Doolin said: “If I had as much money as I have connections, I’d retire.”
He finished after a while, hung up and put the phone back on the low round-table.
“Martinelli,” he said, “not Martini. Supposed to have been Riccio and Conroy’s partner in the East. They had the drug business pretty well cornered. He showed up out here around the last of November, and Riccio and Conroy came in December tenth, were killed the night they got in...”
Halloran said: “I remember that — they were talking about the trip.”
Doolin took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to take a drink. “Martinelli was discharged from St. Vincent’s Hospital January sixteenth — day before yesterday. He’s plenty bad — beat four or five murder raps in the East and was figured for a half dozen others. They called him The Executioner. Angelo Martinelli — The Executioner.”
Mrs. Sare said: “Come and get it.”
Doolin and Halloran got up and went into the little dining room. They sat down at the table and Mrs. Sare brought in a steaming platter of bacon and scrambled eggs, a huge double-globe of bubbling coffee.
Doolin said: “Here’s the way it looks to me: If Martinelli figured you an’ Winfield an’ whoever else was in the private room had seen Riccio shoot him, he’d want to shut you up; it was a cinch he’d double-crossed Riccio and if it came out at the trial, the Detroit boys would be on his tail.”
Halloran nodded, poured a large rosette of chili-sauce on the plate beside his scrambled eggs.
“But what did he want to rub Coleman an’ Decker for?”