Lou smiled faintly at me. "That'Il make it easier for the grafters on the big time; the fellows who take the contracts and don't appear in the business. They say Shannon was square and kept the Board in line. It was a nasty bump-off."
I shook my head. I didn't want to talk about that. I said: "Canales has a noseful of junk a lot of the time. And maybe he doesn't go for redheads."
Lou stood up slowly and lifted his cane off the desk. He stared at the tip of one yellow finger. He had an almost sleepy expression. Then he moved towards the door, swinging his cane.
"Well, I'll be seem' you some time," he drawled.
I let him get his hand on the knob before I said: "Don't go away sore, Lou. I'll drop down to Las Olindas, if you have to have me. But I don't want any money for it, and for Pete's sake don't pay any more attention to me than you have to."
He licked his lips softly and didn't quite look at me. "Thanks, keed. I'll be careful as hell."
He went out then and his yellow glove disappeared around the edge of the door.
I sat still for about five minutes and then my pipe got too hot. I put it down, looked at my strap watch, and got up to switch on a small radio in the corner beyond the end of the desk. When the AC. hum died down the last tinkle of a chime came out of the horn, then a voice was saying: "KLI now brings you its regular early evening broadcast of local news releases. An event of importance this afternoon was the indictment returned late today against Maynard J. Tinnen by the Grand Jury. Tinnen is a well-known City Hall lobbyist and man about town. The indictment, a shock to his many friends, was based almost entirely on the testimony-"
My telephone rang sharply and a girl's cool voice said in my ear: "One moment, please. Mr. Fenweather is calling you."
He came on at once. "Indictment returned. Take care of the boy."
I said I was just getting it over the radio. We talked a short moment and then he hung up, after saying he had to leave at once to catch a plane.
I leaned back in my chair again and listened to the radio without exactly hearing it. I was thinking what a damn fool Lou Harger was and that there wasn't anything I could do to change that.
TWO
It was a good crowd for a Tuesday but nobody was dancing. Around ten o'clock the little five-piece band got tired of messing around with a rhumba that nobody was paying any attention to. The marimba player dropped his sticks and reached under his chair for a glass. The rest of the boys lit cigarettes and just sat there looking bored.
I leaned sidewise against the bar, which was on the same side of the room as the orchestra stand. I was turning a small glass of tequila around on the top of the bar. All the business was at the center one of the three roulette tables.
The bartender leaned beside me, on his side of the bar.
"The flame-top gal must be pickin' them," he said.
I nodded without looking at him. "She's playing with fistfuls now," I said. "Not even counting it."
The red-haired girl was tall. I could see the burnished copper of her hair between the heads of the people behind her. I could see Lou Harger's sleek head beside hers. Everybody seemed to be playing standing up.
"You don't play?" the bartender asked me.
"Not on Tuesdays. I had some trouble on a Tuesday once."
"Yeah? Do you like that stuff straight, or could I smooth it out for you?"
"Smooth it out with what?" I said. "You got a wood rasp handy?"
He grinned. I drank a little more of the tequila and made a face.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?"
"I wouldn't know, mister."
"What's the limit over there?"
"I wouldn't know that either. How the boss feels, I guess."
The roulette tables were in a row near the far wall. A low railing of gilt metal joined their ends and the players were outside the railing.
Some kind of a confused wrangle started at the center table. Half a dozen people at the two end tables grabbed their chips up and moved across.
Then a clear, very polite voice, with a slightly foreign accent, spoke out: "If you will just be patient, madame ... Mr. Canales will be here in a minute."
I went across, squeezed near the railing. Two croupiers stood near me with their heads together and their eyes looking sidewise. One moved a rake slowly back and forth beside the idle wheel. They were staring at the red-haired girl.
She wore a high-cut black evening gown. She had fine white shoulders, was something less than beautiful and more than pretty. She was leaning on the edge of the table, in front of the wheel. Her long eyelashes were twitching. There was a big pile of money and chips in front of her.
She spoke monotonously, as if she had said the same thing several times already.
"Get busy and spin that wheel! You take it away fast enough, but you don't like to dish it out."
The croupier in charge smiled a cold, even smile. He was tall, dark, disinterested: "The table can't cover your bet," he said with calm precision. "Mr. Canales, perhaps-" He shrugged neat shoulders.
The girl said: "It's your money, highpockets. Don't you want it back?"
Lou Harger licked his lips beside her, put a hand on her arm, stared at the pile of money with hot eyes. He said gently: "Wait for Canales . . ."
"To hell with Canales! I'm hot-and I want to stay that way."
A door opened at the end of the tables and a very slight, very pale man came into the room. He had straight, lusterless black hair, a high bony forehead, flat, impenetrable eyes. He had a thin mustache that was trimmed in two sharp lines almost at right angles to each other. They came down below the corners of his mouth a full inch. The effect was Oriental. His skin had a thick, glistening pallor.
He slid behind the croupiers, stopped at a corner of the center table, glanced at the red-haired girl and touched the ends of his mustache with two fingers, the nails of which had a purplish tint.
He smiled suddenly, and the instant after it was as though he had never smiled in his life. He spoke in a dull, ironic voice.
"Good evening, Miss Glenn. You must let me send somebody with you when you go home. I'd hate to see any of that money get in the wrong pockets."
The red-haired girl looked at him, not very pleasantly.
"I'm not leaving-unless you're throwing me out."
Canales said: "No? What would you like to do?"
"Bet the wad-dark meat!"
The crowd noise became a deathly silence. There wasn't a whisper of any kind of sound. Harger's face slowly got ivorywhite.
Canales' face was without expression. He lifted a hand, delicately, gravely, slipped a large wallet from his dinner jacket and tossed it in front of the tall croupier.
"Ten grand," he said in a voice that was a dull rustle of sound. "That's my limit-always."
The tall croupier picked the wallet up, spread it, drew out two flat packets of crisp bills, riffled them, refolded the wallet and passed it along the edge of the table to Canales.
Canales did not move to take it. Nobody moved, except the croupier.
The girl said: "Put it on the red."
The croupier leaned across the table and very carefully stacked her money and chips. He placed her bet for her on the red diamond. He placed his hand along the curve of the wheel.
"If no one objects," Canales said, without looking at anyone, "this is just the two of us."
Heads moved. Nobody spoke. The croupier spun the wheel and sent the ball skimming in the groove with a light flirt of his left wrist. Then he drew his hands back and placed them in full view on the edge of the table, on top of it.
The red-haired girl's eyes shone and her lips slowly parted.