“Just a minute.”
A blonde in a green kimono opened the door. Her hair had been peroxided the shade of sawdust and on her face was rouge, lipstick and mascara. “Goodbye, honey,” she said over her shoulder.
The blonde smelled as though she'd taken a bath in perfume. I mean she stank. I went into the bedroom. A woman was lying under the sheet on a double bed. She had black hair and black eyes and a bandage over part of her face. There was a bottle of medicine on a table by the bed. “I wondered if you'd come,” she said. “Yeah?”
“You don't remember me, do you?”
“Not with the bandage.”
“I'm the one Pug socked. For trying to help you.” I remembered. The one with the broken nose. The one with Chief Piper. I thought maybe it was a touch. Well, she had something coming. I got out my wallet. “I don't want any money.” I put the wallet away.
She said: “What are you going to do about last night?”
“What should I do?”
“Kill that son of a bitch.”
“And fry?”
“You're too smart to fry.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But, lady, I've been drawing the line at murder lately.”
She lay against the pillow, watching me. Her skin was dead white and it made the black eyes look big. She wasn't young, but she was still good-looking. Her shoulders were round and firm. As far as I could tell she was naked under the sheet. I sat down on a rocking-chair. It creaked under my weight.
“But you want to get him, don't you?” she asked. “I wouldn't mind.”
“Neither would I,” she said. “He's pretty tough for a gal to tackle.”
“He knocked out my teeth.”
The way she said it, it sounded like a good reason for bumping off a man. Maybe it was, at that. A girl likes to hold on to her teeth.
“How do you figure on getting him?” I asked.
“Look,” she said, sitting up in bed and almost forgetting the sheet. “I don't know anything about you, but I like your looks. Will you play ball if I've got a good idea?”
“Goon,” I said.
She did. She'd been Pug's girl once, she said, and now she was Chief Piper's. So she was talking from the inside. Pug, she said, came to Paulton from St Louis about four years ago. In a few months he got to be the local Al Capone, not that it was much of a struggle. There was nobody very tough in Paulton. And as Al Capone, she said, he demanded and got a fifty-fifty split with the Vineyard.
“Fifty-fifty split on what?” I asked.
“On everything. Liquor, dope, gambling and women.”
“The hell!”
“You don't know the Vineyard's back of vice in the county?”
I shook my head. I wondered why McGee hadn't told me. Maybe it wasn't true. No, I believed Carmel. She was telling the truth.
“Pug's just front man for the Vineyard,” she said. “He's got plenty of power, but the Vineyard runs everything.”
“Who's the Vineyard's head man?”
“Pug gets his orders from the Princess, but she gets them from somebody above her.”
She didn't know who that was. But she did know, she said, that Chief Piper was a Vineyard man. He got a grand a month to let things stay wide open. He was afraid of Pug Banta.
I said: “I got that idea.”
The district attorney, Carmel said, was on the payroll too. I said it would be hard to shake Pug loose with a set-up like that. Carmel said she didn't think so.
“None of them like Pug,” she said. “My idea's this: if things get very hot the Governor will threaten an investigation. Then the Vineyard will throw Pug to him. Pug'll get a long stretch; the Governor will think he's cleaned up the county, and the Vineyard'll go on operating.”
I said that sounded good. Carmel said: “Only how can we turn on the heat?”
“You got some beer?” I said.
She rang a bell and the Negro gal got me four bottles of cold Bud. Carmel didn't want any. Her mouth hurt too much to drink. I poured down a bottle of beer and asked her how much crime paid in the county. The monthly net, as near as she could figure it, was about ten thousand dollars. Banta got about half of this, and the Vineyard the other half. She said she didn't know how much the DA took.
I said we would probably need help. She said she couldn't think of anybody she'd trust.
“What about McGee, the lawyer?”
“That old fossil!” she said. “He hates the Vineyard, all right, but he isn't bright enough to do anything about it.”
