The gray-papered wall was spattered with blood, punctured with holes where a couple of bullets had gone all the way through. Jack Counihan’s young eyes picked out a stain on the paper that wasn’t accidental. It was close to the floor, beside the Shivering Kid, and the Kid’s right hand was stained with blood. He had written on the wall before he died—with fingers dipped in his own and Toots Salda’s blood. The letters in the words showed breaks and gaps where his fingers had run dry, and the letters were crooked and straggly, because he must have written them in the dark.
By filling in the gaps, allowing for the kinks, and guessing where there weren’t any indications to guide us, we got two words: “Big Flora.”
“They don’t mean anything to me,” Duff said, “but it’s a name and most of the names we have belong to dead men now, so it’s time we were adding to our list.”
“What do you make of it?” asked bullet-headed O’Gar, detective-sergeant in the Homicide Detail, looking at the bodies. “Their pals got the drop on them, lined them against the wall, and the sharpshooter in the kitchen shot ’em down—bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing?”
“It reads that way,” the rest of us agreed.
“Ten of ’em came here from Fillmore Street,” I said. “Six stayed here. Four went to another house—where part of ’em are now cutting down the other part. All that’s necessary is to trail the corpses from house to house until there’s only one man left—and he’s bound to play it through by croaking himself, leaving the loot to be recovered in the original packages. I hope you folks don’t have to stay up all night to find the remains of that last thug. Come on, Jack, let’s go home for some sleep.”
VII
It was exactly 5 a.m. when I separated the sheets and crawled into my bed. I was asleep before the last draw of smoke from my good night Fatima was out of my lungs. The telephone woke me at 5:15.
Fiske was talking: “Mickey Linehan just phoned that your Red O’Leary came home to roost half an hour ago.”
“Have him booked,” I said, and was asleep again by 5:17.
With the help of the alarm clock I rolled out of bed at nine, breakfasted, and went down to the detective bureau to see how the police had made out with the redhead. Not so good.
“He’s got us stopped,” the captain told me. “He’s got alibis for the time of the looting and for last night’s doings. And we can’t even vag the son-of-a-gun. He’s got means of support. He’s salesman for Humperdickel’s Universal Encyclopaediac Dictionary of Useful and Valuable Knowledge, or something like it. He started peddling these pamphlets the day before the knock-over, and at the time it was happening he was ringing doorbells and asking folks to buy his durned books. Anyway, he’s got three witnesses that say so. Last night, he was in a hotel from eleven to four-thirty this morning, playing cards, and he’s got witnesses. We didn’t find a durned thing on him or in his room.”
I borrowed the captain’s phone to call Jack Counihan’s house.
“Could you identify any of the men you saw in the cars last night?” I asked when he had been stirred out of bed.
“No. It was dark and they moved too fast. I could barely make sure of my chap.”
“Can’t, huh?” the captain said. “Well, I can hold him twenty-four hours without laying charges, and I’ll do that, but I’ll have to spring him then unless you can dig up something.”
“Suppose you turn him loose now,” I suggested after thinking through my cigarette for a few minutes. “He’s got himself all alibied up, so there’s no reason why he should hide out on us. We’ll let him alone all day—give him time to make sure he isn’t being tailed—and then we’ll get behind him tonight and stay behind him. Any dope on Big Flora?”
“No. That kid that was killed in Green Street was Bernie Bernheimer, alias the Motsa Kid. I guess he was a dip—he ran with dips—but he wasn’t very—”
The buzz of the phone interrupted him. He said, “Hello, yes,” and “Just a minute,” into the instrument, and slid it across the desk to me.
A feminine voice: “This is Grace Cardigan. I called your agency and they told me where to get you. I’ve got to see you. Can you meet me now?”
“Where are you?”
“In the telephone station on Powell Street.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.
Calling the agency, I got hold of Dick Foley and asked him to meet me at Ellis and Market right away. Then I gave the captain back his phone, said “See you later,” and went uptown to keep my dates.
Dick Foley was on his corner when I got there. He was a swarthy little Canadian who stood nearly five feet in his high-heeled shoes, weighed a hundred pounds minus, talked like a Scotchman’s telegram, and could have shadowed a drop of salt water from the Golden Gate to Hong Kong without ever losing sight of it.
“You know Angel Grace Cardigan?” I asked him.
He saved a word by shaking his head, no.
“I’m going to meet her in the telephone station. When I’m through, stay behind her. She’s smart, and she’ll be looking for you, so it won’t be duck soup, but do what you can.”
Dick’s mouth went down at the corners and one of his rare long-winded streaks hit him.
“Harder they look, easier they are,” he said.
He trailed along behind me while I went up to the station. Angel Grace was
