“I’m waiting for the sordid details.”
“I tried to get her to stop. Honest to God, I did. But she just wouldn’t listen to me.”
“No one’s blaming you... yet,” I told her. “Get on with your story... if you’ve got one.”
“I’m trying to tell you but you keep interrupting.”
I lit another cigarette and didn’t say anything. She said:
“Well?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you say something?”
“I’m practicing not interrupting so you can get on with your yarn.”
“Oh. Well, I lent her some money the first month to put back in the bank so Jim wouldn’t know. She swore to me she’d quit as soon as she got even. But she didn’t get even. She was terribly unlucky like I told you. And the second month all her money was gone and she was frantic and went to Mr. Parker — he’s the manager — and he was awfully kind and loaned her the money to put back in the bank so the statement would look all right to Jim.”
“Quite a philanthropist.”
“What?”
“Let it pass. Did he loan her the money without any security?”
“Only her IOU. And he made her promise to bring it back and gamble with it after Jim saw the bank statement.”
“And she was fool enough to do it?”
“What else could she do? He had her IOU. It wasn’t her money. She just wanted to get back even so she could quit.”
I said, “Of course,” and let it go at that.
“That was when she quit telling me things,” Dolly went on quickly, sucking in her breath. “Jim was out of town a lot on some business, and June began going out evenings. I asked her where she went and she acted awfully funny. Just as if I wasn’t her best friend. And sometimes men came to her apartment and stayed late. Strange men. I left my door open a crack and saw them. But I didn’t ask her any more because I didn’t want her to feel like I was sticking my nose into her affairs.”
“God forbid,” I muttered.
“What?”
“No matter. You saw these things through a crack in your door. How long ago was that?”
“Three or four weeks ago. I was going to this place every afternoon and I had worries of my own. Herman was beginning to gripe about money being missing from his pants, and I was trying awfully hard to win back enough to pay the grocery bill before the man got mad and sent it to Herman.”
“Why didn’t you try borrowing some from the kind Mr. Parker?”
“We-e-e-ll. I did. Finally. That was just last week. And he said I could borrow any amount I wanted... just as long as I promised to not use it for anything else except gambling. And the funny part of it was, Ed, that when I told June about how nice he had been, she begged me not to sign any IOU’s. I couldn’t understand. She cried about it and made an awful scene. I couldn’t get her to tell me why, but she just begged and begged me not to.”
“So you didn’t, of course.”
“Well, I promised her I wouldn’t. But I didn’t tell her I already had.”
“How much?”
“A... a thousand dollars.” Dolly said it in an awed voice.
“How much is left?”
“Not... any. I lost the last of it yesterday on a horse that the man said was a sure winner at six to one. Shows how much he knew. The old nag came in so far behind they didn’t even list him.”
“What the hell has all this to do with June Benton committing suicide in your apartment this afternoon?”
That, I thought, would give Peter Ryan a jolt, listening in on the dictograph.
There was a catch in Dolly’s voice when she said: “I’m just leading up to it, Ed. It’s so horrible I... it makes me feel sick at my stomach to think about what made her do it.”
“Go to the bathroom if you’re going to be sick.”
“Not really sick, Ed. You know... I just feel sick.”
“Go on. Get it out of your system.”
“Get what out of my system?”
“Either the story or what you ate for lunch.”
“I was going to tell you about June. Mind you, I didn’t know anything about all this until this afternoon when poor June came in white as a ghost and said she’s just been to a doctor and he said she had... you know... a nasty disease.”
“What sort of disease?”
“A... a venereal disease. The worst one there is.”
“Syph?”
“Oh-huh. Isn’t it awful? I thought I’d just die when she told me. It’s almost as bad as leprosy or something, isn’t it?”
“Almost. Did she tell you how she came to get a dose?”
“She told me everything. I felt so sorry for her. She used to be so sweet and nice. You’d never dream she’d do anything like she did. When she loved Jim so. But it was really because she loved him so much that she did it. She couldn’t stand to have him find out what she’d been doing with the money. And when they began demanding that she pay it back, she was frantic. They threatened to go to Jim and she begged them hot to. She knew it would just kill him. And they wouldn’t let her have any more money and she was desperate. So she... well... she was crazy to earn enough money to get her IOU’s back and get away from them...”
“So she took the easiest way?”
“It’s horrible of you to say it like that, Ed. You wouldn’t if you knew June like I knew her. She wasn’t that kind of a girl. I don’t believe any man except Jim had ever touched her. She told me she walked the floor two nights praying to God before she decided it would be better to do that and not have Jim know than to be prudish about it and have him find out.”
“All right. All right. Your friend was a sweet innocent little angel. It’s a cinch she didn’t know the ropes, getting dosed up. How did she get in touch with the men?”
“I... I think Mr. Parker had something to do with it. He was the one that first suggested she do it to make the money back.”
I swore under my breath. This was nastier than I had even suspected. But I had just about cleaned Dolly of information. She owed them a grand, and was wondering when they were going to start putting the clamps on her to make her “earn” it back.
I switched off the dictograph and comforted her by promising to get her some clean clients if it finally came to that.
Chapter 3
A whole raft of telephone messages were waiting for me when I got back to my hotel at four o’clock the next morning after taking Dolly home. All between midnight and three o’clock and all from Ellsworth Grange, managing editor of the Bugle.
The final one on the list was marked three-fifteen A. M. It said, tersely: “Mr. Barlow is to call Mr. Grange immediately no matter when he comes in.”
I stuffed the sheaf of messages in my pocket and went up to my room. I knew hell must be popping to have Grange so hot on my tail, but I needed to relax and have a snort before I found out what he was chewing his fingernails about.
Right here will be a good time to give a picture of the situation I was in.
The Miami Bugle is the newest of a string of tabloids on the Atlantic Seaboard. The main office in Newark pulls the strings that make the Bugle go. I’ve been with the outfit a good many years, filling a dozen different jobs; reporter, copy desk, rewrite, even city editor for a couple of rags on the string, finally settling down to covering feature stuff wherever it happened to break.
That’s how I drew the Miami assignment. The job called for a man who wasn’t known in the Magic City; a man who wouldn’t be suspected of having any connection with the Bugle until the whole story was tied up and in the bag.
My meeting Herman and Dolly Meade had been an accident. I didn’t even know they had moved to Miami. When I took the assignment I’d sworn I didn’t know a soul below the Mason and Dixon line.