# Red Harvest (1929)/Chapter 15

CHAPTER XIV
Max
The news of Whisper's capture spread quickly. When Noonan, the coppers he had brought along, and I took the gambler and the now conscious Jerry into the City Hall there were at least a hun­dred people standing around watching us.
All of them didn't look pleased. Noonan's coppers—a shabby lot at best—moved around with whitish strained faces. But Noonan was the most triumphant guy west of the Mississippi. Even the bad luck he had trying to third-degree Whisper couldn't spoil his happiness.
Whisper stood up under all they could give him. He would talk to his lawyer, he said, and to nobody else, and he stuck to it. And, as much as Noonan hated the gambler, here was a prisoner he didn't give the works, didn't turn over to the wrecking crew. Whisper had killed the chief's brother, and the chief hated his guts, but Whisper was still too much some­ body in Poisonville to be roughed around.
Noonan finally got tired of playing with his pris­oner, and sent him up—the prison was on the City Hall's top floor—to be stowed away. I lit another of the chief's cigars and read the detailed statement he had got from the woman in the hospital. There was ​nothing in it that I hadn't learned from Dinah and MacSwain.
The chief wanted me to come out to his house for dinner, but I lied out of it, pretending that my wrist—now in a bandage—was bothering me. It was really little more than a burn.
While we were talking about it, a pair of plain­ clothes men brought in the red-faced bird who had stopped the slug I had missed Whisper with. It had broken a rib for him, and he had taken a back-door sneak while the rest of us were busy. Noonan's men had picked him up in a doctor's office. The chief failed to get any information out of him, and sent him off to the hospital.
I got up and prepared to leave, saying:
"The Brand girl gave me the tip-off on this. That's why I asked you to keep her and Rolff out of it."
The chief took hold of my left hand for the fifth or sixth time in the past couple of hours.
"If you want her taken care of, that's enough for me," he assured me. "But if she had a hand in turn­ing that bastard up, you can tell her for me that any time she wants anything, all she's got to do is name it."
I said I'd tell her that, and went over to my hotel, thinking about that neat white bed. But it was nearly eight o'clock, and my stomach needed attention. I went into the hotel dining room and had that fixed up.
Then a leather chair tempted me into stopping in the lobby while I burnt a cigar. That led to conver​sation with a traveling railroad auditor from Denver, who knew a man I knew in St. Louis. Then there was a lot of shooting in the street.
We went to the door and decided that the shooting was in the vicinity of the City Hall. I shook the auditor and moved up that way.
I had done two-thirds of the distance when an automobile came down the street toward me, moving fast, leaking gun-fire from the rear.
I backed into an alley entrance and slid my gun loose. The car came abreast. An arc-light brightened two faces in the front of the car. The driver's meant nothing to me. The upper part of the other's was hidden by a pulled-down hat. The lower part was Whisper's.
Across the street was the entrance to another block of my alley, lighted at the far end. Between the light and me, somebody moved just as Whisper's car roared past. The somebody had dodged from behind one shadow that might have been an ash-can to another.
What made me forget Whisper was that the somebody's legs had a bowed look.
A load of coppers buzzed past, throwing lead at the first car.
I skipped across the street, into the section of alley that held a man who might have bowed legs.
If he was my man, it was a fair bet he wasn't armed. I played it that way, moving straight up the slimy middle of the alley, looking into shadows with eyes, ears and nose.
​Three-quarters of a block of this, and a shadow broke away from another shadow—a man going pell-mell away from me.
"Stop!" I bawled, pounding my feet after him. "Stop, or I'll plug you, MacSwain."
He ran half a dozen strides farther and stopped, turning.
"Oh, it's you," he said, as if it made any difference who took him back to the hoosegow.
"Yeah," I confessed. "What are all you people doing wandering around loose?"
"J don't know nothing about it. Somebody dynamited the floor out of the can. I dropped through the hole with the rest of them. There was some mugs standing off the bulls. I made the back-trotters with one bunch. Then we split, and I was figuring on cutting over and making the hills. I didn't have nothing to do with it. I just went along when she blew open."
"Whisper was pinched this evening," I told him.
"Hell! Then that's it. Noonan had ought to know he'd never keep that guy screwed up—not in this burg."
We were standing still in the alley where MacSwain had stopped running.
"You know what he was pinched for?" I asked.
"Uh-huh, for killing Tim."
"You know who killed Tim?"
"Huh? Sure, he did."
"You did."
"Huh? What's the matter? You simple?"
​"There's a gun in my left hand," I warned him.
"But look here—didn't he tell the broad that Whisper done it? What's the matter with you?"
"He didn't say Whisper. I've heard women call Thaler Max, but I've never heard a man here call him anything but Whisper. Tim didn't say Max. He said MacS—the first part of MacSwain—and died before he could finish it. Don't forget about the gun."
"What would I have killed him for? He was after Whisper's—"
"I haven't got around to that yet," I admitted, "but let's see: You and your wife had busted up. Tim was a ladies' man, wasn't he? Maybe there's something there. I'll have to look it up. What started me thinking about you was that you never tried to get any more money out of the girl."
"Cut it out," he begged. "You know there ain't any sense to it. What would I have hung around afterwards for? I'd have been out getting an alibi, like Whisper."
"Why? You were a dick then. Close by was the spot for you—to see that everything went right—handle it yourself."
"You know damned well it don't hang together, don't make sense. Cut it out, for God's sake."
"I don't mind how goofy it is," I said. "It's something to put to Noonan when we get back. He's likely all broken up over Whisper's crush-out. This will take his mind off it."
​MacSwain got down on his knees in the muddy alley and cried:
"Oh, Christ, no! He'd croak me with his hands."
"Get up and stop yelling," I growled. "Now will you give it to me straight?"
He whined: "He'd croak me with his hands."
"Suit yourself. If you won't talk, I will, to Noonan. If you'll come through to me, I'll do what I can for you."
"What can you do?" he asked hopelessly, and started sniveling again. "How do I know you'll try to do anything?"
I risked a little truth on him:
"You said you had a hunch what I'm up to here in Poisonville. Then you ought to know that it's my play to keep Noonan and Whisper split. Letting Noonan think Whisper killed Tim will keep them split. But if you don't want to play with me, come on, we'll play with Noonan."
"You mean you won't tell him?" he asked eagerly. "You promise?"
"I promise you nothing," I said. "Why should I? "I've got you with your pants down. Talk to me or Noonan. And make up your mind quick. I'm not going to stand here all night."
He made up his mind to talk to me.
"I don't know how much you know, but it was like you said, my wife fell for Tim. That's what put me on the tramp. You can ask anybody if I wasn't a good guy before that. I was this way: what she wanted ​I wanted her to have. Mostly what she wanted was tough on me. But I couldn't be any other way. We'd have been a damned sight better off if I could. So I let her move out and put in divorce papers, so she could marry him, thinking he meant to.
"Pretty soon I begin to hear he's chasing this Myrtle Jennison. I couldn't go that. I'd given him his chance with Helen, fair and square. Now he was giving her the air for this Myrtle. I wasn't going to stand for that. Helen wasn't no hanky-panky. It was accidental, though, running into him at the Lake that night. When I saw him go down to them summer houses I went after him. That looked like a good quiet place to have it out.
"I guess we'd both had a little something to drink. Anyway, we had it hot and heavy. When it got too hot for him, he pulled the gun. He was yellow. I grabbed it, and in the tussle it went off. I swear to God I didn't shoot him except like that. It went off while the both of us had our hands on it. I beat it back in some bushes. But when I got in the bushes I could hear him moaning and talking. There was people coming—a girl running down from the hotel, that Myrtle Jennison.
"I wanted to go back and hear what Tim was saying, so I'd know where I stood, but I was leary of being the first one there. So I had to wait till the girl got to him, listening all the time to his squawking, but too far away to make it out. When she got to him, I ​ran over and got there just as he died trying to say my name.
"I didn't think about that being Whisper's name till she propositioned me with the suicide letter, the two hundred, and the rock. I'd just been stalling around, pretending to get the job lined up—being on the force then—and trying to find out where I stood. Then she makes the play and I know I'm sitting pretty. And that's the way it went till you started digging it up again."
He slopped his feet up and down in the mud and added:
"Next week my wife got killed—an accident. Uh-huh, an accident. She drove the Ford square in front of No. 6 where it comes down the long grade from Tanner and stopped it there."
"Is Mock Lake in this county?" I asked.
"No, Boulder County."
"That's out of Noonan's territory. Suppose I take you over there and hand you to the sheriff?"
"No. He's Senator Keefer's son-in-law—Tom Cook. I might as well be here. Noonan could get to me through Keefer."
"If it happened the way you say, you've got at least an even chance of beating the rap in court."
"They won't give me a chance. I'd have stood it if there'd been a chance in the world of getting an even break—but not with them."
"We're going back to the Hall," I said. "Keep your mouth shut."
​Noonan was waddling up and down the floor, cursing the half a dozen bulls who stood around wishing they were somewhere else.
"Here's something I found roaming around," I said, pushing MacSwain forward.
Noonan knocked the ex-detective down, kicked him, and told one of the coppers to take him away.
Somebody called Noonan on the phone. I slipped out without saying, "Good-night," and walked back to the hotel.
Off to the north some guns popped.
A group of three men passed me, shifty-eyed, walking pigeon-toed.
A little farther along, another man moved all the way over to the curb to give me plenty of room to pass. I didn't know him and didn't suppose he knew me.
A lone shot sounded not far away.
As I reached the hotel, a battered black touring car went down the street, hitting fifty at least, crammed to the curtains with men.
I grinned after it. Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn't keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.
CHAPTER XV
Cedar Hill Inn
Mickey Linenhan used the telephone to wake me a little after noon.
"We're here," he told me. "Where's the reception committee?"
"Probably stopped to get a rope. Check your bags and come up to the hotel. Room 537. Don't advertise your visit."
I was dressed when they arrived.
Mickey Linehan was a big slob with sagging shoulders and a shapeless body that seemed to be coming apart at all its joints. His ears stood out like red wings, and his round red face usually wore the meaningless smirk of a half-wit. He looked like a comedian and was.
Dick Foley was a boy-sized Canadian with a sharp irritable face. He wore high heels to increase his height, perfumed his handkerchiefs and saved all the words he could.
They were both good operatives.
"What did the Old Man tell you about the job?" I asked when we had settled into seats. The Old Man was the manager of the Continental's San Francisco branch. He was also known as Pontius Pilate, because he smiled pleasantly when he sent us out to be cruci​fied on suicidal jobs. He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman's rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.
"He didn't seem to know much what it was all about," Mickey said, "except that you had wired for help. He said he hadn't got any reports from you for a couple of days."
"The chances are he'll wait a couple more. Know anything about this Personville?"
Dick shook his head. Mickey said:
"Only that I've heard parties call it Poisonville like they meant it."
I told them what I knew and what I had done. The telephone bell interrupted my tale in the last quarter.
Dinah Brand's lazy voice:
"Hello! How's the wrist?"
"Only a burn. What do you think of the crush-out?"
"It's not my fault," she said. "I did my part. If Noonan couldn't hold him, that's just too bad. I'm coming downtown to buy a hat this afternoon. I thought I'd drop in and see you for a couple of minutes if you're going to be there."
"What time?"
"Oh, around three."
"Right, I'll expect you, and I'll have that two hundred and a dime I owe you."
"Do," she said. "That's what I'm coming in for. Ta-ta."
​I went back to my seat and my story.
When I had finished, Mickey Linehan whistled and said:
"No wonder you're scared to send in any reports. The Old Man wouldn't do much if he knew what you've been up to, would he?"
"If it works out the way I want it to, I won't have to report all the distressing details," I said. "It's right enough for the Agency to have rules and regulations, but when you're out on a job you've got to; do it the best way you can. And anybody that brings any ethics to Poisonville is going to get them all rusty. A report is no place for the dirty details, anyway, and I don't want you birds to send any writing back to San Francisco without letting me see it first."
"What kind of crimes have you got for us to pull?" Mickey asked.
"I want you to take Pete the Finn. Dick will take Lew Yard. You'll have to play it the way I've been playing—do what you can when you can. I've an idea that the pair of them will try to make Noonan let Whisper alone. I don't know what he'll do. He's shifty as hell and he does want to even up his brother's killing."
"After I take this Finnish gent," Mickey said, "what do I do with him? I don't want to brag about how dumb I am, but this job is plain as astronomy to me. I understand everything about it except what you have done and why, and what you're trying to do and how."
​"You can start off by shadowing him. I've got to have a wedge that can be put between Pete and Yard, Yard and Noonan, Pete and Noonan, Pete and Thaler, or Yard and Thaler. If we can smash things up enough—break the combination—they'll have their knives in each other's backs, doing our work for us. The break between Thaler and Noonan is a starter. But it'll sag on us if we don't help it along.
"I could buy more dope on the whole lot from Dinah Brand. But there's no use taking anybody into court, no matter what you've got on them. They own the courts, and, besides, the courts are too slow for us now. I've got myself tangled up in something and as soon as the Old Man smells it—and San Francisco isn't far enough away to fool his nose—he's going to be sitting on the wire, asking for explanations. I've got to have results to hide the details under. So evidence won't do. What we've got to have is dynamite."
"What about our respected client, Mr. Elihu Willsson?" Mickey asked. "What are you planning to do with or to him?"
"Maybe ruin him, maybe club him into backing us up. I don't care which. You'd better stay at the Hotel Person, Mickey, and Dick can go to the National. Keep apart, and, if you want to keep me from being fired, burn the job up before the Old Man tumbles. Better write these down."
I gave them names, descriptions, and addresses when I had them, of Elihu Willsson; Stanley Lewis, ​his secretary; Dinah Brand; Dan Rolff; Noonan; Max Thaler, alias Whisper; his right-hand man, the chinless Jerry; Mrs. Donald Willsson; Lewis' daughter, who had been Donald Willsson's secretary; and Bill Quint, Dinah's radical ex-boy-friend.
"Now hop to it," I said. "And don't kid yourselves that there's any law in Poisonville except what you make for yourself."
Mickey said I'd be surpised how many laws he could get along without. Dick said: "So long," and they departed. {{dhr} ***
After breakfast I went over to the City Hall.
Noonan's greenish eyes were bleary, as if they hadn't been sleeping, and his face had lost some of its color. He pumped my hand up and down as enthusiastically as ever, and the customary amount of cordiality was in his voice and manner.
"Any line on Whisper?" I asked when we had finished the glad-handing.
"I think I've got something." He looked at the clock on the wall and then at his phone. "I'm expecting word any minute. Sit down."
"Who else got away?"
"Jerry Hooper and Tony Agosti are the only other ones still out. We picked up the rest. Jerry is Whisper's man-Friday, and the wop's one of his mob. He's the bozo that put the knife in Ike Bush the night of the fight."
​"Any more of Whisper's mob in?"
"No. We just had the three of them, except Buck Wallace, the fellow you potted. He's in the hospital."
The chief looked at the wall clock again, and at his watch. It was exactly two o'clock. He turned to the phone. It rang. He grabbed it, said:
"Noonan talking.... Yes.... Yes.... Yes.... Right."
He pushed the phone aside and played a tune on the row of pearl buttons on his desk. The office filled up with coppers.
"Cedar Hill Inn," he said. "You follow me out with your detail, Bates. Terry, shoot out Broadway and hit the dump from behind. Pick up the boys on traffic duty as you go along. It's likely we'll need everybody we can get. Duffy, take yours out Union street and around by the old mine road. McGraw will hold headquarters down. Get hold of everybody you can and send them after us. Jump!"
He grabbed his hat and went after them, calling ever his thick shoulder to me:
"Come on, man, this is the kill."
I followed him down to the department garage, where the engines of half a dozen cars were roaring. The chief sat beside his driver. I sat in back with four detectives.
Men scrambled into the other cars. Machine guns were unwrapped. Arm-loads of rifles and riot-guns were distributed, and packages of ammunition.
​The chief's car got away first, off with a jump that hammered our teeth together. We missed the garage door by half an inch, chased a couple of pedestrians diagonally across the sidewalk, bounced off the curb into the roadway, missed a truck as narrowly as we had missed the door, and dashed out King Street with our siren wide open.
Panicky automobiles darted right and left, regardless of traffic rules, to let us through. It was a lot of fun.
I looked back, saw another police car following us, a third turning into Broadway. Noonan chewed a cold cigar and told the driver:
"Give her a bit more, Pat."
Pat twisted us around a frightened woman's coupé, put us through a slot between street car and laundry wagon—a narrow slot that we couldn't have slipped through if our car hadn't been so smoothly enameled—and said:
"All right, but the brakes ain't no good."
"That's nice," the gray-mustached sleuth on my left said. He didn't sound sincere.
Out of the center of the city there wasn't much traffic to bother us, but the paving was rougher. It was a nice half-hour's ride, with everybody getting a chance to sit in everybody else's lap. The last ten minutes of it was over an uneven road that had hills enough to keep us from forgetting what Pat had said about the brakes.
We wound up at a gate topped by a shabby electric ​sign that had said Cedar Hill Inn before it lost its globes. The roadhouse, twenty feet behind the gate, was a squat wooden building painted a moldly green and chiefly surrounded by rubbish. Front door and windows were closed, blank.
We followed Noonan out of the car. The machine that had been trailing us came into sight around a bend in the road, slid to rest beside ours, and unloaded its cargo of men and weapons.
Noonan ordered this and that.
A trio of coppers went around each side of the building. Three others, including a machine-gunner, remained by the gate. The rest of us walked through tin cans, bottles, and ancient newspaper to the front of the house.
The gray-mustached detective who had sat beside me in the car carried a red ax. We stepped up on the porch.
Noise and fire came out under a window sill.
The gray-mustached detective fell down, hiding the ax under his corpse.
The rest of us ran away.
I ran with Noonan. We hid in the ditch on the Inn side of the road. It was deep enough, and banked high enough, to let us stand almost erect without being targets.
The chief was excited.
"What luck!" he said happily. "He's here, by God, he's here!"
​"That shot came from under the sill," I said. "Not a bad trick."
"We'll spoil it, though," he said cheerfully. "We'll seive the dump. Duffy ought to be pulling up on the other road by now, and Terry Shane won't be many minutes behind him. Hey, Donner!" he called to a man who was peeping around a boulder. "Swing around back and tell Duffy and Shane to start clos­ing in as soon as they come, letting fly with all they got. Where's Kimble?"
The peeper jerked a thumb toward a tree beyond him. We could see only the upper part of it from our ditch.
"Tell him to set up his mill and start grinding," Noonan ordered. "Low, across the front, ought to do it like cutting cheese."
The peeper disappeared.
Noonan went up and down the ditch, risking his noodle over the top now and then for a look around, once in a while calling or gesturing to his men.
He came back, sat on his heels beside me, gave me a cigar, and lit one for himself.
"It'll do," he said complacently. "Whisper won't have a chance. He's done."
The machine-gun by the tree fired, haltingly, ex­perimentally, eight or ten shots. Noonan grinned and let a smoke ring float out of his mouth. The machine­-gun settled down to business, grinding out metal like the busy little death factory it was. Noonan blew another smoke ring and said:
​"That's exactly what'll do it."
I agreed that it ought to. We leaned against the clay bank and smoked while, farther away, another machine-gun got going, and then a third. Irregularly, rifles, pistols, shot-guns joined in. Noonan nodded approvingly and said:
"Five minutes of that will let him know there's a hell."
When the five minutes were up I suggested a look at the remains. I gave him a boost up the bank and scrambled up after him.
The roadhouse was as bleak and empty-looking as before, but more battered. No shots came from it. Plenty were going into it.
"What do you think?" Noonan asked.
"If there's a cellar there might be a mouse alive in it."
"Well, we could finish him afterwards."
He took a whistle out of his pocket and made a lot of noise. He waved his fat arms, and the gun-fire began dwindling. We had to wait for the word to go all the way around.
Then we crashed the door.
The first floor was ankle-deep with booze that was still gurgling from bullet holes in the stacked-up cases and barrels that filled most of the house.
Dizzy with the fumes of spilled hooch, we waded around until we had found four dead bodies and no live ones. The four were swarthy foreign-looking ​men in laborers' clothes. Two of them were practically shot to pieces.
Noonan said:
"Leave them here and get out."
His voice was cheerful, but in a flashlight's glow his eyes showed white-ringed with fear.
We went out gladly, though I did hesitate long enough to pocket an unbroken bottle labeled Dewar.
A khaki-dressed copper was tumbling off a motor-cycle at the gate.
He yelled at us:
"The First National's been stuck up."
Noonan cursed savagely, bawled:
"He's foxed us, damn him! Back to town, everybody."
Everybody except us who had ridden with the chief beat it for the machines. Two of them took the dead detective with them.
Noonan looked at me out of his eye-corners and said:
"This is a tough one, no fooling."
I said, "Well," shrugged, and sauntered over to his car, where the driver was sitting at the wheel. I stood with my back to the house, talking to Pat. I don't remember what we talked about. Presently Noonan and the other sleuths joined us.
Only a little flame showed through the open roadhouse door before we passed out of sight around the bend in the road.