I told him, “Okay,” and walked up the street to the building where I had first walked into things beginning with June Benton’s suicide.
It was two o’clock in the morning. A pimply boy was dozing in front of the switchboard. I waked him enough to put a call through to the Meade apartment. Dolly’s voice answered. She sounded quavery and frightened.
“This is Ed,” I told her. “Is Herman back in town yet?”
“Ed?”
“You know the one.”
“Of course.” A fluttery laugh. “Ed!”
“Are you alone?”
“Well... yes. But it’s terribly late for you to come up. Don’t you think...?”
“I’m on my way.” I hung up and went up the stairs with the boy picking at his pimples and watching me goggle-eyed.
I hadn’t seen Dolly since the Axelrod tea. Things had been moving along and I hadn’t needed her. She let me in with a fluttery furtiveness. She had on a bedraggled pink nightgown that clung tightly to her hips.
She turned her face away from me, but I kissed her mouth and patted her behind.
“You... I wish you wouldn’t,” she said hesitantly, pulled away from me and sucked in her lower lip.
I went across to a deep chair and sat down. “You haven’t got a very hot welcome for me.”
“Why should I have?” she flared out with a strange burst of anger. “I’ve had trouble enough from the last time you were here.”
“That so? What sort of trouble?”
“I guess you know well enough.” She was quivering inside her nightgown like a kootchie dancer.
“Don’t know a thing about it.”
“The hell you don’t.” She was actually venomous. “Who sent that reporter up here if it wasn’t you?”
I shook my head. “I’m not in the business of sending reporters anywhere. Just routine stuff, I suppose. The Benton suicide raised quite a stink.”
“Routine nothing.” She sat down ten feet from me. Her bare toes curled inward on the rug. Looking at them, I thought of the way Benton’s toes had curved when I spread them apart for the cigarette. “How did they know I knew anything about it?”
“I suppose you shot off your mouth too much. And you were one of June’s friends and her closest neighbor.”
“There was more to it than that. He asked all sorts of questions that only you could have told him to ask me.”
“What paper?”
“The Bugle.”
I didn’t bat an eye. “I didn’t have a damned thing to do with it,” I told her. “What the hell would I send a reporter to pump you for? You spilled your guts to me that night.”
She screwed up her face in a frown. “I could have stood the questions. But the reporter wouldn’t let poor Mr. Benton alone either. And he made Mr. Benton think that I knew a lot more about June’s trouble than I’d let on to him.”
“And Benton jumped you and you told him the whole story.”
She looked startled, her mouth hanging open and eyes bulging: “How do you know?”
“I don’t need a blueprint. When did you spill the dirt to him?”
“Day before yesterday. And he just went wild, Ed. Raved and swore something terrible. Called me everything awful and blamed everything on me.”
“And you handed him my name to get out from under?”
“He dragged it out of me.” Dolly began to get ready for a weep-fest. She pouted up her face and blinked her eyes. “And why shouldn’t I tell him? You were the one that got me into it. It was your fault all along. I wish to God you hadn’t come here that day. I wouldn’t have had anything to hide if you hadn’t come. He even accused me of murdering June when he found out she... did it in my bathroom.”
“So he found that out too? You certainly must have told all when you got started.”
“I couldn’t help it. That fool reporter had filled him up with hints that you must have told him.”
I said wearily: “You played merry hell when you blabbed.”
She was sobbing. She looked haggard and old. “I don’t care. I don’t give a goddamn. It’s good enough for you. It’s plenty good enough for you.”
“Would you be interested in knowing that Benton came to my room to kill me tonight?”
That jerked her up short. She forgot about the act she was putting on. Stopped sobbing and stared at me with her hand in front of her mouth. “What... what happened?”
“I slapped him down.”
“And he... where is he?”
“Where he won’t pull any more guns for awhile. If he’d killed me, you would have been a murderess, Dolly.”
“Not me! Oh God, no! Not me, Ed. I didn’t tell him anything that would have made him want to kill you.”
“You sent him to someone that set him on me.”
“Not me. It wasn’t my fault.”
“You were bragging about it a minute ago,” I reminded her. “Where did Benton go to get information about me?”
“I don’t know.” She had a handkerchief balled up in her hand. Her teeth were biting on it.
I got up and walked toward her. “Better start remembering.”
“I don’t... I won’t tell you.”
“I’ve had enough of people that think they’re not going to tell me things. I’m all through going soft for tonight.”
She shrank back from me. Put up her hands in front of her face. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“Everything except the name of the person that sent Benton after me. Who was it?”
“Before God...”
“You don’t need to blaspheme. I’m going to find out... or wring your fat neck.”
She broke down and began blubbering. Every object in the room took on a faint tinge of red. I saw Dolly’s face beyond a red haze. I had taken a lot that night, and I wasn’t used to taking things.
I reached down and put my hands about her neck. Lifted her up with her squalling like a dying calf. My fingers on her windpipe shut off her voice. I held her in the air, then opened my fingers and let her drop to the floor. “This is your last chance to use your mouth for something besides bawling.”
She looked up at me and believed me. She whimpered: “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. But,” she hurried on as I bent over her with my hands clawed, “I know he got on the track of somebody else that he believed was going to be able to tell him things. I didn’t send him to her. I don’t know how he found her. I don’t even know whether she had anything to do with it or not. He was in to see me early this evening and was all excited and said he was going to get the real lowdown from this girl. He had a date with her then.”
“Who was she?”
“I tell you I don’t know her. A funny name. Cherry, I think he said. Something like that.”
She started to say something else but I walked out without waiting to hear it.
Chapter 21
Cherry opened the door to my knock. She had a faded robe wrapped around her, with a filmy blue nightgown showing underneath. I brushed past her into the room without saying anything.
She closed the door and looked at me with her back against it. “What do you mean by forcing yourself in at this hour of the night?”
“You opened the door for me.”
“I didn’t know who it was.”
“Did you think it was Stormy?”
She didn’t appear a damned bit disconcerted. “It’s none of your business if I did.”
“Let it pass.” I waved my hand and sat down. “Some other things are my business.”
“They’ll have to wait for a more decent hour.”
“They’re not going to wait.”
She moved away from the door — across the room toward the telephone stand. She didn’t say anything but her silence was plenty emphatic.