Shifting the key from the inside of the door to the outside, Walsh deprecated: “This is applesauce, Lefty, but you know how Sam is. We don’t either of us want to rub him the wrong way.”
Byrne grinned wanly.
“It’s all right by me,” he said. “Do your duty, sheriff!”
He was at the window, staring out over cluttered back yards at a rectangle of light in a tall, seedy building below, when the key turned. Evening had come, and Dorcas was up, preening herself for the night’s grind at the Gold Slipper.
Lefty had seen her first from where he stood now. It came back to him, as vivid as if it had been yesterday. That broiling afternoon; street cars and trucks roaring so you couldn’t hear; he at his window and the girl, covered by some filmy silk thing, gasping at hers; their exchange of smiles. He had made a street corner rendezvous by signs, though at first she had laughed, shaking her head. All that — the beginning.
The beginning. And how was it going to end?
She was expecting him to drop in at the Gold Slipper to-night, but he wasn’t going to be there. To-morrow, she’d be certain then, he’d come around to the flat. Would he, though? A chill came on him again. Who could say what to-morrow had in store?
Hungrily he watched her shadow on that shade down the line, passing, repassing, slim and quick. He prayed that she’d come to the window and look out; then he’d switch his own light on and try to show her, in pantomime, that circumstances prevented the keeping of dates just now.
But she didn’t come. Her light went out presently, and even that tantalizing shadow of her was gone.
He smoked a cigarette in darkness before he reached for the switch and threw himself on his bed with a much-thumbed book.
“Money in Gas,” was the book’s title, and it was further described on its cover as “A Practical Guide for the Independent Filling Station Owner.”
III
In the dressing room at the Gold Slipper, toward midnight, a large, glittering blond lady — the famous Tennessee Martin, in person and extremely so — cast eyes of concern upon the prettiest of all her dancing subhostesses, Miss Dorcas O’Donnell.
“Why,” she asked, “so pensive? It’s early for a headache.”
The slender, dark girl made a grimace of repugnance.
“Honey,” she said, “I’m not here for headaches. Not since I collected a real one, once, and missed a date. They could sail the Leviathan right up to the bandstand on all the loaded apple-juice I’ve spilled to-night.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
The girl sighed.
“Everything. This time — a date’s missed me. A very special one.”
“Love, deary,” said Miss Martin, “is a disease. And you’re a hospital case, if I ever saw one. But cheer up. The boy friend will be here when he gets here. You ought to know there’s lots of night work in a profession like his. Hearts may ache, and women may weep, but somebody’s got to go down to the sea in speed boats!”
Dorcas O’Donnell shuddered.
“I can’t laugh it off,” she protested. “I’ve got a feeling that — something’s happened. It wasn’t just the every day risk that Lefty was going to face when I saw him this afternoon. He was bound to have a showdown with the man lie’s been working for — and that man’s a killer, Tennessee! It’s no secret. If I mentioned who he was, and Lefty was yours, you’d be in a panic, too. I tell you, I’m scared to death of what I’m going to see in the papers when I leave here.”
The Gold Slipper’s buxom hostess-in-chief threw an arm around the girl’s trembling white shoulder.
“Then the best thing, chickie,” she comforted, “is to leave before the papers are out. Get on your things this minute, and taxi along home. And don’t sit up when you get there, thinking horrible things that’ll be funny in the morning. Go to sleep. Rest is what your nerves need.”
Good advice — but how could she follow it? Across the dingy yards the starlight showed her Lefty Byrne’s window, standing open. Did it mean, as it always had before, that he was there? If he was, why hadn’t he come uptown? Why, when he knew she’d be anxiously waiting, holding her breath, anguished with fear for him?
It was dawn before she dozed; but at nine she was up, heavy-eyed, and at the window again.
A glad cry escaped her. Lefty Byrne was at his own window. There, and in just the pose of that first day of theirs, a leg thrown up on the sill, a cigarette in his fingers.
He saw her at the moment of her appearance, and she divined he had been watching for her. He waved; she beckoned; he shook his head — and she couldn’t understand that.
Lefty was trying to make her understand; working in what seemed a frenzy of gesticulation to get some message to her across that void filled with the racket of the “L” trains and the flat-wheeled surface cars, the straining trucks and the ceaselessly honking smaller fry of East Side traffic.
He pointed down, and shook his head. He pointed behind him and shook his head. He took out a billfold, held it upside down, open, empty, and shook his head again.
“Come over!” she called desperately. “Come over and tell me!”
Her voice was a whisper in a thunderstorm. He couldn’t hear her. She knew he couldn’t. But he could guess. He spread his hands helplessly. That meant he couldn’t come maybe. Why?
While she was trying to puzzle that out, he vanished from the window. Just before he vanished he had turned quickly, as if some one had come into the room behind him. What did that mean? Why hadn’t he stopped for a good-by wave?
Impulse took her to the telephone when, after long minutes, Lefty hadn’t reappeared.
It was Coats who answered her ring at the garage. He’d been drinking; his voice was thick and surly, but it smoothed when she spoke her name.
“Why, no, kiddo,” he said. “Lefty ain’t around just now.” He laughed. “Anybody else do?”
She stiffened at the lie.
“Where,” she asked, “is he, then?”
Coats hesitated.
“He’s out on a little errand. Ought to be back any minute. Why don’t you come over an’ wait for him?”
She could think of several good reasons why she shouldn’t, but swiftly she was aware of a still bigger and better reason for not presenting them. Around at the garage she might find the answer to the mystery.
“Maybe,” she said, with a thin echo of that widely-imitated, engagingly amiable gurgle introduced in night club circles by Miss Tennessee Martin, “maybe I will!”
She bathed and dressed quickly, and she had a trained smile for big Sam Coats when she walked into his office half an hour later.
“Lefty ain’t here yet,” he told her, grinning back. “But sit down. Make yourself at home. He ain’t the only one that likes to look at you.”
She had girded on her armor of the cabaret for him and took it wide-eyed.
“I thought you were different, Sam,” she murmured. “All business. But you’re like all of ’em. I guess the man doesn’t live who won’t try to hand you a line.”
Coats’s widening smile showed a glint of gold in his upper jaw.
“The big question before the American girl to-day,” he said, “isn’t the men’s line, but what they’re willing to hand with it. I’ll spend money, any day, on mine. Sweet boys are all right, but it takes a fur coat to keep a lady warm when the mercury’s down.”
Dorcas O’Donnell sighed.
“Some get furs, and some don’t,” she said. “You’d be surprised how the big-hearted customers up at the club shower them on me between two and five any morning — in promises. But whenever the delivery cars stop in front of my door, it’s something C. O. D. they’ve got for little Dorcas.”