Red Harvest (15 page)

“Maybe ruin him, maybe club him into backing us up. I don’t care which. You’d better stay at the Hotel Person, Mickey, and Dick can go to the National. Keep apart, and, if you want to keep me from being fired, burn the job up before the Old Man tumbles. Better write these down.”

I gave them names, descriptions, and addresses when I had them, of Elihu Willsson; Stanley Lewis, his secretary; Dinah Brand; Dan Rolff; Noonan; Max Thaler, alias Whisper; his right-hand man, the chinless Jerry; Mrs. Donald Willsson; Lewis’s daughter, who had been Donald Willsson’s secretary; and Bill Quint, Dinah’s radical ex-boy-friend.

“Now hop to it,” I said. “And don’t kid yourselves that there’s any law in Poisonville except what you make for yourself.”

Mickey said I’d be surprised how many laws he could get along without. Dick said: “So long,” and they departed.

After breakfast I went over to the City Hall.

Noonan’s greenish eyes were bleary, as if they hadn’t been sleeping, and his face had lost some of its color. He pumped my hand up and down as enthusiastically as ever, and the customary amount of cordiality was in his voice and manner.

“Any line on Whisper?” I asked when we had finished the glad-handing.

“I think I’ve got something.” He looked at the clock on the wall and then at his phone. “I’m expecting word any minute. Sit down.”

“Who else got away?”

“Jerry Hooper and Tony Agosti are the only other ones still out. We picked up the rest. Jerry is Whisper’s man-Friday, and the wop’s one of his mob. He’s the bozo that put the knife in Ike Bush the night of the fight.”

“Any more of Whisper’s mob in?”

“No. We just had the three of them, except Buck Wallace, the fellow you potted. He’s in the hospital.”

The chief looked at the wall clock again, and at his watch. It was exactly two o’clock. He turned to the phone. It rang. He grabbed it, said:

“Noonan talking…. Yes…. Yes…. Yes…. Right.”

He pushed the phone aside and played a tune on the row of pearl buttons on his desk. The office filled up with coppers.

“Cedar Hill Inn,” he said. “You follow me out with your detail, Bates. Terry, shoot out Broadway and hit the dump from behind. Pick up the boys on traffic duty as you go along. It’s likely we’ll need everybody we can get. Duffy, take yours out Union Street and around by the old mine road. McGraw will hold headquarters down. Get hold of everybody you can and send them after us. Jump!”

He grabbed his hat and went after them, calling over his thick shoulder to me:

“Come on, man, this is the kill.”

I followed him down to the department garage, where the engines of half a dozen cars were roaring. The chief sat beside his driver. I sat in back with four detectives.

Men scrambled into the other cars. Machine-guns were unwrapped. Arm-loads of rifles and riot-guns were distributed, and packages of ammunition.

The chief’s car got away first, off with a jump that hammered our teeth together. We missed the garage door by half an inch, chased a couple of pedestrians diagonally across the sidewalk, bounced off the curb into the roadway, missed a truck as narrowly as we had missed the door, and dashed out King Street with our siren wide open.

Panicky automobiles darted right and left, regardless of traffic rules, to let us through. It was a lot of fun.

I looked back, saw another police car following us, a third turning into Broadway. Noonan chewed a cold cigar and told the driver:

“Give her a bit more, Pat.”

Pat twisted us around a frightened woman’s coupé, put us
through a slot between street car and laundry wagon—a narrow slot that we couldn’t have slipped through if our car hadn’t been so smoothly enameled—and said:

“All right, but the brakes ain’t no good.”

“That’s nice,” the gray-mustached sleuth on my left said. He didn’t sound sincere.

Out of the center of the city there wasn’t much traffic to bother us, but the paving was rougher. It was a nice half-hour’s ride, with everybody getting a chance to sit in everybody else’s lap. The last ten minutes of it was over an uneven road that had hills enough to keep us from forgetting what Pat had said about the brakes.

We wound up at a gate topped by a shabby electric sign that had said
Cedar Hill Inn
before it lost its globes. The roadhouse, twenty feet behind the gate, was a squat wooden building painted a moldy green and chiefly surrounded by rubbish. Front door and windows were closed, blank.

We followed Noonan out of the car. The machine that had been trailing us came into sight around a bend in the road, slid to rest beside ours, and unloaded its cargo of men and weapons.

Noonan ordered this and that.

A trio of coppers went around each side of the building. Three others, including a machine-gunner, remained by the gate. The rest of us walked through tin cans, bottles, and ancient newspaper to the front of the house.

The gray-mustached detective who had sat beside me in the car carried a red ax. We stepped up on the porch.

Noise and fire came out under a window sill.

The gray-mustached detective fell down, hiding the ax under his corpse.

The rest of us ran away.

I ran with Noonan. We hid in the ditch on the Inn side of the road. It was deep enough, and banked high enough, to let us stand almost erect without being targets.

The chief was excited.

“What luck!” he said happily. “He’s here, by God, he’s here!”

“That shot came from under the sill,” I said. “Not a bad trick.”

“We’ll spoil it, though,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll sieve the dump. Duffy ought to be pulling up on the other road by now, and Terry Shane won’t be many minutes behind him. Hey, Donner!” he called to a man who was peeping around a boulder. “Swing around back and tell Duffy and Shane to start closing in as soon as they come, letting fly with all they got. Where’s Kimble?”

The peeper jerked a thumb toward a tree beyond him. We could see only the upper part of it from our ditch.

“Tell him to set up his mill and start grinding,” Noonan ordered. “Low, across the front, ought to do it like cutting cheese.”

The peeper disappeared.

Noonan went up and down the ditch, risking his noodle over the top now and then for a look around, once in a while calling or gesturing to his men.

He came back, sat on his heels beside me, gave me a cigar, and lit one for himself.

“It’ll do,” he said complacently. “Whisper won’t have a chance. He’s done.”

The machine-gun by the tree fired, haltingly, experimentally, eight or ten shots. Noonan grinned and let a smoke ring float out of his mouth. The machine-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was. Noonan blew another smoke ring and said:

“That’s exactly what’ll do it.”

I agreed that it ought to. We leaned against the clay bank and smoked while, farther away, another machine-gun got going, and then a third. Irregularly, rifles, pistols, shot-guns joined in. Noonan nodded approvingly and said:

“Five minutes of that will let him know there’s a hell.”

When the five minutes were up I suggested a look at the
remains. I gave him a boost up the bank and scrambled up after him.

The roadhouse was as bleak and empty-looking as before, but more battered. No shots came from it. Plenty were going into it.

“What do you think?” Noonan asked.

“If there’s a cellar there might be a mouse alive in it.”

“Well, we could finish him afterwards.”

He took a whistle out of his pocket and made a lot of noise. He waved his fat arms, and the gun-fire began dwindling. We had to wait for the word to go all the way around.

Then we crashed the door.

The first floor was ankle-deep with booze that was still gurgling from bullet holes in the stacked-up cases and barrels that filled most of the house.

Dizzy with the fumes of spilled hooch, we waded around until we had found four dead bodies and no live ones. The four were swarthy foreign-looking men in laborers’ clothes. Two of them were practically shot to pieces.

Noonan said:

“Leave them here and get out.”

His voice was cheerful, but in a flashlight’s glow his eyes showed white-ringed with fear.

We went out gladly, though I did hesitate long enough to pocket an unbroken bottle labeled
Dewar.

A khaki-dressed copper was tumbling off a motorcycle at the gate. He yelled at us:

“The First National’s been stuck up.”

Noonan cursed savagely, bawled:

“He’s foxed us, damn him! Back to town, everybody.”

Everybody except us who had ridden with the chief beat it for the machines. Two of them took the dead detective with them.

Noonan looked at me out of his eye-corners and said:

“This is a tough one, no fooling.”

I said, “Well,” shrugged, and sauntered over to his car, where the driver was sitting at the wheel. I stood with my back to the house, talking to Pat. I don’t remember what we talked about. Presently Noonan and the other sleuths joined us.

Only a little flame showed through the open roadhouse door before we passed out of sight around the bend in the road.

There was a mob around the First National Bank. We pushed through it to the door, where we found sour-faced McGraw.

“Was six of them, masked,” he reported to the chief as we went inside. “They hit it about two-thirty. Five of them got away clean with the jack. The watchman here dropped one of them, Jerry Hooper. He’s over on the bench, cold. We got the roads blocked, and I wired around, if it ain’t too late. Last seen of them was when they made the turn into King Street, in a black Lincoln.”

We went over to look at the dead Jerry, lying on one of the lobby benches with a brown robe over him. The bullet had gone under his left shoulder blade.

The bank watchman, a harmless looking old duffer, pushed up his chest and told us about it:

“There wasn’t no chance to do
nothing
at first. They were in ’fore anybody knew anything. And maybe they didn’t work fast. Right down the line, scooping it up. No chance to do anything then. But I says to myself. ‘All righty, young fellows, you’ve got it all your own way now, but wait till you try to leave.’

“And I was as good as my word, you bet you. I runs right to the door after them and cut loose with the old firearm. I got that fellow just as he was stepping into the car. I bet you I’d of got more of them if I’d of had more cartridges, because it’s kind of hard shooting down like that, standing in the—”

Noonan stopped the monologue by patting the old duffer’s back till his lungs were empty, telling him, “That certainly is fine. That certainly is fine.”

McGraw pulled the robe up over the dead man again and growled:

“Nobody can identify anybody. But with Jerry on it, it’s a cinch it was Whisper’s caper.”

The chief nodded happily and said:

“I’ll leave it in your hands, Mac. Going to poke around here, or going back to the Hall with me?” he asked me.

“Neither. I’ve got a date, and I want to get into dry shoes.”

Dinah Brand’s little Marmon was standing in front of the hotel. I didn’t see her. I went up to my room, leaving the door unlocked. I had got my hat and coat off when she came in without knocking.

“My God, you keep a boozy smelling room,” she said.

“It’s my shoes. Noonan took me wading in rum.”

She crossed to the window, opened it, sat on the sill, and asked:

“What was that for?”

“He thought he was going to find your Max out in a dump called Cedar Hill Inn. So we went out there, shot the joint silly, murdered some dagoes, spilled gallons of liquor, and left the place burning.”

“Cedar Hill Inn? I though it had been closed up for a year or more.”

“It looked it, but it was somebody’s warehouse.”

“But you didn’t find Max there?” she asked.

“While we were there he seems to have been knocking over Elihu’s First National Bank.”

“I saw that,” she said. “I had just come out of Bengren’s, the store two doors away. I had just got in my car when I saw a big boy backing out of the bank, carrying a sack and a gun, with a black handkerchief over his face.”

“Was Max with them?”

“No, he wouldn’t be. He’d send Jerry and the boys. That’s what he has them for. Jerry was there. I knew him as soon as he got out of the car, in spite of the black handkerchief. They all had black ones. Four of them came out of the bank, running down to the car at the curb. Jerry and another fellow were in the car. When the four came across the sidewalk, Jerry jumped out and went to meet them. That’s when the shooting started and Jerry dropped. The
others
jumped in the bus and lit out. How about that dough you owe me?”

I counted out ten twenty-dollar bills and a dime. She left the window to come for them.

“That’s for pulling Dan off, so you could cop Max,” she said when she had stowed the money away in her bag. “Now how about what I was to get for showing you where you could turn up the dope on his killing Tim Noonan?”

“You’ll have to wait till he’s indicted. How do I know the dope’s any good?”