“Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”
“Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?” The store detective looked and nodded. “Yes.Thanks, Alec.You’re sure she’s boosting, of course?” “Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it’s more than likely she’s got herself some lace by now.” “Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I’ll be with her.”
Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective’s arm
again.
“I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she’s up to before we knock her over?”
“If it doesn’t take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.
Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.
“Take a plant on the joint while I.get the copper,” Alex Rush ordered.
When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.
“Second floor,” she said.
Behind her the house’s street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I’ll have you understand, and I —”
“Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”
The woman’s scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective’s voice for the harshness of great emotion.
“Why — why — ” she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management —
never to stand in the way of the police. “I’ll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.
Her sharp fingers tapped on a door near the head of the
stairs.
“Who’s that?” a casually curt feminine voice asked.
“Landlady.”
The chunky girl in blue, without her hat now, opened the door. Alec Rush moved a big foot forward to hold it open, while the landlady said, “This is her,” the policeman said, “You’ll have to come along,” and Minnie said, “Dearie, we want to come in and talk to you.”
“My God!” exclaimed the girl. “There’d be just as much sense to it if you’d all jumped out at me and yelled
‘Boo!'”
“This ain’t any way,” Alec Rush rasped, moving forward, grinning his hideous friendly grin. “Let’s go in where we can talk it over.”
Merely by moving his loose-jointed bulk a step this way, a half-step that, turning his ugly face on this one and that one, he herded the little group as he wished, sending the landlady discontentedly away, marshaling the others into the girl’s rooms.
“Remember, I got no idea what this is all about,” said the girl when they were in her living-room, a narrow room where blue fought with red without ever compromising on purple. “I’m easy to get along with, and if you think this is a nice place to talk about whatever you want to talk about, go ahead! But if you’re counting on me talking, too, you’d better smart me up.”
“Boosting, dearie,” Minnie said, leaning forward to pat the girl’s arm. “I’m at Goodbody’s.”
“You think I’ve been shoplifting? Is that the idea?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Uh-huh. That’s what.” Alec Rush left her no doubt on the point.
The girl narrowed her eyes, puckered her red mouth, squinted sidewise at the ugly man.
“It’s all right with me,” she announced, “so long as Goodbody’s hanging the rap on me — somebody I can sue for a million when it flops. I’ve got nothing to say. Take me for my ride.”