“Hello,” I greeted him. “What’s the mob? Emptying the can to make room for more?”
“Them’s our new specials,” he told me, speaking as if he didn’t think much of them. “We’re going to have an augmented force.”
“Congratulations,” I said and went on out.
In his pool room I found Peak Murry sitting at a desk behind the cigar counter talking to three men. I sat down on the other side of the room and watched two kids knock balls around. In a few minutes the lanky proprietor came over to me.
“If you see Reno some time,” I told him, “you might let him know that Pete the Finn’s having his mob sworn in as special coppers.”
“I might,” Murry agreed.
Mickey Linehan was sitting in the lobby when I got back to my hotel. He followed me up to my room, and reported:
“Your Dan Rolff pulled a sneak from the hospital somewhere after midnight last night. The croakers are kind of steamed up about it. Seems they were figuring on pulling a lot of little pieces of bone out of his brain this morning. But him and his duds were gone. We haven’t got a line on Whisper yet. Dick’s out now trying to place Bill Quint. What’s what on this girl’s carving? Dick tells me you got it before the coppers.”
“It—”
The telephone bell rang.
A man’s voice, carefully oratorical, spoke my name with a question mark after it.
I said: “Yeah.”