‘Have it your own way,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t answer my question, Donald.’
‘Oh, hell,’ I said, ‘you’ve got me. What’s the use?’
He turned to the shorthand reporter. ‘The answer is yes,’ he said. ‘Take it down. That’s right, isn’t it, Donald?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go ahead,’ the sheriff said. ‘Let’s hear the truth, Donald. But remember, we don’t want any more lying.’
He deflected the light so that my tortured eyeballs had a rest. ‘Go ahead, Donald.’
‘I killed him,’ I said, ‘but Alma Hunter doesn’t know it. And I didn’t do it because I was guarding Alma Hunter. I did it because I was told to.’
‘Who told you to?’
‘Bill Cunweather.’
The sheriff said, ‘Now, Donald, we don’t want any more’ lies.’
‘You’re getting the real low-down now.’
‘All right. Go ahead.’
‘Do you want it from the beginning?’ I asked.
‘Yes, from the beginning.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I used to know the Cunweather outfit in Kansas City. I’m not going to tell you a thing about who I really am because my father and mother are living, and I’m not going to break their hearts. But you can take it from me that I’ve batted around. But I didn’t have nothing to do with that Kansas City job. I was in California when that job was pulled, and I can prove it.
‘Well, here’s the low-down. Cunweather was the head of the slot-machine racket. Naturally, there was a pay-off. I don’t know all the dope on that, but it ran into quite a wad of dough. Morgan Birks was the pay-off man.
‘Well, things ran along pretty smooth until the grand jury started investigating. A citizens’ vice committee had some undercover men out and they uncovered the whole racket. They knew the names of some of the guys who were getting the dough. They didn’t know the higher-ups, but they knew some of the contact men and they knew how much those men were getting.
‘Well, that was where things began to get interesting, because there was a leak from the grand jury; and we found that the undercover men for the citizens’ committee reported that the pay-off was just about half of what Cunweather thought it was. In other words, every time Morgan Birks would collect ten thousand dollars to pay off to the big shots, he’d salt five grand and pass on only half of what he’d collected as the real pay-off.
‘Los Angeles is a tough city to do business in, and Morgan Birks had specified that if anything was going to be done, he had to have the exclusive handling of the whole business. Morgan Birks had been with Cunweather for some time, and the chief — that’s figured he was absolutely on the up-and-up.
‘Well, when this blow-off came, Morgan Birks took it on the lam, the idea being that he was hiding out from the grand jury. He wasn’t. He was hiding out from the chief because he was afraid the chief was going to rub him out.
‘Morgan Birks had been pretty smart. He’d cached most of the swag in safety deposit boxes, and these safety deposit boxes were in his wife’s name. Well, it happened that that was the particular time his wife chose to start a divorce action, knowing that she had him over a barrel. She’d been laying for a break like that because she’d been stepping and Morgan had the goods on her.
‘That raised merry hell with Morgan Birks. He couldn’t go into court to fight the divorce action. She had all of the stuff where she could get at it and he couldn’t. He had to take things lying down. So he reached an agreement with her — the best he could get — which wasn’t much. He had the deadwood on her, but he couldn’t use it because of what she had on him and because the chief would have taken him for a ride if he’d stuck his head out of cover.’
‘Where was Morgan Birks?’ the district attorney asked.
‘I’m coming to that,’ I said. ‘You said you wanted it from the beginning.’
‘All right. Go ahead and give it to me.’
‘Well, the chief found out that Sandra Birks was going to hire the Cool Detective Agency to serve the papers. So the chief planted me to get a job with the Cool Detective Agency, figuring that we’d find Morgan that way. I got the job and was assigned to serve the papers. Sandra Birks naturally wanted the thing cleaned up.’
‘Now, Sandra was protecting Morgan Birks, but we didn’t know it at the time. She had a man in the house who was supposed to be her brother. It wasn’t her brother at all. It was Morgan. But Morgan was watching her like a hawk. He was afraid she was going to two-time him all the way along the line and skip out with all the money from the safety deposit boxes instead of the cut that they’d agreed on.
‘Well, as soon as I’d get any information from Sandra Birks and Alma Hunter I’d relay it on to the chief. And in that way, we found out where Morgan Birks was hiding ― that is, we found out the man who was supposed to be Sandra’s brother was really the man we wanted.’
‘But how could he pose as her brother when you already knew him?’ the sheriff asked.
‘Because he’d pretended he was in an automobile accident, and they’d taped a lot of stuff over his nose, and the tape had pulled his face all out of shape. He was combing his hair differently, and he’d put on some padding under his coat, enough to fill him out. After I bumped Morgan off, I rolled that padding up into a bundle and dropped it in an ashcan in front of the apartment house. You can check on that.’
‘Go ahead,’ the sheriff said.
‘Well, I passed all this information on to the chief. So the chief had a pug by the name of Fred — I never did know his last name. And he sent Fred out to bring Morgan Birks to time.
‘Well, here’s the funny thing. Sandra had already been down and looted the lock boxes. She was lousy with coin. Morgan Birks found it out, and made up his mind he’d kill her, get the dough, and skip out. But Sandra was playing around with a boy friend, and she didn’t want Morgan to know anything about it. So she talked Alma Hunter into sleeping in her bed. She told her husband she was going to be sleeping in one of the twin beds in the room with Alma — and he wasn’t to come in because he was supposed to be her brother.
‘Her husband had his keys. Along in the middle of the night he slipped into the apartment, tiptoed over to the twin bed, groped around in the dark, and started to choke Alma Hunter, thinking it was Sandra. Alma kicked him in the stomach a couple of times and broke loose his hold. She started to scream, and Morgan beat it. That was the day before I bumped Morgan Off.
‘Well, when the chief got the dope on Morgan, naturally Morgan was on the spot. Morgan confessed to everything and agreed to return the dough. But he couldn’t return the dough until he got it back from his wife. So the chief told him to go get it.
‘But get this — the chief wasn’t trusting Morgan Birks any more, and Morgan knew too much. With the grand jury business coming up and Sandra Birks turning against him and all of that stuff, Morgan represented a pretty bad liability.
‘Now, I’d taken a shine to Alma Hunter. She was a good kid, and when I found out that Morgan had been at work on her throat, I slipped her the rod and told her to protect herself in case anything else happened.
‘Well, Morgan met me at a drug store where the chief had staked me out, and we were going up to get the dough from Sandra. Morgan told me Alma Hunter was out with a boy friend and wouldn’t be in all evening. Do you get the sketch? Sandra Birks had the chief’s dough. We wanted it. We knew it was going to be a rough party. Sandra had passed a stall on to Morgan. He’d fallen for it, and passed it on to me. Morgan figured I’d tap her over the head and get the dough she was supposed to be wearing in a money belt under her nightgown right next to the skin.