“Too late to be shot.”
“Shucks, I’ve been looking forward to it all evening. Miss Gonzales brought me.”
“I know.”
I reached out and touched the fur again. Forty thousand dollars is nice to touch, even rented.
“Dolores will be disappointed as hell,” she said, her mouth edged with white.
“No.”
“She put you on the spot—just as she did Stein.”
“She may have started out to. But she changed her mind.”
She laughed. It was a silly pooped-out little laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.
“What a way you have with the girls,” she whispered. “How the hell do you do it, wonderful? With doped cigarettes? It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality. You don’t have any. You’re not too young, nor too beautiful. You’ve seen your best days and—”
Her voice had been coming faster and faster, like a motor with a broken governor. At the end she was chattering. When she stopped a spent sigh drifted along the silence and she caved at the knees and fell straight forward into my arms.
If it was an act it worked perfectly. I might have had guns in all nine pockets and they would have been as much use to me as nine little pink candles on a birthday cake.
But nothing happened. No hard characters peeked at me with automatics in their hands. No Steelgrave smiled at me with the faint dry remote killer’s smile. No stealthy footsteps crept up behind me.
She hung in my arms as limp as a wet tea towel and not as heavy as Orrin Quest, being less dead, but heavy enough to make the tendons in my knee joints ache. Her eyes were closed when I pushed her head away from my chest. Her breath was inaudible and she had that bluish look on the parted lips.
I got my right hand under her knees and carried her over to a gold couch and spread her out on it. I straightened up and went along to the bar. There was a telephone on the corner of it but I couldn’t find the way through to the bottles. So I had to swing over the top. I got a likely looking bottle with a blue and silver label and five stars on it. The cork had been loosened. I poured dark and pungent brandy into the wrong kind of glass and went back over the bar top, taking the bottle with me.
She was lying as I had left her, but her eyes were open.
“Can you hold a glass?”
She could, with a little help. She drank the brandy and pressed the edge of the glass hard against her lips as if she wanted to hold them still. I watched her breathe into the glass and cloud it. A slow smile formed itself on her mouth.
“It’s cold tonight,” she said.
She swung her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet on the floor.
“More,” she said, holding the glass out. I poured into it. “Where’s yours?”
“Not drinking. My emotions are being worked on enough without that.”
The second drink made her shudder. But the blue look had gone away from her mouth and her lips didn’t glare like stop lights and the little etched lines at the corners of her eyes were not in relief any more.
“Who’s working on your emotions?”
“Oh, a lot of women that keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat-up gumshoe with no yacht.”
“No yacht,” she said. “I’d hate that. I was brought up rich.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You were born with a Cadillac in your mouth. And I could guess where.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Could you?”
“Didn’t think it was a very tight secret, did you?”
“I—I—” She broke off and made a helpless gesture. “I can’t think of any lines tonight.”
“It’s the Technicolor dialogue,” I said. “It freezes up on you.”
“Aren’t we talking like a couple of nuts?”
“We could get sensible. Where’s Steelgrave?”
She just looked at me. She held the empty glass out and I took it and put it somewhere or other without taking my eyes off her. Nor she hers off me. It seemed as if a long long minute went by.
“He was here,” she said at last, as slowly as if she had to invent the words one at a time. “May I have a cigarette?”
“The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.
“Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”
“Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”
She puffed loosely and blinked, then put her hand up to adjust the cigarette. After all these years I can never put a cigarette in a girl’s mouth where she wants it.
