III
In five minutes he was back with a slender blonde girl of twenty-three in pale green silk. The looseness of her small mouth and the puffiness around her blue eyes weren’t yet pronounced enough to spoil her prettiness.
I stood up.
“This is Miss Hambleton,” he said.
She gave me a swift glance and then lowered her eyes again, nervously playing with the strap of a handbag she held.
“You can identify yourself?” I asked.
“Sure,” the man said. “Show them to him, Sue.”
She opened the bag, brought out some papers and things, and held them up for me to take.
“Sit down, sit down,” the man said as I took them.
They sat on the sofa. I sat in the rocking chair again and examined the things she had given me. There were two letters addressed to Sue Hambleton here, her father’s telegram welcoming her home, a couple of receipted department store bills, an automobile driver’s license, and a savings account pass book that showed a balance of less than ten dollars.
By the time I had finished my examination the girl’s embarrassment was gone. She looked levelly at me, as did the man beside her. I felt in my pocket, found my copy of the photograph New York had sent us at the beginning of the hunt, and looked from it to her.
“Your mouth could have shrunk, maybe,” I said, “but how could your nose have got that much longer?”
“If you don’t like my nose,” she said, “how’d you like to go to hell?” Her face had turned red.
“That’s not the point. It’s a swell nose, but it’s not Sue’s.” I held the photograph out to her. “See for yourself.”
She glared at the photograph and then at the man.
“What a smart guy you are,” she told him.
He was watching me with dark eyes that had a brittle shine to them between narrow-drawn eyelids. He kept on watching me while he spoke to her out the side of his mouth, crisply:
“Pipe down.”
She piped down. He sat and watched me. I sat and watched him. A clock ticked seconds away behind me. His eyes began shifting their focus from one of my eyes to the other. The girl sighed.
He said in a low voice: “Well?”
I said: “You’re in a hole.”
“What can you make out of it?” he asked casually.
“Conspiracy to defraud.”
The girl jumped up and hit one of his shoulders angrily with the back of a hand, crying:
“What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this. It was going to be duck soup—yeh! Eggs in the coffee—yeh! Now look at you. You haven’t even got guts enough to tell this guy to go chase himself.” She spun around to face me, pushing her red face down at me—I was still sitting in the rocker—snarling: “Well, what are you waiting for? Waiting to be kissed goodbye? We don’t owe you anything, do we? We didn’t get any of your lousy money, did we? Outside, then. Take the air. Dangle.”
“Stop it, sister,” I growled. “You’ll bust something.”
The man said:
“For God’s sake stop that bawling, Peggy, and give somebody else a chance.” He addressed me: “Well, what do you want?”
“How’d you get into this?” I asked.
He spoke quickly, eagerly:
“A fellow named Kenny gave me that stuff and told me about this Sue Hambleton, and her old man having plenty. I thought I’d give it a whirl. I figured the old man would either wire the dough right off the reel or wouldn’t send it at all. I didn’t figure on this send-a-man stuff. Then when his wire came, saying he was sending a man to see her, I ought to have dropped it.
“But hell! Here was a man coming with a grand in cash. That was too good to let go of without a try. It looked like there still might be a chance of copping, so I got Peggy to do Sue for me. If the man was coming today, it was a cinch he belonged out here on the Coast, and it was an even bet he wouldn’t know Sue, would only have a description of her. From what Kenny had told me about her, I knew Peggy would come pretty close to fitting her description. I still don’t see how you got that photograph. Television? I only wired the old man yesterday. I mailed a couple of letters to Sue, here, yesterday, so we’d have them with the other identification stuff to get the money from the telegraph company on.”
“Kenny gave you the old man’s address?”
“Sure he did.”
“Did he give you Sue’s?”
“No.”
“How’d Kenny get hold of the stuff?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Where’s Kenny now?”
“I don’t know. He was on his way east, with something else on the fire, and couldn’t fool with this. That’s why he passed it on to me.”
“Bighearted Kenny,” I said. “You know Sue Hambleton?”
“No,” emphatically. “I’d never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”
“I don’t like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story’s got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:
“It wouldn’t be the way it happened.”
“That’s too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don’t mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”
He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.
The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn’t like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.
I got up on my feet, telling him:
“Suit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I’ll have to take you both in.”
He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.
The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.
“This is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to take the fall with you.”
“Shut up,” he said in his throat.
“Shut me up,” she cried.
He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.
She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:
“Joe does know her. He got the things from her. She’s at the St. Martin on O’Farrell Street—her and Babe McCloor.”
While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe’s right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:
“Let me tell it.”
“Hop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.
He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:
“He was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don’t think old man Hambleton’s hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn’t a bad guess.
He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.
I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”
“You’ve got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”
“What’s Babe doing now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Is he still puffing them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
“I don’t,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can’t get anything out of him about what he’s doing.”
“How long have he and Sue been here?”
“About six months that I know of.”
“Who’s he mobbed up with?”
“I don’t know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”
“How’s he fixed?”
“I don’t know. There’s always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”
Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn’t going to get much information about my people here.
I went to the phone in the passageway and called the agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives’ room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.
MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and told him:
“This fellow says his name’s Joe Wales, and the girl’s supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We’ve got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I’ve made a deal with them. I’m going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There’s a fire-escape in front of the window. The window’s locked now. I’d keep it that way. If the deal turns out OK we’ll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I’m gone there’s no reason why you can’t knock them around as much as you want.”
MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.
Joe Wales called:
“Hey, you’re not going to uncover me to Babe, are you? That’s got to be part of the deal.”
“Not unless I have to.”
“I’d just as leave stand the rap,” he said. “I’d be safer in jail.”
“I’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”