Black Mask (Vol. 31, No. 4 — July 1948)

It was such a dull funeral, even the grave yawned — till the planting party threatened to turn wholesale.

Chapter One

The quick quiver of tension grabbed at my insides, the way it always does when the waiting is over. I sat on the edge of my chair in the lobby of the Pilgrim Hotel and watched the taxicab stop at the curb. The man who got out was big, beefy, and handled his own baggage.

He fumbled the heavy gladstone bag to the sidewalk, paid off the cab driver and loped toward the hotel door. That was when the sedan with the District Attorney, Jerry Frontenac, and Police Chief Lynch in it, stopped across the street and waited. As long as they stayed out of it, it would be simple.

Sam Kincheloe, the pawnshop dick, sat very still behind one of the potted palms and kept his gloved hands folded in his lap. As the big man came through the door, Kincheloe swung his head around slowly and his eyes met mine. His lips moved slowly without sound.

“Mal Portman.”

I nodded. Mal Portman moved across the lobby with the deceptive grace of a big man, his right shoulder sagging a little lower than his left. When the bellhop was on him, reaching for the bag, a sneering laugh crossed Mal Portman’s tight face. The hop’s hand touched the bag. Portman’s hand slackened its burden. The heavy gladstone slammed down across the boy’s feet, pinning him to the floor for the seconds it took him to regain his balance.

Mal Portman had paused. What words passed between him and the hop didn’t carry across to me. It didn’t matter. A little incident with a hop in the lobby wasn’t what I was there for.

Portman went to the desk. Again, like a poorly rehearsed play, or a missed cue, the continuity of a man getting his key didn’t quite come off. Mal Portman waved his hands. He pounded the desk with a ham-like fist.

The clerk shrugged delicately, reached behind him for a key paddle. Portman yanked the key from the clerk with one savage lunge and walked quickly toward the elevator.

Sam Kincheloe looked to me for his cue. We went over to the elevator. It came down again. A tall girl in a red hat and her early thirties punched her cigarette out in the sand jar and got in the elevator.

The elevator went up and came down again and the bellhop walked toward the front door. We got in the elevator.

Sam Kincheloe said: “Seven.”

The operator held the door open as Maness, the house dick, waddled across the lobby. Kincheloe grunted: “Does that lout have to be in on this?”

I shook my head. Maness got in the elevator and held a hand over the elevator driver’s gloved fist.

Maness said: “What the hell goes with you guys? You trying to give the house a bad name? I see Jerry Frontenac and the chief across the street. You need any more help or do you want me to play it dumb?”

“What you don’t have to know won’t have to hurt you,” I said. “This joint going class... Having a dick on days as well as nights now?”

“Nah,” Maness picked a fleck of cigar wrapper from his tongue and looked at it. “I had to come down early. Girl in 719 claims she lost a music box.”

“One of those belly organs?” Kincheloe laughed. Maness laughed.

“Nah,” Maness said. “One of those little tinkly things. Wanted me to handle it instead of the cops. We don’t like notoriety.”

I looked at the elevator operator. “Seven,” I said suggestively. Maness nodded as if he understood. It was all right if he. did or didn’t, as long as Chief Lynch and the D.A. kept out of it the first few minutes.

Sam Kincheloe dropped behind at the elevator to light a cigarette and I went on down the hall and knocked on the door of Room 717. The door wasn’t locked. It swung open when my knuckles beat on it.

Mal Portman’s back was to me. He raised the window blind, looked over his shoulder and when the look of what shouldn’t have been surprise went away, he turned and came to the door. I whistled softly. The room lights showed up something the lobby lights hadn’t.

Mal Portman’s face had the look of a badly whipped fighter. One eye was almost shut, the other eye had a cut under it and on the opposite cheek bone, a bright mark, the size of a finger looked as if it had been scraped on, or off, by a nutmeg grater.

Portman wiped a thin smear of blood from his puffy lips and the hideous grin I had seen downstairs came to his face.

He said: “Pretty, ain’t I, Barney?”

I didn’t think he would ever be pretty. “You ready to go down to the district attorney’s office now and make your statement?” I asked.

“I didn’t lie to you, Barney,” Portman said. “I was coming back like I promised. I got beat up.” It was one of those self evident statements.

“You explained that part over the phone,” I said. “You ready, now?”

“You couldn’t see your way clear to give me another hour... Maybe two hours?”

“With half of Midwest City looking on?” I retorted. “Let’s go, Mal.”

Mal Portman looked around the room. I followed his weary eyes. His gladstone lay on the bed, open, partly unpacked. His hot eyes rode around the baseboard and back up to mine. “I’d like to get cleaned up a little. Barney.”

The nervous edge began crawling up my insides again. I was getting touchy. “Let’s go!” I snapped. Mal Portman’s eyes darted past my shoulder, back to me and his hand moved, a flash of smooth, bird-like shadow.

The Luger came into his hand, resting there easily, lined up about the level of my collar bone, maybe a little to one side. He just had time to lick the thin thread of blood off his lip with a dart of his tongue and open his eyes wide, clamp his wide mouth tightly shut before I felt the soft brush of the slug push at the fabric of my coat. It moved gently, like the fingers of a timid child.

All this, and death too — before the sound of Sam Kincheloe’s Police .38 rocked its echoes back and forth in the dim hallway — before I saw the slug tear into Mal Portman. It hit his neck and his mouth slacked in surprise. A serene look of contentment flicked on in his eyes. He wore the look of a man who has found peace.

Mal Portman made a noisy exit. The Luger blasted a couple of times from his reflexes, the slugs tearing into the door facing. When he went down, he fell heavily, like any big man falls and the floor shook a little. Across the room, a window pane vibrated faintly from the noise.

Sam Kincheloe pushed me aside and knelt by the body of Mal Portman, safe-cracker and now corpse. When he looked up finally, his face was as white as mine must have been.

“I took one hell of a chance, Barney,” he said. “God, what a chance... Shooting between your arm and your body. It had to be that way or not at all... He had you in the middle.”

I nodded numbly and rubbed a sweaty hand over the fabric of my coat where the slug had ironed across it. Just the thickness of the coat, the shirt and an undershirt away from my ribs.

“Thanks, Sam,” I said. I tried keeping it as simple as possible. “What got into the dumb bunny? It didn’t call for gun-play,” I added bitterly. “Well, Sam, I guess I owe you something. A drink... My life...”

And then the shaking got going in my insides again and I moved over to the wall phone and took down the receiver. The motion was part automatic, part manual. Do something. Call the cops. Do anything, my insides screamed at me. Vomit — or something.

I said into the phone: “Will you please report a shooting in Room 717? Yes, to the police, of course.”

The reaction set in as I hung up. The backwash of shivering set in and I laughed. Sam Kincheloe put a hand on my arm.

“Don’t blow your damn top just because you almost got it shot off,” he said. “You’re too trusting, Barney. You’re a chump for a sucker bet or a sob story. Walk into boys like this with your gun loose, and keep your hands out of your pockets. Well — what the hell, it came out all right, didn’t it?”

Kincheloe calmed me like a veteran catcher cooling down a rookie pitcher with the count three and nothing. I said: “Take it easy, Sam, I’m all right now. I’m back on the beam.”

Kincheloe put his gun away and closed the door. “There will be formal statements to make on this.”

I nodded. “Too bad I couldn’t have taken him back down to the office. He wanted to talk.”

“Which is probably what got him the beating.” Kincheloe said. I looked at Mal Portman’s face. The marks of the beating stood out more clearly now that he was dead. “Next time, Barney, play it smart.”

“We all have our off-days,” I said.

Jerry Frontenac, the district attorney, sat at one side of Chief Lynch’s desk. Lynch sat across from him. I hitched a chair closer to the end of the desk. Sam Kincheloe sat across from me.

Chief Lynch said: “Now boys, I’ve got to make a statement to the press in a few minutes. Anything about the story you want to change before we let it go out?”

I looked at Frontenac. Jerry Frontenac’s eyes were half lidded and veiled as he stared back, unblinkingly at me. “Just tell it your own way, Barney. We already have Sam’s interpretation of the incident.”

“Then you probably have it right,” I said. “Sam went along with me to pick up Mal Portman over at the Pilgrim Hotel. Portman drew his gun. I was caught with my pants down. Sam beat Portman to the shot. I wasn’t expecting any trouble because Portman had talked to me earlier and we had gone over the thing this morning.”

“That’s what makes the thing sour,” Frontenac said acidly. “You see the spot you have us in?”

“No,” I said angrily. “I don’t see any spot. I got a telephone call this morning at ten minutes to nine. A woman, who wouldn’t give her name, asked me if I would go to Sixth and Oak streets and meet a man who could give me some valuable information.”

“So you went.”

“Naturally I went. When I got there, Portman came over to the car, got in and asked me to drive around. He was nervous and jumpy and pretty soon, he asked me to drive him over to the office. He asked me just where he would stand if he told us about his latest crime, surrendered the loot, confessed and took his punishment and got straight with society and us.”

“Ya-a-a-h.” Chief Lynch snorted. “Portman was in a spot and he wanted the sanctuary of your office for a few hours. That, or he wanted to stool for immunity. Wasn’t that the way it was?”

The room was silent while I got up and went to the water cooler and stepped on the little foot switch. I swallowed the cold water, came back to the desk. Easy, Moffatt, I told myself... Lynch is digging a hole for you. You’re a patient man, Barney Moffatt... Easy...

I said: “You want my story or do you want me to make a statement and sign it?”

“To hell with the fine print,” Lynch snapped. “Just keep to the known facts. You get yourself in a spot where one of my men has to shoot a man to death to get you out of it. Quit holding out on us.”

“I’ve never kicked a man down when he wanted to get up,” I sneered. “Portman said he wanted things clean with the law so he could start over. He asked me for a couple of hours to clean up his personal business before he formally surrendered. He told me he could give me the inside story on the Gillson robbery.”

“You see what I mean, Jerry?” Lynch pounded the desk top with his hand.

“That’s the spot, Barney,” Frontenac said. “There wasn’t any Gillson robbery. Portman was giving you a song and dance. Maybe Lynch is right. Portman was scared, came to you for protection. You turned him loose. Someone catches up with him, beats the hell out of him.” The needle was going in deeper, now. “A smarter man would have held Portman on open arrest and tried to find out the answers.”

Chief Lynch got up and stood over me. “Quit holding out.”

I looked at Frontenac. The D.A. said: “You got us into this, Barney. Get yourself out. I won’t cover for you if you won’t tell the truth.” That was Jerry Frontenac, all right. Stand right behind you. Way... way back behind you.

“Give it to the papers this way,” I said. “An investigator for the district attorney’s office, accompanied by a member of the police department went to arrest Portman and he resisted arrest.”

“That isn’t enough, Barney.” Frontenac got up. his face white and strained. “What are the papers going to say when we tell them we don’t have any idea what Portman was going to talk about? They’re going to want to know who beat him. They’ll bring us all into it.”

Chief of Police Lynch pounded his desk with the flat of his hand. “Quit holding out on us!”

I got up and stung my hand as I slapped the oak desk top. “Quit pounding your desk. I can pound it as hard as you can. You guys want a story. I gave you that. You can take it that way or go over to the morgue and ask Mal Portman personally what he had in mind. I said the guy wanted to go straight.”

I forgot all about Sam Kincheloe’s good advice about being smart. I was sore as hell. I took the little card out of my billfold that accredited me to Frontenac’s office and the plated badge. The badge seemed to have a tinny sound as I threw it on the desk.

“All right, Jerry, there it is. A guy wants to go straight and he picks me for the preacher... I won’t let him down. To hell with you guys.”

Frontenac’s face got red. “Take it easy, Barney.”

Sam Kincheloe got up and came around and put a hand on my arm. “The chief just wants the facts, Barney.” Sam Kincheloe snapped the little buttons shut on his black gloves.

I slapped his hand off my arm. “You gun crazy guy,” I snarled. Sam Kincheloe shrugged and looked at the chief. I softened. That wasn’t the way to handle Sam Kincheloe. I owed him something for putting the slug in the slot for me back there at the Pilgrim Hotel. I said: “I’m sorry, Sam. But don’t start crowding me.”

Kincheloe put on his hat. “I know how you feel about it, Barney,” he said and snapped his glove buttons again and went out. Frontenac picked up my credentials and put them in his pocket.

It seemed that I should have had a lump in my throat watching the plated badge disappear... The three years, four months and five days I had been a staff member washed away along with it. I didn’t. If there was a lump in my throat it was the hard, cold, choking lump of rage.

Lynch went over to a cabinet and got a bottle of bonded bourbon and some Dixie cups. He poured the drinks. Two of them one for him, one for the D.A.

He said: “Having wisely resigned your commission as an investigator for the D.A.—” Lynch warmed the cold in his voice with his drink. He smacked his lips. “—you are now a private citizen. Your natural anger will lead you to feel impelled to inquire further into the affairs of this fellow Portman. Just one word... DON’T!”

Frontenac put his drink down the hatch. He fiddled with his black Homburg. “Hold yourself in readiness to appear before the Grand Jury at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, Moffatt.”

Lynch said: “And turn in your gun. You are not empowered to carry firearms. In ten minutes, you will be on the teletype to all enforcement departments. Make one overt act, and I’ll pick you up and toss you in the can.”

“I’ll worry about the gun,” I said. “A guy got shot to death a little while ago because I was too slow with it.”

“One overt act...” Lynch said again.

“I’ll remember,” I promised. “And when the time comes, Lynch, don’t send any of the boys. Come and get it yourself. There’s enough glory to pass it around.”

Nobody stopped me, either then or when I went out the front door of headquarters. I was grateful for that. I wanted to live a long time. I didn’t want to go out, hot-headed, shot to death in the street by a cop. But either way, I wanted to live long enough to let them bury me last.

And because how long I lived didn’t worry me, I went back to the Pilgrim Hotel. Bad news travels fast, but not that fast. Maness, the house dick didn’t ask a lot of questions when I got the key for 717 from him.

Chapter Two All Through Wandering

Maness stood just inside the door and ran a dirty finger around the hole where Mal Portman’s slugs had ripped the wood.

“How’s things?” he asked.

“So-so,” I lied. “How’s with you?”

“Oh, as the man said when he broke his leg... I can’t kick.” Maness chuckled. “Pretty good, hunh?”

I told him it was funny as hell and asked him where I could find the hop who had carried Portman’s bag into the room.

“I talked to him,” Maness said. “He doesn’t know anything.”

“What would there be for him to know?” I snapped.

“You’re sure as hell touchy all of a sudden.” Maness frowned. “I just said I talked to him. He’s a kid named Maxie Steck. He said Portman came into the room, let the kid open his bag... We ain’t got no valets you know — and got his Luger out of the bag and the kid left. That is, he called the kid back, gave him a fin and asked him to get him a fifth of rye.”

I agreed with him that it was standard practice. There was nothing in the room the cops hadn’t seen. There wasn’t anything to look for. It had been a simple killing. I was just the old she-cat coming back for the last kitten that wasn’t there. The carpet was gone and the floor had a clean circle where it had been scrubbed.

The window was open and some of the smells from the exhaust fan on the hamburger joint down seven floors and across the alley rode up on the air and the fried onion part had a clean smell, for a while.

Maness went on down the hall to help the carpenter carry the tools he’d need to repair the holes in the door facing. The room was quiet.

Quiet enough to hear the faint sobbing sound. I went to the wall, put my ear to it. The sounds were diffused and deadened like a poorly tuned radio. But clear enough to make out the sound of a woman, crying softly. As though she was afraid of disturbing someone else. That, and a record player, somewhere, playing an old Gene Austin tune.

It was none of my business. It hadn’t been any of my business either, when Mal Portman had wanted to go straight. It wasn’t impulse. Some of the cold rage and hot resentment that filtered through me had taken something with it and I felt lonely too.

Not lonely enough to cry. Just enough to be bothered by someone else crying and the torch music across the hall. When I knocked on the door of Room 719. the sobbing slowed, then stopped and a chain rattled and fell away from the slot with a dull, metallic thump.

She was about thirty. I remembered her then — the girl in the red hat. getting in the elevator while Kincheloe waited for the hop to come back down. Her hair was a little stringy and her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. She just stood there like a hurt child, the hurt welling up in her eyes as she listened to the music across the hall. Whoever it was liked the torchy part. It came again: Don’t you cry for me, anymore, tonight... I’m coming home...

I said: “Whatever it is, it can be helped.”

Don’t you wait up for me, by the candle-light... I’m coming home... I’m coming home...

I softly cursed the sentimentalist across the hall. The woman shook her head.

“Not this time,” she said bitterly.

I looked past her shoulder, around the room. The dresser with its cheap mirror and the odds and ends and the things that make a dresser a woman’s dresser. The picture. I wanted to get out of there fast. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. Mostly, I wanted to forget the hurt, wet look in her tortured eyes and too, the music across the hall.

I’m all through wandering... I’m weary...

The door closed behind me and I went over and looked at Mal Portman’s eight by ten, hand-tinted portrait. None of the marks on his face were there. Just a friendly sort of look on the face and in the corner, the simple inscription: “To Zelma, with Love.”

I took off my hat. Zelma didn’t seem to mind one way or the other if I stayed or went, so I went to the door and put my hat back on.

I said: “I didn’t know about Mal and you.”

“You’d have read it in the papers. The reporters took a picture of me, too. Mr. Maness was nice about it and tried to have them keep me out of it, but you know how newspaper photographers are.”

I nodded. I knew a lot of pic men. I said: “I’m the fellow Portman had his gun on, when he was killed.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I’ve seen your picture in the papers along with Mr. Frontenac. Do you hound many men to their deaths?”

“Not many. Mal Portman didn’t have to die. He told me he wanted to get going straight. Does that make sense?”

“Yes.” Some of the tears were drying now, leaving little stains on her cheeks. “Yes, that makes sense.”

“I promised to let him go about his business for a couple of hours. He was to surrender to my office. Instead, he went out, got himself beat up. He called me on the phone about that, and asked me to meet him at the Pilgrim Hotel, here next door to your room. So I came for him.”

“Then it wasn’t your men? You didn’t give him the beating — those terrible marks on his face?”

“You saw that? No, it wasn’t my men, nor me. Someone didn’t want Portman to surrender. Don’t you see? The whole thing is senseless. Portman didn’t have to die. I wasn’t even going for my gun... I expected him to come with me peacefully.” I shook my head. “I’d have bet my life — maybe I did — that Portman wanted to go straight.”

“He did.” Her words were cold and bitter. “I am the woman who called you. Mal wanted to make so awfully sure that he could have a couple of hours. I was waiting for him. He was coming back to marry me.”

She stood away from me and scoffed at the hard look of surprise on my face. She held back the tears and waited. It would be a long, long wait. I had no answer for her.

“That was why he was going straight. That was why I was waiting. I’d always have waited.” Her words had a hard, miserable, choking sound. Bitter and hopeless. “Please go away, Mr. Moffatt.”

I kept my hand on the door knob.

She said: “You can laugh, if you like. It is really very funny. Isn’t it funny, Mr. Moffatt?” She laughed a dry little laugh. Sure, it was funny. Funny as hell or an open grave or a slug in your belly.

“I didn’t know,” was the best I could do.

“Mal Portman knew. I knew. Take another good look at me Mr. Moffatt. I’m thirty-two years old. You can’t be too particular when you’re thirty-two, can you?”

Was there any answer to that? I didn’t know. I remembered Frontenac and his redhaired wife and wondered how much she cried for him and when I looked at Zelma again, the tears were gone. Just her cold, tired and weary voice again, asking me to go.

I shook my head and went to the wall phone and called a number I seldom used. It got me two reservations at an uptown restaurant.

“I’m pretty particular,” I said. “First, we’ll have dinner. We’ll talk if you want to, or just sit, or whatever you like. We’ll go over to the fights, afterward at Convention Hall, or if you want to, we’ll just get quietly drunk. None of it will help, but it’ll get you over the hump — the first few bad hours.”

She bit her lip and the sobbing started again. I shook her shoulders gently and when that did no good, I let her cry out the long consuming sobs against my shoulder. Long before she had finished I knew the Portman case hadn’t snapped shut up there in the chief’s office, or ended next door in a four buck a day hotel room with bath — and death thrown in.

I cursed under my breath as the drunk across the hall started the Gene Austin record again and wondered if she was old enough to remember the words.

I went downstairs and caught up with the desk clerk as he was going off duty. He was strictly not the Hollywood type hotel clerk. He didn’t mince. He didn’t prance. He stood in the middle of the washroom, sighted into the mirror and admired the fit of his maroon sports shirt as he closed the mother-of-pearl buttons down the front.

I said: “Mal Portman lived here quite a while.”

“Too long.” He folded the collar down exactly as he wanted it. Some of the dark hair on his chest showed above the top of the opening of the maroon shirt. “He was a nasty sort of Joe.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I tried to be friendly. “Take a shot at you. maybe. Nothing more than that. All in a day, for a boy like Portman.”

“Boy?” He patted the collar again and put on his sports coat. “Old as you are. Thirty-five, if he was a day.”

“Thirty-six,” I corrected him. “He seemed to be having a little trouble getting his key.”

“Why wouldn’t he have trouble? Look, he came down, earlier in the day with some guy and paid his bill and checked out. He comes back about three-thirty, looking like he has been thrown out of some chippy joint. He wanted his key. I asked him to register. That was all the trouble there was, friend.” The clerk buttoned his coat. “I was more or less polite about it, you understand.”

“I could see that,” I said.

The clerk put his face close to mine. His breath was flavored with spearmint. His face was the kind you would expect to see looking at you from the other side of the windshield of a Mack Bulldog truck.

“He asked for his key,” he said belligerently. “I told him he would have to register again. He said to hell with that and did I want him to get tough — so I gave him the key. He had lived here for about a year or so and I didn’t want to be too damn snotty about it. So I handed him the key and took his card out of the dead file and put it back in Occupied. When you and this other John killed him, I put his card back in the dead file. That answer all your questions, friend?”

I thanked him for bothering him.

He said: “You don’t bother me one damn bit.”

“The kid that handled his bag... Maxie Steck. Where do I find him?”

“Maxie went off duty at six o’clock.”

I thanked him again and we went to the lobby.

Halfway across the lobby, he said: “He’s got a room here. 1912.”

I nodded and started toward the elevator. The clerk said: “That would be on the nineteenth floor.” A ghostly smile crossed his face as I punched the UP button. What the hell, I thought. Let him have the punch line. Maybe his feet hurt. Or his stomach. My own stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten lunch and I hoped Zelma wouldn’t mind too much if I talked to the bellhop before I took her to dinner.

Maxie Steck opened the door a crack and eyed me carefully. He had a half-scared, half-looped look on his face and his muddy little eyes tripped across me and the scared look went away. He motioned me into the room with a wag of his bullet-shaped head.

Maness, the house dick, tossed a frown in my direction and threw his poker hand on the top of the discard. The Negro porter with the frayed red jacket put a big paw over the money and held the fifth of rye behind him. Maxie Steck said: “Relax.”

I took Maxie’s arm and we went down the hall and stood under the red fire-exit light. I said: “I saw the little byplay in the lobby.”

Maxie Steck was about twenty, or twenty-two. The half tight look on his face was neither liquor or dope, just experience. The muddy look in his eyes would always be there.

“Somebody complain, or something?”

“Not up to now,” I said. “Portman is dead, his girl friend is crying her heart out and you and Maness and the porter are drinking his liquor. Why should anyone complain?”

Maxie rubbed the palms of his hands together. It made a dry sound. The only sound in the dim hallway. No sweaty palms, no nervousness. Just a hop playing poker with the staff on his night off and the staff helping him drink the dead man’s liquor.

“What can you tell me about Mal Portman?”

“If there’s anything I know better than anything else, it’s to keep my nose clean. I hear a lot about Mr. Portman. I hear he has cracked a few safes in his time. He doesn’t do any of his heisting here at the Pilgrim Hotel, so as far as I’m concerned, here at the Pilgrim he’s a right guy. Away from here, I wouldn’t be the one to know.”

“Now, about the girl in 719.”

Maxie hesitated. “Whatever goes with Mr. Portman and Miss Daley is none of my business. So far as I know, they kept it clean. Suppose you chin awhile?”

“When Portman slammed the bag down on you, you didn’t seem to care much for that sort of treatment.”

“The poor old guy is dead,” Maxie said. “He comes in and whams his keister on my dogs. Think nothing of it. He is dead. Leave us not rake over his bones.”

Maxie started to walk away from the red light.

“Kincheloe talk to you yet?” I just threw it in for effect. Maxie stopped walking. “He will,” I said. “The district attorney is going to fan me in front of the Grand Jury in the morning. I think he is afraid the coroner’s inquest might turn up something he can’t and he’s sore.”

“You in a jam with your boss over this?”

“Up to my knees,” I lied. There wasn’t much use following through. It was the look on the kid’s face that kept me going with the questions. “Who was with Portman when he checked out?”

“He called the guy Jennie, or something like that. They came in together, and this guy with him told me to come up and carry the bag down and when I went out with them to put it in the car, neither one of them did any talking. It was a green or a black Ford coach. Or maybe a four door sedan. I don’t remember.”

“Just the two of them.”

“Yeah, then when Mr. Portman came back later, he drops the gladstone on my dogs and says: ‘Well, you carried it down for the cops, now you can carry it back for me’, then he got his key and we came up to 717.”

“Nothing unusual on the trip up. The room vacant?”

“You kidding? The room had been serviced and was vacant. Nobody home. He told me to open his bag. He came over to the bed, got this German pistol out of the bag and put it under his belt, in front. He says: ‘Maxie, don’t ever trust no cops,’ and asks me to get him a fifth of rye and to please not poison it on the way back.”

“And that was the end of it.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t. Keep this under your skull though because I quit splitting the bigger tips with Maness a while back. Mr. Portman let me get almost to the elevator, then he called me back. He says he is sorry about slamming me around with the bag and I tell him it’s O.K., a guy gets sore once in a while.

“He gets a couple of bills out of his pocket, puts them in my shirt pocket and pats my shoulder and says I’m a good kid and does that make things right. I told him it fixed things up very nicely. Very nicely.”

“And you got the fifth at the liquor store.”

“Yeah. When I got back, the shooting and the tumult had died, so to speak. Sorry to see the old guy go. Maness says he took a beating. Too bad. You want to come in for a drink?”

I thanked Maxie and when we got to the door, Maness opened it. He said: “You forgot to mention that Frontenac had tossed you out over to the court house.”

“A little thing like that,” I said. I turned down Maxie’s offer of the drink and went back down to the seventh floor.

Zelma Daley had done an excellent job with the cosmetics. That was as far as she could go. They don’t make anything to hide the look in her eyes.

“I’m the old nosy boy who used to work for the D.A.” I said. “You think you could be hungry?”

She took my arm and we went down the hall.

Chapter Three A Lead to Murder

Zelma Daley waited in the frowsy corridor of Convention Hall while I went into the washroom with Maness, the house dick, and Sam Kincheloe. Maness unwrapped a half pint of blend and opened it. I helped them kill it and listened to Kincheloe.

He said: “Maness tells me you were nosing around the Pilgrim, talking to the help.”

“Is that bad?”

“No... I was just making a comment. Chief Lynch still thinks you’re holding out all the way down the line. He’s just waiting for you to fall on your face. Now, we see you out with Mal Portman’s girl friend and it gives a guy to wonder. It suggests angles.”

“Lynch told me I was a private citizen,” I flared. “That means I can follow any lead that starts with me or comes back to me. Mal Portman wanted to go straight. It got him killed.”

“Hell,” Kincheloe complained. “We know about that. But you’d better keep a close eye on the moll, though. She was Portman’s woman. No use getting yourself in any deeper with the chief.”

“How deep can you get?” I had to say something to keep from punching Sam Kincheloe in the puss. “Tell the chief I’m running my affairs. He can run his. I’ve got some rights. Stick his nose into my personal affairs and I’ll come for him.”

Maness, the house dick, laughed. Kincheloe laughed. “O.K.,” he chuckled, “I’ll tell him. You want to get a little money down on Kid Kibicki, in the final?”

I cooled a little. I told Sam I didn’t see anything on the card to bet on and we broke it up and I went back and piloted Zelma Daley to our seats.

I pointed out the big shots to her. The mayor, the chief of police, the district attorney and his redhaired wife. The tall, good looking louse with the D.A., and his wife was a fellow named Lou Gillson, of the Gillson Company. Frontenac was in deep conversation with Chief Lynch, and Gillson was giving his attention to Stella Frontenac, the redhead. They were all very happy.

Sam Kincheloe went over to where they were sitting. Stella Frontenac waved at me from across the arena. I waved back.

Zelma Daley said: “She is a beautiful woman.”

“A beautiful tramp,” I corrected her. “She and Gillson, the good looking man, have been carrying on under Frontenac’s nose for about a year. It will boil over one of these days.”

As the house lights went down, Sam Kincheloe got up and went out. Lou Gillson got up and followed Kincheloe, and I tried explaining to Zelma Daley why the boys were fighting. It was easier than explaining baseball to a woman. She took the first bouts with a deadpan and I wondered if it had been a good idea bringing her to the fights to cheer her up.

By the time the main event was on, the place had the usual sounds and smells. Good cigars and bad ones. The same as the people. And the noise.

A wasp colored boy in green trunks climbed into the ring and took a lot of boos. Zelma got a half interested look on her pale face as the white boy, Kid Kibicki, came in. By the end of the fifth, the affair seemed to relax her, until Smoky Kinell, the wasp colored boy, came to his corner with a cut over his eye. the other almost closed.

Zelma Daley was white faced and nervous at this point.

Smoky Kinell was relaxed as the referee looked him over carefully. I half turned in my seat and the hand touched my shoulder.

Maxie Steck threw a nervous, jumpy look over his shoulder, then his muddy eyes jerked back to mine. He said: “You like the Smoke?”

I looked up at the ring. The referee had made up his mind. The wasp colored boy was coming out for the sixth. I said: “He’s got a lot left.”

“Ten will get you twenty he can’t last the ride.”

“That’s a chump bet,” I said. “The ref has his eye on the boy already. It could end anytime.”

“A chance we all have to take,” Maxie grinned. I was beginning to like the muddy eyed hop. Almost enough to let him chump me into a bet.

“He’s got half a chance,” Maxie said. “That makes it a two to one deal. Ten will get you twenty.” I nodded and let him see the corner of a ten. He pushed my hand away and leaned back.

Zelma Daley smiled at me. It was just a little smile and because I had a ten riding on the brown boy I gave him my attention.

If you could believe the sports radio announcer just in front of us, “Kid Kibicki was carrying the mail.” You’ve heard him and his corny phrase over the air on Friday nights. I saw his lips move in his pet expression.

Maybe he was right. Kibicki punished the brown boy with lefts and rights and the boy in the green trunks gave ground freely. He was out-pointed in the first five rounds and now, in the sixth.

Maxie Steck leaned close enough to me to say: “Yessir, Barney, the Kid is really carrying the mail tonight.”

The wasp colored boy backed farther away from our corner. Then they came back. With twenty-five seconds of the round remaining, the brown boy slashed and slugged into Kibicki’s defenses and they came our way. The wasp colored boy threw off his lethargy and his gloves slashed and flashed. A left, two rights and another left caught Kibicki.

A hard right under the heart lowered him and a left brought him up again. Then it happened. If the Kid ‘was carrying the mail’, it would be late tonight. He chucked it in the nearest sewer and lit out for home. The left stunned him. He went down slowly, like Mal Portman had gone down. Zelma Daley had a white, sick look on her face as we stood up. It had been a lousy idea, bringing her to this carnage to help her forget Portman.

They were still working over Kid Kibicki when we got to the end of the row of seats. The wasp colored boy looked down at The Kid, licked his purple lips and climbed through the ropes.

Maxie Steck met me at the end of the row of seats and made exaggerated brushing motions on my coat lapel, with his long fingers. He grinned at the girl.

“Nice boy you got here, Miss Daley. Knows how to pick ’em.” Maxie tucked the two tens into my breast pocket and tamped them down.

“A chump bet,” I reminded Maxie.

“Well,” Maxie said, “that’s the way we learn. Easy come, easy go. Here today, gone tomorrow. Be seeing you around, Barney.” Maxie turned away from us and walked quickly up the aisle.

I took Zelma Daley’s arm. Maybe I was getting off the chump list after all. The twenty would buy a lot of drinks. When I dropped her off at Room 719, at the Pilgrim, I knew a lot about Zelma Daley and Mal Portman. Too much. I went back to the little bar on the corner and got another drink of rye and brooded over it.

It wasn’t one of those sordid things. It had a clean, fresh sound to it. Mal Portman had met her here in this joint where she had worked. He had made a few incompleted passes at her. She didn’t dramatize that part. Just that Portman had fallen for her, hard. She loved the guy. And then Portman had found out that he loved her. And how she had gone for a long walk and looked into her heart and her soul and ripped the bracelet from her arm that Portman had given her and thrown it from her, the tears scalding her eyes, because it was a stolen bracelet. And how she had told Portman and they had gone the next day to a little store down in the North End to buy her a real present. She told me about how Portman had never had a chance as a kid and how she had come from a little farm down around Joplin, Missouri, and how she had met Mal Portman.

Mostly, though, it was about the little music box and the little store in the North End. How Mal had picked out the little mahogany box that tinkled when you opened it and played some little tune she didn’t know the name of and the clean laugh as Mal Portman had paid cold, honest dollars for it. And now Mal Portman was gone. The little music box was gone.

“Mal is gone,” she had said softly. “Do a man’s crimes die with him, Barney Moffatt?”

“They ought to,” I had told her and only half believed it.

“Then can’t we just give him a quiet funeral, like anyone else. Wanting to go straight... Didn’t that earn him that much?”

I had flared a little at that. “The whole thing is screwy,” I had said. “Something is missing from the screwy puzzle.” I didn’t re-hash how Mal Portman had his Luger lined up on me when Sam Kincheloe had given me a life by taking Portman’s.

And she had said: “Goodnight, Barney,” very softly and closed the door. If I could have had my way, it would all be forgotten in seventy-two hours. A quiet little funeral. I’d promised her that much. I wondered if the boys who had pushed him around would be there at the funeral to look on the handicraft of their fists and have a look at the corpse.

I stared at my drink and wondered why they hadn’t just slipped a couple of slugs into Portman and left him down there under the Waterworks Bridge where it had happened. Maybe the beating was to scare him out of town. A beating like that might have scared me out of town. Not Mal Portman. With a girl like Zelma Daley waiting for him? I wondered what I would have done and I knew I would have come back, crawling, if necessary.

Sam Kincheloe slapped me on the back and brought me out of the reverie. Maness, the house dick, sat on my right and Kincheloe on my left.

Sam said: “I understand you had a tenner on the brown boy.”

“You don’t miss much, do you Sam?”

“Not a hell of a lot. Remember what I told you this afternoon? Play it smart, I said?” Sam Kincheloe said: “You’re getting smart. Smoky Kinell has won twenty-nine of his last thirty-two fights with KO’s in the sixth.”

I nodded wisely and offered to buy a drink. They both ordered rye and I looked at the small change in front of me and reached in the breast pocket of my coat for the dough Maxie Steck had dropped to me. I separated the two tens and put one on the bar. Then I stiffened.

A square of paper nestled in the fold of the second bill. I put it in a side pocket, paid for the drinks and went to the washroom.

The square of white paper was a standard, Midwest City pawn ticket. It attested that today, a Mr. John Smith, no address, had placed with the Considine Loan Company, one mahogany music box, the same to be collateral against the loan of one dollar, plus interest, payable every ninety days in advance. I put the thing in my billfold and went back to the bar.

As soon as it was decent for a guy buying a drink, I got away from Maness and Kincheloe and went to the Pilgrim’s Hotel. I was spending enough time there now that it would have been a time saver to have just checked into a room.

The door of Room 1912 was slightly ajar. The smell of rye whisky was strong in the room. Maxie Steck was draped over the card table. Some of his blood had run as far as the scattered cards but no farther. There wasn’t enough to run farther.

The hole in his temple still had little pieces of broken glass clinging to the hair and what was left of the larger chunks, including the neck of the broken bottle, lay on the floor.

Maxie Steck, the muddy eyed bellhop was dead. One dead end of a dead end fork in the wrong road.

“You little chump,” I said fiercely. “Didn’t you already have enough? You had the dead man’s liquor and his twenty bucks and his girl’s music box. Did you need the extra buck so awfully damn bad, Maxie?”

Talking to Maxie wouldn’t do any good and the cold rage shut the words off in my throat. I closed the door and went downstairs. When I was up the street a couple of blocks, I went into a drugstore and phoned the cops and told them about Maxie and his problem.

They asked my name. “Smith,” I said wearily, “John Smith.”

Lou Gillson opened the apartment door and hesitated. “It’s late, Moffatt... Is it official?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t I come in and we’ll find out?”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow — at my office?”

I told him it could wait but that I didn’t think it should. “Tomorrow might be too late,” I added.

He screwed a bitter look of disappointment on his face and let me in. I had a drink of his nice liquor and sat down. I was tired and weary. Gillson’s eyes followed me around the room. His eyes stopped as my eyes stopped on the paleness of the bleached maple door. The bedroom door. I looked back at Gillson.

“It’s about the robbery,” I said.

“What robbery?”

I stood up. “All right, if you’re going to be cagy about it, go ahead. Your safe was robbed three months ago.”

“Was it?”

Gillson’s eyes were icy blue and hard and cold. If he was thirty-five, the pouches under his eyes were fifty-five. He was dressed neatly and attractively and had money. Beyond that, he was a louse.

“Someone should really tell me these things.” He tried a faint smile.

“I’m telling you now,” I snapped. “It’s none of my business if you play house with the district attorney’s wife. I’m not after you on that. I’m after the story about a hell of an unlucky fellow who got shot to death over in the Pilgrim Hotel this afternoon.”

“Oh,” he said. “The Portman affair.”

“The Portman who robbed your safe. This morning, he came to me and offered to throw himself on the mercy of the court — on the Gillson robbery.”

“How much did he tell you?”

“Let’s worry about what you’re telling me. Portman offered to surrender, along with himself, the majority of the loot from the Gillson safe robbery. That was his exact statement. He didn’t get a chance to come back and surrender. He was given a severe beating, maybe to scare him out of town,” I ran over it quickly for him.

“He might have run, but he had a girl waiting for him to come back to, so he came back.”

Lou Gillson stood up. He perspired. He paced the floor. “Who did you hire to beat him up, Gillson?”

“Wait a minute, Moffatt,” Gillson barked. “I don’t play that way. I use money, not force.”

I took another long drink from his bottle.

Gillson said: “Are you in need of money?”

“No,” I said. “I’m solvent.”

“Your loyalties are, I suppose, with Frontenac. the district attorney?”

I remembered Frontenac and the way he had stood behind me in Chief Lynch’s office. I laughed.

“A man is entitled to whatever loyalty he can inspire,” I said. “If he can’t inspire it, he is entitled to whatever his money will buy.”

“Five thousand?” Gillson was sweating now.

I shook my head. “No money. Just the answers.” I knew then he was going to talk. It was just a matter of waiting, and where he would begin.

“You know about — Stella and me?” I nodded. Gillson said: “Stella and I love each other. We have kept it a secret.”

“From whom?” I sneered.

“Jerry Frontenac is an unreasonable man. Three months ago, we were all at a party. Stella and I lost our heads... We came to my office... We embraced... You know how it is.”

“I can guess,” I said.

Lou Gillson’s face reddened. “After we left the office, Stella discovered her charm bracelet was missing. I dropped her off at her apartment because it was getting late. I came back to the office, looked for the damn thing and found it, with the clasp broken. I called her on the phone, told her I had found it and would bring it over. She warned me that Jerry was coming up the stairs. I told her I would put it in the safe, because, after all, it was a present from her husband and you just don’t go around with things like that in your pocket.”

“A man like you ought to be able to jockey a thing like that,” I said. “Why all the horsing around?”

“Well,” Gillson reddened again. “The bracelet is one of those charm things. Lots of little items that she had picked up here and there, a little locket, a trinket... mostly, though, we were afraid of the key angle.”

“What key?” I was getting warm now.

“A tiny miniature of my apartment key. Stella had a jeweler make it for her. A tiny replica of my house key.”

“What else was in the safe?” I had him on the run now.

“Just the envelope with the five thousand bucks.”

Gillson made the words sound very vulgar.

“Mind if I whistle?” I asked. I had another drink. The bedroom door opened a quarter of an inch. Gillson made a futile, gasping sound as I went over and shoved on the door. Someone behind it shoved it back at me.

“O.K., Red,” I said, “you can come out now.”

Stella Frontenac came into the room regally. She tossed her red hair over her shoulder as if she liked the feel of it on her cool skin. Her low cut dress showed the quick rise and fall of her breathing. She looked at me defiantly. “Jerry sent you,” she said.

“To hell with your husband,” I said. “I’m playing this for Barney Moffatt. I guess Jerry doesn’t tell you everything. I tossed in my little tin badge this afternoon.”

“Well, Lou,” Stella Frontenac said, “I guess we’re in a mess.” She pushed her red hair back from her face. The bracelet dangling on her arm made a tinkling, metallic sound.

“Is that the thing?” I asked Gillson softly.

I got my hat and another free drink and went to the door. “One of us is a damn liar,” I said. “If that was in the safe...”

Gillson said: “Your man Portman must have sold it, not knowing its potential value. If he had realized how important it was, he might have used it for blackmail. I would have paid five thousand, gladly, to get back the bracelet.”

“I get it now,” I said. “Your office manager phoned the cops, then you. You realized that if you made mention of the five thousand and not the bracelet, the man who robbed the safe might take a good look at the bracelet, attach importance to the little miniature of the key, and start working back to you. So you told the cops it was all a horrible mistake.”

“Yes,” Gillson nodded his head, “that’s the way it was. My office manager called me, I came at once, explained that I had removed the money the night before. That it was a false alarm. They were nice about it and forgot the whole thing.”

“I guess I’ll have to start somewhere else, myself, and work back to you,” I said. I turned the door knob a little. Stella Frontenac was on me like a playful cat.

“You’ll keep your mouth shut, Barney?”

“Both of you are lying,” I sneered. “You say she lost the bracelet. She’s wearing it now.”

“I was coming to that,” Gillson said quickly.

“You had Portman beat up,” I said. “You wanted him to tell you what he had done with the bracelet. He told you and you let him go. Who was the cop you had working for you?”

A puzzled look trickled into Lou Gillson’s face. “So help me, Barney I don’t know anything about his being beat up. Look... When the thing was robbed from my safe, I had to get it back. It wasn’t worth much as jewelry, but it might bring a few dollars in a pawnshop. So I asked a few guarded questions, got hold of a fellow named Sam Kincheloe, who inspects the pawnshops. This afternoon, it turned up in an old gold buyer’s shop, over on McGee Street. Kincheloe returned it to me.”

“For how much?” I asked.

“There wasn’t any money mentioned,” Gillson said. “Apparently, it had been sold as old gold.”

I didn’t tell them how Zelma Daley had accepted the bracelet and how she had thrown it as far from her as she could when Portman had confessed to her that it had been stolen. It was getting clear now. Someone had found it. The finder had needed money. He had sold it for its gold content to an old gold buyer. And Sam Kincheloe, the pawnshop dick had been on the lookout for it and now it was back on Stella Frontenac’s pale-skinned arm.

And that was the end of the Gillson robbery case and the end of the Portman story.

Stella said: “You’ll keep your mouth shut, Barney?”

“Get away from me,” I snarled. “I don’t give a damn what you do or where you go.”

Lou Gillson said: “I wouldn’t claim the money, if it turned up — unless I had to... Unless you brought us into it, I mean.”

I nodded as if I understood and went out of the apartment and down to the street.

Chapter Four Death Set to Music

Passantino’s Funeral Parlors were still open, with the lights on. So it was only a little after midnight when I had their assurance that they would requisition Mal Portman’s body — when everybody else was through with it. It was O.K. to do a better job for me than they would have done for the county fee.

It was because of that and the shape of my thoughts that I didn’t see the guy with the scrubby beard until I got in my car. He held the short barrelled .38 in his lap with its noise end in my direction.

“Drive up the street a couple of blocks and turn into an alley and stop.”

I obeyed orders. When I stopped, the short man said: “Make the motions very tenderly, mister... Shell it out slowly... Slowly...”

I put the billfold on the seat and my money. He looked everything over, cursed me and jammed the gun hard in my ribs. “Everything!”

The lad was thorough. When he had everything he wanted, ho got out, raised the hood of the old car and jerked loose the plug wires and the coil wire. He backed down the alley as I got out of the car and hugged the brick wall. He tossed a shot at me and I heard it scrape along the bricks and whine on across the street. I ducked. The man turned and ran up the alley to the street and turned right.

I reached inside the car, lowered the sun visor and let the little .32 Auto drop into my hand. I was tired of being the patient man. I liked the feel of the crawling of my insides. I had finished the job several times tonight. At the hotel. At Gillson’s and at Passantino’s Funeral Parlors. The sheer excitement of the little hard knots in my belly pushed me down the alley.

I lost my man twice, found him again and ten blocks later, I stalked him down a dark alley. He knocked on a door. A dim light came on in the rear of a building. The man went in. I moved down the alley cautiously, my coat sleeve scraping along the brick walls.

It wasn’t a long wait. Eight — ten minutes at the most. He came back up the alley, the wrapped package under his arm. I crouched behind the smelly garbage pail of a cheap restaurant and waited.

I could hear his sigh of relief as he passed the spot where I crouched. I let him get ten feet past me.

“Jennie?” I whispered. He stopped, whirled, and I could see his dim outline in the alley. “Jennie?” I whispered again. It was the only name left on the roster of men who had come in touch with Mal Portman.

His gun, or mine, blasted along the darkness. He had good ears. The shot chipped mortar and the slug whispered to me of death as it went on past.

A good man with an automatic, an expert, could have taken him with one shot. I am not an expert with a .32. I shot him twice.

His billfold had a little card in it that made him a deputy constable of a neighboring township. The name answered the “Jennie” angle. The name was: Luce Jenelli.

And that was what Mal Portman had meant. That answered the last question of who had forced him to check out of the Pilgrim Hotel.

I took my gun, my billfold and the things that were mine and picked up the wrapped package and moved down the alley, past the little fifteen watt bulb over the dim sign: CONSIDINE LOAN COMPANY, NIGHT BELL. The cop car turned into the alley as I left it from the other end. Under a street light I tore away the wrappings.

The little mahogany music box was cold to my touch and when I lifted the lid, it didn’t play a tinkling little tune. Or if it did, I wasn’t listening.

I was looking at the beautiful engraving and the strange portrait on the bills. The five one thousand dollar bills taped to the inside of the lid...

Room 1912 still smelled of rye whiskey.

Maxie Steck’s body was gone and just the four of us were there.

A stray piece of glass crunched under Chief Lynch’s foot as he swung and hit me again. My face was getting sore all over.

Sam Kincheloe just sat in his chair and snapped the snaps on his black gloves and looked at the music box. Lynch hit me again.

“You dumb bunny,” he wheezed. “You couldn’t stay out of it. You knocked off the kid to get the pawn ticket and then came right back here to his room.”

“I’m only going to tell you once more,” I said. “You smack me again, and I’m going to signal Maness, out on the fire escape to blow a little hole in your belly with the shotgun.”

Maness, the house dick, pushed the barrel of the cylinder bore twelve-gauge shotgun through the window and put a leg over the sill. “I’ve heard Barney’s story, Lynch,” he said. “I like it.” Maness came into the room.

“Mal Portman robbed the Gillson Company safe,” I said. “He took an envelope with five one thousand dollar bills in it, a bracelet and when it was discovered next morning, Gillson said nothing had been taken. I know all about that now. You and Sam Kincheloe have been covering up for Gillson.”

Lynch looked at the shotgun. Some of the steam went out of him. “We were covering for Frontenac, as much as for Gillson. Even you can see that, Barney, can’t you?”

Chief Lynch belched and swallowed noisily.

“If Frontenac found out about Stella and Gillson, he would have blasted them both. The department would have had two murders on its hands.”

“For the good of the force,” I said. “That why you and the chief played it that way, Sam?”

Sam Kincheloe nodded.

I looked at him, and I said: “The lad who forced Portman to check out of the hotel — Luce Jenelli, a deputy constable — I gunned him out in an alley over on McGee Street just a little while ago.”

Sam Kincheloe said: “We can fix up some sort of story on that too, if it will keep the whole thing quiet.”

“We don’t really think you killed Maxie Steck,” Lynch said. “Looks like a ruckus over a card game.”

“If it all came out,” I said, “we’d have to explain how Mal Portman gave the bracelet to Zelma Daley... How she threw it away when she found out it was stolen... How Sam turned it up in an old gold buyer’s shop?”

“Yes, I guess we would, if it all came out,” Lynch said hesitantly.

“And how Mal Portman, having been beaten up, was leary of what came next and how he passed the pawn ticket to Maxie Steck, in a couple of folded up ten dollar bills. And how Maxie, playing percentages, chumped me into a bet and lost the money to me so he wouldn’t have the pawn ticket on him when he was questioned again.”

Maness said: “You think the pawn ticket was what got you shot at by this ‘Jennie’ character?”

“It makes sense,” I said. “Portman was to be beaten and run out of town so that the five thousand bucks he got from the Gillson safe could be turned up. It wasn’t on him, or he wouldn’t have been allowed to live. Then, when he called me, asked me to pick him up here at the hotel, it must have been that the pawn ticket was right here — maybe it had been rolled up in the curtain down in Room 717.”

“Then you figure he must have got the music box from the girl’s room,” Kincheloe said. “He put the money in it, hocked it and came to you.”

“That’s the only way it makes sense,” I said. “The Daley girl reported it as stolen, to Maness. Maness mentioned that when we were here this afternoon, remember, Sam?”

Sam Kincheloe nodded.

He looked very carefully at Lynch. Lynch said: “Well, there’s Gillson’s money; Stella Frontenac has her bracelet; the district attorney is none the wiser and I guess that wraps up everything. Put that damn shotgun down, Maness, and we’ll all have a drink and get a story ready for the papers.”

I shook my head. Maness held the gun steady.

“What the hell else is there?” Kincheloe said petulantly.

“A matter of opinion,” I said. “Everybody had an opinion on Mal Portman. The clerk said he was a nasty sort of a guy. Maness thought of him as just a man in Room 717. I was going to help him get straight. Lynch, you and Frontenac thought of him as a character who might embarrass the departments. Zelma Daley loved him.”

I paused.

“Well, who else was there to have an opinion?” Lynch barked. He eyed the shotgun again and licked his lips.

“Maxie Steck thought he was a pretty good old guy. Those were his words. He said Portman wanted to make it right with him for hurting his feet. Portman had said: ‘You carried it down for the cops...’ To Jenelli, he was just a guy to get beat up. All in a day’s work.”

I took the shotgun from Maness. “That leaves us a missing cop. Which will it be, gentlemen. You, Lynch, or Sam? I’m going to pay off for Portman, NOW!”

“You’re getting awfully steamed up over Portman,” Sam Kincheloe said. “All right, I’m the lad. I had a chance at a cut of the five grand if we turned it up. I helped Luce Jenelli push Mal Portman around.”

“On his wedding day,” I sneered. “Then you sent Jenelli for me. For the pawn ticket and the music box and the five grand.”

“Wait a minute, Barney,” Sam Kincheloe said. “We’ve got a stopping place. Let’s stop there.”

“Everybody had an opinion of Mal Portman but you, Sam.”

The room got a little chilly quiet feel to it. Like a tomb, or the inside of a dry sewer.

“I don’t get it,” Kincheloe said.

“What was your opinion of him, Sam? Just exactly how did Mal Portman seem to you?”

“Why... I... Portman was...” Kincheloe looked hungrily at the music box again and the five bills. “Do I have to have an opinion?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You do. At least you ought to if you’re going to shoot a man to death. If it’s going to be premeditated murder.”

I almost had to trigger the old twelve-gauge then. Sam Kincheloe surged against the end of it. His eyes blazed. His hand started to his gun, then relaxed.

“Hell,” he said. “You had me fooled for a minute.”

“You were standing behind me,” I said. “Portman went for his gun. He was going to surrender, remember, Sam? You were in the office. You came along. You had to rub Portman the way you did. You dropped back to light a cigarette, letting me get to Portman first. When Mal Portman saw you, he saw you going for your gun. Not for him, Sam. For me. You were going to let me have it in the back because you didn’t know how much Portman had told me. Portman got killed because he was trying to save MY life, not his. You killed Maxie too, because he was a smart boy and couldn’t see the percentage on holding out on you when you questioned him. Did he tell you he had passed the pawn ticket on to me, and just exactly what it was for?”

Sam Kincheloe took a long look at the window. He shrugged and pulled off his gloves. “Well,” he said, “I won’t have to wear these things any more.” He blew his breath on the skinned places on his knuckles. “It was worth a try,” he said.

Lynch said: “I’m sorry, Sam.” He put his big hand on Sam Kincheloe’s arm. “I guess it’s all out in the open now.”

“Yes, I guess it is, chief. Portman was a chump.”

Sam Kincheloe then threw his gloves in the chief’s face and his hand raced for his own gun and he backed to the window. I had seen them come and go, the fast boys and the slow ones, like me.

My shotgun butt was on the floor. I had turned it over to the chief. Kincheloe made it to the window. He waited there, with one foot slung over the sill.

He smiled. “Toss the money to me, Barney.” Sam Kincheloe held his gun steady. I had seen his speed before. I went over and got the money and tossed it to him.

Sam Kincheloe died of chronic greed. Chief Lynch shot him in the chest when he took his eyes off the chief long enough to look directly at the money coming right at him.

He died with one foot still hanging over the sill.

Lynch said: “You can cover up only so many potatoes in a row.”

I nodded my head. Chief Lynch had earned back some of what his stringing along with Kincheloe had cost him. “Let’s get the boys over here and make a complete statement on the whole thing, unless there’s something you want — for this...” Lynch looked at Kincheloe’s body...

It was a quiet funeral. Both of them. They buried Sam Kincheloe first, in the morning. They buried Mal Portman later, in the afternoon. It was a nice funeral.

Not exactly like the Chicago boys and their flashy bronze jobs, but it was very nice.

Chief Lynch was there and Maness and I and Zelma Daley. Jerry Frontenac was there in his Homburg hat. He held it in his hand and looked down and I had a fleeting thought that some of him went into the hole with Portman’s casket.

Stella Frontenac was there, hanging on Jerry’s arm. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even wave at me, or bother to look up at me.

Lou Gillson did, though. He came over afterward and handed me the check for two thousand. I thanked him and put it in Zelma Daley’s handbag where she would find it when she could see again.

I handed him the bill for two thousand, nine hundred seventy-five dollars from Passantino’s Funeral Parlors and he nodded. As we turned to get in the black car going back to Midwest City, I saw him and the older Passantino brother looking at the statement.

Gillson said: “Will a check do?”