I didn’t know what had happened to his gun. It wasn’t in his hand any more. I didn’t stop to look for it. I was busy, crowding him back – not letting him set himself – staying close to him – driving at him with both hands.
He was a head taller than I, and had longer arms, but he wasn’t any heavier or stronger. I suppose he hit me now and then as I hammered him across the room. He must have. But I didn’t feel anything.
I worked him into a corner. Jammed him back in a corner with his legs cramped under him – which didn’t give him much leverage to hit from. I got my left arm around his body, holding him where I wanted him. And I began to throw my right fist into him.
I liked that. His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often.
He was chopping at my face, but by digging my nose into his chest and holding it there I kept my beauty from being altogether ruined. Meanwhile I threw my right fist into him.
Then I became aware that Cara Kenbrook was moving around behind me; and I remembered the revolver that had fallen somewhere when I had charged Tennant. I didn’t like that; but there was nothing I could do about it – except put more weight in my punches. My own gun, I thought, was in one of his pockets. But neither of us had time to hunt for it now.
Tennant’s knees sagged the next time I hit him.
Once more, I said to myself, and then I’ll step back, let him have one on the button, and watch him fall.
But I didn’t get that far.
Something that I knew was the missing revolver struck me on the top of the head. An ineffectual blow – not clean enough to stun me – but it took the steam out of my punches.
Another.
They weren’t hard; these taps, but to hurt a skull with a hunk of metal you don’t have to hit it hard.
I tried to twist away from the next bump, and failed. Not only failed, but let Tennant wiggle away from me.
That was the end.
I wheeled on the girl just in time to take another rap on the head, and then one of Tennant’s fists took me over the ear.
I went clown in one of those falls that get pugs called quitters – my eyes were open, my mind was alive, but my legs and arms wouldn’t lift me up from the floor.
Tennant took my own gun out of a pocket, and with it held on me, sat down in a Morris chair, to gasp for the air I had pounded out of him. The girl sat in another chair; and I, finding I could manage it, sat up in the middle of the floor and looked at them.
Tennant spoke, still panting.
“This is fine – all the signs of a struggle we need to make our story good!”
“If they don’t believe you were in a fight,” I suggested sourly, pressing my aching head with both hands, “you can strip and show them your little tummy.”
“And you can show them this!”
He leaned down and split my lip with a punch that spread me on my back.
Anger brought my legs to life. I got up on them. Tennant moved around behind the Morris chair. My black gun was steady in his hand.
“Go easy,” he warned me. “My story will work if I have to kill you – maybe work better.”
That was sense. I stood still.
“Phone the police, Cara,” he ordered.
She went out of the room, closing the door behind her; and all I could hear of her talk was a broken murmur.
Ten minutes later three uniformed policemen arrived. All three knew Tennant, and they treated him with respect. Tennant reeled off the story he and the girl had cooked up, with a few changes to take care of the shot that had been fired from the nickeled gun and our rough-house. She nodded her head vigorously whenever a policeman looked at her. Tennant turned both guns over to the white-haired sergeant in charge.
I didn’t argue, didn’t deny anything, but told the sergeant:
“I’m working with Detective Sergeant O’Gar on a job. I want to talk to him over the phone and then I want you to take all three of us down to the detective bureau.”
Tennant objected to that, of course; not because he expected to gain anything, but on the off-chance that he might. The white-haired sergeant looked from one of us to the other in puzzlement. Me, with my skinned face and split lip; Tennant, with a red lump under one eye where my first wallop had landed; and the girl, with most of the clothes above the waistline ripped off and a bruised cheek.
“It has a queer look, this thing,” the sergeant decided aloud, “and I shouldn’t wonder but what the detective bureau was the place for the lot of you.”
One of the policemen went into the hall with me, and I got O’Gar on the phone at his home. It was nearly ten o’clock by now, and he was preparing for bed.
“Cleaning up the Gilmore murder,” I told him. “Meet me at the Hall. Will you get hold of Kelly, the patrolman who found Gilmore, and bring him down there? I want him to look at some people.”
“I will that,” O’Gar promised, and I hung up.
The “wagon” in which the three policemen had answered Cara Kenbrook’s call carried us down to the Hall of Justice, where we all went into the captain of detectives’ office. McTighe, a lieutenant, was on duty.
I knew McTighe, and we were on pretty good terms, but I wasn’t an influence in local politics, and Tennant was. I don’t mean that McTighe would have knowingly helped Tennant frame me; but with me stacked up against the assistant city engineer, I knew who would get the benefit of any doubt there might be.
My head was thumping and roaring just now, with knots all over it where the girl had beaned me. I sat down, kept quiet, and nursed my head while Tennant and Cara Kenbrook, with a lot of details that they had not wasted on the uniformed men, told their tale and showed their injuries.
Tennant was talking – describing the terrible scene that had met his eyes when, drawn by the girl’s screams, he had rushed into her apartment – when O’Gar came into the office. He recognised Tennant with a lifted eyebrow, and came over to sit beside me.
“What the hell is all this?” he muttered.
“A lovely mess,” I whispered back. “Listen – in that nickel gun on the desk there’s an empty shell. Get it for me.”
He scratched his head doubtfully, listened to the next few words of Tennant’s yarn, glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and then went over to the desk and picked up the revolver.
McTighe looked at him – a sharp, questioning look.
“Something on the Gilmore killing,” the detective-sergeant said, breaking the gun.
The lieutenant started to speak, changed his mind, and O’Gar brought the shell over and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, putting it in my pocket. “Now listen to my friend there. It’s a good act, if you like it.”
Tennant was winding up his history.
“… Naturally a man who tried a thing like that on an unprotected woman would be yellow, so it wasn’t very hard to handle him after I got his gun away from him. I hit him a couple of times, and he quit – begging me to stop, getting down on his knees. Then we called the police.”
McTighe looked at me with eyes that were cold and hard. Tennant had made a believer of him, and not only of him – the police-sergeant and his two men were glowering at me. I suspected that even O’Gar – with whom I had been through a dozen storms – would have been half-convinced if the engineer hadn’t added the neat touches about my kneeling.
“Well, what have you got to say?” McTighe challenged me in a tone which suggested that it didn’t make much difference what I said.
“I’ve got nothing to say about this dream,” I said shortly. “I’m interested in the Gilmore murder – not in this stuff.” I turned to O’Gar. “Is the patrolman here?”
The detective-sergeant went to the door, and called: “Oh, Kelly!”
Kelly came in – a big, straight-standing man, with iron-gray hair and an intelligent fat face.