Still, those plain-clothes dicks did not despair. They hoped to startle Louie into a confession. With a view to his moral and physical stampede, they conveyed Louie in a closed patrol wagon, at mirk midnight, to the morgue. He hadn't been told what he was charged with; he didn't know where he was going.
The wagon backed up to the morgue door. Louie had never visited the morgue before, though fated in the end to appear there officially. The plainclothes men, one at each shoulder, steered him inside. All was thick blackness; you couldn't have seen your own nose. Feeling their wordless way, the painstaking plain-clothes folk manhandled Louie into position.
Then they flashed on a flood of electric light.
There, within two feet of Louie, and squarely beneath his eyes, lay the dead Crazy Charlie, posed so as to show effectively that gruesome slash across the throat. Louie neither started nor exclaimed. Gazing down on the dead Charlie, he searched forth a cigarette and turned to one of his plain-clothes escorts for a match.
“Do you see this?” demanded the plain-clothes man, slewing round the dead head until that throat-gash yawned like some horrid mouth.
The plain-clothes man was wroth to think he should have worked so hard to achieve so little.
“Yes,” retorted Louie, as cold as a wedge. “Also, I'll tell you bulls another thing. You think to rattle me. Say, for ten cents I'd sit on this stiff all night an' smoke a pipe.”
Those plain-clothes artists gave Louie up. They turned him loose at the morgue door.
The affair worked round, and helped Louie to a better position in the minds of all fair men. It fell in lucky, too, since it more than stood off a setback which overtook him about the same time. Louie had called upon the Irish Wop, at the latter's poolroom in Fourth Avenue. This emigrant from Mayo was thin and slight and sickly, and Louie argued that he might bully him out of a handful of money. Putting on a darkest frown, he demanded fifty dollars, and intimated that dire indeed would be the consequences of refusal.
“Because,” said Louie, “when I go out for anything I get it, see?”