The pride of the A.A.A. stepped into the elevator.
“I got words to say to you.”
“Why don’t you write me a letter?” asked Johnny. “Then I can read and appreciate your words at my leisure. Right now I’m pretty busy.”
Kilkenny punched the button for the fourth floor and the car went up. Kilkenny sized up Johnny. He was obviously making a tremendous effort to contain himself.
“I notice,” Johnny pointed out, “you knew what floor.”
“I know,” Kilkenny said tautly. “I know a lot of things.”
They got off at the fourth floor and Kilkenny pressed the buzzer of Alice Cummings’s apartment. She opened the door. She was wearing a street suit that had probably cost in the general neighborhood of three hundred eighty-five. She looked very nice.
“Oh,” she said when she saw Kilkenny with Johnny.
Both men entered the apartment. “Miss Cummings,” Johnny said promptly, “you know that you’re responsible for furniture and glass breakage.”
“That’s right,” the girl said, looking at Kilkenny. “I’m in enough trouble with the apartment house people right now. They’ve given me notice to move. I don’t want a big bill added on.”
“Don’t crowd me,” Kilkenny said to Johnny. “I’ve already lost my job on account of you.”
“Which job?” Johnny asked.
“You know damn well which job,” snarled Kilkenny. “The one with the Acme Adjustment Agency.”
“Good. That’ll be a load off Sam’s mind. He won’t have to worry about that old mandolin rap. I thought maybe you were referring to the other job.” Johnny indicated Alice Cummings.
Alice Cummings flared. “Have you brought those coins, Fletcher?”
“If you’ve got the seventeen dollars ready.”
She got her purse from a table and opened it.
Johnny said, “I warned you, you’re losing money on the deal.”
“I want what’s mine, that’s all.”
Johnny shrugged. He reached deep into his trousers pocket and brought out the handful of pennies and dimes. He held them out to Alice Cummings. She put the seventeen dollars in bills on the table and cupped both hands to take the coins.
Johnny, looking closely, saw that her nostrils were wide and that she was breathing heavily with suppressed excitement.
“And now, Mr. Fletcher,” Alice Cummings said coldly, “I’ve seen enough of you to last me for some time.”
“Well,” said Johnny. “I’d like to talk to you a moment — alone.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“I think you have. And I know I’ve got something to say to you.”
“Nothing you can say could possibly interest me.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Johnny said. “You made an arrangement with our friend Kilkenny here to, ah, retrieve a certain object from my hotel room. A goose bank.”
“Beat it, Fletcher,” snarled Kilkenny.
“Your cheap hoods ripped the hell out of my room,” Johnny went on calmly. “They didn’t have to do that to find the bank, because it was handy. But they didn’t want the bank alone — they were looking for something that had been in the bank.”
“Breakage or no breakage,” Kilkenny said thickly. His hands came up and he started for Johnny. The latter moved quickly around behind a table on which rested a nice china bowl containing flowers.
“Here goes the furniture,” Johnny warned.
“Stop it, you two,” cried Alice Cummings. “If you have to fight wait until you’re outside.”
“You heard the boss, buster,” Johnny said.
Kilkenny stopped.
Johnny pointed at Alice Cummings. “The real reason I came over is because a certain party came to see me. He said you’d telephoned him and offered to sell him something. Do you know who I mean?” he demanded.
Alice Cummings looked sharply at Johnny. “What do you know about — that?”
“Everything.”
She hesitated, then her eyes went to Kilkenny. “Why don’t you come back in a half hour?”
“I’m here now,” Kilkenny said bluntly. “You’re not going to pull a fast one on me.”
“You’ll get your money,” Alice said, beginning to show her claws to the former bill collector.
“I’ll get it, all of it,” Kilkenny snapped. “I’ve stuck my neck out on this job and I want what’s coming to me.”
“You’ll get it.”
“I don’t think Fletcher knows one damn thing. He’s got a big mouth, that’s all. He’ll make you think black is white and he’ll steal the fillings out of your teeth.”
“I like you too, J.J.,” Johnny said.
Kilkenny bared his teeth, but suddenly wheeled toward the door. “I’ll be back in a half hour and I’m warning you, don’t try any double-cross on me.”
He went out.
Johnny said, “Carmichael, Senior. I’m working for him.”
“Why? Why should he employ a man like you?” demanded Alice Cummings.
“Maybe it’s because he trusts me.”
“You? You’re nothing but a two-bit chiseler and sharp shooter.”
“Baby,” said Johnny gently, “that’s rough talk. You’re too beautiful for talk like that. Why, you’re the sort of doll I could go for myself... if I could afford it.”
“I could go for you, too,” Alice conceded. “If you had enough of what it takes. But since you haven’t—”
“Has Flanagan got it?”
The name rocked her back on her heels. “Who?”
“Harry Flanagan, the one and only. The gigolo...”
That did it. Alice flew at Johnny. She struck him a stinging slap on the face. “You filthy...!” she screamed. She tried to slap Johnny again, but caught both her wrists in his hands.
“Whoa, Nellie!” he cried. “You called me a two-bit chiseler, but I never took a quarter from a doll in all my life. Harry Flanagan’s been taking everything he could get from you that you were able to squeeze out of Jess Carmichael. And he’s been giving it to another doll.”
“That’s a lie!” screamed Alice. She raked Johnny’s shin with her high heel, causing him to wince. “That’s a dirty, filthy lie.”
Again she tried to use her heel on Johnny, but he shoved her away so violently she would have gone over backwards except that her back was to the wall and she collided with that.
“Flanagan’s a louse and everybody on Broadway and Forty-Eighth knows it except you.”
“Get out of here, get out of here!”
“You got everything you could out of Jess Carmichael and then when he got fed up and buttoned up his wallet you were through with him. Or maybe he caught you and your fine Harry Flanagan together...”
The new trend frightened Alice Cummings out of her blind rage. “That isn’t true. Harry didn’t kill him. He didn’t. I know he didn’t.”
“He’s got a good chance of frying for it,” Johnny said.
“No! You’re wrong. You... you mustn’t put the police on Harry. He had nothing to do with it.” She ran forward, toward the table on which she had deposited the coins Johnny had give her. “It’s here — Jess told me. He gave me the bank and he told me that if anything happened to him to give the bank to his father. He said that the old man would know who — who hurt him.”
“There was no note inside the bank. I looked.”
“It wasn’t a note. It was...” She stopped, realizing that she was going too far. She made a tremendous effort to compose herself. “You said — Mr. Carmichael had come to you about — about my phone call to him.”
“He told me you tried to shake him down for fifty thousand,” Johnny said insultingly.
“That’s a lie. I... I wanted to sell him the bank and” — she pointed at the coins — “those. It said in the paper this morning that he’d spend his last dollar to — to find the person who murdered his son. Fifty thousand isn’t anything to him. He’s probably worth fifty million. Jess told me it was — in the bank — and all I wanted to do was to give this to his father.”