Four minutes later he opened the door again and said:
'Inside, you.'
I followed him upstairs to old Elihu's bedroom.
My client sat up in bed with his love letter crushed in one round pink fist, its envelope in the other.
His short white hair bristled. His round eyes were as much red as blue. The parallel lines of his mouth and chin almost touched. He was in a lovely humor.
As soon as he saw me he shouted:
'So after all your brave talking you had to conic back to the old pirate to have your neck saved, did you?'
I said I didn't anything of the sort. I said if he was going to talk like a sap he ought to lower his voice so the people in Los Angeles wouldn't learn what a sap he was.
The old boy let his voice out another notch, bellowing:
'Because you've stolen a letter or two that don't belong to you, you needn't think you--'
I put fingers in my ears. They didn't shut out the noise, but they insulted him into cutting the bellowing short.
I took the fingers out and said:
'Send the flunkey away so we can talk. You won't need him. I'm not going to hurt you.'
He said, 'Get out,' to the chauffeur.
The chauffeur, looking at me without fondness, left us, closing the door.
Old Elihu gave me the rush act, demanding that I surrender the rest of the letters immediately, wanting to know loudly and profanely where I had got them, what I was doing with them, threatening me with this, that, and the other, but mostly just cursing me.
I didn't surrender the letters. I said:
'I took them from the man you hired to recover them. A tough break for you that he had to kill the girl.'
Enough red went out of the old man's face to leave it normally pink. He worked his lips over his teeth, screwed up his eyes at me, and said:
'Is that the way you're going to play it?'
His voice came comparatively quiet from his chest. He had settled down to fight.
I pulled a chair over beside the bed, sat down, put as much amusement as I could in a grin, and said:
'That's one way.'
He watched me, working his lips, saying nothing. I said:
'You're the damndest client I ever had. What do you do? You hire me to clean town, change your mind, run out on me, work against me until I begin to look like a winner, then get on the fence, and now when you think I'm licked again, you don't even want to let me in the house. Lucky for me I happened to run across those letters.'
He said: 'Blackmail.'
I laughed and said:
'Listen who's naming it. All right, call it that.' I tapped the edge of the bed with a forefinger. 'I'm not licked, old top. I've won. You came crying to me that some naughty men had taken your little city away from you. Pete the Finn, Lew Yard, Whisper Thaler, and Noonan. Where are they now?
'Yard died Tuesday morning, Noonan the same night, Whisper Wednesday morning, and the Finn a little while ago. I'm giving your city back to you whether you want it or not. If that's blackmail, 0. K. Now here's what you're going to do. You're going to get hold of your mayor, I suppose the lousy village has got one, and you and he are going to phone the governor-- Keep still until I get through.
'You're going to tell the governor that your city police have got out of hand, what with bootleggers sworn in as officers, and so on. You're going to ask him for help--the national guard would be best. I don't know how various ruckuses around town have come out, but I do know the big boys--the ones you were afraid of--are dead. The ones that had too much on you for you to stand up to them. There are plenty of busy young men working like hell right now, trying to get into the dead men's shoes. The more, the better. They'll make it easier for the white-collar soldiers to take hold while everything is disorganized. And none of the substitutes are likely to have enough on you to do much damage.
'You're going to have the mayor, or the governor, whichever it comes under, suspend the whole Personville police department, and let the mailorder troops handle things till you can organize another. I'm told that the mayor and the governor are both pieces of your property. They'll do what you tell them. And that's what you're going to tell them. It can be done, and it's got to be done.
'Then you'll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again. If you don't do it, I'm going to turn these love letters of yours over to the newspaper buzzards, and I don't mean your Herald crew s--the press associations. I got the letters from Dawn. You'll have a lot of fun proving that you didn't hire him to recover them, and that he didn't kill the girl doing it. But the fun you'll have is nothing to the fun people will have reading these letters. They're hot. I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.'
I stopped talking.
The old man was shaking, but there was no fear in his shaking. His face was purple again. He opened his mouth and roared:
'Publish them and be damned!'
I took them out of my pocket, dropped them on his bed, got up from my chair, put on my hat, and said:
