Free Death House Doll by Day Keene Page A

you get started again and want some pretty company, let me know.” North Clark Street was still North Clark Street. All that was turned off was the neon. He confided, “We’ve got a couple of hot little numbers living right here in the hotel.”
    I said I would keep it in mind and locked the door after him. All I wanted to do was talk to Mona’s lawyer, have him find out one thing for me. It could be I was wrong. If I was, I’d shove on and LaFanti and his boys and the police could find a new yard bird.
    Still, if the girl in the death house had killed Stein, why didn’t Captain Corson think she was guilty? Why was he still working on the case? Why had LaFanti been so certain she’d talked to me? About what? And why had LaFanti told Hymie:
    “Don’t he a chump. You’re thinking like a square. Of course she talked. And unless we get rid of Duval we won’t he safe until they pull that switch.”
    I took a big drink of rye, wishing I was smarter than I was. The rye tasted good. Alternating sips of rye and coffee, I read the morning paper while I ate the sandwiches.
    My picture was on the front page. It was the one the camera man had taken in LaFanti’s apartment just before I’d shot off the lobe of LaFanti’s ear. There was a picture of Mona in the next column, a picture I hadn’t seen before. I studied it carefully but it didn’t tell me a thing.
    Opinion seemed to be divided as to whether I was actually crazy or just out to raise as much hell as I could with Joe LaFanti. In a statement to the press, State’s Attorney Olson had said:
    “Frankly I feel that Sergeant Duval has made a fool of me and the state’s attorney’s office and should be subjected to an exhaustive psychiatric examination. However, when I talked to Duval in my office earlier in the evening and explained the State’s case against Miss Ambler, he seemed perfectly rational and resigned to the guilt of his dead brother’s widow. And I might add that there is no doubt as to Mona Ambler’s guilt.”
    LaFanti was even more big hearted. According to the reporter who’d interviewed him, he’d written off the lobe of his ear to profit and loss. His statement read:
    “I haven’t got a thing against the guy, see? In my book, guys who have been through the hell that Duval has can be excused for blowing their tops. I don’t see how they stay as sane as they do. It must have been a great shock to Sergeant Duval to find his kid brother’s widow where she is. As I see it, he was hurt and disappointed. He hit back instinctively — and I was handy. Mona had been my girl. She’d done his brother wrong with me. I paid the lawyer who defended her. Duval felt like he wanted to pound on someone, so he picked me.”
    I read the statement again. It may have made sense to the reporter. It didn’t make sense to me. When I’d first gotten into the thing, I hadn’t wanted to pound anyone. All I’d wanted to do was to make a few arrangements to take care of Johnny’s kid.
    It said: continued on page two. I turned to the second page. The interview with LaFanti continued:
    “But as for me kidnapping Sergeant Duval, subjecting him to a beating or holding him a prisoner in my apartment, that’s a lot of nonsense. The sergeant had never been in my apartment until he walked in with State’s Attorney Olson and Captain Corson and I can prove it by Manny Kelly, the elevator boy and Miss Gloria May, the young lady to whom I’m engaged and with whom I spent all of yesterday afternoon.”
    I noticed that nowhere in his statement did LaFanti mention either the hood I’d killed or the one whose face I’d massaged with the jagged heel of the shattered rye bottle. He concluded the interview by saying:
    “However, I still feel as I did after a thorough search of my apartment disproved Sergeant Duval’s wild sensations. I feel that he ought to be run through the psycho ward — for his own good.”
    For my good, or his? It took five days to put a guy through the