“Well,” I said, “I used to know the Cunweather outfit in Kansas City. I’m not going to tell you a thing about who I really am because my father and mother are living, and I’m not going to break their hearts. But you can take it from me that I’ve batted around. But I didn’t have nothing to do with that Kansas City job. I was in California when that job was pulled, and I can prove it.

“Well, here’s the low-down. Cunweather was the head of the slot-machine racket. Naturally, there was a pay-off. I don’t know all the dope on that, but it ran into quite a wad of dough. Morgan Birks was the pay-off man.

“Well, things ran along pretty smooth until the grand jury started investigating. A citizens’ vice committee had some undercover men out and they uncovered the whole racket. They knew the names of some of the guys who were getting the dough. They didn’t know the higher-ups, but they knew some of the contact men and they knew how much those men were getting.

“Well, that was where things began to get interesting, because there was a leak from the grand jury; and we found that the undercover men for the citizens’ committee reported that the pay-off was just about half of what Cunweather thought it was. In other words, every time Morgan Birks would collect ten thousand dollars to pay off to the big shots, he’d salt five grand and pass on only half of what he’d collected as the real pay-off.

“Los Angeles is a tough city to do business in, and Morgan Birks had specified that if anything was going to be done, he had to have the exclusive handling of the whole business. Morgan Birks had been with Cunweather for some time, and the chief—that’s Cunweather—figured he was absolutely on the up-and-up.

“Well, when this blow-off came, Morgan Birks took it on the lam, the idea being that he was hiding out from the grand jury. He wasn’t. He was hiding out from the chief because he was afraid the chief was going to rub him out.

“Morgan Birks had been pretty smart. He’d cached most of the swag in safety deposit boxes, and these safety deposit boxes were in his wife’s name. Well, it happened that that was the particular time his wife chose to start a divorce action, knowing that she had him over a barrel. She’d been laying for a break like that because she’d been stepping and Morgan had the goods on her.