Only that didn’t make very good sense, either, when he thought it over a second time. It didn’t seem reasonable that the guy, Sam, would have snatched the kid out of a crowded restaurant just to take him some place and hand him a slugging. And, too, he had noticed that Sam had been shot only in the head. If there had been a struggle for the gun one shot might have landed there but it wasn’t probable that all three of them would.
He shrugged. After all, there wasn’t much profit in trying to guess. When he located the crazy kid, he’d find out quickly enough what had happened.
At Third and Alvarado the cab slid in toward the curb under the crimson glow of a huge soft-drink sign. Tony Ames stepped from the drugstore doorway into the neon radiance. She looked upset and ruffled, which wasn’t in character for her.
She got into the cab, said, “Club Bolero, please,” to the driver through the window and then shut the window.
“I regret at times,” she said, “that I was raised to be a lady. There’re so many words I’d like to use right now.”
“I’ve said ’em all,” O’Hara grinned sourly. “Give, kitten.”
“After you left, we were nibbling smorgasbord and Eddie was talking about making passes and I was telling him I had a swell stiffarm and then he looked across the restaurant and said there was a pal of his he wanted to talk to. He went to a table near the door and sat down with a man there, a small, dark man.”
“That’d be one of the guys who were sapping Eddie last night. Well, he won’t sap anybody else.”
“He was the man that was shot?”
O’Hara nodded. “How’d the kid get away?”
“Paul Akely of Paramount came in and sat down at my table and started to talk. A few minutes later I looked at the other table and no Eddie and no other man. There was only one place they could have gone — out. So I jumped up — Akely probably has his mouth propped open yet — and started out, myself. I just got to the door when I heard some shots, not very loud, and when I reached the sidewalk, I saw Eddie running down the street with a gun in his hand.”
“So you ran after him?”
“I didn’t walk. He turned west on Eighth and when I got to the corner he was at Figueroa, jumping into a cab there. I found another one and kept after him — this far. A flat tire on my cab ended that, so I called to see if I could get you and Brad told me there’d been a man shot. Ken, do you think the kid would do anything like that?”
“Sweetheart, I’ll pick long shots at the track or guess what the weather’ll be a week from now, but I refuse to predict what our All-American nitwit will do from moment to moment.”
“But he’s a nice kid even if he’s a little wild.”
“Thank God he’s only a little wild. Why the Club Bolero?”
“I got the number of his cab and called the cab company. They said the driver had just reported in from there to take another call. So maybe we can find him there.”
“All I hope,” O’Hara growled, “is that the place isn’t on fire when we arrive. Arson is the only thing Eddie hasn’t committed so far and all he needs is time. Tony, you wait in the cab for me.”
By eight o’clock in the evening the Club Bolero was between its dinner-time crowd and its late-in-the-evening mob. It was quiet, so quiet in fact, that O’Hara said, “Eddie can’t be here, kitten. The walls aren’t shaking and the roof isn’t sliding off. Wait for me.”
He had the cab park, not in the parking lot, but a half-block away along the curving length of Sunset. He walked down to the club past antique shops, swank travel agencies and interior decorators’ studios, and turned in under the awning. The doors of the Bolero were of tooled leather, each with a round pane of plate glass, resembling a porthole.
There was a long tear in the leather of one door and one of the plate-glass panes were cracked across the middle. A very tall doorman was looking at the wrecked door in a displeased way.
O’Hara said, “Hello. A truck try to use this entrance?”
“Some fresh kid,” the doorman said. “We hadda throw him out. He was prowling around like he was looking for somebody and he was bothering people so we hadda throw him out.”
“You should have tried opening the door before you threw him.”
Ike looked at O’Hara and a remembering gleam came into his eyes. He said, “Hey, I think it was you who brung him here last night.”
“He sounds like the same enthusiastic type. Where’d he go from here?”
“The third time we tossed him out he went away. I wouldn’t know where he went.”
“And he seemed to be looking for somebody, eh?”
“Now, listen, Mr. O’Hara,” said Ike in a worried way. “You ain’t got any idea of making trouble, have you?”
“Not me. I’m past my pugilistic days by about ten years.”
O’Hara went past the scarred door and down shallow steps to the cocktail room. He couldn’t begin to fathom why the kid had made for the Bolero or whom, if anyone, he had been prowling around and looking for. He knew that if Eddie Mullen had shot the guy called Sam, the Tribune couldn’t cover him even for the sake of the Old Man. But it would help immeasurably if he could locate the kid before the cops pounced on him, could get his story and know what it was all about. Maybe if he could discover why the kid had headed for the Bolero, it might give him a notion where he could find him now. So he looked the Bolero patrons over casually, taking his time.
There were four men lounging on stools in front of the bar, two bartenders behind it. At a table a girl with platinum hair was listening to the life story of an elderly drunk and yawning.
O’Hara knew only one of the men at the bar. The man was tall and rawboned with a high-colored face. He looked a lot like a farmer but wasn’t a farmer. He was Deke Hanna, who body-guarded for Harry Atkins. He didn’t have much brains, O’Hara suspected, but he was one of the main reasons why Harry Atkins could say “yes” and “no” on gambling matters and other rackets in the county without much competition.
Hanna nodded to O’Hara and drowsed over his small beer. O’Hara ordered Scotch and soda, drank half of it, wandered with the glass in his hand to the dining-room. There were scattered diners but he didn’t know any of them. He took stairs to the second floor where the gambling rooms were but the games were closed and there were only two dealers there, cutting each other’s throat at high card. There wasn’t any one in the entire place, so far as O’Hara could tell, whose presence would have explained the kid’s coming there.
But if he had been drawn to the Bolero once this evening, O’Hara reasoned, he might wind up there again and that gave O’Hara an idea. He went back to the cocktail room and into a corridor at the back.
He hadn’t gone very far when quick, light feet stepped along behind him. Deke Hanna grabbed his arm from the back and said, “Hey, Irish, where you think you’re heading?”
“Hello, Deke,” said O’Hara. “You body-guarding Mat Wyman now, too?”
“Never mind,” Hanna said. “You better come on back to the bar, pal, and not bother nobody.”
“Suppose I feel like seeing if Mat’s in his office, instead?”
“You don’t feel like that, Irish.”
A door at the end of the corridor opened wide and Mat Wyman looked out. Through the vista of the door O’Hara saw a tall, starkly thin man lounging on a leather divan.
Mat said, “Hello, Ken. What’s the matter?” He had a nervous, worried look on his sagging face.
O’Hara shrugged. “I had an idea I wanted to talk to you.”