A. A. Fair
Bedrooms Have Windows
One
She was a small, well-formed package of dynamite. A pocket edition Venus — high-breasted, thin-waisted, smooth-hipped with large, brown eyes and taffy-coloured hair. She couldn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, but she was perfect, and she was buzzing like an angry hornet.
The suave individual who ran the cocktail lounge was trying to explain.
A girl as perfect as she was, and as small, could write her own ticket. The manufacturers of the automobiles that used to be called ‘medium priced’ would have worshipped her as a photographic model. She’d have made an airline stewardess whose large brown eyes would have transferred the butterflies from a passenger’s stomach to his heart.
Those eyes were blazing now. She said, “What do you think I am, a street-walker?”
“It isn’t that,” the manager of the cocktail lounge assured her. “It’s a policy, a rule, a law. Unescorted women are simply not allowed in here.”
“You make me sick!” she said. “I’ve heard that unescorted-woman-business until I am absolutely nauseated.”
He had been walking as he talked, his hand placed with deferential gallantry on her arm, and now she was in the hotel lobby, safely removed from the confines of the cocktail lounge. The manager didn’t have to take any more, and he didn’t. He merely bowed, smiled, turned and got out of there, fast.
She stood for a moment in the hotel lobby, undecided and angry.
I had looked up over the top of my paper at the sound of voices. Her roving, angry eyes shifted in my direction.
I started to return to my newspaper, but I wasn’t in time. Her eyes caught mine and held them for a long moment. Then she turned away.
Her face became thoughtful.
I folded my newspaper.
She sank into one of the chairs across from me, and, knowing she was about to make a detailed appraisal, I started to study the folded section of the newspaper intently until I felt the big brown eyes had seen all there was to see. Then I put the paper down. She hastily averted her glance and crossed her knee.
I made what appraisal the circumstances permitted.
All of a sudden she switched her eyes to mine, tilted up her chin and smiled. It was a nice smile that showed teeth.
“Hello, escort,” she said.
“Hello,” I replied, and grinned.
She said, “Frankly, I was debating whether to drop a handkerchief or get up and leave my purse in the chair, or ask you if you had the time. I rejected them all. I don’t like beating around the bush.”
I said, “So you went in the cocktail lounge?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps I want a drink.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Perhaps I like your looks.”
“How nice.”
She opened her purse, took out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Naturally, I’d expect to finance the expedition.”
“Will it be that expensive?”
“I don’t know.”
I said, “We’ll talk about that later.” I got up and offered her my arm.
She said, “Will this be difficult?”
“I don’t think so.”
We went back to the cocktail lounge. The manager was waiting right behind the door.
I said, “What’s the idea of telling my sister she can’t come in here?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a custom, a rule and a law. Unescorted women are not allowed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know. I asked her to meet me here.”
He bowed frigidly and escorted us to a table. Then he went over and said something to the bar-tender.
A waiter came and took our orders.
“Dry Martini,” she said.
“The same,” I told him.
The waiter bowed and withdrew.
She looked across the table at me and said, “You’re nice.”
I said, “I may prey on women. Your body may be found all cut up in a vacant lot tomorrow morning. You shouldn’t pick up strangers.”
“I know,” she said. “My mother told me.”
She was silent for a few seconds, then said, “I tried to get into an auto camp, and they told me they didn’t cater for unescorted women.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It is,” she observed, “practically impossible for a woman to be guilty of immorality without an escort.”
“You shouldn’t have much trouble finding an escort,” I told her.
“I didn’t,” she said, and then added hastily, “but I didn’t want to do it that way. You’re nice. What’s your name?”
“Lam,” I said. “Donald Lam.”
“I’m Lucille Hart. Since we’re brother and sister, we’d better dispense with formality.”
The waiter returned and put two drinks down on the table. He also deposited a check and stood waiting.
She pushed the twenty-dollar note at me under the table. I paid no attention to it, but took my notecase from my coat pocket and put out two one-dollar notes. The waiter promptly reached into his pocket and took out two twenty-five cent pieces. I picked one up. The waiter picked up the other.
Lucille lifted her glass, looked at me and said, “Here’s to crime.”
I extended my glass towards hers, then sipped it.
The drink consisted of sixty per cent ice-water with perhaps a teaspoonful of gin, a few drops of dry Vermouth, and an olive.
Lucille put the drink down, winked at me, made a little face and said, “I guess they don’t want us here.”
“Apparently not,” I said.
“In any event, they don’t want us to become intoxicated.”
“That’s right.”
I sat back and sipped the cocktail, looking over the interior of the cocktail lounge casually, trying to find out why it was she had been so anxious to get into the place, yet not really caring.
It was Saturday afternoon. I had tailed the man I was shadowing to this hotel and had been waiting for the night shift to come on, to see if I could pick up more information, but that could wait. I had all night.
They were doing a fair business. A heavy-set, beefy man in the late fifties was having the time of his life, putting his personality across with a platinum blonde in the dubious twenties and hard as a diamond. She hadn’t quite made up her mind what to do about him yet, and, while she was smiling at his sallies, her eyes were hard with appraisal.
A foursome was proceeding to wade through the preliminaries of a Saturday night drunk. A young chap with long hair and soulful eyes was pouring forth his political views in an impassioned oration to a good-looking chick who had evidently heard it all before but who admired him enough to keep on listening. A middle-aged man and his wife were making an effort to relieve the monotony of matrimony by ‘dining out’ on Saturday night. Their attempt to be interested in each other was a conscious effort which slipped back occasionally into routine boredom, only to be rescued by a sudden burst of conscious animation.
Then I saw the couple she was interested in.
The man was thirty-two or thirty-three, with an air of grave responsibility about him. His mouth showed that he was accustomed to making decisions. His manner had that certain deferential insistence which characterizes the salesman, and his appearance was worried. He might have been intent upon sedition rather than seduction, from the gravely apprehensive aura with which he surrounded himself.
The girl was five or six years younger, red-headed, grey-eyed, and thoughtful. She wasn’t too good-looking, but there was character about her face, and her manner was that of one who has decided to undergo a critical operation. There was affection in her eyes as she looked at the man, but it was the quiet affection of respect. There wasn’t any passion in it.
I took two more sips of the pallid ice-water in the cocktail glass. It was so weak I could taste the flavour of the olive rather than that of the gin. I decided that it was the woman who interested Lucille.