Ten minutes later three uniformed policemen arrived. All three knew Tennant, and they treated him with respect. Tennant reeled of 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 roughhouse. 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 patrolmen 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.”