Braddock came on the wire in the Los Angeles Tribune office a couple of hundred miles from the Alkali City phone booth into which O’Hara had squeezed himself. He was sore.
He said: “You fatheaded Fenian, what’s the idea of you getting drunk and putting through collect long-distance calls to the Tribune? O’Hara doesn’t work here any more. Remember?”
“I’m not drunk,” O’Hara said virtuously. “And I just called to find put if you want me to come back to work.”
“Did you have to go two hundred miles out of town to put in the call?” Braddock yelled.
O’Hara chuckled. “Stick your head out the window, Brad, and we can save long-distance tolls. Anyway, I’ll come back to the Trib if you beg me to.”
“Beg you! After the way you walked out on me to become a lousy stinking press agent, I should beg you!”
“I’d hate to have to take a good story like this to the opposition.”
“Huh?” said Braddock. The loudness went out of his voice. “So you’ve got a story up your sleeve, huh?”
“Just an exclusive angle on that Diplomat killing.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say so, Ken? Shoot!”
“Am I working for the Trib?”
Braddock said: “Irish, I’d beat your ears off if you tried to work for any other sheet in town. I wasn’t sore at you so much as I was sort of hurt you wouldn’t listen to me and walked out on the Trib to be a... a—”
“A lousy stinking flack?” said O’Hara.
“Well, press agents are all right in their place but you weren’t cut out for one. I tried to tell you that but no, you wouldn’t listen. You had to — well, what the hell, welcome back, Irish.”
“It’s swell to be back, Brad.”
Braddock said briskly: “And now let’s skip the corn and get to the story. Shoot.”
“Yesterday,” said O’Hara, “I blundered into Room 907 at the Diplomat, looking for the hotel photog, a little guy named Clancy. Instead of Clancy, I walked in on four guys that looked hotter than a backfire. One of them was the jockey-sized guy who was found stabbed to death half an hour later in a linen closet on the ninth floor.”
“Mmm,” said Braddock in the monotone that indicated he was taking notes. “You got any identification on them?”
“No. By the way, have the cops identified the little guy?”
“Not yet. Let’s have a description of the other three.”
“I can give you better than a word picture. The missing Clancy arrived just about as these guys were about to have words with me about crashing the room. Clancy had the notion it was a convention group so he snapped a shot at them. While they were still looking startled, I got Clancy — and me — the hell out of there. Twenty minutes later one of the guys cornered Clancy in the washroom and kicked most of his plates to pieces. But it so happened he didn’t get the shot Clancy had made in 907. Send a copy boy over to Mike’s Grill and have him pick up an envelope I left there with Mike. There’s some notes in it and a print of the shot, showing all the guys that were in the room, including the prospective corpse.”
“Oke,” said Braddock. O’Hara could hear him yelling for a copy boy, telling the boy what to do and, for Pete’s sake, to get the lead out of his pants. “O.K., Ken, that’s swell. The story is sort of half-baked — we need identification, background, motive — but maybe your old pal, Lenroot, can get action on that once he has the picture. He’s going to be pretty sore you didn’t give him this photo yesterday — hey, what the hell am I saying? I’m sore, myself. Why didn’t you give me the picture yesterday? And what the hell’s the idea of you running off two hundred miles to call in about it?”
“To Query One,” said O’Hara, “I tried to give both you and Lenroot the dope and you both brushed me off and I said to myself, nuts to both those guys and I hope they hate nuts. To Query Two, there’s more to the story.”
“Well, what’re we wasting time on conversation for? Give.”
“You’ve heard of a guy named Rex Miller?”
“We had a story on him this morning. So what?”
“Yesterday afternoon I saw him ride off from the Diplomat with the three survivors from 907. For reasons I won’t go into now, I figured they were headed for somewhere around here. And tonight I tracked Miller down, found him being very social with one of the guys from 907 at a little mining camp about twenty miles out of Alkali Center. I have a hunch if you’ll Wirephoto that picture back to Midland City you’ll find out that the guys in 907 are the racket boys he’s supposedly prosecuting.”
“You mean you think he’s sold out to the other side?”
“Well, in almost the words of that Hoosier poet — the hoodlums’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”
“You’re sure on all this, Irish?”
“I got a picture of Miller and the hood playing cards and drinking together. I’m sending that plate in by a grease monkey from the local garage. He owns a hot rod and is yearning to let it out. The plate should be there by two-thirty, time for the second home edition. Oke?”
“Oke,” said Braddock. “What makes with you now?”
“Clancy and a couple deputy sheriffs and I are waltzing out to visit the mine. The deputies say it was sold to Easterners a while back but hasn’t been worked since the sale. Chances are we won’t find anyone hanging around out there now.”
O’Hara was right. When he, Clancy and the deputies got out to the flat-roofed shack, it was dark, deserted. The Cad was gone and O’Hara got some pleasure out of thinking how hard somebody had had to work to pump up those big tires by hand. The station wagon squatted by the mine shaft but the deputies learned little from looking it over except that it had been bought the day before in Riverside by, so the bill of sale said, one W. J. Herman. The fat man, O’Hara thought, had probably acquired it because running around the desert country in the pale-green Cad with the Illinois plates would draw too much attention.
O’Hara and Clancy pulled into the Tribune parking lot at eleven the next morning. O’Hara had had no sleep. His feet were sore from the long hike across the desert. His stomach was unhappy about the hamburgers he had forced on it in lieu of breakfast. A blanket of the famous Los Angeles smog overlay the downtown district and the acrid fumes bit his lungs and smarted his eyes.
But he felt fine. The thought that once more he had a desk in the city room on the third floor of the dingy gray Tribune Building was enough to make him feel dandy.
He went inside with Clancy at his heels. He stepped into the old and creaking elevator and slapped the bald, elderly operator on the shoulder. He said: “Hi, Otto. Beautiful day.”
Otto said: “Yes, Mr. O’Hara.” He didn’t glance directly at O’Hara. His face had a sort of embarrassed look, the look a man has for a friend who has done something unpardonable.
But O’Hara was too keyed up to notice it.
Otto rocked the car to a stop at the third floor and O’Hara took Clancy’s pipestem arm. “Come on, little man, and I’ll show you the place that’s going to be your home from now on.”
“You think they’ll give me a job, Kenny?”
“If I ask ’em to,” said O’Hara, “they’ll give you a couple of the presses. After last night, I figure I rate around here again.” He flipped a greeting at the blond receptionist. “Morning, Duchess.”
The receptionist said in a very restrained way: “Good morning, Mr. O’Hara,” and went back to sorting mail.
O’Hara thought she could have been more enthusiastic in welcoming back the prodigal but he guessed she was busy. He and Clancy went through the gate and past the partition into the city room, which was quiet, almost deserted, at this hour of the morning. A man on the rewrite battery was hammering out a story and Braddock sat at the city desk.