After she had locked the door behind them, she laid her pistol on the dresser. I laid Jet’s next to it and scowled at her.
“Don’t be mad at me, Manny,” she said. “I couldn’t turn Gerald in.”
I said, “What were they looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“You do,” I said irritably. “You knew when Jet asked you about it this afternoon too.”
I walked about the room examining the evidence of an intensive search and decided there was no point in going over things again, because they obviously had missed nothing. Finally I lifted the lid of the portable phonograph, pulled out the records and peered into the compartment. It was empty.
As I slid the records back in place, Nina pulled me around, took my chin in one hand and planted a light kiss on my lips. “Would you stop being mad at me if I let you watch me practice my new routine?”
“No,” I said shortly.
“I want to prove to you there’s a difference between burlesque and art,” she said.
Pushing me gently to one side, she put on a record, wound the machine and carefully set the needle. In its tinny tone the machine again began to emit Stardust.
“Look, Nina,” I told her. “Ars longa, vita brevis, as the Romans say. I haven’t got time for an art exhibition at the moment.”
Pushing her gently to one side, I switched off the phonograph, removed the record and began to lift the record disc from its spindle. With a hand on my shoulder she swung me around, twined her arms about my neck and flattened her body against mine. Then she kissed me as I’ve never been kissed before.
There was no coyness in this kiss, no assumed reluctance such as the gentler sex generally exhibits during a first kiss in order to convince the man he is the aggressor. As a matter of fact, I would have had to break her arms to avoid it. She got a stranglehold on my head, pulled my face down to hers and went after my lips like a trout after a fly. After about a minute she let me come up for air.
With her lips still nearly touching mine, she asked, “Still mad?” in a sultry voice.
Reaching behind my head, I grasped both her wrists and pried her loose. “Still a little mad,” I said. “Enough to take a look in the one place your friends probably missed.”
In self-defense I still had hold of her wrists, and I could feel her arms stiffen.
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“The place you keep steering me away from,” I said. “First you don’t want anyone but yourself to operate the thing. Then when I merely start to look at it, you try to divert my attention by offering to do your artistic act, and when I won’t bite on that, you become suddenly amorous.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked as I turned toward the portable phonograph.
“Unscrew the top of this thing. There’s lots of empty space in the part containing the works.”
“Don’t you dare harm my phonograph!” she said, and tried to sidetrack me by again twining herself around me.
Reaching out to her, I administered a caress on one of her rosy cheeks with such enthusiasm, it made a noise like a pistol shot. Her mouth popped open, and she stepped back and began to rub the caressed spot. Then suddenly she rushed toward the dresser.
I grabbed a wrist as she went by, tossed her none too gently on the bed, and transferred the two guns on the dresser to my pockets.
She sat on the bed alternately rubbing her wrist and her cheek while I went to work on the phonograph. And as I had suspected, it was the hiding place. In each of the box’s four corners I found a square cardboard carton taped to the wall of the box. They were about three inches square and felt as though they weighed about a half pound each.
When I opened one, I discovered it was filled with a white, fluffy powder.
“Heroin?” I asked casually.
Nina merely watched me.
“About two pounds,” I guessed. “Cut ten to one with sugar and powdered milk, you’d have twenty pounds. How much would that bring you on the retail market?”
“Between thirty-five and forty thousand dollars,” Nina whispered. “It’s half yours, with me thrown in the bargain. Come over here and get better acquainted.”
“I’m already getting better acquainted by the minute,” I said. “I’m beginning to understand everything.”
Nina said nothing, but her eyes contained a mixture of invitation and pleading.
“Your husband’s racket is narcotics,” I said. “And your platonic friend, Henry England, not only helped you escape Gerald, he helped one of Gerald’s narcotic shipments escape too. Jet and Gerald didn’t come here after you. They came after their merchandise. How’d you get it?”
“Henry gave it to me to keep for him,” Nina whispered.
I shook my head at her. “A guy low enough to peddle this stuff would be too greedy to let it out of his sight. Both his informal attire when he died and the fact there was no struggle, indicates Henry was taken by surprise by someone he knew well. He wouldn’t have given either Gerald or Jet a chance to surprise him. Was he watching you practice your art when he got it?”
She slid from the bed and came toward me with an expression of entreaty in her eyes. Her arms reached out to encircle my neck, and I caught the glint of metal in her right hand just in time. She must have had the knife under her pillow.
My left hand grasped her wrist as my right caught her openhanded alongside the jaw. As the knife clattered to the floor, she stumbled backward, tripped and sprawled on her hands and knees.
She stayed there on all fours like an animal, mouthing curses at me all the time I was talking to Inspector Warren Day on the phone.