Tenant’s knees sagged the next time I hit him.
Once more, I said to myself, and then I’ll step back, let him have one on the button, and watch him fall.
But I didn’t get that far.
Something that I knew was the missing revolver struck me on the top of the head. An ineffectual blow—not clean enough to stun me—but it took the steam out of my punches.
Another.
They weren’t hard, these taps, but to hurt a skull with a hunk of metal you don’t have to hit it hard. I tried to twist away from the next bump, and failed. Not only failed, but let Tennant wiggle away from me.
That was the end.
I wheeled on the girl just in time to take another rap on the head, and then one of Tennant’s fists took me over the ear.
I went down in one of those falls that get pugs called quitters—my eyes were open, my mind was alive, but my legs and arms wouldn’t lift me up from the floor.
Tennant took my own gun out of a pocket, and with it held on me, sat down in a Morris chair, to gasp for the air I had pounded out of him. The girl sat in another chair; and I, finding I could manage it, sat up in the middle of the floor and looked at them.
Tennant spoke, still panting.
“This is fine—all the signs of a struggle we need to make our story good!”
“If they don’t believe you were in a fight,” I suggested sourly, pressing my aching head with both hands, “you can strip and show them your little tummy.”
He leaned down and split my lip with a punch that spread me on my back.
“And you can show them this!”
Anger brought my legs to life. I got up on them. Tennant moved around behind the Morris chair. My black gun was steady in his hand.
“Go easy,” he warned me. “My story will work if I have to kill you—maybe work better.”
That was sense. I stood still.
“Phone the police, Cara,” he ordered.
She went out of the room, closing the door behind her; and all I could hear of her talk was a broken murmur.
VII
Ten minutes later three uniformed policemen arrived. All three knew Tennant, and they treated him with respect. Tennant reeled of the story he and the girl had cooked up, with a few changes to take care of the shot that had been fired from the nickeled gun and our roughhouse. She nodded her head vigorously whenever a policeman looked at her. Tennant turned both guns over to the white-haired sergeant in charge.
I didn’t argue, didn’t deny anything, but told the sergeant:
“I’m working with Detective-Sergeant O’Gar on a job. I want to talk to him over the phone and then I want you to take all three of us down to the detective bureau.”
Tennant objected to that, of course; not because he expected to gain anything, but on the off-chance that he might. The white-haired sergeant looked from one of us to the other in puzzlement. Me, with my skinned face and split lip; Tennant, with a red lump under one eye where my first wallop had landed; and the girl, with most of the clothes above the waistline ripped off and a bruised cheek.
“It has a queer look, this thing,” the sergeant decided aloud; “and I shouldn’t wonder but what the detective bureau was the place for the lot of you.”
One of the patrolmen went into the hall with me, and I got O’Gar on the phone at his home. It was nearly ten o’clock by now, and he was preparing for bed.
“Cleaning up the Gilmore murder,” I told him. “Meet me at the Hall. Will you get hold of Kelly, the patrolman who found Gilmore, and bring him down there? I want him to look at some people.”
“I will that,” O’Gar promised, and I hung up.
The “wagon” in which the three policemen had answered Cara Kenbrook’s cal carried us down to the Hall of Justice, where we all went into the captain of detectives’ office. McTighe, a lieutenant, was on duty.
I knew McTighe, and we were on pretty good terms; but I wasn’t an influence in local politics, and Tennant was. I don’t mean that McTighe would have knowingly helped Tennant frame me; but with me stacked up against the assistant city engineer, I knew who would get the benefit of any doubt there might be.
My head was thumping and roaring just now, with knots all over it where the girl had beaned me. I sat down, kept quiet, and nursed my head while Tennant and Cara Kenbrook, with a lot of details that they had not wasted on the uniformed men, told their tale and showed their injuries.
Tennant was talking—describing the terrible scene that had met his eyes when, drawn by the girl’s screams, he had rushed into her apartment—when O’Gar came into the office. He recognized Tennant with a lifted eyebrow, and came over to sit beside me.
“What the hell is all this?” he muttered.
“A lovely mess,” I whispered back. “Listen—in that nickel gun on the desk there’s an empty shell. Get it for me.”
He scratched his head doubtfully, listened to the next few words of Tennant’s yarn, glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and then went over to the desk and picked up the revolver.
McTighe looked at him—a sharp, questioning look.
“Something on the Gilmore killing,” the detective-sergeant said, breaking the gun.
The lieutenant started to speak, changed his mind, and O’Gar brought the shell over and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, putting it in my pocket. “Now listen to my friend there. It’s a good act, if you like it.”
Tennant was winding up his history.
“… Naturally a man who tried a thing like that on an unprotected woman would be yellow; so it wasn’t very hard to handle him after I got his gun away from him. I hit him a couple of times, and he
