The little Canadian op had been watching me curiously while I talked. Now he started to say something, changed his mind, grunted, “Righto,” and departed.
I went out to look for Reno Starkey. After an hour of searching I located him, by telephone, in a Ronney Street rooming house.
“By yourself?” he asked when I had said I wanted to see him.
“Yeah.”
He said I could come out, and told me how to get there. I took a taxi. It was a dingy two-story house near the edge of town.
A couple of men loitered in front of a grocer’s on the corner above. Another pair sat on the low wooden steps of the house down at the next corner. None of the four was conspicuously refined in appearance.
When I rang the bell two men opened the door. They weren’t so mild looking either.
I was taken upstairs to a front room where Reno, collarless and in shirtsleeves and vest, sat tilted back in a chair with his feet on the window sill.
He nodded his sallow horse face and said:
“Pull a chair over.”
The men who had brought me up went away, closing the door. I sat down and said:
“I want an alibi. Dinah Brand was killed last night after I left her. There’s no chance of my being copped for it, but with Noonan dead I don’t know how I’m hitched up with the department. I don’t want to give