6
It was not quite noon when Ned Beaumont left his rooms and walked eight blocks to a pale grey apartment-building in Link Street. He pressed a button in the vestibule, entered the building when the door-lock clicked, and rode to the sixth floor in a small automatic elevator.
He pressed the bell-button set in the frame of a door marked 6ii. The door was opened immediately by a diminutive girl who could have been only a few months out of her teens. Her eyes were dark and angry, her face white, except around her eyes, and angry. She said, “Oh, hello,” and with a smile and a vaguely placatory motion of one hand apologized for her anger. Her voice had a metallic thinness. She wore a brown fur coat, but not a hat. Her short-cut hair–it was nearly black–lay smooth and shiny as enamel on her round head. The gold-set stones pendant from her ear-lobes were carnelian. She stepped back pulling the door back with her.
Ned Beaumont advanced through the doorway asking: “Bernie up yet?”
Anger burned in her face again. She said in a shrill voice: “The crummy bastard!”
Ned Beaumont shut the door behind him without turning around.
The girl came close to him, grasped his arms above the elbows, and tried to shake him. “You know what I did for that bum?” she demanded. “I left the best home any girl ever had and a mother and father that thought I was the original Miss Jesus. They told me he was no good. Everybody told me that and they were right and I was too dumb to know it. Well, I hope to tell you I know it now, the . . .” The rest was shrill obscenity.
Ned Beaumont, motionless, listened gravely. His eyes were not a well man’s now. He asked, when breathlessness had stopped her words for the moment: “What’s he done?”
“Done? He’s taken a run-out on me, the The rest of that sentence was obscenity.
Ned Beaumont flinched. The smile into which he pushed his lips was watery. He asked: “I don’t suppose he left anything for me?”
The girl clicked her teeth together and pushed her face nearer his. Her eves widened. “Does he owe you anything?”
“I won–” He coughed. “I’m supposed to have won thirty-two hundred and fifty bucks on the fourth race yesterday.”
She took her hands from his arms and laughed scornfully. “Try and get it. Look.” She held out her hands. A carnelian ring was on the little finger of her left hand. She raised her hands and touched her carnelian ear-rings. “That’s every stinking piece of my jewelry he left me and he wouldn’t’ve left me that if I hadn’t had them on.”
Ned Beaumont asked, in a queer detached voice: “When does this happen?”
“Last night, though I didn’t find it out till this morning, but don’t think I’m not going to make Mr. Son-of-a-bitch wish to God he’d never seen me.” She put a hand inside her dress and brought it out a fist. She held the fist up close to Ned Beaumont’s face and opened it. Three small crumpled pieces of paper lay in her hand. When he reached for them she closed her fingers over them again, stepping back and snatching her hand away.
He moved the corners of his mouth impatiently and let his hand fall down at his side.
She said excitedly: “Did you see the paper this morning about Taylor Henry?”
Ned Beaumont’s reply, “Yes,” was calm enough, but his chest moved out and in with a quick breath.
“Do you know what these are?” She held the three crumpled bits of paper out in her open hand once more.
Ned Beaumont shook his head. His eyes were narrow, shiny.
“They’re Taylor Henry’s I 0 Us,” she said triumphantly, “twelve hundred dollars’ worth of them.”
Ned Beaumont started to say something, checked himself, and when he spoke his voice was lifeless. “They’re not worth a nickel now he’s dead.”
She thrust them inside her dress again and came close to Ned Beaumont. “Listen,” she said: “they never were worth a nickel and that’s why he’s dead.”
“Is that a guess?”