I gandered at them when I saw them come in the foyer, because customers seldom come in that late. Not enough time left to make it worth the general admission fee. There were two of them; one was a fat, bloated little guy, the kind we call a “belly-wopper,” the other was a pip. He wasn’t tall, dark and handsome because he was medium-height, light-haired and clean-cut looking without being pretty about it, but if I’d had any dreams left he coulda moved right into them. Well, I didn’t, so I headed for the dressing-room to count up my ticket stubs while the stretch was on; see how I was making out. Two cents out of every dime when you turn them in.
They were standing there sizing the barn up, and they’d called Marino over to them. Then the three of them turned around and looked at me just as I made the door, and Marino thumbed me. I headed over to find out what was up. Duke’s next was a rhumba, and I said to myself: “If I draw the kewpie, I’m going to have kittens all over the floor.”
Marino said, “Get your things, Ginger.” I thought one of them was going to take me out; they’re allowed to do that, you know, only they’ve got to make it up with the management for taking you out of circulation. It’s not as bad as it sounds, you can still stay on the up and up, sit with them in some laundry and listen to their troubles. It’s all up to you yourself.
I got the backyard sable and got back just in time to hear Marino say something about: “Will I have to go bail for her?”
Fat said, “Naw, naw, we just want her to build up the background a little for us.”
Then I tumbled, got jittery, squawked: “What is this, a pinch? What’ve I done? Where you taking me?”
Marino soothed: “They just want you to go with them, Ginger. You be a good girl and do like they ast.” Then he said something to them I couldn’t figure. “Try to keep the place here out of it, will you, fellas? I been in the red for six months, as it is.”
I cowered along between them like a lamb being led to the slaughter, looking from one to the other. “Where you taking me?” I wailed, going down the stairs.
Maiden’s Prayer answered, in the cab. “To Julie Bennett’s, Ginger.” They’d gotten my name from Marino, I guess.
“What’s she done?” I half sobbed.
“May as well tell her now, Nick,” Fat suggested. “Otherwise she’ll take it big when we get there.”
Nick said, quietly as he could, “Your friend Julie met up with some tough luck, babe.” He took his finger and he passed it slowly across his neck.
I took it big right there in the cab, Fat to the contrary. “Ah, no!” I whispered, holding my head. “She was on the floor with me only last night! Just this time last night we were in the dressing-room together having a smoke, having some laughs! No! She was my only friend.” And I started to bawl like a two-year-old, straight down my make-up onto the cab floor.
Finally this Nick, after acting embarrassed as hell, took a young tent out of his pocket, said: “Have yourself a time on this, babe.”
I was still working on it when I went up the rooming-house stairs sandwiched between them. I recoiled just outside the door. “Is she... is she still in there?”
“Naw, you won’t have to look at her,” Nick reassured me.
I didn’t, because she wasn’t in there any more, but it was worse than if she had been. Oh God, that sheet, with one tremendous streak down it as if a chicken had been—! I swivelled, played puss-in-the-corner with the first thing I came up against, which happened to be this Nick guy’s chest. He sort of stood still like he liked the idea. Then he growled, “Turn that damn thing over out of sight, will you?”
The questioning, when I was calm enough to take it, wasn’t a grill, don’t get that idea. It was just, as they’d said, to fill out her background. “When was the last time you saw her alive? Did she go around much, y’know what we mean? She have any particular steady?”
“I left her outside the house door downstairs at one-thirty this morning, last night, or whatever you call it,” I told them. “We walked home together from Joyland right after the session wound up. She didn’t go around at all. She never dated the boys afterwards and neither did I.”
The outside half of Nick’s left eyebrow hitched up at this, like when a terrier cocks its ear at something. “Notice anyone follow the two of you?”
“In our racket they always do; it usually takes about five blocks to wear them out, though, and this is ten blocks from Joyland.”
“You walk after you been on your pins all night?” Fat asked, aghast.
“We should take a cab, on our earnings! About last night, I can’t swear no one followed us, because I didn’t look around. That’s a come-on, if you do that.”
Nick said, “I must remember that,” absent-mindedly.
I got up my courage, faltered: “Did it... did it happen right in here?”
“Here’s how it went: She went out again after she left you the first time—”
“I knew her better than that!” I yipped. “Don’t start that, Balloon Lungs, or I’ll let you have this across the snout!” I swung my cat-piece at him.
He grabbed up a little box, shook it in my face. “For this,” he said. “Aspirin! Don’t try to tell us different, when we’ve already checked with the all-night drugstore over on Sixth!” He took a couple of heaves, cooled off, sat down again. “She went out, but instead of locking the house-door behind her, she was too lazy or careless; shoved a wad of paper under it to hold it on a crack till she got back. In that five minutes or less, somebody who was watching from across the street slipped in and lay in wait for her in the upper hallway out here. He was too smart to go for her on the open street, where she might have had a chance to yell.”
“How’d he know she was coming back?”
“The unfastened door woulda told him that; also the drug clerk tells us she showed up there fully dressed, but with her bare feet stuck in a pair of carpet-slippers to cool ’em. The killer musta spotted that too.”
“Why didn’t she yell out here in the house, with people sleeping all around her in the different rooms?” I wondered out loud.
“He grabbed her too quick for that, grabbed her by the throat just as she was opening her room-door, dragged her in, closed the door, finished strangling her on the other side of it. He remembered later to come out and pick up the aspirins which had dropped and rolled all over out there. All but one, which he overlooked and we found. She wouldn’t’ve stopped to take one outside her door. That’s how we know about that part of it.”
I kept seeing that sheet, which was hidden now, before me all over again. I couldn’t help it, I didn’t want to know, but still I had to know. “But if he strangled her, where did all that blood—” I gestured sickly, “come from?”
Fat didn’t answer, I noticed. He shut up all at once, as if he didn’t want to tell me the rest of it, and looked kind of sick himself. His eyes gave him away. I almost could have been a detective myself, the way I pieced the rest of it together just by following his eyes around the room. He didn’t know I was reading them, or he wouldn’t have let them stray like that.
First they rested on the little portable phonograph she had there on a table. By using bamboo needles she could play it late at night, soft, and no one would hear it. The lid was up and there was a record on the turn-table, but the needle was worn down half-way, all shredded, as though it had been played over and over.
Then his eyes went to a flat piece of paper, on which were spread out eight or ten shiny new dimes; I figured they’d been put aside like that, on paper, for evidence. Some of them had little brown flecks on them, bright as they were. Then lastly his eyes went down to the rug; it was all pleated up in places, especially along the edges, as though something heavy, inert, had been dragged back and forth over it.