IV. Hurricane Street
My destination was a gray frame cottage. When I rang the bell the door was opened by a thin man with a tired face that had no color in it except a red spot the size of a half-dollar high on each cheek. This, I thought, is the lunger Dan Rolff.
“I’d like to see Miss Brand,” I told him.
“What name shall I tell her?” His voice was a sick man’s and an educated man’s.
“It wouldn’t mean anything to her. I want to see her about Willsson’s death.”
He looked at me with level tired dark eyes and said:
“Yes?”
“I’m from the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. We’re interested in the murder.”
“That’s nice of you,” he said ironically. “Come in.”
I went in, into a ground-floor room where a young woman sat at a table that had a lot of papers on it. Some of the papers were financial service bulletins, stock and bond market forecasts. One was a racing chart.
The room was disorderly, cluttered up. There were too many pieces of furniture in it, and none of them seemed to be in its proper place.
“Dinah,” the lunger introduced me, “this gentleman has come from San Francisco on behalf of the Continental Detective Agency to inquire into Mr. Donald Willsson’s demise.”
The young woman got up, kicked a couple of newspapers out of her way, and came to me with one hand out.
She was an inch or two taller than I, which made her about five feet eight. She had a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear. Little lines crossed the corners of her big ripe mouth. Fainter lines were beginning to make nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue and a bit blood-shot.
Her coarse hair–brown–needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open. There was a run down the front of her left stocking.
This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men, according to what I had been told.
“His father sent for you, of course,” she said while she moved a pair of lizard-skin slippers and a cup and saucer off a chair to make room for me.
Her voice was soft, lazy.
I told her the truth:
“Donald Willsson sent for me. I was waiting to see him while he was being killed.”
“Don’t go away, Dan,” she called to Rolff.
He came back into the room. She returned to her place at the table. He sat on the opposite side, leaning his thin face on a thin hand, looking at me without interest.
She drew her brows together, making two creases between them, and asked:
“You mean he knew someone meant to kill him?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say what he wanted. Maybe just help in the reform campaign.”
“But do you–?”
I made a complaint:
“It’s no fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff, does all the questioning.”
“I like to find out what’s going on,” she said, a little laugh gurgling down in her throat.
“I’m that way too. For instance, I’d like to know why you made him have the check certified.”
Very casually, Dan Rolff shifted in his chair, leaning back, lowering his thin hands out of sight below the table’s edge.
“So you found out about that?” Dinah Brand asked. She crossed left leg over right and looked down. Her eyes focused on the run in her stocking. “Honest to God, I’m going to stop wearing them!” she complained. “I’m going barefooted. I paid five bucks for these socks yesterday. Now look at the damned things. Every day–runs, runs, runs!”
“It’s no secret,” I said. “I mean the check, not the runs. Noonan’s got it.”
She looked at Rolff, who stopped watching me long enough to nod once.