She wasn’t disappointed. Lefty was over there, looking out — looking for her, patient after the hours.
“Honey boy!” she screamed at him. “You’ve got to get out of there!”
He didn’t get it. Didn’t get a word of it. Didn’t get the frantic signs she made. With only a couple of hundred feet between them, they were a world apart. Precariously close, she realized with a dry sob, to two worlds apart!
And then at the height of her desperation, she thought of her stratagem of another day, and saw a way, thought of that trick of hers to explain to Lefty why she wasn’t meeting him one afternoon after a big night uptown, and went flying to — her laundry bag!
V
She kept her promise. Within a half hour after she had left big Sam Coats, she had returned to him, Walsh at her side.
“Too bad,” she told him, as she had told Walsh. “One of the girls didn’t get home last night, and her sister isn’t feeling well. I stopped to freshen up for a lone woman’s struggle.”
“Your funeral,” grinned Coats. “You missed a lot of drinks. Want to catch up?”
“And how!” cried Dorcas O’Donnell. She stooped to bring up the amplification on the radio until the music was a boiler shop roar, and caught big Sam’s arm. “Come on,” she urged. “Take one with me. My first in a long while.”
“Tootin’ I will,” Coats said, and stumbled after her into the office.
She closed the door, and shook her head at the bottle.
“No, wait,” she breathed. “What about that fur coat, Sam? What about — being in back of me? Did you mean it?”
“I said it,” he told her. “You treat me right, I’ll treat you right. I always do business that way.”
She nodded.
“Then I’ll tell you something. I know where Lefty is!”
“Huh?” Coats stared.
“He’s upstairs, in his room. I just saw him from — from the girl’s flat. He was at his window.”
Big Sam blinked.
“Was he? Well, it’s too bad. He wanted to keep out a’ sight. If you want it straight, he was hell for duckin’ you. You see, a fine chance come up for him to go to Florida — alone. He got wise to himself all of a sudden. Saw he’d be a sucker not to take it.”
The girl laughed.
“I should have a weeping spell!” she said in a voice as hard as Coats’s own. “It’s fifty-fifty. If Lefty’s got his way to make, I’ve got mine to make. Far as I’m concerned, he’s out of my life. Out like a light. There’s plenty of others. Plenty — and real men. Men with dollars to his nickels. He’s cheap. I’d like to tell him so. Tell him to his face!”
It was a great act and the befuddled Coats was getting a good kick out of it.
“Atta baby!” he encouraged. “You tell him, kiddo!”
The girl caught up his hands.
“No, no! I take that back!” she cried. “I never want to see him again. Wants to go to Florida, does he? For all of me, he can go ’way south of there. Go and stay. But I want him to know, Sam, just who’s quitting who. Listen! I’d write him his walking papers here and now, if—”
Coats had decided he liked her in the hysterical part. He wasn’t too far gone to congratulate himself she was that kind — the peppy kind that just blew off steam and tried to beat the man to it when he was ready to give her the gate. So much the better!
He picked her up at the pause.
“If — what?” he said.
“If you’d take his discharge up to him, Sammy,” she finished. “Serve it on him yourself. Right away, while I know just what I want to say to him.”
Big Sam’s arms circled her.
“Momma,” he exulted, “you sure rung the right messenger! Say, I won’t only hand Lefty the walkin’ papers. I’ll fix up his transportation for him — to-night!” He waved at the desk. “There’s paper an’ pen an’ ink. Go ahead. Poison him!”
She wrote just a couple of lines. They were ladylike but final in implication:
Pm playing the mob from now on. You know where you can go. And how.
Coats gloated over the note.
“Thass the idea, kiddo!” he applauded. “Don’t ever waste words. Tell it to ’em snappy.”
He lumbered out of the office, turned his back on the scattered and flattening party and started unsteadily up the stairs.
VI
The key was in the outside of Lefty Byrne’s door, and Lefty was waiting just inside when the Big Shot fumbled at the lock. A heavy wash basin was in his hands, and it came crashing down on Coats’s head as he entered.
For a second Coats stood waving, then he slumped. He was out cold. Byrne, bending over him, ripped open his vest and his shirt, swiftly unbuckled the money belt under them, and took from it the same five thousand dollar bills that he had been forced to give up.
When he had stuffed them into his pocket, he glanced at the note which Coats had dropped. It brought the ghost of a smile to his lips.
“Thanks, lots!” he said aloud. “You’re the smartest girl in America, honey! You bet I know where to go — and how!”
He patted the Big Shot’s pockets, transferred a pistol to his own, and whisked the sheets from his bed. When he had knotted their ends together, he collected sheets from other beds along the “cell block” and tied them in, too, the squawk of the overtimed radio and a bedlam of drunken shouting coming up to him as he worked.
It was in Walsh’s room that he made his rope of sheets fast to the bed. That room looked out on the alley, and there were no fences to climb below. Out the window he went and down.
Three minutes after Coats’s arrival with the note, Lefty was in front of Dorcas O’Donnell’s house with a waiting taxi. Dorcas came scurrying around the corner presently.
“It was kind a’ tough one to read,” Lefty grinned as she climbed hurriedly into the cab. “But it percolated. I crowned Sam, an’ I got my money. Let’s go places.”
Her face again was ashy as she snuggled to him.
“Far places,” said she.
Nearly a half hour had passed before Walsh, always more careful with his drinks than the others, missed the Big Shot.
“Hey!” he shouted, coming out of a doze. “What’s become a’ Sam?”
An answer came hazily through the shriek of the radio.
“Him an’ the skirt went out.”
But the gunman called Buck recollected otherwise.
“No,” he corrected, staggering to Walsh. “They didn’t no such thing. That’s a lie, an’ whoever said it can get as tough as he wants to. Sam went upstairs, thass where Sam went. An’ the dame said she was goin’ to the corner to bring in some san’wiches. But, hell! That’s a long time ago!”
Walsh sprang up.
“Say!” he exclaimed, sobered. “We better see what’s happened. If Sam tangled with Lefty in the shape lie’s in, then plenty may of. Shut off that damn music box!”
There was no sound from above. Walsh, gun in hand, leaped for the stairs.
On the third story he found Coats. The Big Shot was sitting on the floor of Lefty’s room, with the door wide open behind him. He was rubbing his head. His eyes were open, but there was only a profound stupefaction in them.
“I... I was ganged,” he stuttered. “An’ s-somebody copped my dough.”
“Where’s Lefty?” Walsh demanded.
Coats couldn’t tell him, but he found out for himself — saw that hawser of sheets moored to his own bed and leading out the window.