“You always wear black?” I asked.
“But yes. It is more exciting when I take my clothes off.”
“Do you have to talk like a whore?”
“You do not know much about whores, amigo. They are always most respectable. Except of course the very cheap ones.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. What is the urgent matter we have to talk about? Going to bed with you is not urgent. It can be done any day.”
“You are in a nasty mood.”
“Okay. I’m in a nasty mood.”
She got one of her long brown cigarettes out of her bag and fitted it carefully into the golden tweezers. She waited for me to light it for her. I didn’t so she lit it herself with a golden lighter.
She held this doohickey in a black gauntleted glove and stared at me out of depthless black eyes that had no laughter in them now.
“Would you like to go to bed with me?”
“Most anyone would. But let’s leave sex out of it for now.”
“I do not draw a very sharp line between business and sex,” she said evenly. “And you cannot humiliate me. Sex is a net with which I catch fools. Some of these fools are useful and generous. Occasionally one is dangerous.” She paused thoughtfully.
I said: “If you’re waiting for me to say something that lets on I know who a certain party is—okay, I know who he is.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Probably not. The cops couldn’t.”
“The cops,” she said contemptuously, “do not always tell all they know. They do not always prove everything they could prove. I suppose you know he was in jail for ten days last February.”
“Yes.”
“Did it not occur to you as strange that he did not get bail?”
“I don’t know what charge they had him on. If it was as a material witness—”
“Do you not think he could get the charge changed to something bailable—if he really wanted to?”
“I haven’t thought much about it,” I lied. “I don’t know the man.”
“You have never spoken to him?” she asked idly, a little too idly.
I didn’t answer.
She laughed shortly. “Last night, amigo. Outside Mavis Weld’s apartment. I was sitting in a car across the street.”
“I may have bumped into him accidentally. Was that the guy?”
“You do not fool me at all.”
“Okay. Miss Weld was pretty rough with me. I went away sore. Then I meet this ginzo with her door key in his hand. I yank it out of his hand and toss it behind some bushes. Then I apologize and go get it for him. He seemed like a nice little guy too.”
“Ver-ry nice,” she drawled. “He was my boy friend also.”
I grunted.
“Strange as it may seem I’m not a hell of a lot interested in your love life, Miss Gonzales. I assume it covers a wide field—all the way from Stein to Steelgrave.”
“Stein?” she asked softly. “Who is Stein?”
“A Cleveland hot shot that got himself gunned in front of your apartment house last February. He had an apartment there. I thought perhaps you might have met him.”
She let out a silvery little laugh. “Amigo, there are men I do not know. Even at the Chateau Bercy.”
“Reports say he was gunned two blocks away,” I said. “I like it better that it happened right in front. And you were looking out of the window and saw it happen. And saw the killer run away and just under a street light he turned back and the light caught his face and darned if it wasn’t old man Steelgrave. You recognized him by his rubber nose and the fact that he was wearing his tall hat with the pigeons on it.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You like it better that way,” she purred.
“We could make more money that way.”
“But Steelgrave was in jail,” she smiled. “And even if he was not in jail—even if, for example, I happened to be friendly with a certain Dr. Chalmers who was county jail physician at the time and he told me, in an intimate moment, that he had given Steelgrave a pass to go to the dentist—with a guard of course, but the guard was a reasonable man—on the very day Stein was shot—even if this happened to be true, would it not be a very poor way to use the information by blackmailing Steelgrave?”
“I hate to talk big,” I said, “but I’m not afraid of Steelgrave—or a dozen like him in one package.”
“But I am, amigo. A witness to a gang murder is not a very safe position in this country. No, we will not blackmail Steelgrave. And we will not say anything about Mr. Stein, whom I may or may not have known. It is enough that Mavis Weld is a close friend of a known gangster and is seen in public with him.”
“We’d have to prove he was a known gangster,” I said.
“Can we not do that?”
“How?”
She made a disappointed mouth. “But I felt sure that was what you had been doing these last couple of days.”
“Why?”
“I have private reasons.”
“They mean nothing to me while you keep them private.”
She got rid of the brown cigarette stub in my ashtray. I leaned over and squashed it out with the stub of a pencil. She touched my hand lightly with a gauntleted finger. Her smile was the reverse of anesthetic. She leaned back and crossed her legs. The little lights began to dance in her eyes. It was a long time between passes—for her.
“Love is such a dull word,” she mused. “It amazes me that the English language so rich in the poetry of love can accept such a feeble word for it. It has no life, no resonance. It suggests to me little girls in ruffled summer dresses, with little pink smiles, and little shy voices, and probably the most unbecoming underwear.”
I said nothing. With an effortless change of pace she became businesslike again.
“Mavis will get $75,000 a picture from now on, and eventually $150,000. She has started to climb and nothing will stop her. Except possibly a bad scandal.”
“Then somebody ought to tell her who Steelgrave is,” I said. “Why don’t you? And incidentally, suppose we did have all this proof, what’s Steelgrave doing all the time we’re putting the bite on Weld?”
“Does he have to know? I hardly think she would tell him. In fact, I hardly think she would go on having anything to do with him. But that would not matter to us—if we had our proof. And if she knew we had it.”
Her black gauntleted hand moved towards her black bag, stopped, drummed lightly on the edge of the desk, and so got back to where she could drop it in her lap. She hadn’t looked at the bag. I hadn’t either.
I stood up. “I might happen to be under some obligation to Miss Weld. Ever think of that?”
She just smiled.
“And if that was so,” I said, “don’t you think it’s about time you got the hell out of my office?”
She put her hands on the arms of her chair and started to get up, still smiling. I scooped the bag before she could change direction. Her eyes filled with glare. She made a spitting sound.
I opened the bag and went through and found a white envelope that looked a little familiar. Out of it I shook the photo at The Dancers, the two pieces fitted together and pasted on another piece of paper.
I closed the bag and tossed it across to her.
She was on her feet now, her lips drawn back over her teeth. She was very silent.
“Interesting,” I said and snapped a digit at the glazed surface of the print. “If it’s not a fake. Is that Steelgrave?”
The silvery laugh bubbled up again. “You are a ridicules character, amigo. You really are. I did not know they made such people any more.”
“Prewar stock,” I said. “We’re getting scarcer every day. Where did you get this?”
“From Mavis Weld’s purse in Mavis Weld’s dressing room. While she was on the set.”
“She know?”
“She does not know.”
“I wonder where she got it?”
“From you.”
“Nonsense.” I raised my eyebrows a few inches. “Where would I get it?”
She reached the gauntleted hand across the desk. Her voice was cold. “Give it back to me, please.”