“Let’s go up to your room,” I suggested. “I want to talk to you.”
He wasn’t enthusiastic, but he took me up. He had two rooms and a kitchen on the third floor. They were dirty, foul-smelling rooms. I dangled a leg from the corner of a table and waved him into a squeaky rocking chair in front of me. His pasty face and dopey eyes were uneasy.
“Where’s Ashcraft?” I threw at him. He jerked, and then looked at the floor.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he mumbled.
“You’d better figure it out,” I advised him, “or there’s a nice cool cell down in the booby-hutch that will be wrapped around you.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”
“What of that? How’d you like to do a thirty or a sixty on a vag charge?”
“Vag, hell!” he snarled, looking up at me. “I got five hundred smacks in my kick. Does that look like you can vag me?”
I grinned down at him.
“You know better than that, Ryan. A pocketful of money’ll get you nothing in California. You’ve got no job. You can’t show where your money comes from. You’re made to order for the vag law.”
I had this bird figured as a dope peddler. If he was—or was anything else off color that might come to light when he was vagged—the chances were that he would be willing to sell Ashcraft out to save himself; especially since, so far as I knew, Ashcraft wasn’t on the wrong side of the criminal law.
“If I were you,” I went on while he stared at the floor and thought, “I’d be a nice, obliging fellow and do my talking now. You’re—”