“I’m going now,” I said. “Sit tight till you hear from me. And don’t scare up the maid.”
“Remember, I’ve told you nothing,” she reminded me as she followed me to the sitting-room door.
From the Gungen house I went direct to the Mars Hotel. Mickey Linehan was sitting behind a newspaper in a corner of the lobby.
“They in?” I asked him.
“Yep.”
“Let’s go up and see them.”
Mickey rattled his knuckles on door number 410. A metallic voice asked: “Who’s there?”
“Package,” Mickey replied in what was meant for a boy’s voice.
A slender man with a pointed chin opened the door. I gave him a card. He didn’t invite us into the room, but he didn’t try to keep us out when we walked in.
“You’re Weel?” I addressed him while Mickey closed the door behind us, and then, not waiting for him to say yes, I turned to the broad-faced man sitting on the bed. “And you’re Dahl?”
Weel spoke to Dahl, in a casual, metallic voice:
“A couple of gumshoes.”
The man on the bed looked at us and grinned.
I was in a hurry.
“I want the dough you took from Main,” I announced.
They sneered together, as if they had been practicing.
I brought out my gun.
Weel laughed harshly.
“Get your hat, Bunky,” he chuckled. “We’re being taken into custody.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I explained. “This isn’t a pinch. It’s a stickup. Up go the hands!”
Dahl’s hands went up quick. Weel hesitated until Mickey prodded him in the ribs with the nose of a .38-special.
“Frisk ’em,” I ordered Mickey.
He went through Weel’s clothes, taking a gun, some papers, some loose money, and a money-belt that was fat. Then he did the same for Dahl.
“Count it,” I told him.
Mickey emptied the belts, spit on his fingers and went to work.
“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and sixty-two cents,” he reported when he was through.
With the hand that didn’t hold my gun, I felt in my pocket for the slip on which I had written the numbers of the hundred-dollar bills Main had got from Ogilvie. I held the slip out to Mickey.
“See if the hundreds check against this.”
He took the slip, looked, said, “They do.”
“Good—pouch the money and the guns and see if you can turn up any more in the room.”
Coughing Ben Weel had got his breath by now.
“Look here!” he protested. “You can’t pull this, fellow! Where do you think you are? You can’t get away with this!”
“I can try,” I assured him. “I suppose you’re going to yell, Police! Like hell you are! The only squawk you’ve got coming is at your own dumbness in thinking because your squeeze on the woman was tight enough to keep her from having you copped, you didn’t have to worry about anything. I’m playing the same game you played with her and Main—only mine’s better, because you can’t get tough afterward without facing stir. Now shut up!”
“No more jack,” Mickey said. “Nothing but four postage stamps.”
“Take ’em along,” I told him. “That’s practically eight cents. Now we’ll go.”
“Hey, leave us a couple of bucks,” Weel begged.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” I snarled at him, backing to the door, which Mickey was opening.
The hall was empty. Mickey stood in it, holding his gun on Weel and Dahl while I backed out of the room and switched the key from the inside to the outside. Then I slammed the door, twisted the key, pocketed it, and we went downstairs and out of the hotel.
Mickey’s car was around the corner. In it, we transferred our spoils—except the guns—from his pockets to mine. Then he got out and went back to the agency. I turned the car toward the building in which Jeffrey Main had been killed.
Mrs. Main was a tall girl of less than twenty-five, with curled brown hair, heavily-lashed gray-blue eyes, and a warm, full-featured face. Her ample body was dressed in black from throat to feet.
She read my card, nodded at my explanation that Gungen had employed me to look into her husband’s death, and took me into a gray and white living room.
“This is the room?” I asked.
“Yes.” She had a pleasant, slightly husky voice.
I crossed to the window and looked down on the grocer’s roof, and on the half of the back street that was visible. I was still in a hurry.
“Mrs. Main,” I said as I turned, trying to soften the abruptness of my words by keeping my voice low, “after your husband was dead, you threw the gun out the window. Then you stuck the handkerchief to the corner of the wallet and threw that. Being lighter than the gun, it didn’t go all the way to the alley, but fell on the roof. Why did you put the handkerchief—?”
Without a sound she fainted.
I caught her before she reached the floor, carried her to a sofa, found Cologne and smelling salts, applied them.
“Do you know whose handkerchief it was?” I asked when she was awake and sitting up.
She shook her head from left to right.
“Then why did you take that trouble?”
“It was in his pocket. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought the police would ask about it. I didn’t want anything to start them asking questions.”
“Why did you tell the robbery story?”
No answer.
“The insurance?” I suggested.
She jerked up her head, cried defiantly:
“Yes! He had gone through his own money and mine. And then he had to—to do a thing like that. He—”
I interrupted her complaint:
“He left a note, I hope—something that will be evidence.” Evidence that she hadn’t killed him, I meant.
“Yes.” She fumbled in the bosom of her black dress.
“Good,” I said, standing. “The first thing in the morning, take that note down to your lawyer and tell him the whole story.”
I mumbled something sympathetic and made my escape.
Night was coming down when I rang the Gungens’ bell for the second time that day. The pasty-faced
