“Not the willies,” he assured her.
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t act as though he intended telling her, anyway, but just then the cop who had been left outside the basement door rapped, stuck his head in, and said: “Two of the others just showed up.”
Lindsey motioned at random and Dusty Detwiller came in alone, flaring camel’s hair coat belted to almost wasp-waisted tightness around him. He didn’t look particularly jaunty at the moment, though.
“This is awful,” he said to Billie, shoving his hat far back on his head and holding his hand pressed to it. “What’ll we do about tonight? Who’s this man?”
“Name of Lindsey, headquarters... No, don’t pick up any of those chairs. I want everything left just the way it is. You’ll have to stand up.”
Detwiller started unfastening his coat, then changed his mind, tightened it up again. “Hope I don’t catch cold coming out like this right out of a steam-room,” he mourned.
“Do I have to stay in here any longer?” Billie asked, with her eyes on the elongated shadow on the floor. Then she looked up, glimpsed Frankie standing just outside the door with the cop. “That’s all right,” she corrected herself hastily. “I’d better stay. You may need me, I was the only one who wasn’t drinking.”
Lindsey just looked at her, then at the doorway, but he didn’t say anything. “At what time did you leave here?” he asked Detwiller.
“A little before five. It hadn’t started to get light yet.”
“Who was still here when you left?”
“They all were. I was the first one to break away. Armstrong and Kershaw were still playing, but they couldn’t lay it in the groove much any more. Frankie was here too, but he was high on weed. Billie was already falling asleep over the piano. And Hal... Hal seemed all right. He was leaning back there, on two legs of his chair, against the wall. He had a little gin in him, but he seemed all right. He kept shimmying with his hands in his pockets.”
“You went where?”
“The Thebes Baths. I always go there after a session.”
“That’ll be all for just now. Send the other one in, Dugan.”
Frankie came in. The coffee didn’t seem to have done him much good. He looked nervous and jumpy even before Lindsey had opened his mouth to ask him anything.
“Your name?”
“Frank Bligh.”
Lindsey looked at the girl.
“He’s my brother,” she said, moistening her lips.
“You were under the influence of marihuana, I’m told.”
The pallid youth cringed. “So was everyone else except Billie. We all blazed it a little. We always do,” he said defensively. “I show it more, that’s all.”
“Did you stay on to the end?”
“Y-yeah, I guess so.”
“Just be definite about it, will you?” Lindsey said tonelessly. “Who’d already left this room and who hadn’t?”
“Dusty had left, and Armstrong had gone upstairs to his room already, and Kershaw had stumbled out by that time, too. I don’t know where he went.” His eyes traveled up toward the ceiling, dropped again “He was still here,” he said reluctantly.
“Then you were the last one out, except Miss Bligh and the dead man—” Lindsey broke off short. “How’d you get the black eye? Bump into something while you were high?”
It was one of those verbal traps. Frankie’s head started to go up and down affirmatively.
The girl looked up suddenly from the floor. “No, Frank, don’t,” she forestalled him. “Tell him the straight of it, that’s the wisest way in the end. Thatcher gave it to him,” she said to the detective.
“Why?” the latter asked quietly.
“He’d been making passes at me for a long time. That didn’t bother me, I can handle myself. I didn’t tell Frankie. But he found out about it last night for the first time, and they had a scrap in the taxi coming up here. Thatcher hit him in the eye, but then the rest of us patched it up between them, smoothed it over. Dusty won’t stand for any quarreling in the organization. It’s bad for our work. We even stopped for a minute outside a lunchroom and they got a little piece of raw meat for Frankie’s eye and brought it out to him.” She smiled placatingly at the dick. “Frankie’s been worried about it, though, ever since he heard Hal did that to himself this morning. I told him not to—” Then as there was no answering smile, her own froze. “Why are you looking at the two of us like that?” she faltered.
“What do you want me to do, smile, Miss Bligh? This man never hung himself up there. He was murdered.”
Frankie flinched as though he’d been hit. The girl’s face paled.
“I could see that the minute I stepped into the room!” Lindsey snapped. “Either you people are still groggy from your jam-session, or you’re trying to cover up something — and not being very good at it either!”
Frankie Bligh’s cheeks were hollowing and filling like a fish out of water. He gave a stricken yell at his sister. “Now see what you’ve done! Now see what you’ve done! I told you it wasn’t going to look good for me!” He turned and bolted out the door.
“Grab that young fellow, Dyer!” the dick shouted remorselessly after him. “Hang onto him!”
A blue-sleeved arm shot out, fastened itself to Frankie’s shoulder, twirled him around like a top.
Lindsey walked leisurely out to the two of them. “What’d you do it for, kid?” he asked gruffly.
The terrified Frankie’s eyelids fluttered a couple of times, then he sagged limp as a dishcloth into the cop’s arms.
Lindsey had all the surviving members of Dusty Detwiller and his Sandmen ushered back into the jam-pot again about an hour later.
Frankie Bligh hadn’t been booked for the murder yet and was still with them in a bad state of semi-collapse, his wrists manacled together. Armstrong had been sobered up by now, chiefly by heroic methods that had nothing to do with letting nature take its course. Kershaw, the missing member of the original sextet, had been located by an alarm and brought in from the bar where he had gone in all seriousness to brace up on a lethal mixture compounded of paprika, tomato juice and rye.
“Now, if you people still want to do your chore tonight at the Troc,” Lindsey warned them, “you’ll cooperate with me in this. You’re not getting out of here until I’ve had this reconstructed to suit me.”
And as Detwiller commenced to say something, he cut him off with a curt: “If you try getting in touch with a mouthpiece, we’ll simply adjourn someplace else where he can’t find you right away.”
“You can’t do this to us!” Dusty fumed.
“No, but I’m doing it.”
Billie looked at him hopefully. If he put them all through their paces like this together, instead of just concentrating on Frankie and grilling him alone, maybe it meant he wasn’t altogether convinced of her brother’s guilt yet. But then she glanced at the cuffs on his wrists and her hopes died again.
Lindsey had two other dicks working with him now, but they must have been third-graders. Mostly, she noticed, they just did the errands. Thatcher’s body had been taken down, of course, and removed to the morgue, after both he and the room had been photographed.
An ominous loop still remained in the heavy, insulated wiring where his neck had been. A stepladder against the wall showed how he had been disengaged without bringing the wire down from the ceiling, simply by expanding the loop a little and pulling his head through it. That loop, Billie recalled, had always been there, ever since they’d begun using the room — a long oval hanging down between two of the pipes, just clear of the tops of their heads, to take up slack in the wire. Otherwise the heavy hundred-watt bulb in which the cord ended on the other side of the pipe, would have hung down too low toward the floor, been smashed a dozen-times over in the course of their high-jinks.