I said loudly:
'Wait, Noonan. We're going at this wrong. We won't get anywhere unless everybody comes clean. Otherwise we'll all be worse off than before. MacSwain killed Tim, and you know it.'
He started at me with dumbfounded eyes. He gaped. He couldn't understand what I had done to him.
I looked at the others, tried to look virtuous as hell, asked:
'That's settled, isn't it? Let's get the rest of the kicks squared.' I addressed Pete the Finn: 'How do you feel about yesterday's accident to your warehouse and the four men?'
'One hell of an accident,' he rumbled.
I explained:
'Noonan didn't know you were using the joint. He went there thinking it empty, just to clear the way for a job in town. Your men shot first, and then he really thought he had stumbled into Thaler's hideout. When he found he'd been stepping in your puddle he lost his head and touched the place off.'
Thaler was watching me with a hard small smile in eyes and mouth. Reno was all dull stolidity. Elihu Willsson was leaning toward me, his old eyes sharp and wary. I don't know what Noonan was doing. I couldn't afford to look at him. I was in a good spot if I played my hand right, and in a terrible one if I didn't.
'The men, they get paid for taking chances,' Pete the Finn said. 'For the other, twenty-five grand will make it right.'
Noonan spoke quickly, eagerly:
'All right, Pete, all right, I'll give it to you.'
I pushed my lips together to keep from laughing at the panic in his voice.
I could look at him safely now. He was licked, broken, willing to do anything to save his fat neck, or to try to. I looked at him.
He wouldn't look at me. He sat down and looked at nobody. He was busy trying to look as if he didn't expect to be carved apart before he got away from these wolves to whom I had handed him.
I went on with the work, turning to Elihu Willsson:
'Do you want to squawk about your bank being knocked over, or do you like it?'
Max Thaler touched my arm and suggested:
'We could tell better maybe who's entitled to beef if you'd give us what you've got first.'
I was glad to.
'Noonan wanted to nail you,' I told him, 'but he either got word, or expected to get word, from Yard and Willsson here to let you alone. So he thought if he had the bank looted and framed you for it, your backers would ditch you, and let him go after you right. Yard, I understand, was supposed to put his 0. K. on all the capers in town. You'd be cutting into his territory, and gyping Willsson. That's how it would look. And that was supposed to make them hot enough that they'd help Noonan cop you. He didn't know you were here.
'Reno and his mob were in the can. Reno was Yard's pup, but he didn't mind crossing up his headman. He already had the idea that he was about ready to take the burg away from Lew.' I turned to Reno and asked: 'Isn't that it?'
He looked at me woodenly and said:
'You're telling it.'
I continued telling it:
'Noonan fakes a tip that you're at Cedar Hill, and takes all the coppers he can't trust out there with him, even cleaning the traffic detail out of Broadway, so Reno would have a clear road. McGraw and the bulls that are in on the play let Reno and his mob sneak out of the hoosegow, pull the job, and duck back in. Nice thing in alibis. Then they got sprung on bail a couple of hours later.
'It looks as if Lew Yard tumbled. He sent Dutch Jake WahI and some other boys out to the Silver Arrow last night to teach Reno and his pals not to take things in their own hands like that. But Reno got away, and got back to the city. It was either him or Lew then. He made sure which it would be by being in front of Lew's house with a gun when Lew came out this morning. Reno seems to have had the right dope, because I notice that right now he's holding down a chair that would have been Lew Yard's if Lew hadn't been put on ice.'
Everybody was sitting very still, as if to call attention to how still they were sitting. Nobody could count on having any friends among those present. It was no time for careless motions on anybody's part.
If what I had said meant anything one way or the other to Reno he didn't show it.
Thaler whispered softly:
'Didn't you skip some of it?'
'You mean the part about Jerry?' I kept on being the life of the party: 'I was coming back to that. I don't know whether he got away from the can when you crushed out, and was caught later, or whether he didn't get away, or why. And I don't know how willingly he went along on the bank caper. But he did go along, and he was dropped and left in front of the bank because he was your right bower, and his being killed there would pin the trick to you. He was kept in the car till the get-away was on. Then he was pushed out, and was shot in the back. He was facing the bank, with his back to the car, when he got his.'
Thaler looked at Reno and whispered:
'Well?'
Reno looked with dull eyes at Thaler and asked calmly:
'What of it?'
