“Maybe this guy Marsland thinks he can take it over?”
“Marsland?” Shires was contemptuous. “Him? He just came out of the Big House. All he did last night was queer the racket for good. You’ve seen the newspapers, ain’t you?”
Killer Durgan shook his head. His action was a silent lie. He had read all about the death of Tim Waldron, but he wanted to hear the version Shires had to offer.
Ernie Shires leaned forward as he spoke: “Waldron was running a storage-warehouse racket. The suckers began to squawk. Told the coppers and all that, but Waldron had things fixed well enough so they didn’t try to hang anything on him.
“But last night, Cliff Marsland comes along and bumps him off. That would’ve been all right, maybe, but Waldron had a bunch of gorillas checking up on Marsland. They was in the hallway outside of Waldron’s rooms, when the shots was fired.
“They tried to give Marsland the works. Instead, he cleans ‘em and makes a get-away. There was just one guy in that gang that was a real pal of Waldron’s. That was Hymie Bergerman.
“He comes in just as one of his own gang pulls a gat and tries to plug Marsland. Hymie gets the lead by accident. His own guy knocks him off. That made a mess of things.
“There was so much shooting going on around the Spartan Hotel that the coppers had to come in. Everything was haywire, with Tim and Hymie out of the picture.
“The coppers find everything up in Tim’s room — papers, accounts and all that — showing that he was the big guy in the storage racket.
“Some smart dick gets a lot of dope on the situation. He spills the whole lay, and all the tabs have been mooching around. Now it’s all over the front pages, and the whole racket has gone blooey!”