She looked up after a while and showed me a double row of fine white teeth. “I’m Jerry Mae. I love to dance.”
“I used to.”
“You got tired blood? You could always sit down and buy me a drink.”
“I’d rather lie down.”
She chose to interpret this as a pass and giggled mechanically. “You’re a fast worker. I don’t even know your name.”
“Lew.”
“Where do you hail from, Lew?”
“Los Angeles.”
“I spent some time there myself. Los Angeles is a great town.”
“A great town,” I agreed.
Her fingertips moved on the sleeve of my jacket, assessing the probable cost of the fabric. “What do you do there, Lew?”
“Various things.”
“I’d love to hear about them. Come on and sit down and buy me a drink and tell me about yourself.”
“Isn’t there any place we can be alone?”
She pushed me rougishly. “My, you certainly sweep a girl off her feet. If you really feel like a party, there is a room upstairs.”
“Show me.”
I followed her out, running the gauntlet of the bartender’s hostile stare. But he didn’t make a move to interfere. Business was business.
A flight of wooden steps slanted up the blank stucco wall of the building. Her slim nyloned ankles climbed ahead of me. She waited for me at the upper door. Caught in the light from the roof, her face was ghastly, as if it had been stricken with yellow disease.
She led me down a corridor to the little anonymous room where her nights ended. A Hollywood bed covered with red chenille, a powder-strewn dressing-table holding an imitation-ivory radio, a sink in one corner. She closed the Venetian blind over the single window and paused by the radio.
“You like music, Lew?”
“I can do without it.”
There were no chairs in the room. I sat on the bed. Love or something like it had broken its back.
She stood looking down at me with a puzzled expression. Her eyes had the hard dismay that comes from seeing too much for too many years and understanding too little of it. Swallowing her doubts, she perched on my knees, letting her skirt ride up over her thighs. The dead-white skin was pocked with needle-marks.
“Don’t you like baby?”
“I like you fine.”
“Then how do you want me, honey? Peeled?”
“On ice.”
“I don’t get it. That’s a new one, isn’t it?”
“I’d rather have information than fornication.” I lifted her by the waist and set her down beside me on the bed.
She looked at me with a kind of smiling pity. “You don’t look like one of the talkers. I’m clean, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Nothing’s worrying me.”
“I have a regular weekly examination.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“For Christ’s sake,” she said. “If all you wanted to do was talk, we could of stayed downstairs. Now you got to pay for the room.”
“How much?”
“Five bucks. And ten for me. I charge the same for talking, that’s only fair. So what do we talk about, how I got into the racket? Or do you want to hear about the various fellows?”
“I’m interested in one fellow in particular. Tony Aquista. Know him?”
“Sure I know him. He never went with me, though. Personally, I wouldn’t have him. I always thought he was a little psycho.”
“Is that what Jo thought, too?”
Her face hardened under its mask of paint. “I wouldn’t know what Jo thought.”
“Didn’t she go with him?”
“Maybe she played around with him a little bit, strictly for laughs. I guess she took him home a few times.”
“Recently?”
“Yeah, the last couple of weeks. The boss brought him in one night–”
“Kerrigan brought him in?”
“Yeah. He must of told her to be nice to him. I don’t know of any other reason why she would bother with Tony. He hasn’t even got white blood in his veins, and he’s a kind of a psycho, like I said, and an awful lush. You should of seen him last time he was in. He was loaded to the gills, practically blind. Rocco had to put the dry sign on him.”
“When was this?”
Her eyes rolled up in thought. “Three-four nights ago. Sunday night.”
“Was Jo here?”
“Naturally. He took her home. Or she took him home. He wasn’t navigating so good.”
“What does Jo look like?”
“Why? Don’t you know her?”
“Not yet.”
“Seems to me you’re awful interested in a girl you never saw.”
“I have a reason.”
“What reason?”
“It doesn’t matter. Describe her.”
“Well, she’s a little slinky brunette, if you like the type. I was a brunette myself at one time, until I got bored with it.”
“We were talking about Jo,” I reminded her. “I need a complete description.”
“What the hell for? I thought you wanted to talk to me. Incidentally, I haven’t got much more time, and you owe me fifteen.”
“Does Rocco time you?”
“With a stop-watch, practically.”
I took a twenty out of my wallet. It frisked away in her hand like a little green lizard with a homing instinct for the top of her stocking. The feel of the money seemed to encourage her: “Wait a minute. If you want to know what Jo Summer looks like, I can do better than a description.”
She started for the door.
“Don’t forget to come back, Jerry Mae.”
“I won’t.”
She returned with a blue cardboard placard lettered in gold. “This is a picture of Jo – a glamour pose. Rock just took it out of the window yesterday.”
“The Golden Slipper features gorgeous Jo Summer,” the lettering said. “Songs and sallies, three times nitely, never a cover or minimum.”
Attached to the placard was the slightly beaten photograph of a young woman. She wore a sequined black evening dress with a neckline that plunged to the waist. Her half-restrained breasts were her most prominent features, but it was her face that struck me: a sloe-eyed face, lowbrowed under straight black bangs, with a sullen passionate mouth. I had seen her mouth a few hours, earlier, hungrily pressed to the back of Kerrigan’s hand.
I looked up at Jerry Mae. “Is she Kerrigan’s girl?”
She sat on the bed beside me. “Everybody knows that. Why do you think he gave her a job in the place?”
“What kind of a person is she? Straight or crooked?”
“How can I tell? She isn’t exactly a mamma’s girl, but I can’t read her mind. Half the time I can’t even read my own.”
“Who are her friends?”
“I don’t think she has any friends, outside of Mr. Kerrigan. How many friends does a girl need? Oh yeah, she has a grandfather, she said he was her grandfather. He came in one night last month, a few days after she started. He wanted her to pull out of here and go back home with him.”
“You wouldn’t know where he lives?”
“Some place out of town, I think she said in the mountains. I told her she’d be better off at home. I told her if she hung around too long in the cabarets, the wolves would tear her to pieces. I gave her the best advice I could. She’s a little bit of a viper, see, and I tried to talk her out of that. She don’t know what it leads to.”
“What are you on, Jerry Mae? Horse?”
“We won’t go into the subject of me. I’m hopeless.” The corners of her heavy red mouth stretched in a bitter horizontal smile. “The kid wouldn’t take my advice, so she’ll have to learn the hard way.”
“Learn what?”
“You don’t get any kicks in this life for free. You pay double for them afterwards, and after you run out of moxy you go on paying anyway. So now she’s in a real jam, eh?”