Her Alabama accent was still there, but it seemed less lilting than I remembered it. A harshness had crept into the voice, giving it a smokiness that was not altogether unappealing, though she was slurring her words a little. If calling her drunk was less than fair, calling her sober was less than accurate.
I followed her through a high-ceilinged entryway that you could’ve put my Morrison suite in and still had room to hold a cotillion. The place was lavish, tapestries and armor, wrought-iron wall hangings; but it was pretty much a blur to me. I was following a naked woman whose flesh was as creamy white as a carved ivory statuette, a few of which graced an occasional table here in Rudy’s shack.
Jiggling a bit, not being actual ivory, she led me into a big living room where she walked to a Hoover plugged in the wall on a long cord and began sweeping. The sound of it was fairly loud, but she managed to bray above it: “Sorry I didn’t hear you ring the doorbell, Heller!”
“That’s okay!” I yelled back.
She kept at it, sweeping an oriental carpet that extended out before a white marble fire place and its Tara- like pillars like a multi-colored lawn. Over the fireplace hung a dark murky painting with an Old Dutch Master look to it. By which I mean it was like a Rembrandt seen through a lot of cigar smoke.
She shut the vacuum cleaner off, kicking the button savagely with her bare foot, her long auburn hair swinging in arcs, her teeth bared in a snarl. “I hate this fucking place,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, glancing around at the smooth pastel walls and heavy dark Mediterranean furniture, sitting on a red brocade couch that was as comfortable as a guaranteed income. “It’s a real dump, all right.”
She made a face as if she were about to spit on the carpet. The floor on the outer edges of the carpet was polished to a gloss you could ice skate on. The room was immaculately clean and everything seemed to be in its place. The only jarring item, in fact, was the nude woman with the vacuum cleaner.
“I told that bitch I’d shoot her,” she said, pushing the Hoover to one side, going over to a heavy low-slung coffee table that ran damn near the length of the couch before me. She stood right across from where I sat and she lit up a cigarette, taken from a silver jade-inlaid box, firing it up with a silver-and-jade lighter. I could have stared right at her reddish pubic patch, which was trimmed into the shape of a heart, if I were that sort of guy, which of course I was.
She bent over, considerable breasts swaying, and poured, over somewhat melted ice, what was not her first tall glass from a soon-to-be-empty bottle of creme de menthe on the coffee table. Then she put the bottle back on the table next to a floral arrangement and a.38 Smith and Wesson revolver.
She threw back her head, and the glass too, and most of the green stuff was gone when her head and the glass returned; she filled the glass back up and killed the bottle. She looked at me curiously.
“Want something to drink?” she said.
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Rum.”
“Over ice?”
“Why not.”
She walked to a liquor cabinet against a far wall; she moved like sex on springs. I didn’t like this girl much as a human being, but I began to see how she’d gotten where she was today-even if, at age thirty or so, she was starting to show some wear and tear. Her body was holding up great, but then most women’s bodies are at least five years younger than their faces.
And Virginia Hill’s face, pretty as it was, was much older than the last time I’d seen it, back around ’38. Her eyes were a little baggy, the laugh lines turning into plain old fashioned wrinkles, and the hard lines around her mouth marked her as a dame who had her sour moments.
But that milky body, those gravity-defying breasts and that well-tended, trimmed, hennaed valentine between her legs, could make for some sweet moments.
On the other hand, there
Hostess.
She handed me a short fat glass with rum and ice across the coffee table.
“Bottoms up and live, pal,” she said, hoisting her replenished tall glass of creme de menthe. “Tomorrow never comes and, anyway, if it does, you may be dead.”
I made a “salute” gesture with my glass, saying nothing, knowing I couldn’t top her cheerful toast, and sipped the rum and it was smooth, expensive stuff.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, gesturing to her nude self. Her nipples were dark, not erect, and about as big around as half dollars, but worth considerably more. “It’s a little warm today and we’re not air conditioned.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said, thinking it was fairly cool in here, a whisper of a breeze blowing in from somewhere. “I just feel a little overdressed.”
She smiled over the rim of her tall green glass. “Maybe we can do something about that.”
“I thought you were Ben Siegel’s girl.”
“I am. He’d kill you if he found out.” She said this with a smile that made it clear she found that concept very amusing and a little exciting.
“Well, I’ll just keep my clothes on for right now. What’s the gun for?”
“The gun?” Her eyes followed my finger as it pointed to the.38. “Oh, that. I was going to kill that bitch.”
“Which bitch is that, Ginny?”
She squinted. “My housekeeper. Mexican girl. She doesn’t clean worth a shit. I have to do it over, after she does, just to make sure it’s right. Besides, I think she’s stealing from me.” She came around the table and sat next to me. Put her feet up on the coffee table. Her toenails were painted red.
“I may not look it,” she said, with some defensive pride, “but I can run a household. I raised my brothers and sisters, didn’t I?”
“Big family?”
“Ten of us kids and no money. You ever wake up in the middle of the night ’cause of a bad dream, Heller?”
“Sure. I have malaria flare-ups now and then, from the war. I have some doozies where nightmares are concerned.”
“Yeah, well I only have one nightmare. And it’s always the same. I’m locked in a cell for a life term. The outside of the place is a prison. But inside the bars it’s my shabby little house in Lipscomb, Alabama.
This sure was a different story than she’d given the columnists. Actually, she’d given the columnists a variety of stories of her early life, over the years, but they always added up to her being some Southern heiress of the sort cafe society ate up in the ’30s.
“My grandmother was chopping cotton for a living in Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, when she was eighty. I swore that would never happen to me.”
“At this point,” I said, looking at her long legs, pleasantly plump in a Petty Girl way, stretched out before me resting on the coffee table, feet near the gun, “I would think your cotton picking days are behind you.”
“They better be.”
“You weren’t really going to shoot your housekeeper,” I said. Making it sound like a statement not a question.
“Probably not,” she admitted. She seemed to be sobering up just a trifle, despite the creme de menthe she was putting away. Talking about her past had done it. “Look, why don’t I put something on. I’m just in an ornery mood. Looking for somebody to fuck, or fuck with.”
“Why don’t you put on some clothes,” I agreed. “You’re a great-looking woman, but I came around to get my girl back, not to bang her boss.”
She looked at me sideways; her smile was wide and white and appealing-a little like Peggy’s smile, actually.
“You’re pretty cute, Heller,” she said. “I think Peggy should’ve stayed in Chicago and married you or something.”
