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

On the third story he found Coats. The Big Shot was sitting on the floor of Lefty’s room, with the door wide open behind him. He was rubbing his head. His eyes were open, but there was only a profound stupefaction in them.

“I... I was ganged,” he stuttered. “An’ s-somebody copped my dough.”

“Where’s Lefty?” Walsh demanded.

Coats couldn’t tell him, but he found out for himself — saw that hawser of sheets moored to his own bed and leading out the window.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “about Lefty. He’s blew!”

That materially assisted the Big Shot’s recovery. Rage convulsed him.

“What d’you mean, blew?” he thundered. “You guys let him walk, did you?”

“He didn’t walk,” said Walsh. “He slid. He went out my winda into the alley.”

Coats struggled to his feet.

“Then he was tipped!” he accused. “Somebody told him he was in for the works.” His jaw dropped. “Say — that dame! Did she come up here with me and give me th’ double cross?”

“Nope. She went out.”

Walsh was at Lefty Byrne’s window, looking across the yards. He knew Dorcas O’Donnell’s window, for Lefty once had pointed it out to him. On that window his eyes were fixed. A clothes line leading from it to a pole in the center of the noisy court was strung with what struck him, after a moment, as a preposterous assortment of clothing.

His gaze widened as he stared, and suddenly he snorted.

“My Gawd!” he wheezed. “She’s went and pulled that gag with the wash again. An’ maybe she didn’t hand Byrne a lineful this time!”

Coats came up behind him.

“What th’ hell are you talkin’ about?” he snapped.

Walsh pointed at the clothes line.

“There! That’s where Lefty got his dope!”

The Big Shot looked hard at him.

“Somebody’s cuckoo.”

Walsh laughed wildly.

“Somebody’s slick,” he amended between gasps. “It’ll all come out in the wash, they say, and this is once when it did! Listen, Sam. I mind one time when Dorcas O’Donnell fell down on a date with Lefty Byrne. Usually she ducks the heavy wine parties, see? — but she’d got into one where she had to drink plenty. And d’yuh know the way she tipped off Lefty what was the matter with her? She hung out some sheets on her wash line, to signal him she was woozy. Three of ’em, get it? So much as to tell him she was ‘three sheets in th’ wind!’ Ho, ho!”

“What a dame!” commended Coats. He stared at the O’Donnell clothes line again. “But what’s that got to do with — now?”

“It’s the tip off,” said Walsh, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. “Look at that line a’ hers, Sam. What do you see on it?”

“A lot a’ junk,” grunted Coats.

“Name some a’ the things, Sam.”

“You’re nuts. But... well, there’s one a’ them gadgets a broad wears inside her dress sometimes.”

Walsh nodded.

“Sure. That’s right. They call it a ‘slip.’ And what else do you see?”

Coats cursed him.

“Is this an eye test? But it’s a crazy wash at that, when you come to look it over. The upstairs part of a couple pyjama suits without no pants. An’ the half of a pair a’ socks without the soul mate.”

“Fine,” approved Walsh. “Two pyjama coats and a sock. Also, a white belt and an item a’ underclothes. And two sheets and a wash tie, and a lace collar. But you don’t start readin’ in the middle of a line, do you? Read this one from left to right, now!”

“I’ll call a doctor,” Coats offered. “Stop your laughin’. You’re drunk!”

“Who wouldn’t laugh?” clucked Walsh. “I’ll read it to you myself — left to right, the way the line faces Lefty’s winda here. No, I’ll do better. I’ll write it out for yuh.”

He scribbled rapidly on the back of an envelope and handed the envelope to Coats. Reading it, the Big Shot collapsed heavily on the edge of the bed.

“Yeah,” he murmured mournfully “I could sure a’ used that dame! She beats me. She played me right into it.”

Once more, gone speechless, he stared at Walsh’s transcription of the O’Donnell “wash.” It was there, an out-and-out wigwag as the quick-eyed Walsh had written and spaced it:

SOCK COATS. COLLAR BELT UNDER CLOTHES.

TIE SHEETS. SLIP.

A sickly grin spread over the Big Shot’s face.

“Well, I dunno,” he said. “Maybe I’m lucky at that. Cop a dame that works as fast as that, an’ she owns you. Me, I’ll pick ’em dumb an’ be general!”

Exploits of the Wolf

by Alan Hynd

Linky Mitchell was the terror of the underworld until a little man with a keen eye threw a hat in his face...

I

“The Wolf is dead!”

A few weeks ago, when those words slipped from twisted mouths with lightning-like rapidity in certain quarters of that weird labyrinth known as New York’s underworld, there was great rejoicing.

“He’s dead, huh? Well, that’s a relief!”