I said, “I don’t mind coming right out with it in front of your dinge — if you don’t.”
But evidently she did. Maybe Mandy was on a few other payrolls beside her own. She hit her with the tomato-and-lettuce in the left eye as preamble to the request: “Whaddo I pay you for, anyway? Take Foo-Too around the block a couple of times!”
“I tuk him once already, and he was a good boy,” was the weather report she got on this,
“Well, take him again. Maybe you can kid him it’s tomorrow already.”
Mandy fastened something that looked like the business-end of a floor mop to a leash, went out shaking her head. “You sho didn’t enjoy yo’self last night. That Sto’k Club never do agree with you.”
As soon as the gallery was out of the way I said. “You lay off my brother!”
She lit a cigarette, nosed the smoke at me. “Well, Gracie Allen, you’ve come to the wrong place looking for your brother. And, just for the record, what am I supposed to have done to him, cured him of wiping his nose on his sleeve or something?”
“He’s been spending dough like wild, dough that doesn’t come out of his salary.”
“Then where does it come from?” she asked.
“I haven’t found out. I hope his firm never does, either.” I shifted gears, went into low — like when I used to sing “Poor Butterfly” for the customers — but money couldn’t have dragged this performance out of me, it came from the heart, without pay. “There’s a little girl on our street, oh not much to look at, thinks twelve o’clock’s the middle of the night and storks leave babies, but she’s ready to take up where I leave off, pinch pennies and squeeze nickels along with him, build him into something, get him somewhere, not spread him all over the landscape. He’s just a man, doesn’t know what’s good for him, doesn’t know his bass from his oboe. I can’t stand by and watch her chew her heart up. Give her a break, and him, and me. Pick on someone your size, someone that can take it. Have your fun and more power to you — but not with all I’ve got!”
She banged her cigarette to death against a tray. “O.K., is the screen test about over? Now, will you get out of here, you ham-actress, and lemme get my massage?” She went over and got the door ready for me. Gave a traffic-cop signal over her shoulder with one thumb. “I’ve heard of wives pulling this act, and even mothers, and in a pitcher I saw only lately, Camilly it was called, it was the old man. Now it’s a sister!” She gave the ceiling the once-over. “What’ll they think of next? Send grandma around tomorrow — next week East Lynne. Come on, make it snappy!” she invited, and hitched her elbow at me. If she’d touched me, I think I’d have murdered her.
“If you feel I’m poison, why don’t you put it up to your brother?” she signed off. And very low, just before she walloped the door after me: “And see how far you get!”
She was right.
I said, “Chick, you’re not going to chuck your job, you’re not going to Chicago with that dame, are you?”
He looked at me funny and he said, “How did you know?”
“I saw your valise all packed, when I wanted to send one of your suits to the cleaners.”
“You ought to be a detective,” he said, and he wasn’t pally. “O.K.,” he said, “now that you mention it,” and he went in and he got it to show me — the back of it going out the door. But I got over there to the door before he did, and pulled a Custer’s Last Stand. I skipped the verse and went into the patter chorus. And boy did I sell it, without a spot and without a muted trumpet solo either! At the El-Fay in the old days they would have all been crying into their gin and wiring home to mother.
“I’m not asking anything for myself. I’m older than you, Chick, and when a girl says that you’ve got her down to bedrock. I’ve been around plenty, and ‘around’ wasn’t pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so... so... Oh, I didn’t know why myself sometimes; just so you wouldn’t turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them. Chick, you’re just a punk of twenty-four, but as far as I’m concerned the sun rises and sets across your shoulders. Me and little Mary Allen, we’ve been rooting for you all along; what’s the matter with her, Chick? Just because her face don’t come out of boxes and she doesn’t know the right grips, don’t pass her by for something that ought to be shampooed out of your hair with gasoline.”
But he didn’t have an ear for music; the siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that... “Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”
The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it; the valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell, every door in the hall opened to get an earful.
He just stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the port-hole of the elevator. He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged — and no more Chick.
At about four that morning I was still snivelling into the gin he’d left behind him, and talking to him across the table from me — without getting any answer — when the doorbell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went ’way around to the other side of me and then showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming-in — after them; I lived there, after all.
They looked the place over like they were prospective tenants being shown an apartment. I didn’t go for that; detectives belong in the books you read in bed, not in your apartment at four bells, big as life. “Three closets,” I mentioned, “and you get a month’s concession. I’m not keeping you gentlemen up, am I?”
One of them was kind of pash looking; I mean he’d washed his face lately, and if he’d been the last man in the world, well, all right, maybe I could have overlooked the fact he was a bloodhound on two legs. The other one had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks.
“You’re Jerry Wheeler, aren’t you?” the first one told me.
“I’ve known that for twenty-seven years,” I said. “What brought the subject up?”
Cobblestone-face said, “Chick Wheeler’s sister, that right?”
“I’ve got a brother and I call him Chick,” I consented. “Any ordinance against that?”
The younger one said, “Don’t be so hard to handle. You’re going to talk to us and like it.” He sat down in a chair, cushioned his hands behind his dome. He said, “What time’d he leave here this evening?”
Something warned me, “Don’t answer that.” I said, “I really couldn’t say. I’m not a train-despatcher.”
“He was going to Chicago with a dame named Ruby Rose Reading; you knew that, didn’t you?”
I thought, “I hit the nail on the head, he did help himself to his firm’s money. Wonder how much he took? Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to work again at one of the hot-spots; maybe I can square it for him, pay back a little each week.” I kept my face steady. I said, “Now, why would he go anywhere with anyone with a name like that? It sounds like it came off a bottle of nail-polish. Come to the point, gentlemen — yes. I mean you two. What’s he supposed to have done?”