Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

Coats decides to “pick ’em dumb,” after one experience with a girl who thinks faster than he shoots...

I

“I’ll take that rod!” Coats said suddenly.

For a sultry minute, hiding with lowered lids eves that were murderously aflame, Coats would let Byrne do all the talking. Let him strut his stuff.

Then: “I’ll take that rod!” A whip-crack.

Foolishly, Byrne had taken his hand from his pocket. Saying it with words wasn’t quite enough. He wanted to add the gesture of snapping his fingers at Coats.

He didn’t snap his fingers. Coats, flying at the chance, had made one of those split-second, miracle draws of his. His gun, squeezed free in its holster under his left arm, flashed into his hand as uncannily as a sleeved ace into a magician’s.

Byrne stopped short, staring with round, dazed eyes at that dark hole in the pistol muzzle aimed uphill at his heart. His palms jerked to a level with his reddening ears and remained elevated after Coats had deftly rid his pocket of the blue-steel weight that had sagged it.

“Now, go on an’ tell me, Lefty,” Coats invited. “Tell me where I get off at.”

A car rolled into the garage, and one of the four hard-mouthed passengers it had brought walked to the door of the office in back. What he saw wrenched a startled oath from him.

“You birds rehearsin’ something?”

Coats turned a razor-thin smile on the questioner.

“ ’Lo, Jimmy Walsh,” he said. “No — it ain’t a rehearsal. It’s a play.”

“Yeah?” The newcomer’s stolid gaze reappraised the tableau and fastened on Coats — blank. “I don’t get it.”

“The play itself, that’s what it is,” Coats repeated. His rhetorical figure pleased him, and he extended it. “Wrote and produced by Mr. Lefty Byrne. I was supposed to be the dog audience for th’ try-out — see? What I’m doing right now, I’m callin’ the author!”

He exploded with a brief laugh of self-appreciation, and then his voice went harsh.

“Still too fast for yuh, Walsh? Well, I’ll tell you another way. Lefty made a collection to-day — got the dough for that load of fancy stuff that went out on the North Shore Saturday. Five grand he should ’a’ turned in. And would you ask me what he tried to turn in instead? His resignation!”

Lefty Byrne, who had turned several colors directly before Walsh’s intrusion, was all scarlet.

“Listen, Jimmy,” he appealed hoarsely, “is a fella tied to any racket with a ball an’ chain? Can’t he do a fade-away when he wants to — if he can walk out clean? Sam owes me that five grand, every dime of it. Breakin’ with him, why shouldn’t I hold it?”

Walsh blinked and shrugged, deferring to Coats.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m not the big shot in this racket. Sam runs the mob.”

“Tootin’ right I do,” Coats grimly affirmed. “And anything you got comin’ from me, Byrne, is paid when I’m ready to pay. You don’t snatch it, see? Fork over!”

Lefty Byrne swallowed hard and forked. Five crackling notes went on the desk and were swept casually into a drawer.

“I’ll put ’em in a better place,” Coats said, “after I’m done with yuh. I want to hear some more. My mind was somewheres else, so maybe I didn’t get you straight the first time. I’m sittin’ back here safe, am I, grabbin’ the kale while the boys take all th’ risk? I ain’t gave you a fair break, ain’t I?”

He had put down the pistol; and Byrne, taking that to mean the passing of his crisis, drew a deep breath. The film that had dulled his eyes passed away; blue and steady, they met Coats’s glare.

“Be reasonable, Sam,” he urged. “If I got on my ear, it was your fault. I brought th’ dough in, didn’t I? And wasn’t I on the up-an’-up with you, sayin’ I wanted to junk the booze runnin’ game an’ buy that gas station up in Yonkers, an’ settle down?”

“Sure,” grinned Coats. “You as much as told me, ‘Here’s your five grand, Sam, only you don’t get it!’ Then you went up in the air because I couldn’t see it that way.”

Lefty Byrne shook his head.

“Now, wait!” he protested softly. “What happened, you made a rotten crack about — about a certain party. A lady friend a’ mine.”

“Which,” murmured Coats, with a wink for Walsh, “was Dorcas O’Donnell. Right? Be a good guy, Byrne, an’ tell Jimmy what you’re goin’ to do to me if I ever look cock-eyed at that dizzy dame a’ yours again!”

“Oh,” Walsh said, and smirked. “Her!”

“We’re goin’ to get married,” Byrne told him quickly. “Married — regular. Get that.”

“I got a picture a’ Dorcas O’Donnell sittin’ home and darnin’ socks!” crowed Coats. “Say, unless she married a bank roll big enough to buy her all the excitement on Broadway she’d be back to the hostess racket in th’ Gold Slipper before the weddin’ flowers faded!”

Walsh saw something ominous in the tautening of Lefty Byrne’s jaw and the swift hunching of his shoulders.

“Well, I dunno,” he interjected hurriedly, attempting a diplomatic diversion. “She’s got a domestic streak at that, Dorcas has. I mean, you got to hand it to her. She does her own laundry. I know!”

“Whose business is it,” Byrne demanded truculently, “if she does? Let’s just drop her out of th’ conversation, Walsh.” He transferred his frown to Coats. “Now that you’ve got the money, Sam, and a portion of my sentiments along with it, I guess I might as well take the air.”

Coats put out a big hand and dropped it significantly over the two pistols lying side by side on the desk.

“Guess,” he snapped, “again! You’re not walking off, Lefty, as free an’ easy as all that. You know too much to be let stroll out a’ here sore head. Beat it upstairs an’ take a nice peaceful nap for yourself.”

He threw a nod to Walsh.

“Take him up, Jim. Put him in his own room, and turn th’ key on him. His case is goin’ to take some heavy thinkin’!”

II

For one instant Byrne hesitated, weighing his chance for a break against the dubious aftermath of acquiescence. Once he was upstairs Coats had him in the bag. If big Sam made up his mind that way, they could put him on the spot right here — use that rod of Sam’s that had the silencer on it, and bump him without a sound getting to the street. Or if they wanted to make a fancy job of it, they could pile him into a machine and take him for one of those quiet little one-way rides into the country.

As he stared past Walsh, poised for a dash, the square of the outer twilight up in front was already narrowing, the steel garage door rumbling on its rollers. It closed with a clank — and that was that. His only choice then was to give in, to play to Coats.

“Okay, Sam,” he said. “I’ll chase on up — but, say, get that funny idea out a’ your bean, won’t yuh? Whether we split or whether we don’t, I’m no squawker. You ought to know me better’n that by this time.”

For a little Coats studied him, and again the red lids dropped over his eyes. When he spoke there was a note of concession in his voice — a straw that Lefty Byrne snatched at gratefully.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Forget that. The reason I’m holdin’ yuh, Lefty, I don’t want yuh goin’ out mad. We’ll talk about the money end later, when we’re both feelin’ better. Go on along, now. Hit th’ hay. Maybe you’ll wake up with different notions about givin’ the mob the go-by.”

The three riders who had arrived in the big touring car with Walsh looked curiously after Byrne as he started up the stairs back to the office. Evidently they had overheard enough to know he’d had a falling out with Coats, and their chill silence told him plainly enough whose side they’d be on at a show-down. The fact that they’d all been pals, that they’d fought side by side in a dozen skirmishes with hijackers — all that would be overboard if Sam ever turned his thumb down.

Walsh himself said nothing until they were on the second story, threading through the dusty and idle machinery that camouflaged the Big Shot’s diversions of government-doped alcohol by way of his withdrawal permit for Beautiful Doll Boudoir Preparations, Inc.

Up there, remote from Coats’s ears, Walsh deplored:

“Somethin’ must ’a’ rattled loose in your head, Lefty, you tyin’ into Sam that way. A wonder he didn’t turn the smoke on you, instead a’ just the gas.”

“I guess it is,” Byrne agreed moodily. “But there’s a limit to what a guy can take, Jim. He shouldn’t ‘a’ brought in the Kid — that’s all. I think he’s beginning to see it that way himself.”

“Yeah; he’ll be all right now,” Walsh opined. “All you got to do is tell him you changed your mind about jumpin’ the racket, and everything’ll be hotsy-totsy again. That was his main grouch — don’t you see it? He’s short-handed now, the way things are openin’ up.”

Another stairway took them out of the powdery precincts of the Beautiful Doll Preparations to the third and uppermost floor of the garage building. The “cell-block,” the mob called that particular department of the Coats ménage. It had been partitioned by bleak walls of hollow tile into half a dozen sleeping rooms, and each was furnished with a good bed and a dresser.

Lefty Byrne walked directly into a cubicle at the rear. That had been “home” to him for the last couple of years — all the home he’d thought he would ever want, until he’d discovered Dorcas.

Shifting the key from the inside of the door to the outside, Walsh deprecated: “This is applesauce, Lefty, but you know how Sam is. We don’t either of us want to rub him the wrong way.”

Byrne grinned wanly.

“It’s all right by me,” he said. “Do your duty, sheriff!”

He was at the window, staring out over cluttered back yards at a rectangle of light in a tall, seedy building below, when the key turned. Evening had come, and Dorcas was up, preening herself for the night’s grind at the Gold Slipper.

Lefty had seen her first from where he stood now. It came back to him, as vivid as if it had been yesterday. That broiling afternoon; street cars and trucks roaring so you couldn’t hear; he at his window and the girl, covered by some filmy silk thing, gasping at hers; their exchange of smiles. He had made a street corner rendezvous by signs, though at first she had laughed, shaking her head. All that — the beginning.

The beginning. And how was it going to end?

She was expecting him to drop in at the Gold Slipper to-night, but he wasn’t going to be there. To-morrow, she’d be certain then, he’d come around to the flat. Would he, though? A chill came on him again. Who could say what to-morrow had in store?

Hungrily he watched her shadow on that shade down the line, passing, repassing, slim and quick. He prayed that she’d come to the window and look out; then he’d switch his own light on and try to show her, in pantomime, that circumstances prevented the keeping of dates just now.

But she didn’t come. Her light went out presently, and even that tantalizing shadow of her was gone.

He smoked a cigarette in darkness before he reached for the switch and threw himself on his bed with a much-thumbed book.

“Money in Gas,” was the book’s title, and it was further described on its cover as “A Practical Guide for the Independent Filling Station Owner.”

III

In the dressing room at the Gold Slipper, toward midnight, a large, glittering blond lady — the famous Tennessee Martin, in person and extremely so — cast eyes of concern upon the prettiest of all her dancing subhostesses, Miss Dorcas O’Donnell.

“Why,” she asked, “so pensive? It’s early for a headache.”

The slender, dark girl made a grimace of repugnance.

“Honey,” she said, “I’m not here for headaches. Not since I collected a real one, once, and missed a date. They could sail the Leviathan right up to the bandstand on all the loaded apple-juice I’ve spilled to-night.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

The girl sighed.

“Everything. This time — a date’s missed me. A very special one.”

“Love, deary,” said Miss Martin, “is a disease. And you’re a hospital case, if I ever saw one. But cheer up. The boy friend will be here when he gets here. You ought to know there’s lots of night work in a profession like his. Hearts may ache, and women may weep, but somebody’s got to go down to the sea in speed boats!”

Dorcas O’Donnell shuddered.

“I can’t laugh it off,” she protested. “I’ve got a feeling that — something’s happened. It wasn’t just the every day risk that Lefty was going to face when I saw him this afternoon. He was bound to have a showdown with the man lie’s been working for — and that man’s a killer, Tennessee! It’s no secret. If I mentioned who he was, and Lefty was yours, you’d be in a panic, too. I tell you, I’m scared to death of what I’m going to see in the papers when I leave here.”

The Gold Slipper’s buxom hostess-in-chief threw an arm around the girl’s trembling white shoulder.

“Then the best thing, chickie,” she comforted, “is to leave before the papers are out. Get on your things this minute, and taxi along home. And don’t sit up when you get there, thinking horrible things that’ll be funny in the morning. Go to sleep. Rest is what your nerves need.”

Good advice — but how could she follow it? Across the dingy yards the starlight showed her Lefty Byrne’s window, standing open. Did it mean, as it always had before, that he was there? If he was, why hadn’t he come uptown? Why, when he knew she’d be anxiously waiting, holding her breath, anguished with fear for him?

It was dawn before she dozed; but at nine she was up, heavy-eyed, and at the window again.

A glad cry escaped her. Lefty Byrne was at his own window. There, and in just the pose of that first day of theirs, a leg thrown up on the sill, a cigarette in his fingers.

He saw her at the moment of her appearance, and she divined he had been watching for her. He waved; she beckoned; he shook his head — and she couldn’t understand that.

Lefty was trying to make her understand; working in what seemed a frenzy of gesticulation to get some message to her across that void filled with the racket of the “L” trains and the flat-wheeled surface cars, the straining trucks and the ceaselessly honking smaller fry of East Side traffic.

He pointed down, and shook his head. He pointed behind him and shook his head. He took out a billfold, held it upside down, open, empty, and shook his head again.

“Come over!” she called desperately. “Come over and tell me!”

Her voice was a whisper in a thunderstorm. He couldn’t hear her. She knew he couldn’t. But he could guess. He spread his hands helplessly. That meant he couldn’t come maybe. Why?

While she was trying to puzzle that out, he vanished from the window. Just before he vanished he had turned quickly, as if some one had come into the room behind him. What did that mean? Why hadn’t he stopped for a good-by wave?

Impulse took her to the telephone when, after long minutes, Lefty hadn’t reappeared.

It was Coats who answered her ring at the garage. He’d been drinking; his voice was thick and surly, but it smoothed when she spoke her name.

“Why, no, kiddo,” he said. “Lefty ain’t around just now.” He laughed. “Anybody else do?”

She stiffened at the lie.

“Where,” she asked, “is he, then?”

Coats hesitated.

“He’s out on a little errand. Ought to be back any minute. Why don’t you come over an’ wait for him?”

She could think of several good reasons why she shouldn’t, but swiftly she was aware of a still bigger and better reason for not presenting them. Around at the garage she might find the answer to the mystery.

“Maybe,” she said, with a thin echo of that widely-imitated, engagingly amiable gurgle introduced in night club circles by Miss Tennessee Martin, “maybe I will!”

She bathed and dressed quickly, and she had a trained smile for big Sam Coats when she walked into his office half an hour later.

“Lefty ain’t here yet,” he told her, grinning back. “But sit down. Make yourself at home. He ain’t the only one that likes to look at you.”

She had girded on her armor of the cabaret for him and took it wide-eyed.

“I thought you were different, Sam,” she murmured. “All business. But you’re like all of ’em. I guess the man doesn’t live who won’t try to hand you a line.”

Coats’s widening smile showed a glint of gold in his upper jaw.

“The big question before the American girl to-day,” he said, “isn’t the men’s line, but what they’re willing to hand with it. I’ll spend money, any day, on mine. Sweet boys are all right, but it takes a fur coat to keep a lady warm when the mercury’s down.”

Dorcas O’Donnell sighed.

“Some get furs, and some don’t,” she said. “You’d be surprised how the big-hearted customers up at the club shower them on me between two and five any morning — in promises. But whenever the delivery cars stop in front of my door, it’s something C. O. D. they’ve got for little Dorcas.”

Coats chuckled.

“I was going to say something. I guess I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Lefty Byrne mightn’t like it.”

Her gaze was a baby stare, steady and gently thoughtful, and provocative.

“But,” she suggested demurely, “Lefty isn’t here.”

Sam Coats guffawed and slapped his knee.

“That’s good! Well if men are the same — ain’t women?” He swung around and sidled his chair along behind the desk. “I like ’em smart, kiddo. Up on their toes. Out to grab what they can. But — on the square — I always thought you was too good-lookin’ to be anything but dumb.”

The girl evaded his reaching hand, but her smiled stayed put.

“Don’t!” she whispered. “Not here. Lefty—”

Coats’s eyes narrowed.

“Yeah?” he questioned. “Lefty?”

“He... he might be coming back.”

She drew further from him in the pause, while the Big Shot’s blunt fingers began softly to drum the desk.

“Listen,” he said, “listen here, kiddo. Tell me th’ truth. Would you care a lot if he didn’t? Would you mind it, that is, if somebody with a real roll was ready to be good to you?”

She lost the smile at that — gasped.

“Wh-what do you mean?”

The gold tooth flashed again.

“You heard me. You’ve got ears — and brains. A skirt like you could dazzle this town if she had things. If she was hooked up right. What th’ hell are you alive for? Just to sit around and help the butter-an’-egg men get ready for an ice bag in the morn-in’? Or to waste time on a cheap gun that ain’t got nerve enough to stick with his racket?”

The girl straightened.

“That’s — Lefty? Where is he, Sam? Why are you talking that way about him? About him not — coming back?”

Coats had caught himself, and his eyes were veiled to her.

“That’s somethin’,” he said, and coughed, “somethin’ that could be taken care of. I got connections in Florida — and believe me, he’ll go where the best dough is.” He got up and crossed to a filing cabinet; pulled open one of the steel drawers, and from the drawer produced a bottle and glasses. “How about a ‘first to-day’?” he asked. “This is the McCoy, kiddo. Stuff you never get uptown. My own private stock, with th’ music of th’ bagpipes in every drop.”

She had started to refuse, but something was buzzing suddenly in the back of her mind. She had to stay, and that meant she must play the game as nightly she played it at the Gold Slipper. Play it the Spartan Tennessee’s way, with a glass in one hand and the reins firmly in the other, until she knew what was coming up for Lefty.

Out by the garage door, Walsh and two or three others still were loitering. Coming in, she’d wondered why they were sticking so close to-day with the big car; wondered why they had been so set on avoiding her eye. Now, after that sodden miscue of Coats’s, terror was throbbing in her throat.

Yes; she must stand by. If she could only make a party of it, run it in her maddest madcap manner, get them whooping it as she knew they often did, get upstairs to Lefty—

Staring at her with the bottle uncorked, big Sam Coats said: “Well, what do you say?”

She gave him the Tennessee look and the Tennessee gurgle.

“If it’s as good as you say it is, pour me one as big as I ought to want it.” Then, as if it had been a swift inspiration, she wanted to know: “How about having the boys in?”

“Why?” grunted Coats.

Both coolness and promise were in her slow glance.

“I’m a hard woman in a hard world, Sammy,” she drawled. “Starting now, when anybody talks fur coat to me — I want witnesses!”

Coats’s eyes went wide.

“What a gold digger my baby’s turnin’ out to be!” He gave her an ecstatic squeeze in passing, and roared happily through the office door: “Gang! Front and center!”

IV

It called for a flawless technique, the handling of that day’s wild whoopee party in Sam Coats’s garage, for it was a party epic in its potentialities. The Scotch, as plentiful as powerful, early proved a distillation not only of bagpipe music, but of stout Highland combativeness. Twice the thick-shouldered Mr. Walsh had to separate two of his partners of the touring car crew, and once Walsh himself was at the verge of a clash with Coats.

Ardently wishing they’d slaughter one another, but uncertain whether they would, Dorcas O’Donnell vindicated herself as an accomplished mistress of ceremonies by directing the removal of the radio from the office to the garage floor.

“I love to dance,” she shrilled, “when I don’t have to. And what a stag line!”

Coats, maudlin by then, claimed her first.

“When th’ rest a’ you dance,” he hiccoughed, “is when I’m too tired. Whose liquor is it, anyhow? And whose joint — an’ whose dame?”

“You ought to ask Lefty,” some one suggested.

“Shut up!” Coats roared then. “Lefty ain’t here, see?”

But Dorcas O’Donnell had marked the source of the jeering invitation, and that was the man she danced with next.

“What’s the joke about Lefty?” she asked him when they were at the far end of the floor.

Her partner’s tongue was almost, but not quite as loose, as she had hoped it would be.

“Joke?” he said. “Well, if you call it that. Him an’ Sam had an arg’ment about some coin — and Sam’s got the coin. Playin’ close to his vest with it; I’ll say he is. Under his vest. It’s in his money belt now, next to his skin.”

“Yes?” the girl breathed. “And what about Lefty?”

The well had run dry.

“That’s somethin’,” the rum runner told her, belatedly cautious, “that you’ll have to ask Coats.”

When she danced next with Coats, she did try again. But, “He’s gone on erran’ — a long erran’!” was all he told her.

A while after that, Coats went into the office and called one of his men — the straightest one, except for Walsh, of the crowd. The girl, close to the door, overheard an interchange that froze her heart.

“Now, lissen here, Buck,” Coats was saying in a hoarse whisper. “This goes. My mind’s made up. I’m tired a’ hearin’ that broad with her Lefty this and Lefty that, an’ ‘Where the hell is Lefty?’ ”

“Yeah?” said Buck. “It goes — but, what?”

“The works!” snarled Coats. “You’re goin’ to take him out in the ear to-night, and you ain’t goin’ to bring him back. Give him a water ride, see? Take him ’way out an’ sink him. I told the skirt I might be sendin’ him to Florida. Well, I will — inside a shark!”

He came from the office, weaving, to find the life of the party faint and white.

“What’s the matter, kiddo? Gettin’ sick? An’ me just after openin’ another case!”

She rallied bravely.

“No; I’m just beginning to have a good time. But we need more girls. I was just thinking — there’s a couple over in my house. Hostesses. They’d love to come over.”

“Fine!” endorsed Coats. “Phone ’em.”

“I can’t. They haven’t a phone. I’ll have to go after them.”

The host glowered and grunted.

“You wouldn’t come back!”

“I will. I promise. Won’t you believe me — Sammy?”

“All right,” Coats said. “I believe you. But I’ll send Walsh with you, just for luck.”

Walsh went, but the girl left him waiting on the sidewalk when they had turned her corner. Breathless, she flew up the stairs to her own small flat and to the rear window.

She wasn’t disappointed. Lefty was over there, looking out — looking for her, patient after the hours.

“Honey boy!” she screamed at him. “You’ve got to get out of there!”

He didn’t get it. Didn’t get a word of it. Didn’t get the frantic signs she made. With only a couple of hundred feet between them, they were a world apart. Precariously close, she realized with a dry sob, to two worlds apart!

And then at the height of her desperation, she thought of her stratagem of another day, and saw a way, thought of that trick of hers to explain to Lefty why she wasn’t meeting him one afternoon after a big night uptown, and went flying to — her laundry bag!

V

She kept her promise. Within a half hour after she had left big Sam Coats, she had returned to him, Walsh at her side.

“Too bad,” she told him, as she had told Walsh. “One of the girls didn’t get home last night, and her sister isn’t feeling well. I stopped to freshen up for a lone woman’s struggle.”

“Your funeral,” grinned Coats. “You missed a lot of drinks. Want to catch up?”

“And how!” cried Dorcas O’Donnell. She stooped to bring up the amplification on the radio until the music was a boiler shop roar, and caught big Sam’s arm. “Come on,” she urged. “Take one with me. My first in a long while.”

“Tootin’ I will,” Coats said, and stumbled after her into the office.

She closed the door, and shook her head at the bottle.

“No, wait,” she breathed. “What about that fur coat, Sam? What about — being in back of me? Did you mean it?”

“I said it,” he told her. “You treat me right, I’ll treat you right. I always do business that way.”

She nodded.

“Then I’ll tell you something. I know where Lefty is!”

“Huh?” Coats stared.

“He’s upstairs, in his room. I just saw him from — from the girl’s flat. He was at his window.”

Big Sam blinked.

“Was he? Well, it’s too bad. He wanted to keep out a’ sight. If you want it straight, he was hell for duckin’ you. You see, a fine chance come up for him to go to Florida — alone. He got wise to himself all of a sudden. Saw he’d be a sucker not to take it.”

The girl laughed.

“I should have a weeping spell!” she said in a voice as hard as Coats’s own. “It’s fifty-fifty. If Lefty’s got his way to make, I’ve got mine to make. Far as I’m concerned, he’s out of my life. Out like a light. There’s plenty of others. Plenty — and real men. Men with dollars to his nickels. He’s cheap. I’d like to tell him so. Tell him to his face!”

It was a great act and the befuddled Coats was getting a good kick out of it.

“Atta baby!” he encouraged. “You tell him, kiddo!”

The girl caught up his hands.

“No, no! I take that back!” she cried. “I never want to see him again. Wants to go to Florida, does he? For all of me, he can go ’way south of there. Go and stay. But I want him to know, Sam, just who’s quitting who. Listen! I’d write him his walking papers here and now, if—”

Coats had decided he liked her in the hysterical part. He wasn’t too far gone to congratulate himself she was that kind — the peppy kind that just blew off steam and tried to beat the man to it when he was ready to give her the gate. So much the better!

He picked her up at the pause.

“If — what?” he said.

“If you’d take his discharge up to him, Sammy,” she finished. “Serve it on him yourself. Right away, while I know just what I want to say to him.”

Big Sam’s arms circled her.

“Momma,” he exulted, “you sure rung the right messenger! Say, I won’t only hand Lefty the walkin’ papers. I’ll fix up his transportation for him — to-night!” He waved at the desk. “There’s paper an’ pen an’ ink. Go ahead. Poison him!”

She wrote just a couple of lines. They were ladylike but final in implication:

Coats gloated over the note.

“Thass the idea, kiddo!” he applauded. “Don’t ever waste words. Tell it to ’em snappy.”

He lumbered out of the office, turned his back on the scattered and flattening party and started unsteadily up the stairs.

VI

The key was in the outside of Lefty Byrne’s door, and Lefty was waiting just inside when the Big Shot fumbled at the lock. A heavy wash basin was in his hands, and it came crashing down on Coats’s head as he entered.

For a second Coats stood waving, then he slumped. He was out cold. Byrne, bending over him, ripped open his vest and his shirt, swiftly unbuckled the money belt under them, and took from it the same five thousand dollar bills that he had been forced to give up.

When he had stuffed them into his pocket, he glanced at the note which Coats had dropped. It brought the ghost of a smile to his lips.

“Thanks, lots!” he said aloud. “You’re the smartest girl in America, honey! You bet I know where to go — and how!”

He patted the Big Shot’s pockets, transferred a pistol to his own, and whisked the sheets from his bed. When he had knotted their ends together, he collected sheets from other beds along the “cell block” and tied them in, too, the squawk of the overtimed radio and a bedlam of drunken shouting coming up to him as he worked.

It was in Walsh’s room that he made his rope of sheets fast to the bed. That room looked out on the alley, and there were no fences to climb below. Out the window he went and down.

Three minutes after Coats’s arrival with the note, Lefty was in front of Dorcas O’Donnell’s house with a waiting taxi. Dorcas came scurrying around the corner presently.

“It was kind a’ tough one to read,” Lefty grinned as she climbed hurriedly into the cab. “But it percolated. I crowned Sam, an’ I got my money. Let’s go places.”

Her face again was ashy as she snuggled to him.

“Far places,” said she.

Nearly a half hour had passed before Walsh, always more careful with his drinks than the others, missed the Big Shot.

“Hey!” he shouted, coming out of a doze. “What’s become a’ Sam?”

An answer came hazily through the shriek of the radio.

“Him an’ the skirt went out.”

But the gunman called Buck recollected otherwise.

“No,” he corrected, staggering to Walsh. “They didn’t no such thing. That’s a lie, an’ whoever said it can get as tough as he wants to. Sam went upstairs, thass where Sam went. An’ the dame said she was goin’ to the corner to bring in some san’wiches. But, hell! That’s a long time ago!”

Walsh sprang up.

“Say!” he exclaimed, sobered. “We better see what’s happened. If Sam tangled with Lefty in the shape lie’s in, then plenty may of. Shut off that damn music box!”

There was no sound from above. Walsh, gun in hand, leaped for the stairs.

On the third story he found Coats. The Big Shot was sitting on the floor of Lefty’s room, with the door wide open behind him. He was rubbing his head. His eyes were open, but there was only a profound stupefaction in them.

“I... I was ganged,” he stuttered. “An’ s-somebody copped my dough.”

“Where’s Lefty?” Walsh demanded.

Coats couldn’t tell him, but he found out for himself — saw that hawser of sheets moored to his own bed and leading out the window.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “about Lefty. He’s blew!”

That materially assisted the Big Shot’s recovery. Rage convulsed him.

“What d’you mean, blew?” he thundered. “You guys let him walk, did you?”

“He didn’t walk,” said Walsh. “He slid. He went out my winda into the alley.”

Coats struggled to his feet.

“Then he was tipped!” he accused. “Somebody told him he was in for the works.” His jaw dropped. “Say — that dame! Did she come up here with me and give me th’ double cross?”

“Nope. She went out.”

Walsh was at Lefty Byrne’s window, looking across the yards. He knew Dorcas O’Donnell’s window, for Lefty once had pointed it out to him. On that window his eyes were fixed. A clothes line leading from it to a pole in the center of the noisy court was strung with what struck him, after a moment, as a preposterous assortment of clothing.

His gaze widened as he stared, and suddenly he snorted.

“My Gawd!” he wheezed. “She’s went and pulled that gag with the wash again. An’ maybe she didn’t hand Byrne a lineful this time!”

Coats came up behind him.

“What th’ hell are you talkin’ about?” he snapped.

Walsh pointed at the clothes line.

“There! That’s where Lefty got his dope!”

The Big Shot looked hard at him.

“Somebody’s cuckoo.”

Walsh laughed wildly.

“Somebody’s slick,” he amended between gasps. “It’ll all come out in the wash, they say, and this is once when it did! Listen, Sam. I mind one time when Dorcas O’Donnell fell down on a date with Lefty Byrne. Usually she ducks the heavy wine parties, see? — but she’d got into one where she had to drink plenty. And d’yuh know the way she tipped off Lefty what was the matter with her? She hung out some sheets on her wash line, to signal him she was woozy. Three of ’em, get it? So much as to tell him she was ‘three sheets in th’ wind!’ Ho, ho!”

“What a dame!” commended Coats. He stared at the O’Donnell clothes line again. “But what’s that got to do with — now?”

“It’s the tip off,” said Walsh, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. “Look at that line a’ hers, Sam. What do you see on it?”

“A lot a’ junk,” grunted Coats.

“Name some a’ the things, Sam.”

“You’re nuts. But... well, there’s one a’ them gadgets a broad wears inside her dress sometimes.”

Walsh nodded.

“Sure. That’s right. They call it a ‘slip.’ And what else do you see?”

Coats cursed him.

“Is this an eye test? But it’s a crazy wash at that, when you come to look it over. The upstairs part of a couple pyjama suits without no pants. An’ the half of a pair a’ socks without the soul mate.”

“Fine,” approved Walsh. “Two pyjama coats and a sock. Also, a white belt and an item a’ underclothes. And two sheets and a wash tie, and a lace collar. But you don’t start readin’ in the middle of a line, do you? Read this one from left to right, now!”

“I’ll call a doctor,” Coats offered. “Stop your laughin’. You’re drunk!”

“Who wouldn’t laugh?” clucked Walsh. “I’ll read it to you myself — left to right, the way the line faces Lefty’s winda here. No, I’ll do better. I’ll write it out for yuh.”

He scribbled rapidly on the back of an envelope and handed the envelope to Coats. Reading it, the Big Shot collapsed heavily on the edge of the bed.

“Yeah,” he murmured mournfully “I could sure a’ used that dame! She beats me. She played me right into it.”

Once more, gone speechless, he stared at Walsh’s transcription of the O’Donnell “wash.” It was there, an out-and-out wigwag as the quick-eyed Walsh had written and spaced it:

A sickly grin spread over the Big Shot’s face.

“Well, I dunno,” he said. “Maybe I’m lucky at that. Cop a dame that works as fast as that, an’ she owns you. Me, I’ll pick ’em dumb an’ be general!”