Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Cleve F Adams (1884 - 1949) "The missing link between Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy, Cleve F. Adams wrote rambunctious, violent, corrosively cynical private eye fiction from the mid-1930s until his untimely death from pneumonia in 1949 at the age of 54. He also wrote as Franklin Charles and John Spain." (Quote from Fantastic Fiction) Las Cruces, New Mexico. Private eye John J Shannon's operative Gus Vogel reports from an assignment that an old enemy, Kronjager, has spotted him. From here, things go south suddenly, including Shannon, who flies down from LA and into big trouble.

THE PRIVATE EYE

Cleve F Adams

1884-1949

Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942

Contents

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

Chapter 9 | Chapter 10

Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 13 | Chapter 14

Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

Chapter 17 | Chapter 18

Chapter 19 | Chapter 20

Chapter 21 | Chapter 22

Chapter 23 | Chapter 24

Chapter 25 | Chapter 26

Chapter 27 | Chapter 28

___________________

Chapter 1

THE NAME HAD a certain forthright sound to it, even from such lovely lips as those of Miss Frances McGowan. “John J. Shannon,” she read, pretending that it was very difficult because of the reversed lettering on the ground glass door. And then, even more slowly and enunciating each syllable with obvious relish: “De-tec-tive A-gen-cy.” Miss McGowan had but recently come through the door, and had she not known it by heart anyway she could much more easily have read the inscription from the outside, only there would have been no point in this. It would not have annoyed Shannon.

He lifted outraged eyes from Gus Vogel’s telegram. “God damn it, Fran—”

She was horrified. “Oooh, what you said!”

“You’ve heard worse,” he growled. He had a thick shock of dark hair, and very dark eyes under straight black brows, and a big nose and a fair share of chin. It was only when you looked at his mouth that you decided maybe he wasn’t as tough as these other things would lead you to believe. The mouth was as fine and sensitive as a woman’s. He returned to the wire: “Unable work here. Kronjager— remember him— on cops. Come home?” Shannon hurled the telegram from him. “The lousy squarehead!”

Frances picked up the flimsy. “Who— Kronjager?”

“No,” Shannon yelled. “Vogel!”

Miss McGowan’s exquisite lips made disparaging sounds. “Poor Gussie.” She crossed to the windows and feigned an intense interest in something that was happening in the street ten floors below. “I always rather liked Gus.”

“You would,” Shannon said. “You’d like anything that wore pants.” He regarded her without any visible sign of affection, and this was quite odd, for she was a very lovely young lady indeed. Talented, too. Besides modeling seventeen-thousand dollar mink coats and one thing and another for the more exclusive Los Angeles salons, she wrote and, surprisingly, sold detective stories. It was this last activity which had first brought her into contact with John J. Shannon, then a detective-lieutenant on the cops. As a matter of fact, it was she who was responsible for his leaving the cops and going into business for himself. What with two distinct and remunerative trades she was making infinitely more money than an ungrateful city was willing to pay its detective-lieutenants, a condition intolerable to any man, but especially so to a man named John J. Shannon. He frowned. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to go up there myself.”

“Up where?”

“Las Cruces.”

“New Mexico?”

He thrust his chair violently backward. “God damn it, no!” He yelled at the partially open door which led to the tiny anteroom. “Mamie, find out when I can get a plane to Phoenix!”

Mamie’s voice, slightly tinged with sarcasm, wondered what was the matter with his own telephone. He ignored that and tried once more to concentrate on the problem of Gus Vogel. “I don’t know what I see in the guy,” he remarked presently.

“I do,” Miss McGowan said.

Shannon appeared surprised. “You do?”

She nodded. Her brown eyes were uncomfortably direct. “Among other things, he inflates your ego.”

A slow flush crept up around Shannon’s ears. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“But true,” Frances pointed out. She was in a beige wool suit, and her hat was not as ridiculous as some. The late afternoon sun turned her hair the color of champagne. “While you were together on the cops his mistakes made you look super-smart by comparison.” She became entranced with her own powers of analysis. “When he got kicked off you gave him a job so that you could go on looking super-smart.”

Shannon was cut to the quick. “A fine thing.” He was impelled to admit, though not to Frances, that there might be some truth in the accusation. He would not have admitted, even to himself, that he liked the guy. “Anyway,” he announced triumphantly, “he did get kicked off. The minute I wasn’t around to prop him up he fell down.”

Miss McGowan was not one to shirk an argument. “Of course. He got in the habit of leaning on you.” She examined her stockings for runs. There weren’t any. “Left to himself, Gus is as smart as the next one.”

Shannon, remembering Vogel’s telegram, was indignant “That’s what you think.” He pointed a shaking finger. “I send him up to Las Cruces on a simple little job and what does he do? He runs into somebody that recognizes him and he wants to come home!”

A speculative gleam came into Fran’s eyes. “Just what is this simple little job?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” Shannon said. He pretended to be very busy re-reading the telegram. “Some gal’s husband got shot and the cops told her it was suicide, only she doesn’t think so.”

Frances was incredulous. “And you sent Vogel?”

“Why not?” Shannon demanded.

Unerring logic was one of Miss McGowan’s more irritating attributes. “Well, you just got through telling me how dumb he is.” She appeared to become lost in thought. “You wouldn’t by any chance have known this girl before, would you?”

“Certainly not,” Shannon said stiffly.

“Then how did she happen to pick on you?”

Shannon was trapped and he knew it. His agency was not so large, nor so famous, that a total stranger in Las Cruces, Arizona, would have settled on his name in, say, the Los Angeles phone directory. Besides, Phoenix was some four hundred miles closer. “Well—” He was suddenly and terrifically angry. “All right, God damn it, then I did know her!”

“And now she’s a widow,” Fran said. Her voice had a certain inexorable quality. “Perhaps even an attractive widow?”

Shannon wouldn’t look at her. “All right, I sent Vogel, didn’t I?” It occurred to him that the question was peculiarly unfortunate. It, and the fact that he had sent Vogel instead of going himself, implied a former association with Wynn Thorelsen which he would rather not renew— personally. In desperation he offered the age-old excuse of errant husbands: “Look, Mrs. Thorelsen is just an old friend.”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” Fran said sweetly. “I’m not your wife, you know.” She looked at him. “Or did you think I was?”

“God forbid,” Shannon said. From the lower drawer of his desk he got out a bottle of rye and a glass and poured himself a drink. He did not offer Frances any. “Mrs. Thorelsen is a hell of a nice girl, and she was crazy about her husband.” Some of his customary arrogance returned to him. “Not only that, if she says there is something screwy about the way he died, then something is screwy.” He considered having another drink but decided against it. He put the bottle away. “Besides, she’s got ten thousand dollars to spend.” His mouth got a stubborn look about it. “Besides, I don’t like a bunch of small-town cops telling me what I can and can not do.”

Frances regarded hm. “It wasn’t you they told. It was Gus Vogel.”

He scowled. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

Mamie Costello came in from the anteroom. She was a pert red-headed girl with freckles on her nose. “You can get a Phoenix plane at nine o’clock.” Her eyes appraised Miss McGowan’s skunk coat draped carelessly over a chair. “I wish I could get my clothes at forty per cent off.”

“I wish you could too, dear,” Frances said. Her tone implied that in order to do so Mamie would first have to get a better-looking body; one that Richlander & Fink, for instance, thought worthy of displaying their merchandise.

“Christ, you hate yourself,” Mamie said. She addressed her employer. “Well, shall I make the reservation or not?”

Shannon glared at her. “What do you think I asked you to call up for?”

Mamie assumed an air of outraged dignity. “I don’t know, Lieutenant.”

Shannon audibly asked God to give him strength. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?”

“Well, you still act like a cop,” Mamie said. She went out, banging the door. A sort of oppressive silence settled on the room. Miss McGowan found and lit a cigarette. “So you’re going?”

The telephone rang. Shannon picked it up. “Yes?”

It turned out to be Gus Vogel, calling long distance from Las Cruces. His voice sounded funny. “Is that you, John J.?”

Shannon’s eyes got a watchful, cagy look in them “What’s the matter with you?”

“A couple of guys claimed they didn’t like my face,” Vogel said. He coughed apologetically. “They tried to remodel it.”

Shannon drew an unsteady breath. “Cops?”

“No,” Vogel said. He began to talk very fast. “Look, I was in a place having a beer, see, and minding my own business, like I always try to do, John J., and these two guys just came in and got tough.” He became apologetic again. “This whole town is tough, John J. I been here less than seven hours and I already seen half a dozen fights and two killings.” There was a sound as though he might be sucking at a cut lip. “I think Mrs. Thorelsen has got something but I’m afraid to go near her.”

“You talk to her?”

“Only over the phone,” Vogel said. He sighed. “This guy Kronjager recognized me when I came in on the bus and I thought that— Look, John J., I wouldn’t be any good to you dead, would I?”

Shannon cursed him. “We might try it. You certainly aren’t any good to me alive.” After a moment’s reflection he said, “All right, find yourself some nice quiet hole and crawl into it till I get there.” He closed his eyes, calculating distances. “I ought make it by midnight.” He disconnected.

Miss McGowan was applying fresh lipstick to her mouth and regarding her reflection searchingly in the compact mirror. “I could go with you,” she offered casually. “Sort of relieve the tedium of the journey.”

Shannon was heavily sarcastic. “I’m sure it would, darling.” He stood up violently. “But after this last hour a little tedium would be a pleasure.”

Chapter 2

THE BUS LABORED doggedly up the grade, second gear an irritating, monotonous whine. Against the blackness of the night it was a giant luminous bug; the beams of its headlights were antennae, probing each climbing turn and rocky abutment, testing the future with a caution born of the past. Interminably the wet black macadam unrolled before it, spiraling upward and ever upward. A black-and-white road sign, washed clean by the rain, appeared momentarily, gave the elevation at 6750 feet and vanished to the rear. Shannon had a little trouble with his breathing.

Inside the bus it was stifling. Because of the rain the windows were closed, and the ventilators let in only enough cool moist air to accentuate the reek of sweating hunkies and the even more nauseous smell of perfume and powder and cigarette smoke from the three girls up behind the driver. Shannon felt that they were not nice girls. He did not disapprove of their rather too obvious profession; he just wished that it paid better, so that they could have bought better perfume.

A thin, flat-breasted woman in a Salvation Army bonnet sat squarely in the middle of a seat meant for two and stared uncompromisingly straight ahead. Directly opposite Shannon was a great golden-haired man in a vociferous plaid suit. He too sat squarely in the middle of the seat, though not because he feared companionship. His size made it necessary. He was the largest man Shannon had ever seen. Occasionally he would pry his bulk out of the seat and go back along the swaying aisle, admonishing the more obstreperous of the hunkies to silence. There were a score or so of these, and not infrequently a bottle would change hands and be tilted furtively to bearded lips. The golden-haired man was not entirely sober himself; his laugh was huge, and sometimes his great hands would miss the holds on the seat corners and he would almost fall down. He never did, though. His eyes, meeting Shannon’s, were as naive and friendly as a child’s. Shannon hoped that the big man would never find cause to dislike him, Shannon. On one of the occasions when their glances crossed, the giant grinned hugely, exposing a perfect galaxy of gold-filled teeth. “You not afraid from Pilsudski?”

“No,” Shannon said.

Pilsudski nodded, “Iss good.” It was obvious that he knew Shannon’s denial was a lie, but that he bore no hard feelings because of that. He began to hum to himself, not unmusically, something from Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony.

The bus lurched around a turn and began a sharp descent, accelerating slightly, though the driver did not shift gears. Giant tires sucked greedily at the wet pavement. Rain beat on the roof like buckshot. The driver, only a voice beyond his pulled-down curtain, exchanged an occasional bit of badinage with the three painted ladies directly behind him. Shannon tried to look out of his window at the night crawling past, but all he could see was a reflection of his own face. He thought it looked rather more stupid than usual. There had not been a car in either direction for the last half hour.

Presently the bus lifted its nose and began another seemingly interminable climb. Shannon got up and went back to the tiny lavatory at the tail end, banged the door closed, banged the window up and breathed deep of the sodden night. In spite of the rain, the air was thin and very cold. He leaned on the sill and discovered that there was nothing between him and a yawning cloud-filled chasm but a narrow stretch of pavement and a diagonally striped guard rail. He was seized with a sudden chill, not entirely of the night. He hoped the bus driver knew what he was doing. He banged the window shut, intending to once more brave the smells of his fellow passengers in preference to teetering there on the verge of eternity. He actually had the door half open when the right front tire went out. The sound of it was terrific. It was still echoing in the air when the bus lurched drunkenly and went into a sickening, topheavy spin. There was a splintering crash as the rear end hit some temporary obstruction. Shannon was flung sprawling into the aisle.

It seemed to him that all hell broke loose then. Women screamed and men shouted and some of them fell out of their seats on top of Shannon as the bus tried to stand on its tail, failed, and went skidding sidewise down a short steep declivity. A booted foot ground Shannon’s face into the shuddering floor. Cursing, he wriggled free of the wrestling bodies that were smothering him and was on his hands and knees when the front end of the bus struck what was apparently an immovable object. Shannon again became the vortex in a mad whirlpool of what passed for humanity. Discouraged, he lay flat and absolutely still. The lights went out.

It was the giant Pilsudski’s voice which finally rose transcendent above all the others. Horrific Polish oaths, interlarded with good old-fashioned obscenity, rolled and echoed inside the now stationary bus. “Whatsa matter you sonnabitches? You not hurt!” He shouted at the driver. “Hey, Rogalli, why you turn off those lights?”

The lights came on again. Some of the crushing weight was lifted from Shannon’s back. He looked up to find that for this last he was indebted to Pilsudski. The big man was hauling scared hunkies out of the aisle and slamming them into their seats with the practised ease of a farmer stacking cordwood. Shannon got somewhat groggily to his feet. “Well, thanks,” he croaked. One whole side of his face felt as though it were frozen solid.

“Sure,” Pilsudski said. His golden, toothy smile was like a benediction. He turned his broad back and again addressed the driver. “Whatsa matter you, Rogalli, you lose the nerve?” Shannon saw that Rogalli was bleeding from a deep gash slanting down across his nose and under one eye. He wiped at the blood with the back of a hand. “I didn’t do so bad.”

The three girls were huddled together in one seat. The paint stood out on their faces like chunks of rose-lake on an otherwise blank canvas. One of them absently crossed herself.

The Salvation Army lady’s eyes were shut tightly. Her lips moved as though she might be praying, though no sound came out. The score or so hunkies muttered sullenly among themselves. Glass from the shattered windshield crunched under the driver’s feet. He turned and yanked at the lever controlling the doors. “Christ!”

There was a concerted rush for the doors. Shannon debouching presently, discovered that it had stopped raining. The bus windows made pools of yellow light on the highway. The air was clean and sharp and very cold. He saw that the whole front end of the great bus was accordion-pleated and seemingly intent on burying itself in a giant outcropping of rock which hung poised on the edge of what appeared to be a mile-deep gorge. Mist rolled and boiled in the chasm. Shannon licked his lips, pointing. “How far down?”

“Two-three thousan’ feet,” Pilsudski said. He regarded his chattering charges with a kind of affectionate paternalism. “You sonnabitches lucky,” he said. He bent an approving eye on Shannon. “You lucky too.”

Shannon drew a deep breath. “You’re telling me.” He watched one of the girls sop a handkerchief in the rain water caught in a depression of the big rock. She was washing the blood from Rogalli’s face. “Every hour, every single minute that I get from now on is strictly gravy.”

The Salvation Army lady rose bravely to the occasion. It was she who ripped strips from her white petticoat to make a bandage for the bus driver’s face. It developed that she was the only one of the four women who wore a petticoat. She seemed oddly embarrassed about this.

Pilsudski went over and looked at the blown front tire. Shannon became conscious that there was something curious about the way the big man squatted there, his absolute immobility. Shannon went over too. The tire was flattened at the base of the wheel, from the weight of the bus, but elsewhere it was normally round. There was a neat, a very perfect hole in the casing. It was about the size of a nickel and it went clear through and disclosed another hole, slightly larger, in the opposite sidewall. Shannon was afraid he was going to become violently sick at his stomach.

Pilsudski stood up. His blue eyes were no longer naive. There was something terrible in them, and the golden toothy smile had become a fixed grimace. He used his favorite phrase, only this time there was infinitely more meaning in it. “The sonnabitches.”

Sudden sweat broke out under Shannon’s arms and turned to ice on his ribs. “Who?”

Pilsudski looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “How should I knowing?” He turned and began a swift scrabbling ascent of the cut bank rising steeply from the road. Presently darkness and the mountain swallowed him.

A car, coming very fast from the direction of Phoenix, rounded the nearest turn. Its headlights bathed Shannon and the bus and the rest of them with white-hot light. For a moment it seemed that the car was not going to stop. Then there was the shriek of suddenly applied brakes, the scream of tortured rubber and the car, skidded to an abrupt halt. It was a Cadillac Sixteen, very red, very shiny, very expensive looking. There was a woman at the wheel. There were no other passengers. She leaned out of the lefthand window and, probably because he was closest, addressed Shannon. “Trouble?”

Shannon regarded her, practically no chore at all, for she was just about the most vivid thing he had seen in years. She was without a hat, and her slightly windblown hair was as black and shiny as jet. It was so dark that it seemed to hold indigo-blue shadows. Green eyes under brows as straight and black as Shannon’s own probed his face. Her full red mouth was arrogant. “I asked you a question.”

Shannon’s teeth shone whitely. “I heard you, baby.” He waved at the bus. “I’ll leave it to you. Does that look like trouble, or did you think we were having a Klan meeting?”

The bus driver came over. He seemed curiously diffident compared with his former manner. “Hello, Miss MacLeish.” He corrected even that. “I mean, Mrs. St. Cyr.”

“MacLeish will do,” the vivid lady said. She looked at the hunkies, at the three girls, at the Salvation Army lassie. “What happened?”

Apparently Pilsudski’s inspection of the tire had not been lost on the driver. “Somebody took a shot at us.” He gagged suddenly. “With a rifle.”

Shannon felt that he should add something to this. He waved at the mountainside. “A guy named Pilsudski is up there looking for the marksman. He probably won’t find anything.” The lady’s green eyes examined him as though he were a bug under a microscope. He wondered what it would be like to crush his mouth against her full lips. She deliberately removed her eyes from his and again spoke to the driver. “So His Honor was riding with you?”

He looked at his feet. “Unh-hunh.”

Pilsudski came sliding noisily down the cut bank. His once resplendent plaid suit was caked with mud, though the ridiculous green hat with the little red feather in the band had escaped tarnish. He politely bared his head for the girl’s benefit. “Hi, MacLeish.”

“Hello, Mayor,” Miss MacLeish nodded. There was mockery in her eyes when she looked at Shannon. “Mr. Pilsudski is mayor of our homey little town up ahead.”

“No!”

“Fact,” she said, and for the first time since her arrival she smiled. The smile had a degree of intimacy that gave Shannon goose pimples. He felt that he was probably going to get to know Miss MacLeish very well indeed. She turned an exact duplicate of the smile on the giant Pilsudski. “Find anything up there?”

“Road,” Pilsudski said. “The old one.” He explained for Shannon’s edification that the new road, the one they were on, cut off some five or six miles. The muddy toe of his shoe drew a diagram on the wet pavement. “Shesa could gone back to Phoenix or Las Cruces, either wan.” Obviously he meant the potential mass murderer. He lifted his gaze quite suddenly to the girl’s face. “You been pass anybody going other way?”

She shook her head. “Not in the last half hour.”

Pilsudski nodded. “Then is in Las Cruces,” he said. There was that in the way he said it which boded little or no good for the rifleman when Pilsudski found him. Indeed Shannon had a vivid mental picture of the plodding, painstaking search, and of a big golden man tearing someone to bits between his two hands. Shannon remembered that he too had been on the bus, and that he might at this very moment be lying at the bottom of a cloud-filled canyon with a flaming bus for his funeral pyre. His eyes took on a hot, eager light. “Well, somebody is going to have to get a relief bus—and the cops.”

“Yess,” Pilsudski said. He looked at the girl in the sleek red convertible. “You telling Whitey and those bus office?”

“All right.” She gunned the motor into a throaty roar.

“Wait a minute,” Shannon said. He looked at his watch. It was almost twelve. “I’m supposed to be in Las Cruces at midnight. Could I ride in with you?”

“Well—”

“The cops can find me later if they need me,” he said.

She regarded him with an intentness that was a little disconcerting. “You seem to know a great deal about policemen.”

“Oh, I do,” he assured her. “I’ve been in practically every jail in the country.”

Pilsudski turned from a somewhat blasphemous harangue of the restless hunkies. “Iss all right, MacLeish. He no hurt you.”

“I had no idea he would,” Miss MacLeish said. She waited while Shannon got his hat and topcoat from the bus. His luggage was on top, laced down under the tarpaulin. He left it and climbed into the Cadillac. In something less than a hundred feet they were doing sixty. Shannon closed his eyes against the picture of himself and a very gorgeous, very reckless young lady, and a big red Cadillac missing the next turn and ending up in Hades. Wind whistled past his ears with a banshee wail. He wished he had a drink.

After a while she said, “That wasn’t true, about your being in every jail in the country.”

He opened his eyes. “Wasn’t it?”

“No.”

“What makes you think so?”

She laughed then. It was a deep contralto melody, and Shannon felt that if she did it again it was going to be his undoing. He tried to concentrate on Miss Frances McGowan but he was only partially successful. Miss McGowan was in Los Angeles. “You aren’t old enough,” the green-eyed lady at his side said.

“That’s what you think,” Shannon said. He knew, and she knew, that they were no longer talking about jails. He was relieved to note that the turns were becoming less and less abrupt, for the lady showed no signs of slackening her headlong pace. As far as she was concerned, the Cadillac people could just as well have left off the brake pedal. Storm-ridden clouds still blacked out the higher peaks, but it had not yet begun to rain again. Two or three cars passed them, going toward Phoenix, and an oil truck, all Christmasy with colored lights, churned its way toward them up the steadily descending grade. “There seemed to be some question in Rogalli’s mind as to your right name,” Shannon said. He was always very careful about possible husbands in the offing. “Is it Miss MacLeish or Mrs. St. Cyr?”

Her eyes rested on him obliquely. “Would you mind very much if it was Mrs.?”

He shrugged. “Probably not.”

“Then it isn’t,” she said. “Legally, perhaps, but not in fact. I divorced St. Cyr a year ago.” Almost unconsciously she increased the speed of the car. “No, that isn’t quite true. It was George who divorced me.” She gave Shannon a full view of her face this time. “He was my second.”

Shannon licked his lips. “You certainly get around, baby.”

“It’s probably the climate,” she said. Her tone had a note of self-mockery. “You’ll understand what I mean if you’re around Las Cruces very long.” She pointed ahead. In the distance and still far below them a long narrow valley was opening out. The town was a sprawling maze of red and blue neon, petering out toward the ends in queues of yellow streetlights. And on the left, high above the town, were serrated rows of pinpoints, probably from the mine buildings. A blood-red glow against the low-hanging clouds suggested fires from the converters of a giant smelter. “By the way,” Miss MacLeish said, “I don’t know your right name either.”

He pretended to be very busy lighting a cigarette. Twin streams of gray smoke issued from his nostrils. “How about Shannon?”

She considered that. “Well,” she decided presently, “it fits, anyway.” She nodded to herself. “Yes, outside of a possible McGonigle I can’t think of a better one.”

They were actually down on the floor of the valley now. High up the slope immediately opposite them was a brightly lit sign which read: “Resurrection Copper Company.” Shannon shuddered. “There’s one name I don’t like. It’s unpleasantly suggestive.” He thought that but for the grace of God, or maybe the bus driver Rogalli, he, John J. Shannon, might this very moment be lying down in the bottom of a mile-deep chasm, waiting for that other and final resurrection.

“Giles likes it,” Miss MacLeish said.

Shannon half turned in his seat. “Giles?”

“My father,” the green-eyed lady explained. She laughed throatily. “He runs the Resurrection.”

Shannon regarded her. “I wish you’d quit saying that. It gives me goose pimples.” He let his out-stretched arm rest on the back of the seat, not touching her, but near enough so that he could if he wanted to. “Like you.”

The main street of the town engulfed them. Shannon discovered what he had heretofore only suspected. There were at least eight saloons to the block, and all were doing a thriving business. The sidewalks were crowded, and half a hundred juke boxes spewed music into the street from behind constantly swinging doors. On a corner a Salvation Army band fought valiantly against this bedlam, but it was a losing battle. You couldn’t even hear the bass drum. Cars were thick at the curbs, and such drivers as were actually abroad were apparently as careless of life and limb as Shannon’s own charioteer. The Cadillac halted abruptly before a six-story brick building advertised as the Hotel Navarro.

“You’ll probably be stopping here,” the lady said. “It’s the best we’ve got.”

“Yes,” Shannon said. He was suddenly conscious of an intense desire to throttle his companion. It was not that her manner had changed, nor that she was any less beautiful. It was just that his hand, falling from the seat-back to the sunken ledge behind it, had come in contact with an oddshaped leather case. Practised fingers told him the case could contain but one object. It was a rifle.

Chapter 3

VOGEL CAME INTO Shannon’s room with the furtive, slightly apologetic air of the typical private eye—the kind that has given the profession a bad name. He was a round-bellied little Dutchman with naive blue eyes set like unhappy marbles in a pinkly cherubic face. One of the eyes had a mouse under it, and his small, Cupid’s-bow mouth was a trifle puffy. “Hello, John J.” He sucked in his breath. “Jesus, I’m glad to see you!” Vogel was not ordinarily a profane man, so it was clear that he was suffering a tremendous emotional upheaval.

Shannon glared at him. “All right, so you’re a private eye. You don’t have to look like one.”

Vogel took off his hat, looked in it, found nothing of value and put it back on again. “I—now—saw your name on the register.”

Shannon admired him elaborately. “Now that’s what I call a genius. Who’d ever think of looking for a name on a hotel register?”

“Well, but—”

“Never mind,” Shannon said. He was busy unpacking the luggage which had come in on the relief bus. “What about Mrs. Thorelsen?”

Vogel gingerly sat on the edge of the bed. “She was disappointed in you, John J.” He thought about that for a moment. “On account of you didn’t come yourself.”

“Naturally,” Shannon said with becoming modesty. He got a towel out of the bathroom and wiped mud off his shoes. He became heavily sarcastic. “But aside from preferring me to you, what did she have to say?”

Vogel was hurt. “She said the same thing she did in her letter. She said her husband never committed suicide, and she knew he didn’t, no matter what the cops told her.”

Shannon was now considering his reflection in the dresser mirror. He decided he didn’t need a shave. “What did the cops tell her?”

“Well,” Vogel said carefully, as though reciting by rote, “they said they found him in his laboratory, and it was his own gun, and Whitey Loop—that’s the chief of police here—got Wolfgang Rygaard—that’s the big shot up at Las Cruces Consolidated—to admit he couldn’t find all the dough this Bill Thorelsen was supposed to have charge of.” Vogel turned brick red. “Also, there was some talk of a woman he was supposed to be running around with, and when Mrs. Thorelsen give ’em an argument they even brought her the woman.”

“And what did Mrs. Thorelsen say to that?”

Vogel sighed. “That she knew her husband.” He screwed up his eyes and it was obvious that he was quoting from memory. “‘I knew Bill,’ she says.”

Shannon wished some woman would have that much faith in him. “A hell of a lot of help that is.” He considered the weight of evidence against what he knew of Wynn Thorelsen. He decided that she must have changed. “What makes you think she’s got something?”

Vogel became indignant. He addressed an imaginary audience in anguished tones. “He can look at my face and ask me that!”

“Well,” Shannon argued, “even you admitted the two guys weren’t cops. Maybe they really didn’t like your face.”

“After what Lew Kronjager told me?” Vogel demanded. He pointed a pudgy quivering finger. “He wanted to know what I was working on, and when I wouldn’t tell him he come right out and said they didn’t like private eyes in Las Cruces. He said Whitey Loop, especially, didn’t like ’em.” A pink tongue explored the injury to his mouth. “It was right after that when these guys looked me up.”

“You should have told him,” Shannon said.

Vogel stared. “About Mrs. Thorelsen?”

“No,” Shannon said kindly, “about an imaginary client.” His smile became a trifle wolfish. “About, say, an old lady in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, whose husband was last heard of in the copper boom of 1917. She wondered if he was still living.”

Vogel stared at him suspiciously. “What’s this guy’s name?”

“How the hell do I know?” Shannon yelled. His eyes got a crafty look. “Let’s see, now, it will have to be a common name, yet not so common that we’ll actually find the guy.”

Vogel was becoming slightly confused. “How can we find him if he don’t exist?”

Shannon gnashed his teeth. “Christ!”

“Well, I just wondered,” Vogel said. He picked at a raveling on his coat sleeve. “I knew a guy once named Johann Smith.”

Shannon was startled. “What happened to him?”

“The ‘Johann’ was a giveaway,” Vogel said. “He figured he couldn’t part with both ‘Johann’ and ‘Schmidt,’ so he just changed the last half.”

Shannon implored the Most High for patience. “What happened to him?”

“They shot him for a spy in London in 1914,” Vogel said.

“Well, for Christ’s sake!” Shannon’s sudden ribald laughter almost shook the ceiling down. And then, as it always did, swift reaction set in and he became gloomy. He wished that not only was there no Johann Smith, but that there was no Wynn Thorelsen either. Not that he didn’t like Wynn. There had even been a time when he liked her very much indeed. But just the same, were it not for his obligation to her he could devote his time, all of it, to a certain Miss Carmen MacLeish and a rifle which might or might not be the one. He turned brooding dark eyes on Gus Vogel. “This Whitey Loop, what kind of a guy is he?”

Vogel shivered, though it was not cold in the room. “He’s the kind that made the Purple Gang famous. He’s got the crudest pair of eyes I ever seen, except once, maybe.”

Shannon was interested. “Where was that?”

“In the San Diego zoo,” Vogel said. “On a tiger.”

Shannon picked up the phone and called the desk downstairs. “Who’s the most prominent lawyer in town?”

The clerk was apologetic. “There’s only one, Mr. Shannon.” He qualified that. “In private practice, that is.” He was impelled to extol the virtues of this solitary attorney. “He drinks a little, of course, but when it comes to the law you’ll never find a better man than George St. Cyr.”

He could just as well have kicked Shannon in the stomach. “What was that name again?”

“St. Cyr.”

“Oh.” For one brief moment Shannon considered calling the whole thing off. He would phone Wynn Thorelsen and tell her he was so sorry, please, but he was as bad as Gus Vogel; he couldn’t work in Las Cruces either. This could not last, of course. Even as he thought of it, another part of Shannon’s devious mind was already toying with the possibilities. There was a certain piquancy about doing business, or trying to do business, with the ex-husband of Carmen MacLeish. Certainly the man must know the town pretty well. And obviously he must know the lady with the green eyes and raven hair even better. “All right,” Shannon told the clerk, “see if you can locate him for me and have him come up.” As an afterthought he added, “You’d better send up a bottle of Mount Vernon and some ice too.” He remembered Vogel, who was opposed to spirits. “And some beer.”

The clerk coughed. “St. Cyr never drinks anything but Scotch, sir.”

“All right, damn it, some Scotch too, then!” Shannon banged the phone down. “I’ll bet he’s a goddam Britisher.” He was breathing angrily, gustily, through his nose. He glared at Vogel. “Well, what are you staring at?”

“My shoes,” Vogel said. Vogel had very small feet of which he was inordinately proud. “They’re pretty near new and I don’t know anybody can use ’em when I’m gone.”

“Then I’ll bury you with them on,” Shannon said brutally. “I’ll see that they’re put in the coffin myself.” He had another thought and once more tackled the telephone. This time he inquired if there were a newspaper in town, and if so, would it be open at this time of night. It developed that there was and it would. He was presently talking to a man who said he was the editor of the Las Cruces Clarion. “I’d like to run a box on your front page. This is John J. Shannon and I’m stopping at the Navarro.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Shannon.” There was the rustle of copy paper.

“Reward,” Shannon dictated. “To settle an estate would like information about one Johann Smith, believed to have been in Las Cruces-Corona district about 1917. Communicate with, etc., etc.” He frowned portentously, as though he were personally vis a vis the Clarion’s editor. “Got that?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Then send me the bill,” Shannon said. He cradled the phone just as there was a knock on the door. “Come in!”

A Mexican bell-hop in a purple suit came in bearing a loaded tray. Behind him was a tall, stoop-shouldered young man in baggy, very British tweeds. You knew he was young, though his hair was dead white. He had an engaging smile and the brown eyes of a disillusioned spaniel. He was very drunk. “Are you John J. Shannon?” Without waiting for a reply he sat down in the nearest chair. “I’m St. Cyr.”

Shannon regarded him sourly. “I understood you just drank a little.”

“I do,” St. Cyr said amiably. “A little too much.” He waved at the waiting bell-hop. “Just put it on the table, Manuelo, there’s a good fellow.” He fumbled in his pockets but could not find any money. “You tip him,” he instructed Shannon.

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Shannon said, “whose room is this, anyhow?”

“Yours,” St. Cyr acknowledged. He sighed. “Who am I to deny it? I’m just your attorney.”

Vogel got off the bed and went over and opened a bottle of beer. “Well, John J., it looks like you’ve went and hired yourself a lawyer.” He took a tentative sip. “Though God knows what you’re going to do with him.”

Shannon tipped the bell-hop and saw him to the door. When he turned he discovered that St. Cyr was already appreciating the bottle of Scotch. He was appreciating it straight from the neck and without benefit of ice. Shannon was outraged. “No, you don’t. Not until we’ve had a conference.”

St. Cyr relinquished the bottle without a struggle. In the light from the ceiling fixture his white hair became silver. “All right.” He straightened his shoulders and became excessively military. “Carry on, me lads.”

Shannon led him carefully back to the chair. “Look, I’m a private investigator, understand? I’ve got a license to work in California, Arizona and Nevada.” He waved at Vogel. “Mr. Vogel, as one of my authorized operatives, is also licensed to work, right?”

For just an instant St. Cyr’s brown eyes sharpened. “Quite.” He relapsed into a dreamy contemplation of the White Horse bottle.

Shannon was not discouraged. He had worked with lushes before. All you had to do was figure out the exact type of lush they were. He thought he had St. Cyr figured. “But the cops here are kind of tough, get it? First they warned off my operative, then they had him taken apart by a couple of hoods.”

St. Cyr looked at him. “Very tough cops,” he agreed.

Shannon went over and poured himself a shot of rye, and a small Scotch, a very small one, for his new attorney. “Well, now we’re getting some place.”

The Scotch scarcely touched St. Cyr’s lips. “So you want me to keep you out of jail?” He extended his glass for a refill. “I’d have to know what you’re working on.”

“Of course,” Shannon said. He was so certain now that he had St. Cyr figured that he allowed him another drink. He put a great deal of feeling into his description of Mrs. Johann Smith, of Sioux Falls, but more recently of Los Angeles. “This poor old gal came all the way out to the Coast on the off chance of finding her husband before she kicked off.” He passed a weary hand across his brow. “We’ve been working on it for almost a month now.”

Vogel injected what he thought was a helpful remark. “And we finally traced him to Las Cruces.”

Shannon’s smile was a trifle forced. “We think we’ve traced him.” He explained about inserting the ad in the Clarion. “Was that all right?”

St. Cyr opened his eyes very wide. “Quite.”

“Then you’ll help us?”

“Oh, yes,” St. Cyr nodded. His head sagged abruptly and Shannon knew that he had misjudged the man’s capacity. He had misjudged it by exactly one drink. He was furious. “Hey, you can’t pass out on me now!”

St. Cyr lifted his tired head. “Saw you with my wife tonight. My ex-wife,” he added carefully. “Beautiful girl, Carmen, what?”

Shannon’s eyes had a harried look. He committed himself to the extent of a repressed, “Well, in a way.”

“Beautiful,” St. Cyr insisted. He got up and with his hands out in front of him, like a somnambulist, made his way to the bed where he promptly fell on his face. “Well, good night all.”

Chapter 4

AT ONE-THIRTY in the morning there was no lessening of the bedlam which was Front Street. The change from the night shift to the graveyard shift had been accomplished with no notable exodus or influx. Some of the men coming down off the hill were dirtier, that was all. The saloons still flourished, and the cafes, and those combinations of both whose back rooms catered to men and women who liked to joust with Lady Luck. There was no secrecy about the gambling. It was there for one and all, and you either took it or left it alone, according to your lights or inclination.

A pale moon had finally penetrated the overhanging clouds, outlining the rim of the encroaching mountains and touching with silver the vast glacier of ore tailings from the Las Cruces Consolidated’s mill. The roar and rumble of the mill was a thunderous background, a kettle-drum overtone for the hectic, hysterical music of the town itself. Shannon had the distinct impression that the mountain was a volcano in imminent danger of eruption, and that the town felt this too and was drugging itself against an ultimate extinction from which there was no escape. High up the slope a thousand yellow eyes peered down from behind the ever-present pall of ore dust, the serrated windows of the mill and the shaft house and the administration buildings. The headlight of an ore train’s locomotive was a flashing diamond, winking in and out among the peaks on its way from the Resurrection to the Tri-State Smelter at the far edge of the town. The Las Cruces Consolidated was between the two.

Shannon stood on the corner recently evacuated by a discouraged Salvation Army and watched with interested eyes the shifting pageant before him. He felt curiously without an entity of his own, as though he were a wraith lost in the bowels of Hell. Half a dozen drinks and a deal of guarded inquiry had done nothing to dispel this illusion. He wished he had not let Gus Vogel go to bed.

The rain had had no permanent effect; already little dust clouds rose beneath scuffing feet, and the scurrying cars up and down the highway raised minor whirlwinds of it. A sprinkling truck came along presently and washed the pavement clean, but you had the feeling that it was futile. The ore dust was there. It would always be there. The deep bronze of men’s faces became grayed with it.

Surprisingly, for this hour, there were a lot of women still abroad, women whom you instinctively knew were wives or sisters or daughters. Most of them looked older than the men, perhaps because they no longer cared, possibly because they had not the money to compete with those other ladies whose stock in trade was beauty. The Las Cruces Consolidated’s company store, a block-long blood brother to a Sears-Roebuck basement, sold groceries and silk stockings, plumbing fixtures and ladies’ hats.

A hulking Swede stumbled through the swing doors of the Copper Pig, clutching his middle with wide-spread hands. Blood ran out of his belly and dyed his fingers. He fell to his knees, swaying back and forth at the edge of the curb, and a second man, small and squat and dark, plunged out after him. This man had a knife and its blade too was red. Three other men came out after the second, but not as though they intended to do anything about him. They were just interested spectators.

Shannon, breathing gustily through his nose, moved toward the gathering crowd. A siren cut a swath down the middle of the street, and two men got out of the police car. The smaller of the two yelled something at the squat man with the knife. His partner was momentarily lost sight of in the crowd. When he reappeared he was directly behind the squat man and he hit him a full-armed blow with a sap. He continued to hit him, again and again, apparently trying to drive him like a stake into the sidewalk.

The Swede who had been knifed finally quit swaying and fell forward on his face in the gutter. The man with the knife fell down too. An ambulance materialized beside the police car and, quite methodically, as though it were all just routine, the casualties were loaded in and hauled away. The smaller cop got back into the police car. The bulky one, the one who had wielded the sap, saw Shannon standing there at the edge of the crowd. “Well, blow me down!”

Shannon would have liked to do that very thing. “Hello, Lew.” He did not offer to shake hands. He saw that Kronjager had put on weight, most of it around his middle. Kronjager had been kicked off the Los Angeles force, not, like Gus Vogel, for fumbling a case with a political angle, but for doing the same kind of thing to prisoners he had just done to the squat man. Kronjager would never learn apparently.

“Well, well,” Kronjager said heartily, “It’s a small world, hunh?” His voice was thick and there were ruptured veins in his nose and cheeks. He was quite drunk. Small inflamed eyes looked down at the sap in his hand and saw that it was sodden with blood. He tossed it into the back of the police car. “What brings you to Las Cruces?”

“I’m looking for a guy,” Shannon said. He restrained an almost overwhelming impulse to hit Kronjager in the mouth. “Vogel seemed to be having a little trouble.”

“Vogel probably got snotty,” Kronjager said.

Shannon looked at him. “I don’t want to bother anybody, Lew. I just want to be let alone while I find this guy.”

“What guy?”

“A man named Johann Smith,” Shannon said carefully. He explained about Johann Smith. “I’ve got a thousand-dollar retainer and I’d like to earn it.”

Kronjager’s partner yelled at the crowd. “All right, break it up, break it up!” They broke it up. Some of them went back into the Copper Pig, where presently a woman began singing “My Man,” throatily and pretty well. Shannon decided that neither the Swede nor the squat man with the knife had been her man. Apparently they had belonged to nobody. He resisted a desire to get roaring drunk.

Kronjager opened the right-hand car door and put a foot on the running board. “Think you’ll be in town long?”

“I hope not,” Shannon said. His eyes were half closed, sleepy looking. “Not if this is a sample.” He spat. “I’ve got a weak stomach.”

Kronjager appeared to think this was very funny. His belly shook when he laughed. “Well, drop around at Headquarters after a while. I’ve got something that’s good for weak stomachs.” He took his foot off the running board. “By the way, you got any ideas about who took a shot at that bus?”

“No.”

Kronjager nodded. “That’s swell.” His small eyes were intent on Shannon’s face. “You get any, you talk to Whitey or me.”

“All right,” Shannon said. Smoldering eyes watched the police car vanish around the nearest corner. Presently he turned and walked without apparent purpose out toward the east end of town, in the direction of Corona. When he came to the open highway, beyond the last of the street-lights, he increased his pace a little. The darkness made the air seem colder and he buttoned his topcoat about him. Distant thunder rolled beyond the peaks, and high up the slope to his left the smelter roared and belched flame against the lowering sky. The air tasted faintly of sulphur.

Occasionally a car went by, usually in a terrific hurry and leaving behind it a wake of profanity or obscene laughter. Shannon walked carefully on the left side of the highway until he came to the second crossroad beyond the smelter. Here he paused and lit a cigarette, using the act to mask a swift survey of the road behind him. For the moment he was quite alone. He went quickly into the crossroad and to the car that was parked there without light. “Hello, Wynn.”

She leaned out of the car and he kissed her on the mouth, briefly. Her hands clung to him. “This is good of you, Shan.”

“Nuts.” He got in beside her and shut the door. He saw that she was in black, and that she was thinner. Beneath a modish little hat her hair was spun copper. Her gray eyes made him uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Wynn, I came as soon as I could.”

“You needn’t have worried about me,” she said. “That part of it was over and done with a long time ago.”

He understood then that she knew why he hadn’t come in the first place; why he had sent Vogel instead. He was suddenly ashamed under her calm scrutiny. “Well, hell—”

She nodded. “I guess it comes to all of us once, Shan. The real thing, I mean.” Quite suddenly she turned and buried her face against the roughness of his coat. “I loved the guy, Shan.”

He put an arm around her. “Sure you did, hon.” His eyes looked blankly at the night. When he had known her she was a hostess in a night club, not as bad a profession as some perhaps, but not good either. She made her living out of the suckers who came in from just such towns as this one; guys who got fed up and wanted a fling at the big time. Bill Thorelsen had been such a guy.

She pushed herself free of him. Her profile was hard and clear-cut as a cameo. Her voice too had grown hard and taut. “They brought him home to me with a bullet in his head and they gave me ten thousand dollars to take his place.” Her small gloved hands clenched tightly on the wheel. “They were kind. It’s only the hunkies’ widows who are supposed to get the insurance; the hunkies who get killed in the mines.” She laughed. “Bill wasn’t entitled to it, you see. Bill was a suicide.” Shannon’s stomach crawled.

“Cut it, Wynn.”

After a while she said, tiredly, “All right, Shan.” Her chin came up. “Just the same, I’ll spend every dime of it to hang the man who did it.” She looked at him. “Something else has come up since I wrote you—since I talked to Vogel. I’ve had a robbery.”

Shannon sat up a little straighter. “The hell you have!”

“Only they didn’t take anything,” she said. “They were just looking.”

“For what?” Shannon didn’t realize how sharply he had spoken till he saw her flinch. “I’m sorry, hon.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Presently she said in that curiously hard flat voice, “I don’t know what they were looking for. Probably for something they didn’t find when they went through his papers up at the mill.”

“They had the right to look at those,” Shannon said.

“Of course. He was working for them, and there was the alleged shortage in his accounts.”

It occurred to Shannon that he didn’t know much about the Las Cruces Consolidated Mining Company, nor about Wolfgang Rygaard, the man who ran it. “What was Thorelsen’s job?”

“Bill was engineer and chief assayer.”

Shannon wondered what he himself would do if he had killed Bill Thorelsen and wanted to make it look like suicide. “What was the woman’s name?”

Her lips made a thin uncompromising line. “There wasn’t any woman. I tell you I knew Bill. I knew him inside and out.”

“All right,” Shannon said angrily, “the one they told you, then!”

She shivered. “Her name is Rose Machado. She runs a—a place over on the Avenida Juan Batista.” Her hands clenched into fists. “I told her she lied. I told them all they lied.”

“That wasn’t very smart of you, hon,” Shannon said gently. He thought it was odd that he could feel only gentleness for this woman beside him. He thought that perhaps he understood good haters. Shannon was a pretty good hater himself. He opened the car door. “I’ll see what I can do, Wynn.” He got out and stood there quietly for a moment. “If I were you, Wynn, I’d begin mixing around again. That way we can make our next meeting look like an accident.” He laughed harshly. “May I have this waltz, madam?”

“If you like,” she said. For an instant her eyes were as he had remembered them, deep gray pools in which you would not mind drowning. “We always did understand each other, Shan.”

“Yes,” he said. He waited till she had started the motor, waited till she had turned without lights into the main highway before he set match to a fresh cigarette and began retracing his way back to town and the Hotel Navarro. He saw by his wrist watch that it was just two o’clock.

Fitting his room key into the lock he became conscious of two things: first, the door was already unlocked; and second, his latest visitor was quite musical. A deep bass voice hummed something from Rachmaninoff, and, keeping time to it, there was a sort of hollow, measured slapping sound. Shannon opened the door. George St. Cyr was still face down on the bed. The giant Pilsudski was on the bed too, only he was not asleep. He had both pillows propped comfortably behind his head. He nodded genially and energetically at Shannon, but it was obvious that he was not going to stop humming until he had finished the passage. He had Shannon’s bottle of Mount Vernon by the neck and with it he slapped majestic cadence into the cupped palm of his large left hand. The bottle was quite empty.

Shannon closed the door and leaned his back against it. He was beyond surprise. “Are you sure you’re perfectly comfortable, pal?”

Pilsudski finished his allotted task. “Sure,” he said, “Pilsudski always comfortable.” His golden-toothed smile belied the intentness of his eyes. The eyes were as blue and ingenuous as ever, but Shannon had the feeling that this guy could be a very tough number indeed. Pilsudski raised himself on one elbow. “So you are detective, yess?”

Shannon could scarcely deny it. His last information on Pilsudski fixed him as the mayor of Las Cruces, and as such he must be aware of what the police department knew for a fact. He nodded. “Well, in a way, yes.”

“Good,” Pilsudski said. He stood up slowly. “You know who are those sonnabitch try wrecking those bus?”

Shannon licked his lips. “No.”

“You are on it,” Pilsudski pointed out. “Maybe is not me they try to kill. Maybe is you.”

Shannon had already considered this possibility. Nevertheless he became violently angry. “I don’t give a God damn if I was!” He took off his hat and topcoat and hurled them at a chair. “Maybe the bus driver’s wife doesn’t like him any more. Maybe the International Order of Harlots didn’t like the competition they were getting. Maybe—” His dark eyes brooded on the sleeping figure of St. Cyr. “Hell’s fire, how should I know who it was?”

Pilsudski voice was insistent. “But you are detective?”

Shannon scowled. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Then you are finding out,” Pilsudski directed him calmly. “You finding out and you telling nobody but Pilsudski.” Thick fingers curled suddenly about the empty bottle. It collapsed like eggshell. “You better.” He regarded the shattered fragments of glass in his hand with an air of pleased surprise. “Yep, Pilsudski think you better.” He went out.

For all of two minutes afterward Shannon just stood there, staring at the door panel with a mixture of malevolence and acute anguish. He discovered that the palms of his hands were sweating. Presently his voice came back to him and he began cursing in a steady unbroken stream. He stopped that. He went over to the tray on the table, looking for a drink. The bottle of Scotch was empty too. All that was left was some of Gus Vogel’s beer. He drank it sullenly. He swore that if he ever got out of this town alive he was going to quit being a detective and take up some simple occupation, like truck driving.

There was a knock on the door. Shannon went toward it cautiously, holding the beer bottle like a club. “Yes?”

A furtive voice insinuated itself through the panel. “Talk to you a minute, pal?”

Shannon opened the door. His visitor, like the voice, was furtive and insinuating. He slid obliquely into the room. “I’m friends, pal. You can put the bottle down.” He was a smallish man in a checked suit, blue Chesterfield and dark blue Homburg. Tan-colored eyes were set too far apart in a flat expressionless face. “You’re Shannon, hunh?” His lips scarcely moved.

Shannon acknowledged his identity. “And you?”

“Max Mueller,” the small man said. Still with that furtive air but with unbelievable rapidity he went over to the bed, lifted St. Cyr’s head, lifted one of St. Cyr’s eyelids, let both eyelid and head drop. “He’ll do,” he whispered. “Out cold.” He turned to find Shannon towering over him. “Now wait a minute, pal. Don’t get sore.”

Shannon let his hands drop. “You’ll have to talk fast then. I’m getting sick of living in a ball park.”

“Of course you are, chum, of course you are.” Mueller dropped his voice to an even more intimate level. “What are you working on, pal?” He winked. He got out a card that said he was business agent for the Mine Workers’ local. “What did you and Pilsudski talk about?”

Shannon folded the card very carefully, as though it were the most important thing in the world. “Mr. Max Mueller,” he said distinctly, “if I did happen to be working on something, and if I did happen to talk to Pilsudski, you are the last guy in Las Cruces I’d discuss it with.” He reached out and got a fistful of Mueller’s necktie and shirt. “Am I making myself quite clear—chum?”

Mueller made strangling noises. “Don’t!”

“All right,” Shannon said. He released the man and opened the door, pointing. “Good night, Mr. Mueller.” As Mr. Mueller scuttled past him he planted a terrific kick where he thought it would do the most good. “And don’t come back, ever.” He closed the door. “The slimy little bastard.” He went into the bathroom and scrubbed his hands, paying particular attention to the right one, as though Mr. Max Mueller’s necktie and shirt might have contaminated him.

The telephone rang. It turned out to be Los Angeles calling and presently this led to Miss Frances McGowan. “Good morning, darling.”

Shannon cursed her. “As though I haven’t got enough troubles!”

Miss McGowan was profoundly shocked. “Is that a nice way to act?”

“I don’t care!” Shannon shouted. “I’m not going to have you sticking your nose in my business.”

“As if I would,” Frances said. There was a brief hiatus. Then, very sweetly: “So you’ve been having troubles?”

“No!”

“But you just said you were, darling.”

Shannon’s eyes were harried. “You woke me up out of a sound sleep. I’d been dreaming.”

“Of me, Shan?”

He scowled. “God forbid!”

“And you wouldn’t like for me to come up and help you?”

“No.”

She pretended to accept this dictum philosophically. “Well, good night, then.”

“Good night,” he said grudgingly. He was on the point of disconnecting when behind him there was the crash of glass. He turned just in time to see something come hurtling through the window; something that looked like nothing so much as a thick yellow candle with a curiously sputtering wick. It was pure reflex action which made him plunge toward it rather than away from it, and seize it and hurl it back at the shattered window. But even then he was not quite quick enough. The floor seemed to lift under his feet, and there was a sound like no other sound on earth, and the world dissolved in a mass of searing flame and noise and compression which gripped him and wrung from him every drop of consciousness.

Chapter 5

THERE WAS NO PAIN. Shannon’s mind toyed with the phenomenon, nebulously at first, then, as memory brought a fuller awareness, with a kind of fierce disbelief. He did not open his eyes. He was afraid to open them. He wished as long as possible to retain the image of his own body with all its arms and legs intact. He had heard, somewhere, that you felt an amputated member still a part of you. It was certainly like that with Shannon. Each nerve end was a quivering, jumping hair, shot with electricity; his whole being was alive with it, sensitized to the slightest sound. It was the sound that did it. The sound was a man’s laugh. It was not a nice laugh. Shannon opened his eyes.

The man standing at the foot of the narrow hospital bed was tall and very, very beautiful. He was about the most beautiful man Shannon had ever seen. He could have been described as pretty, until you saw his eyes. They had golden irises, like a cat’s, and like a cat’s they were the cruelest eyes in the world. His hair was curly and the color of Fran McGowan’s champagne. The left breast of his dinner jacket bulged slightly more than the show handkerchief could account for. Shannon would have given you six-two-and-even that the man carried a gun in a shoulder clip. It was this man who had laughed. “You were lucky,” he said. After a moment, he added, almost absently, “This time.”

Shannon’s lips moved, but no sound came out. He decided that his vocal chords were paralyzed. He saw that his arms lay on top of the bed covers, quite intact, and farther down, beneath the covers, were two lumps that must be his feet. He wiggled his toes, experimentally, and was pleased to note that the bedclothes moved too. That was all right, then. He was not dreaming.

He became conscious that there were other people in the room. There was a tired-looking man in sterile white, with a stethoscope dangling from his neck, and there was a very fat nurse, also in white, starched and rustling. The rustling set Shannon’s teeth on edge, like the screech of a file on metal. He began to retch, and then he became very sick indeed, and he sensed, rather than saw, the swift movement around him and the porcelain basin beneath his face. After a time he felt better.

There were cool fingers on his forehead, and someone wiped his mouth and around his eyes with a refreshingly damp cloth. He lay back on the pillows, exhausted. The cool fingers did not go away. Presently he saw that they belonged to a woman who was not the nurse; who could never possibly be a nurse, unless it were in a hospital in that heaven which Shannon never expected to attain. Shannon’s voice came back to him with a rush. “Hello, MacLeish.”

“Hello, Shannon.” The tightly drawn bodice of her pale gold frock gave her body the perfection of a Varga creation. Her eyes were the color of the sea at great depths. In them was the restless urgency of the sea, and a cynical awareness of life, and intelligence and the veiled suggestion of an emerald flame which lit an answering flame in Shannon. Her voice was even richer than he had remembered it. “Been playing with matches again?”

Shannon licked his lips. “Unh-hunh.” The sound of rain beating against the windows drew his eyes to them and he saw Gus Vogel standing there. Vogel’s round pink face was rimed with ore dust, or possibly plaster dust, except for two very clean streaks below his blue eyes. He blew his nose loudly. “I don’t care,” he stated. “You scare hell out of me sometimes, John J.”

Shannon was embarrassed for him. “A fine thing!” He looked around but could not find the other victim of the explosion. “St. Cyr?”

Carmen MacLeish made an impatient gesture. “St. Cyr is all right. You probably saved his life but he was too drunk to appreciate it.” Long lashes screened her eyes for a moment and she said, as though to herself, “I’m going to have to ask Giles to do something about St. Cyr. I’m tired having him around under my feet.”

“You don’t have to ask your father,” the tall man at the foot of the bed said. The implication was that he would be glad to relieve Giles, or her, of the responsibility of taking care of George St. Cyr.

Her full red mouth was almost sullen. “The MacLeishes manage their own business.”

“But not very well,” the handsome man said. His cat eyes rested intently on Shannon’s face. “In case you don’t know it, I’m Floyd Loop, Chief of Police around here.”

“I guessed,” Shannon said. “Vogel described you.”

Loop smiled. He had lovely teeth too. “Vogel is a fool. He ought to have told me what he was working on.”

Over by the windows Gus Vogel seemed in imminent danger of apoplexy, but took it out in coughing.

“Well, you know how these Dutchmen are,” Shannon said. “Stubborn.”

“Sure.” Loop brushed an imaginary speck of dust from a coat lapel. “I hope you’re not going to be the same way.” He looked directly at Shannon. “Stubborn, I mean.”

“About what?” Shannon demanded. “Didn’t I tell Kronjager? Didn’t I tell my attorney?” He was outraged. “Why, Christ, I even put it in the newspapers!”

“There’s a classic line about a guy who protested too much,” Loop said. He shrugged his nicely tailored shoulders. “Let’s skip that for a while and talk about dynamite. Who threw it at you?”

“I don’t know.”

“And I don’t like that kind of answer,” Loop said.

Shannon’s nerve ends were still jumpy. He raised himself on one elbow. “Well, then, the hell with you. Why not ask Miss MacLeish?” The lady with the green eyes was outside his new range of vision, but he heard an abrupt intake of breath. “It was she who mentioned that I’d probably saved St. Cyr’s life. Possibly she was around to see it.”

Loop shook his head. He seemed able to shake his head from side to side while his golden cat eyes remained perfectly stationary. “Miss MacLeish was dancing with me at the country club.”

“Then that lets both of you out,” Shannon said. He did not believe it; even if it were true that they had been dancing together at the time there was nothing to prevent their having arranged the thing. He had no proof, of course. There was not one iota of evidence that either of them wished him dead, let alone a motive for the wish. He had a reasonably intelligent thought. “Maybe it was George St. Cyr your party was after.” His smile was unpleasant. “Though that brings us back to the lady and yourself, doesn’t it?”

The lady in question said a very naughty word indeed. “Are you looking for trouble, Mr. Shannon?”

He stared at her with an air of vast surprise. “Who, me? Lord, no!” He went into his stock song-and-dance about how he wanted no trouble whatsoever with anybody. All he wanted was to be left alone while he hunted for the missing Johann Smith. “Can I help it if I keep running into people with enemies?”

“Pilsudski was up in your room too,” Whitey Loop said.

Shannon made a bitter mouth. “That’s what I mean. You’d think it was a three-ring circus.”

“What did Pilsudski want?”

“He thought I might know who took a shot at the bus.” Shannon could not have sworn to it, but he thought that for just a moment Carmen MacLeish looked very sick indeed.

“But you couldn’t help him out?” Loop persisted.

By this time Shannon’s nerves were screaming. He had never been in an explosion before and the symptoms were new to him. He wondered if he were going to die. “No, God damn it, I couldn’t help him out! I can’t help anybody out. All I do is go around shoveling dynamite out the window when somebody throws it in!”

The doctor felt called upon to intervene. “You’d better let him rest for a while, Chief. He’s liable to end up with the screaming meemies.” He became stiffly professional. “Shock, you know.” He signaled the nurse, who picked up a hypodermic from a tray on the dresser and came toward Shannon with it. Apparently Las Cruces hospitals were even worse than some of the police hospitals Shannon had been in. She didn’t bother to swab his arm with alcohol. She didn’t even stretch the skin. She just jabbed the needle in and let him have it. “There!” She seemed quite pleased with herself.

Shannon glared at her. “Remind me to get you some flies some time—so you can pull their legs off one by one. Remind me to put cyanide in your—” But already his mouth was too tired to say, “coffee.” His eyelids came together very slowly, and Carmen MacLeish and Whitey Loop and Vogel and all the rest of them got out of focus and presently were just a blur. He slept.

He dreamed that he was in a bottle, like one of those little carved wooden ships, and that the bottle lay in the cupped palm of one of Jan Pilsudki’s huge hands. He dreamed about the ferret-like little man named Max Mueller, and about Floyd Loop and Lew Kronjager, gross almost to the point of obscenity, and about a man whose face he couldn’t see, but whom he knew to be Wynn’s husband, Bill Thorelsen. This man was clinging desperately to the fragile edge of a transparent white cloud, and the edge kept breaking off in his hands, like pie crust. There was something pretty terrible about this picture, and Shannon felt that he should do something about it, only he couldn’t, because he was penned up inside Pilsudski’s bottle.

On the pleasanter side, alive and vivid as a flame, was Carmen MacLeish. Her scarlet mouth invited him, and her green eyes mocked him, and instinctively he knew that she was going to be very bad for him, and he did not care. He awoke to find a bright morning sun outside his windows. Miss Frances McGowan was in the room. “Well, it’s about time,” she said.

Unaccountably, Shannon was pleased. He should have been very angry indeed, but though he pretended to be, he was not. “So you couldn’t keep your nose clean.”

“With you strewn in little pieces all over Arizona?” Miss McGowan was indignant. “If you don’t want people to worry why don’t you hang up your phone while you’re getting bombed?”

He examined her, to see if she’d been crying, like Vogel. There was no evidence of it. Her face was smooth and unmarred by even the tiniest flaw. She was quite striking in a forest green wool ensemble and caracul greatcoat. Green plastic pumps drew your attention to a pair of nylon-sheathed legs which were faultless. “A lot you care,” Shannon grumbled. He scowled. “You’re nothing but a snoop, that’s what you are. A sort of perambulating conscience.”

Frances seized on this. “Oh, so you’ve been doing things you shouldn’t?”

He leered. “Just a kiss or two.” He smacked his lips. “Nice.”

“Is that why you were bombed?”

He became sullen. “How do I know?” He looked intently at the closed door. Miss McGowan, interpreting the look correctly, went over and opened the door. There were no eavesdroppers. She closed the door. Shannon was amazed. “You mean they let you in to see me without Kronjager or somebody hanging around?”

“I talked to a man named Whitey Loop,” Fran admitted. She tucked a stray wisp of champagne-colored hair beneath the green turban. Her brown eyes had a speculative gleam. “Isn’t he handsome?”

“Beautiful,” Shannon said. His stomach tied itself in a knot at thought of what Miss McGowan might have said to Chief of Police Floyd Loop. “What did you tell him?”

Miss McGowan preened herself before the mirror. “I saw Gus Vogel first, darling.”

Shannon was relieved. “Well, that’s something.” He told her about Wynn Thorelsen. “You probably wouldn’t understand how she feels.” He viewed her with a jaundiced eye. “You haven’t any soul.”

“I have too a soul,” Fran insisted. She peered into the mirror, as though looking for it. “It’s a very beautiful soul.” She nodded her head in appreciation of what she saw. “Like me.”

Shannon asked God in a loud voice to consider what he, Shannon, had to put up with. “You know what Mamie Costello said.”

“That Mamie,” Miss McGowan scoffed. “I don’t know what you see in her.”

Shannon scowled. “She has a soul, anyway.”

“And freckles on her nose,” Frances observed.

Shannon resorted to platitudes. “Beauty,” he stated sententiously, “is only skin deep.” He wiggled his toes beneath the covers. They still worked. He discovered that he felt swell. “Well, for Christ’s sake, what am I doing in bed?” He sat up.

Frances regarded him. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“What you’ve been doing in bed.” She feigned an intense interest in the chart at the foot of the bed. “Who was that black-haired Sheba with the green eyes?”

Shannon flushed. “My attorney’s wife.”

“Your attorney’s ex-wife.”

“All right,” Shannon yelled, “his ex-wife!”

The door opened and the fat nurse in rustling white stuck her head in. “Did you call?”

Shannon glared at her. “I want my clothes.”

She sniffed. “The clothes you had on ain’t fit to be seen in.” She made gestures which she hoped were descriptive of an explosion followed by fire. “Pfffit!” She stared with patent disfavor at the splendor which was Frances McGowan. “He could have some orange juice.”

“Orange juice;” Shannon sneered. His voice rose. “Orange juice!” He hurled a horrific epithet at her. “I don’t want any orange juice, damn it, I want my clothes!”

Chapter 6

THE NEW ROOM at the Navarro differed little from the old one, except that it was on the sixth floor instead of the second, a circumstance arranged by Shannon himself. It had been ascertained that the unknown dynamiter had hurled his makeshift bomb from the roof of the one-story garage adjoining the hotel, and the roof of the garage had suffered, and also a considerable portion of brick wall surrounding Shannon’s window. Shannon had no wish to experience a repeat performance. He had not yet ceased to marvel at his own practically unscathed condition. Breakfast and a barber and a fresh change of clothes had almost eradicated the signs of last night’s preview of Hell, though they had not affected his memory. One of his eyebrows was slightly thinner than the other, relic of his trial by fire, and this lent his dark face a kind of quizzical, Machiavellian aspect.

Gus Vogel came in. His round pink face was worried. “Well, I done like you said,” he announced with an affectation of brisk efficiency. “Consolidated’s timekeepers are combing their old records for a guy named Johann Smith.” Blue eyes clouded a little. “Though you know as well as I do, John J., they ain’t gonna find him.”

Shannon looked at him. “My God, do we have to go all over that again?”

“Well—”

Shannon got off the bed and poured himself a drink. He did not offer Vogel any. “You see this Wolfgang Rygaard?”

Vogel admitted sadly that he had indeed seen the general manager of Las Cruces Consolidated. “I had to get his permission before they’d let me talk to anybody else.” He shivered. “That place is like a fort, John J. I even seen a stenographer carrying a gun!”

Shannon received this information without apparent surprise. “Probably a confirmed virgin,” he said.

Vogel was shocked. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, John J.” His eyes searched the corners of the room for possible eavesdroppers. “This Rygaard is quite a party,” he observed.

Shannon nodded. “I knew you’d get to the point sooner or later.” He licked his lips, found not even a lingering trace of rye on them and poured himself another drink. He was being very patient, for him. “So he’s quite a party, is he?”

“They’re all scared of him,” Vogel said.

Shannon was startled. “Who is?”

“Everybody,” Vogel said. He spread pudgy pink hands in an all-inclusive gesture. “He’s a driver.”

Shannon’s fingers curled, as though he might like to bury them in Vogel’s throat. He resisted the impulse. “Horses or cars?”

Vogel was hurt. “There you go, John J., always ribbing me.” His forehead wrinkled. “I’m trying to give you the picture just like I seen it.”

“Fine,” Shannon said with elaborate sarcasm. “When you get all through I’ll get you a job doing murals in Washington.” He snapped his fingers. “Look, Mrs. Thorelsen has practically accused Rygaard of complicity in her husband’s murder. Does he look like that kind of a guy?”

Vogel was indignant. “You ought to know better than that, John J. Murderers don’t never look like murderers.” He took off his hat and peered into it. “Just the same, this guy strikes me as about the coldbloodedest fish I ever seen. He’s got eyes like— now— gimlets.”

Shannon glared at him. “He find out anything from you?”

“Certainly not,” Vogel said with great dignity. “All I told him—all I told anybody—is that we’re looking for a guy named Johann Smith.”

Shannon confided to God that so far he hadn’t got much more than that out of Vogel, himself. “All right, so he’d cut his grandmother’s heart out and laugh while he was doing it. What else?”

Vogel’s expression was puzzled. “There’s something going on in this town—something bigger than just the murder of one guy. I dunno what it is. I just feel it.” He patted his breast. “In here.” He brightened. “Maybe you’ll feel it too, John J.” He looked at the ceiling. “If he hires you.”

Shannon remained absolutely motionless for all of sixty seconds. “If who hires me for what?”

“Why, Wolfgang Rygaard. Ain’t I been telling you?”

It was at this moment that the building began to tremble, gently enough at first, but with increasing violence, till the windows rattled and the floor vibrated under Shannon’s feet. A sound as of distant thunder accompanied this phenomenon. Shannon discovered that his reflection in the dresser mirror had grown quite pale. “So they’re going to try that again.”

Vogel was apparently unaffected. “Sure, four times a day they do it. Them was the noon shots in the mines.”

Utter silence descended on the room. The noise and the vibration were gone as suddenly as they had come. Shannon exhaled. “Well, for Christ’s sake!” He sank weakly into the nearest chair. After a time it occurred to him that something Vogel had said was almost as startling as the blasts from the underground workings. “Why does Wolfgang Rygaard think he needs a private dick?”

Vogel looked at his feet. “If you ask me, I don’t think he believes in this—now—mythical Johann Smith any more than I do.” He sighed. “Not after what happened to you last night.”

Shannon’s nostrils flared a little. “Oh, so he mentioned that too, did he?”

“Unh-hunh.”

Shannon stood up violently. “And what else?”

Vogel thought. “Well, like I said, he wants to see you. He says to tell you that if you got some spare time on your hands he can maybe use you, and that money’s no object.”

A glow that could have been avarice came into Shannon’s eyes. “How cute.” After a moment he enlarged this to “How too, too cute!” He bent over one of his suitcases and rummaged through it till he came upon his gun, a Police Positive that he had carried so long the blue was worn off in spots. He thrust the gun into the waistband of his pants, beneath his vest. “Do me a favor, Dutch?”

Vogel was apprehensive. “Well, sure, but—”

Shannon looked at him. “Get Fran McGowan out of town.”

Vogel became more than apprehensive. He was appalled. “Now look, John J., how would I go about doing that?”

Shannon flushed. “How do I know? If I knew I’d do it myself, wouldn’t I?” He resorted to cajolery. “She likes you, Gus. Just yesterday she was telling me how much she liked you.”

Vogel’s round pink face became a shade pinker. “No!”

“Fact,” Shannon assured him. He got a light tweed topcoat out of the closet, shrugged into it, found his slightly battered Borsalino and put that on too. “This town is no place for a girl like Miss McGowan, you know that, Dutch.”

“Well—”

Shannon pretended that the matter was all settled. “That’s fine, Dutch, you’ll never regret it.” He was almost to the door when Vogel had an afterthought. “Now wait a minute, John J.” He fixed his eyes on the slight bulge beneath Shannon’s vest. “Why wouldn’t it be a good idea if we all just kind of went home and forgot about things?”

Shannon’s mouth was unpleasant. “Such as?”

“Well, about last night and one thing and another.” He did not look at Shannon directly. “What I mean is, I know you, John J., and I know how you feel, but it ain’t gonna do no good to get yourself shot full of holes, is it?”

Shannon’s teeth shone whitely against the darkness of his skin. “Just how do I feel, Gus?”

Vogel had one of his rare flashes of insight. “Like blasting somebody’s guts out.” His small hands made a resigned gesture. “Not that I blame you, you understand, but—”

Shannon nodded. “Then that’s swell, Dutch. Just forget it and try to do what I asked you.” He went out, banging the door loudly behind him. Miss McGowan and George St. Cyr were just debouching from the elevator. St. Cyr was being very attentive, or so it seemed to Shannon, until, looking closer, he discovered that St. Cyr was clinging to her because he was too drunk to stand alone. “A fine kind of lawyer,” Shannon sneered.

St. Cyr used his free hand to politely stifle a hiccough. “My sincerest thanks, old fellow.” He waved vaguely. “Not for the compliment. For saving my life, you know.”

“I didn’t even remember you were in the room,” Shannon said ungraciously, and quite truthfully. He scowled at Miss McGowan. “You’d better get Vogel out of town. I heard those same two gorillas are laying for him.”

Miss McGowan appeared unimpressed. “Why don’t you get him out of town yourself?”

“He won’t go,” Shannon said. “He’s worried about you.”

“Oh?”

“Well, he is,” Shannon insisted. “He’s scared stiff but he thinks more of you than he does of his own skin, by God.” This seemed to puzzle him no end. “Though what he sees in you is more than I can understand.”

Miss McGowan prodded St. Cyr to a semblance of life. “Now isn’t that too gallant of Mr. Shannon, George?”

Shannon suffered a momentary twinge of jealousy. “So you’re calling each other by your first names already!”

“Of course,” Frances said, “George is going to help me on the background for a story, aren’t you, Georgie?” She looked at Shannon. “George is just full of local color.”

“George is full of Scotch.”

“Well, Scotch and local color,” Fran conceded.

St. Cyr giggled. “That’s very good, m’dear.” He passed a tired hand over his eyes. This seemed to clear his vision so that he really saw Shannon for the first time. “Oh, there you are, my good fellow.” He resembled a very earnest crane as he bent to peer into Shannon’s face. “As your attorney I advise you to be circumspect when the police question you. I was not circumspect.” He considered that gravely. “Indeed, if my esteemed ex-father-in-law had not rescued me I probably should not be here and able to advise you at all.”

Shannon’s eyes got a cagy look. “MacLeish? I was just on my way up to see him.”

St. Cyr blinked owlishly. “Then be circumspect with him too.” He smiled fondly down on Fran McGowan. “Be circumspect with everyone, eh, m’dear?” He attempted to lift his hat to Shannon, but was unsuccessful because he had obviously mislaid it somewhere. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you again.”

“Hasn’t it!” Shannon snarled. He glared at Frances. “You’d better get Vogel out of town. If you don’t I won’t be responsible!” He strode angrily down the hall, jabbed the elevator button incessantly until an outraged bell-hop brought the car up. “Why don’t you do your sleeping at night?”

“In this dump?” the kid demanded. He looked pointedly at Shannon’s chin. “With the kind of guests we have?” He lifted Shannon’s heart into his throat with a sudden headlong descent. “If I find your stomach lying around I’ll save it for you, mister.” He opened the doors with a flourish. “And if you’re thinking of getting me fired, you can’t. My old man owns the joint.”

Chapter 7

THE CAB WAS obviously a discard of some larger and more effete city. It had the wheezes. In the tonneau, feet propped on a dilapidated jump seat, Shannon cursed it and a fate which seemed always to heap on his shoulders more than any man’s normal shade of afflictions. Smoldering eyes considered the crawling panorama which was Front Street. He decided that he hated Las Cruces more than any other town in the world except, possibly, Tia Juana, Mexico, where he had once spent three days in jail because he’d lost his wallet and couldn’t prove he was a cop.

Daylight had brought a semblance of normalcy to Las Cruces. The sidewalks were only moderately crowded, and the shopping trend was definitely mercantile rather than escape entertainment. It was as though Las Cruces had paused for a good deep breath. Shannon was surprised to see kids on the lawn of the Las Cruces Union High School. He had got the impression that the town was childless as well as godless.

On the seat beside him he discovered a copy of the Clarion and he opened this out and saw his own boxed advertisement for one Johann Smith. He read that The Outlet, your independent store, had just received a new shipment of wood-pegged work shoes, guaranteed against copper rot. He read that copper was now at its highest level since 1917. He was intrigued by the information that Las Cruces sat more or less calmly atop a vast honeycomb of subterranean workings, and that when you bought a building lot anywhere in the county your ownership was limited to a depth of only fifty feet. Beneath that the ground belonged to, or was claimed by either the Consolidated Mining Company or the Resurrection Copper Company.

There was a humorous story about a Pole named Mankiewicz whose chicken coops had vanished overnight in the general direction of Hell. It seemed that a couple of Cousin Jack drillers, drunk and a trifle overzealous, had loaded with sixty per cent instead of forty per cent, and the succeeding blast had pulled the mountain down clear from the grass roots. The weight of Mr. Mankiewicz’s chicken coops had done the rest. There was a not-so-humorous story about a cave-in at the 1800-foot level. Twelve men had died because of that. Shannon recalled something that Wynn Torelsen had said. If the companies paid off at the rate of ten thousand dollars per man, twelve men would equal a hundred and twenty grand. Shannon thought that that was a lot of money. He was amazed at the total absence of political comment. It was as though the Clarion avoided it on purpose. Beyond a terse announcement of the next weekly Council meeting there was nothing whatever to show that Las Cruces wasn’t a political orphan. He wondered why Giles MacLeish had bothered to rescue his one-time son-in-law from the police.

The noonday sun warmed the cab’s interior. The motor sounded as though it were in imminent danger of falling apart, and occasionally the driver cursed it, though without any real feeling. He was a Swede. Shannon addressed the back of the driver’s neck. “You have many accidents like this one in the paper?”

“Yah.”

Shannon waited, but apparently the Swede was not a loquacious man. He added nothing whatever to the one monosyllable. “Well, why don’t they do something about it?” Shannon demanded.

Briefly the driver’s eyes met Shannon’s in the rear-vision mirror. “You going do something?”

“No,” Shannon said. He shook his head. “Not me.”

The driver apparently considered the conversation finished. He concentrated on tooling his chariot laboriously up the long slope toward the cluster of buildings under the big sign of the Resurrection Copper Company. An ore train crawled jerkily along the ridge. The rush of ore from the tipple was an almost continuous roar. Topping the rise at last, the cab halted before a sprawling one-story concrete building whose bronze and plate-glass doors were labeled: “General Offices.” Surprisingly, the doors and a half a hundred steel-casemented windows were clean. Indeed the whole top of the hill was clean, and bordering the winding macadam drive there were lawns and flower beds. A sprinkling system tossed spray into the sun with a kind of misty rainbow effect. In spite of the sun the air was thin and sharp, and there was snow on some of the higher peaks. Shannon’s breathing quickened perceptibly as he saw Carmen MacLeish’s red Cadillac parked in the zone reserved for executives. He paid off the hacker and went inside.

The room was a big one, and there were perhaps a dozen clerks behind the long mahogany counter. Adding machines and typewriters made a pleasantly commonplace sound. There was even a girl in a frilly white silk blouse behind a desk marked: “Information.” Beneath the sheer silk Shannon could see that she wore a pale green slip. Her eyes met his frankly admiring gaze and she flushed a little. “Did you wish something?” By carefully avoiding looking out the windows, and by shutting his ears against the rush of ore from the tipple, Shannon could almost imagine himself in the general office of a department store, or maybe a finance company. He said that he did indeed wish something. “Mr. MacLeish, preferably.” He took off his hat. “The name is Shannon.”

He could just as well have said he was Mephisto, or possibly Saul of Tarsus. There was instant silence in the big white room, a kind of poised, palpitant silence, then everybody became almost feverishly busy. Shannon looked at the girl. “What’s the matter, don’t you like the name?”

“Certainly,” she said. She became even more flustered. “I—I like it very much.” She lifted a phone, flipped an annunciator switch and announced that a Mr. Shannon was asking for Mr. MacLeish. She was patently relieved when a door opened at the far end of the room and a man came out. He was a tremendously wide man, and thick, and a double-breasted blue business suit made him look even wider and thicker. He rolled down the aisle on short thick legs, hand outstretched, his voice a cheerful booming sound. “Well, well, so you’re Shannon!” Black hair grew down to the second joints of his fingers.

Mindful of Pilsudski, Shannon shook the hand gingerly. He was relieved when he got all his fingers back intact. “Thanks.”

MacLeish’s laughter shook the room. “I like that, I do indeed. Nothing like a sense of humor in a man.” He put an arm around Shannon’s shoulders. “Come in, boy, come right in. Welcome to the Resurrection!”

Amid a veritable frenzy of activity from the clerical staff he convoyed Shannon up the aisle and through the door from which he had emerged. He closed the door and leaned his broad back against it. His joviality fell from him like a discarded cloak. “Who threw that dynamite at you?”

“I don’t know,” Shannon said. He was getting a little tired of everybody in Las Cruces asking him the same question. He was also at a loss to account for his somewhat peculiar reception. He jerked his head in the direction of the outer office. “What’s the matter with them out there? You’d think I was a ghost.”

“Well, you damned near were,” Giles MacLeish said. He went over to his desk. It was a huge desk, just as MacLeish himself gave you the impression of being huge, though in reality he was not so tall as Shannon. He was wider, certainly, and a good fifty pounds heavier, but in a fight Shannon would still have bet on Pilsudksi. He wondered why the idea of a fight between the two men should have occurred to him. Perhaps it was Carmen MacLeish’s manner toward the big golden-haired Pole who was mayor of Las Cruces. MacLeish gnawed the end from a thick black cigar. “Two escapes in one night make you something of a celebrity.”

Shannon looked at the ornate paneling of the office, at the deep-piled carpet, at the cut stone fireplace. A kind of pearly gray light filtered through the Venetian blinds at the windows. The blinds were tightly shut. “I have no idea that the attempts were aimed at me.” he said cheerfully. “In both instances you may remember that there were others present.”

MacLeish’s eyes were as black and hard as jet. “So you’re sticking to the story of looking for a man named Johann Smith?”

Shannon’s mouth drooped. “You wouldn’t be calling me a liar, would you?”

MacLeish blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Shannon. What are you working on?”

“A guy named Johann Smith.”

MacLeish pretended to be very interested in the ash on his cigar. “That’s what you told Whitey Loop.”

“That’s what I’m telling everybody,” Shannon said. He moved his shoulders impatiently. “If you don’t choose to believe it, that’s your business.”

The swivel chair creaked a little under MacLeish’s weight. He put both hands flat on the desk. “You wouldn’t have been sent out here by my Head Office, would you?”

“No.”

MacLeish considered that. “Damned if I don’t believe you,” he said presently. He got up and began pacing the floor. “How are you with a gun, Shannon?”

Shannon was moved to do a little probing on his own account. Indeed that was his real reason for coming up here in the first place. “With a rifle?” he suggested.

MacLeish made an angry gesture. “Carmen told me about that.” He pointed his cigar at Shannon’s nose. “The rifle in her car was mine. I’ve got half a dozen others. This is deer season.”

Shannon’s estimate of Carmen MacLeish’s intelligence rose considerably. He thought that it was marvelous to find intelligence and beauty in the same woman. “We’ll have to go hunting together sometime,” he said.

MacLeish looked at him. “That’s an excellent idea,” he agreed. “My own, in fact. It brings up the subject of Johann Smith and how much time you can spare from your—search.” He laughed without mirth. “At a price, of course.”

Shannon thought this was very funny. “You’re the second guy that’s offered me employment this morning.” He leered. “Not to mention one I had last night, though there was no money involved in that case. It was just intimated that if I didn’t produce the guy with a rifle I’d probably get my neck broken.”

MacLeish nodded. “That would be Pilsudski.”

“Unh-hunh.”

“And who was the other one?”

Shannon’s eyes glowed. “Sorry, that comes under the head of private business.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” MacLeish said. He went over to the east window and opened the blinds and stood there looking out at the distance peaks. “But first I’m going to tell you a story.” He pointed. “I was born down there in Horseface Canyon, in a shack made out of flattened kerosene cans. I came to work in the Resurrection when it was nothing but a hole in the ground.” He turned and looked at Shannon from beneath lowering brows. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll understand that this is my town they’re ruining.”

Something in the older man’s attitude, in the tone of his voice, struck an answering chord in Shannon. Perhaps it was a reflection of himself, that innermost self which even he rarely looked at. “Who?”

“Rygaard,” MacLeish said.

Shannon stared at him. “Why?”

MacLeish resumed his pacing. “It goes back a long way,” he said presently. “I told you how I started. I ended up as general manager of the Resurrection.” He hurled his dead cigar into the fireplace. “Before Las Cruces Consolidated came into the territory I owned the town too—at least I ran it. Then Consolidated did come in, and with it the smelter, and competition began. There were arguments over boundaries that were difficult of adjustment, because this whole damned country was always loosely surveyed.” His broad mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Fact of the matter is, most of it was in the public domain and good for nothing but mining and goats.”

Shannon discovered a well-stocked liquor cabinet. Without being asked he went over and helped himself to a drink. He wondered what all this had to do—if any—with the alleged murder of Bill Thorelsen. Not that he was really thinking of it as just alleged any more. The seemingly pointless robbery at Wynn Thorelsen’s house was almost definite evidence to the contrary. Also there was the matter of a certain hunk of dynamite thrown at a man named John J. Shannon. He decided that whatever Giles MacLeish chose to tell him, and regardless of the motivation behind the telling, he, Shannon, could not lose by listening.

“Underground,” MacLeish was saying, “opposing crews were continually running into each other. Indiscriminate blasting was wrecking my drifts and stopes, yes, even my main levels.” He puffed furiously at a fresh cigar. “All right, I may as well admit it—I did some of the wrecking too. There wasn’t any good appealing to law. There wasn’t any law except force, and the main idea was to get out the copper.” He paused and stood there on his short thick legs, head thrust slightly forward, like a truculent bull. “Ever hate a man— hate him so bad you could taste it?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“Well, that’s the way I hated, and still hate, Wolfgang Rygaard. To him and his outfit, this was strictly a money proposition. To me it was—well, my life.” He seemed curiously embarrassed under Shannon’s eyes. “An illustration of what I mean is that when the end of the boom came, when the bottom fell out of copper, Consolidated shut down.” He laughed harshly. “Me, I talked my board of directors into letting me go on running. With Consolidated out of the way I even made a little money.”

“That brings us up to date,” Shannon said. “Or almost.” He poured himself another drink, a very small one this time. “A new boom came along and Consolidated opened up again.”

MacLeish nodded. “And they sent Rygaard back.” Big hands knotted into fists. “The clashes haven’t been so open this time. We’ve had a lot of costly and unexplained accidents, and because of the accidents we had a general strike. Because of the strike, and the feeling of the men, I had to import a bodyguard. When the old chief of police got himself shot I put my bodyguard in.”

Shannon carefully lidded his eyes so that his sudden eagerness wouldn’t show. “Whitey Loop?”

“Yes.” MacLeish went around the desk and sat heavily in his big chair. “That wasn’t so smart. I hear every gambling game in town has gone crooked, and Loop is getting a cut.” He sighed. “At that, he was efficient in maintaining order, and while I was mayor I could halfway control him.” He scowled at Shannon. “On the surface I still do, but—”

“Where does Pilsudski fit?”

MacLeish flushed angrily. “Pilsudski is Rygaard’s man. Rygaard ran him against me in that last election—you know, the man of the people.” His voice became savage. “I’m still on the Council, and if I’ve got Whitey Loop I’ve still got the two other members necessary for control. The trouble is—” He stood up violently. “Damn it, I’m laying my cards on the table for you, Shannon. I think Loop has sold out to Rygaard!”

“Why?”

“Because Rygaard doesn’t give a damn what happens to the men, or the town!”

“Or you?” Shannon suggested.

“Or me most of all,” MacLeish admitted sourly. “This hate I’ve been telling you about isn’t all one-sided. Rygaard would like nothing better than to have my operations look so sick that the owners would either close down or sell out.” His voice rose. “You think I like having the men call the Resurrection a death trap? You think I can go on losing money in the middle of a boom and still keep my job?”

Shannon stared out over the valley. “What do you think I can do about it?”

MacLeish pounded the desk in an access of rage. “You’re a detective, aren’t you? Find out if Whitey Loop has thrown in with Rygaard!”

Shannon looked at him. “In order to do that I may have to pretend to throw in with Rygaard myself.”

MacLeish was startled. Indeed something very like fear came into his eyes, and for a moment he looked positively sick. “How will I know that—”

“It’s only a pretense,” Shannon laughed suddenly. “You won’t, pal. That’s just a chance you’ll have to take.”

Chapter 8

POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS in a two-story yellow brick on Second Street, around the corner from Front. The building also housed the Municipal Court, the Council chambers and the office of a deputy district attorney. Shannon went up three stone steps and into a dim square lobby which smelled mustily of wet linoleum and brass polish. A steel grille barred stairs leading downward, apparently to the jail, and there were more stairs leading upward to a lighter and presumably happier region above. Between the two stairs was an alcove with a counter across it, and behind the counter was a cop with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. On the counter itself was a round brass cuspidor, and on Shannon’s entrance the sergeant leaned toward this receptacle and ridded himself of a cud the size of a billiard ball. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” Shannon said. “Is Whitey Loop in?”

The sergeant appeared to be looking for Whitey Loop under the counter, but when he once more straightened all he had was a hunting knife and a half-pound slab of Star. He pointed with the knife. “In there.”

Shannon saw that there was a ground glass door bearing the simple legend: “Chief.” He crossed to the door and opened it. Lew Kronjager was playing solitaire on the scarred oak desk under the front windows. In daylight his face looked even puffier than usual, and the tiny ruptured veins in his nose and cheeks were a faint magenta. “Hello, Lew,” Shannon said. He smiled pleasantly. “I heard you boys wanted to talk to me some more.”

Kronjager laid a king on top of a queen, carefully, as though it were the most important thing in the world. “So you rushed right over,” he said. He looked pointedly at the big clock on the wall. It was four o’clock.

Shannon took off his hat and shaped it between strong brown fingers. “Well, no,” he admitted. “I had some things to do, and besides I figured if it was important you’d have looked me up.”

“I see your girl friend checked out of the Navarro,” Kronjager said.

Shannon admitted that too. He was terrifically pleased that Gus Vogel seemed somehow to have achieved the desired results, though he did not yet know the process. Vogel himself was still registered at the Commercial House. A phone call had elicited this information, though it had not produced Vogel himself. Shannon made a mental note to raise Vogel’s salary. He looked at a closed, solid-paneled door beyond Kronjager. “The sarge outside said Whitey Loop was in.”

“Unh-hunh.” Kronjager got laboriously to his feet and went over to the closed door. “Shannon’s out here, Chief.” Apparently satisfied that he had been heard he started back for the desk, had another thought and headed for the water cooler in the corner. When he was directly opposite Shannon he was struck by still another thought. “You son of a bitch,” he said. He hit Shannon a full-armed blow in the mouth. Shannon sat down. He was still sitting there when Chief of Police Floyd Loop came out of the inner office.

“Well!” Loop said cheerfully, and again, “Well, well!” He was very handsome in blue pin-striped gabardine. His champagne-colored hair glistened in the sun. He looked at Kronjager. “You shouldn’t have done that, Lew. Mr. Shannon is our guest.”

Shannon pushed himself groggily to his feet and stood there swaying slightly. A little blood came out of his mouth and dyed his chin. “If you really want me to get out of town,” he said cheerfully, “you’re using the wrong tactics.” His voice sounded as though he had a mouthful of mush.

Loop’s eyes got a surprised look. “Is that a threat?” Shannon remembered the gun in the waistband of his pants. He pretended to be looking for a handkerchief in his pockets, but when he had accurately gauged the distance between himself and Kronjager he took out the gun, took two swift steps and used the gun to knock Kronjager cold. He was surprised when the gun seemed to leap from his hand of its own accord. Shock numbed his fingers and ran up his arm clear to the shoulder. It was only then that he heard the shot. He looked stupidly at Whitey Loop. The handsome man was just tucking an automatic back into his shoulder clip. “Now,” Loop said pleasantly, “now we can have a comfy little chat.” He went over and kicked Kronjager in the ribs. “Time to wake up, Lew.”

Kronjager did not wake up. He didn’t even groan. Shannon licked his lips. “You’d better keep him off me,” he said quickly. He went over to the water cooler and rinsed his mouth out. A slightly swollen tongue explored the inside of his teeth. There seemed to be none missing.

Loop frowned down at the slowly reviving Kronjager. “You can’t blame Lew for being sore, at that,” he said. “Somebody told him Pilsudski wanted you to find out about the bus and report to nobody but him.”

Shannon spat. “I told you Pilsudski asked if I had any ideas.”

Loop nodded. “But you didn’t tell me it was to be a secret.” The irises of his cat eyes seemed to grow larger. “We don’t like that kind of secrets in Las Cruces, Shannon.”

From the tail of his eye Shannon saw Kronjager furtively stretch out a hand toward the fallen gun. Still watching Loop he managed to step on the hand. “Be nice, Lew.” He bent and scooped up the gun and dropped it into the side pocket of his topcoat. Kronjager sat up. His congested eyes were murderous. “This town isn’t going to be big enough for both us, Irish.”

Shannon looked at him. “Did Whitey Loop tell you to sock me?”

“No.”

Loop began to laugh. “Sure I did, Lew.” He sat down at the desk, being very careful of the creases in his trousers. “We’ve been giving you plenty of rope, Shannon, but like I said, the time has come for us to have a quiet little chat.” He waved a white, well-kept hand. “I had Lew soften you up a little just to give you an idea that we mean business.”

Shannon massaged some of the puffiness out of his lower lip. “What do you want to know?”

Loop’s hands built a church and steeple. His eyes were direct. “You saw Rygaard and MacLeish this morning. What did you talk about?”

Shannon had the distinct impression that he was about to begin walking a tightrope and that he had better walk carefully. Sparring for time he said, “It was Vogel saw Rygaard.”

“All right,” Loop said impatiently. “What did Vogel and Rygaard talk about?”

“About checking the Consolidated’s old records for a man named Johann Smith.”

Loop sighed. “So we’re back to that again.”

Shannon became violently angry. “What else is there?” He waved his hands. “If you don’t believe me, ask Rygaard. Ask Giles MacLeish.”

“And Mrs. Thorelsen?” Loop suggested.

Shannon’s stomach was suddenly as cold as ice. He did not know how Loop had found out about Wynn, but it was obvious that he had. He took a deep breath. “Mrs. Thorelsen is an old friend,” he admitted. “I told her I’d see what I could do.”

Loop’s mouth curled pleasantly. “That’s better.” He looked at Kronjager who had finally got up off the floor. “You see, Lew? Mr. Shannon is going to be quite reasonable after all.”

“I tell you you don’t know him!” Kronjager yelled. He wiped his mouth on the back of a hand. “No matter what he says, this guy has got more curves than the Venus de Milo. Pin him down on Johann Smith and you get Mrs. Thorelsen. Pin him down on her and you’ll get something else.” He seemed in imminent danger of choking to death. “I tell you—”

Loop silenced him with a gesture. His golden cat eyes played on Shannon’s face. “What do you think about Mrs. Thorelsen’s story, Shannon?”

“I think she’s hysterical,” Shannon said. Now that the first plunge was over he thought he saw a way to work even this to his advantage. He spread his hands. “I thought so in the first place, but I owed her something for old times’ sake. So I sent Vogel up.” He scowled. “If you guys had left him alone he’d have wound it up and everybody would have been happy.”

“Yes,” Loop said gently. He looked without affection at Kronjager’s bulk. “That was Lew’s fault. He got a little too impressed with his own importance, didn’t you, Lew?”

Kronjager grunted. “You’ll find out.”

“Yes,” Loop said, “I think I will, Lew.” His voice took on a nice sharp edge. “I think I’m going to find out a lot of things. I think Shannon is going to tell me.” He uncoiled his length with the lithe suppleness of a cat. “How about it, copper?” That last word was a giveaway. If Shannon hadn’t guessed it before, that “copper” and the way Loop said it would have told him that Loop had no more business in a police office than a snake has wings. He wondered where Giles MacLeish had been able to pick up such a man for ordinary bodyguard duty. He said, “I take it that there is something you want me to do.”

“Right,” Loop agreed. He looked at Kronjager. “Go out and buy yourself a drink, Lew.”

Kronjager turned beet red. “I tell you you’re making a mistake, Floyd.” Nevertheless he went toward the door, hesitated, finally opened it and went out. A red sun dyed the office with a last flaming blaze, then dipped out of sight beyond the peaks. Suddenly it was quite cold in the room. Loop waited till the silence was almost insufferable. “Shannon.”

“Unh-hunh?”

“Who threw that dynamite at you?”

“I don’t know.” This was not quite the truth. Not any longer. Shannon thought that he did know, though he did not yet know the reason, nor what he was going to do about it.

“Then find out,” Loop said. His voice cut through the gloom, low but incisive. “I’ve got a good thing in this town. I’m going to have a better.” He pretended to examine his nails. “Play along with me and maybe I’ll cut you in.”

Again something that could have been avarice glowed in Shannon’s eyes. “All right.”

“Of course I’ll be watching you,” Loop said.

Shannon nodded. “That’s okay by me.”

Loop stood up. His face was as smooth and clearcut as a cameo. “I have ways of finding out things, Shannon. I proved that to you in the matter of Mrs. Thorelsen.” He found a cigarette and lit it. “So you can be working on her or on Johann Smith or any damned thing you please.” He blew a perfectly round smoke ring at the ceiling. “Just so I know that you’re really working for me.”

“All right,” Shannon said.

Loop blew another smoke ring. “And God help you if I find you holding out,” he said pleasantly. He snapped the cigarette at the windows. “I’ll make you wish you’d never heard of Las Cruces.”

Chapter 9

THE VALLEY WAS a green bowl, and though the sun had set there was still enough light to see the reflection of towering peaks in the tiny emerald lake at the valley’s lowermost point. Bordering the lake there was a golf course and what looked to be a rather elaborate country club, and there was a scattering of houses, not the barracks-like buildings of the hunkies and Swedes and Cousin Jacks and Irish which made up the town and sprawled over barren hills. These were substantial houses, and pretty houses; houses set apart, as were the people who lived in them, like jewels in a Tiffany window. They were a powerful argument in favor of the white collar.

Carmen MacLeish waved a modishly gloved hand. “Nob Hill,” she said. She wore a dove-gray suit with a touch of scarlet at the throat, and there was a scarlet feather in her gray felt hat, and her bag was scarlet, and the Cadillac convertible, and her mouth. The mouth fascinated Shannon. He kept wanting to crush his own against it. He was glad that Miss Frances McGowan was no longer in town. “Beautiful,” he said.

Green eyes considered him. “Nob Hill?”

He shook his head. “You.”

She made a faintly deprecating gesture, not denying her beauty, but dismissing it as unimportant. She pointed. “The mausoleum is ours.”

Shannon looked across the valley at the mausoleum. It was in truth a somewhat pretentious house for so far-flung an outpost. From a promontory overlooking the lake it rose to a full three stories of cut-stone grandeur, lacking only a moat and drawbridge to make it practically a feudal hall. Shannon remembered that Giles MacLeish had been born in a shack made out of flattened kerosene tins.

Carmen MacLeish seemed able to read his mind at will. “Giles is an eighth Indian,” she said. “Sometimes it comes out in atrocities like that one.”

Shannon admired her. “And you’re Pocahontas?”

“A sixteenth,” she said shortly. The Cadillac was motionless beside the road leading in from the highway. “I might have been Lady St. Cyr if I could have stood him long enough.” She considered that. “Or if he could have stood me.” She turned in the seat and looked at Shannon from beneath long lashes. “I’m not a very nice person, Shannon.” Quite suddenly her gloved hands clenched into fists. “I hate things!”

He put an arm around her. “What things, hon?”

She shivered. “How do I know? Everything. That damned house down there, and this town, and myself—everything.” He could feel her pulling at him, not physically, but like a drug, like a shot of novocaine after the first shock of the needle is over and you start to grow numb. “Why don’t you get out of it?”

“The town?” She lay back against his arm. “I’ve tried that and I always come back.” She half closed her eyes. “Giles needs me.” After a while she said, very low, “What did Giles tell you, Shannon?”

His teeth hardened. “I’m supposed to find out something for him, that’s all.”

“And are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

She stirred a little. “You think I did it, don’t you?”

Shannon was startled. “Did what?”

“Tried to wreck the bus.”

Shannon did not have to pretend to be angry. He really was. He removed his arm from the back of the seat. “If I thought that,” he said levelly, “I’d take your pretty throat in my two hands and let you have it right now.” He drew a deep breath. “That still holds if I ever find out it was you.”

She nodded as if she had quite expected that. “You saw Loop this afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you find out?”

Shannon laughed. “That he is beautiful, darling.” He turned suddenly, burning eyes on her. “Though not as beautiful as you.”

She sighed. “We always come back to that, don’t we?”

“Well, shouldn’t we?”

“I suppose so,” she said. She leaned toward him. “We might as well get the first part over with.” Her lips parted, scarlet, receptive, inviting. Her eyes were wide open.

Shannon kissed her. He could not have done anything else. If she had had a knife in each hand, and intended to bury them both in his back, he could not have done anything else. After a while he pushed her away. “Christ!”

Over her head he saw that another car had come abreast of them and both of the occupants were pretending they hadn’t seen a thing. It was Mr. George St. Cyr who was driving. Beside him sat the lady who was supposed to have left town, Miss Frances McGowan.

Chapter 10

SHANNON LET HIMSELF quietly into the service porch of the Thorelsen bungalow and stood there a moment looking back over the way he had come. It was very dark now. The lights of neighboring houses and, more distantly, those of the country club, were mere pinpricks in the black velvet backdrop which was the night. So far as he could tell he had not been observed, though it was not this that worried him so much as the identity of the observer, if any. Indeed he had come to the conclusion that there was little or no use attempting further secrecy; it was time to start shoving people around on his own account. It was evident that the normal methods of investigation weren’t going to get him anywhere in Las Cruces; there were too many conflicting forces. All he could do—all he could hope to do—was to use these forces to his own advantage, to add a little fuel here and there until something boiled over.

When presently he turned to the inner door, the kitchen door, he saw that it had already opened, and Wynn Thorelsen was a perfumed shadow against the lighter shadows of the kitchen. “Hello, Wynn.” He remembered the perfume. It was, he thought, Black Narcissus. He saw that she had a gun. “You can put it down now, hon.”

“I—I wasn’t sure it was you.” She swayed toward him. “Oh, Shan, it’s good to see you again!”

He laughed briefly. “We Shannons are a tough lot.” He pushed her ahead of him into the kitchen. Light from the hall came in and showed him that she had not finished dressing. He had a brief vision of black lace scanties and firm white flesh before she drew the robe closer about her. Her eyes were in shadow, but her coppery hair and the rest were as he had remembered it. His breathing became uneven. “You’re a beautiful woman, Wynn.”

She shrugged.

“But silly,” he said. He caught her shoulders in his two hands and shook her violently. “God damn it, how do you expect me to work if you’re going to go off half-cocked?”

All the blood drained out of her face, leaving the rouge two ragged splotches of color on alabaster. “What—what did I do?”

“You came snooping around when I was in the hospital, that’s what!” His eyes glowed angrily. “For a while I thought it was Vogel tipped them off, but it wasn’t. It was you.”

She lifted her face then and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. “You think I could stay away when I knew what had happened? When I knew that it was on my account?” When his face did not change she let her shoulders droop. “I’m sorry, Shan.”

“Forget it,” he said roughly. He took off his hat and ran fingers through his thick dark hair. “Look, I’m stymied unless I can find a motive for this kill.” He sensed the sudden tightening of her body. “I’m sorry to have to put it so brutally, hon. It must be this goddam town.”

Some of the color came back into her face. “It’s quite all right.”

“Well, then, how about it? Why should Rygaard—why should anybody—have wanted him dead?” He put an arm out to steady her. “Look, Wynn, if I can’t talk to you in plain English we might as well forget the whole thing.”

She drew in a quivery breath. “I’m sorry.” After a while she said in a perfectly controlled voice, “All I can tell you is that the night it happened, at dinner, Bill was terribly excited about something. He didn’t say anything. I—I just knew it.”

Shannon’s eyes narrowed. “And he went back to the mine after dinner?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “That’s all you know?”

“Yes.”

He began moving around the dim kitchen, picking things up, putting them down again. “I’ve found out one thing that doesn’t make your hunch look so good. Rygaard was supposed to be down at Safford that night, about some trouble with the railroad.”

“So he said.”

Shannon nodded. “Naturally that could be faked, and I’ll look into it, but—” He whirled on her savagely. “But in God’s name why? Why should Rygaard kill a man who was on his side—working for him?”

Quite suddenly she sat down. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, Shan. I haven’t before because it’s—well, it’s almost inconceivable that he—that anybody should think I’d—” Again her face became as white and hard as marble, but her voice was quite steady. “Rygaard is in love with me, Shan.”

Shannon stared. “The hell he is!” He became violently angry. “Well, for Christ’s sake, why didn’t you tell me that before?”

She dabbed at her lips with a tiny black-bordered handkerchief. The robe had fallen open again and he saw that her stockings were black too. He was a sucker for black stockings. He tried to keep his mind on his work. She said, “It was just one of those things. Rygaard was Bill’s employer. It was good business to be nice to him.”

Shannon was incredulous. “And he figured that the only way he could get you was to make you a widow?” He made his laugh purposely harsh. “Not that you aren’t about the most attractive one I’ve seen.” He watched her eyes. “Try again, hon.”

She shivered. “That’s not very kind of you, Shan, reminding me that once I wasn’t so hard to get.”

“I’m not here to be kind,” he said nastily. “At least not in a maudlin sort of way.” He pointed a finger at her. “I thought you wanted me to find out something. I thought you were a good hater.”

It was she who was angry now. “All right, so I’m telling you. I loved my husband. That other was over and done with. Bill knew it and Rygaard found it out later.” She stood up. “No matter what you think, neither Rygaard nor anybody else could have got to first base as long as Bill was alive.” Even white teeth bit at her lower lip. “Figure it out for yourself. The alleged suicide, the blackening of Bill’s reputation, the woman—all could have been intended to make me forget him as soon as possible.”

Shannon’s smile was unpleasant. “So you’ve waited all this time to tell me!”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Have you forgotten that I’ve had a robbery?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything!” Shannon snarled. “That’s the hell of it. Just about the time you think you’ve got your teeth into something solid, something else pops up and makes it look silly.” He tore at his hair. “What’s all this got to do with Giles MacLeish and Whitey Loop and Mueller and a guy named Pilsudski? What are they all afraid of?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Then what were they after—whoever it was that prowled this dump? What did Thorelsen have that somebody wants?”

She didn’t know that either. She bared her wrist and looked at her tiny watch. “I’m dining out, Shan.” Evidently she felt that an explanation for this was necessary, for she said uncertainly, “You told me I should start circulating again.”

“Sure.” He was oppressed with the feeling that there was still something she hadn’t told him. “Who with, Rygaard?”

Her breasts rose and fell unevenly. “With Giles MacLeish.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake!” He began to laugh. “Don’t tell me MacLeish is a prospective suitor too!”

Her gray eyes studied him. “Would you care?” She moved her shoulders in the old provocative way. “In a town like this, women—good-looking women—are scarce. MacLeish is a widower and lonely.”

Shannon’s eyes were suddenly very bright. “Maybe MacLeish did it.”

“Killed Bill?” She was not as startled as she might have been. “It’s possible. Anything is, in this town.”

“And how does our lovely Carmen feel about you?”

“She doesn’t like me,” Wynn admitted. She appeared to consider that. “I suppose that’s perfectly natural. Children aren’t fond of having their parents remarry.”

“Imagine that!” Shannon said in an awed voice. He was intrigued by the picture of Giles MacLeish and Wolfgang Rygaard locked in a struggle over nothing more than this woman before him. He said, “Well, just on the off chance that it isn’t your own sweet self that everybody is after, here’s something we can do to maybe stimulate a little action around here.” He put on his hat. “Give me the keys to the garage.”

She looked at him as though she suspected him of being slightly drunk. “What on earth for?”

“I’m going to find something in Thorelsen’s car,” Shannon said. “Maybe somebody will see me find it.”

“But there isn’t anything!”

“Then I’ll have to take something out to the garage with me.” He snapped his fingers. “Get me some old envelopes, a book, anything. And some brown paper and string.” He looked at her. “I don’t suppose our prowlers thought of the garage?”

“No.”

“Then that’s where we’ll find it,” he decided.

“What?”

He was seized with a sudden fit of silent laughter. “You’re as bad as Gus Vogel.” And then, reminded of her question: “How do I know? Maybe the secret map of a gold mine.”

Chapter 11

IN THE PUBLIC dining room of the country club Shannon ate hugely of top sirloin and shoestring potatoes and hot rolls and cheese. Rather conspicuously displayed for what purported to be something of great value was a bulky Manila envelope tied with red tape. Shannon hoped that someone might see it and think him even a greater fool than he was. He wondered if Giles MacLeish, for instance, thought him a fool; and Wolfgang Rygaard and Whitey Loop. But most of all he wondered about Wynn Thorelsen. Wynn’s most recent disclosures, and her new manner, worried him no end. He could not make up his mind about her.

The dining room was only moderately well filled, and such early diners as were there were mostly men. Through a wide arch at the far end of the room a glassed-in terrace had a view of the lake, and beyond a narrower arch at the right was the bar, done in black oak and brass-studded red leather. From this issued the sound of much male talk and laughter, and, subdued and quavery, the music of a Novachord. The haunting melody of Harry Owens’ “Sweet Leilani” momentarily did something to Shannon’s throat and he wished he were a better man. He wished he had not kissed Carmen MacLeish’s full red mouth; he wished that if he had had to do it he could have done it other than under the eyes of Fran McGowan. He scowled at his Mexican waiter. “This coffee is terrible.”

“Ees too bad, señor.” He was a very polite waiter, “I weel to make heem more better.” He went away.

A man came through the arch from Ye Olde English Taproom and stood there a moment surveying the scattered diners. He was of medium height, and slender, and quietly well dressed in gray. Thinning sandy hair was parted neatly in the center, and beneath a slightly acquisitive nose was a neatly trimmed mustache. His mouth had the positive quality of a steel trap. Having tabulated each and every other person in the room to his complete satisfaction his eyes finally came to rest on Shannon. Directly, yet without hurry, he crossed to Shannon’s table. You had the impression that everything he did was direct and without hurry, and so very efficient that it scared you. He placed the fingers of both hands on the edge of the table, like the Chairman of the Board about to address his directors. “You’re Shannon,” he stated.

Shannon could not deny this. He nodded. “Unh-hunh.”

“I’m Rygaard.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Neither offered to shake hands. Shannon decided that Gus Vogel had not exaggerated the gimlet-like quality of Wolfgang Rygaard’s eyes. He thought that probably Rygaard knew him, Shannon, better than he did himself. His stomach was afflicted with a mild return of the electric shocks occasioned by the explosion of last night. He pushed out a chair. “Sit down.”

“Thank you.” Rygaard accepted the chair. When the Mexican waiter returned with fresh coffee, Rygaard decided that he too would have a cup. Meticulously he clipped the end from a thin dappled cigar, meticulously lit it. A lifted eyebrow asked Shannon if he would like a cigar. Shannon chose a cigarette instead. The coffee was better. Presently Rygaard said, “I suggested to your Mr. Vogel that I might have employment in your line.”

“Who hasn’t?” Shannon muttered. He pointed a finger. “Look, anybody else in this town wants to hire me has got to tell me the score.” Twin streams of angry smoke issued from his nostrils. He looked rather like an irate fire horse on a wintry morning call. “I’m getting damned sick of all this fiddle-faddle.” He banged his coffee cup down. “You want to hire a private eye, say so, and just leave out all the innuendoes. Tell me what you want done in plain black and white and I’ll answer you yes or no.”

Mr. Rygaard was apparently unaffected by this outburst. “Put in black and white,” he said gently, “your first job would be to kill Whitey Loop.”

Shannon almost choked on a lungful of smoke. “Well, that’s black-and-white enough for anybody, isn’t it?”

Mr. Rygaard nodded gravely. “Yes.”

Shannon appeared to consider the proposition. It needed consideration. Not that he intended to accommodate Mr. Rygaard, though he would not have minded killing Whitey Loop on his own account. The point was, did Rygaard really want Loop knocked off, or was this a rather clumsy attempt to test Shannon’s reaction to the suggestion? Was it not possible, indeed, that Whitey Loop had himself instigated this approach? If you believed Giles MacLeish, Whitey might easily have switched his allegiance and thrown in with Rygaard. And if you did not believe Giles MacLeish, then where were you? So far as his own personal affairs were concerned, Shannon had the uncomfortable feeling that he could stand in the middle of Front Street with his eyes closed and spray Las Cruces with a hail of lead and be sure of hitting nobody but enemies. He said, almost regretfully, “The answer is no.”

“Not even for ten thousand dollars?”

Shannon shook his head. “Not for a hundred grand.”

Rygaard became deeply interested in the ash accumulating on the end of his cigar. “Afraid?”

“My gun isn’t for hire,” Shannon said shortly.

“But suppose he were a murderer,” the calm voice persisted.

“I still wouldn’t be interested,” Shannon said. “Not without due process of law.” This last, though a trifle didactic, made him feel virtuous as hell. After a while curiosity prompted him to ask, “Whose murder?”

Rygaard shrugged. “I could name you half a dozen.” Eyes with all the warmth of ball bearings probed Shannon’s face. “But specifically, shall we say Thorelsen’s?”

Shannon’s stomach quivered. It was not that everybody in town seemed to know what he was doing even better than he did; it was Wolfgang Rygaard’s seeming capacity for utter quiet. There was a hint of ruthlessness in it that was infinitely more frightening than Whitey Loop’s dexterity with a gun. Shannon was scared. Even to himself he admitted that he was scared. He tried to mask this with a laugh that was as false as the theory that only the good die young. “What makes you think that wasn’t suicide?”

“I knew Thorelsen,” Rygaard said.

Shannon was reminded that these were almost the exact words that Wynn had used. He crushed out his cigarette, carefully, as though it were the most important thing in the world.

“A lot of good that is.” It occurred to him that if he were Mr. Rygaard, and in love with Wynn Thorelsen, and suspected by her of complicity in the murder of her husband, it would be the natural thing to try to saddle the job on someone else. He had a little difficulty imagining Wolfgang Rygaard in love with anybody. The guy was as cold as ice. He resorted to truth in all its purity. “All right, I’ll admit Mrs. Thorelsen asked me to look into it.” He spread his hands. “Personally I think she’s about ninety per cent hysterical.”

Rygaard smiled. At least it could be construed as a smile. “Do I strike you as being hysterical too?”

“Well, no,” Shannon conceded. “Just the same,” he argued, “you’ve got to give me more than a hunch to get me excited.” He drank thirstily of his coffee. “What was the motive?” He enlarged on that. “On the cops they train you to look for the motive first. I used to be a cop.”

“I know,” Rygaard said. He gave you the impression that he did, too. You felt that he had investigated your dossier clear back to Aunt Minnie. “For a motive I give you the same one responsible for all the other attacks on Las Cruces Consolidated. MacLeish will never be satisfied till he owns Las Cruces, lock, stock and barrel.”

Shannon lidded his eyes. “I understand he damned near does.”

“But only through Loop,” Rygaard said. He appeared to make up his mind about something. “I ran a man named Pilsudski against him in the last election. To be absolutely fair I allowed MacLeish to retain a position on the Council.” He laid his cigar down. “After all, the town depends on, and revolves around, the two mines and the smelter. Pilsudski appointed me. We agreed on two merchants who presumably were unbiased.”

Shannon nodded. So far, the stories tallied.

“It presently developed,” Rygaard went on, “that they were not unbiased.” He frowned. “They couldn’t be.” He opened and closed a fist. “Whitey Loop simply used the old racket tactics. The merchants each had a couple of accidents. After that they voted exactly the way they were told.” His bleak eyes rested intently on the Manila envelope with all the red tape. “You see?”

“I see why you want Loop knocked off,” Shannon admitted. He watched Rygaard light a fresh cigar. “That shouldn’t be hard to arrange in this town.”

“I tried arranging it,” Rygaard said. He said it as calmly, as dispassionately as though confessing sponsoring a chain letter. “Twice.”

Shannon stared. “What happened?”

Rygaard permitted himself a faint gesture of annoyance.

“Loop is still alive, isn’t he?” He sighed. “The others aren’t.”

Shannon’s laugh was pure bravado. “And you’re electing me for the third try?” He shook his head. “Unh-unh. No, thanks.”

Rygaard stood up. “Then I’m afraid I shall have to count you among my enemies, Mr. Shannon.” Again he sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Shannon was sorry too. He felt that if it were possible for him to select his adversaries in whatever game it was that they all were playing, he most certainly would not choose Mr. Wolfgang Rygaard. He licked his lips. “Now wait a minute, let’s get this straight. You and MacLeish hate each other’s guts. Each of you wants control of the town and presumably the territory. Why?”

Under the close-clipped mustache Rygaard’s mouth made an uncompromising line. “It is my business to get copper out of the Consolidated. Anything that interferes with that program becomes my business too.” He shrugged. “Think it over Mr. Shannon.” He turned abruptly and disappeared through the arch into the bar. When he again appeared he had his hat and topcoat on, and there were two men behind him. The two men were as typical of movie bodyguards as you can find anywhere outside of Hollywood. One of them, a gorilla with buck teeth and the general aspect of Mortimer Snerd, stared briefly across the dining room at Shannon. You had the feeling that he was fixing Shannon’s face indelibly on his memory. The three men passed from sight.

Shannon waved violently for his waiter. “Bring me a Scotch and soda. Bring me a bottle!”

“Si, señor.” The man bowed himself away.

It was perhaps five minutes after he had returned, and Shannon was already well into his third drink when Miss Frances McGowan came through the main entrance. She appeared to have brought with her a considerable portion of her somewhat extensive wardrobe. She had on an ermine evening cape, and beneath that was a pale green satin creation which must have cost her, even with the discount, something like two hundred dollars. A faultlessly dinner-jacketed Whitey Loop was her escort. They made a handsome couple. They made, in fact, a beautiful couple. Shannon was furious. Maliciously conscious of this, Miss McGowan approached with the undulant grace of Gypsy Rose Lee. “Dar-ling!”

Shannon glared at her. “Off with the old, on with the new.” As if by accident he draped his napkin over the Manila envelope. “Where’s St. Cyr?”

“St. Cyr?” Frances pretended to have a little difficulty remembering just who St. Cyr was. “Oh, him!” Gloved fingertips tapped her lips, conveying the impression that St. Cyr had only bored her. “The last I saw of him he was being carried into a Turkish bath. Into Abdullah’s Turkish Baths.” She tucked a hand intimately beneath Whitey Loop’s arm. “Chief Loop is helping me with a story.”

Shannon was outraged. “I thought that was St. Cyr.”

She shook her head. “This is a different story.” She giggled. “Chief Loop used to be a gangster. Isn’t that cute?”

Loop himself did not look particularly cute. He looked as though he would like to wring Fran’s neck, or Shannon’s, or somebody’s. He said, “What did Rygaard want of you?”

“He wanted me to kill you,” Shannon said. He derived a certain amount of satisfaction from thus being able to tell the unvarnished truth. If Loop himself had put Rygaard up to making the suggestion, this ought to prove to him, Loop, that Shannon was nothing if not honest. And if it were Rygaard’s own idea, there was still no harm done. Loop probably knew it anyway, and the same thing applied. “He thinks you’re a bad influence on the town.”

“A lot he cares about the town,” Loop sneered. He patted his nice golden hair as a woman would have done. The gun in his shoulder clip hardly showed at all. “I take it that you refused him?”

“Yes.”

Loop smiled then. “That was smart, Shannon. Keep on being smart and you and I’ll get along just fine.”

Frances had been silent for too long. “Isn’t this exciting? I mean, Las Cruces and all?” She shivered deliciously. “I think I’ll write a book about it.”

Shannon’s eyes were harried. “I thought you had left town.”

“Oh, no.” She considered that. “Well, I did think about it, but when I discovered this darling country club and all the”—her hand caressed Loop’s sleeve—“the nice people—” She broke off to stare across the now crowded dining room to where Giles MacLeish and Wynn Thorelsen were just being seated. “Who is that?”

“Some of our best people,” Shannon said. He had the feeling that Fran McGowan knew perfectly well who they were. He thought he detected a curiously predatory look in Whitey Loop’s eyes as they rested on the couple. He wondered if maybe Loop wasn’t interested in Wynn too. He scowled at Frances. “What did you do with Vogel?”

“Gussie?” She was startled. “Goodness, I forgot all about Gussie!”

Loop’s mouth drooped. “He’s still at the Commercial House.”

“That’s fine,” Shannon snarled. “That’s just dandy!” He looked at Miss McGowan. “And you?”

A wave of her hand described the club and its environs. “Oh, I’m stopping here.” Her brown eyes mocked him. “That lush St. Cyr got me a visitor’s card.”

Shannon felt like the little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Now look, if you’re trying to punish me—”

Fran’s eyes widened. “For what?” She gave an expert performance of mentally exploring the past. “Oh, you mean that!” Her laugh was devoid of rancor. “Goodness, Shan, I’m not in the least old-fashioned. Besides, she is quite lovely.”

Loop became actively interested. “Who?”

“The Virgin Mary!” Shannon yelled. He stood up violently, thrust the table away from him, found a crumpled five in his pocket and hurled it on top of his dinner check. “The hell with both of you!” He caught up his coat and hat and was halfway to the door before he remembered the Manila envelope. Whitey Loop was coming toward him, holding it out. “I think you forgot this.”

Shannon snatched it. “Thanks!”

“Don’t mention it,” Loop said politely. His pleasantly musical laugh followed Shannon across the room. “I’ll be seeing you around, shamus.”

Shannon’s ears were still burning when he debouched into the night and looked around for a cab. A pudgy shadow detached itself from some shrubbery beside the drive. “Is that you, John J.?”

Shannon cursed. “Who else?”

Vogel was complacent. “Well, I done like you said, John J. I got Miss McGowan out of town.”

Shannon was speechless.

“It was easy,” Vogel continued. “Just like shooting fish.” For one long moment nothing happened. Nothing at all. Then, like the rush of water from the newly opened spillway of a dam, a veritable torrent of obscenity descended on Vogel’s head.

Chapter 12

SHANNON AND VOGEL WENT down marble steps past a sign which labeled them the entrance to Abdullah’s Turkish Baths. They were greeted by a small man with fierce walrus mustaches. The top of his head was as bald as an egg. “There is something, gentlemens?” His eyes were as black and beady as shoe buttons.

Elsewhere in the building there was the rumble and crash of bowling alleys. Each time a ball hit the pins the walls picked up the echoes and you had the feeling that almost any minute now the walls were going to fall down. The noise was terrific.

“We want to see George St. Cyr,” Shannon said.

The smell of steam and soap and liniment came out of swing half-doors behind the small man. Beady eyes appraised Gus Vogel, returned to Shannon. “I do not think he is here.”

“Sure he is,” Shannon said. “A mutual friend told me she brought him here.”

The eyes brightened perceptibly. “Ah, the so beautiful young lady?”

“There is some doubt about the noun,” Shannon said. “About the rest I won’t argue.” He jerked a thumb at the swing doors. “Sober?”

At this moment St. Cyr himself appeared. At least the upper-and lowermost portions of him appeared. The halfdoors modestly screened his middle. It was obvious that he was stark naked. “Abdullah,” he shouted, “where’s that bottle?” He pretended not to see Shannon and Vogel. His dead-white hair was disheveled.

Shannon glared at him. “A fine attorney I’ve got.” He looked at Abdullah. “All right, go ahead and get him his bottle, but when you get it give it to me, not him.”

Vogel was interestedly looking at Abdullah’s murals. Catching Shannon’s eyes on him he blushed furiously. “You ought to be ashamed,” he told Abdullah.

“Is not me,” Abdullah defended himself. “Is here when I am buy the place.” He went out and up the marble steps.

Shannon returned his attention to the swing doors. St. Cyr had vanished. Cursing a little, for it seemed to him that of all men he was tried most sorely, Shannon pushed through the doors and went along a steamy tile passage between cubicles just big enough for a stool and a cot. Fortunately there were no doors on the cubicles and in the fifth one on the right he found St. Cyr. That gentleman was in the act of knotting his cravat, though he had not yet donned his pants. Bony shanks protruded from beneath the longest-tailed shirt Shannon had ever seen. He decided it must have been made in Bond Street. He thought he detected a certain coldness in St. Cyr’s reception. “All right, so I kissed your ex-wife. You were out with my girl, weren’t you? What have you got to be sore about?”

“Not sore,” St. Cyr stated. “Not sore at all.” He climbed into his pants. “Thirsty.” Brushing his hair he regarded his reflection closely. “Look terrible,” he decided. “Look awful, what?”

“Like hell,” Shannon agreed.

An impromptu quartette in the steam room began singing a song about Las Vegas Nights. Upstairs in the bowling alley at least five guys got strikes all at once. The building shook. “Let’s get out of here,” Shannon said. “I’ve had a hard day.” He and St. Cyr went out to the small lobby, where they found Abdullah and Gus Vogel in a heated discussion over what constituted art and what just plain vulgarity. Shannon took the bottle away from Abdullah, opened it, got a glass from the water cooler and poured it exactly half full. He gave it to St. Cyr. “That’s all, Counselor. That’s every goddam drop till you and I have had a little talk.” He watched St. Cyr drain the glass, watched a little color come into the bony cheeks. “Where’s your overcoat?”

St. Cyr appeared slightly embarrassed. “I don’t remember.”

“You hocked it,” Shannon said.

“Well, yes, now that you mention it I believe I did.”

“A fine thing.” Shannon took off his own. “Here.”

St. Cyr looked at him. “I’m beginning to understand what Miss McGowan meant.”

It was Shannon’s turn to be embarrassed. “If Miss McGowan said anything good about me it’s a lie.” He pushed St. Cyr ahead of him toward the stairs. “Come on, let’s get a bite to eat.”

In the Elite Cafe across the street he watched St. Cyr and Vogel divide a double porterhouse. He himself had coffee. The booth had curtains on it, but he did not bother to close them. At the counter he saw Lew Kronjager wolfing a platter of ham and eggs, and there were half a dozen sloppy-looking cops in uniform. The rest of the patrons were obviously from the mines or smelter. Except for the waitresses there were no women. A row of slot machines against the far wall reminded Shannon of kept women, accepting all, giving little. After a while he leaned across the table and addressed St. Cyr. “Is there any law in this country besides Whitey Loop?”

“Sheriff,” St. Cyr said. “Prosecutor.”

“Honest?”

St. Cyr regarded him. “What is honesty?”

“The legal mind at work,” Shannon sneered. He gnawed at his knuckles. “I didn’t ask you for a dissertation on ethics. I asked you a simple question.”

“Political honesty,” St. Cyr announced, “is the capacity to evaluate your own worth to the community and not steal more than that.”

“That’s cynical,” Vogel said.

Shannon cursed him. “Did you ever figure out how big a stork it would take to carry an eight-pound baby?” He pointed a finger at St. Cyr’s nose. “Look, I want to know if there’s anybody in this lousy county I can take some evidence to and get a fair roll of the dice.” He scowled. “I need protection.” Vogel almost choked on a piece of steak.

“Well, I do,” Shannon insisted. With the handle of a knife he drew patterns on the tablecloth. “Our local police department apparently hasn’t been able to find out who used a rifle on the bus, or who tossed that stick of dynamite through my window.” His eyes looked sleepy. “Maybe they don’t want to find out.”

St. Cyr sat up a little straighter. “Am I to understand that you know who did those things?”

“Not the bus,” Shannon said. “Not yet.” He laid the knife down and looked across the room at the back of Kronjager’s neck. “The dynamite, I think so.” He frowned. “Trouble is, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what I’m working on.”

St. Cyr moistened his lips. He put out a hand for the bottle at Shannon’s elbow, thought better of it. “I take it that Johann Smith is something of a myth?”

“A figment of Vogel’s imagination,” Shannon admitted.

Vogel denied this. “Now look, John J., it wasn’t me that—”

“Shut up,” Shannon said irritably. He stared intently at St. Cyr. “Funny you wouldn’t know why I’m here. Everybody else seems to.” He picked up the knife again. “Mrs. Thorelsen asked me to look into her husband’s murder.”

“Suicide,” St. Cyr said.

Shannon shook his head. “Murder.”

“Proof?”

“I can get it,” Shannon said. “All I want to be sure of is that I’m not wasting my time—that it will be used.”

St. Cyr stood up. “Let’s go over to Corona,” he said.

Chapter 13

THE COUNTY SEAT TURNED out to be a mining town too. It was cleaner than Las Cruces, possibly because it had had more room to expand. In the twelve miles separating the two, the cleft in the mountains had broadened considerably and Corona occupied a sort of level plateau from which the transcontinental highway dived steeply on its way down to Stafford and, ultimately, El Paso. The railroad came in from the main line at Bowie. There was a courthouse in the square, and plenty of signs of night life, though this last seemed not to be as hectic as that in Las Cruces. In the yards adjoining the station a train was being made up. The flats were loaded with copper pigs from the smelters. The two or three cops that Shannon saw looked decently conscious of their uniforms. He breathed a little sigh of relief.

Gus Vogel, driving the rented car as carefully as though it were his own, occasionally asked directions of George St. Cyr. St. Cyr himself, having failed to wheedle another drink out of Shannon, sat wedged between the two, a white-haired martyr touched with dignity. The hock shop had been induced to part with his overcoat. His bony, tweed-clad knees rubbed the dashboard. After a while he said, “Turn left here,” and they entered a tree-lined street of moderately pretentious houses. Before some of the houses there were hitching posts, and on the lawn of one of them was an iron deer. The deer had a startled look, as though the newly risen moon had caught him unawares.

Vogel brought the car to a halt beside a curb paralleling an iron picket fence in which there were wrought-iron gates of an almost unbelievable magnificence. Shannon got out, permitting St. Cyr to do likewise. “No drinks, mind you.”

St. Cyr nodded. “Right.”

“And no names until you are sure.”

“Right.” St. Cyr went through the iron gates and up a gravel drive. More than ever he reminded Shannon of a dignified crane. Shannon got back into the car. “I may want you to go down to Safford,” he informed Vogel presently.

Vogel was indignant. “Why?”

“Check up on Rygaard,” Shannon said. He was very careful to make this sound important, which indeed it could very well be. He wished he could think of some method as efficacious to rid himself of that other incubus, Miss Frances McGowan. “Rygaard is supposed to have been in Safford the night Thorelsen was killed. Find out.”

Vogel pursed his small mouth. “You think he did it?”

“How do I know?” Shannon demanded. After a time he said, grudgingly, “I’ve got a motive of sorts. If Wynn Thorelsen isn’t lying.”

Vogel was startled. “You think she is?”

“Women are unpredictable,” Shannon announced sententiously. He brooded on this. His dark face was sullen. “Especially widows who carry their mourning as far as black lace panties.”

Vogel’s eyes reproved him. “You’re nothing but a lecher, that’s what you are.” He made disapproving sounds. “What would Miss McGowan think?”

Shannon refused to be worried over what Fran would think. “What would she think if she knew you’d been looking at Abdullah’s murals?” His shoulders shook at another thought. “What would Minna think?” Minna was Vogel’s wife.

Vogel shuddered. “Now look, John J.—”

“You get funny with me and I’ll tell her,” Shannon promised him. He saw St. Cyr come out of the tall brick house. He got out of the car and stood there, waiting. St. Cyr’s brogues made rasping sounds on the gravel drive. Otherwise the street was very quiet. A car came by, a closed car without lights, and for just a moment Shannon stiffened. The car did not pause. Shannon relaxed.

St. Cyr was still being aloof and dignified. “He is interested. I couldn’t get him to admit more than that.”

“All right,” Shannon said, “let’s go up.” The three of them went up the drive and were ushered by a colored maid into a big room with a fireplace.

A man who looked like Abraham Lincoln rose from behind a carved mahogany desk so old it was black. There was a horsehair sofa before the fire, and over the mantel was an oval oil portrait of a woman who also looked like Abraham Lincoln.

St. Cyr performed the introductions. “Mr. Shannon, Mr. Vogel—Prosecutor Dawes.”

They shook hands all around. There were calluses on the district attorney’s, presumably from splitting his own cord-wood. Like the chromo on the wall and the horsehair sofa the calluses could be part of an act. Shannon took off his hat and laid it on the desk. “I don’t know how much my attorney has told you, but I understand you’re running for re-election presently. I’ve got or can get information which can kill you or make the election a sure thing. If I went to the papers, or your opponent, it would probably result in your political death.” He assumed a righteous look. “I’ve come to you instead.”

Dawes’ voice was resonant. “Threats, Mr. Shannon?”

Shannon scowled. “All I want is an opportunity to work.”

“At what?”

“St. Cyr told you,” Shannon said. “I came up here to investigate a murder that was passed off as suicide. There have been two attempts on my life. Before that, Mr. Vogel here was beaten up and intimidated in an attempt to get him to leave Las Cruces. My client has had a robbery. No arrests have been made in any of these affairs.” He bent angry eyes on the Lincolnesque face beyond the desk. “What does that suggest to you?”

A large calloused hand massaged a large ugly chin. Dawes’ eyes were a little angry too. “Las Cruces is an incorporated city, Mr. Shannon.”

“In your county.”

The prosecutor sighed a little. “My office prosecutes the cases that are brought to it, on the evidence adduced.” He moved his spare shoulders impatiently. “Granted that Las Cruces is a sore spot, that trouble over there inevitably spreads to the whole county—” He broke off to stare without affection at St. Cyr. “Mr. Shannon is from a big city, Counsellor. Perhaps he doesn’t understand that some of us do not have the money to maintain a separate staff of investigators.”

St. Cyr said nothing whatever to this. Vogel was interestingly examining a crocheted motto on the wall which said that Christ was the head of this house and the honored guest at every meal. There was a puzzled expression on Vogel’s moon face. Shannon said, “I’m offering you—for free—a staff of investigators that you couldn’t buy, even if you had the money.”

“Why?”

Shannon’s mouth became unpleasant. “Because the case I am working on seems to be all tangled up with about a dozen other cases. If I lift even one little corner I’m liable to smear the whole works.” He thrust his hands deep into his pants pockets and took to pacing the room. His gun and St. Cyr’s bottle, in the pockets of his topcoat, banged his bottom as he walked. “There are too many people afraid of too many things to like that.”

Dawes built a church and steeple of his knobby brown fingers. “I have the feeling, Mr. Shannon, that you’d like to do just that—rip Las Cruces wide open.”

“What do you care?” Shannon’s eyes smoldered. “Played right, it might even make you governor.” He laughed. “Played wrong, you might have to go back to work for a living.”

“Yes,” Dawes said. A little laugh rumbled in his own throat. “There is always that, isn’t there?” He thrust his chair back and put his hands on his knees, Lincoln posing for a portrait. “Just what do you want, Mr. Shannon?”

“Protection. If I land in jail, which I probably will, I want my attorney to be able to get me out. If I produce criminal evidence I want it used. If I want to investigate certain parties I’ll need authority.” He grinned crookedly. “I used to be a cop, Mr. Dawes. Sometimes I miss that badge like nobody’s business.”

“Meaning you want one from me?”

“It would help,” Shannon confessed.

Dawes shook his head. “No.”

If he were disappointed Shannon didn’t let it show. “All right, I can get along without it.”

The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Now we come to the matter of evidence. If you have any why didn’t you take it to Lundy, my Las Cruces deputy?”

Shannon looked at Vogel. “Tell him, Dutch.”

Vogel screwed his face into a semblance of sorrow. “I hate to say this, but I’m afraid your—now—Mr. Lundy ain’t quite honest.” He coughed apologetically. “I seen as crooked a cop as ever lived—a guy by the name of Lew Kronjager—pass him a hatful of nice new currency.” He sighed. “In the back room of a cigar store on Front Street.”

Dawes let out a yelp at that. “God Almighty!”

“That’s what I meant,” Shannon nodded. “That’s the kind of thing that would kill you if I took it to the wrong people.” He was very careful not to tighten the screws too hard. “And it’s the kind of thing that will make you—if you hit ’em first.” He waited while the new Lincoln wrestled with the problem.

“I could fire Lundy,” Dawes said, half to himself. He looked from beneath beetling brows at St. Cyr. “How would you like to be a deputy prosecutor?”

“He wouldn’t like it,” Shannon said. “He’d probably get himself shot the first day in office.”

Dawes made up his mind. “This thing is dynamite, Mr. Shannon. You’ll have to watch your step.” He coughed. “Any illegal acts, if condoned by me, would be as fatal as—”

“Proving your incompetency?” Shannon suggested.

The prosecutor stood. “I think the expression was ‘a fair roll of the dice’?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“Then that’s all I can guarantee you, Mr. Shannon.”

Chapter 14

FROM THE DOORWAY of a two-story frame rooming house at the foot of the hill below Las Cruces Consolidated Shannon accosted the first man who came down off the night shift. “Card, buddie?” He flipped his topcoat lapel, exposing a shiny round badge. He had borrowed the badge from a truck driver. The stamped legend was too small for his victim to read. “Union inspector.”

The man had a strong Welsh accent. “Yuss.” He produced the card. It said he was a member in good standing of the Amalgamated Mine Workers and that his dues were paid up until December 31st.

“By the way,” Shannon said, “we’re thinking of lowering the dues. Let’s see, how much are you paying now?”

Cousin Jack saw nothing extraordinary in a union inspector not knowing how much a driller was assessed. He gave Shannon the information readily. Shannon dismissed him with a curt nod. “Thanks, Jack.” At random he chose another man from the mob, and still another, and went through the same procedure. After about fifteen minutes of this he had found out that not all muckers paid the same dues. Notably the ones who paid more were Hunkies. Indeed the last two he questioned turned out to be fellow passengers on the bus the night before. They did not recognize Shannon. He left his doorway and went over to Front Street and the nearest telephone booth, where he put in a call for Mamie Costello in Los Angeles. When her voice answered, sleepily indignant, he said, “This is Abe Klosterholz, hon. Anybody been inquiring about me?”

Mamie was quick on the uptake. “Unh-hunh. Also about poor Mrs. Smith.”

Shannon smiled. “You’re sweet, hon. You didn’t let ’em talk to her, I suppose?”

Mamie borrowed some of his own vocabulary. “How could I?” After a moment she said, “I couldn’t give out that kind of information.” Another pause, then: “Oh, Shan, are you all right?”

“You mean Abe, don’t you?” He didn’t think the operator was listening, but in this town you could never tell. He put his mouth down very close to the transmitter and spoke rapidly, in a jargon which nobody but Mamie could have understood. “Tomorrow is time enough, hon. I’ll call you then.”

“All right.”

He smiled again. “Love me?”

“No.”

“You’ll be sorry.”

“Is that wench McGowan up there with you?”

“We Klosterholzes never give out that kind of information,” he said. He disconnected. He discovered that he felt swell. He went out of the booth and bought himself a cigar and the latest edition of the Clarion. They were still running his ad for the missing Johann Smith. He considered killing this to reduce expenses, but decided not to be cheap. Besides, it gave him a sort of background, even if nobody did believe it. He was rather sorry for Wolfgang Rygaard and Whitey Loop, who had thought to catch Mamie Costello off guard by inquiring for the non-existent wife of a non-existent Johann Smith. He went back to the phone booth and looked up a lady by the name of Mrs. Rose Machado. He did not call her. Instead, he asked the cigar clerk the way to the Avenida Juan Batista, was leeringly directed there and departed.

It turned out to be a dead-end street two blocks long and butting up against the mountain. John the Baptist, could he have seen it, would have deplored the use of his name. Though the houses were better it reminded Shannon of D Street in San Bernardino. The houses all had one thing in common, large illuminated numbers. It was no trouble at all to locate 513. Shannon did not go in immediately. He joined the other furtive male shadows, pausing occasionally as though weighing various honeyed enticements whispered to him from beyond shuttered windows. But presently, satisfied that he was reasonably anonymous, he again approached the house with the red shutters; shutters which were whisperless and therefore advertised more exclusive wares within. A maid in prim white apron and bandeau admitted him and took his coat. She was Mexican. She was not a day over sixteen. “Ees cold out, Senor?” She had swell teeth.

Shannon admitted that it was cold. He said, casually, “Is Rose in?”

The girl looked at him. “You not been here before?” She waved toward a room at the back of the small foyer. “Ees Rose, singing.”

Shannon followed the wave and the sound of the voice. It was a good voice. Though more musical it had in it the same thing that Marlene Dietrich’s has. It was singing “Tonight We Love.” A piano was the only accompaniment. Whoever was playing it was good too.

He came into a room that obviously had once been several rooms. Ranged along the irregular walls were tables with red-checkered cloths and there was a small bar presided over by a Chinese, pigtail still intact. At each of the tables was a girl, and at some of them there was a man too. Stairs without ornamentation climbed to some remote region above, and beneath the stairs was a three-piece string orchestra, silent now, intent as was everyone else on the woman at the piano. Shannon stood with his back to the door, breathing gently, lest even so slight a sound might disturb her. She was not beautiful. Indeed a scar along one cheek made her almost ugly. But her voice, and the way she held her head, made her magnificent. She was so magnificent that again doubt assailed him; doubt of Wynn Thorelsen and her so-called intuition. Thorelsen must have been a man of stone if this woman who called herself Rose Machado couldn’t have influenced him. Shannon decided that he, Shannon, could be influenced. In fact he was, just listening to her. He let his pent-up breath out carefully with the closing word of the song. He discovered that he felt slightly giddy, like a man who has smoked marihuana for the first time.

The applause was genuine. It could not, even in a Las Cruces brothel, be otherwise. Rose Machado accepted it intelligently—she knew she was good—but without condescension either. She touched a red crepe handkerchief to her cheek, the one with the scar on it, and crossed the room to where Shannon stood. “You didn’t clap,” she said.

“No.”

Sloe-black eyes studied him.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t move.”

Her full red mouth curved downward, discounting that. The mouth reminded him, a little, of Carmen MacLeish’s. He put the thought from him. She said, “I don’t remember seeing you around.”

“No.”

The string orchestra was playing now. A few couples moved out onto the tiny dance floor. The Chinese bartender became very busy indeed. The woman’s fingers made a rope of the red crepe handkerchief. “Drink?”

“I don’t mind,” Shannon said. They moved together along the narrow aisle bordering the dance floor. She leaned with her back to the bar and this time her eyes bracketed Shannon with some of the single girls at the tables. “Anything else you want?”

“Not after seeing you,” Shannon said. He had a momentary feeling of impotence, of an inability to cope with this woman’s intelligence. Somehow he had pictured her quite differently; you get to thinking of certain professions as holding only one kind of people. And then, when you run across the exception, the odd one, it throws you. He paid for the drinks, watched her toss hers down her throat, as a man does, quickly, so you don’t have to smell it. He said, “I want to talk to you.”

A small frown drew her brows together. “There is no profit in talk, amigo.”

“In my kind there is,” Shannon said. The sound of dancing feet was sandpapering his nerves a little thin. He looked at the stairs. “Isn’t there some place we could go where it’s quieter?”

“For talk?”

He smiled into her eyes. “For talk.”

“About what, amigo?”

“About a lot of money,” he said. “About maybe ten thousand dollars.”

She moved her shoulders. They were bare and golden warm above the swell of her breasts. Her gown was red crepe, like the handkerchief. Below the scar on her cheek a little pulse quivered beneath the skin. “All right,” she said. She turned and spoke rapidly in Mexican to the Chinese bartender. Shannon followed her up the stairs. Oddly enough she wore no perfume.

In the corridor above there was a series of closed doors. Faint sounds issued from behind some of them, but it was not noisy. The woman opened one at the far end, paused to let Shannon pass her, then came in and closed it quietly behind her. He saw that here too a partition had been taken out, and that the room was a woman’s room, comfortable without ostentation. There was none of the usual claptrap about, no leering French dolls, no batik cushions. Gas logs burned low in a plain white fireplace between French doors which apparently gave on a covered balcony. Presently there was the sound of feet on the balcony, and then the feet descended wooden stairs to the street and a door somewhere near at hand opened and closed and there was silence. The woman sat on the end of a chaise and looked at the fire. “I’m listening.”

Shannon laughed. “I could go for you in a big way, Machado.” She looked up at him. “I just run the place,” she said. She appeared to consider that. “Besides, you want to talk.”

“About money,” he nodded. He took out his billfold, selected a hundred, creased it thoughtfully, finally laid it on the mantel. “Just to prove I know what I’m talking about.” He sat in a chair then and lit a cigarette. “I know a gal who writes,” he said after a time. “Once in a while she gets stuck on a story and it’s worth money to her to get an intelligent criticism.” Twin gusts of smoke issued from his nostrils. “You look pretty intelligent to me, Rose.”

She touched the scar on her cheek and for a moment something that could have been anger showed far back in her eyes. “Thanks.”

He crushed out his cigarette. “This guy I’m going to tell you about,” he said, “could just as well have been a gal.” He watched her from beneath half lowered lids. “Maybe it was just the money that made him do it, maybe it was something else, but he allowed himself to get in kind of a jam. He wasn’t smart like you, Rose. He didn’t figure the percentages.”

She sat up a little straighter. “How much of this do I have to listen to for a hundred dollars?”

“There’s always more where that came from,” he said. His teeth shone whitely for an instant. “Maybe this guy figured he could get more, too. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t the money at all that mattered.” He leaned forward a little. “You know what he did, Rose?”

She wouldn’t look at him. “No.”

“He lied about something,” Shannon said. “A guy got killed and this other guy, the one I’m telling you about, was approached by the killers and told to say certain things in case he was asked.” He spread his hands. “Now I’ll leave it to you, was he smart to do it, or wasn’t he?”

Her breasts rose and fell unevenly. “What you’re trying to say is that the killers might decide to kill him too.”

“That’s the idea,” Shannon nodded. “Maybe not; maybe they’d rely on the money, or whatever it was they used.” He stood up. “If they got in a jam, though; if it looked like somebody was getting too interested in this guy, they might be afraid he’d sing a song.”

The scar on her face had turned absolutely white. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If I were this guy,” Shannon said, “I’d think about talking. I’d maybe talk to somebody who could offer money and protection.”

The crepe handkerchief was becoming frayed in her hands, but she kept her voice quite steady. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Shannon sighed. “Well, maybe it will come to you, Rose.” He looked around for his hat and coat, remembered that they were downstairs. “In case it does, the name is Shannon and I’ll be at the Navarro.” He went out.

Chapter 15

THE SOUND OF A TYPEWRITER, so late at night, pointed him unerringly to Fran McGowan’s room. Fran liked to work at night. Also she hated to be interrupted, but she had caused him, Shannon, so much uneasiness, not to mention irritation, in the last couple of years that he had no qualms whatever. For all of him, the muse could go milk a duck. He stood there for a moment in the shrubbery outside her window and listened to the erratic clatter of type bars operated by two fingers and a thumb. He was glad she was not his secretary.

The country club was not entirely deserted. There were half a dozen cars still parked in the drive out in front, and in Ye Olde English Taproom someone was playing the Novachord, very soft and sweet. Somewhere not too far away a couple of mocking birds sang lustily, probably to keep their teeth from chattering. There was the feel of snow in the wind which came down off the mountains and rustled the trees at Shannon’s back. Distantly, there was the whistle of a locomotive and the ever-present obbligato of the mines. The moon had disappeared.

Finally Shannon went over to the oblong of yellow light which was Fran’s window and tapped on the glass. The clatter of the typewriter ceased briefly, then was resumed with a determined air. Furious, because he knew she had heard him, he used knuckles this time. Her light went out. Presently there was the creak of a steel casement being cranked open and Fran stood there faintly outlined between him and the window drapes. “Go away.”

“Listen,” he said, exercising great repression, “this is no time to act like a prima donna.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m busy.”

“What do you think I am?” he demanded.

She hazarded a guess. “A heel?”

His curse was no less horrific because of its enforced quiet. He tried to pull the window farther open but was foiled by the ratchet. He resorted to cajolery. “Look, hon—”

“Well—”

Presently he stood inside the room and pulled the drapes, though he did not close the window itself. Frances turned on the lights. “I don’t know what I see in you,” she observed.

This was Shannon’s own line and he resented her use of it. “I’m your hero, remember? The guy you came up here to save from a fate worse than death.”

“There isn’t any,” Fran said. She had on a black Chinese silk robe with embroidered pale gold dragons. The dragons were the same color as her hair, and even in his moment of travail Shannon had to admit she was beautiful. She sat on the straight chair before the small table on which was her portable. An index finger rattled the space bar suggestively. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

He told her. “I think I’ve got things started popping,” he said. “This Dawes is cagey, but I think maybe he’s on the level.” He drew in a deep breath. “Like to do something for me, hon?”

“What?”

“Go down to Phoenix?” He explained that. “MacLeish has got a couple of good reasons to hate Pilsudski. One, Pilsudski is maybe Rygaard’s puppet, but just the same he’s taken MacLeish’s place as mayor. Two, Pilsudski is bringing in unskilled labor and forcing it down MacLeish’s throat.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. They came in contact with his gun and St. Cyr’s bottle. He withdrew the bottle and poured Frances a drink, a very small one. Because there was only one glass he himself drank from the neck. He smacked his lips. “Carmen MacLeish had a rifle in her car and she happened along almost too opportunely.”

Fran looked at him. “Did you suggest that to our estimable chief of police?”

“Would I?” He scowled. “He probably knows it anyway. He’s Giles MacLeish’s man.”

“Are you sure of that?”

Still with his hands in his pockets he sat down in a slipper chair. “Well, no, come to think of it. Matter of fact, MacLeish tried to hire me to check up on Loop and Rygaard.” His brows made a straight black line. “At that, I’d know better where I was if I knew whether or not Carmen MacLeish really was in Phoenix.”

“Why don’t you send Gus?”

“Vogel is on his way down to Safford,” he said shortly.

Miss McGowan was not exactly a fool. “So you’ve finally got him out of town and now you’re trying to get me out.” Her very nice mouth made a very unlovely sound. “What you’re really trying to do is make sure there are no strings on you when the fireworks start.”

He avoided her eyes. “That’s a lie.” He became very earnest indeed. “It shouldn’t be hard to do. You’ll find somebody that knows her—a gas station maybe. She’d have had to get gas for that Cadillac.” From memory he repeated the Cadillac’s license number. “You can figure the time and the distance, and if she really was in Phoenix you can almost spot her from the moment the bus went into its dance.”

Fran jotted down the number. “I’ll think it over.”

“Thanks, hon.” Shannon was relieved. He stood up and looked over her shoulder at the page in the typewriter. “Shannon,” he read, “Shannon, you rat—” He was outraged. “Can’t you find any other names for your heels?”

Miss McGowan regarded him kindly. “I like heels named Shannon.”

Shannon was oddly affected. “I’m glad you do, hon.” He bent and kissed her behind the ear. For a long time afterward he remembered that kiss, not for the emotion involved but for the fact that it probably saved his life. Coincident with the necessary stoop there was the crash of glass from the dresser mirror, and immediately following that there was the sound of a shot. With one sweep of his arm Shannon knocked Frances and the lamp to the floor, and then, in total darkness, he ripped the drapes aside and plunged through the window. There was nothing. There was not one single solitary sign of the potential assassin. Indeed for a long moment there was no sound. Shannon was just rising from his hands and knees when the first lights came on in the rooms to either side of him. Out on the drive there were shouts and the noise of a car being started. He ran that way, detoured across the first green of the golf course as he saw headlights swing into the highway. The headlights pinned him there at the side of the road. Rubber screamed. The car came to a shuddering halt. He saw that it was the big red Cadillac and that Miss Carmen MacLeish was behind the wheel. She leaned over and opened the right-hand door. “Get in.”

He held his gun straight out in front of him, like the veriest tyro. “So it was you.”

“Me?” She brushed the back of a hand across her eyes. The rouge stood out in ugly splotches on a face that had gone quite white and vacuous. “Giles and a dozen men are underground at the Resurrection. Something’s happened to them.” She keeled over in a dead faint in Shannon’s arms.

Chapter 16

HIS FIRST ACT WAS not too gallant, but considering that a third attempt had just been made on his life, and probably by this very beautiful young lady in his arms, it was scarcely the time to think of true chivalry. He grasped her neck firmly in his left hand, dropped his gun and used a forefinger to poke one of her eyelids open. The eye regarded him blankly, without the slightest flicker. She had really fainted, then. He propped her in a corner of the seat and busied himself searching the car. Except for his own he found no gun. When the advance guard from the club arrived on the scene he was holding Miss MacLeish tenderly in the crook of his arm and feeding her small portions of Scotch from the bottle. “Come on, baby, take a little more now.”

There were five guests and a white-jacketed club steward in the first batch. Three of the guests were women. Shannon permitted them to take charge of Carmen MacLeish. “Any of you people happen to be with her inside?”

The steward answered for all of them. “No sir, she was all alone tonight.”

“Where?”

One of the male guests was slightly on the drunk side. He took exception to Shannon’s sharp tone. “What business is it of yours?”

Shannon told him carefully and explicitly where he could go and what he could do after he got there. “I understand there’s some trouble up at the Resurrection. She mention it to any of you?”

She had not mentioned it. “Though she did look quite ill, sir,” the steward said, “when she came back from the women’s lockers. There’s a phone in there. Perhaps—” He broke off as some more guests and attendants arrived. Among these was Fran, a little breathless and liable to freeze to death in the Chinese silk robe.

“We heard a shot,” the drunk announced belligerently. He looked around for corroboration. “Didn’t we hear a shot?”

They all agreed that they had heard a shot. “Am I arguing?” Shannon yelled. “I heard it too.” His left hand made an almost imperceptible sign to Frances. “I was walking along the road here, and right after that Miss MacLeish came tearing out and got in her car. When I stopped her to see what it was all about she fainted.”

Frances accepted her cue. “The bullet came through my window and smashed a mirror.” She shivered, probably with the cold, though with the exception of Shannon her audience could not know that.

Everybody immediately forgot all about Carmen MacLeish. “The devil you say! You mean they were shooting at you? Who was it?” There were a hundred more questions just as inane. Frances announced with a trace of asperity that she didn’t know who had done it, but that if she ever found out she would let them all know. Presently Shannon caught her eye and she came over. “You know what to do,” he said from the corner of his mouth. “She hasn’t got the gun. Look for it. She came out of the women’s locker room right afterward and was on her way, only I caught her.”

“And you?”

“I’m sticking with the lady,” he said. He saw that Miss Carmen MacLeish had been almost completely revived. He thrust the impromptu first-aid ladies aside. “Thanks, folks, I’ll take it from here.” He banged the car door closed, went around and climbed in under the wheel. “You might let the chief of police know about that shot.” He drove hurriedly away.

For a time neither of them spoke, and there was no sound but the roar of the motor and the wind rushing past. From the tail of his eye Shannon could see her profile, beautiful even in its set hardness. He was conscious of her hands clenched tightly in her lap, and he thought that no matter what the cause she must be laboring under a terrific strain. Presently they debouched into the main highway and began the swift diagonal ascent of the road to the Resurrection. She drew an unsteady breath. “That was silly of me, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“Fainting like that.”

“Oh.”

She moved a little farther away from him. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” he said shortly. He shifted into second gear as the climb became steeper. The nearness of her was beginning to affect him again and he found himself actually making excuses for her, or trying to. Covertly he watched her hands. “What happened up at the mine?”

“They were opening up an abandoned drift on the 1200-foot level. Giles went down.” She shivered. “Part of the shoring gave way and the roof came down on them—or behind them.”

He stared straight ahead. “They notify you at the club?”

“No.” It seemed to him that her breathing was a little more uneven now. “They hadn’t meant to notify me at all until—until after they’d found out.” She turned her green eyes full on him then. “There’s something wrong, Shannon. Something’s between us that wasn’t there—this afternoon.” She considered that. “Is it her? Does she mean so very much to you?”

He was startled. “Who?”

“Miss McGowan.”

It occurred to him that here was still another motive for the most recent attempt on his life. Was it possible that the lady beside him was jealous? He decided that he was being slightly egotistical. “Hardly,” he said. They roared up to the crest of the hill.

In and around the shaft house there was a constantly shifting but curiously silent throng. Floodlights illumined their faces, bearded faces, dirty faces, but all alike in one respect. There was a tense expectancy about them, and a kind of sullen anger. You felt that they had not been enjoined to silence; that the whole thing was part of a ritual observed a thousand times before. There was no rush of ore from the tipple; even the noise of the machinery and the slap-slap of steel cables was subdued, as though it too waited, breathless and expectant, for news from below. The cage was down. A man with a portable telephone stood beside the shaft gates, a man with a holstered gun strapped to his thigh. There were two or three other men with guns, though they were very careful to seem unconscious of them. You felt that any overt or sudden move would precipitate a rush from the mob, a loosed flood which could not be stopped by a handful of men with guns. There was the drip of water from the showers and somewhere a locker door slammed loudly.

Carmen MacLeish’s voice was carefully repressed. “Hello, Kim. Hello, Otto.” She spoke to half a dozen other men. “May I get through, please?”

The mob parted readily enough. Shannon and the girl went through and crossed to the man by the shaft gates. He licked his lips. “They’re trying to drive a pipe through, Miss MacLeish. We’re working as fast as we can.”

“I’m sure you are, Pete.”

In that moment Shannon admired her as he had admired no other woman. She can take it, he thought. Her old man is down there, somewhere, and she knows that he may never come up, and she can stand there discussing it like a soldier. It occurred to him that his theory about her earlier agitation was all shot to hell, but oddly enough he was not as disappointed as he should have been. He discovered that he was hanging on word from that telephone as avidly as any of the others.

The cage came up. In it were two men. “More pipe,” one of them said laconically. Sweat runneled the powdering of ore dust on his face. For just a moment his bloodshot eyes rested on Carmen MacLeish. After that, all during the loading of pipe sections he did not look at her again.

Her hand trembled on Shannon’s arm. “I’m going down.”

“All right,” Shannon said. “I’ll go with you.”

No one attempted to stop them as they got into the cage. They hugged the iron grille which walled it on two sides. There was an ore car on bolted-down tracks and still room enough for a hundred men. It was the biggest elevator Shannon had ever been on. And the descent, when it finally began, was the swiftest he had ever experienced, a kaleidoscopic plunge through alternate darkness and light. Landing stages flashed past his eyes, giant rock-walled rooms, cavernous octopi whose tentacles were a myriad tunnels reaching off into nothingness. Empty now, devoid of men and movement, they echoed hollowly, malignantly to the passage of the elevator. Shannon was oppressed with the knowledge of his own smallness. He clung tightly to Carmen MacLeish’s hand. It was as cold as ice.

And then, when he thought that he could hold his breath no longer, the downward plunge ended. Shannon gagged a little with the suddenness of it. Through a kind of fog he was conscious of gates opening, and men and noise and swift purposeful movement. Carmen MacLeish urged him toward an electric-powered train of ore cars and obediently he climbed aboard. Pipe clanged and echoed as it was loaded, a bell set up a terrific clamor; then began a horizontal race as breathtaking as the vertical descent. So close to the ground, with roof and walls crowding in upon you, the speed was probably exaggerated, but Shannon could have sworn the tunnel was coming toward him at eighty miles an hour. He envisioned himself as a projectile in the bore of a giant gun. He looked at Carmen MacLeish. Dim, wide-spaced yellow lights alternately dyed her skin saffron and left it in shadow. She seemed quite unimpressed with the speed. Drifts opened out on either side and were gone, like rungs on a ladder, and there was a sound as of angry surf in a cave. Surprisingly the air was good.

The train slowed, the click of wheels over rail joints became clearly audible and they halted, though the tunnel still stretched away before them. In a lateral drift to the right, giant floodlamps illumined a scene like something out of Dante. Perhaps half a hundred men labored there, labored and cursed and sweated, and their grotesque shadows leapt and writhed on the walls and the roof and against the seemingly imponderable mountain of rock and rubble and twisted timbers which mocked their puny efforts. For these men were not relying on the pipe alone, that tiny thread of iron crawling inch by inch into the mass. If successful it could bring air and perhaps a message of hope to the entombed men. It could not mend broken bodies. So the mountain must be moved, and they were moving it, though ever so slowly, with bars and picks and shovels, with air hammers and their bare hands. The racket of half a dozen pavement breakers was deafening. A man with a headset clamped to his ears bent down and affixed an instrument like a microphone to the new section of pipe being coupled on. Shannon watched with fascinated eyes as the big wooden mauls rose and fell, rose and fell, incessantly, driving the iron of life into the stubborn bosom of death.

Shannon put his mouth down close to the girl’s ear. “What keeps it from buckling?” he shouted. “The pipe, I mean.” For a moment he had forgotten that she was not just an interested spectator like himself. A dull flush darkened his face as he remembered. “I’m sorry, hon.”

She nodded. Presently she leaned against him, as though she might absorb some of his strength. “It does buckle—sometimes.” Her green eyes lifted. “Then they pull it out and do it all over again.”

He marveled at that. “The hell they do.” The odd thought occurred to him that mining in general, and this blind probing in particular, must be a little like the detective business. You kept trying, that was all, and if you were lucky you hit, and if you weren’t you didn’t. He hoped these men around him would be luckier than he had been. Not that in one sense he hadn’t been lucky at that. In two days Death had knocked on his door three times and he was still around. He touched Carmen MacLeish’s hair with his lips. “He’ll pull through, baby.” Three more sections of pipe had followed the first before the man with the headset raised an arm for silence. The racket of the air hammers ceased; all movement ceased, and all sound except for the hiss of compressed air in the hoses. The girl leaned more heavily on Shannon and he could feel the sudden trembling in her body. He put both arms around her, holding her tight. “They’ve got it,” the man said. His voice sounded unnatural in the stillness. He lifted his hand and someone put a pipe wrench into it. He began a measured tapping on the iron still exposed. Shannon was no expert on Morse, but even he got the question: “O.K.?”

Only the man with the headset could hear the answer. His lips spelled it out as he got it. “A-l-l b-u-t t-w-o. N-e-e-d a-i-r.” Carmen thrust Shannon from her. “Ask him”—she moistened parched lips—“ask him—” She could not go on, but the man understood. The wrench beat out a swift query: “MacLeish?”

And again his mouth relayed the answer. “MacLeish talking.”

She turned then and looked at Shannon. “MacLeish is talking, Irish.” She swayed toward him. “Is there—anything left in that bottle?”

Chapter 17

IN AN APARTMENT over a hardware store on Second Street Shannon found Maxie Mueller, business agent for the Amalgamated Mine Workers. The ferret-like little man stared at his caller with sleep-drugged eyes. It was four o’clock in the morning. “What’s the big idea?” He was in the noisiest pajamas Shannon had ever seen. Behind him the cluttered room had the look of a poker flat after an all-night session.

“I just thought we ought to have a little talk,” Shannon said. He put a flattened hand in the middle of the small man’s chest and pushed. He went in and closed the door and twisted the key. Sombre eyes watched Mueller pick himself out of the wreckage of a taboret loaded with bottles, glasses and overflowing ash trays. Some of the cigarette butts had lipstick on them. “Where were you between midnight and one o’clock?”

“Here,” Mueller said promptly. He licked his thin lips. “I can prove it.” After a while he got around to asking the inevitable “Why?”

Shannon leaned his back comfortably against the door. There was a little color in his high cheekbones and his mouth was not pleasant. “Somebody took a shot at a friend of mine,” he said. “I thought it might be you.” He did not believe that the bullet had been aimed at Frances, but he thought it a good idea to go on pretending that he did. At least for a while. Mueller was indignant. “Why the hell should I?”

“For the same reason you threw that dynamite,” Shannon said. He took out his gun.

Mueller’s shifty eyes darted around the room. His skin was the color of old parchment. “You—you must be crazy!”

“I am,” Shannon nodded. “In about two minutes I’m going to start shooting, and I’m going to watch the slugs bounce you around on the floor till there aren’t any more.” His smile was that of an epicure savoring his favorite dish. “I’m going to like that, Maxie.”

Desperately Mueller seized on the promised stay of execution. You can say an awful lot in two minutes. “Now look, copper, you got me all wrong. Why should I have thrown that 60 percent?”

“So it was 60 percent,” Shannon said. “The guy didn’t tell me that.”

“What guy?”

“The guy you got it from.” Shannon said this with as much confidence as though he and the guy were buddies. He figured he was on pretty firm ground now. So did Mueller. With a bleat of terror the small man bent far over and scuttled for the bedroom door. Shannon ran after him. Mueller actually had his hand on the knob when Shannon caught him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him kicking back into the room and hurled him into a chair. “You son of a bitch.”

Mueller watched the gun with the intent gaze of a hypnotized bird. “You—you didn’t shoot!” He appeared to extract some small degree of hope from this fact. “I’ve got dough, copper. How—how’s about just forgetting the whole thing?”

Shannon’s smile was a trifle wolfish now. “How much dough?”

A cunning look came into the beady eyes. “Five grand?”

“For all my trouble?” Shannon was outraged. “Come again, Maxie.”

Mueller shuddered. “Ten?”

Shannon considered that. Finally he said, “Cash?”

“Yes.”

“Get it,” Shannon said. He watched Mueller move a picture on the wall and with shaking hands dial the combination of a small safe. Mueller had to try three times before the door finally swung open. Counting the money Shannon said, “This the union’s dough or yours?”

“Mine.”

Shannon put the money in his pocket. “You and Pilsudski must have a pretty nice thing here.”

Mueller’s thin lips curled. “Pilsudski’s a fool.”

“Sure he is.” Shannon discovered an open desk in a corner of the room. “Just so you won’t think I am too, you’d better sign a confession.” He waved his gun at the desk.

Mueller began to shake all over again. “Now look, copper—”

“The hell with you,” Shannon said angrily. “You tried to dynamite once. How do I know you won’t try it again? How do I know you won’t try to get this ten grand back?”

It was obvious that Max Mueller had been considering this very thing. He sighed. “Well—” Finally he went over to the desk and picked up a pen. “What do I say?”

Shannon’s face was ingenuous. “Just say, ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ and then tell ’em it was you that threw the dynamite.” Almost absently he added, “Maybe you’d better put down the guy’s name that sold it to you.”

Mueller stared at him suspiciously. “You know that already.”

“Well, sure, but suppose I get knocked off?” He shrugged. “Not that I don’t trust you, pal.” He watched Mueller’s pen move reluctantly across the paper. “Tell ’em about why you did it too. You know, about charging Pilsudski’s hunkies three times the regular dues and keeping the gravy for yourself. About how you were scared that maybe the Head Office had sent me out to check up on you, and how you needed a little time to cover up.”

The pen hovered in mid-sentence. “This is dynamite.”

“You ought to recognize it,” Shannon laughed.

The pen was still irresolute. “But Christ, I—”

“What are you afraid of?” Shannon demanded. “All I want to be sure of is that the next time something happens it isn’t you.” He scowled. “I’ve got enough troubles.”

You could see Mueller figuring all the angles. If he signed the confession Shannon had him, but then it looked as though Shannon had him anyway. With a kind of fatalism he finished the statement and signed it. Shannon picked it up and admired it. He waved it in the air to dry the ink. He put it in his pocket. The smile went away from his mouth and he began to shake. “Now get dressed.”

A lesser intelligence than Maxie Mueller’s could have sensed something radically wrong in that. He came to his feet. “What for?” The sudden stark fear on his face was an ugly thing to see.

“We’re going over to Headquarters,” Shannon said.

“But you—you said—”

“I said that the next time something happened I wanted to be sure it wasn’t you.” By a tremendous effort of will Shannon stilled the trembling in his legs. He had never before been this close to deliberate murder. “With you in jail I’ll be sure.”

Sweat stood out on Mueller’s face like the excrescence on a moldy rock. “You son of a bitch!”

“No.” Shannon shook his head. “The ten grand is the difference between an extortion and attempted murder rap and”—he gestured with the gun—“and what I’d really like to do.” Mueller’s narrow shoulders acknowledged defeat. “All right.” And then, swift as light, he yanked open the drawer behind him and yellow fingers clawed at the gun which was there. With one blow Shannon knocked him cold. Flaming eyes looked down at his handiwork for a long, long time before he finally shook himself free of the desire to kick the guy’s teeth in. He went to the phone. “Get me Police Headquarters, sister.” When Whitey Loop came in some five minutes later he had Kronjager with him. He looked like Apollo Moderne. With his eyes shut and a halo he could have been a saint. His eyes were not shut. They slithered off Shannon’s face and settled malevolently on the body of Maxie Mueller on the floor over by the desk. “I might have known it!”

“That’s what I thought too,” Shannon said. Not too subtly his manner implied that the chief of police had probably known it all along. “But since you didn’t I thought I’d give you a little help.” He shrugged, and though his next words were meant as a jab at Kronjager he did not look at the beer-bellied man. “You told me you didn’t care what I did, so long as I was working for you.”

Kronjager’s face became suffused. He was remembering that he had been asked to leave the office during part of that last interview between Shannon and Loop. Shannon was deliberately goading him into the belief that other and more important things had been discussed behind his back, and though Kronjager may have sensed this he could not sense the purpose behind it. His confusion took the form of anger. “This guy is taking you for a sucker, Whitey. I’m warning you, like I did before, that he’s got more curves than a pretzel.”

Shannon laughed. “But the curves on a pretzel always end up in the same place, Lew.” He took the thick sheaf of currency out of his pocket and divided it evenly into two piles. One pile he pushed toward Whitey Loop. “Five grand,” he said. “Half. I think that’s about right.”

Something that could have been admiration showed briefly in Loop’s handsome cat eyes. “You figure all the angles, don’t you, Shannon?”

Shannon made a bitter mouth. A thumb indicated the slowly awakening Maxie Mueller. “He’d have told you about it, wouldn’t he?”

“And he’ll tell everybody else!” Kronjager yelled.

“But nobody’ll believe it,” Shannon said. He took out the confession and smoothed it flat on the table. “Not after this.” He managed to look as crooked as he was pretending to be. “Nobody in the world ever heard of a cop taking a bribe and then pinching the guy who gave it to him.”

Loop was amused. “I’m just beginning to appreciate you, Irish.” He looked at Kronjager. “You could take some lessons, Lew.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Kronjager said. His eyes were bloodshot. “And if you’re smart you won’t want any part of it either.”

Mueller came to life. “I want a lawyer!”

“You’ll get a lawyer,” Loop said. He snapped his fingers. “Put the cuffs on him, Lew.” Kronjager lumbered over, and when Mueller attempted to resist the cuffs he smacked him in the mouth. Mueller began to whimper. Shannon had a hell of a time not feeling sorry for the guy. He remembered the dynamite and it was a little easier. Loop creased the confession between slender, well-kept fingers. “How’d you work it, Irish?”

Shannon told him. “He came sucking around, wanting to know what Pilsudski and I had talked about.” He stared very hard at Kronjager. “It was he told you Pilsudski had been in my room.”

Kronjager flushed. Shannon accepted that as an admission. “He overheard the last part of what Pilsudski said, but he thought there might have been more. When he tackled me and I threw him out on his ear he figured I was a sure bet to be investigating him, so he tried to cancel me out.” He was beginning to be angry all over again. “When that didn’t work he passed some information on to Kronjager, hoping you guys might do what he had failed to do.”

“Knock you off?” Loop suggested.

“Yes.”

Loop laughed. “But you let it ride?”

“I didn’t have any motive, except that I’d manhandled him a little bit,” Shannon said. “When I really got to thinking about him I checked with some of the men and found another one.” He put smoldering eyes on the chief of police. “If I were you I wouldn’t let this get around for a while. After what happened tonight up at the Resurrection it’s only going to take a little bit to touch the men off.”

Kronjager leered. “The hell with that. With what we’ve got and what we can make this bastard tell us we can put the skids under Pilsudski.”

“Shut up, Lew.” Loop scarcely raised his voice, but there was no doubt that he was boss. He looked at Shannon. “There’s one other little matter we ought to get straightened out. Somebody took a shot at Miss McGowan tonight.” He remembered that it was almost morning. “Last night, rather. Any ideas about that?”

“No.”

“You were there.”

“I was on my way there,” Shannon corrected him. He took out his gun. “If you think it was me you can compare that with the slug.”

Loop did not offer to take the gun. “I don’t think it was you. On the other hand”—he stared thoughtfully at the cursing Mueller—“you might know who it was.”

Shannon’s ribald laughter echoed in the room. “Go ahead and pin that on him too if you want to.” He looked at Kronjager. “Personally, I think it was Lew, here.”

Kronjager began to shake. “Let me take this guy, Whitey.”

“No.” Loop’s cat eyes rested speculatively on Shannon’s face. “Why should he?”

“Maybe he’s queer,” Shannon suggested. “Maybe he was jealous and afraid you were getting too interested in the lady.” He watched Kronjager’s face turn the color of raw liver. “Better see about your blood pressure, Lew. You’re liable to die a natural death.”

Chapter 18

FRONT STREET WAS at its lowest ebb. The night shift had apparently had its fill, and the graveyard shift was not due down off the workings for some three hours yet. A light still burned in the Western Union office, and after some little thought Shannon went in and filed a wire to a man named O’Hara in San Francisco. It was a rather long telegram. Besides outlining the case against Max Mueller it described Las Cruces as a powder keg which was liable to be touched off at any moment, causing no end of trouble for the Amalgamated Mine Workers. It suggested that John J. Shannon, upon the proper authorization from Headquarters, would be glad to keep things under control until the arrival of Max Mueller’s successor. It gave references, notably the Los Angeles police department.

The clerk was a pimply-faced youth who had been asleep when Shannon entered. He read the wire but did not appear to think there was anything funny about it. He charged Shannon three dollars and eighty-five cents for sending it. Shannon saw that there was a phone booth and he entered this and called the smelter, inquiring for Jan Pilsudski. It appeared that Pilsudski worked the night shift, and therefore should be home in bed. Shannon got the address and went over there. It was a rooming house over a combination pool hall and restaurant. A few early risers were having breakfast at the corner, and the smell of frying eggs and bacon and coffee came out, reminding Shannon that he was hungry. He thought this was a hell of a place for the mayor of Las Cruces to live.

He went up narrow, dimly lighted stairs. In an alcove on the first landing there was a kind of office, deserted now, with only a fifteen-watt bulb burning over the mail and key rack. Stickers pasted below the pigeon-holes gave the names of the tenants. Pilsudski was in Room 27. Shannon went down there. As he lifted his hand to knock he became conscious of movement down at the far end of the corridor. A man was going away from him, swiftly, but very, very quietly. Indeed Shannon caught but a brief flash of tweed-clad legs beneath a flapping overcoat, and of a head crowned with dead white hair before the back stairs swallowed the oddly retiring and furtive person of Mr. George St. Cyr. He considered going after his attorney and asking him what the hell, but decided against it. He knocked on the door.

It opened almost instantly, as though Pilsudski had been expecting someone, or had just parted from someone. He seemed a little surprised at seeing Shannon standing there. “Hoh, iss you!”

Around them, in some of the adjoining rooms, there were vague rustlings and mutterings, and one guy in particular had a snore that was like nothing human. Pilsudski had on a pair of long woolen underdrawers, nothing else. Golden hair grew luxuriantly on his barrel-like chest, matching the golden mane on his leonine head. He made a fine figure of a man. Shannon admired him. He said, “Would I get to look like that if I worked in a smelter?”

Pilsudski flexed his biceps. “Makes um strong,” he admitted.

“Is that why you work there?”

“Sure.”

“I just wondered,” Shannon said. He accepted the fact that he had not been thrown out as an invitation to come in. He saw a sagging iron bed and a dresser from which the paint was scaling, a couple of chairs and a spindly golden-oak table. A drop cord depended from the ceiling, ending in a yellow incandescent which did little toward making the room exactly glamorous, but it was clean. He closed the door, conscious that Pilsudski’s eyes had never left him. “They arrested Max Mueller about an hour ago.”

Pilsudski stood perfectly still. He stood that way for so long that Shannon was afraid he had gone to sleep. Finally the big man said, “Who?”

Shannon sat in a chair and took off his hat. “Loop and Kronjager.” He put a hand in his topcoat pocket, the one with his gun in it. “I fingered the guy for them.”

Pilsudski shook himself. The effect was that of a St. Bernard coming out of the water. “Why you do that?”

“Because he’s the one that threw that dynamite in my window,” Shannon said. Carefully, without hurry, he outlined the means by which he had isolated Mueller as a suspect. “Mueller is bound to talk,” he said presently. “I thought you’d like to know.”

Pilsudski’s eyes opened very wide. “What I care?”

Shannon stretched his legs out in front of him. He looked sleepy, and he was sleepy, but he was also being very, very watchful. “You’ve been importing men, guys that probably never saw a copper mine before, and Max Mueller has been unionizing them for you—at a price.” He sighed. “That’s going to look kind of bad, pal.” His voice took on a certain inexorable quality. “There was another accident last night. Up at the Resurrection. One of the two men that died belonged to you. His beneficiary is the Polish Relief Society. I don’t think there is any Polish Relief Society.”

An almost beatific expression came into the giant’s blue eyes. “Iss me,” he said proudly. “Polish Relief is Pilsudski.” In spite of the red woolen drawers he was clothed in a kind of regal dignity. “Iss legal.”

Shannon was startled. “Who told you that—St. Cyr?”

“Unh-hunh.” He admired St. Cyr. “Iss very smart, that wan.”

“Like hell he is,” Shannon said. “Maybe it’s legal and maybe it isn’t, but neither one of you is very smart.” For a moment he was lost in thought, and then curiosity overcame him. “How much have you got in the kitty?” He corrected that last to “treasury.”

“Not wan goddam cent,” Pilsudski said, as though that too was a matter for pride. “Iss go to help make Poland to live again.” He drew himself erect. “You like all the others, yes? You think is fonny, those hunkies, yes?” He pointed a finger the size of a frankfurter. “Those hunkies know they gonna die maybe, but they feel good, ’cause it helps Poland—just like they was soldiers.”

“Well, I’ll be God damned!” Shannon said. He thought that they were even better than soldiers. About ten thousand dollars better, because that was what it cost the mine and smelter operators every time one of them died. It occurred to him that Wolfgang Rygaard, in backing Pilsudski for mayor, had nursed a viper to his bosom; a patriot maybe, but from the operators’ standpoint a viper nonetheless. He pretended great admiration for the scheme. “How do you work it?”

Pilsudski scratched an itch between his shoulder blades. “Iss offices in Phoenix,” he said. “Mens join society, sign papers.” He waved. “W’en they die, Pilsudski gets ten t’ousand dollars.”

“And you’re working in a smelter!”

“Iss for Poland,” Pilsudski said simply.

Shannon stood up. “Now I’ll tell you why you’re not smart, pal.” He scowled. “You and that lousy attorney of mine.” He had to tilt his head back a little to look into the big man’s eyes. “Did it ever occur to you that a good half of these accidents might not be accidents at all?”

Pilsudski took even that in his stride. “Iss not my business.” It appeared that he, doubling for the Polish Relief Society, was nothing if not an opportunist. All around him men were dying. The companies were paying off. His only trouble had been that so many of the men had been Irish, Welsh and what not, and not in the least interested in the eventual rebuilding of the great country, Poland. It had seemed a simple thing to him to substitute patriotic Poles wherever possible. “Only iss union town,” he said. He sighed heavily. “So I am needing those Max Mueller.” It occurred to him that without the venal Mueller his scheme was in danger of falling apart. His big hands knotted suddenly into fists. “I think I am going be very mad on you,” he said.

Shannon backed away from him. “Now wait a minute, I’m trying to do you a favor.” In his pocket his strong brown fingers curled tightly about the butt of his gun. He hoped he was not going to have to use it. “No doubt your motives are very noble and all that, but unfortunately it isn’t only your patriots that are getting themselves killed. How do you think all the others are going to feel? What’s going to stop the operators from accusing you of causing the accidents?” As a matter of fact he was not at all sure that Pilsudski hadn’t been causing them. That was the trouble with most of these patriots; they were fanatics. For the first time his real purpose behind this visit came out in the form of a casual suggestion: “If I were you, Jan, I’d hole up somewhere until after this blows over.”

Pilsudski took a slow step toward him. Though his blue eyes were still wide and naive, his voice had become a low growl. “You are not going tell anybody,” he said. His purpose was clear. The curl of his fingers implied unpleasant things being done to somebody’s throat. Shannon needed only one guess as to whose throat. “You’re forgetting Max Mueller,” he said. He saw that the name had not registered. Pilsudski was like a man in a trance. He had room for but one idea at a time. Shannon kept backing away, step by step, until he felt the bed behind his knees and knew that he could go no farther. He was going to have to shoot and he did not want to, and he was not at all sure that even if he did it would stop the big man. He discovered that he was saying Max Mueller’s name over and over again, foolishly, babbling like an idiot. Then Pilsudski had him, bending him back over the bed, and he could not say anything any more. He couldn’t even breathe. He pulled the trigger, knew that the hammer had fallen, but beyond that nothing happened. There was no shot. He began to struggle then, childishly, like a drowning man going down for the last time. And like a drowning man’s his vision was suddenly quite clear and he saw George St. Cyr come into the room and pick up a chair. After that he lost count for a little while.

Chapter 19

“THAT MAKES US EVEN,” St. Cyr said. Crane-like, he bent to peer at the recumbent Pilsudski. He was not talking to Pilsudski. Even if he had been, Pilsudski couldn’t have heard him.

Shannon sat on the bed and massaged his throat with tender fingers. “What made you come back?”

“I don’t know,” St. Cyr said. “I just thought I’d better.” He picked up the chair with which he had hit Pilsudski, saw that it was no longer going to be very serviceable as a chair and finally propped it in a corner, a trap for the unwary sitter. He took a flask out of his hip pocket and held it to the light, measuring its contents. Apparently there was enough, for he said, “Drink?”

“You’re damned right,” Shannon said. He seized the flask in both hands and tilted it to his lips. Liquor scorched a pair of tonsils that appeared to have been sandpapered raw. He coughed. “Well, thanks.” He was oddly embarrassed. He hated to think of what would have happened if St. Cyr had not come back.

“Quite all right,” St. Cyr said politely. He emptied the flask. With a kind of clinical interest he again examined his victim. Pilsudski was just beginning to stir. “Marvelous physique, what?”

“But dumb,” Shannon said. It occurred to him that he himself had not been exactly smart. “Look who’s talking.” He tried to extricate the gun from his pocket. A wrinkle in the lining had got caught between the hammer and the firing pin. He cursed it. “Christ!”

St. Cyr regarded him in some amazement. “You would have shot him?”

Shannon felt of his throat. “Wouldn’t you?” After a while he said, “I didn’t want to. I need him in my business.” He yanked a sheet off the bed and began methodically tearing it into strips. When presently he got up off his knees, Pilsudski bore a rather striking resemblance to a mummy. “That ought to hold you, you bastard.” Pilsudski answered nothing to this. His eyes were wide open and no doubt he wanted to, but a gag is a gag. Shannon looked at St. Cyr. “As long as you’re here you can help me carry him.”

“Where?”

“How do I know?” Shannon demanded. “Some place we can keep him on ice for a day or two.” He scowled. “You think the cops aren’t going to tie him up with Mueller?”

St. Cyr denied thinking anything of the kind. “I take it you’re not being just a good Samaritan?”

“I told you, didn’t I? I need him in my business.”

St. Cyr teetered on his heels. “And that is?”

Shannon looked at him. “You wouldn’t understand this. You’re British. But just for the hell of it I’m going to tell you.” His eyes got a sultry look. “I sent a friend of mine up here to do a job. He got pushed around. So I came up and people began pushing me around too.” He found his hat and put it on. “The Shannons hate to be pushed, that’s all.”

“I see.” St. Cyr waved a bony hand at the giant mummy on the floor. “Pilsudski?”

“He’s a lever,” Shannon said shortly. He drew a deep breath. “I hope.”

“I’ve a car downstairs,” St. Cyr said. Presently it developed that he knew of a worked-out silver claim called the Dos Pesos too. After some little discussion they decided that the Dos Pesos was just the place for a guy named Pilsudski. They lugged him down the back stairs, loaded him in the car and carried him out there. Dawn was still an hour distant and what was left of the night was darker than the inside of a black cat when Shannon closed the heavily timbered door and adjusted the smashed padlock to look as though it was still locked. A rutted, weed-grown road led them back to the highway and presently into town and the Hotel Navarro. “As an attorney,” Shannon said, getting out, “you’re not such a hell of a lot of good, but on the whole I’m glad I hired you.” He put out his hand. “Remind me to get drunk with you sometime.” St. Cyr accepted the hand, shook it once, dropped it. “Right.” He went away. Shannon went into the lobby. The clerk who looked as though he might read the Esquire ads hailed him. “There was a phone call for you, Mr. Shannon.”

Shannon paused. “They leave their name?”

“No, sir.” The clerk yawned. “It was a woman.”

Shannon figured that any one of at least four women might have called him. He finally decided he would try Fran McGowan, just on the off chance that she might have found the gun she was supposed to look for. In the phone booth he leaned his forehead against the cool metal coin box, waiting for someone at the country club to wake up. When someone presently did he asked to be connected with Fran’s room and waited some more. He thought that probably he was being a very great fool. On the other hand he might be a very great detective. He was so tired that for the moment he didn’t really care which he was.

Fran’s voice came to him, distant but no less indignant because of that. “What do you want?” she demanded crossly.

He sighed. “Apparently it wasn’t you who called me.”

“No.”

He wondered if the attendant out at the club might be listening in. “Then you didn’t find it?”

“No.”

He scowled at the blank panel in front of him. “Is that all you can say?”

“Yes.”

“Well, did anybody else find it?”

“No.”

“I wish you were always that monosyllabic,” he said. He banged the receiver up, good and loud, hoping it would give her an earache. He dropped another coin and dialed Wynn Thorelsen’s number. Here he got no answer at all. He could hear her phone ringing and he waited a long time before he finally concluded she must be out. He frowned a little, wondering why she should be out at this time of night. It occurred to him quite suddenly that the call might have come from Rose Machado. He was on the point of looking up her number when he decided that if it had been she who called he couldn’t do business with her over the telephone. He let the book drop and went out and told the clerk he would be back in half an hour.

Front Street was slowly coming to life, though it was still very dark. A garbage truck was banging cans in the alley paralleling the street, and here and there cafe kitchens showed lights and activity. Shannon’s heels raised little echoes as he walked. It was very cold and he turned up his coat collar against it and wished he had a drink. Coming presently into the Avenida Juan Batista he discovered that he was quite alone. Except for himself the street was as devoid of life as a desert island. The shutters on all the houses were closed tightly and even the street numbers eyed him blankly. He had the odd sensation of standing naked in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare; of being watched by a thousand eyes from behind those shutters. He increased his pace a little, and when he came opposite the stairs leading up to the covered balcony he went up them swiftly. It was not until he reached the landing that he paused and leaned there against the rail, breathing softly. Below him was a tiny walled patio, and the faint scent of dew-laden grass came up to him. On his right, four doors opened onto the balcony. He remembered that Rose Machado’s apartment had had French doors. There was only one pair of these and he went toward them, balanced on the balls of his feet and very quietly. He saw that behind drawn drapes there was faint light. With his fingernails he tapped gently on the glass.

There was no answer. After a moment he tried it again and it seemed to him that there was furtive movement in the room. A tiny gust of wind came up the stairs, and rattled the windows, and it was then that he discovered the catch was broken. He went in, very quickly, parting the closed drapes and letting them fall behind him. Rose Machado, still in the scarlet dress of last night, lay on the white chaise. Where the gown swelled over her breasts it was stained a darker red, and there were two small holes in the center of the stain, very close together. Her eyes were wide open.

Shannon’s first impulse was to run. There was nothing but danger for him here, now. Then he realized that this was not a cold murder, cold in the sense that Bill Thorelsen’s was. It was hot, so hot that it was burning up, and the heat from it might easily warm the trail back to that other one. Swift anger attacked him, anger at himself for predicting, but not actually foreseeing this; anger at the woman for being clumsy. He crossed the room and touched one of her hands. It was cold as ice. Again the urge to flee came over him, yet he did not. He bent over the chaise, studying the twin holes in her breast. They were almost contact shots. If he had needed anything to prove that the killer was known to her, this was it. Very quickly, then, he went over the room, searching it, using a handkerchief when he touched things, so that there would be no fingerprints. Presently it occurred to him that this was silly; he had been here before, and the police would find out that he had. He found no gun. He went back to the woman and stood there looking down at her for a moment, and the hard light went out of his eyes and he was no longer angry. “I’m sorry, Rose,” he said through stiff lips. “I kind of liked the way you sang.”

Chapter 20

THE TELEPHONE AWAKENED HIM. Sleepily he reached out for it, forgetting where he was. Then, as his groping hand found nothing and the telephone continued to ring, he opened his eyes and memory smote him. He got up and padded across the room in his bare feet and lifted the receiver. “What’s the idea? I thought I told you I wasn’t to be disturbed.”

“Sorry, Mr. Shannon,” a cool voice said. “We have a telegram for you and thought it might be important.”

The whole of last night came back to him then; the things he should have done and hadn’t; the things he shouldn’t have done and had. He felt terrible. He felt like the man of whom it is said that, given enough rope, he will hang himself. “All right,” he said churlishly, “send it up.”

His wrist watch informed him that it was five minutes past noon. Not believing that, he went to the windows and yanked the drapes apart and looked out. Apparently the watch was right. Bright sunshine came in and hurt his eyes and bathed his bare feet. He discovered that of all his memories the one of Rose Machado was the worst. He had a mild fit of the shakes.

There was a knock on the door and he went to it and accepted the yellow envelope thrust at him by the bell-hop in the vivid purple suit. “You might as well take that ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign down with you. Nobody pays any attention to it.” He closed the door and opened the wire. It was from the man in San Francisco named O’Hara:

“John J. Shannon, Las Cruces, Arizona.

Empower you to act for us until arrival new representative. Investigate Mueller activities but keep lid on. Advise if need help.

Amalgamated Mine Workers, Pacific Area,

Sean O’Hara, Chairman.”

Down in the left-hand corner they had repeated “Empower.” Shannon felt that two “empowers” gave him enough authority to do almost anything he wanted to, at least temporarily, with about thirty thousand men. He began to feel a little bit like God, or maybe President Roosevelt. He went into the bathroom and began to shave. His reflection regarded him without happiness. It said that he was neither God nor the President, he was nothing but a stupid ex-cop who had turned into an even more stupid private eye. He did not argue the point.

It was not until he had finished showering and was almost dressed that the next interruption came. This time it was the law. You knew it was the law by the belligerence of the knock. Shannon was grateful that he had been allowed as much as six hours’ sleep. He smoothed the furrows of worry from his face and gave a very fair imitation of an innocent, carefree “Come in!”

Loop and Kronjager came in. Kronjager’s blue serge suit looked as though he had slept in it. He face looked as though he had not slept at all. The tiny ruptured veins in his nose and cheeks were a kind of bilious magenta and he had a hard time keeping the triumph out of his eyes. “Did we wake you up, Shannon?”

Shannon said no, he’d been up a long time. He went on knotting his tie. “What seems to be the trouble?”

Floyd Loop answered that one. “No trouble.” His cat eyes moved unhurriedly about the room. “No trouble at all.” As usual his clothes looked like a million. He was in fawn gray this morning, and the left lapel of his coat was so cunningly tailored that the gun hardly showed a bulge. Shannon wondered if that had been a lucky shot, the one that had snatched his own gun out of his hand, or if Loop was really that good. He decided the guy must be good, and had proved it. Otherwise people wouldn’t be so scared of him.

Loop was whistling a little tune between his teeth now. He stopped that to inquire if Shannon had ever heard of a lady named Rose Machado. “Lives over on the Avenida Juan Batista.”

That was meant to be a trap. He watched Shannon’s face, expecting it to show that Shannon knew she didn’t live there any more. Shannon nodded. “Sure. I met her last night.”

“What time last night?”

Shannon decided to be a little angry. “Why not ask the lady?”

“I’m asking you.”

“And I’m telling you to go roll a hoop.” Shannon said. He appeared to realize that he was being accused of something. “Look, what’s this all about, anyway?”

Kronjager thrust out an unshaven chin. “What’d you go over there for in the first place?”

Shannon leered. “What do people usually go over there for?”

“Don’t give me that,” Kronjager said. He took out his gun, hefting it suggestively. “You went over to talk to her about Thorelsen.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“And then you killed her,” Loop said.

Shannon’s face registered surprise, then shock, then outraged innocence. He hoped he wasn’t overdoing it. “You’re a liar!” He allowed suspicion to come into his eyes, suspicion that they were ribbing him. “You’re not kidding me—she’s really dead?”

Kronjager spat. “You never saw one any deader.”

“Christ,” Shannon said. He just couldn’t seem to believe it. “And only last night I heard her sing!” He looked at Loop. “Ever hear her, Whitey?” He was overcome. “Marvelous, that’s what she was. Why, that gal ought to have been—”

“Save it,” Loop advised him crisply. “We’ll put it on her headstone.” For the first time anger showed in his eyes, and Shannon didn’t know whether to be more afraid of him this way or when he was purring. “Now maybe you’ll answer my question.”

Shannon looked around for a cigarette, finally found one, lit it and filled his lungs. “You know the answer to that, Whitey. That’s what brought you around to see me. I dropped in there about midnight, maybe a little after, left my hat and coat with the maid, listened to Rose sing, went upstairs with her for a little while—”

Loop’s eyes flamed a warning. “I know. Then you came down and got your hat and coat and went around the corner for a chocolate soda.” He said a very ugly four-letter word. “With whipped cream!” He made a fist of his right hand, looked very hard at Shannon’s mouth. “I’m not talking about that time, you bastard. I’m talking about the second trip.”

“There wasn’t any second trip,” Shannon said. He moved a little, putting Loop between himself and Kranjager. He thought maybe he could take one at a time, but certainly not both. “I can account for almost every minute after the first and only visit.” He watched Kronjager move to compensate his own change of position. “When did it happen?”

Loop relaxed a trifle. “Roughly at four o’clock this morning.”

Shannon began to laugh. “If you think back you’ll find that at four this morning I was very busy with Max Mueller and you and Lew, here.”

“I said ‘roughly.’”

“All right, before that I was with Giles MacLeish, after they got him out of that cave-in. Carmen brought me into town.”

“And where’d you go after you left us?”

“To see my attorney.” He spread his hands. “This whole thing is kind of silly, isn’t it? I mean, if I did go to see her about Thorelsen, and she was lying, she wouldn’t be any good to me dead.”

Loop appeared to be convinced. “That’s right, by God!” He turned to Kronjager. “Remember that, Lew. Mr. Shannon did not kill the Machado woman. He’s proved he didn’t.” The smile he gave Shannon was the kind the wolf gave Little Red Riding Hood. “That’s in case you wanted to change your story later.”

Little needles of apprehension did things to Shannon’s stomach. “Why should I want to change it?”

Kronjager’s belly shook with obscene mirth. “To maybe keep your client from hanging, that’s why.” He guffawed. “You Irish are so goddamn sentimental!”

Shannon licked his lips. “Mrs. Thorelsen?”

“We’ve got her,” Loop nodded. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.” At the door he turned. “And if you’re thinking it’s a frame you can get her an alibi and make a liar out of Ballistics. The slugs came out of her gun.”

Chapter 21

PILSUDSKI’S TEETH MADE unpleasant grinding noises. He was trying to induce a little saliva from what moisture was left in his system after six or seven hours of being gagged. He worked at it very hard, and after a while he was able to say his favorite line: “You sonnabitch!”

Hunkered down beside him on the rocky floor of the Dos Pesos, Shannon admired the label on the quart bottle of cheap rye. He smacked his lips. “You could have some of this if you’d be nice.” He wished he had not been so penurious. He did not like cheap rye.

A bar of sunlight came in the half-open door of the tunnel and touched Pilsudski’s head with gold. Where there was no covering his body looked blue. It was very cold in the tunnel. “I’ve brought you some clothes, too,” Shannon said. He added other inducements. “And some food and blankets.” He looked around. “You could be quite comfortable here.”

Pilsudski growled. “Whoosa knock me out?”

“A pixie,” Shannon said. He had another small drink of the rye. He pretended that it was the cold that made him shudder. “Trouble with you, Jan, you’re impulsive. I’m doing you a favor—I was trying to do you one last night—and you’re too dumb to realize it.” He sighed. “Yours was a noble racket, but it’s all over now. It would have been over even if you’d killed me.”

Pilsudski was staring very hard at the bottle. “Those sonnabitch Mueller are talking?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t he?” He was impelled to dilate on the peculiarities of guys like Max Mueller. “He’s in a jam and the only comfort he can get out of it is seeing you in a jam too.” He became argumentative. “After all, you made a lot more out of the racket than he did. You think he wants to see you get away with it?”

Pilsudski was sullen. “Iss no racket.”

“Well, maybe not,” Shannon conceded. “I’m just telling you how it will look to the buddies of a bunch of guys who’ve been getting killed. They don’t give a damn whether Poland ever lives again or not.” He emphasized his next words with the bottle. “And if they don’t get you, the law will. No matter what your purpose was, the law can prove collusion with a confessed crook, Mueller.”

Pilsudski looked at him curiously. “How you know I won’t beat your brains out when you untie me?”

Shannon saw no reason to mention the gun in his pocket, and the fact that he had made sure the hammer would never get caught in the lining again. “I trust you,” he said.

Pilsudski was touched. His eyes were childlike in their wonder. “What you wanting I should do?”

“Just stay here,” Shannon said. “Keep out of sight for a day or two and maybe I’ll be able to fix things for you.” He did not say that maybe he would be able to fix things for himself too. He had not yet figured out exactly how he would use Pilsudski. It just seemed like a good idea to have as many hole cards as possible. He held the bottle to Pilsudski’s mouth. “Okay?”

“Hokay,” Pilsudski said.

Shannon got out a knife and went to work on the twisted sheets. When he was through with that he left Pilsudski to massage the circulation back into his own arms and legs and began carrying in the stuff from the rented car. “Anybody comes snooping around, hold ’em for me.” He remembered St. Cyr. “All but our mutual counsel.” He stared at the goldenhaired giant with sudden suspicion. “I don’t suppose it was you that’s been arranging these accidents?”

Pilsudski was standing erect now. He flexed his great arms. “Like those bus, maybe?” He seized the bottle and almost drained it. “You are forgetting Pilsudski is on those bus?” Shannon had forgotten it. What with one thing and another he had almost forgotten that he too had been on the bus. “All right, then, all you’ve got to do is stay put till I come for you.” He went out and got in the car and tooled it back down the weed-grown road to the highway. So far as he could tell, he had not been observed. The sun was warm on his back, and the rye, now that he had gotten over the taste of it, sloshed pleasantly in his stomach, and on the whole he felt pretty good. He wondered how St. Cyr was making out with Wynn Thorelsen. He himself had not gone to see her, which probably was why he had not been tailed out to the Dos Pesos. Floyd Loop would have expected him to see her the very first thing. Oddly, though, it was neither Pilsudski’s comfort nor the desire to out-think Loop which had kept him from going. It was the knowledge that he himself had tried to phone her and there had been no answer. He decided that killing Rose Machado was just the kind of thing a hysterical woman would do. Not sure that Shannon was accomplishing anything, perhaps believing that he never would, she had probably taken the bit in her teeth and tried to get an admission out of the woman herself. He had no doubt that Loop’s evidence was strictly on the level. He himself had seen her with a gun in her hands only last night.

Coming into town he saw George St. Cyr standing on the steps of City Hall. As usual he was bareheaded, though this time he had had a haircut and his white hair was brushed neatly back. His tweeds looked as though they might have been pressed. He looked pretty good. Shannon parked and waited for him to cross the street. “You see her?”

“Yes, I saw her.” St. Cyr’s manner indicated that he had not been too pleased with what he saw.

“Well, did she do it or didn’t she?”

“I’m afraid she did,” St. Cyr said. He avoided Shannon’s eyes. “The gun is hers. In fact it was her husband’s before her. That’s how the police were able to check so readily.” He studied the palm of his left hand. “Sort of poetic justice, what? The gun that killed her husband killed the woman responsible.”

Shannon made an impatient gesture. “Say it was stolen.”

“Of course,” St. Cyr said.

“She say where she’d been all night?”

“Driving.” St. Cyr had a rather expressive mouth. “Just driving around, you know. She saw no one. No one saw her.” With the ball of his thumb he rubbed a speck of dirt off the car door. “She had dined with Giles MacLeish, and when she heard about the accident up at the Resurrection she was upset.” His brown spaniel eyes looked at Shannon. “You know?”

“I don’t give a God damn,” Shannon said angrily. “We’ve got to get her out of it.”

“Well, maybe I’ll think of something,” St. Cyr said. He regarded Shannon intently. “Often I find that liquor stimulates my imagination. Would you entertain a motion to get stiff?”

“No!”

“Then I’ll entertain it all by myself.”

“You will like hell,” Shannon said. He got out of the car. “We’re going over to see the editor of the Clarion.” He took a firm grip on a bony, tweed-clad arm and led his attorney down the block. “This may look like a side issue but it all ties in together.”

The editor was a smallish, completely bald man with hornrimmed glasses and frayed black alpaca sleevelets. His nose said that he had an intimate acquaintance with the bottle of rye on his desk. Shannon shuddered. St. Cyr performed the introductions. The editor’s name was Salter and it appeared that he was also the publisher. He got out some tumblers and proffered the bottle. St. Cyr declined on the grounds that he never drank anything but Scotch. Shannon said he didn’t either. He said, “I dropped in to pay you for that ad you’ve been running.”

Salter was regretful. “No answers, Mr. Shannon?”

“Not one.”

“That’s an odd name.” Salter said. He savored it, along with a swallow of rye. “Johann Smith—very funny.”

“What’s funny about it?”

Salter absently blue-penciled a proof. “I don’t know, I just seem to recall something about it, that’s all.”

At the back of the big room a boy was feeding dodgers into a job press. A man with a green eyeshade was tinkering with a lone linotype. On the glass-topped counter between Shannon and the editor was a calendar with a printed slogan enjoining you to “Do It Now!” Shannon decided he would do it now. “How would you like to sell this sheet?”

Salter reached for the bottle. “I must be losing my grip,” he said. “Are you actually making me an offer?”

“Maybe.”

Salter tried to keep the eager look out of his eyes. “I’ve got about eighteen thousand invested in equipment. Besides—”

“Including the sidewalk outside?” Shannon wanted to know. “Well, call it ten grand—in cash.”

“I’ll give you five.” Shannon took his half of the Mueller steal out of his pocket. It made a nice showing. The bills were practically new, and they rustled when he scattered them on the counter. Avarice tinted Salter’s glasses a faint green. “There’s a condition too,” Shannon said.

Salter’s hands shook as he poured a fresh drink. “What?”

“You’d have to run the sheet for a while. Say two or three days.”

St. Cyr was doing his best not to look amazed. You felt that Shannon was a new experience to him, but that he would always be carefully polite, no matter what happened. He said, “As your attorney I ought to tell you that the Clarion isn’t exactly a gold mine.”

He looked at the Clarion’s owner. “No offense, Salter.”

Salter was slightly crestfallen. “Well—”

Shannon made a magnificent gesture. He could afford to be magnificent with somebody else’s money. “The offer still stands.” He lit a cigarette. “Matter of fact, the reason this isn’t a gold mine is that Salter doesn’t know his politics. He avoids them entirely.”

Again Salter had recourse to the bottle. This time his battle was with something else besides avarice. “I don’t want to get mixed up in anything.”

“That’s why I’m offering to take over,” Shannon said. “Otherwise I’d have bought a front page and called it a day.” He took out the O’Hara telegram and laid it on the counter. St. Cyr read it, shuddered, poured out three fingers of rye and drank it quickly. He almost but not quite held his nose. “God save us!”

Salter read more slowly. You could see his news instinct wrestling with caution. “I don’t know what’s behind this, but I’m afraid—” He stood up. “I’ll sell you the paper. I won’t run it.”

Shannon became persuasive. “You won’t have anything to worry about. You’ll just be an employee.”

He shrugged. “Tell you what. Build up the sale on the front page. Then if anybody gets tough they’ll get tough with me.”

Salter looked at him. “What are you trying to do?”

“I like this town,” Shannon lied. “I’m going to become a solid citizen.” With gestures he described the front page he had in mind. “Mueller’s arrest, and the way he’s plundered the men; the new ownership of the Clarion; the appointment of John J. Shannon, who will entertain a grievance committee at eight o’clock tonight.”

Salter’s eyes glistened. “Well—”

Shannon pressed his advantage. “Look, I’ve even got a friend who’ll write the emotional parts for you. She’s literary as hell.”

St. Cyr was overcome. “Miss McGowan?”

“Certainly,” Shannon said with great dignity. “Miss McGowan is public spirited. Like me.” He stared very hard at Mr. Salter. “Of course, if you don’t want to do it I can go over and buy a special edition in Corona.”

“Oh, I’ll do it,” Salter said. He yelled at the boys in the back room. “Hey, Jerry, Pete, Ortega, come on out and meet your new boss!” He began hurriedly gathering up the scattered currency. Jerry and Pete and Ortega came out and met their new boss. They were not impressed. Ortega, the linotype man, spat a brown stream at a non-existent cuspidor. “Does that mean we get paid?”

“Paid!” Shannon said. “Why, hell, you can have the lousy sheet when I get through with it!” He took St. Cyr’s arm. “Come on, let’s go over and get Mueller’s keys.”

St. Cyr’s legal mind was at work. “Really, you know, we should draw up the necessary forms and go into escrow.”

“Later,” Shannon said. He and St. Cyr crossed the street and went into City Hall. The lobby had half a dozen cops in it this time. They looked uneasy, as though they might be expecting a riot call. The door to the chief’s anteroom was open. Shannon and St. Cyr went in there. Floyd Loop himself was at Kronjager’s desk. “What do you want?”

Shannon tossed him the telegram. “I’m pinch-hitting for the Amalgamated Mine Workers. I want Mueller’s office keys and anything else belonging to the union.” He looked smug. “I’m also the new owner of the Clarion.”

For just a moment it seemed that Loop was unable to breathe. Then, very carefully, he said, “Aren’t you getting a little too big for your pants, Shannon?”

Shannon was hurt. “Am I cutting in on anything of yours?” He became indignant. “No, by God, and I don’t want to!” He took off his hat and threw it on the desk beside the telegram. “These were just a couple little rackets you’d overlooked and I thought I’d—” He looked at St. Cyr, said, “Excuse me, Counselor,” and leaned over and put his mouth down close to Loop’s ear. “Remember the five grand last night? There’ll be more.”

Loop stood up. “I don’t like it, Shannon.”

“Then you’re a bigger fool than I think you are,” Shannon said. Again he leaned close and whispered. “With the paper and the men in your pocket you can do almost anything you want to in this town.” The implication was that it was Loop, not he, who would have these things in his pocket. Shannon was content to be the front man. “I think I’ll even join the Rotary Club,” he grinned.

Loop looked at St. Cyr. “What about him?”

“I’ll take care of him,” Shannon promised. Aloud he said, “Anything you want to ask the chief about Mrs. Thorelsen, Counselor?”

“I’d like to see she’s made a little more comfortable,” St. Cyr said.

Loop’s eyes returned to Shannon. “What about her?”

“That’s up to her lawyer,” Shannon said. He was regretful and a little angry. “Naturally I want to do what I can for her, but if she’s going to go off half-cocked—”

“You callous son of a bitch,” Loop said. There was nothing but admiration in his voice.

Chapter 22

A BRASS BAND CAME down the street, brave in red and white uniforms and playing lustily one of Sousa’s more stirring marches. Behind the band was a horse-drawn hearse, the horses nobly caparisoned and prancing a little, and behind the hearse, sitting very straight and dignified in an open carriage, rode the widow. She had a faint mustache. She looked a little like Queen Victoria. Behind the carriage marched a double line of men, resplendent in their Sunday best, and apparently quite happy about the whole thing.

From the windows of Local 197, Amalgamated Mine Workers, Shannon looked down upon the parade. He was afflicted with the inferiority complex common to all crusaders, the feeling that missionaries must have when trying to convince headhunters that it’s better to play checkers. Out in the anteroom men sat on the hard benches, waiting to get a look at their new business agent, and down the hall in the Eagles’ lodge room a man with a bass horn was practicing. Gus Vogel cleared his throat nervously. “I hope you know what you’re doing, John J.” His hat was balanced precisely on his small plump knees. He had not been able either to prove or disprove Mr. Wolfgang Rygaard’s presence in Safford on the night that Bill Thorelsen had died.

Shannon returned to the desk. “You see the railroad people?”

“Sure, but without coming right out and saying why I wanted to know, it was pretty hard to pin ’em down to an exact time. Rygaard’s up and down the line a lot.” Vogel brightened. “One thing I do know, he didn’t stay in any of the hotels in town.”

Shannon remembered that he had promised to call Mamie, in Los Angeles. He did that, wondering whether he should reverse the charges or let them go on the Mine Workers’ bill. He was feeling pretty bad about the hundred dollars of his own money he had given to Rose Machado. He decided that in a way this was the Mine Workers’ business. “Hello, Mamie?”

Mamie sounded morose. “I thought you might be dead again.”

“A lot you’d care,” Shannon said. He put self-pity aside as being unworthy of his new estate. “You find anything?”

“No. At least not under his own name.”

Shannon was discouraged. It had occurred to him that Mr. Rygaard might have employed the stock market as a means of getting control of the Resurrection Copper Company. He decided that Rygaard must be like the rulers of certain belligerent nations; instead of buying what he wanted he’d spend a hundred times the cost in waging a war over it. Shannon had always thought this procedure rather silly, but then he made no pretence of understanding world politics. He said, “All right, pet, forget it,” and hung up.

Vogel jerked a thumb at the door of the anteroom. “Who’s all them guys?”

“Just guys,” Shannon said. He got up and went to the door. “The paper told you all there is to know. Mueller’s been robbing some of you and as soon as I find out how much there’ll be refunds.” Watching their faces he felt a little bit like Daniel in the lions’ den. “I’ll talk to a grievance committee at eight o’clock tonight.” Some of them went away. Some just continued to sit. Shannon wondered how long he would have before the new and accredited business agent arrived. He closed the door and stood over Vogel. “I want you to go down to Phoenix, Dutch. Find the offices of the Polish Relief Society and get a line on where all that dough has been going and how it got there.”

“Why don’t you ask Pilsudski?”

“I’d rather do it this way,” Shannon said. “You don’t have to be subtle. Give ’em a flash at a badge and tell ’em you’re working for the government. Tell ’em Pilsudski has skipped out.” He thought a moment. “While you’re down there you might check up on Carmen MacLeish too.”

“I thought Miss McGowan was gonna do that.”

“Miss McGowan has to write copy for the Clarion,” Shannon said.

“More than she already has?” Vogel looked with undisguised distaste at the first edition of the Clarion under its new management.

“That depends,” Shannon said. He was conscious of the reason for Vogel’s worry. “She won’t be in any danger now. I’m a big shot.”

“You’re a fool,” Vogel said frankly, adding his customary apology, “If you don’t mind my saying so, John J.” He stood up and adjusted his hat to his round head with geometric precision. He sighed, “Well—”

“Goodbye, Dutch,” Shannon said kindly. He dismissed the reluctant Vogel with the air of a busy executive. He put his feet on the desk and became lost in thought. Wynn Thorelsen worried him a little. On the other hand, there was nothing to do about her yet, short of a jail delivery, which he wasn’t ready to attempt except in the direst extremity. He thought that between the Clarion and his temporary control of Local 176 he might be able to pop Bill Thorelsen’s killer to the surface, like dynamiting fish. He thought that if he could do this he could get Wynn off with a very light sentence indeed. Wynn had a nice pair of legs. He wished some of the fish would start arriving.

But when the first of them did, he could hardly be described as a fish. He was Wolfgang Rygaard and he was angry. He had a copy of the Clarion in his hand and he slapped it down on Shannon’s—or Mueller’s desk so hard the inkwells jumped. “What are you trying to do—get me lynched?” Behind him, his two bodyguards effectively blocked the only exits. The one with buck teeth and the general air of Mortimer Snerd gave Shannon duck bumps. You could see he was a man with but one idea. The other one was a slender dark man who kept both hands in his topcoat pockets. You felt that this was not just to keep them warm.

Shannon took his feet off the desk. “How was that again?”

“You heard me,” Rygaard said. He was not the shouting kind, but the effect on Shannon’s stomach was the same. “You’ve linked Mueller with Pilsudski, and by inference with me. Pilsudski is known to be my man.”

“Then the inference is not mine,” Shannon pointed out. He scowled. “If you elect a mayor you’re supposed to know what he’s doing. At least that’s the way it works where I come from.”

Rygaard’s eyes bored into him. “What have you done with him?”

“Who?”

“Pilsudski!”

“I haven’t done anything with him,” Shannon said. “Why should I?”

“That’s what I don’t know—yet.” You gathered that this condition was not going to prevail long, not if Mr. Wolfgang Rygaard could help it. He looked from Shannon to his two men. “I don’t think you would be missed if you happened to leave Las Cruces, Mr. Shannon.”

Shannon leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, his chin in cupped hands. “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Rygaard. If anything happened to me at this particular moment there are about twenty thousand guys would take it as a personal affront.” He smiled. “I’m their champion. I’m the only champion they’ve got for the time being.” He sneered at Mortimer Snerd. “Don’t get any idea, punk. If I disappear, or get killed, the mine operators are the logical ones to suspect.”

At a look from Rygaard the gorilla and the slender dark man went out into the hall. The door closed. Rygaard found one of his thin dappled cigars and lit it. Through the first cloud of aromatic smoke his cold gray eyes regarded Shannon with a kind of respect. “You’re a curious combination, Mr. Shannon—a mixture of native intelligence and bull in the china shop.” He examined the tip of his cigar. “I don’t think you’re the usual rabble-rouser, so I ask myself what it is that you hope to accomplish by all this.”

Shannon’s mouth drooped. “It’s all very simple. A guy named Mueller, under the misapprehension that I was after him and his petty racket, threw some dynamite at me.” He spread his hands in wide gesture. “So I got Mueller.”

“And Pilsudski,” Rygaard said.

“Pilsudski was a by-product.”

“Like me?”

Shannon stood up violently. “Can I help it if it looks like Pilsudski framed these accidents, or you through him?” He pointed a finger. “That’s what happens when you start playing politics. One thing ties up with another.”

“I see,” Rygaard said quietly. He seemed intent on the accumulating ash of his cigar. “Only Pilsudski could prove that I had no connection with, or knowledge of, this Polish Relief Society.”

“Well?”

Rygaard exhaled gently. “Find him for me, Mr. Shannon.”

Shannon considered that. “I might try,” he said finally. His eyes were ingenuous. “As long as there isn’t any talk of killing people—like Whitey Loop, for instance—I’m still a private eye and open to offers.”

“The suggestion about Loop was a mistake,” Rygaard conceded. “I’ve reconsidered.” He took out a pigskin billfold and removed ten hundred-dollar bills. “Find Pilsudski for me and there will be more.” He laid the currency on the desk.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Shannon said. He put the money in his pocket, carelessly, as though thousand-dollar retainers were an everyday occurrence. He went to the windows and stood there looking down at the street for a moment. “There’s one other thing I’ll have to make as a condition. I want to be able to come up to the Consolidated and ask questions without getting slugged.”

“Questions about Bill Thorelsen?”

“Yes.”

Rygaard was still for so long that the silence became oppressive. “Why?”

Shannon turned then and put sombre eyes on his visitor. “Mrs. Thorelsen shot Rose Machado. If I can prove she had a reason for it, at least a woman’s reason, I can maybe get her off with a year.” Try as he would he could detect no sign that Wynn’s arrest, and his own acceptance of her guilt, had the slightest effect on Rygaard. He decided the man could not possibly be in love, or if he was it was not the kind of love that Shannon understood. “You can see that. If the Machado woman was a party to Thorelsen’s murder—if, in the first place, it was a murder—then Mrs. Thorelsen would get sympathy from any jury on earth.”

A tiny nerve at the corner of Rygaard’s mouth began to twitch. He tried to mask even that by poking at his close-clipped mustache. “I think I told you that I sympathized with Mrs. Thorelsen’s views.”

“And suggested that I knock off Whitey Loop.”

Rygaard made an impatient gesture. “That was an entirely different matter.”

“Was it?” Shannon’s fingers busied themselves with lighting a cigarette. His eyes never left Rygaard’s face. “I don’t think there’d better be any more accidents for a while, pal.”

Rygaard dropped his cigar in an ash tray. “If you’re hinting that I had anything to do with that one last night—”

“I’m not hinting anything,” Shannon said. “The Consolidated has had just as many as the Resurrection.” He spat out a flake of tobacco. “I’m just suggesting that it would be nice if there weren’t any more. I’ve got a very weak stomach.”

“And the Clarion.” The Consolidated’s manager allowed a wry smile to touch his lips. “That’s a bet I overlooked.”

“It wouldn’t be any good without the union,” Shannon said. He grinned. “Together they’re almost unbeatable.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Rygaard said. He became brisk. “Meantime, you’re welcome up at the Consolidated.”

“Thanks.” He watched Mr. Wolfgang Rygaard depart. He wished he could have faked that telegram from O’Hara. Then there wouldn’t have been a new business agent in the offing. He felt that his imminent successor was apt to prove an embarrassment, and that time was of the essence. There was a knock on the anteroom door. “Come in.”

This time he had two visitors at once. They were Whitey Loop and Mr. Alf Lundy, who was the deputy prosecutor Gus Vogel claimed to have seen accepting a hatful of money from Kronjager. Mr. Lundy was a red-necked young man with a cowlick and a mole which he kept worrying between a thumb and index finger. The mole was not the only thing that was worried. “I don’t think we’ve—ah—met before, Mr. Shannon.”

Shannon admitted that. He made his voice carefully insulting when he added, “I recognize the type, though.”

Mr. Lundy was terribly embarrassed. “There seems to be some sort of misunderstanding here. Mr. Dawes—” He paused and his eyebrow interrogated Shannon’s face. “You’ve met Mr. Dawes?”

“Oh, quite,” Shannon said. He had practically no trouble at all recalling his interview with Mr. Kenesaw Dawes, the Abe Lincoln of Corona County. “I sort of thought he’d shoot off his mouth, so I didn’t depend on him too much.”

Lundy nervously cleared his throat. “Well, about that money—” He looked to Whitey Loop for a little assistance, but got none. Loop seemed to be intent on the front page of the Clarion.“What I mean to say,” Lundy continued, “is that I’m local chairman of the Police & Fire Department Benefit fund.”

Shannon leered. “Since when? Since this morning?”

“Certainly not,” Lundy said stiffly. Again his eyes sought succor of the police chief. “That is to say—”

Shannon laughed. “Forget it.”

Lundy looked at him. “Does that mean—?”

“That I will? And Vogel?” Shannon sat on a corner of the desk. “Do you think we ought to forget it, Whitey?”

Loop folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “It might be a good idea.”

“Then consider it forgotten,” Shannon said. He took Loop’s arm and led him over to the windows, out of earshot of Lundy. “I got a thousand bucks out of Rygaard, to look for Pilsudski.” He put a reluctant hand in his pocket. “If you’re going to want half of everything—”

“Keep it,” Loop said shortly. It was obvious that Lundy hadn’t been the only reason for his call. “I thought Mueller’s arrest was going to be soft-pedaled.”

“Sure,” Shannon said. He appeared to realize for the first time that Loop was displeased about the Clarion’s front page. “You mean you didn’t understand about that?” He frowned. “The soft pedal was just until we got a good grip on things.”

“On what things?”

Shannon was surprised. “Look, you’ve got the two mine operators at each other’s throats already. Why not play it to the limit?” He shrugged expressive shoulders. “Oh, I realize that you’ve been playing one against the other all along.” He pointed a finger. “But just for peanuts. Just for the gambling and vice take.”

Loop looked at him. “What have you got in mind?”

Shannon managed to look positively Machiavellian. “Owning the town, the mines”—he waved his hands in an all-inclusive gesture—“everything.” He winked. “Take it from me, pal, there’s more to this private war than meets the eye.”

The irises of Loop’s eyes dilated. His tone was sharp. “What?”

“I don’t know that yet.” Shannon became mildly reproving. “You’ve got to admit I’ve been a little handicapped until now.”

“But you’re not any more?”

“Not if you’re with me,” Shannon said.

They had both forgotten Mr. Alf Lundy hovering in the background. His cough reminded them that he was still there. “Perhaps I’d better be running along?”

“I’ll go with you,” Loop said. Once more he turned his curious golden eyes on Shannon. “But you did go to see Dawes?”

Shannon laughed. “That was before I realized the possibilities.” This time his glance included Lundy. “Two arrests within twenty-four hours—arrests that are bound to result in convictions—ought to convince the most zealous prosecutor in the world.” He winked broadly. “As for that other, Vogel will claim he made a mistake.” He watched them through the door with every evidence of good will.

Chapter 23

FRANCES CAME IN while he was still relieving his pent-up emotions. “Goodness, what language!”

He flushed under her calm gaze. “I don’t care. They think they can push me around, they’re crazy.”

“To a strictly impartial observer,” Frances said, “it looks like you’re doing a little pushing yourself.” Frances had a bunch of violets pinned to her furs, violets which must have come all the way from Phoenix. She was, as usual, platinum perfection. She smelled good too, which was more than Shannon could say for Max Mueller’s office. He pretended he didn’t see the violets and offered a sullen rebuttal to her remark about who was pushing whom. “Well, what do you expect?”

She regarded him. “If you must know, I expect to find you dead almost any time now.”

He scowled. “A lot you’d care.”

“But it’s so messy.” She sniffed appreciatively at the violets. “Giles MacLeish got them for me.”

“Did I ask you?” Shannon yelled.

“He’s helping me with a story,” Miss McGowan said. Her eyes were like stars. “Isn’t it wonderful the way people want to help poor struggling authors?”

Shannon’s mouth was unpleasantly suggestive. “I’ll bet you didn’t struggle too much.” He kicked a drawer shut. “You ought to be ashamed. He’s old enough to be your father.”

It was at this moment that Giles MacLeish himself came in. “Who is?”

“Rygaard,” Shannon said maliciously. He interpreted the smile MacLeish gave Miss McGowan as slightly possessive. MacLeish was wide and important looking in double-breasted gray. He had a Cecil Bruner boutonniere. Shannon looked at him without love. “Well, go on and ask me, like Rygaard did, if I’m trying to get you lynched.”

“All right,” MacLeish said amiably. “Are you?”

Shannon started at him suspiciously. “You seem to be feeling pretty good for a guy that was trapped in a mine tunnel only last night.”

MacLeish examined his nails. “Maybe that’s why I feel good,” he said. “I got out.”

“There were two guys who weren’t so lucky,” Shannon said.

MacLeish’s heavy brows drew down in a frown. “You think I’ve forgotten that?”

“I suppose not,” Shannon said. “It cost you, or your company, twenty grand.”

MacLeish thrust out his chin. “That’s the kind of remark that gets people’s necks broken.” The thick black hair bristled on his hands as he made them into fists. “Yesterday I admitted to you that in reprisal for some of Rygaard’s acts I’d taken a few pot-shots myself.” He drew a deep breath. “Not one of those resulted in a man’s death.”

Shannon shrugged. “But there were deaths.”

“I told you,” MacLeish said. “Rygaard would wreck his own operations if he could throw the blame on me.”

Shannon moved aimlessly about the office. “You check up on that job last night? You question the men?”

“Yes.” After a while the big man said, almost regretfully, “It looks like an accident, nothing more.” He frowned at a memory. “Matter of fact, I was the last one into that drift, so it couldn’t have been any of the others.” Short thick legs carried him over to the windows beside Frances, and he stood there a moment looking down at Front Street traffic. “There’s a chance that it was an old charge, just lying there waiting for a careless pick to touch off. There’s an equal chance that it was planted.”

Shannon’s eyes were suddenly bright and intent. “Say it was planted. Say that Rygaard instigated the planting.” He laughed without humor. “You admit you’re responsible for a little sabotage yourself. How did you go about it?”

MacLeish looked at him from under beetling brows. “I’d have to know which side you’re on before I told you that.”

Shannon cursed him. “You asked me to investigate certain things for you, didn’t you? How can I, if you won’t play ball?” He scowled as MacLeish started to say something. “All right, I told you it might look like I’d thrown in with Rygaard; I told you you’d have to take the chance that I really had. You’ve still got to take that chance.”

MacLeish shot a swift glance at Fran’s profile. “How about it, Miss McGowan, is he to be trusted?”

“Not any farther than you can throw the Empire State Building,” she said bitterly. It was obvious to Shannon that she had not forgotten Carmen MacLeish and the very red Cadillac.

Nevertheless MacLeish seemed satisfied. He said, “The men are switching all the time. They get fired, or quit, and when their money’s gone they go back to work, usually for the other company.” He stared at Shannon. “It’s simple enough to hire a job done.”

Shannon was slightly incredulous. “You mean these guys wouldn’t blackmail hell out of you afterward?”

“And incriminate themselves?”

“How’d you like me to put that on the front page of the Clarion?” Shannon demanded. His eyes were angry. “The men wouldn’t stop to analyze your motives, or find out which accident was caused by whom. All they’d need would be a rope.”

“I wouldn’t like it,” MacLeish admitted. Thick fingers explored the place where a noose might logically tighten. “No, I don’t think I’d like that at all.”

“Then there hadn’t better be any more of these arranged accidents,” Shannon said. It occurred to him that he had said practically the same words to Wolfgang Rygaard. Quite suddenly he realized that he was a big shot—if only temporarily. He felt omnipotent. He said, “I found out one thing you wanted to know, anyway. Whitey Loop is not with Rygaard.”

“You sure.”

“Positive.”

“Then here’s a little something on account,” MacLeish said. From an inside pocket he produced a fat-looking envelope. Shannon’s keen ear detected a pleasantly crisp rustling when he squeezed it. He put it in his pocket. “Thanks.”

MacLeish was still thinking about Loop. “He may not be with Rygaard, but is he still with me?”

Shannon’s expression was wooden. “I can find out.”

“Then do that,” MacLeish said. He became a little more cheerful as he turned to Frances. “Cocktails, Miss McGowan?”

“Anywhere you say,” she agreed. She took up her purse and gloves.

Shannon said, “There’s one other thing, MacLeish. How do you feel about Wynn Thorelsen?”

MacLeish took his hand off the doorknob. “I’m sorry for her.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Your very charming daughter thinks different.”

A slow flush dyed MacLeish’s already dark skin. “That’s natural in a daughter, isn’t it? Carmen was quite fond of her mother. She’d be jealous of any woman I looked at twice.” He smiled at Frances. “Probably she’ll be jealous of you.”

Shannon had a little difficulty with his breathing. He attempted to cover this up lighting a cigarette but the matches kept breaking off in his hands. He finally hurled both cigarette and matches at the wastebasket. “Is Rygaard in love with her?”

MacLeish just stared at him for a long moment. “If it were possible for him to be in love with anyone but himself I’d say yes.”

Shannon’s mouth drooped. “What does that mean?”

“He’s interested,” MacLeish said. “I wouldn’t know about love.” He held the door open for Miss McGowan. “Ready?”

She turned and looked at Shannon with an expression he couldn’t fathom. It might be a goody-goody-I-told-you-so look, or it might be sincere admiration. Her words indicated the latter, but with Fran you never could tell. “I’ll give you one thing, Mr. Shannon. You’ve certainly made yourself important to a lot of people, in a very short time.”

He was overcome with self-pity. “That can work two ways,” he told her darkly. He watched his guests depart with the air of a misunderstood martyr. His feeling of omnipotence had vanished entirely.

Carmen MacLeish found him brooding on the ills with which humanity, and especially John J. Shannon, was beset. She was vivid in black caracul and the kind of hat you see only in the movies. She looked like Kay Francis, only younger. “Has Giles been here?”

Shannon admitted sadly that Giles had been there. “He’s out having cocktails with a blonde.”

“Well, that seems like a very good idea for you and me,” Carmen said. Her green eyes appraised him. “Not the blonde—cocktails.” She came and sat on the edge of the desk, facing him, and he discovered that there were other things beside her eyes and her voice which fascinated him. He tried not to look at them. “I wish I knew why everybody was so damn happy.”

She laughed. “Meaning me?”

“Your father too.”

She smoothed her skirt over her knees, not looking at him. “Really, that shouldn’t be too difficult to explain. That was a near thing last night.”

“And this sudden cheerfulness is the reaction?”

“What do you think?”

He scowled. “I wish I knew.”

She leaned forward and laid her mouth on his. “Like me?”

He kissed her without his customary enthusiasm. “Don’t cloud the issue any more than it is.” He avoided her eyes. “Was Giles home last night when you got back?”

Her hesitation was so brief that it might have passed unnoticed if he hadn’t been watching for it. “Yes.”

“The servants weren’t so sure,” he said. “They thought they heard a car just after we left the house.”

She was a little angry now. “Just what are you trying to prove?”

“That Mrs. Thorelsen didn’t kill Rose Machado.”

“I see,” she said in a flat voice. “You’d rather it was Giles?”

“I wouldn’t like it,” he confessed. He looked at her. “Matter of fact, I haven’t any motive, except that he hates Rygaard like nobody’s business.” He touched her knee as she would have risen. “No, wait a minute, hon.”

Her green eyes hated him. “It’s my father you’re accusing of murder, you know.”

“He’s just accused himself,” Shannon said. He was impelled to add, “Well, maybe not of that, but of using sabotage to wreck Rygaard and Las Cruces Consolidated.” He stood up violently. “How do I know there weren’t any lives lost in those jobs of his? I’ve only his word for it.”

She sat perfectly motionless for a long moment. “I could kill you for that.”

Shannon laughed harshly. “And for all I know you may have tried, baby.” He began moving about the room. “All right, so he’s your father. He’s also a guy that had something, and lost it, and wants it back again—the town.” He pointed a finger at her. “He practically accused Rygaard of the Thorelsen kill. The Machado woman had something and she was killed too.” He spread his hands in a wide gesture. “Looks bad for Rygaard, doesn’t it?”

She stood up. “Aren’t you forgetting Mrs. Thorelsen’s gun?”

“Do you think I am?” He thrust his hands deep into his pockets. “Your father had just as good a chance to steal it as Rygaard.” He watched her without appearing to do so. “He had dinner with her last night.”

A quickly drawn breath was the only sign that she was affected. “Giles is sorry for her.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Shannon said. He remembered Wynn’s black lace underthings. He thought that those, and pity, would make a very nice start toward something else. He remembered that MacLeish was part Indian and that maybe those things wouldn’t count if you hated someone enough. He wondered if he himself would sacrifice a woman in order to get at Wolfgang Rygaard. He decided that if he would, and didn’t want to be too obvious about it, he would say just about what MacLeish had said. “According to your father, Rygaard is and has been interested in Wynn Thorelsen. The implication is that he might have been interested enough to put Thorelsen out of the way.”

Sea-green eyes studied him curiously. She was no longer angry. “I take it that the theory doesn’t meet with your approval?”

He was irritable. “I don’t know.” He began pacing the floor again. “It’s just that nearly everything that points to Rygaard—all these accidents and things—could just as well point to MacLeish too.”

She was scornful. “Have you forgotten that Giles almost lost his own life last night? I suppose he arranged that!”

He nodded, as though answering something in his own mind that had bothered him. “Looks bad for Rygaard again, doesn’t it?” He came and stood before her. “I’m talking to you this way because I like you, hon.” The perfume of her blue-black hair was strong in his nostrils. “You do things to me.”

“I can see that,” she said drily. “I practically sweep you off your feet.” She was perfectly composed now. She could discuss the relative guilt of her father and Wolfgang Rygaard as though both were utter strangers. She was even quite logical. “Part of the Consolidated’s accidents could be inspired by Rygaard, in order to throw suspicion on Giles.” She shrugged. “Naturally you’re wondering if the reverse isn’t true.”

Shannon decided that she had a fine mind. “It’s funny that Loop never proved anything. Didn’t he investigate?”

“Loop isn’t a detective,” she pointed out.

“Kronjager is—or was.” It occurred to him that Kronjager, no matter what he found out, would do what he was told. The thought brought a speculative gleam into Shannon’s eyes. Kronjager might be on Rygaard’s payroll, yet unable to sway Loop against MacLeish. This would be apt to result in a stalemate. And of itself this stalemate, this deadlocking of purposes, would necessitate increasing violence. He was reminded of Rygaard’s attempt to hire him to kill Floyd Loop. In the same breath he remembered that Giles MacLeish had wanted, or pretended to want, Shannon to investigate a possible connection between Loop and Rygaard. Come to think of it, MacLeish, in that very first interview, had said, “How are you with a gun?” In careful retrospect this could be construed as a veiled suggestion that Giles MacLeish wouldn’t grieve too much if Loop were killed. Obviously both men felt that Loop was the key man. With him dead, or definitely aligned with one side or the other, a decisive battle might be waged. Shannon knit his brows over that one. By joining Loop, or appearing to do so, he had strengthened neither Rygaard’s position nor MacLeish’s. He had, however, accomplished something. He was pretty sure that for a day or two there wouldn’t be any more accidents in the mines. And tonight he intended to go even farther than that. He brightened. “Well, how about those cocktails, baby?”

She picked up her bag. “A sort of armed truce?”

Shannon scowled at her. “You think I like this? You think that for two cents I wouldn’t say to hell with it and go out and get roaring drunk?”

“With me, darling?”

Remembering Frances and the way she seemed to be throwing herself at every eligible male in town Shannon decided that he would rather get roaring drunk with Carmen MacLeish than with anybody else in the world. He told her so. He said, “But drunk or sober, you affect me the same way.”

She leaned toward him. “And how is that, darling?”

“You give me goose pimples,” he admitted. It occurred to him that maybe that was what she had been trying to do all along. He pushed the thought out of his mind and kissed her with great enthusiasm. It was while he was thus busily engaged that he heard muttered curses out in the anteroom, and stumbling, uneven footsteps. He thrust Carmen from him and his hand dropped to the gun in his pocket. Someone banged solidly against the door, and whoever it was had a hell of a time finding the knob. Shannon went over and helped. Lew Kronjager lurched drunkenly into the room. In one large fist he had a bottle, and in the other a couple of water tumblers, apparently lifted from some restaurant. He was bleary-eyed. He did not see Carmen MacLeish. “Gotta talk to you,” he informed Shannon. He winked owlishly. “You and me’ll have little drink and talk things over.” He waved the bottle and almost fell down.

Shannon led him carefully to a chair. “All right, Lew.” He removed both bottle and glasses from the sodden man’s hands, held one of the glasses to the light and found, as he had suspected, that it was dirty. He carried them over to the lavatory in the corner and rinsed them out. “What’s on your mind, Lew?”

Kronjager watched him pour the tumblers half full. He reached out a shaking hand. “Don’t think because I’m drinking with you I don’t hate your guts.”

“That’s all right,” Shannon said. He sat on the edge of the desk, and though Kronjager didn’t know it he was toasting Carmen MacLeish when he lifted his glass. “Here’s to crime”

Kronjager gulped: “To crime,” he said emotionally. He was on the brink of a crying jag. Bloated cheeks pushed his eyes almost shut and Shannon momentarily expected to see a couple of elephantine tears leak out. “Gotta find out where I stand,” Kronjager said. He attempted to set the glass down, missed the desk by six inches. The glass rolled around on the rug, picking up light refractions from the late afternoon sun. “The hell with it.”

Shannon looked at Carmen, poised with her hand on the doorknob. His look said that this would only take a moment and that then they could go after the cocktails. He returned his attention to Kronjager. “Where you stand?”

Kronjager made a great effort at concentration. “Sure.” He fiddled aimlessly with his hat. After a while he said, resentfully, “He thinks you’re Jesus, by God!”

Shannon’s eyes got a sleepy look. “Whitey?”

“Unh-hunh.” He bent far over and picked up the glass. The act seemed to restore some of his self-assurance. “What I want to know is, are you and him trying to squeeze me out?”

Shannon laughed. “Worried, Lew?”

“You’re damn right I am,” Kronjager said loudly. He fumbled the glass in his two hands, finally dropped it again. “I keep tellin’ the guy I know you and he won’t believe it.” He grew cunning. “Look, you say the word and I’ll throw in with you.”

“Against Whitey?”

“Yes.”

Shannon swung his legs. “No.”

“You son of a bitch,” Kronjager said thickly. He climbed unsteadily to his feet. “I wish to Christ that slug had hit you.”

“Out at the country club, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Shannon slid off the desk. “Lew.” The change in his voice was noticeable, even to Kronjager. He licked his lips. “Unh?”

“Only three people in the world could have known that slug was meant for me, Lew.”

Kronjager’s sodden mind struggle with that for an instant. And then, when he saw what he had done, he began to sweat. Great beads of it stood out on his forehead and his eyes got a glassy look. “You’re crazy!”

“Just three,” Shannon said. He used his fingers to tick them off. “Miss McGowan, myself and the guy that fired it.”

Kronjager went for his gun. Shannon actually stood there and let him get it half way out before he stepped forward, like a punter, and drove a foot into the big man’s paunch. Kronjager sighed and folded over. Shannon straightened him up with a left and a right to the face. After a while he became conscious that the face was no longer there in front of him. Surprised, he looked around and saw Carmen MacLeish standing by the door. Her face was dead white. “You still want to drink with me, baby?”

“I—don’t know,” she said faintly. A little color flowed back into her cheeks and it occurred to Shannon that she was neither sick nor shocked at what he had done to Kronjager. She was afraid. She moistened her lips. “What was the reason for that?”

“He just told us,” Shannon said. He sucked at a split knuckle and watched Kronjager try to get up and fail. “He was afraid I was cutting him out with Loop.” He picked up the phone and called City Hall.

Chapter 24

THREE PEOPLE SAT in a booth in the Copper Pig, each watchful of the other two, each pretending that only the surface words were important. At least this was the impression that Shannon got. He knew that he himself was being careful, so there was no reason to suppose that the others weren’t too. He thought that in spite of the difference in their colorings Carmen MacLeish and Floyd Loop were very much alike, sleek, beautiful cats, self-centered and, like cats, thoroughly unpredictable, because they were adepts at dissembling.

The bar was fairly well crowded. Someone with an ear for music like Shannon’s had put a nickel in the juke box and got a Harry Owens recording of “Sweet Leilani.” Carmen MacLeish sang it softly and well, looking at Shannon with green eyes that reminded you of tropic lagoons. She had taken off her hat and her hair was a lustrous jet casque. He wished to Christ that Loop had chosen another time to look him up. He waited till the song ended before he said, “All right, so you checked his gun with the slug that busted the mirror. What more do you want?”

“His motive,” Loop said.

Shannon had already had three martinis, and these on top of the whiskey he had drunk with Kronjager had given him a mild edge. He leered. “I told you. He’s jealous.”

“You suggested that last night.”

“But not for the same reason,” Shannon said. “If you remember, we were talking about your sudden interest in Miss McGowan.” He fumbled around in his pockets for a cigarette, couldn’t find one and finally accepted what was left of Carmen MacLeish’s. It tasted of lipstick. He regarded her fondly. “Tell him what happened in the office, hon.”

“I already have,” she pointed out. She sipped at her rum Collins. “About three times.”

Loop studied his well-kept nails. “So you were in Miss McGowan’s room after all. Why did you lie to me?”

Shannon was indignant. “If I hadn’t, would I have caught Kronjager?” He answered his own question. “You’re damn right I wouldn’t.” The waiter arrived with a fresh martini and Shannon drank thirstily. “Anyway, what do you care?”

“I don’t,” Loop said.

Shannon thought that this was a lie. There was nobody to whom Kronjager’s arrest could prove more embarrassing than to Whitey Loop. The chief of police was worried about what his lieutenant might say in court. Shannon casually offered him an out. “He could be shot, trying to escape.”

Loop’s lips moved. It looked as though he might be saying, “You fool,” but no sound came out. He was quite conscious of Carmen MacLeish at his side. She laughed musically. “How too, too intriguing!”

“Cute,” Shannon said. He really thought so. Not the suggestion itself, but the fact that Loop had probably already considered it and was now stymied because Shannon had brought it out into the open. If anything happened to Kronjager, Carmen would remember. Whether or not she would remember it publicly was something else again. Shannon did not yet know how deep Loop and MacLeish were in together. The whole thing was a kind of game, with everybody watching everybody else, and all you could do was play the field. One thing Shannon was sure of. He himself couldn’t be double-crossed, because he had no friends. He had reached the point where he didn’t even consider Gus Vogel his friend. He almost wept at his own loneliness. He waved violently for a waiter.

After a while Loop said with every indication of genuine regret, “Well, I must be going,” and got up and put on his hat. This was a gray Homburg and he wore it at just the proper angle. All he lacked was a stick to make him the true boulevardier. He eyed Shannon’s flushed face intently. “You might drop around to Headquarters this evening.”

“Sure.” Shannon got up and moved around the table to Carmen’s side. He had apparently forgotten all about the chief, who stood there undecided a moment, finally gave it up as a bad job and went out.

The guy with the nickels had found another tune that Shannon liked, an old Show Boat number called “Make Believe.” Shannon got up and pulled the curtains to the booth. Fran McGowan began to seem very far away indeed. He wondered if she was having as good a time as he was. He hoped not. He held Carmen’s hand and told her how sorry he was that he had ever suspected her of shooting at him through that lousy clubhouse window. “When I might have known all the time it was that bastard Kronjager.”

She leaned her lovely head against his shoulder. “What were you doing in the lady’s room, darling?”

“Dictating.”

“Probably,” Carmen said. “But what?”

“A letter.” He was outraged at the implication that he had been there for any other purpose. “Where else could I have found a typewriter at that time in the morning?”

“I must remember to take up typing,” Miss MacLeish said. She looked at her watch. “Goodness, six o’clock!” She began gathering together her purse and gloves.

Shannon was indignant. “What’s the hurry?”

“I’ve got to go down to Phoenix.”

He remembered that Gus Vogel was in Phoenix, investigating, among other things, an alleged former visit by this selfsame young lady. “I could go with you,” he offered.

Her mouth lost a little of its softness. “Not tonight.”

“All right for you,” he said sulkily. With some difficulty he attained his feet, permitting her to squeeze by him. He was quite drunk. He salved his ego by stating with great dignity that he couldn’t have gone with her anyway. “I have to address a grievance committee.”

A gloved hand patted his cheek. “That’s nice, darling.” Warm lips brushed his own, then she was gone.

He retired to his booth and sat there for a while, viewing with acute distaste the collection of empty glasses. More than ever he was impressed with Miss MacLeish. She had drunk fully as much as he, yet here he was, practically stinko, while she, the gorgeous wench, was able to march down the aisle like a dew-fresh bride. He decided that what he needed was food. “And clear away the decks,” he instructed the waiter who took his order. After a time he folded his arms and buried his face in the comfortable hollow thus afforded. The juke box played “St. Louis Blues,” which he hated. He slept until the waiter came back with a top sirloin, French fries and a pot of coffee. He ate ravenously, pressing the food down upon the alcohol in his stomach like a blotter on spilled ink. He began to regard himself as a very great detective again.

It was while he was measuring sugar into his last cup of coffee that a shadow fell athwart the tablecloth, and looking up he discovered Mr. Kenesaw Dawes, the lank and Lincolnesque prosecuting attorney of Corona County. Mr. Dawes was not happy. “Talk to you a minute, Shannon?”

“Sure.” Shannon tasted the coffee and found it just right. He waved at the seat opposite. “Sit down.”

Dawes slid into the booth, closed the curtains behind him and jack-knifed his long legs under the table. Shannon wondered if the guy thought all the other customers were blind. By this time the Copper Pig was packed. Dawes cleared his throat. He built a church and steeple of his bony fingers. He became earnest. “Mr. Shannon, I’ve a confession to make. I’m afraid I—”

“Tipped your hand to Lundy?”

Dawes was surprised. “Well, as a matter of fact—”

“I know,” Shannon said, “you didn’t trust me.” He turned on his nastiest laugh. “Well, I didn’t trust you either, pal.” He pointed his steak knife. “That’s the trouble with honest people, they’re untrustworthy. You can’t depend on ’em. They get to thinking how they’ve been wronged, how their confidence has been misplaced, and they’ve just got to do something about it.” He became smug. “Now me, I’m never in any hurry about things like that.”

Mr. Dawes permitted himself a bleak smile. “You seem to be doing all right.”

“And all legal, too,” Shannon nodded. He disregarded the slightly illegal act of kidnapping Pilsudski, on the grounds that self-preservation was the first law of nature. Besides, Mr. Dawes didn’t know about Pilsudski. “Lundy has three cases that even he doesn’t dare nolle pros.”

Dawes parted the curtains with the air of conspirator. There were no eavesdroppers. “It was about Lundy that I looked you up.” He gnawed at one of his knobby knuckles. “There’s no doubt the man is a crook.”

“And you want my help to prove it?” Shannon shook his head. “Sorry, Vogel has had a terrific lapse of memory.” His smile was unpleasant. “And one thing about Vogel, his memory gets worse and worse as he goes along.”

Dawes flushed. “Then you’ve sold out?”

“I’ve been pushed out,” Shannon said. “You did it.” He was suddenly and violently angry. “Because you couldn’t keep your God damned mouth shut!” In his pants pockets he found enough loose bills to cover the check and a moderate tip. He thrust the table away from him with unnecessary vigor, pinning the anguished Lincoln to the booth partition, got up and yanked on his hat. “Goodnight, and don’t bother to look me up again!” He crossed the street to the Hotel Navarro. There had been no telephone calls for him.

Entering his room some few minutes later he discovered that there hadn’t been any visitors either. He knew this because everything was exactly as he had left it, and he had gone to great pains to memorize even the position of the pins in his clean shirts. He was a trifle disappointed. Ever since preparing that important-looking envelope at Wynn Thorelsen’s place he had been expecting someone to take an interest in it, but no one had. It was discouraging. He decided to cheer himself by counting the money given him by Giles MacLeish and Wolfgang Rygaard. It was in the Rygaard batch that he found the marked hundred-dollar bill. He had marked it himself. It was the one he had left as a token of good faith in the apartment of Rose Machado.

Chapter 25

WITH THE COMING OF NIGHT Police Headquarters had lost its somnolent air and seemed in a fair way of becoming a hive of industry. There were now two men on the desk under the stairs in the lobby, and from the squad room at the rear there were sounds of great activity. The door to the deputy prosecutor’s office had a light behind it, and voices indicated that Lundy was catching up with some of his night work. A typewritten notice posted at the foot of the main stairs said that tonight’s Council meeting had been postponed, and Shannon thought that this was probably due to the absence of Mayor Pilsudski. Down below there was the racket of tin plates being banged against barred doors, sign that some of the prisoners were not exactly complacent with their lot. Shannon went into Loop’s office and found a new man at Kronjager’s desk. This was the squat, flat-faced detective Shannon had first seen in the squad car with Kronjager, immediately after his arrival in Las Cruces. This man viewed Shannon without love. He said, “What the hell do you want?”

“Is that any way to talk to a prominent citizen?” Shannon reproved him. “Are you unaware of the power of the Press?”

The inner door opened and Chief of Police Floyd Loop looked out, saw Shannon and beckoned. “It’s about time.” He turned his eyes on Kronjager’s successor. “You hear from that party yet?”

The squat man shook his head, no. It developed that his name was Belasco. “He ain’t been seen since early last night.” Shannon wondered if they meant Pilsudski. He decided he wouldn’t ask. Following Loop inside he discovered Miss Frances McGowan ensconced in the most comfortable chair. A neat length of nylon hose gave the office a pleasantly informal air. Shannon looked suspiciously at Whitey Loop’s handsome mouth, expecting to find traces of lipstick there. Either his suspicions were unfounded or Loop had wiped it off. Shannon decided that maybe it was his own conscience troubling him. He said, “Well, this is quite a surprise!”

Miss McGowan regarded him intently. “Is it?”

“It certainly is. I thought you were writing copy for the Clarion.”

Loop sat at the desk. “As a matter of fact, I asked Miss McGowan to step over here for a moment.” He pushed a cigarette box toward Shannon. “Just what are your ideas for the next front page?”

Shannon thought about that for a moment. “Kronjager’s arrest would make a good head.”

“Probably,” Loop said. His cat eyes glowed. “Just the same, I don’t think we’ll use it.

“No?”

“No.”

“All right,” Shannon said amiably. “You and Miss McGowan figure it out.” He took off his hat and molded it between strong brown fingers. “Look, I’d like to see Mrs. Thorelsen for a minute.”

“Why?”

Shannon scowled. “Because I don’t want her thinking I’m a heel and leaving her flat.” He did not see fit to mention certain evidence that it might have been someone else who had shot Rose Machado. For that matter, the marked hundred-dollar bill would not be worth a damn in court. There were no witnesses that he had marked it, or that he had left it with the woman.

Loop’s chair creaked. “Where’s St. Cyr?”

“I don’t know,” Shannon said. “Probably stinko in some gutter.” He sighed. “Anyway, I couldn’t find him.”

The police chief took another tack. “You see Dawes tonight?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“What did you tell him?”

“To go to hell,” Shannon said angrily.

“A lot of good that will do,” Loop said just as angrily. He stood up. “Have you forgotten that he can put the heat on Lundy through Kronjager?”

Shannon looked at him. “I told you what you could do with Kronjager.”

“In front of a witness, by God!”

Frances yawned. “Not the luscious Carmen, I trust?”

Shannon flushed. “At least I was chaperoned!” He scowled at Loop. “Let her talk her head off if she wants to. If you’re as smart as I think you are it won’t prove anything.” He became indignant. “Anyway, what did you expect me to do? The guy offered to sell you out, didn’t he? If I hadn’t nailed him he’d have gone to somebody else.”

“There’s always that,” Loop admitted. His golden eyes probed Shannon’s face. “I guess we can fix things up in spite of Dawes.”

“Sure we can.” Shannon leered. “A prosecutor is no better than the jury he selects, and between you and me we can see that no matter who he selects—”

Loop laughed. “That will do to tell Kronjager, anyway. It will keep him quiet till something can be arranged.”

“Sure.”

“There’s one other thing,” Loop said. “What are you going to tell the men tonight?”

“Just enough so that they’ll know we’re on their side.”

“Against the operators?”

“Not necessarily,” Shannon said. He smiled. “We’ll just want their help in clearing up the whole mess, that’s all.” He helped himself to a cigarette, pretending that he didn’t see the look in Fran’s eyes. “When we’re solid with them we can put the squeeze on MacLeish and Rygaard or not, just as we choose.” He flicked the burned match at a wastebasket. “Mueller was a piker.”

Loop’s eyes narrowed. “What about the guy coming in to take Mueller’s place?”

“He’ll be reasonable,” Shannon said. He winked. “He’ll be reasonable or else.”

There was silence in the office for a little while. Finally Loop said in a curious voice, “Kronjager saw right about one thing anyway. You’ve got more curves than a pretzel.”

Frances, for once, seemed incapable of saying anything.

Shannon turned toward the door. “How about seeing Mrs. Thorelsen?”

“All right,” Loop said. He picked up the phone and presently Shannon was following an unshaven turnkey down the stairs and along the corridor between two rows of steel-barred cells. He did not see Kronjager.

They came to a blank steel door painted to resemble wood, and the turnkey unlocked this and stood aside while Shannon went in. Wynn Thorelsen was lying face down on the couch. She was still in black. The room was fair sized and comfortably furnished. Apparently St. Cyr had been able to persuade someone that his client deserved special consideration. “Hello, Wynn.” For a moment Shannon wished he had not come. He was still a little angry with Wynn.

At sound of his voice she rolled on her side and looked at him. The mascara on her eyelashes was smudged a little, as though she might have been crying. Her hair was burnished copper. “What do you want?”

“Just to talk to you a while.” He came and sat on the edge of the couch, his eyes darkening as she moved to avoid his touch. “I’m sorry if it looked as though I’d run out on you. I had some things to do.”

“I know,” she said dully. “You had some things to do before, too. So you had Vogel come up.” She wiped her mouth on the back of a hand. “This time you sent St. Cyr.”

“Wynn.” There was that in his tone that forced her to look at him. “Let’s not fight about things, hon. One way or another I’ll get you out of here.”

Her laugh was bitter. “With a year?”

“If you killed her,” he said. After a while he said, “Did you?”

Gray eyes held sudden shadows and she put her hand to her throat, as though expecting the noose to be already there. “No.”

Shannon sighed. “And you were just riding around all that time?”

“Yes.” Again she laughed. It had a dry sound to it, like the rustle of dead leaves. “I don’t expect you to believe me.”

“It doesn’t make any particular difference whether I do or not,” he said in a flat voice. “I’m trying to help you.” He stood up and began pacing the floor. “Christ Almighty, I’ve wound this town up like a clock spring, just trying to help you.” He set fire to a cigarette and stuck it between her lips. “We’re going to pretend somebody stole the gun.” He laughed a little. “Maybe they did, at that.” Narrowed eyes watched her draw smoke deep into her lungs. “The point is, who?”

“Rygaard.”

He took off his hat and ran brown fingers through his dark hair. “Why?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? To shut her up about Bill.”

“And why’d he kill Bill?”

She closed her eyes. “Oh God, I don’t know, Shan.”

He cursed soundlessly for a moment. “I’ve got something that may help you—at least it tends to support your theory.” He told her about the hundred-dollar bill. “The trouble is, I can’t see Rygaard lifting it any more than I could you. To a guy like him a C-note wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

“But if he didn’t know it was marked?”

He shrugged. “It’s a possibility.” He cupped a hand beneath her chin and stared deep into gray eyes that were like shadowy pools. “What’s between you and Giles MacLeish, hon?”

She shivered, but she did not avoid his eyes. “Nothing.”

“That’s what MacLeish said,” Shannon nodded. He knit his brows over something that was too deep for even his devious mind. “I’m trying to tie this kill, and the one before it, in with the feud between MacLeish and Rygaard.” He looked at her. “Did it ever occur to you that MacLeish might have done both jobs and tried to make it look like Rygaard?”

She thought about that for a long moment. “It could be,” she finally decided. “One is as bad as the other, and if—” She broke off as though afraid to go on.

“If what?”

“If Bill had found something inimical to MacLeish and threatened to expose him—” Her shoulders drooped. “Oh, Shan, I’m so tired!”

He nodded. “I’ll bet you are, hon.” He looked around the room. “Comfortable? Is there a matron on duty?”

“I’m all right, Shan.” She got up and touched his arm. “I’m sorry if I was nasty to you. I might have known you wouldn’t let me down.”

“No,” he said. “No, I won’t let you down, Wynn.” He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost eight o’clock. “Well, I’ll be running along, then.” He gave her a smile that he hoped had more cheer in it than he felt. “If I see St. Cyr I’ll send him around to keep you company.”

“Good night,” she said. Then, very low, “And thanks a lot, Shan.”

“Forget it.”

The turnkey let him out and he went back along the noisy steel-barred corridor. This time he saw Kronjager. The big guy was standing with his bloated face pressed close to the bars, waiting for him. “You son of a bitch.”

Shannon’s breath came a little unevenly. “I’m going to tell you something for your own good, Lew. You took a shot at me and I shouldn’t do it, but I’m going to.” With one eye on the turnkey he leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Loop’s planning to cross you up, pal. Anybody offers you a chance to escape, don’t take it.” He nodded pleasantly and continued on his way.

In the office of Local 197 there were eleven men waiting for him. He did not know why there should be eleven, rather than nine, or twelve, but then he didn’t know the slightest thing about grievance committees in general. This one looked about what he had expected. Some of them were dressed up, almost painfully dressed up, and three or four could just have come down off the hill. “Hello, boys.”

A guy almost as big as Pilsudski shuffled his feet. “You Shannon?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“Well, what’s this all about?”

Shannon looked around the ring of faces. He saw as varied an assortment of nationalities as it was possible to find outside the conference table of the now defunct League of Nations. He climbed up on a bench, decided that this made him look too much like an orator and finally compromised by sitting down on the back of it. He did not take off his hat. “Aside from Mueller’s stealing some of you blind, what’s your biggest beef?”

Apparently the big guy had been appointed spokesman for the lot. He scowled. “So the operators give us ten grand if we get killed. So what the hell good is that?” He looked around. “You can’t spend it if you’re dead, can you?” Everybody agreed that you couldn’t spend it if you were dead. With the heel of his shoe Shannon drew patterns on the scarred bench seat. “You guys know you’re taking chances every time you go underground. That’s why the insurance is so big.” He looked at his hands. “Aren’t the usual safety precautions taken?”

There was a rumble from the men. “They’re within the law,” the big guy said. He laughed scornfully. “The regulations don’t include having eyes in the back of your head and having to watch the guys that hire you.”

“You can always quit,” Shannon said.

“And that’s what we’ve decided to do,” the man said. “We’re calling a general strike until the operators quit using us like dummies in a fight where we can’t win.”

Shannon decided that he would be doing Mr. O’Hara, in San Francisco, and maybe the unions as a whole, a disservice if he permitted the men to walk out now. He considered his words carefully. “I’m not saying the operators aren’t responsible. I’m not saying they are, either. All I can tell you is that neither Rygaard nor MacLeish could handle these accidents all by themselves.” He looked the big guy straight in the eye. “I’ll give you six-two-and-even that some of your own pals have been hired to do the actual dirty work.”

“So what?”

“So you’ve got to find ’em,” Shannon said. His mouth drooped. “Look, I’m not a professional business agent. And about copper mining I don’t know from nothing.” He pointed a finger. “But one thing I do know and that’s people. I know that wherever you find men in big bunches you’ll find some that can be bought.” He stood up. “It’s up to you to catch these bastards in your own ranks. They’ll lead us to the guys that hired them.”

Eleven men held a hasty conference. Finally the big guy once more addressed Shannon. “We can’t do that if we call a walkout.”

“No.” He lit a cigarette and threw the match on the floor, which he considered a nice touch. “People call guys in my line a private eye. I want you to tip the men off that from now on they’re all private eyes.” Twin streams of smoke issued gustily from his nostrils. “Twenty thousand pairs of eyes ought to pick up something—if they know what they’re looking for.” He squinted a little. “That doesn’t just mean while you’re on shift, either. Look for guys that are spending more dough than they have any right to have on eight to twelve bucks a day.” Thumb and forefinger snapped the butt at a spittoon. “And when you find ’em, bring ’em to me.” He had their interest now, full and complete. He breathed a little sigh of relief. “Maybe a little publicity in the Clarion will stir things up for you. At least it ought to keep any more of you from getting killed.”

A guy who talked like Pilsudski thrust his way forward. “Me, I t’ink you are smart like anything, falla. By me it’s hokay.” He scowled at his fellows. “Hokay by you?”

It was okay by them. Presently they went away and Shannon went into the other office and called Mr. Salter, editor and sometime publisher of the Clarion. “Look, here’s what I want you to do.” He outlined what he wanted done. “I don’t give a goddam what you think, or what anybody else thinks. Who owns that lousy sheet, anyway?”

“You do,” Salter admitted. And then, maliciously, “And believe me, pal, after this next issue she’s all yours.”

Shannon scowled. “I’ll sell it to the union.”

Salter thought this was very funny. “What for, scrap iron?” He made a peculiarly unlovely sound with his lips. “If there’s anything to all this stink you’re raising, somebody’s going to toss a case of 60%, with detonators, right smack through our front windows.”

“I only hope you’re there to see it,” Shannon told him kindly. He hung up and was on the point of leaving the office for the night when the telephone rang. Mamie Costello’s voice came over the wire, a little breathless, as though it had run all the way from Los Angeles. “Shan? I think I’ve got something!”

“You always did think you had something.”

“Fool!” Mamie was indignant. “Look, you wanted me to check recent stock purchases in the Resurrection, presumably by a man named Rygaard, and I told you there weren’t any.”

Shannon’s heavy brows drew down. “So now you’ve found out different?”

“So now,” Mamie announced triumphantly, “I put reverse English on that order and looked up who was buying Las Cruces Consolidated.” She paused to give weight to the coming disclosure. “And who do you think it was?”

“I’m holding my breath,” Shannon said.

“A guy named Pilsudski!”

Involuntarily Shannon closed his eyes. “That son of a bitch,” he said, over and over again. “That innocent, dumb-looking son of a bitch!” After a while he thought of something. “Look, how were these orders placed?”

“I thought of that too,” Mamie assured him loftily. “The couple of brokers I talked to got their instructions, and the money, by mail. The certificates went to a box number in Phoenix.” She gave Shannon the number. “Though that probably won’t do you much good,” she admitted. “Anybody can hire somebody else to rent a box for them.”

Shannon swore. Somehow he could not believe that Pilsudski would have gone to all that trouble; the guy simply wasn’t smart enough. He toyed with the idea that maybe it was somebody else, using Pilsudski’s name. Somebody, say, like Giles MacLeish, who appeared to want Las Cruces Consolidated, or at least to wreck it, more than anyone he could think of at the moment. He quit swearing long enough to give Mamie a grudging, long-distance pat on the head for her acumen. “Okay, so you’re smart. Did I ever say you weren’t?” He had what he hoped was a brilliant thought. “Scout around some more, hon. Maybe somebody talked to this guy on the phone. If he did, find out what kind of a voice he had.”

“What kind of a voice has Pilsudski got?”

Shannon sighed. “About what you’d expect of a guy with that kind of name.” He attempted a rough version of Pilsudski’s accent, but Mamie’s raucous laughter discouraged him. “All right, but have photostats made of the letters anyway.” He made a bitter mouth. “Personally, I don’t think the guy can write.” He disconnected and sat there a moment, hat down over his eyes, unhappy at the thought of how Pilsudski had fooled him. He had rather liked Pilsudski. Presently he took out his gun, looked at it, put it back in his pocket, got up and locked the office and went around to the garage where that morning he had rented a car. He drove out to the abandoned Dos Pesos, hoping he would not have to kill Pilsudski before he could make him talk; hoping too that Pilsudski would not kill him. The memory of Pilsudski’s hands on his throat was still unpleasantly fresh. It was with him when he parked the car, without lights, in the rutted, weed-grown road and went quietly and very carefully toward the heavily timbered door. He need not have worried. Pilsudski wasn’t there any more. The Dos Pesos shaft was empty.

Chapter 26

MAMIE COSTELLO’S second call caught Shannon just after his return to the Navarro. He took it in the phone booth in the lobby. “Shan, did you send Vogel down to Phoenix?”

Little prickles of apprehension stirred the hair at Shannon’s nape. “Yes, why?”

“Well, something’s happened to him,” Mamie said. “The Phoenix cops called Minna, and Minna called me. She’s about crazy.”

“So am I!” Shannon yelled. “What do you mean, something’s happened to him? What is this, a guessing game?”

“Don’t shout,” Mamie said. “I can hear you perfectly.” She lowered her own voice. “The cops think it’s an ordinary hit-and-run. They found him spread out all over a street.”

Shannon’s stomach tried to crawl up into his throat. Probably because of this his voice had a choked sound. “Dead?”

“Not yet,” Mamie said. “There’s a broken leg and an arm  and half a dozen ribs.” She began to whimper a little then, snuffling like a very small puppy. “It’s—it’s the fractured skull they’re worried about. They had to operate and they wouldn’t do it without Minna’s permission.” She blew her nose loudly, angrily. “You let that little guy die, Shan, and I’ll never speak to you again!”

Shannon was staring at the blank wall of the booth with eyes that didn’t see it. For the moment he had forgotten Pilsudski, and all he could think of was a small crushed body lying in some police hospital, and a girl with red lips and green eyes, a girl who had had to go down to Phoenix that evening and who drove a big red Cadillac like a fiend. “All right,” he said presently, “I’ll take care of it.” He remembered Vogel’s wife Minna. “You’d better go over and stay with her, hon. I’ll call you back.” He hung up and with stiff, oddly clumsy fingers fumbled some loose change out of his pocket and called the Phoenix police. It took him all of five minutes to find out where Vogel was, and that the operation had already been performed. A guy who said he was a police surgeon scorned the idea that Vogel might talk. “He’s lucky to be breathing.”

“You keep him breathing,” Shannon said in a tight voice. “If you need any help, get it. I’ll be down there in an hour or so and I’m expecting to find him alive.” Ten minutes later he was on the road, black macadam unwinding under the wheels of the rented car with painful slowness, though the speedometer said 60. He wished he had the MacLeish Cadillac. Then he decided that he had better stop thinking about that Cadillac. He wondered what Vogel had found that had made this attack so necessary to someone. The theory that it was an ordinary hit-and-run accident was as silly as the one that good always triumphed, though the Phoenix cops could not be expected to know that. They couldn’t, unless Dutch Vogel had had something in his pockets to show what he had been working on. Shannon’s foot trod down on the accelerator. On the down grades he found that he could make 70. It occurred to him that he was taking the curves almost as recklessly as Carmen MacLeish, and that he wouldn’t be able to do Vogel, or anybody else, any good if he went over the edge. He began to be conscious of the cars which occasionally passed him, and of the night. There was no moon. The mountains pressed down upon the road, squeezing it to a thin black ribbon. A cold wind burned his ears and there was the smell of rain in the air. After a while a few drops fell and were flattened against the windshield. He hoped the tires were good.

When he came to the place where the bus had almost taken its fatal dive he saw that they had repaired the shattered guard rail. It seemed like a long time ago, that first accident, years and years ago. He cursed a little, remembering that it had not been an accident, but a deliberate attempt at mass murder. Curiously, thinking about it in retrospect, it occurred to him that it might be totally unrelated to the other two attacks on his life. He had accounted for those. He had not explained the first one. He began to think very hard about Jan Pilsudski.

It lacked a few minutes of eleven when the mountains finally spewed him out onto the desert at Apache Junction. Between Mesa and Tempe, traffic thickened considerably and he had to slow down to a modest fifty. From Tempe on in he had a broader highway, but there were even more cars. Chafing at the drag, and at speed cops whom he hated as though he had never been one, he practically crawled into Phoenix and at last came to Police Headquarters and the adjoining receiving hospital.

A uniformed cop referred him to the desk inside, where an intern referred him to the surgeon with whom he had talked on the phone. The surgeon was a tall, sallow man who looked as though he needed the Arizona climate. He said his name was De Grasse. He and Shannon went into a narrow white room which smelled sickeningly of ether and antiseptic. Vogel’s round body looked curiously flat under the covers on the bed. His head was a mass of bandages. Shannon’s tonsils were two clenched fists in his throat as he went over and touched one of the pillows. He had a foolish impulse to get down on his knees. He restrained it.

After a time he became conscious that two other guys had come into the room. Experience told him that they were dicks and that they were going to ask a lot of questions. It occurred to him that they must know Vogel was a private eye, and that he was too. He looked at the surgeon. “Well?”

“He’ll live,” De Grasse said. His sallow face reflected professional pride. “For a man who has one foot in the grave himself I did pretty goddam good.” He looked at the two dicks. “Didn’t I?”

“You sure did,” the fat one said. He had a cast in one eye, making it very difficult to tell just where he was looking. The other man was small and hard as nails. His face was the color of saddle leather and looked just about as durable. Eyes as sharp and bright as jet beads looked Shannon over from head to foot. “What was he working on, shamus?”

“He wasn’t working,” Shannon said carefully. “He was on his way home.” He drew a deep breath. “I sent him there.”

“Without baggage?”

Shannon shrugged. “I didn’t see him actually leave town. You try the S.P. station? The bus and air terminals?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t find anything?”

“We found he didn’t have anything,” the small man said. His lips were the thinnest, most uncompromising lips Shannon had ever seen. “He didn’t have anything even on the bus coming down from Las Cruces.”

Shannon was puzzled. “That’s funny.”

“That’s what we thought.”

Shannon frowned at him. “I know the whole routine, chum. I used to be a cop myself.” He took off his hat and massaged the red line left on his forehead by the brim. “So what makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”

The fat one answered that. Besides the cast in his eye he had a terrific wheeze. “His skull. We thought maybe a sap might have done it.” The exertion of talking made him pant a little. “Not that he wasn’t hit by a car, but that could have been afterward.”

“I see,” Shannon said. He watched the bedcovers rise and fall with Vogel’s slow breathing. Vogel’s mouth was like a child’s. “Robbery?”

“We can’t tell unless we know what he had on him to begin with.” Small-and-tough looked intently at Shannon’s face. “His wallet had about thirty bucks in it.”

“Then it wasn’t robbery,” Shannon said.

A brief silence ensued. Finally the small man asked the question Shannon had been waiting for. “Why’d you send him home?”

“Because he wasn’t any good to me up there.” He became earnest. “If you know anything about Las Cruces you know how tough the cops are. They don’t like private dicks in their midst. One of them recognized Vogel and he couldn’t work.”

“And what was he supposed to be working on?”

Shannon moved his shoulders impatiently. “A guy named Johann Smith. His wife wanted us to locate him.”

The fat one let out his breath. “Well, for God’s sake!”

“Fact,” Shannon assured them. He spread his hands. “So you see it’s just one of those things. Some guy hit him and scrammed the hell out. You might look for some dented fenders or something.”

“We’re already doing that.”

“Good.” Shannon touched the surgeon’s arm. “You’re sure he’s going to be okay?”

“As sure as we can be of anything.”

“When will he be able to talk?”

De Grasse shook his head. “That’s something else again, my friend. Maybe twelve hours, maybe not for a couple of days.” He pursed his lips. “But certainly not under twelve hours.”

“Then I guess there’s no use my sticking around here,” Shannon said. He took out his billfold. “Anything he needs, special nurses, anything, I want him to have.”

“We’ll send you a bill,” De Grasse said.

The fat detective put his good eye on Shannon’s nose. “What’s your hurry?”

“I’ve got to call his wife.” Shannon knew better than to ask to see the contents of Vogel’s pockets. Besides, he was pretty sure there was nothing of importance in them. If there had been, these two cops would have found it. They weren’t dumb. He laid a hand, very gently, on Vogel’s slow-moving chest. “See you around, Dutch.” He was suddenly embarrassed under the eyes of the three men watching him. They couldn’t be expected to understand that the Irish, especially the Black Irish, can sometimes talk to people through a thicker wall than unconsciousness. He yanked his hat on and thrust out a chin at Leatherface. “Okay for me to go?”

“It’s all right with me,” the small man said. He pretended to be greatly interested in the chart at the foot of the bed. “Stopping in Phoenix?”

“The Desert Inn,” Shannon said.

But when he was once more outside he did not go directly to the hotel, nor did he call Minna Vogel. He spent five valuable minutes losing the tail the cops had waiting for him in a Chevrolet coupe that looked as though it belonged to a high school student.

It had begun to rain in earnest now. Water sluiced down off the top and over the windshield as though someone were up there with a pump. The wipers pushed doggedly at it, but between the upswing and the down it was like looking through crumpled cellophane. Shannon dodged in and out of alternately lighted and dark streets till the Chevrolet’s headlights no longer showed in his rear-vision mirror. He thought angrily that cops were all alike; they kept trying to stick their noses in other people’s business. He returned by a roundabout route to Van Buren Street and finally found a drug store that was still open and had a phone booth. Somebody opened the spigot as he crossed the sidewalk, drenching him, and altogether he was not in a happy frame of mind when presently he hung up on Minna Vogel’s wailing. He looked in the phone book for the address of the Polish Relief Society, couldn’t find it and finally had to wake somebody up at the local Chamber of Commerce. The Polish Relief Society didn’t have a telephone. They didn’t have any Dun & Bradstreet rating, either. All they had, according to Shannon’s informant, was an address in a walk-up office building over on Fillmore Street. “We don’t know very much about them,” the man said.

“I can see that,” Shannon said. He hung up and again braved the elements and drove over to Fillmore Street. From under the awning of a clothing store, long since closed for the night, he surveyed the rest of the block. All the other stores were closed too, and his was the only parked car. He went into a stygian hallway that smelled like a dentist’s office, fumbled around till he found a light switch, flicked it on and went up rubber-treaded stairs. At the top he found another switch and turned the lights off. It was obvious that if there was anybody else in the building they liked to sit in the dark. Shannon wasn’t particularly worried about the other tenants anyway. He just didn’t want the beat cop, or some private patrol, getting curious. A couple of matches guided him down the hall to the ground-glass door of the Polish Relief Society, and he stood there a minute, breathing gently, listening for some sound from the street out front. There wasn’t any. Beyond the door it was a bit lighter than here in the hall, indicating that there was a window opposite. Another match showed him a Yale lock which looked stubborn, and besides he was in a hurry. He took out his gun, wrapped his hat around it and smacked the glass opposite the knob. The crash was like a sound-effect man’s idea of somebody falling downstairs with a tubful of China. Perhaps a square foot of glass fell out. Shannon held his breath for what seemed like an hour before he finally reached through and unlocked the door. He could just as well have saved himself all the trouble. The furniture was still there, but the Polish Relief Society had moved out. There wasn’t even a second-hand envelope to show that it had ever existed.

Chapter 27

UNDER THE IMPETUS of two front pages, the like of which had never before appeared in Las Cruces, the Clarion was booming. Salter regarded Shannon with a jaundiced eye.

“Twenty-five thousand copies, by God, and I let you have it for a lousy five grand!”

“That’s what you get for not being a crusader,” Shannon said. He looked virtuous. “Of the people, for the people and by the people.” He had not had time to change his clothes yet and he stank of wet wool. He looked covetously at the bottle of rye on Salter’s desk. “Is that in the inventory?”

“No.”

“I’ll accept your kind invitation anyway,” Shannon said. He reached over and got the bottle and poured a tumbler half full. He shuddered. “Christ!”

Salter couldn’t get over the phenomenal increase in the Clarion’s circulation. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said presently. “I’ll give you your dough back and a $500 profit.”

“Hell,” Shannon said, “you must have made that much out of the two extras.” He watched anguish and avarice fight it out on Salter’s face. “You expect me to come in here and teach you the newspaper business for marbles?”

“But you said you might give it to the help when you were through with it!”

“Maybe I’m not through with it,” Shannon said. He was, but that was strictly his own affair. He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to Salter that after his, Shannon’s, departure, the Clarionwould probably fall right back into its normal slough of despond. He became magnanimous. “Look, give me a thousand over and above the five and I’ll sign the lousy sheet back to you right now.”

“Want a pint of blood, too?”

Shannon turned toward the door with the air of a very busy man. “Well, I’ll sell it to the union, then.”

“Wait a minute,” Salter said. He answered the telephone. From the one side of the conversation he could hear Shannon gathered that it was some potential advertiser wanting to buy space. He wondered if perhaps he wasn’t making a mistake in selling out so cheaply. Salter hung up with a resigned expression. “All right, you chiseler.” He got out his check book.

“Make it in two checks,” Shannon said. “Either that or give me the thousand in cash.”

Salter paused in his writing. “Why?”

“Income tax,” Shannon said. He scowled. “I’ve been trying to beat those bastards for years.”

It was just after he had signed away all right and title to that certain property commonly known as the Clarion, a daily newspaper published in Las Cruces, Arizona, that he saw George St. Cyr peering in at him from the street. He waved.

St. Cyr came in. “Hello, there.” He was not as drunk as Shannon had seen him. He had a copy of the Clarion and his brown spaniel eyes were faintly disapproving. “I’m afraid the operators aren’t going to like you, old fellow.”

“The hell with them,” Shannon said loftily. He lowered his voice. “You see Mrs. Thorelsen tonight?”

“I was just on my way over there,” St. Cyr said.

“Tell her I’ve thought of a way to spring her, will you?”

St. Cyr regarded him. “Legally?”

Shannon looked mysterious. “Maybe not, but as soon as I’m sure it wasn’t her I can frame the guy.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet,” Shannon said. “Probably MacLeish.” He winked. “For that matter, her gun could have been stolen by either one, MacLeish or Rygaard.” He thought of something. “Pilsudski’s gone.”

St. Cyr was startled. “No!”

“Fact,” Shannon said. He sighed heavily. “That’s the way with people. You trust ’em, you try to give ’em a break and they run out on you.” He yanked at his rain-sodden hat. “No reason for it, either, unless he was the one instigating all these accidents. All I hid him out for was because the men might not have understood. They’d have lynched him.”

Salter was an interested eavesdropper. “Now they’ll only lynch the operators.”

“I ought to slap your big ears down,” Shannon told him. He drew St. Cyr aside. “Mind telling me why you divorced Carmen?”

Something that could have been pain made the tall man’s eyes more like a spaniel’s than ever. “I’d rather not discuss that, Shannon.”

“Oh, a gentleman!”

St. Cyr looked at him. “Am I to understand that she is implicated?”

Shannon told him about Vogel. “Dutch had two things to look up—Carmen and the Polish Relief Society. I know that Carmen was going down to Phoenix. She told me so herself.”

“But it could have been Pilsudski!”

Shannon’s mouth made a firm hard line. “We’ll know as soon as Vogel’s able to talk.” He clapped St. Cyr on the shoulder. “Well, maybe after a while you and I can go on that bender we promised ourselves.” He went out into the sounds and smells of Front Street.

The rain had resolved itself into a steady drizzle, and a hundred neon signs tinted it all the colors of a rainbow. Small depressions in the pavement held pools of water that danced and shimmered in the light, and exploded under the splashing feet of pedestrians. Automobile traffic was scant, though there were still plenty of parked cars at the curbs. It was one o’clock in the morning.

Whitey Loop and the dick named Belasco came out of the Copper Pig, Belasco in the black rubber slicker, Loop in a gabardine waterproof that had probably come from Brooks Brothers. Shannon thought dispiritedly that even rain couldn’t affect the handsome chief of police. Loop spotted him and crossed over. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Phoenix.”

“Why?”

Shannon made a bitter mouth. “Some bastard in a two-ton truck had to pick tonight of all nights to run over a guy.” He sighed. “The guy was Vogel.”

Loop’s cat eyes got an eager light in them. “Kill him?”

“Not quite,” Shannon said. He appeared to be interested in his hands, which could have stood a good scrubbing at that. He’d had to change a tire on the way back. “Some of these squareheads are tougher than they look.”

There was a scarcely discernible edge to Loop’s smooth voice now. “Where is he?”

“The cops have got him,” Shannon said.

If Loop was disappointed he didn’t permit it to show. He dismissed Vogel with a shrug. “MacLeish and Rygaard are looking for you with fire in their eyes.” He too had a copy of the Clarion.“You seem to have scared the pants off of them.”

Shannon nodded. “Twenty thousand pairs of eyes would make anybody nervous.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, pal. They turn up anything, they’ve got instructions to bring the guys to me first.”

“That reminds me,” Loop said. “Your successor has arrived.” His mouth twisted. “Credentials and everything. He’s up in the office now, going over Mueller’s books.”

Shannon was unimpressed. “What kind of a guy is he?”

“Honest,” Loop said. You gathered from his tone that there was no worse indictment. “Honest and tough.”

Shannon clucked his disapproval. After a while he said, “Well, you and I are tough, anyway.” He took off his hat and slapped the accumulated rain from it. “I’d better go up and see this guy, hunh?”

For the first time Loop let irritation show through the veneer. “I wish to Christ I knew what you were doing—or at least that you knew what you were doing.”

Shannon was surprised. “Why, we’re cleaning up the town, that’s all.” He leered. “We’re cleaning up all the loose ends, so we won’t have any competition.” He tossed the chief a bone. “We’ll be needing a new mayor, pal. Pilsudski’s gone.”

Loop licked his lips. “How do you know?”

“I helped him get away,” Shannon said. He was modestly pleased with himself. “Any little loose ends we can’t pin on anybody else we can stick Pilsudski with.”

“Jesus!” You could see that Pilsudski’s absence opened up wide new vistas. “By God, Shannon, I never thought I’d admit it, but I’m glad you—” He broke off at a sudden thought. “Listen, Irish, you wouldn’t be trying any of those famous curves on me, would you?” He patted the slight bulge beneath his left lapel. “Because if I find you are—if I even get the idea you are—”

Shannon’s stomach did a mild flip-flop. He hadn’t forgotten that Floyd Loop had shot a gun out of his, Shannon’s, hand without even looking. He decided to be offended. He was cut to the quick. “I can pull out now,” he offered. “You figure you can’t trust me. I’ll pull out and leave you with it.”

Loop’s finely chiseled nostrils flared a little. “Never mind, just watch your step, that’s all.” He turned and recrossed the street to where Belasco was still waiting for him.

Shannon went up to the office of Local 197, found nobody in the anteroom and opened the communicating door between that and the private office. There was a man sitting at the desk, immersed in a mass of papers and going through all the motions of a certified public accountant. He looked like a middle-aged ex-pug. He glared at Shannon. “Well?”

“Not bad,” Shannon said. “On the other hand, not so good, either.” He closed the door and leaned his back against it. “I’m Shannon.”

The man stood up. “The hell you are!”

“Well, I am,” Shannon said. He took out Salter’s check, the one for five thousand dollars. “I suppose Mueller told you I’d shaken him down for ten grand?”

“He mentioned it,” the man said grimly.

Shannon laid the check on the desk. “There’s half. The other half you’ll have to collect from the chief of police.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’d suggest that you wait till, say, tomorrow afternoon before you go after it.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t you’ll never get it.” Shannon drew a deep breath. “Besides, you’ll get me killed.”

“Sit down,” the man said. It developed that his name was Clancy, and after a while he and Shannon decided that they almost liked each other. Clancy even opened a drawer and got out a bottle of Irish whiskey. He filled the glasses and they drank a long life—in prison—to Max Mueller. Clancy held the bottle to the light and squinted one eye at it. “It’s things like this that give the unions a bad name.”

“Maybe we can give the operators a bad name too,” Shannon said. The Irish whiskey on top of the rye was making him philosophical. “Anyway, they’re going to think a long time before they try any more blitzkriegs.” He looked suggestively at his empty glass. “The men bring in any suspects yet?”

Clancy shook his head. “No.”

“Too early,” Shannon said. He permitted his glass to be replenished. Perhaps five minutes went by before it occurred to him that he might precipitate matters by calling Wolfgang Rygaard and asking him what the hell he meant by stealing that hundred-dollar bill from Rose Machado. He decided he would wait a while. He would call Frances instead, using Vogel’s accident as an excuse. He felt that it would be comforting to talk to Frances. She was really a very nice gal. She was a swell gal, by God. When it became apparent that Mr. Clancy was not going to offer him any more liquor he pulled the phone to him and gave the number of the country club. “Miss McGowan come in yet?”

“Yes,” the steward said, “she is in, but I don’t think she wishes to be disturbed. I heard her typewriter going only a few moments ago.”

Shannon identified himself. “You go and disturb her anyway,” he directed. “Tell her I’ve got a very important message.” Waiting, he eyed Clancy with a kind of remote dignity. “For five thousand bucks I could have bought a carload of the best Irish in the world.”

“You can’t even handle the load you’ve got,” Clancy said. He spilled a bottle of ink on the ledger. “Neither can I, by God!”

The steward came back. He sounded agitated. “Really, I can’t understand it,” he said, “Miss McGowan seems to have disappeared.”

Chapter 28

AN ELEVEN O’CLOCK SUN CAME in the windows and dyed the office a faint saffron. “This is the part I always hate,” Shannon said. “The part where you’ve got to explain everything you did.” He was looking pretty good, considering he’d been up all night and with the coming of the dawn had gone out and dug up part of a rocky hillside. He had on a freshly pressed blue suit, and his hair was combed nicely and his teeth were brushed till they shone. He felt like the interlocutor in a minstrel show, only the people facing him weren’t going to get up in a minute and start singing close harmony. Perhaps the most complacent of the lot was Chief of Police Whitey Loop, and he didn’t know what lay in store for him. The others, reading from left to right, included Giles MacLeish and his lovely daughter Carmen; the dick named Belasco who was keeping an eye on Wynn Thorelsen, next him; Mr. Wolfgang Rygaard, very cold and aloof; George St. Cyr, neatly brushed and smelling only faintly of Scotch; Mr. Kenesaw Dawes, the Lincolnesque prosecuting attorney of Corona County, in sober black and his somewhat nervous deputy, Mr. Alf Lundy. Against the door leaned a very fat man who had been introduced all around as the county coroner. His name was Dwiggins. “In a case of this kind,” Shannon said, “it’s always well to have the coroner on hand.” He smiled at Carmen MacLeish. “The coroner, you see, is the highest officer in a county. He can even arrest the sheriff.”

Floyd Loop shifted in his chair a little at that. His cat eyes moved from Shannon’s face to Dawes, saw nothing particularly menacing there and finally returned to Shannon. “All right, get on with it.”

Shannon nodded. “Just to get everything straight for the records, Mrs. Thorelsen sent for me to come up here and investigate the alleged suicide of her husband. She seemed to think he had been murdered and I now have come to believe she was right.” He sighed. “Unfortunately I can’t prove it. I don’t even know the exact motive.” His eyes encompassed the circle of faces. “Perhaps some of you can help me. Mr. MacLeish, for instance, or Mr. Rygaard.”

Giles MacLeish thrust his great head forward, like a bull about to charge. “What the hell do you mean by that?” MacLeish wasn’t liking Shannon very much this morning, but then nobody else was either. “If you think I killed him, why don’t you come right out and say so?”

Rygaard said nothing at all. Rygaard would have made a good poker player. His eyes were bleakly interested, nothing more.

Wynn Thorelsen drew a quivery little breath. “Shan, I—”

“You’ll be all right, hon,” Shannon said. He liked the way the sunlight lay in her coppery hair. He thought that redheads ought always to wear black. His mind returned to the business at hand. “What I mean to say was, all of this talk of feuds and such would sound more reasonable if I knew what one of you two guys has that the other wants.”

Rygaard’s face remained blank. MacLeish scowled. “You know damned well what I want. I want Las Cruces Consolidated to quit wrecking my operations, and the only way I can stop that is to chase Rygaard out of the territory.”

Rygaard looked at him with a kind of detached interest. “Try it,” he invited. Even without his two bodyguards he gave you the impression of being invincible. A bleak smile asked Shannon’s pardon for the interruption. “As you were saying?”

“Well,” Shannon said regretfully, “if you won’t help me we’ll have to skip that for a moment.” He shrugged. “Maybe you don’t know how valuable a property you’ve got.” He meant Rygaard. “Thorelsen did. That’s why he was killed.” Carmen MacLeish moved her chair a little closer to her father, almost protectively. Her green eyes watched Shannon as though he were someone she had never seen before. Wynn Thorelsen put the back of a hand to her mouth, held it there. Shadows lay in the hollows of her cheeks. Beside her, Belasco pretended to be cleaning his nails while looking at her legs. St. Cyr coughed apologetically. “Pardon me, old fellow, are you suggesting that Thorelsen knew something about Las Cruces Consolidated, and was killed for it, and you don’t know what it is?”

“That’s right,” Shannon said.

“But I don’t see—”

“It’s pretty complicated,” Shannon confessed. “I only know it’s so because somebody has been spending every dollar he could get his hands on to buy Consolidated stock.” He looked sleepy-eyed at Rygaard. “I hardly think he’d do that unless he had some inside information. Not on the recent earnings.”

“No,” Rygaard said softly. He stared at Giles MacLeish. “What name was this stock transferred to?”

“Pilsudski’s.”

Everybody looked terrifically surprised at that. “By the way,” MacLeish said, “just where is Pilsudski?”

“He’s dead,” Shannon said. In the silence that followed you could hear the rasp of Belasco’s knife on his fingernails. “I dug him up this morning,” Shannon said. He poked at a blister in the palm of his hand. “Out by an abandoned silver claim called the Dos Pesos.” He looked at St. Cyr. “It took two of us to get him out there. I knew you couldn’t have carried him very far alone.”

If he had wanted drama he got it. Carmen MacLeish gave a stifled cry. MacLeish cursed. Rygaard half rose from his chair as though intending moving in on his competitor, thought better of it and settled back. St. Cyr’s brown eyes got a hurt, bewildered look. “Really, old fellow—” He ran a shaking hand through his dead white hair and presently his bony knees gave way under him and he sat down. “I take it that I am being accused of murdering him?”

“Yes.” Shannon thought that if he wasn’t careful he was going to be very sick at his stomach. He had been even fonder of St. Cyr than he had of Pilsudski. “I’m sorry, George, but that’s the way it’s got to be. Not only Pilsudski, but Rose Machado, and before her, Thorelsen, and God knows how many others.” He turned and looked out the window. It was easier to talk that way. “There was the bus too, and Dutch Vogel down in Phoenix. I ought to hate your guts, but somehow I don’t. I even admire your nerve in sticking around when you must have known what was coming.”

St. Cyr’s voice came to him, mildly reproving. “You make me out rather a lively fellow, my friend. As an attorney would you mind if I suggested a bit of proof is in order?”

“All right,” Shannon said. He swung about and looked at Carmen MacLeish. “I’m sorry I can’t lay the background and still be a gentleman.” He laughed harshly. “Not that it matters. Nobody ever called me a gentleman anyway. I’m a cop.”

“Don’t mind me,” she said. Her proud head was straight up. “I know what I am and I guess everybody else in town does too.”

Her father touched her arm. “Carmen, please!”

She laughed, musically enough, but without mirth. “That’s right, if Carmen pleases!” Her green eyes met Shannon’s black ones. “I’ve always done what I wanted to. I’ve slept with whom I pleased, when I pleased. St. Cyr just got tired of being laughed at, that’s all.”

“Thank you,” Shannon said. Though he no longer wished to kiss her he admired her. He looked at the faces around him, faces that seemed to be suspended in midair, like ridiculous moons. “I think that’s why I sympathize with St. Cyr’s beginning this thing. If I had been in his shoes I’d have hated you too.”

Loop’s voice was irritable. “Come on, come on, don’t go maudlin on us, Shannon!”

No, Shannon thought, no, you son of a bitch, I won’t go maudlin on you. I’m going to hang you higher than a kite in a minute, but you’re too self-centered to see it. Aloud he said, “St. Cyr’s original objective was to hurt his ex-wife. The only way he could do that was through her father, possibly the one person in the world she really cared for.” He could not look at the white-haired man with the bony knees and the spaniel eyes. “So he capitalized on a hatred that already existed between her father and Wolfgang Rygaard. By pitting one against the other, by arranging accidents to both, at least to their operations, he built up a situation that was almost bound to result in MacLeish’s downfall and possibly his death.” He put a cigarette in his mouth but forgot to light it. “Oddly enough, I don’t think he felt any direct hatred for MacLeish himself.”

Someone struck a match. It turned out to be the squat detective Belasco. Everybody glared at him. Everybody but George St. Cyr, who seemed to be standing up better than most. Shannon thought dully that maybe there was something to the old School-tie-and-Carry-on business after all. He made his voice carefully impersonal, like once when he addressed a squad of rookies in police school. “It didn’t occur to him until later that he could make some money out of the thing. When it did he helped Pilsudski organize the Polish Relief Society.” He discovered the unlighted cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “I don’t know yet how he swindled Pilsudski out of the dough.”

“In fact,” St. Cyr said genially, “in fact, my friend, you don’t know anything.” Crane-like he peered at the others. “In books, detectives can guess, but not in a court of law.” He stretched his long tweed-clad legs out in front of him. “The defense rests.”

“I know you got it,” Shannon said stubbornly. “You got at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, as evidenced by your purchases of Las Cruces Consolidated stock.”

“In the name of Jan Pilsudski?”

“But in your handwriting,” Shannon said. He dragged smoke deep into his lungs. “And there was one telephone conversation remembered by a Los Angeles broker because Mr. Jan Pilsudski had such a very British accent.” Shannon gave Mamie Costello full credit for this research. “Of course, if you can explain where you got all that money—”

“I don’t think I shall try,” St. Cyr said. He got up and took a very small gun out of his sleeve. Floyd Loop shot it out of his hand. It was not as neat a shot as the one he had practised on Shannon, possibly because this was such a very small gun. St. Cyr looked down at a handful of bloody fingers and keeled over in a dead faint. There was a lot of excitement.

It turned out presently that Dwiggins, the coroner, was Dr. Dwiggins. He looked like a horse doctor, but he managed to put a tourniquet on St. Cyr’s arm and a fairly adequate temporary bandage on the smashed hand. Someone produced a bottle of brandy. St. Cyr opened his eyes and looked around. “Silly business, what?” He saw Shannon over by the windows. “Fainting, I mean.”

Wynn Thorelsen stood up. “Shan, could I please—?”

“Go home?” He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, hon. You see, you were in it with him.”

There was silence again, utter and absolute. Even the sombre Mr. Kenesaw Dawes looked surprised. Wynn just stood there, very straight and beautiful, and only the uneven rise and fall of her breasts showed the strain she was under. “You must be crazy,” she said after a while. “It was I who sent for you.” Her eyes took on a faint glaze as she stared from one to the other of those around her. “I’ve been in jail, accused of a murder I didn’t commit. I’ve—” She turned the wide gray eyes full on Shannon. “Shan, you can’t do this to me. Not after—”

His skin was suddenly an ugly yellow and stretched taut over his cheekbones. “You counted on me to get you out. You thought I’d do it even if I knew you were guilty.” Laughter that was as dry as dust rattled in his throat. “I’d have done it too, if it had only been the Machado woman—if you’d had an honest beef.” He deliberately turned his back. “Put the cuffs on her, Whitey.”

St. Cyr’s voice found a new strength. “Shannon.”

“Well?”

“I’ll make a deal with you. Turn her loose and I’ll tell you what Thorelsen found out.”

“I’ll have to see your hand first, George.” For the first time Shannon looked directly at the man. “Want to gamble?” He shrugged. “We could get it in time anyway.”

“Not till hell freezes over,” St. Cyr said. He looked at Rygaard and MacLeish, who seemed for the moment to have forgotten their differences. “You’ve been mining these mountains for twenty years and you still don’t know what’s there. Thorelsen himself just stumbled on it.”

Rygaard moistened his thin lips. “Mine or his?”

St. Cyr laughed. “Why do you think I’ve been buying Consolidated? I’d have wrecked you both, by Heaven, in order to get it all.”

Wynn Thorelsen spat at him. “And you wrecked yourself over a lousy hundred-dollar bill!” She swung on Shannon. “I’ll take a chance. It’s tin, that’s what it is, T-I-N!” She sneered at Rygaard. “If you’d pushed some of those tunnels another ten feet east you’d have found it.”

MacLeish sat down heavily. “God Almighty!”

Rygaard, who would benefit more than anybody, seemed curiously unaffected. “Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, MacLeish. It’s probably only a pocket.” He snapped his fingers. “They found some up in Canada too, remember?”

St. Cyr began to shake. The knowledge that even if he hadn’t got caught it might all have been for nothing did something to his mental processes. Deepsunk eyes burned into Shannon’s. “If you must have it, then, here’s the hole card.” He waved at Wynn Thorelsen. “This time it’s not only her. We both go free.”

“For what?”

“For Fran McGowan.”

“I’ve already got Fran McGowan,” Shannon said. “I followed you around half of last night till I finally figured out where you had her.” He saw that St. Cyr didn’t believe him. “Hon?”

Fran came out of the inner office. Aside from a very small lump on her head and a run in her stocking she looked quite normal. “Did you call me, darling?”

St. Cyr started to run and Loop and Belasco tackled him. It was Loop who cuffed him to Wynn Thorelsen, and it was while the chief’s hands were thus engaged that Shannon came up behind him and got his gun. It was really quite a simple thing, but Shannon didn’t let out his breath for ten seconds afterward. “Boy, what a relief!” He backed carefully away from the fury in Loop’s eyes. “Even without the gun you scare the pants off of me.”

Belasco looked stupidly from one to the other. “Hey, what goes on here?”

“Take him,” Loop said through tight lips. “Take the son of a bitch!”

Belasco considered it. He considered everything, including the gun in Shannon’s hand and the one under his own armpit. He decided the odds were too heavy. “I’m sorry, Whitey, I don’t think I’d better.”

Loop did a surprising thing then. The lines smoothed out of his face and he was once more his normal, handsome self. “I’m sorry I lost my temper, Shannon.” He smiled pleasantly at the whole group. “My apologies to everyone. After all, I’m only a gunsel, and a gunsel deprived of his gun feels kind of naked.” He looked at Shannon. “I suppose it was you that persuaded Kronjager not to escape?”

“Unh-hunh.”

“He seemed oddly stubborn about it when I offered him the chance.” With a faint shrug of his nicely tailored shoulders Loop turned to the desk. “Well, they can’t give me more than ten years. If you’re alive then I’ll look you up, Shannon.”

“Stand still,” Shannon said.

Loop did not stand still. He spread out flat on the desk, opened a drawer and snaked out a spare gun. Shannon shot it out of his hand. “I’ve always wondered if I could do that,” he said. He brought the gun back in a wide-armed sweep and knocked Belasco cold just as that gentleman was about to shoot him. Sweat ran down from under his nose and was salty on his lips. “Well, I guess that’s that.”

After a while, after a long, long while, when everybody but Dawes and Dwiggins and Frances had either walked out, or been dragged out, Shannon dropped heavily into Whitey Loop’s chair. “My God, am I tired!”

Mr. Dawes began pacing the floor, like Lincoln with his hands clasped behind his back. “I’d like to see you in that chair permanently, Mr. Shannon.”

“Unh-unh,” Shannon said, “no, thanks.” He looked out the windows at Front Street. “I appreciate the thought, though.” He remembered where he was. “Like hell I do.” His mouth twisted, “Tin! Why, Christ Almighty, I wouldn’t live here if the streets were paved with solid gold.”

Dr. Dwiggins, for a fat man, and a coroner at that, was about the least loquacious man Shannon had ever met. He seemed to be dividing his interest between the bump on Fran’s head and the run in her stocking, though it might have been something else in the stocking besides the run. Finally, aware that Dawes wanted his opinion, he said, “There’ll have to be some things cleared up, of course.” He helped himself to one of Whitey Loop’s cigars. “What decided you on St. Cyr?”

“My message,” Fran said promptly.

Shannon was outraged. “Your message!” He hauled a crumpled sheet of manuscript from his pocket and spread it out on the desk. “This will give you some idea of what I have to put up with.”

The page was covered with a lot of drivel about this and that, and about a heel allegedly named Shannon, and down almost at the very bottom it looked as though Miss McGowan had become uncertain about the correct spelling of a word. It said, “Censor, Censure, Censer.” Shannon sighed. “That’s supposed to mean St. Cyr. She left it in her typewriter when he knocked her cold.”

“Why, I think that was very smart,” Mr. Dawes said. Even Lincoln was coming under her spell. “You saw him come in then?”

“In the mirror,” Fran said. “I couldn’t scream, and even if I had he’d probably have shot me. He looked positively mad.” She herself did not look that way. She looked smug. “So I just went on typing, and I knew that if I actually put his name down he’d see it, so I thought of something that would sound like it, and there you are.” She giggled. “And my hero found me, finally, in a dungeon or something that smelled of horses.” She considered that. “Not very nice horses.”

Shannon glared at her. “Are you all through?”

“With dungeons that smell like horses? You bet I am.”

“You’re also undoing the good impression these gentlemen had of you,” Shannon said. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet on the desk. “Mrs. Thorelsen was what someone said about me, a curious combination of intelligence and stupidity. She got me up here because she knew me; she knew me well enough to know that when people started pushing me around I’d probably do a little shoving on my own. What she and St. Cyr hoped to accomplish, of course, was the ultimate extinction of both Rygaard and MacLeish. Neither Rygaard nor Las Cruces Consolidated could go on taking a beating indefinitely. His owners would either fire him or sell out at a loss, in which case St. Cyr might reasonably have expected control.” He lit a cigarette and allowed the smoke to dribble out of his mouth. “The Polish Relief Society worked two ways. Pilsudski—St. Cyr through Pilsudski—not only got ten grand for each man killed; Las Cruces Consolidated lost it.” He laughed a little, and closed his eyes. “Smart, hunh?”

Both Dawes and the coroner agreed that it was smart.

“Besides,” Shannon said, “St. Cyr was getting back at his ex-wife through her father. Every time something happened to Consolidated, Giles MacLeish got blamed for it, and Rygaard being the kind of guy he is, there were reprisals.” He leaned forward and crushed out the cigarette. “Mrs. Thorelsen kept pointing me at Rygaard as the murderer of her husband, and for a while I thought he might be. Same with MacLeish. When I turned to him, that was all right with her too.”

Dwiggins took his eyes off Fran’s legs. “In other words, she hoped that in one way or another you’d ignite an explosion.”

“I told you she knew me. She thought that at one time I had been in love with her. She counted on that as a last resort.”

“How?”

Shannon sat up straight. “On the face of it, the use of her own gun—Thorelsen’s—for the Rose Machado kill looks stupid, but here is how it works: I’m supposed to think that she’s being persecuted. Someone murders her husband; someone later steals her gun and kills a perjured witness and saddles the guilt on poor, defenseless Mrs. Thorelsen.” He made a bitter mouth. “So I’m supposed to go around shooting people till I get the right guy. And even if I think she did it herself I can frame somebody, can’t I? Why sure, I used to be in love with the gal!”

“Then she never considered her arrest a real danger?”

“Christ,” Shannon said, “even in books that’s supposed to be an asset. She was smart enough to know that maybe she’d overplayed her hand once or twice with me. If something like the attack on Vogel happened while she was safe in jail, that in itself would remove any possible suspicion.”

“But it didn’t,” Dawes said.

“The hell it didn’t,” Shannon said. “They’ve had me running around in circles for three days, largely because there were plenty of side angles, like Mueller and Loop and Kronjager and Rygaard and MacLeish. I kept telling myself it all tied in together but I couldn’t see how. All I could do was start taking things apart one at a time.” He thought about that for a little while. “Take the attack on the bus. For a time I thought that was meant for me.”

“But it wasn’t?”

Shannon shook his head. “Pilsudski, and indirectly either MacLeish or Rygaard. I think maybe Pilsudski was getting smart. Maybe he wasn’t qualified with forged letters of appreciation from some Polish ex-ambassador. And if the thing had come off, MacLeish had two excellent motives. Pilsudski had supplanted him as mayor; Pilsudski was running in labor that wasn’t worth a damn and forcing it, through the union, down MacLeish’s throat.” He sighed. “No, St. Cyr had no means of knowing I was on that bus. Mrs. Thorelsen probably told him I was coming; she could not have known when. And anyway, she wanted me here, alive and kicking.”

“I hate to mention this,” Dawes said. “You’ve done all you said you’d do, and more, but I feel that you are at least partially responsible for Pilsudski’s death.”

“I’m sorry,” Shannon said, and he really was. He felt like hell about Pilsudski. “I could hardly foresee what happened. I even told him to hold anybody that came around except our mutual attorney.” He got to his feet. “Let’s wind this up in a hurry. I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth.”

Mr. Dawes pursed his lips. “Now let’s see. Thorelsen discovered the tin while his superior, Rygaard, was away.” His Lincolnesque brows drew down. “Mrs. Thorelsen seems to have introduced an element of truth here. She told you he was very excited about something that night.”

Shannon kicked the wastebasket. “She had to offer some kind of a motive for his murder. If she couldn’t make me believe that he had been murdered I wouldn’t do anything.”

“In reality,” Dawes continued, “we infer that she and St. Cyr were already involved in a clandestine affair; that she thought her husband was a fool to announce his find to his employers, and that when he insisted, she and St. Cyr killed him.”

“And bribed the Machado woman to come forward with a phony suicide motive. At least it was supposed to look phony to me, so that when she too was killed there would be two murders chalked up against Rygaard.” Shannon took a breath. “I have no doubt that some framed evidence incriminating him would have appeared later.” He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and did a little pacing himself. “Funny about that marked bill. St. Cyr had been living practically in poverty, stinting himself so that he’d have just that much more with which to buy stock. I guess he couldn’t resist the hundred bucks lying right in front of him.”

“He didn’t know it was marked, of course.”

“Not until Mrs. Thorelsen told him,” Shannon said. He looked at Dwiggins. “On his return from Phoenix he ran into a front page of the Clarion that scared the hell out of him. With twenty thousand pairs of eyes really on the job it was a cinch that one or more of his hired saboteurs would be turned up.” He sighed. “Then he went across to the jail and learned from Wynn Thorelsen about the marked bill. He knew it could be traced back to him, as it has been—from Rygaard to a bartender who remembered where he got it.” He resisted the impulse to look smart. “When I left that information with her I still wasn’t sure. I just thought she was a possibility.” He described his baiting of a trap with the important-looking Manila envelope. “I gave plenty of people a chance to look at it, but nobody was interested. The only person who could actually know that it contained nothing of value was Wynn Thorelsen. She helped me prepare it.” His eyes grew dark and unhappy. “It occurred to me that her story of a previous robbery might be a lie. I didn’t know why.”

“Tell me one thing,” Dawes said. “Why didn’t he run?”

“Because Mrs. Thorelsen’s arrest turned out to be a boomerang. She was in jail, and I suppose that in his way he loved her. Besides, if he’d run out on her, she’d have talked and we’d have got him eventually anyway.” Shannon sat heavily in the chair at the desk. “No, his best bet was to spar for time and hope for a break. Vogel wasn’t going to be able to talk for ten or twelve hours at least. St. Cyr didn’t know I’d been investigating the stock angle, and anyway he thought he had that covered by a Pilsudski who would have vanished into thin air.” His mouth twisted. “As for me, I hadn’t any definite word from Mamie Costello until this morning. I couldn’t even look for Pilsudski’s grave until daylight.” He scowled at Frances. “Sure, I had him on a kidnap charge, but I didn’t have a motive for any of it.”

“And he didn’t know you’d found her!” Dwiggins marveled. He smiled paternally on Miss McGowan. “You were to be his anchor to windward, my dear, and, if I may say so, a very lovely anchor indeed.”

“Around my neck,” Shannon said churlishly.

Dawes looked at him with curious eyes. “It’s odd that it should have been St. Cyr who kept Pilsudski from strangling you.”

“What’s so funny about that?” Shannon demanded. “I saved St. Cyr from some dynamite, didn’t I?” He shook Fran’s hand from his shoulder. “I don’t care, damn it, I feel bad enough without being reminded of things.” He pointed a finger at the Lincolnesque nose. “And anyway, I tell you he needed me, and Pilsudski was becoming a nuisance. He was probably sore as hell because he busted the chair instead of Pilsudski’s head.”

It was at this moment that the outer door opened and Carmen MacLeish looked in. “Will you call me later, darling?”

Shannon scowled. “No.”

The door banged loudly and she was gone. Miss McGowan smiled. “That’s a nice man, darling. Mama will give you a gold star for that.”

Shannon glared at her. “You know what you can do with your gold stars.” And then, quite suddenly, he was pleased with the idea of her playing around with gold stars. Maybe, if he weren’t too tired, he’d even help her a little bit. He smiled for the benefit of Mr. Dawes and Coroner Dwiggins. “Anything else?”

They said no, they didn’t think there was anything else. They went out. Shannon was on the point of seizing Miss McGowan in his arms when the telephone rang. He looked at it suspiciously. “Now what?” Finally, though, when it kept on ringing, he picked it up gingerly and admitted that his name was Shannon.

His caller was the new, or at least the more recent, publisher of the Clarion. “Just to show you the kind of coverage we’ve got, there’s a guy in here from Safford with a three-day-old copy of your ad. Says he’s Johann Smith.”

Shannon wet his lips. “He can’t be. There isn’t any such man. He’s a—a figment of the imagination.”

“Like hell he is,” Salter said indignantly. “He’s standing right here beside me with an armload of proof.”

Shannon’s eyes were haunted. “Tell him it was a mistake.”

“Not me,” Salter said. “I’ll let you tell him.” He lowered his voice. “From where I’m sitting he looks about nine feet tall.”

The telephone fell from nerveless fingers. “Christ!”

Miss McGowan regarded him fondly. “It’s all a part of the great Shannon tradition, darling.” She sighed a little. “Never a dull moment.”

End

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26
- Chapter 27
- Chapter 28