She sounded quite unperturbed by his violence. “I like to see who I’m talking to. You better come over here.”
“What’s your room number?”
She laughed. “Room two two two. Just you come on up... alone, Mr. Tully.”
“What are you afraid of, Miss Blake?” For a wild instant he suspected some sort of trap.
“Witnesses,” she said simply. “You say nothing to nobody and come alone, mister, or don’t bother to come at all.”
8
She was waiting for him in the doorway of her room. He supposed she had instructed the seedy clerk at the desk in the dusty lobby to warn her of his arrival.
Stretched over her gelatinous figure were skintight slimjims with a pattern of huge pink roses and a knit blouse that sculptured her outsized chest. There was a cigarette in her fat fingers and a tobacco crumb on her lips.
“Anybody with you?” She stepped into the hall and glanced down the dingy stairwell.
“You said to come alone.”
She motioned him into her room and followed him in.
She shut and latched the door and leaned back against it, watching him critically — even, Tully thought, anxiously. He glanced around the room; he had never set foot in Flynn’s Inn before. Like the hall it was dingy and cramped and dirty, and she had brought with her from the motel room the same odor of stale smoke and cheap perfume. He wondered if he was the intended victim of a badger game — the bed was unmade, the bedclothes tumbled about.
“Have a drink, Mr. Tully?”
“What? Oh — no, thanks. Miss Blake—”
“I never been much on this ‘Miss Blake’ stuff.” The woman went to the dusty bureau and poured herself a shot from a two-thirds empty fifth of rye. “You call me Maudie.”
“Look,” Tully said. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but if this is some kind of shakedown racket—”
“Why, Mr. Tully, you got no right to talk to me like that!” She actually sounded injured. “I just had a story to tell you.”
“Then tell it, please, and I’ll get out of here.”
“A real sad story, I mean.” She slung the contents of the shot glass down her throat. “About a girl who needs a loan.”
“I’m not a banker or a money-lender,” Tully said shortly. “I’m in the market for information and I’ll buy it. How much do you want?” He brought out his wallet and waited. Her quick animal eyes pounced on it and sprang away. She went back to the bureau and refilled the glass.
“What’s your hurry, Mr. Tully? Why don’t you sit down and relax?” Tully looked around, spotted one uncluttered chair, and sat down on it. “That’s better,” she smiled. “You see, Mr. Tully, I leveled with the cops. My neck ain’t stuck out. If I happen to remember an extra detail later, that’s natural, ain’t it?”
“What detail?”
Her glance was fixed on his right hand, and he looked down. He had forgotten that he was still holding the wallet. “First about that loan I mentioned...”
He made an impatient gesture. “How much?”
Maudie Blake said swiftly, “A hundred. Cash. They don’t like checks here.”
Tully opened his wallet and leafed through its contents. There were three twenties and a few small bills. “All I have on me is seventy-eight dollars.”
She walked over to him and deliberately looked into his wallet. “Okay,” she said. “Gimme.”
He handed her the bills and put his empty wallet away. She made a tight roll of the money and thrust it into the cleft under her blouse.
“Well?” Tully demanded. He felt himself sweating.
She carried her drink to a lumpy chair and sat down, draping her left leg over the arm. She looked at him uneasily and gulped the whisky. She had apparently been drinking for some time; her eyes were beginning to blear and she sounded a little tight.
“You’re not going to like this, Mr. Tully,” the woman began slowly. “Remember, I never promised you would. Right?”
“If it’s about Crandall Cox,” Tully said, “I’m listening.”
“And your wife.” She blinked and tongued her lips. “She wasn’t the only one,” she said. “A long time ago... well, Cranny used to tell me he didn’t give a damn about any of them but me. I didn’t believe him even then. But — you know how dames are, Mr. Tully. Or maybe you don’t.”
Or maybe I don’t...
Maudie Blake’s face drooped all over. “I was the one who was always there — he always had me, and he knew it. Cranny Cox was the kind needed a woman to fall back on when he was scared or broke — something like a dog he could count on no matter what he did. A dog that didn’t ask for nothing but a pat on the head once in a while, or even a boot in the rear.”
She got up and shuffled back to the bureau and the whisky bottle.
“It must have been rough on you,” Tully said. Who cares? he thought. Get on with it!
“Rough? Yes, you could say that, mister... yess’r, you could sure say that.”
He thought she was going to cry. Instead, her mouth tightened and she seized the bottle and drank directly from it and then took it back to the lumpy chair with her.
“When he got real sick this last time,” she said, “I figured I had Cranny for good. Though what I wanted with him I can’t tell you. All I knew was... I’d sooner have a kick from Cranny Cox than a kiss from any other man I ever knew. And he knew it. Goddam that ugly creep, he knew it!”
“Miss Blake,” Tully said. “Maudie—”
But she mumbled, “And I was wrong again. I didn’t have him, any more than the other times. He still had his great big plans to live it up. He just let me take care of him till he could get back on his feet. Then he robbed me and took off again.”
In spite of the sick dread in the pit of his stomach Tully found himself becoming aware of Maudie Blake as a woman, a hopeless addict of what she herself would hardly dare call love — love for a man who permitted her to shelter and nurse and feed him and give him money, and who then deserted her again.
“Did you know his plans? That he was coming here?”
“He didn’t tell me nothing. One day I come home and he was gone, and he didn’t come back. No note, no nothing. But I found a bus timetable... he’d marked it... name of a town, and I remembered he’d once said it was his home town.”
“So you followed him?”
“Took the next bus.” She hiccupped and giggled, “’Scuse me.”
“Why?”
“Huh?” She peered at him owlishly.
“Why did you follow him?”
She seemed surprised. “He needed me.”
“If he left you without a word,” Tully said, “how did you know he was at the Hobby?” Suddenly he was suspicious.
“I didn’t. But I figured him for a cheap motel — I’d only left a few bucks in my flat that he’d lifted. Third motel I tried, there he was, walking across the parking lot.”
“I suppose he wasn’t very glad to see you?”
“He cussed me out good.” She laughed, tilted the bottle again. But it was empty, and she flung it from her. “Later he says okay, you’re here you can stay, only keep out of my hair.” She laughed again, then scowled and began to struggle out of the chair. “I got to get me another bottle—”
But Tully was towering over her, and she plopped back in alarm. “Cox told you why he’d come here, didn’t he?”
“No—”
“You’re lying. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
Through her fright he saw a glint of cunning. “That ain’t what you’re buying for seventy-eight bucks, Mr. Tully.”
“Would you rather Lieutenant Smith asked you the question?”
“You yell copper and a fat lot of good it’ll do you,” she muttered. “I’d just have to tell him like I’m telling you: I don’t know why Cranny came here, I just followed him, that’s all. Is there a law against that?”