“Just a minute,” he called, and I faced him again. “What’s your name?”
“Wisher,” I said. “Shine, if you want a front one.”
“Shine Wisher,” he repeated. “I don’t remember ever hearing it before.”
It would have surprised me if he had—I had made it up only about fifteen minutes before.
“You needn’t yell it,” I said sourly, “so that everybody in the burg will remember hearing it.”
And with that I left him, not at all dissatisfied wit myself. By tipping him off to Boyd, I had put him under obligations to me, and had led him to accept me, at least tentatively, as a fellow crook. And by making no apparent effort to gain his good graces, I had strengthened my hand that much more.
I had a date with him for the next day, when I was to be given a chance to earn—illegally, no doubt—“a piece of change.”
There was a chance that this proposition he had in view for me had nothing to do with the Estep affair, but then again it might; and whether it did or not, I had my entering wedge at least a little way into Jake Ledwich’s business.
I strolled around for about half an hour, and then went back to Bob Teal’s apartment.
“Ledwich come back?”
“Yes,” Bob said, “with that little guy of yours. They went in about half an hour ago.”
“Good! Haven’t seen a woman go in?”
“No.”