The Little Sister

She came to sit close to me. I shook my head. “Over there. I really do have to talk sense.”

She sat down opposite and looked at me with grave dark eyes. “But yes, amigo, whatever you wish. I am your girl—at least I would gladly be your girl.”

“Where did you live in Cleveland?”

“In Cleveland?” Her voice was very soft, almost cooing. “Did I say I had lived in Cleveland?”

“You said you knew him there.”

She thought back and then nodded. “I was married then, amigo. What is the matter?”

“You did live in Cleveland then?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“You got to know Steelgrave how?”

“It was just that in those days it was fun to know a gangster. A form of inverted snobbery, I suppose. One went to the places where they were said to go and if one was lucky, perhaps some evening—”

“You let him pick you up.”

She nodded brightly. “Let us say I picked him up. He was a very nice little man. Really, he was.”

“What about the husband? Your husband. Or don’t you remember?”

She smiled. “The streets of the world are paved with discarded husbands,” she said.

“Isn’t it the truth? You find them everywhere. Even in Bay City.”

That bought me nothing. She shrugged politely. “I would not doubt it.”

“Might even be a graduate of the Sorbonne. Might even be mooning away in a measly small-town practice. Waiting and hoping. That’s one coincidence I’d like to eat. It has a touch of poetry.”

The polite smile stayed in place on her lovely face.

“We’ve slipped far apart,” I said. “Ever so far. And we got to be pretty clubby there for a while.”

I looked down at my fingers. My head ached. I wasn’t even forty per cent of what I ought to be. She reached me a crystal cigarette box and I took one. She fitted one for herself into the golden tweezers. She took it from a different box.

“I’d like to try one of yours,” I said.

“But Mexican tobacco is so harsh to most people.”

“As long as it’s tobacco,” I said, watching her. I made up my mind. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”

“What,” she asked carefully, “is the meaning of this by-play?”

“Desk clerk’s a muggle-smoker.”

She nodded slowly. “I have warned him,” she said. “Several times.”

“Amigo,” I said.

“What?”

“You don’t use much Spanish do you? Perhaps you don’t know much Spanish. Amigo gets worn to shreds.”

“We are not going to be like yesterday afternoon, I hope,” she said slowly.

“We’re not. The only thing Mexican about you is a few words and a careful way of talking that’s supposed to give the impression of a person speaking a language they had to learn. Like saying ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t.’ That sort of thing.”

She didn’t answer. She puffed gently on her cigarette and smiled.

“I’m in bad trouble downtown,” I went on. “Apparently Miss Weld had the good sense to tell it to her boss— Julius Oppenheimer—and he came through. Got Lee Farrell for her. I don’t think they think she shot Steelgrave. But they think I know who did, and they don’t love me any more.”

“And do you know, amigo?”

“Told you over the phone I did.”

She looked at me steadily for a longish moment. “I was there.” Her voice had a dry serious sound for once.

“It was very curious, really. The little girl wanted to see the gambling house. She had never seen anything like that and there had been in the papers—”

“She was staying here—with you?”

“Not in my apartment, amigo. In a room I got for her here.”

“No wonder she wouldn’t tell me,” I said. “But I guess you didn’t have time to teach her the business.”

She frowned very slightly and made a motion in the air with the brown cigarette. I watched its smoke write something unreadable in the still air.

“Please. As I was saying she wanted to go to that house. So I called him up and he said to come along. When we got there he was drunk. I have never seen him drunk before. He laughed and put his arm around little Orfamay and told her she had earned her money well. He said he had something for her, then he took from his pocket a billfold wrapped in a cloth of some kind and gave it to her. When she unwrapped it there was a hole in the middle of