shadowing. Up a blind alley with his gun tucked away on his hip and his overcoat buttoned? Not a chance. He was as dumb as any man ought to be, but he wasn’t quite that dumb. The only two ways out of the alley could be watched from the edge of Bush Street over the tunnel. You’d told us Thursby was a bad actor. He couldn’t have tricked Miles into the alley like that, and he couldn’t have driven him in. He was dumb, but not dumb enough for that.”
He ran his tongue over the inside of his lips and smiled affectionately at the girl. He said: “But he’d’ve gone up there with you, angel, if he was sure nobody else was up there. You were his client, so he would have had no reason for not dropping the shadow on your say-so, and if you caught up with him and asked him to go up there he’d’ve gone. He was just dumb enough for that. He’d’ve looked you up and down and licked his lips and gone grinning from ear to ear—and then you could’ve stood as close to him as you liked in the dark and put a hole through him with the gun you had got from Thursby that evening.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy shrank back from him until the edge of the table stopped her. She looked at him with terrified eyes and cried: “Don’t—don’t talk to me like that, Sam! You know I didn’t! You know—”
“Stop it.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “The police will be blowing in any minute now and we’re sitting on dynamite. Talk!”
She put the back of a hand on her forehead. “Oh, why do you accuse me of such a terrible—?”
“Will you stop it?” he demanded in a low impatient voice. “This isn’t the spot for the schoolgirl act. Listen to me. The pair of us are sitting under the gallows.” He took hold of her wrists and made her stand up straight in front of him. “Talk!”
“I—I—How did you know he—he licked his lips and looked—?”