I said: “That’s quite a token.” I liked Mae at that moment about ninety per cent less than I’d ever liked her, and she’d never been the kind of girl I’d want to take home and introduce to the folks. I didn’t tell her I thought she’d been extravagantly overpaid — that was pretty obvious. I waited for her to go on and let me in on what I had to do with it all.
She went into a fast song and dance about what a cinch it was going to be to take Steinlen for the twenty-five grand, about how it wasn’t technically blackmail because she was simply exchanging his check — a check that he’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to his wife — for the cash ten times as much cash. She said the reason she wanted me to come in on it was because she thought I could make the deal better than she could and because we’d have to be careful not to let the twenty-five-hundred-dollar check get out of our hands before we got the cash.
When she finished I grinned at her without any particular warmth and said: “Why don’t you have Tony work with you on this?”
She said: “Don’t be a sap, Red — if Tony knew about this, or found out about it, he’d cut my throat.” Then she went on to cuss Tony out and explain that she was all washed up with him, and had been for a long time and that she was going to scram to Europe as soon as she got her big dough.
When she got all that out of her system I lit into her and told her that in the first place she was crazy as a bedbug to figure on beating Steinlen out of anything, and in the second place I wouldn’t show in a deal of that kind if it was for a million, and a natural — I was getting along too well legitimately — and in the third place she was an awful sucker to finagle around with something that Tony might find out about before she could get away. I finally wound up by explaining to her, with gestures, that my job was keeping people out of trouble, not getting them into it.
She took it fairly easy. She said she was sorry I couldn’t see it her way, and that she’d have to find somebody else or do it herself. She said that however she worked it would have to be done quickly because Steinlen’s wife, who was Sheila Dale the Astra star, was due back from location the next morning — and Steinlen would be psychologically ripe for the touch with his wife coming in. Mae was a bright girl in some ways. It’s too bad she was so full of larceny — bad company I guess.
We went back out into the kitchen and she fixed a drink for herself and started fixing one for me and I showed her my full glass.
She said: “I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this under your hat...”
I smiled and shook my head and drank some of the ginger ale in a kind of silent toast to her success. Then I tried to talk her out of it again in a roundabout way but it was no go — she’d made up her mind. A couple drunks weaved out into the kitchen and Mae mixed drinks for them.
Tony came in while they were there, which was just as well because it didn’t look like Mae and I had been doing our double act all the time he’d been out.
He said: “Cora made me stay an’ have a couple drinks with her. She is very sad and won’t come down.” He went on to explain to me that Cora’s boy-friend had walked out on her, and what a heel he was, and what he, Tony, would do to him if he saw him. Tony’s voice was very soft and he spoke each word very quietly, very distinctly, with just a trace of accent.
I glanced at Mae while Tony was telling me in detail what he would do to Cora’s boy-friend; she was gargling another drink.
I shoved off pretty soon and went down and got into a cab and went back to the Derby. In a little while the fight crowd started drifting in and Franey and Broun and a bookmaker named Connie Hartley came in and we had a few drinks and sat around and told lies. I’d been on the wagon for a couple weeks and I was getting pretty sick of it — I had quite a few drinks. Hartley had some racing-forms and Franey and I picked a few losers for Saturday.
After a while Franey and Hartley and I went out to the Colony Club and there was a friend of mine there who was a swell piano player. We listened to him and had a lot more drinks. I got home about four.
I woke sometime around eleven I guess, but I didn’t get up right away. I made a couple phone calls and then tried to get back to sleep but that was out. Finally I rolled over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the extra which had been shoved under the door. By twisting my head around I could read the headline:
I got up then, and sat on the bed and read the story. Mae Jackman had been murdered at around three-thirty in the morning, as near as the police could figure, in her apartment at the Mara. The body had been discovered at eight-thirty by the maid. The dragnet was out for Tony Aricci.
I had breakfast at a little joint down the street a few doors from the hotel. When I went back up to my room there was a man standing in the dim elbow of the corridor just outside my door. It was Tony. He stepped close to me and jabbed an automatic into my belly. I unlocked the door and we went into my room and closed the door.
I said: “What’s it all about?”
Tony’s face was something I still dream about when I have too much lobster and cherry brandy. His usually dark swarthy skin was gray; his mouth was a dark gray slit across the lower part of his face, and his eyes were stark crazy.
When he spoke it sounded like the words were coming up out of a well. He said: “You killed Mae.” There was no intonation — the words were of exactly the same pitch.
I didn’t feel especially good. I edged away from him slowly, sat down very slowly in the chair by the window. While I was doing that I was saying: “For the love of the — Tony — where did you get such a dumb idea?”
He said: “If you didn’t kill her you know who did. She’s been calling you for three days. You talked to her alone last night while I was at Cora’s — all the time I was away. There is something I do not know. I have known there was something I did not know for a long time. You must tell me what it is. If you do not tell me what it is I am going to kill you.”
If I have any gift for figuring whether people mean what they say, he meant it. I stalled, lit a cigarette.
I said: “Sit down, Tony.”
He shook his head very sharply.
I went on. “You’re on the wrong track, Tony. If that gang of drunks officed you that Mae and I were in the bedroom while you were upstairs — she took me in to show me the stills on her last picture. We talked about old times...” I leaned forward, shook my head slowly. “I thought you had killed her when I read it in the paper just now. I thought you’d had one of your battles and you’d gone a little too far.”
He wilted suddenly. He fell down on his knees beside the bed and the automatic clattered to the floor and he put his head in his arms on the bed and sobbed in a terrible dry way like a sick animal. He said brokenly and his voice was muffled by his arms, seemed to come from very far away: “My dear God. My dear God! I kill her! — I kill her who I loved more than anything! Why, my dear God, do they say I killed her?...”
It was embarrassing to see a guy like Tony break down like that. I got up and picked up the automatic and dropped it into the pocket of my topcoat and patted Tony’s shoulder. I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t know what to say, so I went back and sat down and looked out the window.