coppers. But Pete's dead now and his racket has gone blooey.'
When I climbed out the window the old man was standing in front of the cases, looking at them with greedy eyes while he counted on his fingers.
'Well?' Mickey asked when I returned to him and his coupe.
I took out the bottle of anything but Canadian Club, pulled the cork, passed it to him, and then put a shot into my own system.
He asked, 'Well?' again.
I said: 'Let's try to find the old Redman warehouse.'
He said: 'You're going to ruin yourself some time telling people too much,' and started the ear moving.
Three blocks farther up the street we saw a faded sign, Redman Company. The building under the sign was long, low, and narrow, with corrugated iron roof and few windows.
'We'll leave the boat around the corner,' I said. 'And you'll go with me this time. I didn't have a whole lot of fun by myself last trip.'
When we climbed out of the coupe, an alley ahead promised a path to the warehouse's rear. We took it.
A few people were wandering through the streets, but it was still too early for the factories that filled most of this part of town to come to life.
At the rear of our building we found something interesting. The back door was closed. Its edge, and the edge of the frame, close to the lock, were scarred. Somebody had worked there with a jimmy.
Mickey tried the door. It was unlocked. Six inches at a time, with pauses between, lie pushed it far enough back to let us squeeze in.
When we squeezed in we could hear a voice. We couldn't make out what the voice was saying. All we could hear was the faint rumble of a distant man's voice, with a suggestion of quarrelsomeness in it.
Mickey pointed a thumb at the door's scar and whispered.
'Not coppers.'
I took two steps inside, keeping my weight on my rubber heels. Mickey followed, breathing down the back of my neck.
Ted Wright had told me Whisper's hiding place was in the back, upstairs. The distant rumbling voice could have been coming from there.
I twisted my face around to Mickey and asked:
'Flashlight?'
He put it in my left hand. I had my gun in my right. We crept forward.
The door, still a foot open, let in enough light to show us the way across this room to a doorless doorway. The other side of the doorway was black.
I flicked the light across the blackness, found a door, shut off the light, and went forward. The next squirt of light showed us steps leading up.
We went up the steps as if we were afraid they would break under our feet.
The rumbling voice had stopped. There was something else in the air. I didn't know what. Maybe a voice not quite loud enough to be heard, if that means anything.
I had counted nine steps when a voice spoke clearly above us. It said:
'Sure, I killed the bitch.'
A gun said something, the same thing four times, roaring like a i6inch rifle under the iron roof.
The first voice said: 'All right.'
By that time Mickey and I had put the rest of the steps behind us, had shoved a door out of the way, and were trying to pull Reno Starkey's hands away from Whisper's throat.
It was a tough job and a useless one. Whisper was dead.
Reno recognized me and let his hands go limp.
His eyes were as dull, his horse face as wooden, as ever.
Mickey carried the dead gambler to the cot that stood in one end of the room, spreading him on it.
The room, apparently once an office, had two windows. In their light I could see a body stowed under the cot--Dan Rolff. A Colt's service automatic lay in the middle of the floor.
Reno bent his shoulders, swaying.
'Hurt?' I asked.
'He put all four in me,' he said calmly, bending to press both forearms against his lower body.
'Get a doe,' I told Mickey.
'No good,' Reno said. 'I got no more belly left than Peter Collins.'
I pulled a folding chair over and sat him down on it, so he could lean forward and hold himself together. Mickey ran out and down the stairs.
'Did you know he wasn't croaked?' Reno asked.
