What will Happen in Red Harvest

I believe based of pages 41-48, that the Continental Op doesn't actually know who the murderer is despite his answer to Mr. Willsson. He is going to arrest Whisper and probably interrogate him “wrong” questions to expose the real culprit. He will either go down the civil path and keep interviewing people, especially the Noonan, and slowly piece together the puzzle. Or, which I hope happens, but probably won’t: the Continental Op keeps the ten thousand dollars for himself and becomes a self-employed hit man, who takes out the gangsters of Poinsonville, or brings them to prison. Either way, the Continental Op will go away from the Agency and do what he thinks as justice. Along the way as he is cleaning up the town, he will interrogate each gangster, either manipulatively or ruthlessly, and find the true killer from one of them squealing. He will then go into a state of shock, got drunk, and go on a man hunt for the killer. He will lose all sense of right and wrong, hunting down the killer. There will be an epic gun fight, as the killer hired protection. After eliminating the thugs, and maybe having a short chase, the Continental Op stares down the killer. Cornered, the killer goes into long detail as to why he/she did it. The Continental Op gets flooded with emotions and either winds up killing the killer or just arrests him/her, because he regained his felling of justice. The town is now cleaned up, and the Agency calls with another case he needs to go to. Then there are maybe a couple of pages at the end of the narrator reminiscing about the Poisonville case.