O’Hara grimaced, muttered, “And all for that little tramp! Johnny, it’s hard to swallow.”
Heading for town, O’Hara drove fast, expertly, along the broad boulevard that wound through rolling hills, past darkened exclusive-looking estates, on toward the greater compactness of the city proper.
After a time he saw headlights in his rear vision mirror, noticed they were creeping up on him but gave them no particular thought. He eased to a halt at the red blinker of a boulevard stop, slipped into a lower gear, began to pick up speed again. The car behind, a light-tan sedan, didn’t make the boulevard stop.
Beyond the intersection it slid up alongside him and suddenly began to cut him skilfully into the curb, O’Hara braked and while the two cars were still rolling, the right-hand door of the sedan was whipped open and a man swung from it to the running-board of O’Hara’s coupé.
The man was young, looked scarcely in his twenties, but he had a pinched white face, eyes that were dark smudges in his pallor. His jaws moved rhythmically while he clung to the car with one hand and with the other held a gun that poked O’Hara’s left ear.
“Stick up, brother,” he intoned around a wad of gum. “Set her down.”
O’Hara stopped and the white-faced youth stood down in the road, said, “Light, brother.”
O’Hara got out. He would have made two of the slim young gunman but the gun was held steadily on him, a blue glimmer in the faint light back of the headlamps, and the man’s jaws worked at the gum as steadily and calmly as though all this were an old and boring routine with him.
So O’Hara didn’t move but he said sourly, “Joke’s on you. Payday’s tomorrow and I’ve got six bits.”
The gum-gnasher said nothing. He got behind O’Hara and began to go through his pockets. The man behind the wheel of the tan sedan leaned through the open door and watched the proceedings nonchalantly. He was big and thick-shouldered with a face that was flattened down almost to a single plane as though a horse had stepped on it.
He didn’t speak until the lights of another car popped into sight over the crest of a long hill. The lights came rushing down toward them and the man in the car said in a confidential voice, “Better make it snappy, Vince.”
Vince still said nothing but he straightened up. O’Hara sensed what was coming and tried to dodge but the gun barrel slammed him above the temple. He groaned, tried to pivot, but the gun barrel clipped him again, beating him down into blackness.
When he came put of it he was in a ditch beside the road. His hat was gone and his head felt like a free balloon except that there were quick knives of pain slicing through it. After a little he climbed out of the ditch. His car, lights out, was parked a short distance away. He got to it, sat on the running-board for a while and began to feel better.
He went through his pockets and found them empty of everything, even the half-dozen pencils he always carried. But his keys were still in the ignition lock so he climbed under the wheel and got going toward the city again.
It was five minutes of two when he located an all-night drugstore. He bought gauze, tape and iodine from a curious clerk.
“What’s the other guy look like?” the clerk grinned.
“Too good to suit me,” O’Hara told him and shut himself into a phone booth where he looked up the number of Johnny Lawton’s home and then dialed it.
When her voice answered, he said, “Tony?”
“And what happened to you, my good man?”
“I’ve been out getting an idea knocked into my head. How’d you make out with Mrs. Lawton?”
“When you didn’t show up, I called the city desk and got the lowdown. Nancy — that’s Johnny’s wife — is taking it like a brick. I gave her a triple bromide and she’s dozed off. Of course, at first she did a couple of ground loops because she simply couldn’t understand Johnny committing suicide.”
“My understander doesn’t get it, either.”
“And, incidentally, I’m pretty sore at you for not showing up. It was pretty tough for a while.”
“Sorry, gadget. I was held up a bit, if that’s an excuse.” O’Hara grinned to himself, didn’t enlarge on the subject. “I’ll come out there now if there’s any reason to.”
“No. I’ll stay with her the rest of the night.”
“Then I’ll go home,” O’Hara said, “gargle three fast slugs of rye and hit the innersprings. I can use a lot of it.”
Tony’s voice sounded faintly worried. She said, “Ken, your voice sounds funny. Are you affright?”
“I’m O.K. Give you a buzz in the morning.”
Wolfheim’s fish grotto, across from the City Hall, was a cheerful place to dine provided you didn’t mind seeing your prospective meal ogling you from the huge glass fish tank in the window. O’Hara made for the mellow lights of the place through a steady drumming downpour that now and then whipped itself into a miniature cloudburst.
He had had a good sleep, talked with Tony Ames briefly on the phone the following morning and now he expected to meet her here for dinner. She was in a booth at the rear and he had shed his hat, his sodden trenchcoat, spiking them on the rack beside her trim, translucent raincoat.
She was small and neat in a dark, tailored suit. She cocked her oval, pointed face and nice hazel eyes upward at him and paused in her spearing of a morsel from the seafood cocktail before her when she saw the X of adhesive tape above O’Hara’s temple, the congested bruise that spread out from it.
She said as he sat down, “So, fighting with those big rough boys from across the tracks again.”
“O.K., precious,” O’Hara muttered. “Laugh.”
A waiter came, took his order for a double old-fashioned, oyster cocktail, filet of sea bass, shrimp salad, lemon chiffonade pie, coffee.
“At least,” Tony said, “it doesn’t sound as though you were dying.”
“You’re too, too sympathetic.”
“And you’re very, very mysterious. You haven’t told me yet why you think Johnny didn’t commit suicide or what happened to you last night.”
“We’ve got plenty of time. Did you find out anything on Inez Dana like I asked you to this morning?”
“Not much.” She finished the cocktail morsel, rested her elbows on the table, her smoothly pointed chin on locked hands. “Joe Rockley, the press agent out at the Barcelona, helped me get most of it — we’ll have to give him a break in a story some time. She’s twenty-four, white, female. Raised in the same town in Nebraska that gave Detective Lieutenant Otto Shuford to a waiting world. Studied dancing in New York and did a copy of the Sally Rand thing at a South Wabash café in Chicago until recently. Came out here a couple of months ago, looked up Shuford and Shuford promoted her the job at the Barcelona through Johnny Lawton. Shuford has been giving her the rush act and Lawton had been seeing a lot of her, too.”
“How about the Barcelona’s manager, Kerr?”
“I understand Kerr has his own headache, a poisonous blonde, named Betty. Betty at the moment is supposed to be back in Chicago. And now about you. Who patted you on the head with the well-known blunt instrument?”
“A guy I’d like very much to see again.” The waiter brought the double old-fashioned, went away again. O’Hara sketched out very briefly the hold-up. He said, “Hell, they even took an envelope I’d outlined an idea for a play on.”
“That saves you the trouble of writing it.”
“I got just that much sympathy from the cops. A reporter held up. Ha-ha-ha — joke. Inspector Blane cracked a rib laughing. As for it maybe tying in with Johnny Lawton — hooey. Blane came back at me with the news that only Johnny’s prints were ‘on the gun and both slugs came from that gun. Furthermore the paraffin test on Johnny’s hand showed he had fired a gun. So it’s suicide to Blane and, ‘Will you quit bothering me,’ says he, ‘about trifles like reporters doing the Dutch act?’ ”