“Darn you,” Sheila raged at me. “What did you have to do that for? You never want to mind your own business. Look at him.”
Blood trickled slowly from Vito’s mouth. Sheila squatted prettily on her heels at his side and dabbed at his lips with her handkerchief.
“He’ll live,” I said. “I think you’re crazy, panting around after a guy who isn’t worth it. Vito’s no good.”
“What about me? You saw the way I could show you around downstairs. I’m as bad as Vito. I’m as bad as you are.”
“Tough girl,” I said. “You look like a kid and you’re afraid people will take advantage of you, so you got to act tough. All right, you know about the bootlegging, but you don’t have any part in the setup. The people at Tolliver’s have got to know if they stay here any length of time. You think your friends will pin a medal on you for that and say, hey, this Sheila, she’s tough?”
“He’s still bleeding.” She was dabbing at Vito’s lips with the reddening handkerchief and trying to listen to me. Creases of concern marred her forehead, but her eyes were watery as Vito opened his eyes, shook his head and muttered.
“I’m all right,” he said, pushing Sheila’s hand away.
He didn’t look all right. Only enough blood remained in his face to trickle out slowly through his battered lips. The way his teeth had been jarred together, he’d be eating mashed potatoes and strained prunes for a week.
“What about Gargantua here?” he wanted to know. “You can find time to fool around with more men at…”
“Vito!”
A sneer looked foolish on his battered lips. “Don’t Vito me. First Archer, then Kellum, then this guy…”
“Kellum!” Sheila shrieked. “The rest of it I won’t argue about, although it’s not true. None of it. But Kellum!” Sheila smiled at me and told me, “Maybe you should have poked him harder.” Women. “Me and King Kellum?”
“That’s just it,” Vito whined. “It’s bad enough if you fool around with ordinary guys, but that fruit is too much.”
“I was just talking to him, that’s all. You wouldn’t understand that, though, would you? A girl can’t even talk.” Sheila turned quickly away and lit a cigarette with her face to the wall, but I grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the hall which led to another flight of stairs and the bathhouse. “If he wants to think something like that is going on, we might as well give him a little circumstantial evidence.”
“But where are we going?”
“I said I wanted to talk to you.”
“Vito…?”
“Can take care of himself. Right, Vito-boy?”
But Vito only grumbled and propped himself up into a sitting position. We left him there and went down to the beach. The sun was a scarlet smear in the west and daylight was already following it in a quick retreat from the seashore. In an hour it would be dark.
I took off my shirt and spread it on the sand and told Sheila to sit down. While she smoothed out her skirt and tucked her legs under her sideways I looked around. Clouds and a cool salt breeze had chased most of the swimmers from the beach but fifty yards to our left and closer to the water a dozen kids — none of them a day over twenty, I guessed — had spread out three blankets and were waiting for nightfall. Even at this distance I could see some of the boys wore dog-tags around their necks, young soldiers showing off to their girls, who all wore their small, sharp breasts thrust high in tight sweaters, as if they belonged to a club and this was their badge.
“First,” I said, “a question which has nothing to do with you. Do you happen to know where Karen is?”
“No, I don’t. But Karen hasn’t been getting along very well with the people here lately.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I can’t put my finger on it. Little arguments, I guess. Mostly with Vito and Mr. Soolpovar. It was like they were telling her to mind her own business and she wasn’t buying. Listen, you probably know more about this than I do.”
I shook my head. “Tell me about Karen as if I don’t know a thing.”
“O. K.” Sheila looked at me strangely, as if she were thinking, he’s not Gideon Frey after all, he’s a Martian with four arms and green antennae on his head. “When Karen first got here to take Bert Archer’s place while he was in service, she didn’t know what was going on downstairs at all. When she finally began to get wind of it, she thought Bert had been ashamed to tell her. Brother, was she mistaken. You see, Bert Archer never knew about it, either. He was a naive kid. Probably if he stayed around a while longer he’d have found out about it, but before that could happen he was on his way to Korea. Anyway, Karen wanted no part of it, but she’d promised Bert to keep his interests going for him.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “I figured this stuff got started after Bert was gone and Karen had a hand in it.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You knew when it started. You…”
“Go ahead.”
“Say, wait a minute! Then… then that means you’re not what everyone thinks. Hey, let me out of here!” Sheila stood up quickly, thighs flashing whitely in the gathering dusk as her skirt swirled. I grabbed her arm and pulled her down again, her knees digging a furrow in the sand.
“Let go of me. I’ve got to tell Vito. He thinks you’re from the boss.”
Sheila’s eyes swept over the sand quickly. Her best avenue of escape would be with the teen-agers, fifty-yards away. But even at this distance and in this poor light you could tell the boys were trying to see if the girls’ sweater badges covered padding or flesh and the girls were making a little like Vasco da Gama, too. Sheila flushed in virginal embarrassment and resigned herself to me.
“O.K., but you better make some sense about yourself after. As far as I could see, Karen didn’t want any part of what we were doing, but she didn’t want to implicate Bert, either. You see, it never occurred to her he was completely innocent.
“You can imagine how worried everyone was after Bert had died, since that would leave Karen free to tell what she knew. But suddenly Karen seemed to be playing along and giving more cooperation than she ever had before. First she had to worry about Bert Archer, then you came along and the same thing started all over again because we all thought you were from the boss.”
“What do you think now?” I asked Sheila.
“I don’t know what to think. If you were from the boss you would have known how long we’ve been operating and would have known everything started before Bert went into service and Karen had nothing to do with it. But if you’re just a friend of Bert’s, like you said at first…”
Sheila gazed out across the sand toward the dark, soft-hissing Coney Island surf. Light was fading rapidly, but the beach wouldn’t pull down any bright-sprinkled cover of stars tonight. Except for the lights from the boardwalk, it was now almost completely dark. “I had a man to worry about, too,” she said. She’d averted her face but I guessed she was pouting.
“Maybe you’re right about Vito. I — I’m beginning to think so myself. But you can’t end something like that overnight. Maybe it’s the old story. I’m just a kid and I wanted a man I could look up to and I thought Vito was like that at first and… You’re making me talk too much. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”