“This is Peak,” said a voice that didn’t sound anything at all like his. “Who’s talking?”
I said disgustedly, “This is Lillian Gish,” hung up the receiver, and removed myself from the neighborhood.
I gave up the idea of finding Reno and decided to go calling on my client, old Elihu, and try to blackjack him into good behavior with the love letters he had written Dinah Brand, and which I had stolen from Dawn’s remains.
I walked, keeping to the darker side of the darkest streets. It was a fairly long walk for a man who sneers at exercise. By the time I reached Willsson’s block I was in bad enough humor to be in good shape for the sort of interviews he and I usually had. But I wasn’t to see him for a little while yet.
I was two pavements from my destination when somebody S‑s‑s‑s‑s’d at me.
I probably didn’t jump twenty feet.
“ ’S all right,” a voice whispered.
It was dark there. Peeping out under my bush—I was on my hands and knees in somebody’s front yard—I could make out the form of a man crouching close to a hedge, on my side of it.
My gun was in my hand now. There was no special reason why I shouldn’t take his word for it that it was all right.
I got up off my knees and went to him. When I got close enough I recognized him as one of the men who had let me into the Ronney Street house the day before.
I sat on my heels beside him and asked: