The two talked for perhaps forty minutes—though it must be admitted that a portion of that time was devoted to a discussion of the terms of employment. Mr. Tollman had never undertaken having a man shadowed before and he regarded the fees as needlessly large.
Back once more in his office in a building on Forty-second Street, Mr. Hagan cut the end from a cigar and gazed out across the public library and the park at its back. The frosted glass of his hall door bore the legend, "The Searchlight Investigation Bureau. Private."
"Well, what did you find out about this job?" inquired a member of the office force who had entered from a communicating room, and the chief wrinkled his brow a little as he studied his perfecto.
"It's a dirty business, Schenk," he replied crisply. "It's the kind of thing that gives knockers a license to put detectives in the same class as blackmailers—and the old Whey-face himself is a tight-wad. He wrangled over the price—but I made him come through."
"What does he want done?"
"He wants a guy framed. You remember what the bulls did for Big Finnerty, when Finnerty was threatening to squeal to the District Attorney's office about police graft?"
Schenk nodded. "They pulled the old stuff on him. Sent him to the Island a year for gun-toting."
"Sure, and he didn't have a gat at that—that is, not until the bulls planted it in his kick on the way to the station house." The dignity of Mr. Hagan's consultation manner had dropped from him, and he had relapsed into the gang argot with which police days had given him an intimate familiarity.
"Sure he didn't. That's the way they frame a man. It's the way they framed—"