CHAPTER XVIII
Knowing that he had come alone, except for the taxi-driver whom he had instructed to wait, Calvin did not reckon upon other persons forming an erroneous and, as it turned out, also a far-reaching interpretation of his appearance at the Temple. Of course it was a fault of Calvin's that he dealt too confidently with what was in his own mind, ignoring, or not even suspecting, the ideas in the heads of others.
Frankie Zenn and George Baretta were, on the contrary, a pair of enterprising gentlemen who had elevated themselves to agreeable, if somewhat precarious, positions of affluence and authority through the circumspect exercise of a habit of making a liberal allowance for the intentions and motives of others.
At an hour considerably earlier than Joan Daisy Royle's appearance at the Temple, both Baretta and Frankie Zenn had come into possession of the information that one of Considine's friends had "squealed." They knew not only the general source of the squeal, but it's exact nature—that is, they knew that not Considine's death but the Ketlar murder had been described in damaging detail.
This was an affair concerning which George Baretta was extremely sensitive; for it had been a personal, and not a business, killing; also it had been a shooting of a girl; moreover, it had never been necessary. Indeed, from a practical point of view, when coolly considered, it could be held to have been hardly advantageous. The girl had made him mad when he had been drunk enough
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