'Yep,' Murry said and the end of his nose got sharper.
'With Whisper?'
'I wasn't with him all the time.'
'Were you with him at the time of the shooting?'
'Nope.'
The chief's greenish eyes got smaller and brighter. He asked softly:
'You know where he was?'
'Nope.'
The chief sighed in a thoroughly satisfied way and leaned back in his chair.
'Damn it, Peak,' he said, 'you told us before that you were with him at the bar.'
'Yep, I did,' the lanky man admitted. 'But that don't mean nothing except that he asked me to and I didn't mind helping out a friend.'
'Meaning you don't mind standing a perjury rap?'
'Don't kid me.' Murry spit vigorously at the cuspidor. 'I didn't say nothing in no court rooms.'
'How about Jerry and George Kelly and O'Brien?' the chief asked. 'Did they say they were with him just because he asked them to?'
'O'Brien did. I don't know nothing about the others. I was going out of the bar when I run into Whisper, Jerry and Kelly, and went back to have a shot with them. Kelly told me Tim had been knocked off. Then Whisper says, 'It never hurts anybody to have an alibi. We were here all the time, weren't we?' and he looks at O'Brien, who's behind the bar. O'Brien says, 'Sure you was,' and when Whisper looks at me I say the same thing. But I don't know no reasons why I've got to cover him up nowadays.'
'And Kelly said Tim had been knocked off? Didn't say he had been found dead?'
''Knocked off' was the words he used.'
The chief said:
'Thanks, Peak. You oughtn't to have done like you did, but what's done is done. How are the kids?'
Murry said they were doing fine, only the baby wasn't as fat as he'd like to have him. Noonan phoned the prosecuting attorney's office and had Dart and a stenographer take Peak's story before he left.
Noonan, Dart and the stenographer set out for the City Hospital to get a complete statement from Myrtle Jennison. I didn't go along. I decided I needed sleep, told the chief I would see him later, and returned to the hotel.
XIII. --$200.10--
I had my vest unbuttoned when the telephone bell rang.
It was Dinah Brand, complaining that she had been trying to get me since ten o'clock.
'Have you done anything on what I told you?' she asked.
'I've been looking it over. It seems pretty good. I think maybe I'll crack it this afternoon.'
'Don't. Hold it till I see you. Can you come up now?'
I looked at the vacant white bed and said, 'Yes,' without much enthusiasm.
Another tub of cold water did me so little good that I almost fell asleep in it.
Dan Rolff let me in when I rang the girl's bell. He looked and acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened the night before. Dinah Brand came into the hall to help me off with my overcoat. She had on a tan woolen dress with a two-inch rip in one shoulder seam.
She took me into the living room. She sat on the Chesterfield beside me and said:
'I'm going to ask you to do something for me. You like me enough, don't you?'
I admitted that. She counted the knuckles of my left hand with a warm forefinger and explained:
'I want you to not do anything more about what I told you last night. Now wait a minute. Wait till I get through. Dan was right. I oughtn't sell Max out like that. It would be utterly filthy. Besides, it's Noonan you chiefly want, isn't it? Well, if you'll be a nice darling and lay off Max this time, I'll give you enough on Noonan to nail him forever. You'd like that better, wouldn't you? And you like me too much to want to take advantage of me by using information I gave you when I was mad at what Max had said, don't you?'
'What is the dirt on Noonan?' I asked.
She kneaded my biceps and murmured: 'You promise?'
'Not yet.'
She pouted at me and said:
'I'm off Max for life, on the level. You've got no right to make me turn rat.'
'What about Noonan?'
'Promise first.'
'No.'
