“Working,” the man told him, without giving Shayne a second glance. “Her dressing room upstairs. First door.”
Shayne thanked him and went up. This part of the building, which the public never entered, was in a bad state of repair. The paint was peeling, the floors were dirty. He stood aside on the landing to let a dancer go by. She was barefooted, and wasn’t wearing much in the way of a costume. The first door at the top of the stairs was unmarked and without a latch. Shayne pushed it open and went in.
It was little more than a large closet. An unshaded bulb was burning above a make-up table with a fly- specked mirror. Clothes were thrown carelessly over the back of a chair. A small window that looked out on the alley was open as far as it would go, but the air in the room was heavy with the smell of cosmetic preparations and stale tobacco smoke.
Shayne lit his cigarette and made a quick survey of the room. One of the several dresses hanging along one wall had a Paris label, a sign that he was in the right place. He opened a small trunk, and found it filled with a jumble of costumes. He continued around the room, his deeply trenched face clearly showing his distaste for the job. He almost missed the small purse on the dressing table, amid a litter of jars and tubes and crumpled tissues. He cleared a space on the table and turned it inside out.
Below, the drum-beat had quickened. Shayne disregarded the few coins, the hairpins, lipstick and eye-tools. There were several torn scraps of newspaper and a folded letter. The drum-beat was now very fast; the girl’s number must be nearing its climax. He pulled the letter out of the soiled envelope and read it quickly. It was on a letterhead of the American consul, addressed to Mile. Vivienne Larousse at a St. Albans hotel. In stiff official language it listed the conditions under which French citizens could be assigned a quota number for permanent admission to the United States. Mile. Larousse’s chances, the consul seemed to feel, were not good.
Shayne thrust the letter back and picked up the newspaper clippings. The lines on his face deepened. They were radio schedules, like the one he had found in the Camel’s desk, and a light pencil-line had been drawn in the same way around several listings. The drummer in the main room of the nightclub was slapping his drum with mounting frenzy. He beat out a complicated series of rhythms in a final excited flurry, and there was an abrupt burst of applause. Shayne swept the assortment of objects back into the purse. Before he snapped it, he looked at the radio schedules again. One of the little circles had been drawn around the six o’clock news on Wednesday in the previous week. That was the exact moment when Albert Watts had locked his travel agency and walked off toward the bay, not to be seen again alive.
Closing the purse with a snap, Shayne stepped back against the opposite wall. His eyes were bleak. The crowd continued to applaud, and mixed with the clapping there were a few drunken shouts. Gradually the noise died. A moment or two later, Shayne heard the click of high heels on the iron steps. The door opened.
In addition to high-heeled slippers, all she seemed to be wearing was a light cotton wrap, which she wasn’t bothering to hold together. When Shayne had seen her earlier that evening, her face had been alert and interested. Her eyes had been alive. Now, coming into a mean, sordid room where she believed herself to be alone, her face sagged and was without luster. She seemed years older. Sitting down at the dressing table, she leaned forward to look without pleasure at her reflection in the mirror. She had reached up to take off her eyelashes when she saw Shayne.
“Hi,” he said.
She whirled. Her eyes were wide with shock.
“Now take it easy,” Shayne said. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”
She wet her lips and took a deep breath, pulling the wrapper across her breast. “Mr. Shayne. You gave me a bad moment, do you realize that?”
“Sorry. I didn’t think I ought to walk in here with a brass band.” He pulled the trunk out from the wall and sat down. “How was the show? You got a nice hand.”
Some of her quick expressiveness came back to her face. “It was not too bad. But this last show is difficult, after midnight. All the undrunken ones have gone home, and the pigs who remain-I feel that we have been wallowing all of us in the same sty. It will be hours before I can sleep.”
“Maybe you ought to go into some other business.”
She gave him an angry look. “Unhappily, I have never learned to operate a typewriter. I do not wish to be a clerk in a store. That is not my talent. But I begin to think I have been wrong, I am a third-rate artist and such I shall always be. And yet, here in this third-rate place, is it possible to be anything else? If I stay here much longer, I predict what will happen. One night after this last show, I will come up here and I will not have the courage to look myself in the face, which is necessary to change my make-up. And I will shoot myself.”
“I doubt if you’ll do that, baby,” Shayne said. “Not so long as half the population of the world is male. You may not make it in show business, but I think you’ll make it.”
She gave him a suspicious look. “This I hope is a compliment.”
“Have the cops been bothering you?”
She made a scornful sound. “I am not bothered by flics, of any nation. Somebody told them you and I danced together, so they asked me questions. They showed me a picture. It was bad, very fuzzy, on one of those little police placards. I did not recognize it. And you? Did you see the Camel?”
“Yeah, I saw him,” Shayne said. “It seemed to me we were getting to be pretty good friends, but then we had an argument and now I don’t think he likes me.”
“Then I am sorry. I do not like you either.”
“It’s not that simple. All I want from you is a little information. He won’t know I’ve been here unless you tell him.”
“And why should I not tell him? I dislike this job of his very much, but I would dislike even more to be without it. In three weeks’ time, I would be deported.”
“Didn’t you say something about wanting to go to America?”
A gleam appeared in her eye. She turned toward him a little, moving the chair so her wrapper opened. “Are you going to take me?”
Shayne grinned. “Don’t waste it on me. Your best bet is still Paul Slater.”
A wrinkle sprang up between her eyes. “What do you know about Paul Slater?”
“Quite a bit, baby. I made friends with the night clerk at the Half Moon. He didn’t know your name but he could describe you. Before he was finished the poor guy was drooling. It seems you’ve been coming there to see Slater.”
She thought a moment. “I would like a cigarette, please.”
He took out his pack, shook out a cigarette for her and held the match. She put her hand on his wrist as she took the light, then breathed out smoke slowly and looked up at him through her long artificial eyelashes.
“The Camel always keeps a supply of gasoline on his boat. I know where to get more. Do you know boats?”
“I know boats,” Shayne said, “but I don’t know the water around here. And you can’t get a nightclub ticket in the States unless you come in legally.”
She laughed bitterly. “If I put my name on the list now, perhaps there will be a place for me when I am eighty-nine. Of course I can always meet some lonely American and become married. There will be no nonsense about having a job waiting, having two sponsors, to guarantee I will not cost your rich government any money. But it is not so simple to get married as people think. The only American bachelors who come to St. Albans are college freshmen on Christmas vacation. It is said that Americans marry younger each year. But not these children. They have other thoughts besides marriage. And as for men like Paul Slater, they are married already. Did your friend the night clerk tell you that the last thing Paul Slater will ever do is get a divorce from his wife?”
“But what if his wife gets a divorce from him?” Shayne said.
“Oh?” she said, interested. “Now that, I concede, had not occurred to me.”
He let her think about it. The door was swinging in a slight draught. Shayne pulled it open and looked out; the corridor was empty. He closed the door and leaned against it to keep it closed.
“I’m not too up-to-date on the situation,” he said, “but I may know a couple of angles you don’t. His wife has had nothing but bad breaks all her life. Maybe that’s why he won’t ask for a divorce, he’s afraid she’d crack up and he’d have it on his conscience. By this time she probably knows all about how he’s been two-timing her with a nightclub dancer. That’s a hard secret to keep in a place like this. They’ve been fighting like cats and dogs-that’s another thing the night clerk told me. I used to take her out before she and Slater got married. I still go for her. This
