“Thank you very much.”
“We’re glad we could be of service, sir.”
I started toward the door and turned back. “None of my business, but there I was improving your day, and all of a sudden I’m Typhoid Mary. Would it help anything if I bought something?”
“I would be happy to wait on you, sir.”
“Come out, come out, wherever you are, and tell me, please, why that picture turned you off?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you”
She stopped abruptly, made a wry face. “Maybe you’re not having me on after all, Mr. “McGee. Travis McGee.”
“Mrs. Wooster. You give the impression of being able to find your way around, Mr. McGee. And if you’d never seen her in your life, that picture should give you some kind of a message. But you spent an evening with her. I don’t want to say anything more. I don’t want to knock a steady customer.”
“I was under the spell of black velvets. From two o’clock on. Half and half, stout and champagne. They came aboard at six. If you’ve ever tried that magic potion.. She laughed. “Sure have. Everything gets such a lovely glow.”
“That’s why her name is gone too. And what she does. Some kind of an entertainer, I think. I mean that’s the way the picture looks.”
“Mr. McGee, you are backing me into a corner. I don’t want to make any moral judgments. She has a lovely face and a lovely body. And we can guarantee she’s well-dressed. But do one little thing. Take a look at that picture again, and let’s just say she doesn’t sing and she doesn’t dance, and she isn’t an actress, nor does she entertain with Aloha and other requests on her musical saw. And let’s say she distributes quite a few of those pictures.”
I looked at it again. “Mrs. Wooster, you may have saved me from a very awkward little situation.”
She lowered her voice. “If there was a chance of my being wrong, one small chance, I would have kept my mouth shut, believe me. But about five months ago she was here one afternoon with a little redheaded girlfriend, and it had been a long and liquid lunch. The girlfriend was DeeDee or BeeBee or something. They were both back in the fitting room, and there was a good customer there too, and the customer said something that apparently annoyed the redhead. I would guess that… the redhead actually has a better background than Miss Western. But, to shock the other woman, the redhead, who’d been sitting waiting for Miss Western to get her suit fitted, she jumped up and… like a circus barker or something, she pretended to be auctioning off the merchandise, patting Miss Western and turning her around and displaying her charms and… saying it would cost for this and for that… a kind of obscenity I never heard before. Miss Western was helpless with laughter. The other customer fled in tears. And… they weren’t kidding. It was as if, all of a sudden, they had both changed into something we never saw around here before. They were both hooting with laughter when they left. And when Miss Western came in the next time, Miss Gates asked her not to bring her friend back again ever. She took it all right. You just don’t look as if… that is the sort of girl you’d want to look up. Or, excuse me, have to look up.”
“Now you’re making my day. But what sent the woman out in tears? Bad language?”
“The redhead was making some ugly comparisons. Andra confronted her and apologized and said the redhead would never be permitted inside the shop again. But she never has come back.”
“I guess this makes you the only friend I have left in town,’ I told her.
She sighed. “You know, it’s a shame. I have a perfectly great gal in mind. So she’s visiting your sister in Chicago. If I were you… I mean trying to think like a guy, spending just a few days here, you probably belong to something that has some kind of reciprocal deal with the Yacht Club. They’ve got a pool and tennis courts and so on, and it’s relaxed and friendly. What I wouldn’t do is go pub-crawling down Sand Alley. That’s the strip down at the beaches. It is sort of what they call a little bit wide open. Let’s just say there’s a lot of different kinds of Tami Westerns, and people have gotten served some pretty strange drinks.”