“Man, this stuff dies painless with me,” she said and sat down. “It never knows what hit it. What was we talkin’ about?”
“A redhaired girl named Velma who used to work in your place on Central Avenue.”
“Yeah.” She used her second drink. I went over and stood the bottle on an end beside her. She reached for it. “Yeah. Who you say you was?”
I took out a card and gave it to her. She read it with her tongue and lips, dropped it on a table beside her and set her empty glass on it.
“Oh, a private guy. You ain’t said that, mister.” She waggled a finger at me with gay reproach. “But your liquor says you’re an all right guy at that. Here’s to crime.” She poured a third drink for herself and drank it down.
I sat down and rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and waited. She either knew something or she didn’t. If the knew something, she either would tell me or she wouldn’t. It was that simple.
“Cute little redhead,” she said slowly and thickly. “Yeah, I remember her. Song and dance. Nice legs and generous with ‘em. She went off somewheres. How would I know what them tramps do?”
“Well, I didn’t really think you would know,” I said. “But it was natural to come and ask you, Mrs. Florian. Help rourseif to the whiskey — I could run out for more when we need it.”
“You ain’t drinkin’,” she said suddenly.
I put my hand around my glass and swallowed what was in it slowly enough to make it seem more than it was.
“Where’s her folks at?” she asked suddenly.
“What does that matter?”
“Okey,” she sneered. “All cops is the same. Okey, handsome. A guy that buys me a drink is a pal.” She reached for the bottle and set up Number 4. “I shouldn’t ought to barber with you. But when I like a guy, the ceiling’s the limit.” She simpered. She was as cute as a washtub. “Hold onto your hair and don’t step on no snakes,” she said. “I got me an idea.”
She got up out of the rocker, sneezed, almost lost the bathrobe, slapped it back against her stomach and stared at me coldly.
“No peekin’,” she said, and went out of the room again, hitting the door frame with her shoulder.
I heard her fumbling steps going into the back part of the house.
The poinsettia shoots tap-tapped dully against the front wall. The clothes line creaked vaguely at the side of the house. The ice cream peddler went by ringing his bell. The big new handsome radio in the corner whispered of dancing and love with a deep soft throbbing note like the catch in a torch singer’s voice.
Then from the back of the house there were various types of crashing sounds. A chair seemed to fall over backwards, a bureau drawer was pulled out too far and crashed to the floor, there was fumbling and thudding and muttered thick language. Then the slow click of a lock and the squeak of a trunk top going up. More fumbling and banging. A tray landed on the floor. I got up from the davenport and sneaked into the dining room and from that into a short hail. I looked around the edge of an open door.
She was in there swaying in front of the trunk, making grabs at what was in it, and then throwing her hair back over her forehead with anger. She was drunker than she thought. She leaned down and steadied herself on the trunk and coughed and sighed. Then she went down on her thick knees and plunged both hands into the trunk and groped.
They came up holding something unsteadily. A thick package tied with faded pink tape. Slowly, clumsily, she undid the tape. She slipped an envelope out of the package and leaned down again to thrust the envelope out of sight into the right-hand side of the trunk. She retied the tape with fumbling fingers.
I sneaked back the way I had come and sat down on the davenport. Breathing stertorous noises, the woman came back into the living room and stood swaying in the doorway with the tape-tied package.
She grinned at me triumphantly, tossed the package and it fell somewhere near my feet. She waddled back to the rocker and sat down and reached for the whiskey.
I picked the package off the floor and untied the faded pink tape.
“Look ‘em over,” the woman grunted. “Photos. Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. People from the joint they are. They’re all the bastard left me — them and his old clothes.”
I leafed through the bunch of shiny photographs of men and women in professional poses. The men had sharp foxy faces and racetrack clothes or eccentric clownlike makeup. Hoofers and comics from the filling station circuit. Not many of them would ever get west of Main Street. You would find them in tanktown vaudeville acts, cleaned up, or down in the cheap burlesque houses, as dirty as the law allowed and once in a while just enough dirtier for a raid and a noisy police court trial, and then back in their shows again, grinning, sadistically filthy and as rank as the smell of stale sweat. The women had good legs and displayed their inside curves more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s office coat. Blondes, brunettes, large cowlike eyes with a peasant dullness in them. Small sharp eyes with urchin greed in them. One or two of the faces obviously vicious. One or two of them might have had red hair. You couldn’t tell from the photographs. I looked them over casually, without interest and tied the tape again.
“I wouldn’t know any of these,” I said. “Why am I looking at them?”
She leered over the bottle her right hand was grappling with unsteadily. “Ain’t you looking for Velma?”
“Is she one of these?”
Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else. “Ain’t you got a photo of her — from her folks?”
That troubled her. Every girl has a photo somewhere, if it’s only in short dresses with a bow in her hair. I should have had it.
“I ain’t beginnin’ to like you again,” the woman said almost quietly.
I stood up with my glass and went over and put it down beside hers on the end table.
“Pour me a drink before you kill the bottle.”
She reached for the glass and I turned and walked swiftly through the square arch into the dining room, into the hall, into the cluttered bedroom with the open trunk and the spilled tray. A voice shouted behind me. I plunged ahead down into the right side of the trunk, felt an envelope and brought it up swiftly.
She was out of her chair when I got back to the living room, but she had only taken two or three steps. Her eyes had a peculiar glassiness. A murderous glassiness.
“Sit down,” I snarled at her deliberately. “You’re not dealing with a simple-minded lug like Moose Malloy this time.”
It was a shot more or less in the dark, and it didn’t hit anything. She blinked twice and tried to lift her nose with her upper lip. Some dirty teeth showed in a rabbit leer.
“Moose? The Moose? What about him?” she gulped.
“He’s loose,” I said. “Out of jail. He’s wandering, with a forty-five gun in his hand. He killed a nigger over on Central this morning because he wouldn’t tell him where Velma was. Now he’s looking for the fink that turned him up eight years ago.”
A white look smeared the woman’s face. She pushed the bottle against her lips and gurgled at it. Some of the whiskey ran down her chin.
“And the cops are looking for him,” she said and laughed. “Cops. Yah!”
A lovely old woman. I liked being with her. I liked getting her drunk for my own sordid purposes. I was a swell guy. I enjoyed being me. You find almost anything under your hand in my business, but I was beginning to be a little sick at my stomach.
I opened the envelope my hand was clutching and drew out a glazed still. It was like the others but it was different, much nicer. The girl wore a Pierrot costume from the waist up. Under the white conical hat with a black pompon on the top, her fluffed out hair had a dark tinge that might have been red. The face was in proffle but the visible eye seemed to have gaiety in it. I wouldn’t say the face was lovely and unspoiled. I’m not that good at faces. But it was pretty. People had been nice to that face, or nice enough for their circle. Yet it was a very ordinary face and its prettiness was strictly assembly line. You would see a dozen faces like it on a city block in the noon hour.
Below the waist the photo was mostly legs and very nice legs at that. It was signed across the lower right
