“An elbow, huh?” putting all the contempt he could in his voice; and somehow any synonym for detective seems able to hold a lot of contempt.
I might have tried to talk myself back into the Wisher role. It could have been done, but I doubted that it would be worth it; so I nodded my confession.
His brain was working now, and the passion left his face, while he sat rubbing his right hand, and his little mouth and eyes began to screw themselves up calculatingly.
I kept quiet, waiting to see what the outcome of his thinking would be. I knew he was trying to figure out just what my place in this game was. Since, to his knowledge, I had come into it no later than the previous evening, then the Boyd murder hadn’t brought me in. That would leave the Estep affair—unless he was tied up in a lot of other crooked stuff that I didn’t know anything about.