“O’Brien did. I don’t know nothing about the others. I was going out of the bar when I run into Whisper, Jerry and Kelly, and went back to have a shot with them. Kelly told me Tim had been knocked off. Then Whisper says, ‘It never hurts anybody to have an alibi. We were here all the time, weren’t we?’ and he looks at O’Brien, who’s behind the bar. O’Brien says, ‘Sure you was,’ and when Whisper looks at me I say the same thing. But I don’t know no reasons why I’ve got to cover him up nowadays.”

“And Kelly said Tim had been knocked off? Didn’t say he had been found dead?”

“ ‘Knocked off’ was the words he used.”

The chief said:

“Thanks, Peak. You oughtn’t to have done like you did, but what’s done is done. How are the kids?”