Top of the Heap

gave me freedom for a second. I threw myself against the door which had been slowly swinging shut.

Bill charged, but I had the door open and was out in the reception room, running across it with Bill in hot pursuit.

The door opened.

Bill yelled a warning. I flung myself into the opening just as Channing started in. I hit Channing as though he had been a line of scrimmage.

My momentum plowed him back, but I was slowed up enough for Bill’s long arm to reach out. His fingers grabbed the back of my coat collar.

Something hit me on the side of the head. A wave of blackness came up from my stomach. The bitter of nausea was in my mouth and my knees went limp.

I tried to hang onto the doorknob, turning around, jerking my head back as I did so.

I had a glimpse of Bill, his arm upraised, a blackjack looped around his wrist. There was no expression on his face. He even looked slightly bored.

Then the arm chopped down.

There was a blinding flash inside my brain and the floor smacked my face.

Chapter Seventeen

I had no idea what time it was when I regained consciousness. I was sprawled on a bed in a cheap, dingy bedroom equipped with an iron bedstead, a chair, a dresser, a washstand, and a wardrobe closet.

It was the sort of cheap furniture that could have been picked up at a secondhand store, completely different from the sumptuous, synthetic elegance of the gambling house — and yet a subconscious feeling existed that I was still within the confines of the gambling house.

Bill was sitting in a chair reading one of the so-called true detective magazines. The chair was almost directly beneath a single electric light hanging from a twisted green drop cord and covered with a green shade.

I moved my head and the room started rocking around as though it were a cabin on a boat in a heavy sea.

I felt sick.

Bill turned a page in the magazine, then looked over at me as a precautionary measure, saw my eyes were open, pushed a thick forefinger in between the pages of the magazine to mark his place, put the magazine down, and grinned. “How you feelin’, buddy?”

“Rotten.”

“You’ll feel better after a while.”

He got up out of the chair, picked a bottle from the dresser, unscrewed the top, and held it under my nose.

It was a smelling salt that did a great deal to revive me.

“Now, just take it easy,” Bill cautioned sympathetically. “You ain’t hurt bad. Just roughed up a bit. You’ll be all right.”

Gradually the throbbing left my head. The room steadied down and my head settled into a dull, constant ache with a sore spot above and back of my right ear that felt like a boil.

“What’s the idea?” I asked.

Bill read a couple more interesting paragraphs in the magazine before he looked up to answer the question. “I’m not supposed to talk.”

“What are you supposed to do?”

“Keep you right here.”

I said, “That could be pretty serious, you know, in case I wanted to get up and walk out.”

“How come?”

“Kidnapping.”

He grinned. “Save your breath, buddy.”

I swung around to a sitting position on the bed.

Bill watched me with quizzical interest.

I slowly got up.

Bill put down the magazine. “Now, listen, Lam,” he said, “you’re a nice egg but you’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan. You’ve led with your chin and you should be smart enough to know that that’s going to make trouble.”

“What’s Channing planning to do?” I asked.

“I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet.”

“He’s got to let me go sometime.”

The smile left Bill’s face. “Don’t be too sure about that. You don’t know some of the things I know.”

“What?”

“I told you I’m not talking. Now, shut up. I’m going to read. I won’t talk, and I don’t want to listen.”

“You’re working for Channing, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Like your job?”

“I’m getting by all right.”

“Loyalty is a fine thing,” I said, “but self-preservation is the first law of nature. You’d better start thinking about yourself.”

He laughed a heavy, mirthless laugh. “Look who’s talking. You’re You should have done that before you ever came into the joint.”

I said, “Do you think I’m foolish enough to have gone into this place unless I knew what I was doing?”

I saw interest in his eyes. “You were probably just taking a big chance.”

I said, “Don’t kid yourself. You know what’s been going on in the background. Gabby Garvanza wanted to muscle in on the situation up here. Gabby Garvanza got put on the spot and stopped a lot of lead. The trouble was the fellow who did the job was a little nervous and the bullets weren’t put in the right places to do the job.

“Now Gabby Garvanza’s well and he’s up here in San Francisco. What do you suppose he came up here for?”

Bill closed the magazine.

I said, “The real owner of this joint was George Tustin Bishop. Channing was simply the front who handled the accounts and juggled the figures around.

“Maurine Auburn had been Bishop’s girlfriend. He threw her over when he divorced his wife and married Irene, the strip-tease artist. Bishop was getting rid of both his wife and his mistress at the same time. That’s how wrapped up he was in Irene. Maurine took up with Gabby Garvanza, but she’d always carried a torch for George Bishop.

“Maurine was supposed to be Gabby Garvanza’s girl. Someone tried to rub Gabby out. Maurine saw the whole thing. She wasn’t hurt. No bullets were fired in her direction. She didn’t say anything. Why?”

I could see Bill was thinking.

“The reason,” I said, “could have been because the gunman was someone she liked very much. That someone liked her so well he wouldn’t want her hurt. He knew she liked him enough so that he knew he could depend on her not to squeal.

“Then Gabby began to get well, and Gabby knew who had shot him. Gabby started planning to go to San Francisco and even scores.

“Maurine wanted to warn her friend. She wanted to make certain that the next attempt on Gabby’s life was going to hit the jackpot. You think back on that story the newspaper tells about how she walked out on the people who were with her — bodyguards that had been provided by Gabby to see that nothing happened to her.

“She pretended to get crocked, to pick up with some fellow whom she met by chance — Well, I did a little checking of my own. That fellow was an aviator. Maurine picked him up, all right, but they didn’t go out making whoopee together. They dashed out to the airport. The fellow she’d picked up cranked up his plane and made a blue streak to a field up north of San Francisco, where the plane let down and Maurine and George Bishop were scheduled to have a secret confab and lay plans so Gabby Garvanza would cuddle up on a nice cold slab in the