“But the police, Joey, aren’t getting me! Didn’t you know? Didn’t you...”
He broke off as soft footsteps sounded outside the door, coming up the front stairs. His gaze flicked involuntarily to the door. Joey was almost on top of him before Arnheit could jerk his glance back and fire.
Joey heard the bullet shower planter. His hands closed on Arnheit’s forearm. Something a tough buck sergeant had once taught him came back to Joey. He jerked his arm, bent his body. He heard the snapping of Arnheit’s bone. The old man screamed, and Joey set his teeth and hit him on the point of the chin. Arnheit would suffer enough, Joey decided grimly. Might as well give him the temporary anesthesia of unconsciousness with that broken arm.
Cora moved softly up in the crook of his arm. They looked at the small man and Cora breathed. “Somehow he reminds me of a tiny coral snake, curled in the sun. small to be so deadly...”
The door slammed back, interrupting her. Ralph Ballinger stood in the doorway, freckles flaming. Behind him, craning their gazes over his shoulder were four men who exuded the odor of solid citizen.
“What the hell is going on here?” Ballinger demanded.
“Just wait’ll you find out,” Joey said, “I... we... that is, your poker games.”
Ballinger glared down at Arnheit, at Joey and Cora, at the room in general. “Poker games? You nitwit, doesn’t it stand to reason that, playing every night, seven nights a week, the cops would be wise and hound us to damnation and gone, forcing us to move the game constantly? Since the whole neighborhood was so positive I was never home after dark, we’ve been coming slipping back here the past five nights. Thomas, you’d better start explaining what...”
“Well,” Joey said, “in the first place, there’s a corpse downstairs.”
Ballinger and four solid citizens shouted, “Corpse? Did you say...”
They were interrupted by the arrival of the cop from across the street who’d been shadowing Joey, to the best of his knowledge. The cop had heard Arnheit’s gunfire. Now he took over, and Joey was glad enough to go over all the details with the squad that came from headquarters shortly.
Later over coffee, Cora squeezed his hand and said, “After the publicity you’re going to get, Joey, you’ll have to fight off the publishers with a big stick. Your books...”
He glanced about the smug, quiet lunchroom, the counterman grinning over a comic book. “We won’t even use a small stick,” he confided.
Cora smiled at him. “Mr. Ballinger was very indignant, says he’s just a quiet, nice gentleman who likes a game. In fact, losing his sleep, the place cluttered with corpses, Mr. Ballinger is vacating the flat.”
She paused, looking at Joey. He studied his coffee cup a moment, looked up at the counterman. “Say, Mac, you know where to find a justice of the peace this time of night?”
The counterman laid aside his magazine. He walked around the counter, pulled up a chair, and leaned his elbows on Joey’s and Cora’s table. “You asked the question of the right man, brother,” he assured Joey gravely. “This justice I know is a regular sort of guy. He is positively the finest marrying Sam...”