I’d been there about fifteen minutes when Louie Hazen came in.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“It depends upon what you mean, okay. The bulls are nuts. Know what they’re tryin’ to do? The first rattle out of the box, they want to pin it on me.”
“Pin what on you?”
“Killing Sid Jannix.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“No, they are.”
“How do they get that way?”
“Well, it’s Jannix all right, see? I identified him, and they wanted to know how I knew. Seemed to ‘think that just because I’d seen a man once in the ring I couldn’t identify him when I saw him on a slab. So I told ’em I couldn’t have picked him out if I’d just seen him stretched out stiff, but that I’d seen him and talked with him the night before, that I’d seen him in action. When you fight for a living, you learn how to look for little peculiarities in a man’s fighting style, and once you’ve seen ’em, you remember ’em as long as you live. Well then, the bulls wanted to know all about where I saw him in action, and as soon as I told ’em, they started jumpin’ on me, said that I had a grudge against him, that he’d been too good for me, and had got me in bad on my job, and that I’d sworn was goin’ to get even. They called up Breckenridge and asked him all about it, and asked him if I hadn’t said something about getting even.”
“What did Breckenridge say?”