She raised her face and there was a mixture of stark fear and animal lust in her eyes. Then her mouth was against mine, hot and alive, like her trembling body. Her tongue darted out and her hands pulled at my clothes...
I walked through the hot night with the woman smell still clinging to my body. It had been hard to make Lolita stay back at the room, and I succeeded only when I told her I was going to Vellutini’s. She wasn’t kidding about being afraid of him.
As I walked, I took the gun out and checked its magazine. Then I flicked the safety off, nestled it back in the shoulder rig and went on through the narrow, sweltering streets to the jook place that Mike Vellutini ran. The place where one night a few months ago a St. Petersburg society woman had been indiscreet with one of her many boy friends. Vellutini had gotten pictures of her, drunk and in bed with the man. And now he was making her pay through the nose to keep the picture under wraps.
Clever, though, Vellutini had never let it be known that he was the blackmailer. Always, the man whom Lolita had called Joe had contacted the woman for the money. He carried prints of the pictures. That was all.
I had come across the bay from St. Petersburg as an agent for Grace Perring to meet the man in the alley. I had brought with me a large sum of money to give him for the information that I now had for nothing...
I went into Mike Vellutini’s, a place of thick smoke, dark shadows, not Latin piano, and cheap liquor. An evil hole on a back street where men and women from across the bay could come and hide their sins in sweltering private rooms that Vellutini rented for a high price.
I walked across the floor and somewhere above me, in the layers of yellow smoke, a ceiling fan turned apathetically, casting a shadow, helpless in the muggy heat.
Nobody stopped me as I wandered through the place, into the back room, a closed den, rancid with the odors of stale smoke, beer, and the sweat from men’s bodies. The men sat around under a single light, suspended from the ceiling by a drop cord and covered with a green shade... mostly Negroes from the docks and Latin cigar workers, playing bolita. The room held its breath while the little balls, consecutively numbered and tied in a bag, were tossed from one person to another. The players sat, dripping sweat, their teeth clamped on cigars, staring at the sack. They smoked, spit on the floor, and cursed while they waited to see if the ball clutched through the cloth would bear their winning number.
I didn’t know the face of the man I was looking for, so I drifted through the crowd, seeking a clue to the owner of the place.
I moved down a hallway toward the men’s room. A door opened and a man came out into the hall. He was fat and greasy and dirty. I could smell him from ten feet away. He was dressed in an undershirt, a limp grey rag, soggy and stained with sweat, and he had a towel around his neck to soak up the sweat that ran down the thick, red creases of flesh. Beside the undershirt, he was wearing baggy seersucker trousers and tennis shoes.
His eyes were buried deep in soft pads of flesh, two glittering black marbles that studied me carefully. “You want someone?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Mike Vellutini,” I said, and felt the weight of the gun under my left shoulder.
“Yeah?” He moved his cigar from one corner of his heavy, wet lips to the other. “About what?”
“Business, you might say.”
His voice sounded like a flat tire rumbling over hollow pavement. “Come in here.” He turned his back on me and lumbered into the office room.
I followed. It was a small, hot place like the other rooms. A French door opened out onto a courtyard where banana trees stood motionless in the still night.
The heavy man sat down behind his desk on a creaking swivel chair. He picked up a palmetto leaf and fanned himself while he looked at me through the cigar smoke with his shiny marble eyes.
“Go ahead,” he rumbled. “I’m Mike Vellutini.”
I sat on a chair, keeping my coat loose so the gun would come out fast. I went right to the point. “Several months ago,” I said, “a woman, Grace Perring, came over from St. Pete with a man who was not her husband. During the night they were in a number of places in Ybor City. She was too drunk to remember any of them. But in one of the places, she and this man were in bed and somebody took their picture. A week later, a thin little man came to call on her with prints of this picture. He represented another man who wanted a large sum of money not to show the picture to her children and friends. He kept coming back for money until it was more than she could pay. I came over to find the real blackmailer.”
Vellutini sat behind the desk with an amused look on his face. “So now you find him. Me — Vellutini.” He laughed, and sucked hungrily at the cigar. “Yes, that was a good picture. She sure was enjoying it, that blonde bitch. What a wrestle she was giving him!” He laughed some more, with his flabby lips around the cigar. “So why you risk your neck, you dumb flatfoot? Money? Or did that blonde bitch offer to pay you off the way she’s been payin’ off all those other guys in St. Petersburg?”
I shrugged. “Let’s say she has some nice kids. Three of them.” I reached for my gun, feeling a little tired.
Vellutini might have looked fat and lazy but he wasn’t dumb. While he flicked the palmetto leaf with his right hand, his left had crept below the level of the desk to an open drawer. Now it sprang out and there was a very heavy revolver in it, pointed at me.
We both fired the first shot together. Mine didn’t miss. I followed it with a second.
A pair of red roses blossomed out on Vellutini’s soggy undershirt, then dissolved and ran down over his fat belly. He grunted, staring at me stupidly, his slobbery lips hanging open. Slowly, he rose to his feet, knocking the chair over behind him. He stood there for a second, swaying, staring at me. Then he fell across the desk with a crash.
Quickly, I dragged out desk and file drawers, pawing through them while voices murmured in the hall and fists beat against the door.
In the bottom of one drawer I found what I wanted, a snapshot negative. Even in the undeveloped negative I could recognize Grace Perring, and see the drunken, animal pleasure on her face as the man with her fondled her.
I stuffed it into a pocket and went through the French doors, through the courtyard and out into the dark streets.
I walked down through the stinking alleys of Ybor City toward the boat. I still had a body to bury out in the bay on my way back to St. Petersburg, and I still had to phone Lolita and warn her to say she knew nothing if the police questioned her.
Inside, I felt tired, dirty, and defeated. It would be nice, I thought, to stick around this Ybor City and the hot-blooded Lolita, who was mine for the asking.
But I had to get home to the quiet hell I lived in, across the bay.
I had to go on protecting, the best I knew how, the lives and happiness of three wonderful children whose mother was Grace Perring — my wife.
The Loyal One
by Richard Deming
The road, even in good weather, must have been little more than a trail. Now, covered by nearly a foot of snow and with the depth increasing by the minute, Cynthia realized it would have been impassible for a lesser car or a lesser driver. Even with its special chains and with Johnny Venuti at the wheel, it seemed a miracle to her the big sedan was able to go on.
From the back seat she strained to peer past Johnny’s shoulder at the road ahead, but by now the distance the yellow fog lights were able to probe through the steadily thickening curtain of falling snow had become so slight, the hood obstructed what little of the road could be seen from the back seat. Involuntarily she gave a frightened little whimper, and her husband at her side squeezed her hand reassuringly.