When I came out two cops were there, and four or five of the fags, and one of the girls in a dinner coat, and a guy in a derby hat. Whether he was the dick that had been waiting for Juana, and he grabbed some of them on the way out, I didn’t know. When the cops saw me they motioned me to stand aside, and one of them went back to phone. Pretty soon two more cops came up, and a couple of detectives, and next thing, the place was full of cops. There was one guy that seemed to be a doctor, and another that seemed to be a police photographer. Anyway, he set up a tripod, and began setting off bulbs and throwing them in the fern pot. Pretty soon a cop went over, motioned to me, and he, a detective, and I went out. I didn’t have any coat there, but I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t know whether they had Juana, or even where she had gone, and I was afraid if I asked them to let me go to the apartment, they would come with me and find her. We went down in the elevator. Harry ran us down. When we got to the lobby, more cops were there, talking to Tony.
We got in a police car, drove down Second Avenue, then down Lafayette Street, and on downtown to a place that seemed to be police headquarters. We got out, went in, and the cops took me in a room and told me to sit down. One of them went out. The other stayed, and picked up an afternoon paper that was on the table. We must have sat an hour, he reading the paper and neither of us saying anything. After a while I asked him if he had a cigarette. He passed over a pack without looking up. I smoked and we sat for another hour. Outside it was beginning to get light.
About six o’clock a detective came in, sat down, and stared at me a while. Then he began to talk. “You was there tonight? At this here Hawes’s place?”
“Yes, I was.”
“You seen him killed?”
“I did.”
“What she kill him for?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Come on, you know. What you trying to do, kid me?”
“I told you I don’t know.”
“You live with her?”
“Yes.”
“Then what do you mean you don’t know? What she kill him for.”
“I’ve got no idea at all.”
“Was she in this country illegal?”
I knew by that Tony had spilled what he knew. “That I can’t tell you. She might have been.”
“What the hell can you tell me?”
“Anything I know I’ll tell you.”
He roared for a minute about how he could make me tell him, but that was a mistake. It gave me time to think. That illegal entry was a way he could tie me in, and hold me if he wanted to, and I knew the only way I could be of any use to her was to get out of there. Whether they had got her or not I didn’t know, but I couldn’t be any good sitting behind bars. I kept looking at him, thinking over the entries on my passport, and by the time he began asking questions again I had it all in hand, and thought I could get away with a lie. “So you quit that goddam stalling. One more thing you can’t tell me and I’ll open you up. Come on. She was in illegal, wasn’t she?”
“I told you I don’t know.”
“Did you bring her in?”
“I did not.”
“What? Wasn’t you in Mexico?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Didn’t you bring her in with you?”
“I did not. I met her in Los Angeles.”
“How you come in?”
“I rode a bus up to Nogales, caught a ride to San Antonio, and from there took another bus to Los Angeles. I met her about a week after that, in the Mexican quarter. Then I began working for pictures, and we hooked up. Then she came with me to New York.”
I saw I had led with my chin on that, on account of the white slave charge. He snapped it back at me before I even finished. “Oh, so you brought her to New York.”
“I did not. She paid her own fare.”
“What the hell are you trying to tell me? Didn’t I say cut that stalling out?”
“All right, ask her.”
Then came a flicker in his eye. I had a quick hunch they hadn’t got her yet. “Ask her, that’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t be silly. I’m not paying any woman’s fare from Los Angeles to New York. I heard of the Mann Act too.”
“Who turned in the tip against her?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Come on—”
“I told you I don’t know. Now if you’ll cut out your goddam nonsense, I’ll tell you what I do know, and maybe it’ll help you out, I don’t know. But you can just drop this third-degree stuff right now, or I’ll be starting a little third-degree of my own before long that you may not like so well.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean. You’re not talking to some Hell’s Kitchen gunman. I’ve got a few friends, see? I don’t ask any favors. But I’m claiming my rights, and I’ll get them.”
“All right, Sharp. Shoot it.”
“We went to the party, she and I.”
“Yeah, that drag was a funny place for a guy like you.”
“He was a pixie, but he was also a musician, and I had worked for him, and when he asked us to his housewarming—”
“Are you a pix?”
“Starting up again, are you?”
“Go on, Sharp. Just checking up.”
“So we went. And pretty soon one of the boys came up, and— ”
“One of them pixes?”
“One of the bellboys. And I found out there was a guy downstairs waiting to see me. And I found out Hawes had put in three calls that day to the Immigration Office—”
“Then he did turn her in?”
“I told you I don’t know. I wasn’t taking any chances. I told her what the boys had told me, and tried to get her out of there. I told her to leave, and she did, but then she came back with this sword, and they started up again this bullfight game they had been playing—”
“Yeah, we know all about that.”
“And she let him have it. And goddam well he had it coming to him. What the hell business was it of his whether she—”
“What he turn her in for?”
“That I don’t know either. He had tried to tell me once or twice that living with a girl the way we did wasn’t doing me any good, that it was hurting my career—”
“Your singing career?”
“That’s right.”
“What he have to do with that?”
“He had plenty to do with it. I don’t only sing here in New York. I’m under contract to a Hollywood picture company, and he controlled the picture company, or said he did, and he was afraid— ”
“Hays office stuff?”
“That’s it.”
“Oh, I get it now. Go on.”
“That’s all. It wasn’t just morals, take it from me it wasn’t, or friendship, or anything like that. It was money, and fear that the Mann Act would ruin one of his big stars, and stuff like that. All right, he went up against the wrong person. She let him have it, and now let him count up his Class A preferred stock.”
He asked me a few more questions and then went out. As near as I could tell I had done all right. I had fixed her up with a motive that anyway made sense, him trying to bust us up, and it would look a hell of a sight better after we were married, as I knew we would be before the case ever came to trial. I had kept out of it what was really between Winston and me. I would have even told him that if it would have done her any good, but I knew that one whisper of that would crack everything wide open, and ruin her. I had anyhow made some kind of a stall about the Mann Act and the illegal entry, and they couldn’t disprove it unless she told them different, and I knew they’d never get anything out of her. Around seven o’clock they gave me something to eat, and I waited for their next move.
Around eight o’clock a cop came in with one of my traveling cases, with clothes in it. That meant they had been in the apartment. I was still in evening clothes, and began to change. “You got a washroom here?”