I was all alone, trying to decide whether to pay another month’s rent and carry on or to save my few dollars for eats. I thought I had sewed up a big job as chief investigator for Western Jewelers’ Association, but their headman, Gates, had just phoned me the sad news. He was giving the job to an ex-dick named Rufus Sloan. Rufus and I were like a pair of strange bulldogs. Rufus beat me out because the cops gave him a stronger recommendation than they gave me. Rufus knew how to play ball, and on a couple of occasions the cops had taken a strange dislike to me.
I was washed up. The smart thing would be to close up the alleged office and leave town. There were two or three burgs where agencies would put me to work.
Then in walked Peggy. A girl to put new heart in a man.
“Hello. Is anybody here?” she asked.
I got up and ran my hand over my hair. I wished I had been wearing my other suit and that new polka-dot tie that had set me back three bucks.
“May I come in?” she said.
That’s when I caught the lilt in her voice. Before that, all I could do was look at her.
“You bet!” I said, when I recovered. Girls like her didn’t come into my office more than once in a lifetime. “Lady, you can not only come in, but I hope you’ll stay a long while.”
She opened her eyes wide — they were sort of gray-green — and I saw the mischief in them. Then she laughed, and when she laughed that was something.
She looked around the office. I got red in the face. This girl was smart. She knew a lot about me just from taking a look around. She knew I wasn’t making any dough, that the janitor of the building wasn’t taking good care of my place, that I was on the way out. She probably figured that I was an ambitious guy who thought he could go places with his own two-bit agency.
She saw the bottle on my desk and smiled.
I touched it tentatively. “Would you—” I began.
“Seeing it’s a good Irish brand, I would!” she said.
I got a clean glass, poured one for her, one for me.
“Here’s luck!” she said.
“Thanks. I need it. Down the hatch.”
Down it went and she didn’t even make a face.
“You’re Timothy Ryan, detective?” she asked.
“I am,” I said.
“Well, then, you’re the very man I want to see.”
“Just a moment, please. How did you happen to choose me?”
“Oh, I ran my finger down the list in the telephone book until I came to a name I liked. I’m Peggy Sullivan and I—”
She didn’t go on. Someone else had come in. She heard him, turned and gasped. He was a little guy, young, thin, wiry, with a face older than he should have had.
“Peggy, you fool!” he said. “I told you not to go to a dick! You’ll only get yourself in worse trouble.”
I got up and walked toward the door. “What do you want here, feller?” I asked. “Miss Sullivan and I—”
The guy pulled a gat and shoved it at me.
“Get back, shamus!” he snapped. “Come on, Peg. You’re coming with me.”
“Pete don’t! Please!”
The girl had jumped toward him, trying to step between us.
“Hit him, Kelly!” I yelled.
There was nobody named Kelly around, but the thin guy swung just the same. And it wasn’t Kelly who hit him; it was Timothy Ryan, in person. Right under the ear. He went down and stayed. No credit to me. When a hundred and ninety pounds of beef hits a hundred and ten pounds of skin and bones, something like that has to happen. I took his gun and left him on the floor. I locked the outer door.
“Now, Miss Sullivan,” I said, “we can continue our little talk.”
“I... I guess I’d better not,” she said, looking down at Pete. “No. It would just make more trouble. I shouldn’t have come here. He told me—”
“Never mind what he says or the likes of him,” I told her. “I’m in it now, trouble or no trouble. Whether you want me to help you or not, little Pete is going to try to get back at me in some dark alley some night. So—”
“Oh!” she said.
“Never mind that. I’m used to it. Just tell me.”
Well, she did. And if it hadn’t been Peggy Sullivan telling it, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it. But with her saying it, it had to be true. First of all, Gus Markey had died a week ago in his suite at the Hotel Imperial. I knew that; everybody knew it; the papers had been full of it. Peggy worked at the cigar stand in the hotel; she had known Gus well.
Gus was a gambler and a lot of other things. He had a private mint. He’d lived in the hotel quite a while. A lot of people might have wanted Gus to die, but he fooled them and died a natural death — of pneumonia.
When he was sinking, Gus sent one of his boys down to Peggy and asked her to come up. She went. He wanted to see her alone. His doctor and nurse and body-guard went out.
“You’re a good kid, Peggy, and I like you,” Gus told her. “You’re all right. I’ve got something for you.” He fished into the mattress cover on his bed and pulled out a flat leather case. “There’s fifty grand in here, sis,” he said, “and I don’t want a lot of punks killing each other for it. You take it. Stick it in a bank. Do anything you want with it. Nobody will know you’ve got it and it’s all yours. If you don’t spend it all in one place, it’ll last a while. That’s all, babe. Dough never did me any good. Maybe you can get some fun out of it.”
Peggy had been afraid to take it. He insisted. Finally, she took the leather case and left him. At noon she went down to the big bank on the corner, rented a safe deposit box and put the case in it Yes, she had looked. The fifty grand was in it. Somebody must have seen her going into the bank. Gus had a lot of visitors that afternoon and he died that night.
Guys continued to go to his rooms, where his body-guard was staying until the lease expired, and they practically pulled the furniture apart, looking for something. It wasn’t there. Peggy had it.
Then this guy she called Pete stepped into the picture. She had known Pete Blinker almost all her life; they had lived in the same block as kids. She hadn’t seen him lately. She knew he had served a one-year term for snatching an old lady’s handbag and that he was generally no good; she had heard that he was working for a bookie. He told her he had been working for Gus.
Pete and his friends had it all figured out. Gus had passed the dough to Peggy — they had checked all other possibilities — and she had been spotted in the bank. More than that, they had seen the key to her safe deposit box. Pete’s suggestion — he told her he was just passing it on from the, boss — was that she should get the dough out of the box and hand it over. She could take a grand cut herself — one grand, no more. If she didn’t — well, a lot of things could happen. And would.
They had probably been surprised. Peggy Sullivan wouldn’t hand over the jack, not even for one grand and safety. She would keep it, as Gus had asked her to, or she would see that it was returned to its rightful owner, if Gus had got it by robbery or fraud. But she would not — and her eyes flashed when she told me — hand it over to a gang of thugs!
Then things had happened. A guy had talked rough to her, at the stand, and she had slapped his face. The manager of the hotel saw it and fired her. She had been living in the hotel and sticking close to her room when not on duty. She had to move.
She went into an apartment with a girl friend, and after that they were both subjected to all sorts of annoyances — even their clothes were doused with crude oil and ruined. Peggy couldn’t let her friend be treated that way — she was afraid they might do something to the other girl — and had moved into a furnished room.
The annoyances started all over again — telephone calls that awakened her landlady in the middle of the night, lies about Peggy, men coining around at all hours. The landlady had asked her to move. Peggy decided she had enough.