Fly Paper and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

Hambleton?”
    â€œNo,” emphatically. “I’d never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”
    â€œI don’t like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story’s got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”
    He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:
    â€œIt wouldn’t be the way it happened.”
    â€œThat’s too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don’t mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”
    He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.
    The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn’t like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.
    I got up on my feet, telling him:
    â€œSuit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I’ll have to take you both in.”
    He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.
    The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.
    â€œThis is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to take the fall with you.”
    â€œShut up,” he said in his throat.
    â€œShut me up,” she cried.
    He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.
    She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:
    â€œJoe does know her. He got the things from her. She’s at the St. Martin on O’Farrell Street—her and Babe McCloor.”
    While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe’s right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:
    â€œLet me tell it.”
    â€œHop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.
    He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:
    â€œHe was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don’t think old man Hambleton’s hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn’t a bad guess.
    He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.
    I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”
    â€œYou’ve got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”
    â€œWhat’s Babe doing now?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIs he still puffing them?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œLike hell you don’t.”
    â€œI don’t,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can’t get anything out of him about what he’s doing.”
    â€œHow long have he and Sue been here?”
    â€œAbout six months that I know of.”
    â€œWho’s he mobbed up with?”
    â€œI don’t know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”
    â€œHow’s he fixed?”
    â€œI don’t know. There’s always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”
    Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn’t going to get much information about my people here.
    I went to the phone in the passageway and called the Agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives’ room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.
    MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and