“Do you not think he could get the charge changed to something bailable—if he really wanted to?”
“I haven’t thought much about it,” I lied. “I don’t know the man.”
“You have never spoken to him?” she asked idly, a little too idly.
I didn’t answer.
She laughed shortly. “Last night, amigo. Outside Mavis Weld’s apartment. I was sitting in a car across the street.”
“I may have bumped into him accidentally. Was that the guy?”
“You do not fool me at all.”
“Okay. Miss Weld was pretty rough with me. I went away sore. Then I meet this ginzo with her door key in his hand. I yank it out of his hand and toss it behind some bushes. Then I apologize and go get it for him. He seemed like a nice little guy too.”
“Ver-ry nice,” she drawled. “He was my boy friend also.”
I grunted.
“Strange as it may seem I’m not a hell of a lot interested in your love life, Miss Gonzales. I assume it covers a wide field—all the way from Stein to Steelgrave.”
“Stein?” she asked softly. “Who is Stein?”
“A Cleveland hot shot that got himself gunned in front of your apartment house last February. He had an apartment there. I thought perhaps you might have met him.”
She let out a silvery little laugh. “Amigo, there are men I do not know. Even at the Chateau Bercy.”
“Reports say he was gunned two blocks away,” I said. “I like it better that it happened right in front. And you were looking out of the window and saw it happen. And saw the killer run away and just under a street light he turned back and the light caught his face and darned if it wasn’t old man Steelgrave. You recognized him by his rubber nose and the fact that he was wearing his tall hat with the pigeons on it.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You like it better that way,” she purred.
“We could make more money that way.”
“But Steelgrave was in jail,” she smiled. “And even if he was not in jail—even if, for example, I happened to be friendly with a certain Dr. Chalmers who was county jail physician at the time and he told me, in an intimate moment, that he had given Steelgrave a pass to go to the dentist—with a guard of course, but the guard was a reasonable man—on the very day Stein was shot—even if this happened to be true, would it not be a very poor way to use the information by blackmailing Steelgrave?”
“I hate to talk big,” I said, “but I’m not afraid of Steelgrave—or a dozen like him in one package.”
“But I am, amigo. A witness to a gang murder is not a very safe position in this country. No, we will not blackmail Steelgrave. And we will not say anything about Mr. Stein, whom I may or may not have known. It is enough that Mavis Weld is a close friend of a known gangster and is seen in public with him.”
“We’d have to prove he was a known gangster,” I said.
“Can we not do that?”
“How?”
She made a disappointed mouth. “But I felt sure that was what you had been doing these last couple of days.”
“Why?”
“I have private reasons.”
“They mean nothing to me while you keep them private.”
She got rid of the brown cigarette stub in my ashtray. I leaned over and squashed it out with the stub of a pencil. She touched my hand lightly with a gauntleted finger. Her smile was the reverse of anesthetic. She leaned back and crossed her legs. The little lights began to dance in her eyes. It was a long time between passes—for her.
“Love is such a dull word,” she mused. “It amazes me that the English language so rich in the poetry of love can accept such a feeble word for it. It has no life, no resonance. It suggests to me little girls in ruffled summer dresses, with little pink smiles, and little shy voices, and probably the most unbecoming underwear.”
I said nothing. With an effortless change of pace she became businesslike again.
“Mavis will get $75,000 a picture from now on, and eventually $150,000. She has started to climb and nothing will stop her. Except possibly a bad scandal.”
“Then somebody ought to tell her who Steelgrave is,” I said. “Why don’t you? And incidentally, suppose we did have all this proof, what’s Steelgrave doing all the time we’re putting the bite on Weld?”
“Does he have to know? I hardly think she would tell him. In fact, I hardly think she would go on having anything to do with him. But that would not matter to us—if we had our proof. And if she knew we had it.”
Her black gauntleted hand moved towards her black bag, stopped, drummed lightly on the edge of the desk, and so got back to where she could drop it in her lap. She hadn’t looked at the bag. I hadn’t either.
I stood up. “I might happen to be under some obligation to Miss Weld. Ever think of that?”
She just smiled.
