Free Have Gat—Will Travel by Richard S. Prather Page A

looked down as two cars pulled into the curb. Policemen left the cars and hurried into the building. At my feet was the little .32 I'd dropped when I'd come to; I picked it up, swung out the cylinder. Two empty cartridge cases were in it.
    I didn't move for a moment, forcing myself to think. A Borneo headhunter could have figured out that Foster had killed Danny and was framing me for the murder — and Foster didn't do things halfway. That would be fixed so I'd have a fat chance of explaining to the police — especially now. For two weeks the papers had been riding the police hard about the still-unsolved murder of a union official named Tyler. Under the circumstances, they'd solve Danny's murder fast; it could even happen that they'd solve Tyler's murder fast.
    My lips were sore, puffed and bruised. I'd been slugged while unconscious. Danny's face was marked up, too; it would look as if we'd been in a fight — and that could explain the lump on my head. It didn't help that I'd knocked Danny on his fanny a week ago.
    I ran, I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and was at the third floor before I heard the heavy steps pounding upward. I didn't know how much the police knew about me — but I knew I had a murder gun in my pocket. A few feet on my right was the open door to room 302. I could see the middle-aged hotel maid putting new sheets on the bed. I jumped to the door and jerked off my coat, held it loosely in my hand as the officers reached the landing.
    I glared inside at the woman, my hand on the doorknob. The two officers stood at the head of the stairs. "Okay, baby," I shouted, "if that's how you want it, you can fry in hell!"
    The little woman's jaw dropped open and her eyes got very wide as I slammed the door shut with a crash that rang down the hallway. I swung around, putting on my coat, and walked to the stairs. The two uniformed officers were looking at me; one of them ran his eyes over my dark hair, my face, my puffed lips, checking my size and build. That probably meant they had some kind of description of the "killer."
    "Well?" I roared at them. They looked at each other. I ran a finger over my puffed lips and mumbled, "The bitch, damn wildcat," as I started to brush by them. They shrugged, went on up the stairs.
    Moments after they were out of sight the door behind me opened and the little old lady looked out. "What did I do?" she asked me.
    I was on my way to the lobby. I got there, looked around. Several shops could be reached from the hotel lobby. I walked into one of them, a florist's shop. Several thousand dollars that had been in my wallet while I was unconscious were gone, I discovered, but I found a few bucks in my trousers pocket, bought a dozen roses, and continued with them to the street.
    I was sweating, but I knew the mental storm wasn't showing on my face. Years of high-stakes poker had taught me to control my expression and bearing; but, inside, my kidneys were coming apart. Nobody stopped me while I walked to a cab a few yards away, told the driver to light out. He lit, I switched cabs a dozen blocks from the hotel, leaving my roses behind, got out of the second cab three blocks from Green Park. At Green Park I walked boldly onto the grass, picking up somebody's newspaper on the way, made a pillow of my coat and lay down with the newspaper over my face.

    I thought about the four men I'd been playing poker with until about four p.m. today, Thursday. Vic Foster was an attorney and small-time politician with big ideas who'd twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. He was a tall, bony man, thin and sagging with a craggy face. Foster looked like an old-time western sheriff relaxing after cleaning up on all the outlaws in town. By shooting them in the back. Short, fat, white-haired Arthur Jason was a circuit court judge. Bert Stone, fifty years old and six-feet-four inches tall, with a big red nose that looked as if somebody had just slugged him on it, was an electronics expert and