“How long before you boys come busting in?” the girl asked.
“We’ll give you a minute,” Hanley answered. His pale eyes looked at the tight dress beneath the raincoat, and his hard mouth twisted into a brief sardonic grin. “A minute oughta be plenty for you, baby. The guy’s bedroom is across the living room, first door to the left.”
“Suppose he isn’t asleep? Suppose he hears me, and I don’t even get time to take my coat off, let alone anything else? What do I do then?”
“I’ll take a peek at him and see if he’s sleeping,” Hanley told her. “But just in case you don’t get time to do a full strip routine, I’ll tell you what you do. You grab the guy and smear a yard of that lipstick on his puss, and hope for the best.”
“What I can’t figure out is how come you guys have got a key to this john’s apartment. It don’t make much in the sense department, to me. Of course, I’m just a innocent country girl from Dakota, and there’s lots of things I don’t understand.”
Spinelli smiled and stepped close to the blonde. “I’ll bet you burned up more of Dakota than the drought, too,” he said, and put a hand inside the girl’s raincoat. “But the way you’re built, honey, you should worry if you ain’t smart. You got a body will answer all the important questions.”
“Well, you aren’t answering my question doing what you’re doing, Buster.”
“If we want a key to a place, we know how to get it. Keys come a lot cheaper than you do, baby.”
The blonde giggled. “But it isn’t exactly legal, is it?”
“You’d be surprised how many things aren’t,” Spinelli said, and now he had both of his hands inside the raincoat.
Hanley cursed them softly. “Break it up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He turned, took a key from his overcoat pocket, unlocked the inner door of the foyer and disappeared into the darkness of the hall beyond. In a few moments he was back, his face impassive, a heavy and weary mask. He had a grimy ten dollar bill wrapped around two thick fingers of his right hand, and he held it out to the girl, jabbing his finger tips against her breast.
“The john ain’t home,” he said. “The deal’s off for today. Take ten for your trouble, and I’ll phone you when I rig the thing again.”
The blonde looked at the ten dollar bill, her harsh mouth crimped into a scornful knot. “I was supposed to get a hundred bucks for this caper,” she said. “Can I help it if the mark isn’t home? It oughta be at least twenty for a girl to go out of the house on a day like this.”
“You’d never really be worth more than two dollars,” Hanley said tonelessly, “even as pork. You want the sawbuck, baby, or you want the back of my hand?”
The girl took the ten dollar bill. She gave Hanley a single glance of hatred, smiled bitterly at Spinelli, and walked out onto the street.
Hanley took a cheap cigar from his breast pocket, lighted it deliberately and nodded at Spinelli, speaking no word. He went ahead of him out onto the street, a shambling lonely figure in a shabby overcoat, a soiled gray hat pulled low on his brow.
The wind had died, and the rain had turned into a substance that was neither rain nor snow, but both — drizzling wet flakes that melted almost instantly against their cheeks. Hanley walked down the street to where Neil Garson sat in the parked car, and tapped on the front window.
“No ball game today, Neil,” he said. “Wet grounds. I’ll call you later, kid.”
He turned away from the car, without another glance at Garson, and plodded on down the sidewalk, with Spinelli following slightly behind him. He walked twenty yards farther along the street, stopped before a half-opened gate of wrought iron. Beyond the gate a short, blind alley led to the service door of an apartment house.
“A real blister, that babe,” Spinelli said, making uneasy conversation, as if suddenly frightened by the complete lack of expression in the eyes Hanley turned on him. “A bum, of course, but built like a brick smokehouse. If you like them like that, huh, Boss?”
Hanley hit him twice, suddenly, savagely, with a left hook that gashed Spinelli’s right eyebrow and a short, chopping right hand that smashed the cupid’s bow lips into crimson pulp. Spinelli staggered half a dozen feet into the alley, spun entirely around by the force of the second blow, and fell upon his hands and knees. He crouched a moment, shaking his head as if to clear it, and then slowly rose to his feet.
“You found out a lot about Clare Ibberson, didn’t you?” Hanley asked, his hands at Spinelli’s throat. “You found out a lot while you was supposed to be checking her husband, huh?”
Spinelli spat blood, and clawed at Hanley’s fingers. “All of us knew about her,” he quavered. “Me and Garson and Anderson, too. Only we were scared to tell you, because we knew you’d gone overboard about the broad.”
“Tell me,” Hanley said in his emotionless whisper. “Come on, Spinelli, talk!”
“She’s strictly bad coffee,” Spinelli said, sobbing. “She’s a real monster, Hanley, so help me God! She killed her first husband in California, when she was only eighteen. Got off, after the jury was hung, in two trials. She married another guy and had a kid, and then run off and left him and the kid when they was sick and broke. Ibberson’s a decent guy, a good egg. She only married him for his money, and she hired you to get something on him, because she figured you’d frame the guy if she got her hooks into you deep enough. She’d go to bed with anybody wore pants, and still had strength enough to get ’em off.”
“Prove it,” Hanley said. “Tell me something to prove it before I kick your face through the back of your head!”
Spinelli was silent for a moment, and then his voice rose in a frantic wail. “I’ll tell you something will prove it! I was in her apartment at twelve-thirty, just before I left to meet you. You thought she went to Connecticut, didn’t you, after you and her had a late breakfast? Well, she didn’t. She come back to the apartment, and I was there, because I know where she keeps her key, and I let myself in. Only she kicked me out — she kicked me out because it was plain she was expecting some other guy.”
Hanley’s fist blurred toward Spinelli’s jaw, and with his other hand he jerked Spinelli’s head forward to meet the blow. Then he stood back as Spinelli’s eyes clouded and he slumped slowly down to the alley floor.
Hanley looked down at him a moment, his face completely without expression, and then turned and left the smaller man lying there with his eyes staring sightlessly up at the gray autumn sky.
Hanley watched Clare Ibberson shut the door of her bedroom and stand with her back against it, her smile like something carved on a face that was pale beneath its rouge. She had hair the color of burnished copper, and enormous gray-black, faintly slanted eyes. The negligee she wore was a filmy cloud of black chiffon, a gossamer robe that seemed to dissolve like mist against the lights of the living room. Beneath it, Hanley saw the remembered loveliness of her body, the satin and ivory sheen of flesh that was unclothed except for the thin brassiere that held the pointed, up-thrust breasts, and the V-shaped wisp of silk that covered her where her stomach curved to meet her thighs.
Hanley suddenly stirred as though someone had struck him with a whip. His gloved hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.
“You didn’t go to Connecticut,” he said slowly. “You didn’t go to Connecticut at all.”
“The funniest thing happened,” Clare Ibberson said, and her laugh was high and shrill and uncertain, a nervous laugh that jangled like vibrating wires. “I’d left all my money at home. So I took a taxi and came back here after it, and just as I got in, the phone rang, and it was Sally French. To tell me she was ill, and asking me if I couldn’t come next week end instead.”