She didn’t turn a hair but stood on her tiptoes, her red lips within an inch or two of my face.
“My, but you look nice when you’re mad, Ed! Sort of big and strong like, as though there was nothing you’d stop at. Now do you want to meet mother?”
I shook my head. “I’m on my way, and I won’t be here Thursday,” I said as I headed for the hall.
She got my hat, opened the door, and then came bounding down the steps like a rubber ball.
“Don’t be so hasty, Ed. Remember I’ve got to drive you back. I took you out and I’ve got to get you home. I’ll bet you didn’t bring any mad money with you, either, and I haven’t made a young man walk home for nearly six weeks now, so I don’t want to break my good record.”
I was mad and I’d have said more right then, but I caught a glimpse of someone hiding behind the shadow cast by a shade tree across the street. The street light was just bright enough to intensify the shadows and I couldn’t get a good look at him, but, from the way he ducked back out of sight I was satisfied I was the bird he was looking at.
All of a sudden the solution of the whole thing flashed across my mind. The girl was one of these modem, heartless flappers, probably jazz mad and pinched for money. The old man had shut down on her allowance, and she’d made up her mind to throw in with a blackmailer, get something on him and split fifty-fifty with the blackmailer. If they could prove that Ed Jenkins, the international crook, was being entertained at the home of John Staunton Lambert, someone would have to come across to hush things up. It was a wild idea all right, but things like that are worked every once in a while by the kids of today, and if that was the scheme it wouldn’t be the first time a kid had blackmailed the folks… and yet… somehow it didn’t seem to fit the picture. Of course if the fool kid thought that the human octopus would split anything with her she had two other guesses coming. He’d string her along for a good thing, and then tell her to go chase herself.
“Come, come, Ed. Why so thoughtful?”
There was a teasing note in her voice.
“You don’t need to sit over there all huddled up against the door that way. For a man who posed as such a wicked betrayer of little girls, and took the apartment key and put it in his pocket with that ‘I have you in my power’ sort of look, you seem to be pretty distant when you’re automobile riding.”
She had me guessing. I looked into the dancing devils of those two sparkling eyes, saw the parted, crimson lips, the laughing mouth, and saw something else, saw that there was some hidden emotion lurking in the depth of those eyes. There was a great big, serious something down underneath. It wasn’t fear, but it was worry, worry and something else, sort of a look of desperation such as I imagine a crook has when he’s being taken out to the electric chair.
A machine swung in behind us and the lights shone through the window in the back of the roadster.
“What a nice little boy hims is,” she taunted. “My great big lukewarm daddy.”
At that I kissed her, and her kiss was a surprise, a long, trembling, clinging kiss of sheer youth, of abandon, and yet not of passion. It was more the kiss of a child who is afraid of being left alone in the dark, and yet there was the touch of a grown-up woman in it, too.
The roadster swung off toward the curb, and she twisted back the wheel with a quick turn of the wrist. The other car shot past us, and in the driver’s seat I could get a glimpse of a big, sagging frame that seemed to slump down upon the seat, immobile and inert, while a pair of long, restless arms wrapped about the steering wheel. The human octopus was driving that car, although he did not turn his head.
“Hot siggety boom!” exclaimed the girl as she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “My lukewarm daddy’s come to life!”
And at that I laughed. Here was no innocent kid being made the victim of a conspiracy. Here was a modem flapper, alive, alert, possessing a knowledge of the world and its ways, starting deliberately to play with fire, to seek to trap Ed Jenkins into some situation which would prove his undoing. All right. Let her go to it.
She swung into the curb and parked.
“Ed, you may be a first class crook, but as a necker you’re the bunk. What you don’t know about necking would fill a book. Come over here and let mommer give you a lesson.”
Five minutes later she started the car again.
“The original asbestos poppa!” she said half to herself, half to me.
Once more there was a purring hum and the big car with the human octopus at the wheel slid by. This time I was sure she saw him. Her mouth twitched, and, although her head did not turn, she kept her eyes on the other car.
We drove along in silence for a few minutes, the spell of the warm night, the proximity of the slender girl, the blazing stars, all conspiring to make me moody and reflective. I stole a glance at her face and, as I did so, she leaned forward to turn out the dash light. As her eyes came within the circle of the illumination just before she switched off the little globe, I saw the sparkle of moisture. There were tears in her eyes, tears running down her cheeks. She spun the wheel and managed to dash the back of her hand across her eyes, surreptitiously.
“Hot spit!” she exclaimed, apropos of nothing.
At the door of the apartment she insisted on one more, goodnight kiss, and threw herself into my arms, a bundle of vibrant, quivering, clinging femininity, kissed me, opened the door of the roadster, patted my arm, and took a deep breath, a breath in which there could be no mistaking the quick catch of a sob.
Somehow I felt strangely old as I approached the door of my apartment. Being with such a hot bundle of emotion, such flaming youth, had only emphasized my own, staid, philosophical outlook on life. Here was a girl, young yet sophisticated, playing some deep game in which the stakes were more than any girl in her position had any business gambling for; at one moment seeking to draw me to her by hot kisses, and at the next weeping copiously if surreptitiously, and all the time being shadowed by the human octopus, the king of the blackmailers, while at home waited a tired-eyed, stooped parent…
It was all too much for me. I had begun to drift into the quiet eddies of life, seeking to find some slow stream in which I could drift with the sluggish current. Being sucked back into the vortex of life, into the whirlpool of youthful emotions was too much for my mental equilibrium. This California immunity was making me soft, making me seek the quiet safety of a law-abiding, well-ordered life. I made up my mind then and there that I’d not seek to keep my immunity. I’d go after things in my own way, fight my old duel with the law. Let them catch me if they could.
As soon as I opened the door I knew something was wrong. There was no sound of pattering feet as Bobo launched himself on me in a glad ecstasy. Instead there was a pitiful whine, and a slow, weak, thump, thump on the floor.
Hastily, I switched on the light.
Bobo had been shot, shot with a revolver equipped with a silencer, probably, because there were no signs of commotion in the house. He was lying there on the floor, his eyes glazing, yet summoning his waning strength to wag a greeting with his tail, and he seemed trying to apologize for the loss of blood which prevented him from getting up and fawning upon me.
In a second I who had been contemplating the calm philosophy of life but a moment before, who had been speculating that the mad emotions of youth were gone never to again return, was seeing red with rage, a rage which had never before been equaled in my life.