Candy

“Or a rich man.”

“Candy—”

“Jeff,” she said, impatiently, “just what in the world do you want?”

“I want you to live with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I took a breath. “Then … then go to bed with me just one more time. Just once—it won’t hurt you and it sure as hell won’t hurt the bastard who’s keeping you. And I’d … appreciate it.”

It sounds ridiculous now; it must have sounded equally ridiculous to her at the time. The only person to whom it seemed sensible and logical was a grade-A moron by the name of Jeff Flanders, and it even seemed pretty silly to him a second or two after he said it.

“No,” she said, which was a relatively sane thing for her to say.

“Candy—”

“I’ve entered into a business arrangement,” she said. “You don’t seem to understand that.”

“But—”

“I have a code of ethics. Part of the arrangement was the stipulation that I remain true to the bastard who’s keeping me, as you put it. Therefore—”

“Stipulation,” I echoed. “Pretty big word for a hick from Gibbsville, wouldn’t you say?”

She frowned at me.

“Candy,” I pleaded. “Just once—”

She turned away from me but I caught her arm again and she turned reluctantly to face me.

“Remember what it was like? Remember the time in the elevator, the time on the floor, the time we took a bath together?”

She remembered—it was plain to see in the shadow of a grin that crossed that beautiful face. I barely heard her when she murmured It was nice in a very soft and infinitely sensual whisper.

She remembered—but she chose to forget. In a second she was all business, all frigidity, all coldness. She shrugged away from me and her eyes were hard as diamonds as she stared at me.

“I’m going now,” she said.

“Let me come with you.”

“You may not come with me. I want to walk alone and I do not want you with me.”

“I’m coming anyway. I’m damned better company than that silly-looking hound.”

“If you don’t leave me alone,” she said, the Gibbsville creeping back into her voice, “I’ll call a cop—and there’s one right on the corner.”

Candy was not the brightest girl in the world. She had never been remarkable for her intellectual prowess and she proved it that fine evening.

I let her alone. But when she was half a block away I started following her and she didn’t so much as turn her head to see if I was around. Maybe she took it for granted that I would disappear from her life as she had tried to disappear from mine. That was the type of uncomplicated mental activity of which she was capable. When things didn’t fit for her she ignored them, and now she was trying to ignore me.

That was her way. It made life with her or without her equally impossible, but it also simplified the job of following her. Tailing a person is not the hardest poser in the world when the person being tailed is unaware of the presence of the tail. You simply walk after the person. That’s all. You don’t dodge into alleyways or duck behind parked cars or any other moronical games that private eyes play in motion pictures. You just walk, and the person that you’re tailing also walks, and it’s lots of fun all around.

I was a natural-born detective. She walked and I walked—over 54th to Madison, down Madison to 53rd, five doors down 53rd to an imposing brownstone where the doorman opened the door for her and in she went.

A nice short simple walk, uncomplicated except for a moment when the damnable dachshund urinated on a lamppost. That was the sole interruption.

So there I was, Jeff Flanders, the defective detective, standing on the street in front of an imposing brownstone in which lived my erstwhile lady-love.

Now what?

Ah, of course. Now I had to find out which apartment she lived in. I reached back into my bagful of fictional- private-eye lore and took a ten-dollar bill from my wallet, planning to bribe the docile-looking doorman. That was the way the guys did it in the movies. Lord, do they throw money around! A good doorman must get five yards a week in bribes alone.

Then something struck me, something which may well have never occurred to Mike Hammer or Ellery Queen or Hercule Poirot or Shell Scott. Hell, I didn’t have to stick ten bucks in the doorman’s grubby paw.

All I had to do was look on the mailbox.

I walked bravely past the doorman, entered the plush little vestibule and turned an inquiring eye upon the row of mailboxes and doorbells. I found what I was looking for in a hurry—Candace Cain in raised script on a little white card over the bell for apartment 4-B.

Now what?

I considered taking the elevator to the fourth floor and knocking on Candy’s door. After seven seconds of careful deliberation I figured out what a prime example of human stupidity that would be. She would toss me out on my rump, maybe call in the law. She had made it relatively plain that she didn’t want to be bothered and if I showed up knocking on her door I was only asking for trouble.

So the natural thing to do was to go home, pick up a bottle and start in where I had left off before Les Boloff had so rudely interrupted me. To hell with Les Boloff. To hell with Joe Burns and Phil Delfy and the Beverley Finance Company. To hell with Candace Cain, raised script and ermine stole and funny dog. To hell, for that matter, with Jeff Flanders.

That was the natural thing to do.

In case you have not already mapped this much out for yourself, I have not made a life’s work out of doing the natural thing.

I got on the elevator and instructed the lackey operating the car to deliver me safe and sound on the fifth floor. Mark that well—the fifth floor. There I got out of the car, wandered around long enough to discover the precise location of apartment 5-B, and rang again for the elevator. I rode back down to the ground floor and left the building.

Clever subterfuge, eh? By this shifty means I managed to figure out what part of the building Candy’s apartment was in. Through such nefarious plotting I could determine which window to peer through if I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

I wanted to set eyes on Candy.

The doorman gave me a funny look on the way out so I gave him an equally funny look right back to put him in his place. I walked around the side of the building where he couldn’t see me and stood like an oaf staring up at Candy’s window. It was a nice window. It even had curtains.

And, more important, it had a fire escape.

Get the message? The situation was made-to-order for Jeff Flanders, boy detective and ace second-story man. All I had to do was mount the fire escape, climb helter-skelter to the fourth floor, and make like a Peeping Tom.

Kindly refrain from asking me at this point just why I wanted to do these things. I would be hard-pressed to explain it to you. A psychiatrist might say I was suffering from temporary insanity. A psychiatrist who knew me well might say that I was suffering from permanent insanity. The hell with it. I hate psychiatrists.

The fire escape posed a minor problem. The last section of it didn’t reach to the ground. The notion behind it evidently was that the last section was lowered from above in the event of fire, but remained up in the air otherwise to discourage clods like me from using it as a stepladder to success. This does make a certain amount of sense—it’s a good deal better than the jackass of a fire escape on the hotel I lived in, the cockeyed Kismet, where the fire escape drops you off in a blank alley. You can spend the rest of your life trapped between four dull buildings if there’s ever a fire in the Kismet.

As I observed, the fire escape posed a minor problem. It might have been enough to deter an ordinary