I wasn’t going to miss this, even if it killed me. Very carefully I raised my head. All the veins, arteries and nerves in it yelled murder, pulsed, expanded and became generally hysterical, but I managed to sit up. The light dug arrows into my eyes, and for a moment or so I held my head in my hands. Then I peeped through my fingers.
MacGraw and Hartsell were standing by the door looking as if their feet were resting on a red-hot stove. MacGraw had a cringing this-has-really-nothing-to-do-with-me smile on his face. Hartsell looked as if a mouse had run up his trousers leg.
I turned, keeping my head still, and looked towards the french windows.
A girl stood between the half-drawn curtains; a girl in a white strapless evening-gown that showed off her deeply-tanned shoulders and the snug little hollow between her breasts. Her raven-black hair lay about her shoulders in a page-boy bob. I had a little trouble in focussing, and her beauty came to me slowly like a picture thrown on the screen by an amateur projectionist. The blurred outlines of her face slowly became sharp-etched. The misty hollows that were her eyes filled in and came alive. An oval, small-featured, very lovely face with a small, perfectly-moulded nose, red sensual lips and wide, big eyes as dark and as hard as nuggets of coal.
Even with the blood pounding in my head and my throat aching and my body feeling as if it had been fed through a wringer, I felt the impact of this girl’s allurement the way I had felt the impact of MacGraw’s fist. She not only had the looks, but she also had that thing: you could see it there in her eyes, the way she stood, in the curves of her body, in the tanned column of her throat: shouting at you like the twenty-foot letters on an advertising hoarding.
“How dare you beat this man!” she said in a voice which carried across the room with the heat and the force of a flame-thrower. “Is this Brandon’s idea?”
“Now look, Miss Crosby,” MacGraw said pleadingly. “This guy’s been sticking his snout into your affairs. The Captain thought maybe we should discourage him. Honest, that’s all there’s to it.”
For the first time as far as I knew she turned her head to stare at me. I couldn’t have looked a particularly pretty object. I knew I had collected a number of bumps and bruises and the cut on my right cheek where the Wop had hit me was bleeding again. Somehow I managed to grin at her: a little crooked, not much heart in it, but still, a grin.
She looked at me the way you look at a frog that’s jumped into your morning cup of coffee.
“Get up!” she snapped. “You can’t be as badly hurt as all that.”
But then she hadn’t been slapped over the skull three or four times or kicked in the throat and ribs or punched in the jaw, so it wasn’t fair to expect her to know if I was badly hurt or not.
Maybe it was because she was such a lovely that I made the effort and somehow got to my feet. We Malloys have our pride, and we don’t like our women to think we are soft. I had to grab hold of the back of a chair as soon as I was on my feet, and I very nearly spread out on the floor again, but, by clinging on and riding the pain that went shooting down into my heels and back again to my skull like a roller-coaster gone haywire, I began to come out of it and get what is termed my second wind.
MacGraw and Hartsell were looking at me the way tigers look at a lump of meat that’s been sneaked out of their cage.
She began speaking to them again in that scornful, blistering voice:
“I don’t like your sort. And I’m going to do something about it. If this is the way Brandon runs his police force the sooner he gets the hell out of it the better!”
While MacGraw was mumbling excuses I set my compass and steered a zigzag-course towards the overturned whisky bottle. The cork was well home so no damage had been done. It was quite a feat to bend and pick it up, but I managed it. I anchored myself to the mouthpiece and drank.
“And before you go you’re having a taste of your own medicine,” she was saying, and, as I lowered the bottle, she thrust the rubber cosh she had picked up towards me. “Go on, hit them!” she said viciously. “Get your own back!”
I took the cosh because otherwise she would probably have pushed it down my throat, and I looked at Hartsell and MacGraw, who stared back at me like two pigs waiting to have their throats slit.
“Hit them!” she repeated, her voice rising. “It’s time someone did. They’ll take it. I’ll see to that.”
It was an extraordinary thing, but I was pretty sure they would have stood there and let me beat their heads off.
I tossed the cosh on to the settee.
“Not me, Lady, that’s not the way I get my fun,” I said, my voice sounding like a record being played with a blunt gramophone needle.
“Hit them!” she commanded furiously. “What are you frightened of? They won’t dare touch you again. Beat them up!”
“Sorry,” I said. “It wouldn’t amuse me. Let’s turn them out. They’re lousing up the room.”
She turned, snatched up the cosh and walked up to MacGraw. His white face turned yellow, but he didn’t move. Her arm flashed up and she hit him across his face. An ugly red weal sprang up on his flabby cheek. He gave a whimpering grunt, but he still didn’t move.
As her arm flashed up again I grabbed her wrist and snatched the cosh out of her hand. The effort cost me a stab of pain through the head and a hard-stinging slap across the face from Miss Spitfire. She tried to get the cosh from me, but I held on to her wrists and yelled: “Beat it, you two lugs! Beat it before she knocks the hell out of you!”
Holding her was like holding an angry tigress. She was surprisingly strong. As I wrestled with her MacGraw and Hartsell charged out of the room as if the devil was after them. They fell down the steps in their hurry to get away. When I heard their car start up I released her wrists and stepped away.
“Take it easy,” I said, panting with my exertions. “They’ve gone now.”
For a moment she stood gasping, her face set and her eyes blazing; a lovely thing of fury, and then the anger went and her eyes lost their explosive quality and she suddenly threw back her head and laughed.
“Well, we certainly scared the daylights out of those two rats, didn’t we?” she said, and flopped limply on the settee. “Give me a drink and have one yourself. You certainly look as if you need one.”
As I reached for the bottle I said, looking at her intently, “The name, of course, is Maureen Crosby?”
“You’ve guessed it.” She rubbed her wrists, making a comical grimace. “You’ve hurt me, you brute!”
“Sorry,” I said, and meant it.
“Lucky I looked in. If I hadn’t they would have had your hide by now.”
“So they would,” I said, pouring four fingers of Scotch into a glass. My hand was very unsteady and some of the whisky splashed on to the carpet. I handed her the glass, and began to fix myself a drink. “Whiterock or water?”
“In its bare skin,” she returned, holding the glass up to the light. “I don’t believe in mixing business with pleasure or water with Scotch. Do you?”
“It depends on the business and the Scotch,” I said, and sat down. My legs felt as if the shin bones had been removed. “So you are Maureen Crosby. Well, well, quite the last person I expected to call on me.”
I thought you would be surprised.” There was a mocking expression in the dark eyes and the smile was calculated.
“How’s the drug cure going?” I asked, watching her. “I’ve always heard a dopie should lay off liquor.”
She continued to smile, but her eyes were not amused.
“You shouldn’t believe all you hear.”
I drank some of the whisky. It was very strong. I shuddered and put the glass on the table.
“I don’t. I hope you don’t either.”
We sat for a long moment, looking at each other. She had the knack of making her face expressionless without losing her loveliness which was quite an achievement.
“Don’t let’s get complicated. I’m here to talk to you. You’re making a lot of trouble. Isn’t it time you took your little spade and dug in someone else’s graveyard?”
I made believe to think this over.
“Are you just asking or is this a proposition?” I said finally.
Her mouth tightened and the smile went away.
“Can you be bought? I was told you were one of those clean, simple, non-grafting characters. I was particularly advised not to offer you money.”
