“They’re watching the place,” I said.
“I know it,” she said. “Somebody followed me home.”
She took me into the bathroom and went to work.
“It’s not bad at all,” she said. “Just ordinary cuts and bruises. But why did they do this to you? What were you doing?”
“I went out on an errand,” I said. “They’d never have known I was gone, but some clown had to call me on the telephone. They could hear it ringing and they knew I wasn’t here. What’s the matter?”
She was already pretty white and tense. Now she put her hand over her mouth and her eyes got big and full of tears.
“Oh Lord,” she said. “Oh, Lord, that was me.”
“You?”
“I got to thinking after I got home. I didn’t have any right to expect you to do anything. I didn’t have any right to reproach you. I wanted to tell you that. And I thought I ought to warn you that you were being watched. So I called. When you didn’t answer I thought at first you’d—”
She hesitated, and I said, “Passed out,” and she nodded.
“Then I began to get really worried. I called again, and again, and then finally I had to come back to see if you were all right.” She began to cry. “And it was my fault.”
“You didn’t mean it,” I said. “You were trying to help.” My first impulse was to kill her, but she looked so miserable. “Please, stop crying.”
“I can’t,” she whispered, and looked at the bloody washrag she had in her other hand. “I think I’m going to faint.”
She looked as though she might. I put my arm around her and took her into the other room, and we sat together on the edge of the bed, with her face buried on my shoulder. I wound up kissing her.
I think both of us were surprised to find we liked it.
“You’re a nice kid,” I said. “If you weren’t so rich—”
She said quickly, “Didn’t you know? My side of the family doesn’t have a million to its name. We’re the poor Hardings. That’s one reason my brother was so anxious to show off.”
“You may be in danger yourself,” I said, suddenly alarmed for her. “They’re already curious about you.”
“Since you’re not going to do anything about Marjorie, I can’t see that it matters,” she said.
“Well—” I said.
“You have done something! What? Please tell me.”
“No. You’re in trouble enough already. Anyway, it isn’t much.” It wasn’t, either, unless Prioletti could turn up something on that autopsy report. And even that would only be a first step, an opening wedge. “One thing I’d give a lot to know,” I told her, “is where Brian Ingraham was the night his wife was killed.”
“You don’t think,” she said, her face reflecting horror, “that Brian had anything to do with it.”
“He’s Justinian’s man. Body and bank account.”
“But his own wife!”
“This is a hard world we live in.”
She shivered. “And Marjorie said she’d given the maid the night off, so they’d be alone, and she was going to make herself beautiful so Brian would have to choose her instead of Justinian. She was vain, poor Marjorie. I just can’t believe— Well, it doesn’t matter what I believe, does it? Anyway, I know where Brian was that night, or at least where Marjorie thought he was. She was going to have to wait until he got home to talk to him.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Where was he?”
“At the Roman Garden, with Justinian.”
Chapter Five
Sin in a middle-western steel town is organized, functional, and realistic. It is not like in the movies. The necessary furniture is there, and nothing more. No velvet drapes, no gilt mirrors, no ultramodernistic salons, no unbelievably beautiful females. The houses are just houses, and the whores are just whores. Numbers slips can be bought in almost any dingy little sandwich shop, pool hall, or corner grocery, and anyone can play, even the kids with as little as a penny. The night clubs and gambling palaces, like the Roman Garden, are businesslike structures wasting no time on the fancy junk. There’s a bar, and there are the gambling layouts, and that’s that. Food, entertainment, and decor are haphazard. The bosses don’t figure that’s what you came for.
At nine o’clock on a hot morning the Roman Garden looked downright dreary. It was primarily a big, barny, old two-and-a-half-story frame house, with a new front tacked on it, yellow glazed brick with glass-brick insets and a neon sign. There was a parking lot around back. A couple of cars were already in it. The sports car I knew was Eddie Sego’s.
I went in through the back door. No one followed me. No one had followed me since the two musclemen left me in the alley. I had escorted Sheila to her apartment, making her promise that she would go to her uncle s first thing in the morning, and there had not been a sign of a tail, nor was there now. I wished I knew why.
I walked down the hall and pushed open the door that said OFFICE. A thoroughly respectable-looking, middle-aged female was sitting at a desk, writing busily. I went past her to the door marked PRIVATE and went through it before she could do more than squawk.
Eddie Sego was in the inner office. He was busy, too. There’s a lot of paper work in any business, and he had a stack of it. He was wearing a magnificent silk sports shirt, and a pair of hornrimmed glasses. With his hairy forearms and thick, low-growing black hair, the glasses made him look like a studious gorilla.
He leaped up, startled. Then he saw who it was and sat down again, and swore. He took his glasses off.
“You ought to know better than that, Carver,” he said. “Bursting in without warning. I might have thought it was a heist and shot you.” He looked at me with his head on one side. “What are you doing here, anyway? And what hit you?”
“You know damn well what hit me,” I said. “Eddie, it isn’t fair. I’ve played ball. The Emperor wanted me to shut up, and I did. What more does he want?”
“Look,” said Eddie, “I’m no mind reader. What’s this all about?”
“Of course,” I said, “you’re not going to admit you know. Okay, I’ll spell it out. Last night a girl came to visit me. A mutual friend just died, and she was looking for sympathetic conversation. Everything was going fine with us until she went home. Then I found out my place was being watched. A big goon followed her and scared the wits out of her, and then when I left my room for a breath of air two guys jumped me. They wanted to know where I was going and why, and then they threatened to kill me, when they got the order. And I haven’t done a damned thing. Everybody’s got a limit, even me. And I’m pretty close to it.”
“Are you?” said Eddie. He got up and came around the desk to me, he looked at me for a moment, close to. Then he hit me, fast as a coiled snake, in the pit of the belly. He watched me double up and move back, and his lip curled. He stood there with his hands at his sides, almost as though he was giving me an invitation.
I didn’t take it, and Eddie said, “Limit! You’ve got no limit. You haven’t got anything.” He turned his back on me. “You don’t even have a reason to come whining to me. I didn’t send anybody around. I don’t care what dames you see, and I can’t imagine Justinian does, either.”
He sounded as though he really had not sent anybody. In the small corner of my mind that was not concerned with the pain in my gut, I wondered if Justinian was playing this one over Eddie’s head. It was possible.
I managed to say, “They were his boys, just the same. The same two that beat me before.”