“Her coat’s in the check room,” he told the waiter.
“To hell with her coat,” the waiter said succinctly.
“Mine too. We’ll take her out to the car. Then I’ll come back for our coats.”
“Cold out there.”
“I can take it.”
“Hot,” she said. “Me. Warm. Really.”
“You won’t be for long,” the waiter told her.
Sweet asked, “It hasn’t started snowing again, has it?”
The waiter shook his head, but Sweet, on the opposite side of her, could not see him.
A big man and a slender woman in a sable wrap were coming through the door as they reached the vestibule. For a moment, the newcomers stared in amazement, then the woman collapsed into helpless laughter.
“Shut up,” Sweet told her. “You don’t know what’s happening.”
“Me neither,” Candy said. She belched, breathed the cool air of the vestibule, and immediately felt better. “Why are you so nice to me?”
“I like you,” Sweet said.
“You too.”
The waiter pushed open the door with his foot. A little new snow had fallen; the most recent automobiles had left twining, opalescent tracks in it like the trails of arctic pythons. The cold air felt wonderful. Her face was hot, her belly overwarm as well as overfull. (At last! At last! Full to bursting, dead, solid full, with every scrap of hunger crowded out.) When she stepped out into the snow, her feet felt cool rather than cold.
“You don’t have to hold me,” she said. “I’m okay now.”
Sweet told her, “I’d rather hold you.”
“You’re sweet.” Taking her arm from the waiter, she turned, enfolded Sweet, and kissed him.
“Thank you,” he said when he could speak again. “But we have to go to the car now.”
“All right.” Candy slipped and nearly fell. The waiter caught her. “I’m all right,” she insisted.
“Sure,” the waiter said.
“Hey, you remind me of somebody. My boyfriend.”
“I thought he was your boyfriend.”
“No, he’s my …” She could not think of a polite word and was not certain there was one. “My boyfriend, you know, he didn’t have—” She belched again. “Any more money. That champagne. How much did I drink?”
“Couple bottles,” the waiter told her. “Where’s your car, sir?”
“Black Caddy,” Sweet grunted. “Other side of the van.” Candy was leaning most of her weight on him.
“Nice car.”
“Rented.”
“We’ll have to put her in back.”
Sweet nodded. “It’s not locked.”
“Okay, sir. Just hold her for a moment while I get the door open.”
For a moment Sweet did so, as Candy took two tottering steps toward the black car. One bare foot slipped in the snow, and she fell.
She fell slowly and yet inevitably, as a ruinous warehouse collapses under a surfeit of rich goods, or a tall, broad maple (and indeed, her red-gold hair and round, flushed face suggested one) under the intoxicating weight of a thousand fruiting vines.
Sweet tried to support her and nearly fell with her. She sought to hold herself up, or at least to break her fall, with the arm the waiter had released. That, too, failed her, her hand skidding from under her in the snow, which had not yet been much packed. Her belly and her face buried themselves in the loose snow.
“Oh, God!” Sweet said. He jerked a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his sweating face.
“Wait a minute, I’ll help you with her, sir.”
“If you hadn’t let go it wouldn’t have happened.”
“All right,” the waiter said. “All right.”
A jet with blazing lights roared past, a thousand feet overhead. Futilely, Candy struggled to stand.
Murder Mystery
The room over the witch’s was not a room at all; it was a suite. Stubb glanced appreciatively at the white-and-gold mirrors and the Louis XIV carpet before seating himself on a spindly chair of velvet and gilded wood. He liked small chairs, and this one smelled of money.
“Drink?” Cliff asked.
“I’ve had too much beer already,” Stubb told him. “On an empty stomach, too. Think you could order your star operative a sandwich from room service? I haven’t eaten since lunch.”
“Whatever you want.” Cliff picked up the telephone.
“Then make it a hot roast beef, medium rare. Coffee. How come I’ve got an in on this one?”
“You don’t happen to know … ?” Cliff squinted at the label pasted on the cradle.
“Two eleven.”
“Thanks.” He dialed. “A hot roast beef sandwich au jus. Put plenty of meat on it. Two coffees, and they’d better be hot when they get here. Room eight seventy-seven in five minutes, understand?”
As he hung up, Stubb said, “I asked you how come I’ve got an in, Cliff.”
“Who said you’ve got an in?”
“You did.”
“Like hell!”
“You said three hundred a day.”
“And I meant it, Jim. That’s solid.”
“Enough to buy me off the case I was on. This afternoon you wouldn’t have me for fifty.”
“For God’s sake, Jim, you know the business! When you called, I didn’t have this job.”
Stubb stood up. “If I meet the boy in the hall, I’ll tell him to take the sandwich back.”
“Okay,” Cliff threw up his hands. “You always were a smart monkey. It ever get through to you that you’d be better off if you weren’t quite so God-damned smart?”
“And a foot taller.” Stubb sat down again.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. All right. There’s a murder, and you knew him. That’s all, Jim. That’s everything—I swear to God.”
“Uh huh. No rough stuff. That’s what you said. Ben Free?”
“You knew somebody snuffed him?”
“It’s him, then.”
“That’s the name we got, yeah.” Cliff took a snapshot from the breast pocket of his coat and handed it over.
The old man lay on a filthy floor that might have been concrete. The back of his shirt was soaked with his blood, and a pool had formed beneath his chest. Only the side of his face was visible, but it was Free.
“Twice in the back,” Cliff said. “Big slugs. We’ve got a line to the ballistics lab, but they haven’t made them yet. Probably forty-fives or three-fifty-sevens. He went right down. Probably never knew what hit him.”
“He stayed up long enough for the guy to shoot twice.”
“There’s that, yeah.”
“Where?”
“Hold on. Jim, I’ll brief you, but I want to ask you a couple of questions first. I don’t want you to go into your act again, but God damn it, you’re working for me. How’d you know who it was?”
“Just a guess.”
“All right, how’d you guess?”
“You said I knew him. I know a lot of characters around town, but you know most of them yourself, and you’ve got guys on the payroll who know them too, so it wasn’t one of those. That left people I knew way back and people I know now in my private life. Somebody who knew the guy way back isn’t worth three hundred a day—the odds against his having anything worthwhile are terrific. That left my private life. Most of the people I know like that are women, but you indicated this was a man, you said him. And you’ve been here in the hotel for a while, you said, trying to get hold of me, but I haven’t seen anything in the paper. So it was probably today, and I asked myself about men I know, privately, that I haven’t seen in the last eight or ten hours.”