“Sure. I’ll level with you, Scott.” He hesitated. “I give you some bum ones, but this one’s the McCoy. I # seen it. Yesterday it was. It was on Wilcox, that’s all I know for sure. I was... wasn’t feelin’ good.”
That meant he’d been drunk. He licked his lips and looked at the empty shot glasses. I waved at Manny. And a minute later, over the filled glasses, with Joe’s sharp whiskey breath in my nostrils, I got fragments of a story from him, the rest of it still lost somewhere in his drunkard’s brain. There wasn’t any sound in the quiet of Manny’s except Joe’s voice, and as he talked I could almost see what had happened through Joe’s eyes, everything out of shape, part of a different world with darker shadows and brighter sun, a strange and unreal and exaggerated world that Joe often lived in.
I could see him on the street, his throat aching for a drink, his body hungry for it. He stumbled in off the street into a bar and there was this guy. “He was a tall guy,” Joe said, “Jesus, he was clear up to the ceiling, ten feet tall he was and he was stooped over by this booth thing, a kind of funny little booth thing there that had a doll in it. He give her the hoop and she put it on. I was right inside the door a little, next to the dumb thing she was in, and I seen it good. The eyes was red like the snake was alive on it, just like it was alive there.” He talked in a monotone, slowly twirling the shot glass. “She took it and put it on and the big guy took it off of her, squeezin’ her a little, and stuck it in her purse there. I was right up alongside them then, I thought she was at a bar but it wasn’t no bar, and then the big guy seen me. He gimme a shove, for nothin’, just shoved me back up on the wall and the whole place was goin’ around. I tried to tell him I just wanted a drink and he picked me up and pushed me out. Like to ripped my head off.”
“This guy, Joe. How big you say he was?”
“He was ten feet tall. Don’t laugh, I’m not lyin’. He was at least twice as big as me, ten feet tall, clear up to the ceiling he was.”
If it hadn’t been for the crude drawing Joe had made I might have left then; if there was any truth in the story it seemed so distorted that it wouldn’t help me. But I asked him, “What about the girl? What did she look like?”
“I dunno. But I seen her leave and I followed her.”
“Why?”
He blinked at me and didn’t answer for almost a minute. “I seen where she lived,” he said finally.
That was enough, and it made sense to me. Joe was a good thief between cures, but when he needed a shot he’d steal anything. From a baby carriage — to a diamond bracelet. He went on, “I don’t ’member what she looked like, but she had a walk like nothing I ever seen. It was a circus, Scott.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Right across from Polly’s. Right on the corner. You know it?”
Polly’s was a beer joint where you could place a bet in the back room. I knew the spot. “You’re sure, Joe? You got this straight?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It don’t seem real, does it?” He licked his lips again. “But it’s straight, Scott. I give it to you straight.”
I took out the nightclub photo and showed it to him. “On the doll’s wrist. That look near enough?”
He bent over the print, then looked up at me, a pleased expression on his face. “That’s it. I swear, that’s it. But that ain’t the doll. I’m pretty sure it ain’t.”
I gave him the twenty. “Anything else, Joe?”
He shook his head, spread the money out before him on the table. I stood up. “Thanks.”
He nodded and waved at Manny.
“Joe,” I said, “give a listen. Why don’t you spend some of that for a big steak? Get yourself—”
He interrupted angrily. “Lemme be. I give you what you was after, didn’t I? Now leave me be.”
“Sure. See you. And the hell with you.” I was sorry as soon as I said it, but Joe was a nice enough guy when he was sober. He’d made me laugh plenty of times, and there are too few things to laugh at. I didn’t like seeing him slopped up most of the time, so I barked at him.
He laid a hand on my arm, shaking his head. “Don’t get a heat on, Scott. Just lemme be.”
“Sure, Joe. Cheers.” I left. The sun was almost blinding after the gloom in Manny’s and I stood outside for a moment wondering if Joe had told me anything at all. The story was just crazy enough, though, that it was probably true — as true as Joe could get it. I got in the Cad and drove toward Hollywood and Polly’s. A diamond bracelet with a snake’s head and rubies for eyes, a guy ten feet tall, and a gal with a walk like a circus. I knew, from Joe's description, where to look for the gaclass="underline" the left half of a duplex — if there was a gal. It was worth a check.
She was a tall, willowy tomato with dark hair and the unashamed curves of a modern Venus in white sweater, black skirt and spike-heeled pumps, and she came out of the duplex on Wilcox Street like a gal in a hurry. I hadn’t got a good look at her since I’d staked out near the duplex on the corner, but in the hour I’d waited for her to show I’d deduced a few interesting things about her from the frilly black underthings hanging on a line behind her place. But not even the transparent and abbreviated step-ins hanging there, nor Joe’s fuzzy words, had prepared me for her walk. Walk?
That wasn’t a walk; it was a parade. Wilcox Street should have been curved into a horseshoe lined with bald-headed pappies chipping their choppers and falling down in dead faints while a band played “Put The Blame On Mame, Boys!” And there should have been a drum. I fell in about fifteen yards behind her and followed, let’s face it, grimly intent on my job and wondering how she made any forward progress at all.
After two blocks she still hadn’t looked back. I was carrying a brown tweed coat over one arm and a hat in my hand, and there were dark glasses in my shirt pocket. In case she got a look at me I could put the stuff on and look a bit different except that I’d still be six-two. But my preparations for a cagy tail seemed wasted, because she apparently didn’t expect anyone to be following her. Maybe there was no reason she should have. She certainly wasn’t sneaking up the street.
She kept going like that for another block and I followed her happily. Just across the next street was a small cocktail lounge with a sign over the door: Zephyr Room. She went inside. I followed her in, stopped inside the door and looked around as my eyes got accustomed to the dimness. She’d disappeared somewhere, but there were booths on the left, four or five people in them, and a bar extending from the back halfway up the right wall. This side of the bar, at its end, was a small U-shaped table with a stool behind it. I felt a little tingle of exhiliration; that must be the “kind of funny little booth thing” that Joe had mentioned. He’d been in here, all right.
I went to the bar and climbed onto a stool next to a cowboy leaning against the bar. At least he thought he was a cowboy; he was wearing high-heeled boots and tight blue jeans, a white-trimmed black shirt, and a black neckerchief looped around his neck and tucked through a small silver cow’s skull at his throat. He was real quaint.
I ordered a bourbon and water and while the bartender mixed it I reached into my inside coat pocket and took out the neatly typed list of stolen items I’d got from Osborne’s jeweler. I made a few random check-marks on it with a pencil, not being careful about hiding the list from possibly prying eyes, and when the bartender brought my drink I turned the paper face down on the bar and asked him, “Did a sharp brunette just wobble in here?”
“Wobble?” He looked puzzled, then he grinned. “You must mean Lois. Yeah, she’ll be out in a minute.” He jerked his head toward the U-shaped table. “Dice girl.”