Max and Rig worked fast, ripping drawers, hangers, partitions, out of the trunk. Rig got the body by the feet. Max by the head, and they jackknifed Atkins into the trunk very neatly, tucked in a trailing arm and slammed the halves of the trunk shut, locked it. Max tossed a Chinese throw rug over the bloody stain on the large rug while Rig carried the debris from the trunk back into the bedroom.

When Rig came back, he said, “We’ll lug this one down the back way to the car and come back for the live one. You can handle him, Vic?”

“What d’you think?” Philippi said, his eyes darkly on O’Hara. “If we had another trunk, I’d handle him here and now.”

Max said, “Uh-uh, boss. He looks pretty heavy. Why should we lug him around if he can walk?”

Max hummed some more about “Off to work we go” while Rig wedged open a swinging door between dining-room and kitchen and they carted the trunk through the door, out of sight.

Philippi’s pinpointed stare made O’Hara sweat gently between the shoulder blades, down the length of his spine. There had been lots of times when he had stuck his chin out, asking for trouble and finding it, but at least on those occasions he’d been prepared for it, had had an even chance of blocking it away from his chin. But this time all he’d been was the big-hearted sap, a dumb Good Samaritan, trying to get a screwball kid out of his jam, and he’d succeeded only in messing himself up.

There wasn’t any misreading the vengeful purpose in Philippi’s eyes, his tight mouth, and if O’Hara sat there passively until Rig and Max came back, it would be too late, quite a bit too late. He couldn’t handle three of them; he didn’t even think he could handle Philippi who stood a dozen feet away with the gun like a rock on his hip.

O’Hara thought, “Damn Eddie Mullen!”

He put his hands tight over his knees to keep them from shaking. He said, “Look, Philippi, suppose the kid did kill your brother and Atkins, why take it out on me? I didn’t do it, did I?”

“Try to talk your way out of it. I think you know plenty about it and I’ve got a hunch you ain’t even a newspaper guy.”

“Look me up, ask anybody about me.”

“Turn it off,” Philippi said coldly. “I’m going to get the punk — it’s personal with me, now — and I suppose I should let you go so you could shoot off your face about that?”

There was an odd noise at the bedroom doorway and O’Hara looked, saw the redhead standing there unsteadily in nothing more than pink panties, a brassiere. She said, “I’m gonna... I’m gonna—”

Philippi barked, “Seena, get back in there.”

Seena started to run blindly out into the room, reeling and stumbling. She burped. “Look out, I’m gonna be... be sick. Where’s the... the...”

She weaved into a table, upset it and stumbled away. O’Hara got springs in his knees but he didn’t move because Philippi still didn’t take his eyes off him for a moment.

“Seena, you little tramp,” Philippi snapped, not looking at her, “get back in there. Damn it, get back in—”

The redhead gurgled incoherently and unseeingly she ran into the end of the divan, caromed off it in front of O’Hara. O’Hara’s foot shot out, caught her on the hip. She went sidewise as though she had been sprung from a catapult and tangled with Philippi as he tried to duck her, tried to get the gun centered on O’Hara again.

O’Hara was on his feet instantly. He caught the back of the chair he had been in and skated the heavy piece of furniture across the rug at the pair. It slammed into Seena just as Philippi was getting clear of her and snarled them both up again while O’Hara whirled, flung toward the velvet draperies between the living-room and the foyer.

Philippi’s gun blasted as he cleared the draperies and he knew he wouldn’t have time to get the hall door open before Philippi would be on him from behind. He dived to one side of the draped arch, spun and poised himself. The draperies whipped aside and O’Hara uncorked one from his knees. Philippi literally drove his chin into the punch. He had been coming so fast that the blow didn’t quite halt him and he came on forward, falling as he did so.

He was out like a light, in mid-air. He rolled over twice on the floor before he came to a stop.

O’Hara scooped the gun off the floor where it had fallen from Philippi’s hand. He swung back into the living-room and picked up his hat. The redhead was climbing to her feet and she must have had a stronger stomach than she’d figgured on because she hadn’t been sick yet.

O’Hara said, “Thanks, babe,” and she said. “Ol’ handsome brute again.”

O’Hara went out into the foyer and found that Philippi was coming out of it so he tried the sedative effect of a kick on the chin. Philippi very promptly relaxed and O’Hara opened the hall door, headed for the stairway.

The party in the front apartment had reached the quartet stage and you couldn’t hear yourself think, even out in the hallway.

At the second floor O’Hara heard the elevator rumble up the shaft beside the stairway and when he reached the lobby, the doorman in the elegant uniform wasn’t in sight. O’Hara was glad of that; not that he couldn’t have handled an argument with the guy but he was temporarily tired of arguments.

He went down the block toward the red tail-light of the cab in which he’d left Tony Ames not thirty minutes before. It seemed closer to thirty days. He stuck his head in the open window, didn’t open the door.

He said, “Hi, Gadget.”

“Don’t gadget me, you trifler,” Tony Ames said. She laughed a little but she sounded as though she had been worried. “I saw you trailing after that redhead.”

“Now, kitten—”

“I’m kidding you, funny face. Get in and tell me what kept you so long.”

O’Hara didn’t open the door. He said, “Honeybunch, will you do me a favor?”

“When you start that ‘honeybunch’ stuff,” Tony said dryly, “I know the fun is starting and you’re trying to ace little Ames out of it.”

There was a sudden rasp of flint against steel in her hand and the small flame of a cigarette lighter sprang into yellow life. It wasn’t much light but enough to outline O’Hara’s face and head.

She said softly, “Lipstick on your neck and blood on your chin. Did the redhead have to knock you down before you’d let her get affectionate? Get in here, fella, and tell me what happened.”

O’Hara sighed. “Try to keep anything from you, nosy.”

He didn’t get in but he talked briefly, pithily. Oscar was apparently sound asleep on the front seat and there were panes of glass between him and them but O’Hara kept his voice down anyway.

When he’d finished, Tony Ames breathed, “Ken, this is an awful, horrible mess! D’you really think the boy killed Atkins?”

O’Hara shrugged.

“But why would he have done it?”

“That’s among the things I’m going to find out. Up to now we’ve been so busy following the paper chase the kid’s leading us, that we haven’t had time to do anything. From now on he’ll have to sort of look out for himself, because two murders make this thing too big to be just background for a game of button, button, where’s Eddie Mullen.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to find out who killed the guy in the car and who killed Atkins and why. If the kid did it, he’ll have to take what’s coming.”

“Where do we start?”

“First I want you to scoot to a phone some place and get a flock of cops over here. I’ll try to slow up these Manhattan babies in moving Atkins’ body while the cops are on the way. Then you can trot down to the office, dig in the sports library and find a picture of the Brand University football squad of last fall. Eddie Mullen ought to be on it.”

Tony Ames said, “I begin to get it. Maybe Eddie Mullen isn’t Eddie Mullen. After all, nobody out here ever saw him before.”

“I want to be sure, one way or another. Now get along, little doggie.”

“Promise you won’t start anything until the cops get here?”

“Don’t worry. I’m getting smart in my old age.”

Tony Ames didn’t sound too convinced but she said, “O.K. Wake up Oscar for me.”

When the cab was a receding tail — light, swooping down the hill toward Highland. O’Hara cut back across the street and went at a smart walk toward the corner. He knew the layout of these hill apartments — a concrete apron behind them with private garages opening onto the concrete. He figured he’d have time to get back there, locate the car to which Rig and Max had carried Atkins in his trunk coffin and do something about it while Rig and Max were upstairs reviving Vic Philippi. It ought to take Philippi a little while, anyway, to shake off the effects of that kick in the chin.

There was a chance that O’Hara might find either Rig or Max along with the car and the body. He wouldn’t mind that too much, either. He could be pushed around and slapped down just so long and then something in him, harking back to the bogs of Ireland, overrode caution and what was commonly denominated as plain horse sense.

The driveway leading to the garages wasn’t twenty feet distant and O’Hara was freeing Rig’s automatic from his coat pocket where he’d dropped it, when there was a roar of exhaust back of the apartment. O’Hara swore, stretched his legs and he hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when a neat, tan sport job whipped out of the drive. It rasped rubber in a vicious right turn, swerved far into the street and straightened out.

O’Hara had a swift, fragmentary glimpse of Rig’s round, oily face behind the wheel and there were others in the car although he couldn’t tell one from another or even how many there were. But he didn’t think he’d find anybody left behind in that sixth-floor apartment. Vic and the redhead had no doubt been piled in the car, too. O’Hara had been in darkness as the car slammed out past him to the street and there wasn’t much chance anybody in the car had seen him or recognized him if they had.

Not that that made much difference, with the sport job streaking south toward the boulevard while he was virtually rooted there.

A shiny V-8 coupe purred up from the boulevard, nudged the curb a hundred feet away and O’Hara said, “Hah,” and got going. He came up on the street side of the coupe and the driver, a young fellow in evening clothes, looked up, startled. A girl was climbing out the other door to the sidewalk.

O’Hara said, “Borrow your car, laddie?”

The young fellow’s mouth dropped open. “I... I should say not. What’s the idea?”

“A swell idea if I had time to explain it,” O’Hara said. He grinned a little, no more than a little, and shoved the automatic into sight. He said, “This is part of it. Catch on?”

The lad slid away from the gun fast, almost knocking the girl down, while O’Hara jerked the door open, got behind the wheel. He said, “Thanks, old-timer,” and got the V-8 away in a fast U-turn while he was still saying it.

Down at the boulevard a block and a half away the tan sport job was slowing for a turn. It wound to the right and O’Hara jammed his foot hard on the coupe accelerator. The V-8 was fast, had lots of guts. It whooped up to fifty inside of half a block, bore down at the boulevard intersection. O’Hara eased it off at the cross walk, swung wide into the boulevard. He wove in front of a bus, startling the driver into near-spasms, and got to the outside lane of traffic.

There wasn’t a great deal of traffic on the boulevard at that hour but there was enough to hide, for the moment, the sport job. Then O’Hara saw it jogging along past a street car a block ahead, not going fast, not going slow. O’Hara let up on the throttle, began to pace the tan car. Apparently neither Rig at the wheel nor any of the occupants had any idea they were being followed and they had no intention of attracting notice by stepping along too fast.

The sport job rolled across Highland, kept going west. O’Hara beat the red light at Highland by a bare fraction of a second and rolled the V-8 closer to the sport job, settled down half a block behind and held that distance.

He hadn’t the faintest notion where Philippi and his goon squad were headed, but he knew he was headed the same place even if he didn’t know what he was going to do about anything when he did arrive. As he drove he kept his eyes open for a radio patrol car but block after block slid by and there wasn’t a sign of one.

That was the trouble with cops — when you didn’t want them around, they were all over yon like gooseflesh, and when you did need them, they were as scarce as Republicans in Texas.

Both cars crossed La Brea. Traffic got lighter as the boulevard hiked up toward the hills that were black against the star-strewn sky. O’Hara dropped the V-8 a full block behind and the sport job ground on west. It made the boulevard stop at the Laurel Canyon road and turned to the right along the canyon floor.

O’Hara gave himself one guess then. Philippi was headed for Mulholland Highway which wound along the crest of the hills for miles, deserted at this time of night and with hundreds of brush-covered slopes down which a body might be tumbled to lie hidden for weeks, months, maybe years.

His one guess was wrong. Their car whipped around the curves of the canyon road, grinding steadily upward. Its tail light vanished around a curve and when the V-8 swung to make the turn, the red spark was gone completely.

O’Hara could have drawn from memory a detailed road map of Laurel Canyon, all the tributary canyons there, and he knew instantly where the sport job was headed — Horseshoe Canyon, which angled off to the left and wound sharply upward to a cul-de-sac in the hills. He knew also that there were three canyon estates and three only along the slopes of Horseshoe and that of the three one had belonged to Harry Atkins.

He grimaced faintly. A very humorous guy, this Vic Philippi, picking out Harry Atkins’ own place as a dumping ground for his body.

O’Hara drove the V-8 a hundred feet beyond the entrance to Horseshoe Canyon, parked it. Horseshoe Canyon was dark, quiet, almost as isolated as though it had been ten hours instead of ten minutes away from busy Hollywood. The sky was a star-powdered ceiling to the canyon as he plodded upward but the floor of the canyon, the dirt road, lay in complete blackness.

In the stillness his feet seemed to wake tiny, almost inaudible echoes. Only he knew they weren’t echoes when he stopped for a moment and the echoes came right on up the canyon after him. So he freed the automatic from his pocket, stepped into the darker gloom of a tree bole. After a little his eyes picked out a figure and when the figure came abreast of him, he chuckled faintly.

He said with dryness in his voice, “Well, Gadget?”

The figure jumped a loot and Tony Ames said, “You idiot, d’you want to scare my permanent wave right off my head?”

“When you walk up dark roads, you can expect boogymen. So what are you doing here — and keep it down.”

“I’ll tell you,” Tony whispered, “and then maybe you’ll tell me. I’d just finished putting through that call for the cops in a drugstore at Highland and the boulevard and was coming out the door when I saw you slide past in a V-8. Well, that wasn’t according to schedule. You should still have been up at that apartment. So I hopped into the cab and set sail after you. You were way ahead when you turned into the canyon but I saw the V-8 parked down there. So some rapid deductions and so here we are. Maybe you can tell me why.”

O’Hara told her. He added. “I don’t know if that exactly answers why but I’m hoping to go deeper into the subject. Now would you mind scramming and phoning the cops a new address?”

“I can’t walk that far back,” Tony said. “My feet hurt. Let’s use the phone at Atkins’ place.”

O’Hara sighed. “I was afraid you’d be like that, pest. Got a gun with you?”

“I’ve got the sweetest little .25 in my bag, as you very well know.”

“O.K., break it out.”

They almost ran into the rear of the sport job before they saw it. The car was parked off the road, half in and half out of a clump of brush and across the road lights gleamed mellowly from a studio window high on the canyon side.

O’Hara said, “Easy,” under his breath and got his eyes up to the rear window of the sport job slowly, cautiously. He hadn’t expected the car to be parked there deserted or to see lights on in Atkins’ sprawling hillside home.

After a moment he took his eyes away from the rear window and stepped around the car, jerked the rear door open. He said, “Hello, Red.”

The redhead, who was slumped in the rear seat, squalled a little but not very much or very loudly at the sight of him. She said thickly, “ ’S handsome brute, b’ Gawd. Wha-what’re you doing here, ol’ handsome brute? What you followin’ me round for?”

There wasn’t anyone else in the car and the body of Harry Atkins, if it had been in it, wasn’t there now. O’Hara said, “Climb out, Red, and no noise if you don’t want to get slapped in the pan with a lot of gun barrel.”

The redhead climbed out awkwardly. She was in bedroom slippers, a dress that had been hastily pulled on over her head so that the red hair was all awry in the faint light from the studio window up the hill.

O’Hara said, “Can you handle her, kitten?”

“What d’you think I am?” said Tony. “A sissy?”

“Then she’s all yours while I case the place, and maybe crash the party there. If you hear a couple of whistles that’s an engraved invitation for you to join the merry throng — but otherwise, Gadget, you keep Red down here.”

O’Hara plowed away into blackness. He found a gate, opened, in a high wire fence and after that it was really too easy. He angled across a smooth, upward sweep of lawn, came alongside the house and looked through the studio window from a dozen feet away. He could see Vic Philippi standing in the center of a big, white-walled room, talking through a jaw that was twice the size it should have been.

Max was lounging on a table beside Philippi and Deke Hanna and Mat Wyman stood very stiffly and tensely against one wall under a gun in the hand of the oily-faced man named Rig who was just inside figure draperies at an archway. O’Hara saw shoe tips of imported Scotch grain and by stretching a little he saw the rest of Eddie Mullen.

The blond young man was stretched out on a divan across the room, an arm trailing limply to the floor. O’Hara could see his chest moving spasmodically, his lips fluttering loosely with each breath.

O’Hara cut across velvety grass again toward white stone steps. His feet didn’t make any noise when he went up the steps or when he went through a wide-open door and along the thick, expensive rug of an entry hall. He stopped just the other side of the archway he had seen through the window, got his hand on folds and jerked.

He put the muzzle of the automatic into Rig’s fat neck and said, “Surprise, fellows! And in case you’re puzzled, what I’ve got poked into your neck, Rig, it’s your own trusty rod. Now just drop that cannon you’re holding and we can all be friends.”

Rig swore fluently and Philippi cursed sharply once and was silent. Max didn’t say anything but Rig was still swearing when the gun dropped out of his hand onto a thick Oriental.

Deke Hanna’s rawboned face was quiet, expressionless but Mat Wyman cried out sharply with relief. He said, “Cripes, O’Hara, wherever you came from, am I glad to see you! These... these — cripes, these muggs were trying to decide whether to blast us or just beat our brains out.”

O’Hara said, “Everybody over to that wall, facing it and hands reaching. You too, Mat.”

“But, Ken, what the hell? All I’ve done is try to do people favors and get kicked in the pants for it. You asked me to feed your pal a mickey if he showed at my Bolero Club and I did. And I couldn’t keep him around there so I got Hanna to help me get him up here. If there’s any funny business, all I want is out of it.”

“And all I want.” O’Hara said, “is answers, Mat. After I’ve got the answers, maybe you can beat it, maybe you can’t. Now everybody against the wall before I get very, very nervous. And you. Rig, quit cussing; you’re repeating yourself.”

Rig shrugged and moved across the room reluctantly. When O’Hara had them all lined up, he said, “Swell. And now where’s Atkins’ body, Philippi?”

Philippi said thickly, as though his jaw wasn’t feeling any too good, “We dumped him over his own fence and what’s it to you, nosy?”

“One of the answers,” O’Hara said. He let his eyes flick sidewise at Eddie Mullen and for the first time saw the long purple bruise over the blond kid’s right temple. He said, “What’d you do, Mat, feed the kid his mickey with a sap?”

“I swear—”

“Skip it,” O’Hara grunted. He put two fingers of his left hand to his teeth, blew a couple of shrill blasts. “In a moment, pals, we’ll be getting some more answers. Just relax, but not too relaxed.”

After a little there were steps in the hallway. The redhead weaved past O’Hara, made one complete turn and flopped into a chair and Tony Ames came in after her, kept a serious, hazel gaze and a small but competent-looking gun on her.

O’Hara said, “Thanks, Gadget. And now for the inquiring reporter stuff. Mat, suppose you start by telling me where you were between six and eight this evening.”

Mat’s words bounced back from the wall in front of him. He said vehemently, “I was at my club. I was there without a break from five until a few minutes ago.”

“You can prove it?”

“By a dozen people, Ken. Why?”

“Because a very smart try has been made tonight to ease both Atkins and Philippi out of the local picture. At seven o’clock somebody started it by knocking off Philippi’s half-brother, Sam Ticino.”

Philippi growled, “Who you kidding? Your pal killed Sam.”

“Wrong,” said O’Hara. “The kid only saw who killed Sam. He grabbed Sam’s gun and grabbed a cab, tailed whoever it was out to the Bolero. He hung around there, saw the killer leave the place with Atkins and followed them to your apartment. He got in there after Atkins had been killed and was probably trying to figure what to do next when you barged in on him and he had to scram. So he beat it back to the Bolero, which seemed to be the nerve center for the whole thing and was sapped and brought up here by Deke Hanna and Wyman.”

“By Gawd,” Philippi breathed. “Wyman—”

“That doesn’t quite hold up, either. I think his alibi on the first killing will prove out, so he couldn’t have been the one the kid was tailing, although he did have the opportunity to bump Atkins. He was out of sight with Atkins for twenty minutes, supposedly in his office, but he could have waltzed Atkins out the back way, over to your apartment and been back in that time. Only, if he didn’t do the first one, he didn’t do the second. He probably knew a lot about it — afterward — but I doubt if he was in on it. He hasn’t that kind of guts. But he’d be too afraid of Hanna to spill anything on it.”

“Ah, nuts, Vic,” said Rig, “this guy is just talking. The kid done it all right.”

“That’s not reasonable, either,” O’Hara said, his words flowing on evenly. “The kid’s college-bred and even though he might have killed Sam in self-defense, he wouldn’t have had a motive in the world to kill Atkins.”

“You know,” said Tony Ames, “that he’s really Eddie Mullen?”

O’Hara grinned a little. “I saw his scrap book at the hotel today and he’s in twenty pictures with his football squad. I tried to send you to the office to check the picture because I smelled trouble and I wanted you safely out of it.”

“You meanie, you.”

“If the kid didn’t do it,” Philippi said, “then who did?”

“There’s Rig — or Max.”

“Both of ’em were with me all evening.”

O’Hara said cheerfully, “That’s all I needed to know.” He flicked a glance at the redhead who was slumped in the chair with her eyes closed, her mouth slack. He said, “Friends, let me present a smart gal — Seena Vance.”

Out of the silence Philippi choked, “You mean Seena — you mean she killed Sam and Atkins?”

“I’ve had her on my mind for quite a little while,” O’Hara said. He kept the edge of his gaze on her, saw that her eyes were open, her mouth was firming up although she hadn’t moved otherwise. “She was Luck Hauser’s girl before she was yours and she knew the cleaners’ and dyers’ inside out. I think maybe she was tired of being the doll and figured she could be the brains, particularly with the racket getting off to a fresh start in fresh territory. But she had to ace both you and Atkins out first and there wasn’t any better way than by framing a war between you. She laid Sam’s killing at Atkins’ door and Atkins’ murder at yours. And between the cops running both mobs ragged, and both mobs gunning each other out, she’d get in.

“Sam had been shot three times in the face which made it almost certain that whoever did it was sitting in his car, waiting for him, and that he’d known and trusted whoever it was because he walked right into it. Then at the apartment tonight I suspected she wasn’t within a mile of being as plastered as she pretended. All I got on her breath was beer. She pretended I was a brand-new face to her downstairs and then up in the hall she suddenly remembered I’d been following her around for twenty-four hours. Also when she pulled the stunt that let me get away — I don’t quite get it yet why she did that — she put on a gonna-be-sick act. But she didn’t get sick which shows it was a fake because I know from experience that when you gotta go, you gotta go and you can’t change your mind.”

The redhead didn’t look very tight now, although she was still slumped loosely in the chair. She sneered, “This guy uses a swell brand of hop, Vic. I suppose I was just going to walk in and take over the town all by my little self.”

“No,” O’Hara said. “You were going to take it over with your brains and Deke Hanna’s gun. Deke had to be in on it. You’d never have got Atkins away from the Bolero alone if Deke hadn’t wanted it that way. Atkins hadn’t ridden or walked the streets without him for five years that I know of.”

O’Hara hadn’t been watching the redhead, he’d been watching Deke Hanna’s back arching, his high farmer’s shoulders twisting. It was sort of fascinating watching his slow killer’s brain working out through his muscles, his nerves that way.

So O’Hara didn’t see the redhead uncoiling like a spring from the chair, winding herself around Tony Ames, grabbing at Tony’s little gun — until the thing was done.

The redhead screamed, “Deke!”

The scream took O’Hara’s eyes involuntarily away from Hanna for no more than the fraction of a second. And when they returned, Hanna had spun away from the wall, dropping to one knee. A gun was sliding out of his coat sleeve, a short-barreled deadly little thing, and the room trembled to its thunder.

Lead tunneled through O’Hara’s coat sleeve. O’Hara’s hand began to squeeze Rig’s automatic and Tony Ames and the redhead swayed between him and Hanna. He swore, tried to sidestep, to get a clear shot before Hanna’s gun cut loose again and the women kept getting in the way.

He saw Hanna up on his feet, dodging, holding the little gun poised with a practiced coolness. Hanna danced agilely to one side, cut along by the divan, got into the clear. His gun cut down toward O’Hara and the automatic swung toward Hanna. Then Eddie Mullen rolled off the couch and gathered Hanna into his arms like an end cutting down a wide-running half-back. O’Hara thought he could hear the bones crunch as the pair of them hit the floor.

Out of the corner of his eye O’Hara saw movement at the wall and the gun in his hand swiveled. He said, “Drop it, Max. The party’s over and you’re just a bit too late to get into it.”

Max looked sheepish and stuck a gun back into his shoulder holster and Philippi said severely, “You damn fool, ain’t everything worked out nice for us without you trying to start trouble all over?”

O’Hara looked back at Eddie Mullen and the blond young man was beating Deke Hanna’s head enthusiastically against the floor. Tony Ames was on her feet again and the redhead was back in the chair.

O’Hara grinned, said, “Remember the unnecessary roughness ruling, Eddie. The guy’s been out for at least a minute now.”

Eddie stopped pounding Deke Hanna’s head but he didn’t get up. He said, “Say, you’re not a bad reporter yourself, Ken. I heard how you doped it out and it was just about right. I got talking to this Sam guy at the restaurant and it turned out he was a pretty good egg when he was sober so I said I was sorry about the night before and I’d like to say so to Philippi.

“So he said Philippi was in a bookie joint a couple of blocks away and we could go down and see him. The rest of it was the way you said. This guy, Hanna, brought the Atkins fellow out the back way from the Bolero and put Atkins behind the wheel of a car. Then the redhead climbed in with a gun and made Atkins drive away.

“I tailed them to that apartment and I was prowling around the back stairs when I heard shots and saw the redhead run out the back door. So I went there.

“Afterward I went back to the Bolero and in the back door there when — bam! — something hits me and I don’t know any more until I hear you talking here. Even then I felt sort of dopey as though a couple of full-backs had run over me and I thought maybe I was dreaming until the shooting started.”

O’Hara wagged his head despairingly. He said, “You dope, if you’d only told somebody in the beginning instead of trying to imitate a whole Homicide squad—”

“All I was after, Ken, was the story. I thought that was the way to be a reporter.”

Deke Hanna moved a little and Eddie took hold of his ears again and banged his head.

“Hey, you,” said Eddie. “The rules say no crawling with the ball after the referee blows his whistle.”

At the airport Tony Ames came through morning sunlight toward O’Hara and Eddie Mullen. She grinned at O’Hara, said when she got close, “Your girl friend’s sore at you, Ken.”

“My what is which?”

“Seena. I’ve just come from talking to her at the city jail and she says she saved your life last night and why don’t you come to see her. What is this strange power you have over redheaded women, my broth of a boy?”

O’Hara looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t stop now.”

“She said she angled you into things at the apartment last night because Philippi was getting ready to move Atkins’ body before she had a chance to tip off the cops and she wanted you to see it, sort of be a witness. She hadn’t figured Philippi would also decide to remove you and she liked you too well for that so she decided to create a little diversion and give you a chance to get out from under.”

O’Hara said, “Sure, and also get me to the outside where I could yell my head off to the cops.”

An announcer began bellowing in a megaphone something about Trip Five to El Paso, Memphis and so on and so on and points east and Eddie Mullen looked lugubrious.

A redcap grabbed his bag and Eddie said. “Gee, kids, I don’t know why the folks had to wire me to come home when I was just about getting warmed up out here.”

“I can’t imagine,” Tony Ames said, smiling.

Eddie got under way. Over his shoulder he said, “We’ll make a swell team when I come back in the spring, Ken. So long — and don’t forget. I’ll be back with you in the spring.”

O’Hara chuckled. “Lord,” he prayed to Eddie’s retreating back, “Lord, give me strength.”