I found Slip shooting pool in a dump on the wrong side of Main Street. I took him back into the men’s room, shut the door and leaned against it.
“Slip, I guess you heard about Joe.”
“Joe Raspberry?”
“Come off it. You know what Joe.”
He licked his lips. “Yeah. It... was in the papers.”
“Sure. So now you tell me every goddamn thing you know about Cannon and Tinkle and Artie Payne.”
“Huh? I don’t know nothin’—”
I didn’t lay a hand on him, but I said, “Shut up, I know you do. You practically grew up with Tinkle and you did a bit at Quentin with Artie. Listen steady, Slip. Big Foster’s back in town. He knows I puked on him at the trial, but he doesn’t know who belched to me. He’d sure like to know.”
It didn’t take him long to figure that one out. He frowned and said, “You couldn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“I could, Slip. And I would. The squeeze is on. I’m in a spot, man. I’m a little mad about Joe, too. And nobody would ever know I finked on you except you and me. And Foster. And then just me and Foster.”
He told me what I wanted to know.
Dazzy Brown was a knocked-out, easy going colored boy who played trumpet so sweet it made Harry James sound like a man with a kazoo, and Dazzy inhaled marijuana smoke as if it were oxygen. He’d been in stir for stealing eight saxophones and a trombone, so he knew what stir was like, and I sidled up to him at a West-side bar, threw a friendly arm around his shoulders, planted my chops three inches from his and said softly, “Listen, Cat, I just learned you grow that gage in dower pots, so come along with me, boy, you’re going to the house of many slammers where they don’t play no blues,” and it was remarkable the way he cooperated.
Then there was Hooko Carter, the long-nosed grifter with a heroin habit, who had never given me the time of day before this, but who was going to give me all twenty-four hours very soon now. I got him out of bed in his rooming house, and he didn’t have anything to say either. At first. So I told him:
“Hooko, you’re my pal, I want you to know that. You’re also Artie Payne’s pal; and there’s a rumble you and Cannon used to be closer than Siamese twins. Something else I know: it costs you forty skins a day for reindeer dust, and you need that steady supply. You get it from Beetle, but you don’t know where he gets it. I do, but I don’t have enough on the guy to put him away — just enough so he wouldn’t like antagonizing me. He’d be glad to do me a favor. What’s it like when you can’t get your dynamite, pal?”
So I got a little more from Hooko. By four o’clock in the afternoon I’d made a few more enemies, and one gunsel had spit through his teeth at me, and maybe he’d do it again, but he sure wouldn’t do it through teeth. I’d been a real rip-roaring wildcat, all right, and a lot of the things I did I wouldn’t have done on an ordinary day, but this was no ordinary day — and I’d got what I wanted, even more than I’d expected.
And one thing was sure: There was a new rumble in the back rooms and bars and hangouts now, the grapevine was twitching and hoodlums and hipsters were bending ears all over town. The question now wouldn’t be: What’s Scott going to do about it, but Who’s gonna get killed? The canaries would feel a little better, and keep on singing, but I wondered what Cannon and Tinkle and Artie would be thinking now. Because they’d be on the grapevine too; they’d know I was throwing a lot of weight around, leaning on them, even though they wouldn’t know for sure what I’d learned or what I was going to do next. But Cannon would know by now that I figured on killing him.
I’d found out for damn sure what I’d already been sure of, that Cannon and Tinkle and Artie were the boys who’d been pulling the ten-to-two jobs — and most important of all I learned there was a job set up for tonight. If the job went through, there’d be four of us in on it; if it didn’t, I’d try another way. From bits and pieces I’d made my plan. From Hooko I found out, among a lot of unimportant things, that Artie Payne was called the “Professor” because he had such a valuable think-pot, and because he’d been librarian at Folsom for three years; from Slip I learned the Professor had worked in the Westinghouse labs from the time he was twenty-six till he was thirty-four, and he’d naturally learned a lot about lighting, all kinds of lighting and lights. I already knew Tinkle, the Cowboy, had been a locksmith. And I figured, from personal experience, that Cannon could break a man’s neck with one blow of his big fist if he hit him squarely with his three-hundred pounds behind it. It was adding up, fitting together.
At two-thirty in the afternoon I put in a third phone call to Lois. I’d called her a second time at one, but there hadn’t been any answer then either. So I hadn’t seen or talked to her since that sad moment when she’d said, “Why, Cannon. What—” and I’d heard Cannon grunt as he started to swing. But I’d done a lot of wondering. I’d just about rejected any idea that she was “in” with Cannon on any of his capers — it was hardly likely she’d have showed me the hot rocks he’d handed her if she were — but whether she’d known the stones were stolen or not I didn’t know. I kind of leaned toward the idea that what she’d told me last night was true: that she hadn’t known and hadn’t wanted to know; the implication being that the snake-eyed hoop was a damned handsome chunk of sparkles, and she hoped it was clean. And the word I’d got from the boys around town was that Lois was simply a solid tomato, on the up and up, whom Cannon was hot for. I liked it that way, because I’d begun getting somewhat steamed up about Lois myself — and I was more than a little worried about her. I thought again about how I’d felt starting for the morgue last night.
Then she answered the phone. “Lois? Uh, Shell Scott here.”
“Oh... hello, Shell.”
“You all right?”
“Yes. How about you? I saw the papers.”
“That was a frame. I’m O.K., a little stooped over, but on my feet. What happened to you after I — after I left?”
Her story was that she’d gawked at Cannon while he dumped me into my Cad, then tried to slap his eyeballs out, at least so she said, then they’d had a word battle during which she’d called him all kinds of names. After a minute or two of this, they’d finally gone back into her apartment — were there when I’d banged on the door, Cannon ready to clobber her if she’d peeped — and after my departure the fireworks continued.
She went on, “It lasted about an hour, but when he left, I told him not to come back.”
“I called you last night but your line was busy. What—”
“Even after Cannon left, he phoned me a couple times. He was so persistent, I took the phone off its hook and went to bed.”
I was quiet for a minute, then, “Honey, I guess you haven’t changed your opinion of me. Or, have you?”
“When I found out you were a detective I wondered if you wanted to take me out because you... let’s say, just couldn’t resist me, or if you had a detective’s reason. So naturally I was a little disappointed last night. But then I realized you were right; I knew the kind of man Cannon was, but I took the things he gave me anyway. I feel better now, though; as long as I thought he might have bought those things for me I could enjoy them. But when I knew he probably stole them, naturally I gave them back.”
“You what?”
“I gave them back to him. Last night.”