Free Strip for Murder by Richard S. Prather

screw.”
    I chewed on my lip a second. “Tell me, just for fun. What's A.T. and T. quoted at nowadays?”
    He swung around, went into his suite, and slammed the door again. The neighbors were going to start complaining if he didn't quit that. I went down to the Cad. An uncooperative boy, Poupelle. But he'd told me a little. So had Vera.
    It took me almost an hour to get out to Pasadena, visit the Palmer Hospital, and talk for two minutes with a bandaged Mr. Elder, then get back into L.A. Elder didn't tell me anything new, but it checked right down the line with what Laurel had told me. He'd just seen the rock and jumped at Laurel, shoved her, and bang. That was all he knew.
    My office is in downtown L.A., between Third and Fourth on Broadway, second floor of the Hamilton Building. I went there and peeked at the guppy tank on top of the bookcase. The colorful little fish had a fit while I dropped some salmon meal into the feeding ring; then I climbed behind my desk and got busy on the phone.
    It took half an hour to put out a dozen lines among informants, hoodlums, bootblacks, barbers, bartenders. I wanted information about Paul Yates, Andon Poupelle, Garlic, and any of his chums; any rumbles about people named Redstone, for that matter. And I was willing to pay for it. Much of what I was doing the police had already done, and done better; a number of my own informants, though, would never talk to a cop, but would to me. I might get something. Then I went carefully over the Yates report on Poupelle, the one Mrs. Redstone had given me. There were a couple of items where Yates had been specific enough with places and dates so that I could check his statements. I phoned Western Union and sent a couple of telegrams on those items, added another wire to a detective agency in New York, then left the office.
    I started walking, headed for the back rooms, the smelly bars, the dumps and the dives. Some of the boys I wanted to see were seldom near a phone; some of them were seldom sober enough to use one. I'd been over this route dozens of times before, and always it made me a little sick, even a little sad. Lower Main Street and Spring, Los Angeles Street, the whole area I tramped, has a kind of horror about it in the daytime. At night the softer lights and shadows hide some of its squalor, but in sunlight it's hard and ugly.
    I saw white-bearded men sprawled in doorways, wrapped in the sweet smell of wine; a young, empty-eyed man sitting on wooden steps at a dingy hotel entrance, his fly unzipped, something crusted on his chin and shirt front. I talked to an amazingly thin middle-aged woman with bones showing everywhere and a face like a skull with skin stretched over it, her voice mumbling as she stared at me fixedly from dark, burning eyes. But I didn't get a single slice of useful information. It's funny, but among the derelicts and hoodlums and alcoholics around me, there were probably the answers to a thousand crimes. There's an “underworld wireless” that they all seem to have an ear on. Often a torpedo can get knocked off at noon in Miami and the whispers will be going around among the stumblebums and small-time hoods in L.A. before the sun goes down. So I kept walking, talking, buying beers, and spending quarters. For two bits a man can buy a bottle of port. But I didn't get anything solid until almost four-thirty P. M. And even then I wasn't sure.
    About that time a small-time grifter named Iggy the Wig, a bald-headed hoodlum who wore a rug to keep him glamorous, caught up with me in Jerry's, a beer joint on Main. He was one of the guys I'd phoned earlier. We sat at the bar and I bought two beers and gave one to him.
    Iggy poured down half of his and said, “About Yates. Yeah, I heard a word. Not big, but I know who can tell you. Lemme think a sec.” He pulled at his beer. “What's it worth—if I can think of it?”
    â€œA fin.”
    â€œA sawbuck?”
    â€œA fin, Iggy. Give, or