He glared at me with pale white rimmed eyes.
"Books," he snarled. "A hundred pounds a box, easy, and me with a seventy-five pound back."
"Well, watch the weight," I said.
He got into the elevator with six boxes and shut the doors.
I went back up the steps to the lobby and out to the street and the cab took me downtown again to my office building.
I gave the fresh-faced kid too much money and he gave me a dog-eared business card which for once I didn't drop into the majolica jar of sand beside the elevator bank.
I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back.
The half-room was an office split in two to make reception rooms.
Mine had my name on it and nothing else, and that only on the reception room.
I always left this unlocked, in case I had a client, and the client cared to sit down and wait.
I had a client.
11
She wore brownish speckled tweeds, a mannish shirt and tie, handcarved walking shoes.
Her stockings were just as sheer as the day before, but she wasn't showing as much of her legs.
Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.
"Well, you do get up," she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy's size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. "I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."
"Who's he?"
I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her.
She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.
"A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates.
You wouldn't know him."
"Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."
She stood up and said:
"We didn't get along very well yesterday.
Perhaps I was rude."
"We were both rude," I said.
I unlocked the communicating door and held it for her.
We went into the rest of my suite, which contained a rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes.
There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it. "You don't put on much of a front," she said, sitting down at the customer's side of the desk.
I went over to the mail slot and picked up six envelopes, two letters and four pieces of advertising matter.
I hung my hat on the telephone and sat down.
"Neither do the Pinkertons," I said. "You can't make much money at this trade, if you're honest.
If you have a front, you're making money — or expect to."
"Oh — are you honest?" she asked and opened her bag. She picked a cigarette out of a French enamel case, lit it with a pocket lighter, dropped case and lighter back into the bag and left the bag open.
"Painfully."
"How did you get into this slimy kind of business then?"
"How did you come to marry a bootlegger?"
"My God, let's not start quarreling again.
I've been trying to get you on the phone all morning.
Here and at your apartment."
"About Owen?"
Her face tightened sharply.
Her voice was soft. "Poor Owen," she said.
"So you know about that."
"A D.A.'s man took me down to Lido.
He thought I might know something about it.
But he knew much more than I did. He knew Owen wanted to marry your sister — once."
She puffed silently at her cigarette and considered me with steady black eyes.
"Perhaps it wouldn't have been a bad idea," she said quietly. "He was in love with her.
We don't find much of that in our circle."