She poured another for herself and for me. Rolff hadn’t touched his first one. He said, still staring at the brown bottle:
“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”
The girl scowled and said disagreeably:
“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”
“Yeah.”
Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.
“And if I help you will I get some of the ten–?”
“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”
The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:
“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”
“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.
Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded:
“So I’m too utterly filthy for you now, am I?”
He said evenly:
“I said to betray your friends to this chap would be utterly filthy, and it would.”
She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-checked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t.
She let go his wrist, turned her back on him, and reached for gin and seltzer. She was smiling. I didn’t like the smile.
He got up, blinking. His wrist was red where she had held it, his face bruised. He steadied himself upright and looked at me with dull eyes.
With no change in the blankness of his face and eyes, he put a hand under his coat, brought out a black automatic pistol, and fired at me.
But he was too shaky for either speed or accuracy. I had time to toss a glass at him. The glass hit his shoulder. His bullet went somewhere overhead.
I jumped before he got the next one out–jumped at him–was close enough to knock the gun down. The second slug went into the floor.
I socked his jaw. He fell away from me and lay where he fell.
I turned around.
Dinah Brand was getting ready to bat me over the head with the seltzer bottle, a heavy glass siphon that would have made pulp of my skull.
“Don’t,” I yelped.
“You didn’t have to bust him hike that,” she snarled.
“Well, it’s done. You’d better get him straightened out.”
She put down the siphon and I helped her carry him up to his bedroom. When he began moving his eyes, I left her to finish the work and went down to the dining room again. She joined me there fifteen minutes later.
“He’s all right,” she said. “But you could have handled him without that.”
“Yeah, but I did that for him. Know why he took the shot at me?”
“So I’d have nobody to sell Max out to?”
“No. Because I’d seen you maul him around.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “I was the one who did it.”
“He’s in love with you, and this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. He acted like he had learned there was no use matching muscle with you. But you can’t expect him to enjoy having another man see you slap his face.”