I merely looked at him without answering.
“What did Percy say to you?” he asked.
I simulated his short unpleasant laugh.
“He intimated in his terse, ungrammatical way that he was going to learn me to kick a field goal, my head being the ball. And the lesson was to teach me to stay out of your hair.”
“No explanation of how you got in my hair?”
I shook my head. “Since our sole contact concerned Walter Lancaster, I assumed my looking into his murder ruffled your toupee.”
Barney snorted smoke in my direction. “We also discussed a lady.”
For a moment I didn’t get it, and when I finally did, it filled me with such a mixture of disgust and rage, I slid from my stool and reached out to gather a fist full of smoking jacket.
Across the room Flat-face said tonelessly, “You’ll get a slug in your guts.”
That deterred me from slugging Barney, but did nothing to abate my anger. Gripping the seat of the bar stool between us instead of his jacket, I leaned toward him and said impolitely, “You underdeveloped cretin! I’m up to my neck in a double murder investigation, trying to prevent a third, and you bother me with a lot of teen-age nonsense over a girl! In grammar school boys sic their gangs on fellows who mess with their girls, but they outgrow such juvenile stuff by the time they get to high school. Of course, never having attended either one, a paleolithic moron like you wouldn’t know that, but...”
“Hold it, Moon!” Barney said in a strangled voice.
“You ape-brained simpleton!” I yelled. “Grown men don’t win women by having their rivals beat up. What in hell do you think you’re accomplishing with this nonsense?”
Leaving his stool, Barney gripped the opposite side of the same one I was gripping and put his handsome nose an inch from mine. “I’m going to marry that girl! That’s what I’m accomplishing!” he yelled back to me. “And I’m keeping you away from her if I have to beat your brains out every hour on the hour!”
I straightened up. “She wouldn’t have a triple-plated jerk like you if you had every man in a radius of fifty miles beaten up.”
That released his trigger. Stepping away from the bar, he started a fast left hook at my head. Unfortunately, for him, this put him between me and the gun in Flat-face’s hand.
Deflecting his hook with my open right palm, I leaned my back against the bar, brought up my aluminum foot, planted it in his groin and snapped my leg straight. He shot across the room on his heels, crashed into Flat-face and took him to the floor with him.
I was vaulting the bar while Slim dropped his cards, leaped to his feet and began to reach under his coat. With a pinch bottle of Scotch in one hand and a quart of Irish whiskey in the other, I spun toward him and hurled the former end-over-end just as his gun began to clear. The Irish I flipped two feet lower an instant later.
Slim ducked the Scotch just in time to catch the Irish squarely on the nose. The pinch bottle burst all over the wall behind him, but the Irish didn’t even break. It rolled one way, Slim rolled the other, then both lay still.
The instant the Irish left my hand, I was rearmed again, this time with a square bottle of gin and a quart of bourbon. Both started toward the corner containing the pool table just as Barney rolled from Flat-face’s lap. Seated spread-eagled on the floor, Flat-face tried to duck and fire at the same time. Both bottles missed, but so did his bullet.
Before Flat-face could align his sights for a second shot I had two more bottles started, and after that I kept them going as rapidly as a juggler throws Indian clubs. It is amazing how accurately you can toss a full quart bottle clear across a room. In spite of hardly taking time to aim, not one of the eighteen quarts I threw missed Barney or Flat-face more than two feet. After the second volley Flat-face gave up trying to get in a shot, and he and Barney devoted themselves to scampering about on all fours in a frantic attempt to dodge the rain of hard drinks.
Had they kept out of each other’s way, perhaps all the bottles would have missed, but they were both paying more attention to me than to where they were going, and they met head on just in time for the seventeenth bottle to catch them right where their heads were touching.
Rolling both Flat-face and Barney on their backs to prevent them from drowning in a puddle of whiskey, I examined them and decided neither probably suffered anything more dangerous than mild concussion. I picked Flat-face’s pistol off the floor, wiped it clean of liquor and thrust it in my coat pocket. Relieving Slim of the keys to the blue sedan, I pocketed them also. Then I found an ice bucket behind the bar, filled it with water and dumped it in Barney’s face.
Spluttering, the gang leader sat erect, groaned and pressed both hands to the side of his head.
I said, “Barney, can you understand me?”
Thickly he said, “Yes.”
“Then listen carefully. I don’t care how hard you chase Fausta, because when she gets tired of your chasing, she’s perfectly capable of tying a can to your tail without my help. And if I feel like it, I’ll chase her too. Without your permission. But keep your goons away from me.”
He said something under his breath.
“Understand this clearly, Barney. I’ve no intention of spending the rest of my life jumping at shadows. One more pass at me and I’m coming at you with a gun. Not after your hoods, but straight at you. And if you think that won’t get you dead, check the morgue records over my way.”
Still clasping both hands to his head, Barney said indistinctly, “I know you’ve knocked off a bad boy or two, Moon.”
“Mister Moon.”
After a pause he sulkily amended, “Mister Moon.”
“Want to call it quits, Barney, or want to make this a real feud?”
His glazed eyes peered up at me with hate, but after an imperceptible hesitation, he said, “I guess a dame’s not important enough to kill a guy over, and I’d have to kill you if you came gunning.”
“Think you could?” I asked.
“I don’t want to,” he said with a mixture of pain and irritation. “All I ever intended was to give you a few bumps, but you got to take things serious. Just go away and leave me alone.”
I left him alone amid the ruins of his play room and his two hoods, drove the sedan to my house, where I left it, and proceeded to Fausta’s. She listened to my story with more than passing admiration for the narrator.
XIII
With Fausta in tow, I arrived at Warren Day’s office about nine o’clock the next morning. The inspector looked up in simulated astonishment when we walked in.
“Still up from last night?” he asked.
“You may scratch Barney Seldon off your list of suspects,” I retorted.
The abrupt way in which I made this announcement made Day blink. “What?”
“Barney Seldon.” I gave him a brief rundown of my previous evening’s activities. “So you may as well tear up that assault complaint against Percy Sweet and Seldon,” I concluded. “You only wanted it as an excuse to hold Seldon when you got your hands on him anyway. And since both Barney and Percy Sweet are clear on the Lancaster and Knight killings, I’m not interested in pressing charges.”
The inspector scratched his long nose. “Suppose Barney was selling you a bill of goods?”
“He wasn’t,” I assured him. “Aside from the fact that our killer tried to poison Fausta, which Barney would certainly never do, his hoods dumping me and scurrying to Fausta’s rescue the minute they learned she was in danger, cinches it that Seldon was merely behaving like a jealous juvenile delinquent. And don’t tell me his actions were too childish to be plausible. You have to possess sub-normal intelligence to be a hood in the first place.”