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

“Guess,” he snapped, “again! You’re not walking off, Lefty, as free an’ easy as all that. You know too much to be let stroll out a’ here sore head. Beat it upstairs an’ take a nice peaceful nap for yourself.”

He threw a nod to Walsh.

“Take him up, Jim. Put him in his own room, and turn th’ key on him. His case is goin’ to take some heavy thinkin’!”

II

For one instant Byrne hesitated, weighing his chance for a break against the dubious aftermath of acquiescence. Once he was upstairs Coats had him in the bag. If big Sam made up his mind that way, they could put him on the spot right here — use that rod of Sam’s that had the silencer on it, and bump him without a sound getting to the street. Or if they wanted to make a fancy job of it, they could pile him into a machine and take him for one of those quiet little one-way rides into the country.

As he stared past Walsh, poised for a dash, the square of the outer twilight up in front was already narrowing, the steel garage door rumbling on its rollers. It closed with a clank — and that was that. His only choice then was to give in, to play to Coats.

“Okay, Sam,” he said. “I’ll chase on up — but, say, get that funny idea out a’ your bean, won’t yuh? Whether we split or whether we don’t, I’m no squawker. You ought to know me better’n that by this time.”

For a little Coats studied him, and again the red lids dropped over his eyes. When he spoke there was a note of concession in his voice — a straw that Lefty Byrne snatched at gratefully.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Forget that. The reason I’m holdin’ yuh, Lefty, I don’t want yuh goin’ out mad. We’ll talk about the money end later, when we’re both feelin’ better. Go on along, now. Hit th’ hay. Maybe you’ll wake up with different notions about givin’ the mob the go-by.”

The three riders who had arrived in the big touring car with Walsh looked curiously after Byrne as he started up the stairs back to the office. Evidently they had overheard enough to know he’d had a falling out with Coats, and their chill silence told him plainly enough whose side they’d be on at a show-down. The fact that they’d all been pals, that they’d fought side by side in a dozen skirmishes with hijackers — all that would be overboard if Sam ever turned his thumb down.

Walsh himself said nothing until they were on the second story, threading through the dusty and idle machinery that camouflaged the Big Shot’s diversions of government-doped alcohol by way of his withdrawal permit for Beautiful Doll Boudoir Preparations, Inc.

Up there, remote from Coats’s ears, Walsh deplored:

“Somethin’ must ’a’ rattled loose in your head, Lefty, you tyin’ into Sam that way. A wonder he didn’t turn the smoke on you, instead a’ just the gas.”

“I guess it is,” Byrne agreed moodily. “But there’s a limit to what a guy can take, Jim. He shouldn’t ‘a’ brought in the Kid — that’s all. I think he’s beginning to see it that way himself.”

“Yeah; he’ll be all right now,” Walsh opined. “All you got to do is tell him you changed your mind about jumpin’ the racket, and everything’ll be hotsy-totsy again. That was his main grouch — don’t you see it? He’s short-handed now, the way things are openin’ up.”

Another stairway took them out of the powdery precincts of the Beautiful Doll Preparations to the third and uppermost floor of the garage building. The “cell-block,” the mob called that particular department of the Coats ménage. It had been partitioned by bleak walls of hollow tile into half a dozen sleeping rooms, and each was furnished with a good bed and a dresser.

Lefty Byrne walked directly into a cubicle at the rear. That had been “home” to him for the last couple of years — all the home he’d thought he would ever want, until he’d discovered Dorcas.

Shifting the key from the inside of the door to the outside, Walsh deprecated: “This is applesauce, Lefty, but you know how Sam is. We don’t either of us want to rub him the wrong way.”

Byrne grinned wanly.

“It’s all right by me,” he said. “Do your duty, sheriff!”

He was at the window, staring out over cluttered back yards at a rectangle of light in a tall, seedy building below, when the key turned. Evening had come, and Dorcas was up, preening herself for the night’s grind at the Gold Slipper.

Lefty had seen her first from where he stood now. It came back to him, as vivid as if it had been yesterday. That broiling afternoon; street cars and trucks roaring so you couldn’t hear; he at his window and the girl, covered by some filmy silk thing, gasping at hers; their exchange of smiles. He had made a street corner rendezvous by signs, though at first she had laughed, shaking her head. All that — the beginning.

The beginning. And how was it going to end?

She was expecting him to drop in at the Gold Slipper to-night, but he wasn’t going to be there. To-morrow, she’d be certain then, he’d come around to the flat. Would he, though? A chill came on him again. Who could say what to-morrow had in store?