“What do you want with me?” Cherry sat down and became very matter-of-fact.
“What do most men want of you?”
“Aren’t you taking too much for granted?”
“Am I?”
She got up with a little shrug. “There are dishes in the kitchen waiting to be dried.”
I followed her into the kitchen. A dishpan full of dishes stood in the sink. I took the cloth away from her and began drying them. She sat down on a stool, propped her chin in her hand, and watched me gravely.
“Are you going out to the joint tonight?” I asked as I juggled knives and forks.
“The joint?”
“On Weston Avenue.”
“Yes. I have to take a couple of women I met today.”
“Perhaps I’ll see you there.”
She nodded, looking away quickly when I tried to see into her eyes.
I finished drying the dishes and dumped out the water. “Let’s go into the living room where it’s cooler.”
She followed me in, sat down in a deep chair facing me, took one of my cigarettes and leaned forward to get a light off my match.
“How can you take it?” I asked suddenly.
“The same way you do.”
“Hell, I’m a man. You’re the one that’s cheating on your sisters under the skin.”
She puffed on her cigarette. “It’s a living.”
“The easy way?” I sneered.
“Why not?”
I leaned back and decided I was getting nowhere fast. “Oh, the hell with it. Let’s get down to business. With Lucy out of the picture, I came to get some dope from you.”
“What sort of dope?”
“Well, I like to know where I stand. Stormy has charge of the joint, eh?”
“He’s the only one any of us come in contact with.” She opened her lips to say something else. Closed them without saying it.
“I was ordered to report to him... but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take orders from him.”
“You might be better off if you did.”
“Why?”
“I’ve heard whispers... that the person at the top is a woman... or a female devil.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
“They say no man has ever met her and been the same.”
“Bunk. Women don’t get under my skin.”
“Don’t they?” Cherry was smiling faintly.
“How many of you were working with Lucile?”
“Four of us have been working with her regularly.”
“How many other missionary groups at work?”
“Three or four.”
That was all I could get out of Cherry about the inside workings of the syndicate. Either she didn’t know, or wouldn’t talk.
I changed the subject before she might begin to think I was too curious for one supposed to be on the inside, and got up to go after talking about this and that without breaking through her reserve.
I’d tossed my hat on a little stand near the door when I came in. Picking it up, I was looking down at a round flat brass receptacle for calling cards. A large square one was on top. I blinked my eyes at the name: Herman Blattscomb.
Cherry was holding the door open for me. I went out wondering.
Chapter 11
Walla Walla got me through the ornamental iron gates leading to the huge palm-shrouded structure on Weston Avenue. There was another uniformed guard at the door. Walla Walla wasn’t enough for him. I had to mention Lucile and Stormy before he pressed a button and let the heavy doors swing open.
There was a swanky foyer just inside. Potted palms, and girl attendants who were dressed and looked like houris. A lounge and bar opened off the foyer. A wide arch led into a vaulted space that must have once been a ballroom.
There must have been a hundred bridge tables in that one room. Half of them occupied early in the evening when I went in.
Concealed lighting shed a soft glow over the room. A cathedral-like hush hung over the tables.
That was my first impression. Strolling down among the tables gave me a different feeling. Women are lousy gamblers. There’s nothing light-hearted about a game of chance among women. No cheerful sallies across the table. No mirthful laughter while the cards are being shuffled and dealt.
They don’t enjoy gambling. It just isn’t in their natures. They play to win. Their fingers are avid, their eyes calculating.
There were a few men scattered among the women players. Pretty poor specimens of my sex. Two distinct types. Cold-eyed and predatory. Effeminate weaklings.
Every foursome — each member of every foursome — would have repaid a psychoanalyst’s close observation. The one common denominator was greed. Human greed. The distinguishing characteristic of our civilization.
I wouldn’t have given two cents for our civilization as I strolled through the room. Goddamn it, it was enough to make a sane man sick at his stomach. You could see that most of the players had plenty of money. A large percentage of them must never have known want as the word is commonly used.
I’m no tin god, but a demonstration of human greed always gets my goat. It wasn’t so much that any of them wanted money as it was that they wanted to take it away from someone else. A desire to feed their ego at the expense of another. Brotherly love didn’t stand a chance in that joint.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the bridge playing. There wasn’t much to be learned about the workings of the syndicate in that room. An attendant told me I could find anything I wanted upstairs.
I went up a curving stairway to an upper hall where my feet sank into the soft carpet. There were nude statues in little niches along the hall. The hum of voices, the drone of croupiers, the rattle of dice came from rooms leading off the hall.
I peeked into some of them as I went by. Women by the hundreds. Expensively dressed, jeweled women. With tense, strained faces.
There were roulette tables drawing a big trade, and faro layouts fringed by a small group of the initiate. The crap tables were getting a big play, and I paused to watch a horse-faced hussy spit on the cubes and roll them out imploring for a “natural.” She didn’t get her natural, and the houseman raked in a pile of crumpled bills that would have fed a coal miner’s family for a month.
There weren’t any fillies hanging around the crap table. They were all women old enough to have known better.
It’s funny to see how the different types go for different ways of losing their money. I’ve noticed the same thing among men.
Ninety per cent of the bridge players were women in their thirties. Slender, poised, well-gowned women. Wealthy sophisticates.
Roulette seemed to draw the youngsters — and the women not so obviously wealthy. There was more naivete displayed on the faces watching the little ball go around the wheel. Less sophistication and more unconcealed eagerness. Older, dumpy women, with their petticoats showing as they leaned over the tables to push their money onto numbers or combinations.
The crap layouts seemed to appeal to another distinct group. Lorgnetted dowagers threw away all their dignity moaning for the dice to “do them right.” Watching them, I got the impression that they would have liked to have hung their corsets up to the chandelier and really gotten hot.
There were chuck-a-luck tables in another room, red-dog, poker, and black-jack dealers. The chuck-a-luck layouts were getting a fair play. Two or three red-dog and black-jack games were taking money from women who didn’t know any better; but the two tables set aside for the devotees of the grandest sport were deserted.
A woman sat at one of the tables, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with a deck of cards. There wasn’t even a dealer on duty at the other table with the neon sign, POKER, overhead.
I went over and sat down in one of the chairs in front of the woman dealer. She had white hair and gentle eyes. She reminded me of my grandmother who used to set out cold buttermilk and a crock of cookies when we visited at her Indiana farm.