One hand on my burning belly, I crossed to the window and waved an arm at Dick Foley, stalling on a corner down the street. Then I went to the bathroom and looked to my wound. A blank cartridge does hurt if you catch it close up!
My vest and shirt and union suit were ruined, and I had a nasty scorch on my body. I greased it, taped a cushion over it, changed my clothes, loaded the gun again, and went down to the office to wait for word from Dick. The first trick in the game looked like mine. Heroin or no heroin, Dummy Uhl would not have jumped me if my guess—based on the trouble he was taking to make his eyes look right and the lie he had sprung on me about there being no strangers in Chinatown—hadn’t hit close to the mark.
Dick wasn’t long in joining me.
“Good pickings!” he said when he came in. The little Canadian talks like a thrifty man’s telegram. “Beat it for phone. Called Hotel Irvington. Booth—couldn’t get anything but number. Ought to be enough. Then Chinatown. Dived in cellar west side Waverly Place. Couldn’t stick close enough to spot place. Afraid to take chance hanging around. How do you like it?”
“I like it all right. Let’s look up ‘The Whistler’s’ record.”
A file clerk got it for us—a bulky envelope the size of a briefcase, crammed with memoranda, clippings and letters. The gentleman’s biography, as we had it, ran like this:
Neil Conyers, alias The Whistler, was born in Philadelphia—out on Whiskey Hill—in 1883. In ’94, at the age of eleven, he was picked up by the Washington police. He had gone there to join Coxey’s Army. They sent him home. In ’98 he was arrested in his home town for stabbing another lad in a row over an election-night bonfire. This time he was