and she let me look at her like that as long as it pleased me.
I had to put my hands down and squeeze the arms of the chair. My collar was too tight all of a sudden, and something was crawling up my spine.
Her teeth were clamped together. Her eyes were vicious. ?Make me,? she said.
Another trickle of blood ran down my chin, reminding me what had happened. I reached up and smacked her across the mouth as hard as I could. Her head rocked, but she still stood there, and now her eyes were more vicious than ever. ?Still want me to make you??
?Make me,? she said.
Chapter Four
We ate supper in a Chinese joint on Times Square. The place was crowded but nobody had eyes for the meal; they were all focused on Connie including mine and I couldn?t blame them any. If low-cut gowns were daring, then she took the dare and threw it back at them.
I sat across the table wondering if skin could really be that soft and smooth, wondering how much less could be worn before a woman would be stark naked. Not much less.
The meal went that way without words. We looked, we smiled, we ate. For the first time I saw her objectively, seeing a woman I had and not just one, I wanted. It was easy to say she was beautiful, but not easy to say why.
But I knew why. She was honest and direct. She wanted something and she let you know it. She had spent a lifetime with five men who treated her as another brother and expected her to like it. She did. To Connie, modeling was just a job. If there was glamour attached to it she took it without making the most of it.
It was nearly nine o?clock when we left, straggling out with full bellies and a pleasant sensation of everything being almost all right. I said, ?Going to tell me the schedule??
Her hand found mine and tucked it up under her arm. ?Ever been slumming, Mike??
?Some people think I?m always slumming.?
?Well, that?s what we?re going to do. The kids all have a new craze on an old section of town. They call it the Bowery. Sound familiar??
I looked at her curiously. ?The Bowery??
?You ain?t been around recently, bub. The Bowery?s changed. Not all of it, but a spot here and there. Not too long ago a wise guy spotted himself a fortune and turned a junk joint into a tourist trap. You know, lousy with characters off the street to give the place atmosphere all the while catering to a slightly upper crust who want to see how the other half lives.?
?How the hell did they ever find that??
A cab saw me wave and pulled to the curb. We got in and I told him where to go and his hand hit the flag. Connie said, ?Some people get tired of the same old thing. They hunt up these new deals. The Bowery is one of them.?
?Who runs the place??
Connie shrugged, her shoulders rubbing against mine. ?I don?t know, Mike. I?ve had everything second hand. Besides, it isn?t only one place now. I think there?re at least a dozen. Like I said, they?re modeland-buyer hangouts and nothing is cheap, either.?
The cab wound through traffic, but over to a less busy street and made the running lights that put us at the nether end of Manhattan without a stop. I handed the driver a couple of bills and helped Connie out of the door.
The Bowery, a street of people without faces. Pleading voices from the shadows and the shuffle of feet behind you. An occasional tug at your sleeve and more pleading that had professional despair in the tone. An occasional woman with clothes too tight giving you a long, steady stare that said she was available cheap. Saloon doors swung open so frequently they seemed like blinking lights. They were crowded, too. The bars were lined with the left-overs of humanity keeping warm over a drink or nursing a steaming bowl of soup.
It had been a long time since I had made the rounds down here. A cab swung into the curb and a guy in a tux with a redhead on his arm got out laughing. There was a scramble in his direction and the redhead handed out a mess of quarters then threw them all over the sidewalk to laugh all the louder when the dive came.
The guy thought it was funny too. He did the same thing with a fin, letting it blow out of his hand down the street. Connie said, ?See what I mean??
I felt like kicking the bastard. ?Yeah, I see.?
We followed the pair with about five feet between us. The guy had a Midwestern drawl and the dame was trying to cover up a Brooklyn accent. She kept squeezing the guy?s arm and giving him the benefit of slow, sidewise glances he seemed to like. Tonight he was playing king, all right.
They turned into a bar that was the crummiest of the lot on the street. You could smell the stink from outside and hear the mixture of shrill and raucous voices a block away. A sign over the doorway said NEIL?S JOINT.
The characters were there in force. They had black eyes and missing teeth. They had twitches and fleas and their language was out of the gutter. Two old hags were having a hair-pull over a joker who could hardly hold on to the bar.
What got me was the characters who watched them. They were even worse. They thought it was a howl. Tourists. Lousy, money-heavy tourists who thought it was a lot of fun to kick somebody else around. I was so damn mad I could hardly speak. A waiter mumbled something and led us to a table in the back room that was packed with more characters. Both kinds.
Everybody was having a swell time reading the dirty writing on the walls and swapping stories with the other half. The pay off was easy to see. The crowd who lived there were drinking cheap whisky on the house to keep them there while the tourists shelled out through the nose for the same cheap whisky and thought it was worth it.
It sure was fun. Nuts.
Connie smiled at a couple of girls she knew and one came over. I didn?t bother to get up when she introduced us. The girl?s name was Kate and she was with a crowd from upstate. She said, ?First time you?ve been here, isn?t it, Connie??
?First . . . and last,? she told her. ?It smells.?
Kate?s laugh sounded like a broken cowbell. ?Oh, we?re not going to stay here long. The fellows want to spend some money, so we?re going over to the Inn. Feel like coming along??
Connie looked at me. I moved my head just enough so she?d know it was okay by me. ?We?ll go, Kate.?
?Swell, come on over and meet the gang. We?re meeting the rest later on. They wanted to see all the sights including . . .? she giggled, ?those houses where . . . you know.? She giggled again.
Connie made a mouth and I grunted.
So we got up and met the gang. If it weren?t that I had Connie with me they would have treated me like another character too. Just for a minute, maybe, then a few fat guts would have been bounced off the walls. There was Joseph, Andrew, Homer, Martin and Raymond and not a nickname in the pack. They all had soft hands, big diamonds, loud laughs, fat wallets and lovely women. That is, all except Homer. He had his secretary along who wasn?t as pretty as she was ready, willing and able. She was his mistress and made no bones about it.
I liked her best. So did Connie.
When I squeezed their hands until they hurt we sat down and had a few drinks and dirty jokes then Andrew got loud about bigger and better times elsewhere. The rest threw in with him and we picked up our marbles and left. Martin gave the waiter a tenspot he didn?t deserve and he showed us to the door.
Connie didn?t know the way so we just followed. The girls did all the steering. Twice we had to step around drunks and once we moved into the gutter to get out of the way of a street brawl. They should have stayed in the gutter where they belonged. I was so hopping mad I could hardly speak and Connie rubbed her cheek against my shoulder in sympathy.
The Bowery Inn was off the main line. It was a squalid place with half-boarded-up windows, fly-specked beer signs and an outward appearance of something long ago gone to seed.
That was from the outside. The first thing you noticed when you went in was the smell. It wasn?t. It smelled like a bar should smell. The tables and the bar were as deliberately aged with worm holes and cigarette burns as
