“And the man in the taxi with you was one of them?” I asked. “I was driving down the street behind you when you were attacked, and I could see there was a man with you. He was one of them?”
“Yes! I did not know it, but it must have been that he was. He does not defend me. A pretense, that is all.”
“Ever try sicking the cops on this hubby of yours?”
“It is what?”
“Ever notify the police?”
“Yes, but”—she shrugged her brown shoulders—“I would as well have kept quiet, or better. In Buffalo it was, and they—they bound my husband to keep the peace, I think you call it. A thousand dollars! Poof! What is that to him in his jealousy? And I—I cannot stand the things the newspapers say—the jesting of them. I must leave Buffalo. Yes, once I do try sicking the cops on him. But not more.”
“Buffalo?” I explored a little. “I lived there for a while—on Crescent Avenue.”
“Oh, yes. That is out by the Delaware Park.”
That was right enough. But her knowing something about Buffalo didn’t prove anything about the rest of her story.
VI
She poured more brandy. By speaking quick I held my drink down to a size suitable for a man who has work to do. Hers was as large as before. We drank, and she offered me cigarettes in a lacquered box—slender cigarettes, hand-rolled in black paper.
I didn’t stay with mine long. It tasted, smelt and scorched like gunpowder.
“You don’t like my cigarettes?”
“I’m an old-fashioned man,” I apologized, rubbing its fire out in a bronze dish, fishing in my pocket for my own deck. “Tobacco’s as far as I’ve got. What’s in these fireworks?”
She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, with a sort of coo in it.
“I am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu incense mixed with the tobacco.”
I didn’t say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who would dye her dog purple.
The dog moved under its chair just then, scratching the floor with its nails.
The brown woman was in my arms, in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. Closeup, opened by terror, her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were gray-green. The blackness was in the shadow from her heavy lashes.
“It’s only the dog,” I assured her, sliding her back on her own part of the bench. “It’s only the dog wriggling around under the chair.”
“Ah!” she blew her breath out with enormous relief.
Then we had to have another shot of brandy.
“You see, I am most awfully the coward,” she said when the third dose of liquor was in her. “But, ah, I have had so much trouble. It is a wonder that I am not insane.”
I could have told her she wasn’t far enough from it to do much bragging, but I nodded with what was meant for sympathy.
She lit another cigarette to replace the one she had dropped in her excitement. Her eyes became normal black slits again.
“I do not think it is nice”—there was a suggestion of a dimple in her brown cheek when she smiled like that—“that I throw myself into the arms of a man even whose name I do not know, or anything of him.”
“That’s easy to fix. My name is Young,” I lied; “and I can let you have a case of Scotch at a price that will astonish you. I think maybe I could stand it if you call me Jerry. Most of the ladies I let sit in my lap do.”
“Jerry Young,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That is a nice name. And you are the bootlegger?”
“Not the,” I corrected her; “just a. This is San Francisco.”
The going got tough after that.
Everything else about this brown woman was all wrong, but her fright was real. She was scared stiff. And she didn’t intend being left alone this night. She meant to keep me there—to massage any more chins that stuck themselves at her. Her idea—she being that sort—was that I would be most surely held with affection. So she must turn herself loose on me. She wasn’t hampered by any pruderies or puritanisms at all.
I also have an idea. Mine is that when the last gong rings I’m going to be leading this baby and some of her playmates to the city prison. That is an excellent reason—among a dozen others I could think of—why I shouldn’t get mushy with her.
I was willing enough to camp there with her until something happened. That apartment looked like the scene of the next action. But I had to cover up my own game. I couldn’t let her know she was only a minor figure in it. I had to pretend there was nothing behind my willingness to stay but a desire to protect her. Another man might have got by with a chivalrous, knight-errant, protector-of-womanhood-without-personal-interest attitude. But I don’t look, and can’t easily act, like that kind of person. I had to hold her off without letting her guess that my interest wasn’t personal. It was no cinch. She was too damned direct, and she had too much brandy in her.
I didn’t kid myself that my beauty and personality were responsible for any of her warmth. I was a thick-armed male with big fists. She was in a jam. She spelled my name P-r-o-t-e-c-t-i-o-n. I was something to be put between her and trouble.
Another complication: I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman
