Beneath the window he could hear a voice, a woman’s, then a man’s: they blended, murmured; a door closed.
Someone came up the stairs in swishing garments, on the swift hard heels of a woman.
He began to hear sounds in the house: voices, laughter; a mechanical piano began to play.
“Hear them?” he whispered.
“She’s got a big family, I reckon,” Virgil said, his voice already dull with sleep.
“Family, hell,” Fonzo said.
“It’s a party.
Wish I was to it.”
On the third day as they were leaving the house in the morning, Miss Reba met them at the door.
She wanted to use their room in the afternoons while they were absent.
There was to be a detective’s convention in town and business would look up some, she said.
“Your things’ll be all right.
I’ll have Minnie lock everything up before hand.
Aint nobody going to steal nothing from you in my house.”
“What business you reckon she’s in?” Fonzo said when they reached the street.
“Dont know,” Virgil said.
“Wish I worked for her, anyway,” Fonzo said.
“With all them women in kimonos and such running around.”
“Wouldn’t do you no good,” Virgil said.
“They’re all married.
Aint you heard them?”
The next afternoon when they returned from the school they found a woman’s undergarment under the washstand.
Fonzo picked it up.
“She’s a dress-maker,” he said.
“Reckon so,” Virgil said.
“Look and see if they taken anything of yourn.”
The house appeared to be filled with people who did not sleep at night at all.
They could hear them at all hours, running up and down the stairs, and always Fonzo would be conscious of women, of female flesh. It got to where he seemed to lie in his celibate bed surrounded by women, and he would lie beside the steadily snoring Virgil, his ears strained for the murmurs, the whispers of silk that came through the walls and the floor, that seemed to be as much a part of both as the planks and the plaster, thinking that he had been in Memphis ten days, yet the extent of his acquaintance was a few of his fellow pupils at the school.
After Virgil was asleep he would rise and unlock the door and leave it ajar, but nothing happened.
On the twelfth day he told Virgil they were going visiting, with one of the barber-students.
“Where?” Virgil said.
“That’s all right.
You come on.
I done found out something.
And when I think I been here two weeks without knowing about it.……”
“What’s it going to cost?” Virgil said.
“When’d you ever have any fun for nothing?” Fonzo said.
“Come on.”
“I’ll go,” Virgil said.
“But I aint going to promise to spend nothing.”
“You wait and say that when we get there,” Fonzo said.
The barber took them to a brothel.
When they came out Fonzo said:
“And to think I been here two weeks without never knowing about that house.”
“I wisht you hadn’t never learned,” Virgil said.
“It cost three dollars.”
“Wasn’t it worth it?” Fonzo said.
“Aint nothing worth three dollars you caint tote off with you,” Virgil said.
When they reached home Fonzo stopped.
“We got to sneak in, now,” he said.