“I know he had them when he went to the Perkins Hotel. He was there about five minutes when Alma Hunter came in and joined him. They registered as man and wife. Then Sandra Birks and her brother showed up. Then he went out. He pulled the papers out of his pocket when he hit the sidewalk, to make sure they were all okay and ready for service, and pushed them back again into his inside coat pocket. He went to the telegraph office and sent a telegram. We don’t know who it was to. The telegraph girls wouldn’t kick through with any information. Money didn’t interest them. We kept trying until they threatened to call the cops. I tagged him from there to a costumer’s. He got a bellboy costume and went to the hotel. He was there about twenty minutes and then came out with Mrs. Cool.”

“When did Mrs. Cool go to the hotel?” the chief asked.

“We didn’t cover that. Jerry was on the job at the hotel. I think he said she came about twenty minutes before this guy went back with the costume.”

I lay there on the floor, seemingly drifting on a sea of black pain with waves of nausea sweeping over me. I wanted to retch and couldn’t. My sides hurt when I tried to breathe. I knew that the warm stuff trickling down my face and onto the collar of my shirt was blood, but I was too weak to do anything about it.

The woman said, “Get Jerry on the phone. Tell him to go through that hotel with a fine tooth comb. Morgan Birks is in there.”

“Morgan Birks can’t be in there,” Fred kept insisting. “We had the tip on that hotel. Jerry’s been on it ever since last week, and we know Birks hasn’t been there—not yet. That hotel’s the place where Morgan was to meet his cutie.”

“Did you tail this guy, or pick him up at the hotel?” the woman asked.

“Picked him up at the hotel.”

“And the hotel’s sewed up?”

“Tighter than a drum.”

“He served those papers in the hotel.”

Someone reached down and picked me up. The end of my sore nose was clamped between the knuckles of two fingers. When the hand jerked, it felt as though my nose had come out by the roots. Fred’s voice, still sounding bored, said, “Talk.”

“Lay off his face, Fred,” the woman said.

A kick at the base of my spine jarred me clean up to the top of my head. “Come on,” Fred said, “give us the low-down. You served those papers.”