higher and the vice squad would slap a morals charge on the Cochrane Enterprises.
Nix, nix, I told myself. She looks seventeen, she'll claim eighteen, and tomorrow morning her battle-ax mama will rush in yelling she's only sixteen. But I was only kidding myself. I didn't really care. Not too much.
'Mr. Franks has been looking everywhere for you, sir;, she said with the nice clean smile that was starting to get on my nerves. What ever happened to all the whory looking, hard-eyed tarts who used to haunt carny lots?
'For me? Why?'
'I'm sure I don't know, sir. He simply said-'
I'd been through this same dialogue with one of her nice clean boyfriends. 'Okay, okay. Where does he want to see me?'
She didn't quite point because anybody knows that's bad manners, but made a sort of indicative gesture toward the south.
'His office is upstairs over the storerooms, sir.'
Upstairs, naturally. With Private on the door. I smiled at the bright little thing and looped my arm in hers.
'Show me, huh?'
You'd have thought I had pinched her where I shouldn't.
'Please, Mr. Thaxton! That sort of familiarity isn't necessary.'
I decided she was a little college thing. They usually don't know a term like familiarity in highschool. That was my top-of-the-head thought. My sub-level thought was more basic, more home-truthish. It was this:
You're dated, boy. You're age-lagging. Once past thirty you enter the anachronism stage. The young tasties are starting to think of you as Uncle Thax.
You want the truth? It hurt when she backed off from me. That's a funny and goddam tragic thing about a man. No matter how old or how wise he becomes he still needs to feel that every good-looking female between fifteen and fifty is instantly attracted by his magnetic personality. When they aren't-he dies.
'Forgive me,' I said with a bitter smile (bitterness usually rouses the mate sympathy in a female). 'Now and then I encounter an honest to God virgin and I forget how to act.'
This was the cynical, world-weary bit which had always found great success in my past. Today it fell flat on its face. The nice clean little thing with the pretty legs looked at me as if to say 'You really shouldn't drink so much, Mr. Thaxton.'
'You'll find Mr. Franks' office just around the corner, sir,' she said in a voice you could starch a stuffed shirt in.
I gave up. I nodded and turned away. Then I looked back and said, 'Hey. How old are you?'
'Eighteen.' Still starchy about it.
'That's what I thought.'
I went around the corner and entered the building with the word Private on the door.
Billie was coming down the stairs and she stopped and smiled and said, 'Thax.'
And suddenly I was seventeen again and standing fifteen years back in an Ohio stream up to my ankles and a very pretty young girl was standing on a log above me and looking down at me in a way that can only happen the first time, and nothing in this entire goddam atomic bombhaunted world was relevant. Only that girl and myself and our picnic by a lonely Ohio stream.
I went up the steps and took Billie's hand.
'Billie-you just reminded me of the first time I fell in love. I was seventeen and she was sixteen, and it was the year I ran off to join a circus.'
Billie's smile deepened. She was looking into my eyes.
'Thax, you're an incurable romantic daydreamer.'
'Well-'
'No,' she said. 'Don't say it doesn't matter. It does matter, darling. It does.'
Then she kissed me.
I just stood there. There's no other way to describe it. I just stood there. Billie squeezed my hand.
'Wait for me behind the nautch show tonight.' She went around me and started down the steps. Then I woke up.
'Hey. What's with you and Franks?'
She looked up at me and her face, for all its inherent sensualness plus beauty-parlor perfection, seemed bright and innocent. Nice and clean-to coin my own phrase.
'I just gave Franks my two weeks notice,' she said. 'I'm quitting. Tell you tonight.'
Her spikeheels clit-clattered down the rest of the steps. The door marked Private swung closed in her faint perfumed wake. I stared at it.
Quitting? No more Billie? Just two weeks? I was no longer the boy standing in the Ohio stream. I felt like an old overworked anachronism again. I went upstairs and knocked on the landing door. Franks' voice told me to come in.
The business manager's office was done in the same motif as May's suite. Swedish modern. It wasn't bloated with a lot of satin cushions though.
The bluff-faced Mr. Franks was just closing his safe and he stood up in his two-hundred dollar suit and came around his driftwood-Rez desk to offer me his hand. We shook and he asked me how Neverland was treating me, and I said, 'Fine,' and asked how it was treating him, and he chuckled and said, 'Fine, just fine,' and I reminded him that he wanted to see me.
He said, 'Yes,' in a somewhat distracted manner and went back to his desk and picked up the phone and asked the exchange for Mrs. Cochrane's suite in the Queen Anne Cottage. He smiled at me while he waited for a connection and said:
'Sit down, Thax, sit down.'
I sat down in a chair that felt like it had been growing on one of our hardwood ridges when Columbus missed America.
'May?' Franks said into the phone. 'Thaxton's here now. Can you come over?'
He winked at me while he listened to her reply, to show me that it was really nothing serious-just the usual female nonsense.
I didn't believe his wink any more than I believed his Swedish modern office. He was a natural-born yes- man who tried to cover it up with a hearty show of efficiency.
'Well,' he said as he parked the phone back in its cradle.
That didn't mean much to me, so I said so.
'Well what?'
He raised his eyes inquiringly. 'Pardon me?'
'You said well,' I told him. 'That usually means well something or other. I'm waiting for the something. The other you can keep.'
His bluff fuse broke into a Babbitt smile and he sat down. We looked at each other across his massive driftwood-Rez desk.
'I simply thought it was time we had a little talk, Thaxton.'
'We? Why invite my ex-wife into our little talk then?'
He fussed with his pens and pencils on his uninked desk blotter, arranging them just so.
'Well-' he said, 'I thought it would be better if she were here. Because it more or less concerns her, you see?'
I said, 'If you mean the murder of her husband-I suppose it does more or less concern her.'
He frowned and made a geometrical pattern with his pens and pencils.
'You're a part of this show, Thaxton,' he said gravely. 'And you were once Mrs. Cochrane's husband. I should think you would be willing to see us through this trying time.'
'Um. As long as this trying time doesn't pin a rose on me.'
He looked at me quizzically.
'Ferris is now toying around with two ideas,' I told him. 'One-I helped May knock over Cochrane, for money.
