I hunched forward on the chair, got to my feet. The drink began to work. It hardened my stomach up a bit and I began to feel fairly tough again.
“Watch yourself,” Gannon warned. “I read tonight’s paper. I know the cops want you, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of any doubt. You’re free to blow. Beat it.”
“Wait until you read this,” I said, and raised my hand to reach inside my coat. His left pocket jumped and the cloth bulged. My hand froze in mid-air. I lowered it, slowly, and grinned.
“Help yourself,” I said.
He took a step. His right hand slid in between my coat and shirt and touched the photostat. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, leaned back from the waist, dug both thumbs deep into the back of his hand between the finger bones, and twisted, heaving all my weight forward at the same time. He kicked his feet into the air to save his arm. The photostat flipped at the ceiling, zigzagged to the floor. He landed on his back. The fall shook the building. Air oozed out of his lungs in a long flat groan, as if he wanted to get rid of it and was doing it deliberately.
I gathered in all the guns.
“Hold it,” I barked at the girl.
She dropped the brass fire tongs. They hit the hearth with a metallic clatter. More music for the boys downstairs. A phone dial whirred nearby. I shot a glance through the bedroom doorway. The little Jap maid was busily hooking out a number.
“Hey,” I yelled, and waved the Luger at her.
She dropped the phone and covered her face with her hands and waited for death.
“Old Killer Dillon,” I said bleakly, to no one in particular.
Gannon made a noise. His throat muscles looked like taut ropes under the skin of his neck. Congested blood darkened his face. His arms and legs move jerkily. His hands clawed at his belly.
The girl in the pale blue evening gown didn’t move. Strain widened her dark eyes. The pallor of her face made the lipstick on her full-lipped wide mouth look almost black. I grabbed up the photostat and dangled it in front of her.
“Your friend Keever had this made,” I growled. “I think he was murdered for it. But I barged in right after he was killed — downstairs, right below this, in his apartment — and the killer had to leave without it. I guess the same guy killed Costain, huh?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said, in a choked voice. “I... who do you mean?”
“The Duke,” I said heavily. “You have a very jealous husband, Mrs. Mazonik. I can’t say I blame him for much of anything — except the way he put me in the middle of murder.”
“Duke Mazonik and I have been divorced for over a year,” she whispered.
I shrugged. “That only makes it possible for you to testify against him,” I said. “It doesn’t change any facts. The Duke killed Harvey Costain, on account of you, probably. With what I have now, the police will have no trouble proving that. The Duke killed Keever, too. There was a heel. Maybe he had it coming. That Keever would have blackmailed his own grandmother.”
A faint shiver shook her bare shoulders. The man on the floor got his breath back, finally. He gulped it in with a wracking heave of his chest. The congested blood began to go out of his face. His eyes cut me up in little strips and fed me to the sharks.
The girl said: “What now?” Her voice sounded as if she was past caring.
“The joint’s crawling with cops,” I said. “It’s time to whistle for them.”
“Not yet,” a new voice said.
Duke Mazonik came through the swing door from the kitchen. He had an old worn service revolver in his hand. It pointed at me. His eyes had a glaze over them. There were stiff lines around his mouth. “Drop them guns, John.”
I dropped the guns. The butt of the Luger bounced off my foot and a tickle of pain ran up my leg. It seemed to be one of those days.
“Remember that voice on the phone, John?” the big blond ex-cop asked, in a cold lifeless tone of voice.
I nodded, stiffly. My mouth felt dry and overcrowded with my tongue in it.
“I never put you in the middle, boy,” he grated harshly. “You put yourself in the middle. If you coulda kept your face out of this, nobody woulda got hurt, except Harvey Costain. He got what was coming to him.”
“What about Keever?” I husked. “He knew Costain was spending a lot of time here. He smelled something fishy. He must have guessed who had a motive for killing Costain. He was the one who dug up the fact that Gail Tremaine was Helen Baird — Mrs. Duke Mazonik. Money might have kept him quiet for a while — until his demands got larger than your bank account. Then what?”
“He stuck his face in, yeah. But he ain’t got no face no more, has he?”
“No,” I said thickly. “He ain’t got no face no more. How’s my face doing?”
“Not so good, John. Not so good. This is curtains for all of us. Me, too.”
Madness glittered in his eyes. His gun had sagged a bit. He raised it, with me as his first target. In the sudden awful silence that fell upon the room, you could hear the remote tread of heavy feet and distant muffled shouts. The police were doing what they could to track me down.
Mazonik cocked the revolver with his thumb and the dry click of the hammer was like the crack of a rifle.
A stealthy movement caught my eye. Gannon’s left hand was less than six inches from the butt of the Luger. I smiled waxily at the big round black front end of Mazonik’s gun. This was it.
I yelled.
The gun went off and a giant sledge hammered my right shoulder and spun me around. I went down, but not out. Guns slammed. Women screamed. Glass crashed. Police whistles let go, shrilly. Guns kept on slamming. Big flat feet thundered on wood. Wood gave way with a tearing splintering sound. Then everything went black.
I woke up in a white room under white sheets on a white bed. My shoulder was packed in white gauze. When the nurse came in, she said that my face was rather white, too. I had lost a little blood.
My first visitor was Lew Gannon. He was very pleasant and spoke quietly, as if he had been warned not to excite the patient. Neither the girl, Gail Tremaine, nor the little Jap maid had been hurt, he told me. One of Mazonik’s slugs had nicked him a little, but not seriously. He had shot Mazonik three times with the Luger. The big blond ex-cop was still alive.
He asked how I was feeling and I told him fine. He asked if the District Attorney, or anybody like that, had been in to see me. I shook my head, no. He laid his soft gray felt hat on the white dresser and sat down on the foot of the bed and smiled.
Then he told me that he had asked the authorities not to bother me until I felt better. I said that was nice of him. He kept on smiling and looked a little embarrassed and said not to worry about any hospital bills.
I gave him the eye.
“The D.A. is taking care of your bills,” he said. “You cracked a murder case for him pretty fast. It’s only fair. You saved more than that in time and money for the city.”
“I wasn’t working for the city,” I said. “Or the D.A. either.”
He reached for his hat and got off the bed and then just stood there holding the hat. “I thought you’d like to know,” he said.
“Uh-huh, sure,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
He fumbled with the hat and looked down at it.
“Thanks for saving my life, too,” I told him.
“Oh, hell.” He flushed. “I didn’t come here for that. You made the holes and did the blocking. Anybody could have carried the ball behind you. Mazonik just signed a full confession, by the way.”
He lifted his eyes from the hat. There was something in them, something on his mind. I felt too stiff and old and tired to wonder, or care, what it was. I didn’t say anything.