The gutters were dirty, there was trash in the streets, papers were blowing wildly and the half-hearted sidewalk snow removal had created unsightly melting lumps carelessly blocking off storm sewers.
Johnny hesitated before the iron steps of the Ybarra tenement. He'd come over here, but he hadn't really made up his mind. This trip could turn out to be not such a good idea if Consuelo Ybarra was still set on a hair trigger. Still, only she could tell him what he needed to know. If she doesn't hand you one of your ears before you get your mouth open, he thought grimly.
Well, one way to find out. He climbed the steps, entered the building and started up the five flights. In contrast to his first early-morning climb there was noise aplenty now-shrill, childish voices, the continual sound of doors opening and closing and the banging of pots and pans.
Johnny knocked twice at the door of 5-B. For seconds there was no sound at all, and then he could hear a cautious shuffling noise inside as though the inner side of the door had been carefully approached. He knocked again, impatiently.
“Who is it?”
He would have known that husky voice among a thousand. “Open up, Consuelo.”
The door opened conservatively on the chain latch, and she looked out at him. “You!” she said, and the pronoun became an epithet. “Are you ashame' of your name?”
“I'm not ashamed of nothin',” he told her flatly. “I don't blat my name for these walls to hear.” Behind her in the doorway he could see that the shades were drawn and the lights on. Her voice had sounded thick and unsteady, and he studied her in the poor hall light. The eyes looked dull and the full-lipped mouth slack, and the disorderly mass of blue-black hair seemed to be flying all over the small head. “You drunk?” Johnny asked her apprehensively.
She smiled broadly. “Not dronk. Dreenking.” She fumbled off the new chain latch, for which he was responsible, and threw open the door. “Come in!” The smile flattened to a half sneer as he hesitated. “The beeg man is afraid!”
“Ahhhh!” he said roughly, and pushed inside, past her. “Listen to me, now. Drunk or sober, you start anything an' I'll finish it, see? I don't want no caterwauling in my ear.”
“But of course,” she said gravely, and missed the first three times she tried to rehook the chain-latch bolt, her movements all in slow motion. She finally managed it and preceded him inside. His uneasiness increased when he got his first good look at her. She was in her stockinged feet and a shapeless purple dressing gown that should have made her look like a hag. Instead it made her look like a very attractive gypsy, Johnny thought. “Sit down,” she invited him with a wave of her arm, which nearly overbalanced her, and collapsed herself into a chair beside a table prominently furnished with a bottle and glass, each half empty. “Mus' make yoursel' at home.”
The liquor had tripled her tongue to the point where her speech, ordinarily quite good, was more accented than Manuel's. She pulled herself up out of the chair in sections and weaved unsteadily to a wall cabinet, from which she removed another glass. She returned to the table and sloppily poured him a drink. She pushed the overfilled glass in his direction, picked up her own and stared over its rim at him, her eyes narrowed with the intensity of her thought.
“Confusion everyone,” she toasted finally, “an' hell damn hell.” She giggled triumphantly, threw back her head, tossed down her drink, coughed, gasped and sank down into her chair. Her eyes watered and ran copious tears.
Johnny picked up his drink and sniffed at it. “What the hell kind of wild moose milk is this?” he demanded disgustedly. “Tequila?”
“Mescal,” she said in a faraway tone when she could get her breath. “National drink. Smooth's mother's milk. Good for babies. Something matter with me. Can't drink it.”
“You drank half a bottle of this-this antifreeze?”
“Cer'ainly. Felt fine, till 'bout ten minutes ago.” She hiccuped gently, cocked her head on one side and looked at him sleepily. “You're the bigges' theeng-”
“Never mind that,” he said harshly. “I came over here to ask you something.”
“Okay. All right. Yes.” She re-enacted the complicated maneuver of rising from the chair, then turned her back to him. Before he realized her intention she had slipped out of the dressing gown with a movement of her hands and a shrug of her shoulders. Beneath it she was wearing the stockings and a white blouse that failed to cover her rib cage-and the rest was Consuelo Ybarra. Johnny felt his eyes bulge as he stared at the soft lamplight polish on the dusky ivory tints of her buttocks.
“What the hell you doin'?” he demanded huskily. “You came to ask,” she said in surprise over her shoulder, then smiled and gestured at herself coquettishly. “All right. Yes.”
“I didn't-” he began, and swallowed it as she turned. She moved toward him, stumbled, fell up against him and threw her arms convulsively around his neck. She was shivering as though with a chill, but Johnny's hands had come up instinctively and filled themselves to overflowing with flesh that was far from chilled. He couldn't see her face, but he could hear her panting.
“Hurt me!” she urged throatily, and moved in his hands. Her dead weight hung suspended from his neck, and her body writhed ceaselessly. “Hurt me!” she demanded despairingly. “Your hands. Your-belt.” Her voice roughened in a hoarse gasp. “Do — something!”
He almost fell getting her through the doorway.
He was on his way out when he remembered. He walked back in beside the bed and, after the first glance at the face on the pillow, avoided looking at it. It was far more naked than the body. “Manuel had a twenty-five caliber Spanish automatic,” he said roughly.
“Si, pis tola.” She might have been a thousand light-years distant.
“Where is it?”
“Bureau-bottom drawer.” Her voice had no resonance. “I hid it.”
He crossed swiftly to the bureau, stooped and dredged ruthlessly amidst the welter of flimsy underwear. His probing hands touched something hard, and he removed it, unwrapped the tightly folded pink slip to its hard core and looked down at the toylike, pearl-handled weapon in his hand. So Manfredi hadn't killed Hendricks. Check that, Killain. He didn't kill him with Manuel's automatic.
He rolled the little handgun back up in the slip and thrust it back in a corner of the drawer.
He returned to the bed, but she spoke before he could. “Don't talk. Go.”
He was surprised to find that it was daylight when he reached the street. Where he had been it had been night for some time.
CHAPTER XIII
At the apartment Sally greeted him with a quizzical expression as he slipped out of his coat in the hall. “Well, man?” she queried, hanging up the coat in the closet. “You said afternoon. Where I come from we'd call this evening.”
“I said 'maybe,' too,” he pointed out. “Congress is just gonna have to legislate a few more hours into the day.” He walked into the living room and dropped down in his armchair with a sigh.
“You sound as though it'd been a hard day at the office,” Sally jeered, the corners of her generous mouth curving upward. “What held you up?”
“The alarm didn't go off,” Johnny told her blandly.
“That's the trouble with those strange bedrooms,” she answered thoughtfully. “The alarm never does act like your own.” The smile expanded as she sat down on the arm of his chair. “I wonder why no one's ever done a thesis on that interesting subject?”
“Hush yo' mouf, Ma,” he directed her amiably. “You know I always trot right along home to you.”
“With your shirt tail out,” she gibed, and burst out laughing as he looked down instinctively. She tangled a hand in his thick, unruly hair. “Mr. Killain, you are really something.”
He pulled her from the chair arm into his lap, sliding an arm about her. “You're not so bad yourself, midget.” The little silence was comfortably unstrained.
“I had a telephone call,” she said finally.
