“Take it off,” I ordered. “You don’t carry anything out with you.”
His fingers worked with the buckle, dragged the belt from under his clothes, let it fall on the floor. It was padded fat.
Still holding his neck, I took him upstairs, where the girl still sat frozen on the kitchen chair. It took a stiff hooker of whisky and a lot of words to thaw her into understanding that she was going out with the old man and that she wasn’t to say a word to anybody, especially not to the police.
“Where’s Reddy?” she asked when color had come back into her face—which had even at the worst never lost its niceness—and thoughts to her head.
I told her he was all right, and promised her he would be in a hospital before the morning was over. She didn’t ask anything else. I shooed her upstairs for her hat and coat, went with the old man while he got his hat, and then put the pair of them in the front ground-floor room.
“Stay here till I come for you,” I said, and I locked the door and pocketed the key when I went out.