“Heller!” he said. He was a skinny, tow-haired guy in his late twenties with a bad complexion and a good outlook. “What no good are you up to?”

“The Goldblatt’s shooting. That kid they killed was working with me.”

“Oh! I didn’t know! Heard about the shooting, of course, but didn’t read the papers or anything. So you were involved in that? No kidding.”

“No kidding. You on watchman duty?”

“Yeah. Up and down the street, here, all night.”

“Including the union hall?”

“Sure.” He grinned. “I usually stop up for a free drink, ’bout this time of night.”

“Can you knock off for a couple of minutes? For another free drink?”

“Sure!”

Soon we were in a smoky booth in back of a bar and Eddie was having a boilermaker on me.

“See anything unusual last night,” I asked, “around the union hall?”

“Well…I had a drink there, around two o’clock in the morning. That was a first.”

“A drink? Don’t they close earlier than that?”

“Yeah. Around eleven. That’s all the longer it takes for their ‘members’ to lap up their daily dough.”

“So what were you doing up there at two?”

He shrugged. “Well, I noticed the lights was on upstairs, so I unlocked the street level door and went up. Figured Alex…that’s the bartender, Alex Davidson…might have forgot to turn out the lights, ’fore he left. The door up there was locked, but then Mr. Rooney opened it up and told me to come on in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was feelin’ pretty good. Looked like he was workin’ on a bender. Anyway, he insists I have a drink with him. I says, sure. Turns out Davidson is still there.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. So Alex serves me a beer. Henry Berry-he’s the union’s so-called business agent, mousy little guy with glasses-he was there, too. He was in his cups, also. So was Rooney’s wife-she was there, and also feeling giddy.”