Face down on the white gravel a man sprawled—a thin man in dark clothes—and just above his collar, where the head and neck join, was a hole. I knelt to peer into his face.
Then I pushed through the crowd again, back to where Axford was just getting out of the car, the engine of which was still running.
“Pangburn is dead—shot!”
XIV
Methodically, Axford took off his gloves, folded them and put them in a pocket. Then he nodded his understanding of what I had told him, and walked toward where the crowd stood around the dead poet. I looked after him until he had vanished in the throng. Then I went winding through the outskirts of the crowd, hunting for Porky Grout.
I found him standing on the porch, leaning against a pillar. I passed where he could see me, and went on around to the side of the roadhouse that afforded most shadow.
In the shadows Porky joined me. The night wasn’t cool, but his teeth were chattering.
“Who got him?” I demanded.
“I don’t know,” he whined, and that was the first thing of which I had ever known him to confess complete ignorance. “I was inside, keepin’ an eye on the others.”
“What others?”
“Tin-Star, and some guy I never seen before, and the broad. I didn’t think the kid was going out. He didn’t have no hat.”
“What do you know about it?”
“A little while after I phoned you, the girl and Pangburn came out from Joplin’s part of the joint and sat down at a table around on the other side of the porch, where it’s fairly dark. They eat for a while and then this other guy comes over and sits down with ’em. I don’t know his name, but I think I’ve saw him around town. He’s a tall guy, all rung up in fancy rags.”
That would be Kilcourse.
“They talk for a while and then Joplin joins ’em. They sit around the table laughin’ and talkin’ for maybe a quarter of a hour. Then Pangburn gets up and goes indoors. I got a table that I can watch ’em from, and the place is crowded, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my table if I leave it, so I don’t follow the kid. He ain’t got no hat; I figure he ain’t goin’ nowhere. But he must of gone through the house and out front, because pretty soon there’s a noise that I thought was a auto backfire, and then the sound of a car gettin’ away quick. And then some guy squawks that there’s a dead man outside. Ever’body runs out here, and it’s Pangburn.”
“You dead sure that Joplin, Kilcourse and the girl were all at the table when Pangburn was killed?”
“Absolutely,” Porky said, “if this dark guy’s name is Kilcourse.”
“Where are they now?”
“Back in Joplin’s hangout. They went up there as soon as they seen Pangburn had been croaked.”
I had no illusions about Porky. I knew he was capable of selling me out and furnishing the poet’s murderer with an alibi. But there was this about it: if Joplin, Kilcourse or the girl had fixed him, and had fixed my informant, then it was hopeless for me to try to prove that they weren’t on the rear porch when the shot was fired. Joplin had a crowd of hangers-on who would swear to anything he told them without batting an eye. There would be a dozen supposed witnesses to their presence on the rear porch.
Thus the only thing for me to do was to take it for granted that Porky was coming clean with me.
“Have you seen Dick Foley?” I asked, since Dick had been shadowing Kilcourse.
“No.”
“Hunt around and see if you can find him. Tell him I’ve gone up to talk to Joplin, and tell him to come on up. Then you can stick around where I can get hold of you if I want you.”
I went in through a French window, crossed an empty dance-floor and went up the stairs that lead to Tin-Star Joplin’s living quarters in the rear second story. I knew the way, having been up there before. Joplin and I were old friends.
I was going up now to give him and his friends a shakedown on the off-chance that some good might come of it, though I knew that I had nothing on any of them. I could have tied something on the girl, of course, but not without advertising the fact that the dead poet had forged his brother-in-law’s signature to a check. And that was no go.
“Come in,” a heavy, familiar voice called when I rapped on Joplin’s living-room door.
I pushed the door open and went in.
Tin-Star Joplin was standing in the middle of the floor: a big-bodied ex-yegg with inordinately thick shoulders and an expressionless horse face. Beyond him Kilcourse sat dangling one leg from the corner of a table, alertness hiding behind an amused half-smile on his handsome dark face. On the other side of a room a girl whom I knew for Jeanne Delano sat on the arm of a big leather chair. And the poet hadn’t exaggerated when he told me she was beautiful.
“You!” Joplin grunted disgustedly as soon as he recognized me. “What the hell do you want?”
“What’ve you got?”
My mind wasn’t on this sort of repartee, however; I was studying the girl. There was something vaguely familiar about her—but I couldn’t place her. Perhaps I hadn’t seen her before; perhaps much looking at the picture Pangburn had given me was responsible for my feeling of recognition. Pictures will do that.
Meanwhile, Joplin had said:
“Time to waste is one thing I ain’t got.”
And I had said:
“If you’d saved up all the time different judges have given you, you’d have plenty.”
I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown
