“Already been sick. Get going, pal.” I gave him another buck. The profits on tonight's job were shot to hell. The old man mumbled something, pulled his flag down, and took off.
4
Louise and I walked up two flights of stairs that smelled of garbage and other human stinks that made me glad I lived on a boat. She nodded at a door and I got her keys out and opened it. She staggered in, asked, “Want some coffee?”
“No. Good night, baby.”
“Come on in, talk to me. I got the jitters.”
“What's that, new name for a big head?”
“Isn't only the liquor—it's you. Way you... you hit Charles. It was so... so cold.”
“And when you were out and he socked you, what was that, a love tap?”
She shivered. “That was just being... sneaky. It's different. Come on, don't make talking to me a big deal.” I stepped in and she shut the door and I asked, “Where's the lights?”
“Forget them, the place is a mess. And I don't like you seeing me with a black eye.”
I felt along the wall till I found a switch. It was a one-room apartment with a kitchenette stuck in the far end like a sore thumb. I opened a door leading to the John, and the only other door, a closet. There was an unmade studio couch, and all her furniture was the buck down and buck-a-week kind. I came back to her and she snapped off the light. “So you had to see my shoddy place.”
“I'm the careful type, don't want any enraged poppas or husbands coming out of the darkness.”
“You're too suspicious. Don't you think I've had enough trouble for one night,” she said, and in the darkness I felt her come close to me. She did something I liked—she was a couple inches taller than I was and she suddenly kicked off her high heels. I could feel her hair level with mine. She put her arms around my neck and I smelled the odd smell of her, mixed with the stale odor of whisky.
Louise whispered in my ear, “Suppose you think I'm a pushover?”
“Could be, are you?” I said, not touching her. I knew a lot of good reasons for not laying strays.
She laughed, breathing into my ear. She began talking, fast and low. “Yes, if being a pushover means you need some loving, a feeling you're wanted in this crazy world. You work hard every day, building up to a dance and it all turns out so dull and boring, lot of empty noise. And you wake up to find a strange man driving you home, a blond-haired, doll-faced little...”
“Cut that,” I said, trying to push her away. My hand touched a great deal of cool skin, and that lace bra strap.
“... And he talks tough and you don't believe him, only he is so hard he frightens you. It's almost like a new thrill, gives the evening a new tone, a sharp edge.”
I was fooling with the strap and it broke or came apart and I had my fingers on the heavy rise of her breast. I could still remember all the reasons for not tangling with strays.
“Aren't you even going to kiss me?”
I moved my head down to duck her lips and ducked into her firm breast, the hard nipple stabbing me in the eye. She giggled. “Now you'll have a shiner.”
“But this is the best way to get one,” I said, my lips moving against the lush smoothness of her breast.
Her laughter was a high note of hot triumph in the still room as her hands tore open my shirt.
I could still remember all those reasons for skipping quickie affairs—but I didn't believe a one of them.
5
The shrill sound of an alarm shattered my head. I sat up. The room was dim with the hard early gray light of morning. The alarm claimed it was five-thirty. Louise got out of bed and shut the damn thing off. She threw her arms back, stretched; even the morning light couldn't change the comfortable curves of her strong body, nor the wild red of her. I didn't object to seeing them, I don't believe in mixing the two “B's”—business and bed. After I talked my last secretary into working between the sheets, the office went to hell. In Anita's case there was another danger—despite her saying she was nineteen, I was sure she was jail-bait, and I'm not that sex-slappy.
Anita was a slender, almost skinny, dark-haired kid, with an eager, sharp face that reflected her constant drive. She looked more like a bobby-soxer than a secretary, but she was an efficient office worker, and I wasn't paying the world's highest salary.
She was honest, a hard worker, and a nice kid—and she was driving me nuts. Aside from throwing her young bosom all over the office (when I once politely suggested she ought to buy a bra out of petty cash, Anita said, “Hell, those two-piece jock straps are for old women.”) the kid also had the private eye bug. Her mother must have been frightened by a comic book for Anita thought being a detective was strictly being a super Humphrey Bogart. It was a source of painful astonishment for her to learn that I'd never been on a big robbery, much less a murder, that the private eye business is 99.99 per cent guard work, skip tracing, and maybe now and then shadowing a two-timing wife or husband. Anita lived in a private world of “big rewards,” childish daydreams about the “sensational capture of Public Enemy 1 to 10,” and junk like that.
Taking my mail, three letters, I sat down at my desk, asked, “Anything worth reading in these?”
“You got two bills, and a case—a great big one, a hundred bucks worth,” Anita said with mild disgust. “The boys called in, patrolled the stores last night, everything okay. We're out of cards, so I called the printer. I've also typed out four letters to dance-hall owners, usual baloney. At noon you have a lunch appointment with a slob named Boscom, owns the 5th Street Casino, a real fire-trap.”
“Thanks,” I said, opening the one letter that wasn't a bill. “Keep working through the directory, sending form letters to the other dance halls.”
“Okay, okay, Hal, and don't think it isn't just all too, too thrilling. See this?” She waved an FBI circular. “There's a two hundred grand reward on that armed car robbery in Frisco. Gee, think of lifting two million bucks... even bigger than the Brink's job up in New England. Two hundred thousand bucks... reward.” There was a far-away, dreamy, quality to her voice.
I grinned at her. “I know, two more box tops and you can send away for your tin badge.”
Anita made a comment about my mother living on a diet of bones. Talking tough was another of her charms.
The case was from Guy Moore, who was my MP officer in Tokyo. Now he was a struggling lawyer in St. Louis. An old man had died leaving an “estate”—if you can call a rundown farm by such a fancy handle—to his niece, one Marion Lodge. The case meant a lot to Guy because a bank was handling the estate and if he showed fast action on this, they'd give him some real important cases. After a lot of remembering what buddy-buddies we'd been in the army, Guy wrote he could only afford a hundred bucks, and would I kindly break my back and locate the gal. There was a check enclosed and a snapshot of the girl. The check looked prettier than the gal—she was an ordinary-looking, big kid of about twenty-one, with an overlong nose, and black hair that hung in corny curls. Guy gave me her last known address, as of 1949, on the lower West Side.
“Get your book out.”
“I'll come over,” Anita said, although the office was so small I could dictate from one end of the room to the other without raising my voice. She came over, moving her hips like a lazy heel-and-toe walker, sat down beside me, her skirt above her knees. She had on an interesting perfume. I sent Guy a letter saying I'd do my best and to airmail me any info on Marion Lodge's background, education, birthmarks, and what she was supposed to be doing in New York.
Then I knocked off a couple of mild dunning letters to remind several storekeepers they were behind on their ten bucks a month for “Darling's Protective Service.”