Kells said: “I’ll see what I can get on the pansy — and try to talk a little sense to the telephone girl at the hotel and the cab driver that hauled me here.”
The pounding on the door was almost continuous. Someone put a heavy shoulder to it, the hinges creaked.
Kells started toward the bedroom, then turned and came back. She tilted her mouth up to him and he kissed her. “Don’t let this lug husband of yours talk,” he said — jerked his head down at Dave Perry — “and maybe you’d better go into a swoon to alibi not answering the door. Let ’em bust it in.
“My God, Gerry! I’m too excited to faint.”
Kells kissed her again, lightly. He brought one arm up stiffly, swiftly from his side; the palm down, the fist loosely clinched. His knuckles smacked sharply against her chin. He caught her body in his arms, went into the living room and laid her gently on the floor. Then he took out his handkerchief, carefully wiped the little automatic, and put it on the floor midway between Haardt, Perry and Ruth Perry.
He went into the bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom. He raised the window and squeezed through to a narrow ledge. He was screened from the street by part of the building next door, and from the alley by a tree that spread over the back yard of the apartment house. A few feet along the ledge he felt with his foot for a steel rung, found it, swung down to the next, across a short space to the sill of an open corridor-window of the next-door building.
He walked down the corridor, down several flights of stairs and out a rear door of the building. Down a kind of alley he went through a wooden gate into a bungalow court and through to Whitley and walked north.
Cullen’s house was on the northeastern slope of Whitley Heights, a little way off Cahuenga. He answered the fourth ring, stood in the doorway blinking at Kells. “Well, stranger. Long time no see.”
Cullen was a heavily built man of about forty-five. He had a round pale face, a blue chin and blue-black hair. He was naked except for a pair of yellow silk pajama-trousers; a full-rigged ship was elaborately tattooed across his wide chest.
Kells said: “H’are ya, Willie,” went past Cullen into the room. He sat down in a deep leather chair, took off his Panama hat and ran his fingers through red, faintly graying hair.