booths trying to make a few sales before the barman threw him out. I bought a paper and looked through it to see if there were any interesting murders. There were not.
I folded it and looked up as a slim, brown-haired girl in coal black slacks and a yellow shirt and a long gray coat came out of somewhere and passed the booth without looking at me. I tried to make up my mind whether her face was familiar or just such a standard type of lean, rather hard, prettiness that I must have seen it ten thousand times. She went out of the street door around the screen. Two minutes later the little Mexican boy came back in, shot a quick look at the barman, and scuttled over to stand in front of me.
“Mister,” he said, his great big eyes shining with mischief.
Then he made a beckoning sign and scuttled out again.
I finished my drink and went after him. The girl in the gray coat and yellow shirt and black slacks was standing in front of the gift shop, looking in at the window. Her eyes moved as I went out. I went and stood beside her.
She looked at me again. Her face was white and tired. Her hair looked darker than dark brown. She looked away and spoke to the window.
“Give me the money, please.” A little mist formed on the plate glass from her breath.
I said: “I’d have to know who you are.”
“You know who I am,” she said softly. “How much did you bring?”
“Five hundred.”
“It’s not enough,” she said. “Not nearly enough. Give it to me quickly. I’ve been waiting half of eternity for somebody to get here.”
“Where can we talk?”
“We don’t have to talk. Just give me the money and go the other way.”
“It’s not that simple. I’m doing this at quite a risk. I’m at least going to have the satisfaction of knowing what goes on where I stand.”
“Damn you,” she said acidly, “why couldn’t he come himself? I don’t want to talk. I want to get away as soon as l can.”
“You didn’t want him to come himself. He understood that you didn’t even want to talk to him on the phone.”
“That’s right,” she said quickly and tossed her head.
“But you’ve got to talk to me,” I said. “I’m not as easy as he is. Either to me or to the law. There’s no way out of it. I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too.”
“Well, isn’t he charming,” she said. “Private detective and all.” Her voice held a low sneer.
“He did the best he knew how. It wasn’t easy for him to know what to do.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You, and what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been and what you expect to do. Things like that. Little things, but important.”
She breathed on the glass of the shop window and waited while the mist of her breath disappeared.
“I think it would be much better,” she said in the same cool empty voice, “for you to give me the money and let me work things out for myself.”
“No.”
She gave me another sharp sideways glance. She shrugged the shoulders of the gray coat impatiently.
“Very well, if it has to be that way. I’m at the Granada, two blocks north on Eighth. Apartment 618. Give me ten minutes. I’d rather go in alone.”
“I have a car.”
“I’d rather go alone.” She turned quickly and walked away.
She walked back to the corner and crossed the boulevard and disappeared along the block under a line of pepper trees. I went and sat in the Chrysler and gave her her ten minutes before I started it.
The Granada was an ugly gray building on a corner. The plate glass entrance door was level with the street. I drove around the corner and saw a milky globe with
“How much to leave this here a short time? I’m going upstairs.”
He gave me a shady leer. “Kinda late, boss. She needs a good dustin’ too. Be a dollar.”
“What goes on here?”
“Be a dollar,” he said woodenly.
I got out. He gave me a ticket. I gave him the dollar. Without asking him he said the elevator was in back of the office, by the Men’s Room.
I rode up to the sixth floor and looked at numbers on doors and listened to stillness and smelled beach air coming in at the end of corridors. The place seemed decent enough. There would be a few happy ladies in any apartment house. That would explain the lanky Negro’s dollar. A great judge of character, that boy.
I came to the door of Apartment 618 and stood outside it a moment and then kicked softly.
31
