O’Hara walked from Eighth and Hope to the offices of the Tribune and went upstairs to the city room. He nodded to Joe Hawke, who was sitting in at the desk for Braddock, the city editor, and went to a typewriter at the back of the big, barnlike city room. He wrote half a dozen lines and then tossed his cigarette into a waste basket when he saw a man with a round, pug-dog face come in the door of the city room. He went over to the desk where the man was inserting himself into the city editor’s chair.
“What the hell are you doing around here?” said Braddock, his pug-dog face peevish. “I assigned you to keep the Mullen kid out of mischief. If we don’t send him back to college right side up, we’ll probably all lose our jobs.” He scratched his square chin, scowled. “Hell, if the old man can’t dig up more unknown relatives and unload ’em on the city room! How you getting along with him?”
“I must be getting old,” said O’Hara. “I handle three-alarm fires, floods, quakes, triple murders and society on the side without a breathing spell. But I’m getting too feeble to body-guard a college football player all night and all day. Be a pal and send three strong men to take my place.”
Braddock’s scowl changed into a grin. “What’s the matter. Irish, is the boy sort of active?”
“Active?” said O’Hara. “I met him yesterday noon and since then he’s had four fights with citizens, borrowed a police squad car so he could play with the siren, wrecked two bars and a night club—”
Joe Hawke interrupted, said, “I’m going to eat, Brad. All quiet except Ben Tyndall’s out with the cops on a shooting of some kind. He should be calling in soon.”
Hawke rolled his sleeves down and went away and O’Hara said, “Where was I? Oh, yes. The kid winds up by trying to make Vic Philippi’s girl, socking Philippi and getting blackjacked by Philippi’s hooligans. I got him out of it whole but it was just luck.”
“Vic Philippi, eh? What’s he doing out here?”
“I’d heard he was out here but not why. He may be vacationing or he may have business ideas. He was first lieutenant to Luck Hauser when Luck was running the cleaners’ and dyers’ racket in New York. And when Luck got himself bumped off, Philippi fell heir to the racket and also to Luck’s sweetiepie, Seena Vance. That was the redhead the kid was on the make for last night, although I didn’t realize who she was until I heard Philippi call her ‘Seena.’ ”
“What makes you think he might have business ideas?”
“He’s been washed up in New York since Dewey began throwing his weight around there and this town is ripe for a cleaners’ and dyers’ shakedown. Harry Atkins and his boys have operated it a bit but they’ve been too busy with their gambling spots to pay much attention to it. But there’ll be plenty of fireworks just the same if Philippi tries to horn in on it because there’s a lot of dough in protecting all the little cleaning stores. So I wrote you a memo on it and you can stick one of your reporters on it.”
Braddock read the memo swiftly, said, “What’s the matter with you handling it, Irish?”
O’Hara grinned. “I’m no reporter. I’m a nursemaid now.”
One of the city desk phones cut in with a peremptory jangle and Braddock picked it up, listened a moment, said, “O.K. Ben, I’ll send you a photog.”
He hung up, said, “A guy shot to death in a car near Eighth and Hope. Witnesses said a young blond guy jumped out of the car with a gun and beat it and a gal chased after him.”
O’Hara growled in his throat, said, “That tears it.” He reached in a hurry for the limp felt he had tossed on the desk.
“Huh?” Braddock said.
“I left the Mullen kid in a restaurant at Eighth and Hope.”
“You think it might be—”
“If it isn’t, I’ll eat the Old Man’s toupee, and be glad to.” O’Hara was already heading for the door.
Braddock yelled after him, “I— Hey, listen...” But O’Hara was gone.
At Seventh and Hope O’Hara could see the crowd a block ahead, overflowing across the curb, jostling around a glossy, black sedan. His cab nosed into the fringe of the crowd, brakes shrieking, and O’Hara tossed silver at the driver and piled out. He used his shoulders freely through the mob, got to the center and brought up against Ben Tyndall, who was sitting on a fender of the dark sedan, whistling cheerfully through his teeth and attending to his nails. There were half a dozen uniformed cops trying to keep the crowd back and two Homicide dicks, Hal Clark and George Sanderson, were poking around at the door of the car.
Tyndall said, “Quit shoving, guy,” and then looked up and saw it was O’Hara. He said, “Hi, Ken. I thought you were governessing Eddie Whatshisname.”
“Smile when you say that, Bennie,” said O’Hara. “I don’t suppose you’ve found out yet what happened here.”
“I’ll give you nice odds on that. A young guy with blond hair shot a guy named S. Ticino of New York three times in the head. The blond guy hopped out of the car and beat it on foot, west on Eighth. He was waving a gun and a gal was chasing him. Looks to me like one of these here triangle things.”
“Probably,” O’Hara said. He went to the door of the car and looked in over the shoulders of thin Hal Clark. Clark was holding a flash on the face of the dead man, who was sprawled across the front seat, and the face was that of the small man who had stuck a gun in O’Hara’s belly behind the Bolero the night before. The small man’s coat was flung open, showing a small belt holster clipped just below his vest at one hip, but there was no gun in the holster.
Clark recognized O’Hara, bobbed his head at him.
Sanderson straightened up, said, “Hello, Ken. No gun around, Hal. The blond guy must have used this mugg’s rod for the job.”
“Got any line on who this lad is?” O’Hara said.
“S. Ticino, whoever the hell that is,” Sanderson said.
A coroner’s wagon came through the crowd, scattering it, and stopped by the sedan. O’Hara stepped back, oozed through the crowd and, when he came out on the other side, made a beeline for the Little Bit O’ Denmark. Inside the door, O’Hara ran his eye over the restaurant, saw two elderly women at the table where he had left Tony Ames and All-American Eddie.
He headed for a phone booth at the rear of the place, dialed the Tribune and snapped, “Braddock. Duchess,” when the operator at the paper came on. He hardly waited for Braddock to speak.
“O’Hara, Brad. It was the fair-haired boy, all right.”
“What d’you mean, all right?” Braddock snarled.
“I’m just trying to tell you—”
“I’m way ahead of you. Tony Ames is at a drugstore at Third and Alvarado. She’s a good enough reporter to phone in. Beat it out there and pick her up and then find this kid. Don’t stick your nose in this office until you’ve got him hog-tied. Who’d he shoot?”
“A slug named S. Ticino.”
“And who is that?”
“One of Vic Philippi’s punks who sapped the kid around last night. He was good at bombing the stores that didn’t want protection.”
Braddock swore feelingly. “When the Old Man hears about this, we’ll all be on the street. The cops got any line on the kid?”
“Only a vague description so far.”
“All right, pick up Tony and then round up the kid quick and let me know. I’ll be figuring what we can do about it.”
In a cab, headed for Third and Alvarado, O’Hara sucked at an unlit cigarette unthinkingly. He was sore, sore at himself for having left a screwball like Eddie Mullen on Tony Ames’ hands and sore at the blond kid for being a screwball.
He had a pretty fair notion of what had happened. Philippi’s punk, still smarting from the night before, had run across the kid, put a gun on him and started to take him some place where he could finish what had been started in the service yard of the Bolero. And the kid somehow had got the gun away and turned it loose.