record because you used to be a bull? And you thought if you could get me to put it to him you could clean up a little dough playing him?”
“I’ll be damned if I was going to come through with that much,” he said, “but since it’s been said I’ll put a yes to it.”
“Did you clean up?”
“I win myself six hundred iron men.” He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead with the chewed end of his match. “And then I lose myself that and my own two hundred and some in a crap game. What do you think of that? I pick up six hundred berries like shooting fish, and have to bum four bits for breakfast.”
I said it was a tough break but that was the kind of a world we lived in.
He said, “Uh-huh,” put the match back in his mouth, ground it some more, and added, “That’s why I thought I’d come to see you. I used to be in the racket myself and—”
“What did Noonan put the skids under you for?”
“Skids? What skids? I quit. I come into a piece of change when the wife got killed in an automobile accident—insurance—and I quit.”
“I heard he kicked you out the time his brother shot himself.”
“Well, then you heard wrong. It was just after that, but you can ask him if I didn’t quit.”
“It’s not that much to me. Go on telling me why you came to see me.”
“I’m busted, flat. I know you’re a Continental op, and I got a pretty good hunch what you’re up to here. I’m close to a lot that’s going on on both sides of things in this burg. There’s things I could do for you, being an ex-dick, knowing the ropes both ways.”