I knew Bertha would be laying for me at the hotel. So I never went back. What money I had saved up was in the form of traveler’s checks, and I bought an ancient jalopy, picked up a heavy woolen shirt, some overalls, and a leather coat at one of the stores, purchased some bedding, a gasoline stove, cooking-pots, threw in a few canned goods, and was ready to leave by three-thirty that afternoon.
We looked like a typical bunch of dust-bowl refugees as we went rattling out of town. No one tried to stop us. We passed a carload of cops who looked us over and let us go on by.
We rattled out on the Beatty road, the car turning out a consistent thirty-seven miles an hour.
Along in the late afternoon, I pulled off on a crossroad which ran out into the desert, a pair of twisting ruts cut into the sand. After we were a couple of hundred yards from the main highway, I pulled out, picked my way through clumps of sagebrush, and stopped on a bare stretch of wind-blown desert.
“How about it?” I asked Louie Hazen.
“It’s a swell place, buddy.”
Helen Framley got out without a word, started lifting things out of the car.
“You got enough blankets,” she said to me.
“We’ll need them.”
Her eyes met mine. “Two beds or three?”
“Three.”
“Okay.”
She spread the blankets down on the desert. Louie lifted the gasoline stove out of the carton in which it had come, set it up on the running-board, filled the fuel tank, and in a few minutes had a hissing blue flame under a coffeepot.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Nothin’,” he said. “Just stick around. You’re the man of the family, the big boss. Ain’t that right?” he asked, looking over at Helen Framley.
“That’s right.”
“What do I call you when it’s time to come to meals?” he asked, giving her that snaggle-toothed grin.
“Helen.”
“Okay. I’m. Louie. There ain’t no hard feelin’s because of that slot-machine business?”
“Not a bit,” she said, and pushed out her hand.
He folded his battered fist around her slim fingers, grinned once more, and said, “We’re gonna get along.”
He started moving around, picking out pots and pans, reaching, into the grub box. There wasn’t so much as a wasted motion. He didn’t seem to be particularly in a hurry, but he accomplished things in an incredibly short time.
Helen and I tried once or twice to help, but he brushed us aside impatiently. “This ain’t goin’ to be no feast,” he said. “We ain’t goin’ to set no table or have no style. We ain’t got enough water to do a lot of dishwashin’, and there ain’t goin’ to be many dishes, but the grub’s goin’ to stick to your ribs.”
A few moments later, a breath of desert wind wafted an odor of beans over to our nostrils, beans with a touch of garlic and the smell of fried onions.
“Louie,” I asked, “what is that?”
“That there,” he said with pride, “is a dish of my own invention. You cut up a couple of onions fine, put ’em in a little water, and let ’em boil down to a dry pan. Then you add a little grease and fry ’em up. Put in a little garlic, then open a can of beans, and put in some syrup. That there grub will stick to your ribs, and it ain’t goin’ to taste bad.”
Helen and I sat side by side on the blankets watching the western sky as some invisible artist went about painting a desert sunset, working swiftly with vivid colors, and a bold brush.
We were still watching the colors when Louie pushed steaming plates into our hands. “Here you are,” he said, “all dished up. You eat it on the one plate, arid what I mean is you clean it up.” And he grinned at us.
We went to work on the grub. It tasted better than any cooking I’d had for months, with fresh sourdough French bread to sop up the gravy that was left in the plate after we’d cleaned out the mixture of beans, onions, and garlic.
Helen sighed. “I think that’s the best food I’ve ever tasted. Donald, why didn’t you think of this sooner?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m dumb,” I said.
The afterglow faded from the west. Blazing stars came out to hang in the sky overhead.
Helen said, “I’ll do the dishes.”
Louie was insulted. “What does a nice girl like you know about doin’ dishes? Not camp style, anyway. Look, sister, out here in the desert we don’t have much water, see? I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He took the dishes out to a place about fifteen yards in front of the car, turned on the headlights, squatted on his heels, and scooped up sand. He piled sand in the plates and started rubbing. By the time he’d finished, the sand had soaked up everything that had been left on the plates and scoured them clean. Louie poured boiling water over the dishes, just a few spoonfuls to each dish. The water cleaned off what was left of the sand, and left the dishes bright and clean.
“There you are,” Louie announced proudly, “a lot cleaner than you coulda got ’em with a whole dishpan full of water. Now we’ll stack ’em up on the running-board and be all ready for breakfast. What time you want to roll out?”
“I’ll let you know,” I told him.
Louie said, “I thought I’d pull my blankets over here and—”
“This is all right,” Helen said. “I’ve got the three beds made, side by side.”
Louie waited for a few minutes, then said, “Okay.”
We sat around on the blankets for a while.
“How about a campfire?” Louie asked.
I said, “Someone might be looking for us along the road.”
“Yes. I suppose so. How about a little music?”
“Got a radio?” I asked.
“Somethin’ better,” Louie said.
He pulled a harmonica from his pocket, tenderly wrapped his warped fingers and battered knuckles around the instrument, and raised it to his mouth.
It wasn’t the sort of playing I’d expected. I’d been prepared for Home Sweet Home and some of the harmonica classics, but Louie gave us everything. The music which poured forth from that harmonica seemed somehow to blend in with the calm tranquillity of the desert night. It became a part of the darkness, the stretches of silent sand, and the steady stars.
Helen came over to lean against my shoulder. I slipped an arm around her waist. I could feel her steady, regular breathing, the warmth of her cheek, could smell the fragrance of her hair. Her hand stole into mine, slender and soft. I felt her shoulders heave as she took in a deep breath, then gave a long sigh.
The night was still warm. Twice within an hour we heard the distant snarl of approaching automobiles. Headlights danced vaguely up and down the main highway, casting weird shadows. The sound of the approaching car grew to a whine, then rapidly faded as the glare of the brilliant headlights gave place to the glowing red of a receding taillight. There were only those two cars within more than an hour. For the rest, we had the desert to ourselves.
Louie’s music had the majesty of organ music. It was, of course, due in part to the environment, the desert, and the steady stars, in a sky which looked as though it had been freshly washed and polished by some cosmic housekeeper. Louie played by ear, but he was an artist, and he made that harmonica accomplish things one would have thought impossible.
Then, after a while, Louie quit playing, just let the music fade into silence, and we sat there, looking up at the stars, out at the dim outlines of the automobile, of the sagebrush against the sand of the desert, feeling the eternal silence.
Helen said softly in a half whisper, “It’s close to heaven out here.”
I could feel the warmth of her body through her clothes and mine, could feel the weight of her head settling down against my shoulder. Once or twice her muscles gave involuntary little twitches, as the nerve tension relaxed, and her body surrendered itself to drowsiness.
After a while, a breeze so faint as to be all but imperceptible stole over the desert, but that breeze was cold. The warmth simply vanished. The breeze grew stronger. You could feel the air moving now. Helen snuggled closer. She doubled her legs, and pushed her knees hard against my leg. For a moment, warmth returned, then the breeze came again, and Helen straightened with a shiver.
“Gettin’ cold,” Louie said.
“Bedtime,” Helen announced. “Mine’s the end bed. Donald, you sleep in the center.”
She moved over to her blankets, slipped out of her outer clothes. It was too dark for details, but the starlight showed the general contours of her figure as her outer garments slipped down her smooth limbs. I watched her without curiosity and without self-consciousness. It was as though one were seeing a beautiful piece of statuary by starlight.
She slid under the covers, twisted and turned for a moment, slipping out of her underclothes, then sat up in bed to pull pajamas on and button them around her neck.
“ ’Night,” she said.
“Good night,” I called.
Louie, slightly embarrassed, kept silent, pretending to think she had been talking only to me. She raised herself on one elbow. “Hey, Louie,” she called.
“What?”
“ ’Night.”
“Good night,” he mumbled self-consciously.
We waited a few minutes until she had settled herself in her blankets, then Louie and I got out of our clothes and snuggled down into our covers in our underwear.
I wondered how cold it was going to get. I could feel the tip of my nose getting cold. The stars were hanging in the sky directly above me. I wondered if one of them might fall, and if so whether it would hit me — then suddenly I opened my eyes, and an entirely different assortment of stars was in the heavens. The ground was hard underneath, and my muscles were cramped, but the clear fresh air, keen with the tang of dustless cold, had purified my blood, sucked the poisons out of me, and left me feeling as relaxed as though I’d been sleeping for a month.
I closed my eyes again. Once I woke up just before dawn to see the frosty glitter of bluish green where the sky was just beginning to take on color above a band of pale orange. I watched the orange grow vivid, saw a little cloud leap into crimson prominence. Listened to the rhythmic breathing of the girl on one side, heard Louie’s placid snoring — thought about getting up at the “crack of dawn,” and then snuggled down into the warmth of my blankets.
When I woke up, the sun was over the horizon, casting long shadows from the greasewood and sagebrush. A series of rippling contortions of the blankets next to me showed that Helen Framley was getting dressed. Louie was bent over the stove on the running-board of the car, and the fragrance of coffee stung my nostrils.
There has never been anything quite as soul-satisfying, quite as filled with the promise of life as the smell of coffee out in the open when the fresh air has done its work, and you realize that you’re ravenously hungry.
Helen Framley came up out of her blankets, to stand slim and graceful. The golden rays of the early-morning sun touched the youthful lines of her figure with reddish orange. She glanced at me, saw I was looking up at her, and said naturally, “ ’Lo, Donald.”
“ ’Lo,” I said.
Louie turned around at the sound of her voice, then whirled back to bend over the stove.
There was quiet amusement in her eyes. “Hello, Louie,” she called.
“Hello,” he called back over his shoulder.
She finished her dressing, and said, “I could go for this in a big way. I wonder why someone didn’t invent it sooner.”
“It’s been here longer than we have,” I remarked.
She stood facing the east, the sun illuminating her features. Abruptly, she flung out her arms toward the sun in an impulsive gesture, then turned, sat down, and slipped on her shoes.
Louie said, “Half a basin of water apiece, and that’s all, and breakfast’ll be ready in five minutes.”
We washed up, cleaned our teeth, sat on our blankets, while Louie gave us scrambled eggs, coffee that was golden clear, bacon cooked somehow so that it had a nutty flavor, crisp without being brittle. He had a little wood fire going, had let it die down to coals, and a screen propped on some small rocks over these coals was the grate on which he had browned thin slices of the French bread into golden-crisp toast with butter glistening on it.
Every mouthful of food seemed deliciously flavored strength. I felt as though I didn’t need boxing lessons, that I could stand up to any man on earth and blast him to the ground with my bare fists.
We sat around for a few minutes after breakfast, smoking cigarettes, soaking up the warmth of the sunlight. We finished our cigarettes. I looked at Louie. We looked at the girl. She nodded. We started rolling up the blankets, fitting them into the ancient jalopy. No one spoke much. We had no need for words.
Half an hour later, with dishes all done and put away, the car neatly packed, we were on our way, rattling across the desert, the motor full of piston slaps and bearing knocks, but managing to deliver its thirty-seven miles an hour. The sun rose higher. The shadow cast by the automobile shortened. The warmth gave place to heat. The right rear tire developed a puncture. Louie and I changed it. We didn’t find it particularly annoying. We weren’t nervous, and we weren’t hurried. Everything went like clockwork — entirely different from those occasions when I’d been dashing around in Bertha Cool’s agency car trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Then a tire would go flat, and nothing would work. The car would roll off the jack. The nuts would get cross-threaded, on the bolts, and the rim never seemed to fit right on the wheel.
We didn’t hurry. We had all the time in the world. Occasionally, we’d stop to just soak up the scenery.
We traveled all that day, camped at night on the desert, and got to Reno around noon the following day.
“Okay,” Louie said, “here we are. What’s the orders, skipper?”
The jalopy was covered with desert dust. I needed a shave. Louie had black whiskers sprouting all over his chin. All three of us were burned from the desert sun and wind, but I had never felt so serenely relaxed.
“An auto camp,” I said, “while we get cleaned up, and find out what’s to be done.”
We found an auto camp. The woman let us have a cabin which had two rooms and three beds. We scrubbed under the shower. Louie and I shaved, then I left them in the cabin while I went out to reconnoiter.
I rang up the telephone company and inquired if Mrs. Jannix had a telephone. She didn’t. I rang up all the hotels, asked them if a Mrs. Jannix was registered with them. She wasn’t. I rang up the public utilities. They didn’t want to give out any information.
I went back to the auto camp, picked up the other two, and we went out looking for a place to stay.
I finally found one just about dark, a place which was ideally suited for what we wanted. A man had a little filling station about seven miles out of town. He’d started to put up an auto court, but his finances had run out, and all he had was one big cabin back about a hundred yards from the highway.
We loaded the jalopy with provisions, and moved in that night. Louie played on his harmonica, waltzes, and Helen and I danced for a while. There was a little wood stove in the place, and we kept the cabin filled with that comfortable warmth which comes only from a wood stove in a kitchen.
Louie pulled me out of blankets early the next morning. It was time, he explained, for road work.
Helen smiled at me sleepily, said, “Have a good time,” rolled over, and went back to sleep. I put on rubber-soled tennis shoes, tightened my belt, took a drink of hot water with a little lemon juice in it, and followed Louie out into the cold. The sun was just getting up. The air stabbed through my thin clothing.
Louie saw me shiver. “You’ll be all right in a minute. You’re too light to do much sweating. Come on now, here we go.”
He started off at a slow jog. I fell in behind him. A hundred and fifty yards, and the cold gave way to tingling warmth.
I realized there was quite an elevation here. My lungs began to labor for air. Louie, however, kept slogging along. We were on the pavement now. The steady kloop — kloop — kloop of his rubber-soled shoes grew monotonous.
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Don’t talk,” he called back over his shoulder.
I kept plugging along. My legs felt as though they were weighted with metal. We were jogging slowly enough so I could manage my breathing, but I was tired, terribly tired. It seemed as though we’d run miles before Louie swung around abruptly, looked me over with the eye of a professional trainer, said, “All right, walk awhile.”
We started walking along briskly, sucking in great lungfuls of the cool, clean air. My legs were tired, but the change in muscular action was a relief.
After several minutes, Louie started jogging again, and I fell in behind him. The cabin showed up a quarter of a mile ahead. It seemed to take hours to reach it.
Louie wasn’t winded. I could see that he was breathing more deeply, but that was all.
“Try opening up the bottom part of your lungs,” he said. “Suck the air way down into the lowest part of your lungs. Okay, we’ll go through a few moves now, just some of the preliminary stuff.”
He brought out a set of sweat-stiffened boxing-gloves and put gloves on my hands. “Now then,” he said, “the most deceptive blow and the hardest to deliver is an absolutely straight punch. Now, let’s see a straight left.”
I lashed out with a left.
He shook his head. “That ain’t straight.”
“Why not?”
“Because your elbow came up with the punch. Way out from the side of your body. Keep your elbow right in close to your body as you bring your fist up. First the left, then the right.”
I tried again. Louie looked pained but patient. “Now look,” he said. “Take off that right glove for a minute. I want to show you ‘something.”
And he showed me. And he told me, and then he kept me shooting out the left until I could hardly raise my arm.
“It ain’t good,” he said, “and it ain’t bad. You’ll improve. Now, let’s try a straight right. Now when you throw a straight right—”
A voice from the window said in a sleepy drawl. “Wouldn’t it be easier to take a licking than go to all that trouble, Louie?”
I looked up at the bedroom window. Helen Framley, her elbows perched on the sill, a kimono falling away from her throat, was watching us with an amused twinkle in her eyes.
Louie said, in all deadly seriousness, “There’s times when a man can’t afford to take a licking, Miss Helen — maybe he’d be fighting for you.”
“Save it,” she told him. “I like men with black eyes, and besides I have to clean my teeth.”
She left the window. Louie turned to me with that grin pulling his lips back so that the missing teeth showed as black spaces. “There,” he announced, “is a girl for you. Buddy, what I mean that’s a girl!”
I nodded.
Louie was looking at me speculatively as though he wanted to say something else, perhaps wondering if he dared to try coaching me in something that wasn’t fighting. But it was hard for him to find words. At length, he said, “Listen, buddy, you know where I stand. I’m your pal, see?”
I nodded.
“I’m backing your play. No matter what it is, I’m backing it.”
Again I nodded.
He blurted awkwardly, “Well, don’t pull no punches on my account. Come on, get your mitts up and let’s go through that again. One — two — one — two — one — two — one — two—”
I was so tired I could hardly move when we finished. Perspiration was commencing to stand out on my skin. Louie looked me over. “No cold showers for you, buddy. That cold-shower stuff is all right for the guys that have a layer of fat under their skin. Even then it don’t do ’em as much good as they think it does. You take a warm shower, not hot, now, just a little bit warmer than your skin. Get the temperature with your hands, then step in under it. It’ll feel like a cold shower at first, and you’ll want to turn on more warm water, but don’t do it. Just stay under there and put on lots of soap and scrub off good. Then make the water just a little cooler, not enough to give you a shock, but just start cooling it down until you feel you’d like to get out and then get out quick. Rub yourself good with a towel, then get in on your bed and — well, then’s when I take over.”
I took the shower. The towels furnished by the man who owned the cabin were little thin things that became wringing wet by the time you were half through drying yourself.
Louie was waiting in my room when I stretched my damp body out on the bed. He had a bottle, and, as he sloshed some of the contents of the bottle into his hand, I thought I smelled alcohol, witch hazel, and bay rum. Then Louie went to work. He kneaded, pounded, massaged, slapped, rubbed, and then did it all over again.
I began to feel a delightful sense of relaxation. I wasn’t drowsy, but I could feel new, clean blood coursing through my muscles, could feel my skin tingle and glow.
From the kitchen, I could hear the rattle of pans. Louie gave a little exclamation, strode across the room, jerked the door open, and said, “Hey, I’m the cook here.”
I heard Helen Framley’s deep-pitched distinctive drawl saying, “You used to be. You’ve been promoted to trainer. I’m taking over the breakfast.”
Louie came back to the bed. “A great girl,” he said, stiffening his fingers and jabbing them into the muscles on each side of my spine.
It took Louie half an hour to get me massaged to suit him, then I got into my clothes, feeling slightly tired but not fatigued. Helen had the table set, with grapefruit, coffee, golden brown toast, thick ham steaks, and fried eggs. As we started eating, she got up to pour flapjacks into a big frying-pan.
I felt hungry, not particularly ravenous, just hungry, but the food I ate didn’t seem to have any effect on my hunger. I ate and ate and my stomach refused to fill up.
Louie watched me approvingly.
Helen Framley said, “You’ll have him so fat he’ll waddle.”
“He won’t put on over three pounds,” Louie said. “He’s using up energy, and it takes food to supply that energy. He won’t carry an ounce of fat, but, boy, oh, boy, will he get solid.”
Her eyes searched mine. “Why the sudden desire to become proficient in the manly art of self-defense?” she asked.
I said, “I get tired of being a human punching-bag.”
“And so you quit your job, hire a boxing instructor, and start right in with road work, massages, boxing, and regular fight training?”
“That’s right.”
“When you go after anything, you don’t use any halfway methods, do you?”
“No.”
“Some things, anyhow,” she said, and turned away.
Louie said, “Now, buddy, after breakfast, you don’t do nothing. See? You just sit back for an hour and let your food digest. You read the paper, and try to keep from moving. Don’t do anything that will use up energy.”
Nothing in my life ever felt quite so good as that hour of complete relaxation which followed. Then I announced that I had work to do. Louie wanted me to take some breathing exercises, and some “skull practice,” but I insisted I had to go to town.
Helen said we needed some groceries, and handed me a list. Louie volunteered to go along and buy the groceries. Helen said she’d stay in the cabin and straighten things up.
Louie talked about her all the way into Reno. “A wonderful girl,” he said. “She’s got what it takes. She’s championship stuff. Sock her one on the button, and her knees might be buckling, but you’d never know it.”
I eased the car into a parking-space and told Louie to be back in half an hour.
“I’ll be here,” he promised. “You got that grocery list?”
I handed him the grocery list and twenty dollars. “Expense money,” I said. “When it’s gone, tell me and I’ll give you some more.”
His eyes held that same devotion you see in the eyes of a big dog looking up at his master. “Okay, buddy,” he said, and pushed the money down into his pocket.
I went into one of the hotels, got a list of numbers, closeted myself in the telephone booth, and went to work. I called retail-grocer associations, credit bureaus, the dairies, and even the ice company. I was, I explained, from the Preferential Credit Bureau of San Francisco. I was trying to get some information on a Mrs. Elva Jannix. I knew they wouldn’t have any credit applications, but I’d like very much to have them check their deliveries during the next few days, and if they got any information to save it until I called again.
That’s a peculiar thing. No matter what kind of an alibi you use, you can’t get information out of a business house unless you pose as a credit man, and then they’ll turn everything inside out. They almost never ask to see any credentials. Simply tell them you’re handling a credit matter, and the world is yours.
I made the rounds of the banks, told /hem I was trying to locate a stolen check, asked them if they’d had any business dealings with a Mrs. Jannix, either Mrs. Sidney Jannix, or Mrs. Elva Jannix.
Most of them fell for it. One of them didn’t. The manager wanted to know more about me. Somehow, the way he went at it, I had an idea Mrs. Jannix might be a client of that bank. A man can tell you he hasn’t the information you want without violating any ethics, but if he happens to have the information you’re after, he gets a little cagey about giving it out.
I went back to the car. It had been an hour and ten minutes. There was no sign of Louie Hazen beyond a pasteboard carton filled with canned stuff, and two heavy brown-paper shopping-bags loaded with various staples.
I sat and waited for fifteen minutes. The sun crawled over the roofs of the store buildings, and sent warm rays glancing down into the streets. I felt drowsy. My muscles and nerves were all relaxed. I didn’t give a damn for Bertha Cool or the detective agency or anything that concerned it. I closed my eyes to rest them against the glare of the sunlight — and woke up with a jerk from a sleep so sound that it took me a few seconds to realize where I was and how I had got there.
I looked at my watch.
It had been more than two hours since I’d left Louie.
I put a note on the steering-wheel, “Back in ten minutes. Don’t leave,” and went back to make some more telephone calls, plugging up a few loopholes I might have missed.
I came back and the note was still on the steering-wheel. There was no sign of Louie. I started the car and drove back out to the cabin. Helen had been sweeping. A handkerchief was tied around her hair for a dust cap. “Hello,” she said when I’d brought the groceries in. “What did you do with Louie?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened?”
“He went out to get the groceries. I told him to wait in the car when he came back, and to be sure and be there in half an hour. He wasn’t there. I waited over an hour longer, and then came out here.”
She took off her dust cap, put her broom in the corner, went into the bathroom, washed her hands, and when she came out, was rubbing some fragrant lotion into the skin.
She said, “This might be a good time to talk.”
“About what?”
“Lots of things.”
I sat down beside her on the little settee. She got up after a moment and moved over to a chair facing me. “I want to look at you,” she explained. “If you’re going to lie to me, I want to know it.”
“That doesn’t sound very encouraging.”
She said, “I like you.”
“Thanks.”
“I liked you from the first time I saw you.”
“Leading up to something?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead then.”
She said, “The orthodox technique for a nice young thing is to be very demure and, if you take an interest in her, lead you along very, very gently. I don’t do things that way. When I like someone, I go for them in a big way. When I don’t like ’em, I just don’t like ’em, and that’s all there is to it.”
I nodded.
“That first night out on the desert,” she said, “was about the happiest night I ever spent in my life. The second night was almost as good.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Now, I don’t like it.”
“Why?”
“I thought you were strong for me.”
“I am.”
“Phooey!” she said, with a little grimace. Then her eyes came up to mine. “It isn’t because of what I was doing — that slot-machine racket — that you cooled off toward me?”
“I didn’t cool off toward you. I like you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She was silent for a few seconds, then she said, “Anyhow, being with Pug and working that machine racket, and having batted around on my own has made me feel that I’m on one side of the fence and the cops are on the other. There’s no particular reason I should feel that way except I’ve had a lot of shakedowns in my time, and particularly on the slot-machine racket. Once or twice, Pug would get caught. The slot-machine man would pretend he was going to make a complaint and prosecute. We always knew it was a bluff, but the cops would hold us on their own and shake us down for everything they could get before they’d turn us loose. Well, I got to looking at cops as being — well, just cops.”
I didn’t say anything.
She averted her eyes once more, studied her shoe tip. “All right, Donald,” she blurted at length, “if you think I know something about Pug’s murder, and if you thought you could make a play for me because I was strong for you, pretend that you’d quit the detective business, and get me to tell you what I knew that way — well, Donald,” she said, looking at me suddenly with the steady stare of slate-gray eyes, “I think I really could kill you if you’re taking me for that kind of a ride.”
I said, “I wouldn’t blame you.”
She kept studying me. “Going to say anything more?” I smiled and shook my head.
She got to her feet abruptly. “Damn you, I wish I knew what it was you do to me, but I’m just telling you — I still say you’re working on that case. Remember what I told you.”
“I will. Where do you suppose Louie is?”
“Darned if I know. Did you give him any money?”
“Yes.”
She said, “There’s something wrong with Louie.”
“What?”
“He’s slap-happy.”
“I knew that a long time ago.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Something else wrong with him?”
“I don’t know. It comes out of that condition of being slap-happy. They all get it sooner or later. I think Pug had some of it. It keeps them from seeing things the way you’d see them or the way I’d see them. Look, Donald, do you think that after a while, if you keep hanging around and I get nuts over you, I’ll spill everything I know?”
“I just hadn’t thought much about it.”
“Well, think about it now then.”
“All right, I will.”
“If you ever try to pump me about that, I’ll kill you. I — l’d not only hate you, but — but — but it would do something to me, Donald. It would jerk something out from under me. Please, Donald, give me a break on that. If that’s the play, let’s just call this little party off right now, and I can get over it — maybe. If I wait a few more days, I’ll never get over it.”
“Got any friends here?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Where would you go and what would you do?”
Her eyes grew hard. “Say, don’t you think you can frighten me with that line. Any time I need a man to live on, I’ll take an overdose of sleep medicine. I can walk out of here right now with nothing but my bare hands, and — well, I’ll get by, and I won’t sell myself, either.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know. I’d find something. How about it? Do I start?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
She said, “I suppose you won’t open up.”
I said, “If you don’t want to tell me anything you know about what happened to Pug, I hope you never do.”
She came over to stand in front of me. “All right,” she said, “I’ll give it to you in words of one syllable. You can have anything you want out of me. You can ask me anything, and I’ll do it. And if you ask me what about Pug, and what do I know about the night he was bumped off, I — well, I’d probably rat, but the minute you asked me that question, I’d know why you’d been doing all this,” and she swept her hand in a gesture which included the auto camp. “And when I knew that you’d been doing it just to get me so, that I couldn’t say no to anything you’d ask — I’d be so sick inside, I could never feel clean or decent again, or think there was anything clean left in the world — ever. You got that straight?”
“Yes.”
“All right then. What do we do next?”
I said, “I guess we go uptown and see if we can locate Louie in any of the bars.”
She studied me a second or two, then burst out laughing, but there was a note of bitterness in her laughter.
I walked over to stand close to her. “Don’t you see,” I told her, “I don’t want anything I’m not entitled to.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Go on from there.”
“You’re right about one thing. I’m a detective. I’m working. It isn’t that I’m working for the B. Cool Agency. It’s that I’m working on a case. I’m trying to see that some other people get a fair deal. They’re depending on me, whether they know it or not. If I don’t do the job, I don’t think anyone else will.”
“And so you want me to tell you what I know about—”
“I don’t want you to tell me a damn thing,” I said. “I’m strong for you. I think you’re one of the nicest girls I’ve ever met. But I’d never have asked you to leave Las Vegas and come out with me if it hadn’t been a matter of business. I’m enjoying it. I’m happy. I like to be near you. I like the way you do things. I like everything about you. But I’m working on a job, and the reason I’m here with you is because it’s along the line I’m following to make a success of that job.”
“And when the job’s over?”
I’d been dreading that question. I said, “I’ll probably have something else tossed into my lap.”
“And you’re not going to ask me what I know about Pug?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t plan this so I’d spill what I knew?”
“No.”
“And it’s because you didn’t want to take something under false pretenses that you’ve told—”
I nodded.
“And has it occurred to you that you’ve never even kissed me?”
“Naturally,” I said.
Her eyes were on mine now, and there was a steady, shining light I hadn’t seen in them before. She said, “I guess this is where we hit the jackpot, Donald.”