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 it and the hole was stained with blood.”
“That wasn’t nice,” I said. “I wouldn’t even call it characteristic.”
“You did not know him very well.”
“True. Go on.”
“Little Orfamay took the billfold and stared at it and then stared at him and her white little face was very still. Then she thanked him and opened her bag to put the billfold in it, as I thought—it was all very curious—”
“A scream,” I said. “It would have had me gasping on the floor.”
“—but instead she took a gun out of her bag. It was a gun he had given Mavis, I think. It was like the one—”
“I know exactly what it was like,” I said. “I played with it some.”
“She turned around and shot him dead with one shot. It was very dramatic.”
She put the brown cigarette back in her mouth and smiled at me. A curious, rather distant smile, as if she was thinking of something far away.
“You made her confess to Mavis Weld,” I said. She nodded.
“Mavis wouldn’t have believed you, I guess.”
“I did not care to risk it.”
“It wasn’t you gave Orfamay the thousand bucks, was it, darling? To make her tell? She’s a little girl who would go a long way for a thousand bucks.”
“I do not care to answer that,” she said with dignity.
“No. So last night when you rushed me out there, you already knew he was dead and there wasn’t anything to be afraid of and all that act with the gun was just an act.”
“I do not like to play God,” she said softly. “There was a situation and I knew that somehow or other you would get Mavis out of it. There was no one else who would. Mavis was determined to take the blame.”
“I better have a drink,” I said. “I’m sunk.”
She jumped up and went to the little cellarette. She came back with a couple of huge glasses of Scotch and water. She handed me one and watched me over her glass as I tried it out. It was wonderful. I drank some more. She sank down into her chair again, and reached for the golden tweezers.
“I chased her out,” I said, finally. “Mavis, I’m talking about. She told me she had shot him. She had the gun. The twin of the one you gave me. You didn’t probably notice that yours had been fired.”
“I know very little about guns,” she said softly.
“Sure. I counted the shells in it, and assuming it had been full to start with, two had been fired. Quest was killed with two shots from a .32 automatic. Same caliber. I picked up the empty shells in the den down there.”
“Down where, amigo?”
It was beginning to grate. Too much amigo, far too much.
“Of course I couldn’t know it was the same gun, but it seemed worth trying out. Only confuse things up a little anyhow, and give Mavis that much break. So I switched guns on him, and put his behind the bar. His was a black .38. More like what he would carry, if he carried one at all. Even with a checked grip you can leave prints, but with an ivory grip you’re apt to leave a fair set of finger marks on the left side. Steelgrave wouldn’t carry that kind of gun.”
Her eyes were round and empty and puzzled. “I am afraid I am not following you too well.”
“And if he killed a man he would kill him dead, and be sure of it. This guy got up and walked a bit.”
A flash of something showed in her eyes and was gone.
“I’d like to say he talked a bit,” I went on. “But he didn’t. His lungs were full of blood. He died at my feet. Down there.”
“But down where? You have not told me where it was that this—”
“Do I have to?”
She sipped from her glass. She smiled. She put the glass down. I said:
“You were present when little Orfamay told him where to go.”
“Oh yes, of course.” Nice recovery. Fast and clean. But her smile looked a little more tired.
“Only he didn’t go,” I said.
Her cigarette stopped in midair. That was all. Nothing else. It went on slowly to her lips. She puffed elegantly.
“That’s what’s been the matter all along,” I said. “I just wouldn’t buy what was staring me in the face. Steelgrave is Weepy Moyer. That’s solid, isn’t it?”
“Most certainly. And it can be proved.”
“Steelgrave is a reformed character and doing fine. Then this Stein comes out bothering him, wanting to cut in. I’m guessing, but that’s about how it would happen. Okay, Stein has to go. Steelgrave doesn’t want to kill anybody—and he has never been accused of killing anybody. The Cleveland cops wouldn’t come out and get him. No charges pending. No mystery—except that he had been connected with a mob in some capacity. But he has to get rid of Stein. So he gets himself pinched. And then he gets out of jail by bribing the jail doctor, and he kills Stein and goes back into jail at once. When the killing shows up whoever let him out of jail is going to run like hell and destroy any records there might be of his going out. Because the cops will come over and ask questions.”
“Very naturally, amigo.”
I looked her over for cracks, but there weren’t any yet.
“So far so good. But we’ve got to give this lad credit for a few brains. Why did he let them hold him in jail for ten days? Answer One, to make himself an alibi. Answer Two, because he knew that sooner or later this question of him being Moyer was going to get aired, so why not give them the time and get it over with? That way any time a racket boy gets blown down around here they’re not going to keep pulling Steelgrave in and trying to hang the rap on him.”
“You like that idea, amigo?”
“Yes. Look at it this way. Why would he have lunch in a public place the very day he was out of the cooler to knock Stein off? And if he did, why would young Quest happen around to snap that picture? Stein hadn’t been killed, so the picture wasn’t evidence of anything. I like people to be lucky, but that’s too lucky. Again, even if Steelgrave didn’t know his picture had been taken, he knew who Quest was. Must have. Quest had been tapping his sister for eating money since he lost his job, maybe before. Steelgrave had a key to her apartment. He must have known something about this brother of hers. Which simply adds up to the result, that that night of all nights Steelgrave would not have shot Stein—even if he had planned to.”
“It is now for me to ask you who did,” she said politely.
“Somebody who knew Stein and could get close to him. Somebody who already knew that photo had been taken, knew who Steelgrave was, knew that Mavis Weld was on the edge of becoming a big star, knew that her association with Steelgrave was dangerous, but would be a thousand times more dangerous if Steelgrave could be framed for the murder of Stein. Knew Quest, because he had been to Mavis Weld’s apartment, and had met him there and given him the works, and he was a boy that could be knocked clean out of his mind by that sort of treatment. Knew that those bone-handled .32’s were registered to Steelgrave, although he had only bought them to give to a couple of girls, and if he carried a gun himself, it would be one that was not registered and could not be traced to him. Knew—”
“Stop!” Her voice was a sharp stab of sound, but neither frightened nor even angry. “You will stop at once, please! I will not tolerate this another minute. You will now go!”
I stood up. She leaned back and a pulse beat in her throat. She was exquisite, she was dark, she was deadly. And nothing would ever touch her, not even the law.
“Why did you kill Quest?” I asked her.
She stood up and came close to me, smiling again.
“For two reasons, amigo. He was more than a little crazy and in the end he would have killed me. And the other reason is that none of this—absolutely none of it—was for money. It was for love.”
I started to laugh in her face. I didn’t. She was dead serious. It was out of this world.
“No matter how many lovers a woman may have,” she said softly, “there is always one she cannot bear to lose to another woman. Steelgrave was the one.”
I just stared into her lovely dark eyes. “I believe you,” I said at last.
“Kiss me, amigo.”
“Good God!”