'You're not going to sound at all if you don't get back to your warrior, lady,' Marsha cut in. 'Now scram.'
Kay faked a pout at her and said so-long to me after another long hand-clasp. When she was across the room Marsha slipped her arm through mine. 'Kay's a wonderful gal, but if you have it and it wears pants she wants it.'
'Good old Kay,' I said.
'Luckily, I know her too well.'
'Any more around like that?'
'Well, if it's a celebrity you'd like to meet, I can take you backstage and introduce you to a pair of Hollywood starlets, a television sensation, the country's biggest comic and...'
'Never mind,' I said: 'You're enough for me.'
She gave me another one of those squeezes with a laugh thrown in and I wanted to kiss her again. The kid with an arm in a sling who tapped her on the shoulder as he murmured, 'Two minutes more, Marsha,' must have read my mind, because his eyes went limp and sad.
Marsha nodded as he walked off and I pointed my cigarette at his back. 'The kid's got a crush on you.'
She watched him a moment, then glanced at me. 'I know it. He's only nineteen and I'm afraid he has stars in his eyes. A month ago he was in love with Helen O'Roark and was so far down in the dumps when he found out she was married he almost starved himself to death. He's the one I took to the hospital the night the Decker fellow broke into my apartment.'
'What happened to him?'
'He was setting up props and fell off the ladder.'
Down at the end of the hall hairy legs in short pants was banging on the piano again screaming for everyone to get back on the stage. Togas started to unravel from the floor, chairs and the scenery and if I had a dozen more pairs of eyes I could have enjoyed myself. Those babes didn't give a damn what they showed and I seemed to be the only one there who appreciated the view. The overhead lights went out and the stage spots came on and I was doing good watching the silhouettes until Marsha said, 'I'm getting jealous, Mike.
It wasn't so much what she said as the way she said it that made me jerk around. And there she was leaning on the stack of chairs like a nymph under a waterfall with her own toga wide open down the middle and an impish little grin playing with her mouth. She was barely a reflection of light and shadow, a vague white statue of warm, live flesh that moved with her breathing, then the toga came shut slowly before I could move and she was out of reach.
'You don't have to be jealous of anybody,' I said.
She smiled again, and in the darkness her hand touched mine briefly and the cigarette fell out of my fingers to the floor where it lay like a hot red eye. Then she was gone and all I could think about was tonight.
Chapter Five
After the little theater the glare of the sun was almost blinding. I fired up another butt and climbed back into the car where I finished smoking it before I had myself in line again. All the while I kept seeing Marsha in that white toga until it was branded into my brain so deeply that it blotted out everything else. Marsha and Kay and Helen of Troy or something in a lot of white togas drifting through the haze like beautiful ghosts.
Like the ghost of a killer I was after. I threw the butt out the window and hit the starter.
I let my hands and my eyes drive me through traffic while the rest of me sat and thought. It should have been so damn easy. Three guys dead and a killer running loose looking for his lousy split of a robbery that didn't happen. Decker dead on the sidewalk. Arnold Basil dead in the gutter. Hooker dead in his own room and me damn near dead on the floor. Sure, it was easy, just like an illiterate doing acrostics.
Then where the hell was the big puzzle? Was it because Basil had been Lou Grindle's boy, or because Fallon's name kept cropping up? I jammed the horn down at the guy in front of me and yelled as I pulled around him. He gave me a scared grimace and plenty of room and I shot by him swearing at the little things that piled up one after the other.
Then I grinned because that was where the puzzle was. In all the little things.
Like the boys who tried to take me when I was putting the buzz on Hooker.
Like the money that Decker had picked up from somewhere to pay off Dixie Cooper.
Like Decker putting his affairs in order before he walked out and got himself bumped.
Now I knew where I was going and what I wanted to do, so I got off the avenue onto a street and headed west until I could smell the river and see the trucks pulling into their docks for the night and hear the mixture of tongues as the longshoremen streamed out of the yards.
The nearest of them were still ten minutes away when I pulled up outside the hole-in-the-wall saloon and there weren't any early birds inside when I pushed the door open. The bartender was perched on a stool watching the television and his hand automatically went out for a glass as he heard me slide up to the bar.
I didn't let him waste his beer. I said, 'Remember me, buddy?'
He had a frown all set and his mouth shaped to tell me off when his memory came back with a jolt. 'Yeah.' His frown had a twisted look now.
I leaned on the bar so my coat hung loose enough for him to see the leather of the gun sling and he knew I wasn't kidding around. 'Who were they, buddy?'
'Look, I...'
'Maybe I ought to ask it different. Maybe I ought to ask it with the nose of a gun shoved down your throat. You can get it that way if you want.'
He choked up a little and his eyes kept darting toward the door hoping someone would come in. He licked his lips to bring the words out and said, 'I... don't know... who the hell they were.'
