“First we’ll stow this with the others,” I said.
After he had helped me do that I told him to lock the cell door. He did, and I took the key with one hand, his neck with the other. He squirmed like a snake while I ran my other hand over his clothes, removing the blackjack and a gun, and finding a money-belt around his waist.
“Take it off,” I ordered. “You don’t carry anything out with you.”
His fingers worked with the buckle, dragged the belt from under his clothes, let it fall on the floor. It was padded fat.
Still holding his neck, I took him upstairs, where the girl still sat frozen on the kitchen chair. It took a stiff hooker of whisky and a lot of words to thaw her into understanding that she was going out with the old man and that she wasn’t to say a word to anybody, especially not to the police.
“Where’s Reddy?” she asked when color had come back into her face—which had even at the worst never lost its niceness—and thoughts to her head.
I told her he was all right, and promised her he would be in a hospital before the morning was over. She didn’t ask anything else. I shooed her upstairs for her hat and coat, went with the old man while he got his hat, and then put the pair of them in the front ground-floor room.
“Stay here till I come for you,” I said, and I locked the door and pocketed the key when I went out.
XV
The front door and the front window on the ground floor had been planked and braced like the rear ones. I didn’t like to risk opening them, even though it was fairly light by now. So I went upstairs, fashioned a flag of truce out of a pillow-slip and a bed-slat, hung it out a window, waited until a heavy voice said, “All right, speak your piece,” and then I showed myself and told the police I’d let them in.
It took five minutes’ work with a hatchet to pry the front door loose. The chief of police, the captain of detectives, and half the force were waiting on the front steps and pavement when I got the door open. I took them to the cellar and turned Big Flora, Pogy and Red O’Leary over to them, with the money. Flora and Pogy were awake, but not talking.
While the dignitaries were crowded around the spoils I went upstairs. The house was full of police sleuths. I swapped greetings with them as I went through to the room where I had left Nancy Regan and the old gink. Lieutenant Duff was trying the locked door, while O’Gar and Hunt stood behind him.
I grinned at Duff and gave him the key.
He opened the door, looked at the old man and the girl—mostly at her—and then at me. They were standing in the center of the room. The old man’s faded eyes were miserably worried, the girl’s blue ones darkly anxious. Anxiety didn’t ruin her looks a bit.
“If that’s yours I don’t blame you for locking it up,” O’Gar muttered in my ear.
“You can run along now,” I told the two in the room. “Get all the sleep you need before you report for duty again.”
They nodded and went out of the house.
“That’s how your agency evens up?” Duff said. “The she-employees make up in looks for the ugliness of the he’s.”
Dick Foley came into the hall.
“How’s your end?” I asked.
“Finis. The Angel led me to Vance. He led here. I led the bulls here. They got him—got her.”
Two shots crashed in the street.
We went to the door and saw excitement in a police car down the street. We went down there. Bluepoint Vance, handcuffs on his wrists, was writhing half on the seat, half on the floor.
“We were holding him here in the car, Houston and me,” a hard-mouthed plainclothes man explained to Duff. “He made a break, grabbed Houston’s gat with both hands. I had to drill him—twice. The cap’ll raise hell! He specially wanted him kept here to put up against the others. But God knows I wouldn’t of shot him if it hadn’t been him or Houston!”
Duff called the plainclothesman a damned clumsy mick as they lifted Vance up on the seat. Bluepoint’s tortured eyes focused on me.
“I—know—you?” he asked painfully. “Continental—New—York?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Couldn’t—place—you—Larrouy’s—with—Red.”
He stopped to cough blood.
“Got—Red?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “Got Red, Flora, Pogy and the cush.”
“But—not—Papa—dop—oul—os.”
“Papa does what?” I asked impatiently, a shiver along my spine.
He pulled himself up on the seat.
“Papadopoulos,” he repeated, with an agonizing summoning of the little strength left in him. “I tried—shoot him—saw him—walk ’way—with girl—bull—too damn quick—wish …”
His words ran out. He shuddered. Death wasn’t a sixteenth of an inch behind his eyes. A white-coated intern tried to get past me into the car. I pushed him out of the way and leaned in, taking Vance by the shoulders. The back of my neck was ice. My stomach was empty.
“Listen, Bluepoint,” I yelled in his face, “Papadopoulos? Little old man? Brains of the push?”
“Yes,” Vance said, and the last live blood in him came out with the word.
I let him drop back on the seat and walked away.
Of course! How had I missed it? The little old scoundrel—if he hadn’t, for all his scariness, been the works, how could he have so neatly turned the others over to me one at a time? They had been absolutely cornered. It was be killed fighting, or surrender and be hanged. They had no other way out. The police had Vance, who could and would tell them that the little buzzard was the headman—there wasn’t even a chance for him beating the courts with his age, his weakness and his mask of being driven around by the others.
And there I had been—with no choice but to accept his offer. Otherwise lights out for me. I had been putty in his
