Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 51, No. 2, June 28, 1930

Foolishly, Byrne had taken his hand from his pocket. Saying it with words wasn’t quite enough. He wanted to add the gesture of snapping his fingers at Coats.

He didn’t snap his fingers. Coats, flying at the chance, had made one of those split-second, miracle draws of his. His gun, squeezed free in its holster under his left arm, flashed into his hand as uncannily as a sleeved ace into a magician’s.

Byrne stopped short, staring with round, dazed eyes at that dark hole in the pistol muzzle aimed uphill at his heart. His palms jerked to a level with his reddening ears and remained elevated after Coats had deftly rid his pocket of the blue-steel weight that had sagged it.

“Now, go on an’ tell me, Lefty,” Coats invited. “Tell me where I get off at.”

A car rolled into the garage, and one of the four hard-mouthed passengers it had brought walked to the door of the office in back. What he saw wrenched a startled oath from him.

“You birds rehearsin’ something?”

Coats turned a razor-thin smile on the questioner.

“ ’Lo, Jimmy Walsh,” he said. “No — it ain’t a rehearsal. It’s a play.”

“Yeah?” The newcomer’s stolid gaze reappraised the tableau and fastened on Coats — blank. “I don’t get it.”

“The play itself, that’s what it is,” Coats repeated. His rhetorical figure pleased him, and he extended it. “Wrote and produced by Mr. Lefty Byrne. I was supposed to be the dog audience for th’ try-out — see? What I’m doing right now, I’m callin’ the author!”

He exploded with a brief laugh of self-appreciation, and then his voice went harsh.

“Still too fast for yuh, Walsh? Well, I’ll tell you another way. Lefty made a collection to-day — got the dough for that load of fancy stuff that went out on the North Shore Saturday. Five grand he should ’a’ turned in. And would you ask me what he tried to turn in instead? His resignation!”

Lefty Byrne, who had turned several colors directly before Walsh’s intrusion, was all scarlet.

“Listen, Jimmy,” he appealed hoarsely, “is a fella tied to any racket with a ball an’ chain? Can’t he do a fade-away when he wants to — if he can walk out clean? Sam owes me that five grand, every dime of it. Breakin’ with him, why shouldn’t I hold it?”

Walsh blinked and shrugged, deferring to Coats.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m not the big shot in this racket. Sam runs the mob.”

“Tootin’ right I do,” Coats grimly affirmed. “And anything you got comin’ from me, Byrne, is paid when I’m ready to pay. You don’t snatch it, see? Fork over!”

Lefty Byrne swallowed hard and forked. Five crackling notes went on the desk and were swept casually into a drawer.

“I’ll put ’em in a better place,” Coats said, “after I’m done with yuh. I want to hear some more. My mind was somewheres else, so maybe I didn’t get you straight the first time. I’m sittin’ back here safe, am I, grabbin’ the kale while the boys take all th’ risk? I ain’t gave you a fair break, ain’t I?”

He had put down the pistol; and Byrne, taking that to mean the passing of his crisis, drew a deep breath. The film that had dulled his eyes passed away; blue and steady, they met Coats’s glare.

“Be reasonable, Sam,” he urged. “If I got on my ear, it was your fault. I brought th’ dough in, didn’t I? And wasn’t I on the up-an’-up with you, sayin’ I wanted to junk the booze runnin’ game an’ buy that gas station up in Yonkers, an’ settle down?”

“Sure,” grinned Coats. “You as much as told me, ‘Here’s your five grand, Sam, only you don’t get it!’ Then you went up in the air because I couldn’t see it that way.”

Lefty Byrne shook his head.

“Now, wait!” he protested softly. “What happened, you made a rotten crack about — about a certain party. A lady friend a’ mine.”

“Which,” murmured Coats, with a wink for Walsh, “was Dorcas O’Donnell. Right? Be a good guy, Byrne, an’ tell Jimmy what you’re goin’ to do to me if I ever look cock-eyed at that dizzy dame a’ yours again!”

“Oh,” Walsh said, and smirked. “Her!”

“We’re goin’ to get married,” Byrne told him quickly. “Married — regular. Get that.”

“I got a picture a’ Dorcas O’Donnell sittin’ home and darnin’ socks!” crowed Coats. “Say, unless she married a bank roll big enough to buy her all the excitement on Broadway she’d be back to the hostess racket in th’ Gold Slipper before the weddin’ flowers faded!”

Walsh saw something ominous in the tautening of Lefty Byrne’s jaw and the swift hunching of his shoulders.

“Well, I dunno,” he interjected hurriedly, attempting a diplomatic diversion. “She’s got a domestic streak at that, Dorcas has. I mean, you got to hand it to her. She does her own laundry. I know!”

“Whose business is it,” Byrne demanded truculently, “if she does? Let’s just drop her out of th’ conversation, Walsh.” He transferred his frown to Coats. “Now that you’ve got the money, Sam, and a portion of my sentiments along with it, I guess I might as well take the air.”

Coats put out a big hand and dropped it significantly over the two pistols lying side by side on the desk.