X. Crime Wanted–Male or Female
Half an hour later, when I left the building, Dinah Brand was sitting at the wheel of a pale blue little Marmon, talking to Max Thaler, who stood in the road.
The girl’s square chin was tilted up. Her big red mouth was brutal around the words it shaped, and the lines crossing its ends were deep, hard.
The gambler looked as unpleasant as she. His pretty face was yellow and tough as oak. When he talked his lips were paper-thin.
It seemed to be a nice family party. I wouldn’t have joined it if the girl hadn’t seen me and called:
“My God, I thought you were never coming.”
I went over to the car. Thaler looked across the hood at me with no friendliness at all.
“Last night I advised you to go back to Frisco.” His whisper was harsher than anybody’s shout could have been. “Now I’m telling you.”
“Thanks just the same,” I said as I got in beside the girl.
While she was stirring the engine up he said to her:
“This isn’t the first time you’ve sold me out. It’s the last.”
She put the car in motion, turned her head back over her shoulder, and sang to him:
“To hell, my love, with you!”
We rode into town rapidly.
“Is Bush dead?” she asked as she twisted the car into Broadway.
“Decidedly. When they turned him over the point of the knife was sticking out in front.”
“He ought to have known better than to double-cross them. Let’s get something to eat. I’m almost eleven hundred ahead on the night’s doings, so if the boy friend doesn’t like it, it’s just too bad. How’d you come out?”
“Didn’t bet. So your Max doesn’t like it?”
“Didn’t bet?” she cried. “What kind of an ass are you? Whoever heard of anybody not betting when they had a thing like that sewed up?”
“I wasn’t sure it was sewed up. So Max didn’t like the way things turned out?”
“You guessed it. He dropped plenty. And then he gets sore with me because I had sense enough to switch over and get in on the win.” She stopped the car violently in front of a Chinese restaurant. “The hell with him, the little tin-horn runt!”
Her eves were shiny because they were wet. She jabbed a handkerchief into them as we got out of the car.
“My God, I’m hungry,” she said, dragging me across the sidewalk. “Will you buy me a ton of chow mein?”
She didn’t eat a ton of it, but she did pretty well, putting away a piled-up dish of her own and half of mine. Then we got back into the Marmon and rode out to her house.
Dan Rolff was in the dining room. A water glass and a brown bottle with no label stood on the table in front of him. He sat straight up in his chair, staring at the bottle. The room smelled of laudanum.
Dinah Brand slid her fur coat off, letting it fall half on a chair and half on the floor, and snapped her fingers at the lunger, saying impatiently:
“Did you collect?”
Without looking up from the bottle, he took a pad of paper money out of his inside coat pocket and dropped it on the table. The girl grabbed it, counted the bills twice, smacked her lips, and stuffed the money in her bag.
She went out to the kitchen and began chopping ice. I sat down and lit a cigarette. Rolff stared at his bottle. He and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. Presently the girl brought in some gin, lemon juice, seltzer and ice.
We drank and she told Rolff:
“Max is sore as hell. He heard you’d been running around putting last-minute money on Bush, and the little monkey thinks I double-crossed him. What did I have to do with it? All I did was what any sensible person would have done–get in on the win. I didn’t have any more to do with it than a baby, did I?” she asked me.
“Of course not. What’s the matter with Max is he’s afraid the others will think he was in on it too, that Dan was putting his dough down as well as mine. Well, that’s his hard luck. He can go climb trees for all I care, the lousy little runt. Another drink would go good.”