didn't know what he was doing in Paulton. He'd come into the bowling alley one day about a month ago and said he was living in Paulton. He didn't say what he was doing. He'd asked me to look him up if I ever got there. That, I said, was what I'd been trying to do.
The chief's pale eyes slid over the two dicks. “Beat it,” he said.
They went out. The chief took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at it. The end was chewed. He tossed it in a brass spittoon and got another from his vest. He found one for me, too. I took it, bit off the end and lit it. It was an expensive Havana. We blew smoke at each other for a while.
The chief asked casually: “When'd you leave St Louis?”
I found my railway ticket and gave it to him. “This morning.”
He examined the ticket, looking at both sides of it. “Then you couldn't have killed him,” he said.
“I wouldn't kill him,” I said. “I wanted to drink beer with him.”
The chief stared out the window.
I said: “If I'd shot him, would I come around later in the day?”
He sucked at the cigar. “People do funny things.”
“Not that funny,” I said.
I showed him a card that said I was a representative of the Acme Hardware Company of St Louis. That seemed to satisfy him about me. He told me about the shooting. He said somebody had shot Mr. Johnson with a rifle from the outside of the house. The landlady had heard him come in about four-thirty in the morning, and a little later she'd heard something heavy fall in his room. There weren't any other noises so she didn't worry about it. Mr. Johnson didn't come down for breakfast, but she thought he was sleeping and didn't call him. When he missed lunch, too, she went up and found his body.
“Anybody hear the shot?” I asked.
“The rifle must have had a silencer,” the chief said, beginning to look bored.
I said: “That's damn queer.”
“I figure,” be said, “that Mr. Johnson was playing around with a woman. Maybe a married woman.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and tapped ashes into the spittoon. “What else would keep a man up so late?”
I laughed heartily. He went on:
“And I figure the husband, or the brother, followed him home and plugged him from the outside with a rifle while he was undressing.”
I said: “Husbands don't usually have rifles with silencers lying around.”
“That's so,” the chief said. His eyes met mine for a second, then went back to the window. “Where're you staying?”
“At the Arkady.”
“If we want you, we'll let you know.”
The pasty-faced cop was waiting outside. He pointed out the way to the hotel. “It's only five blocks,” he said.
I thanked him and started, out. The sun was low, but it was still hot. There was no breeze at all. I thought what lousy cops they were, not even knowing enough to frisk me. I hated cops anyway, especially dumb ones. I wondered what they'd have done if I had told them Oke Johnson was my partner.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN I got into my room I wanted a drink bad. Oke Johnson had been a shock, even though we'd never got on together. You don't have a partner killed every day. I telephoned for the Negro. He came to the door and I told him to get me a quart of bourbon and some magazines. Film Fun and some of those others with photographs of half-naked babes, and Black Mask. I gave him a fin.
The room was like a tent in the sun. I could feel the heat coming right through the window-shades. I got out of my clothes and put my revolver in a bureau drawer. On my way to the shower I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and stopped to look at my belly. The knife wound was healing fine. There would be a scar, but what the hell! What's a scar on the belly? I saw I was getting bigger. Every time I looked at myself naked I saw that. It wasn't all fat; the flesh seemed hard enough, but it still kept coming. I thought I'd probably hit the scales at two hundred and forty. That was twenty pounds too much. I thought, well, maybe the heat will take it off. Or those baths downstairs. I went to the shower and turned on the cold water. I got in. It felt fine.
The Negro knocked while I was in the shower. I put a towel around my middle and let him in. He had a bottle of Old Crow and four magazines. I gave him the sixty cents change.
“Charles, it would be nice now if you got me that blonde from the Vineyard.”
He rolled his eyes. “You don't want her, Mister Craven.”
“How do you know what I want?”
“They say that blonde's poison.”
“Listen, Charles, if blondes were poison, I'd have died thirty years ago.”
He bugged out his eyes at me and left. I mixed a drink and went back in the shower. I drank under the water. Then I came out and fixed another drink and lay on the bed and thought about Oke Johnson until I got tired. In a way I was real sorry he was dead, especially as it put me on the spot. But I couldn't go after his murderer. There was that job to do first.
I drank and smoked and looked at the dolls in the movie magazines. Then I looked at the brassiere ads. Then I tried to read a story in Black Mask. It was about a G-man I'd read about before. He was different from the G-men
