Finally, the door swung open. And closed.
Somebody was feeling for the light switch.
Somebody brushed against me. I sprang.
We went to the floor together, but it was a quick struggle. I found a spot, lashed out twice, and there was no more resistance. We both lay still, me on top. The body beneath me was soft and warm with very little muscle hardness. I pushed up, went to the light and flicked it, and there, sprawled supine but always attractive, lay Sophia Sierra, not unconscious, her eyes fluttering, surprise still a mark on her face. Her right hand held a sharp-pronged pick-lock. A black velvet short-coat was over the red dress. She blinked until, it appeared, I came into focus, for, immediately, she sat up.
“You!” she said.
“You!” I replied. “I’ll be a son of a bitch!”
“You are,” she said and rubbed at her jaw.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said. “And with a professional pick-lock yet?” I helped her up. She shook her head groggily, but then she smiled, and I went soft all over again. “What are you doing here?” I said, but I said it much more pleasantly.
“You first,” she said. “You tell me first.” We went together to the living room. I put on the light. She took off the black coat and spilled out on a couch. She looked tired and frightened, but, somehow, that added to her allure.
“Honey,” I said, “you’re a nice, sweet, attractive gal, and I’m crazy about you.”
“Yeah, I remember,” she said.
“But I’m working on a murder thing, and I’m working in co-operation with the cops.”
“Cops?” she said as if I had really gone mad.
“You heard me. I’m here because the cops gave me permission to be here. In fact, they gave me the keys to get in here. But you’re here by virtue of a pick-lock. You’ve broken in here and you’re trespassing. That’s a crime either way. If I call the cops in — which I should do — you’re deep in trouble right up to that gorgeous chin of yours. Is that what you want me to do?”
“No,” she said.
“Then you’re going to have to talk it up, sweetie. First of all, what are you doing here?”
“I might be jammed in Vivian Frayne’s murder.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ll tell you, if you let me,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Phelps wasn’t the first guy she pinched right from under my nose. I was burning when that happened—”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I beat it out of the Nirvana at that time. I took off a couple of weeks. I went for a vacation. Matter of fact, I went to Cuba. I wrote her a few letters and told her what I thought of her and her tactics. I told her I had friends, real bad boys. I told her that that pretty face of hers was going to be mashed up by them, maybe even worse was going to happen to her. I was hot then, burning. And she was scared witless.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me, when I got back. First, she tried to soft-soap me on the Phelps deal — that it wasn’t her fault, that she hadn’t made a pitch for him, that he’d just kind of gravitated to her. After I thought about it, after I cooled down — I figured that to be true. I really didn’t hold it against her.”
“What’s this got to do with her being scared witless?”
“She said something else to me, back there at the beginning, when I got back from my vacation. She said that if anything ever happened to her, the cops would know that it came from me, if it came from me.”
“How would they know?”
“She was saving my letters, she said. If anything happened to her, the cops would get those letters, and they’d know that I was behind whatever happened to her.”
“I get it,” I said. “How’d you feel about that?”
“Once I cooled off, I didn’t care. We kind of became pretty good friends after that, as a matter of fact. I think you can figure the rest.”
“You mean,” I said, “you came here tonight hoping to find those letters. So that no heat would be going toward you on her murder.”
“Correct.”
“Honey, this is from the horse’s mouth. Don’t waste your time. Those letters are not here.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Honey, the cops’ve racked this joint up pretty good. If your letters would have been here, they’d have found them. And if they’d have found them, they’d have yanked you in for questioning. You can be sure of that.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” she said softly.
An idea hit me. “Did Vivian Frayne have a vault, maybe?”
“No.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I’ve had that checked. By experts. You can depend on that. No vault. Not in any bank in the whole city of New York.”
I snapped my fingers. “If she saved your letters,” I said, sure of my hunch, “I think I know where they are. Now if you want to stop being a liar, I’ll make a try for your letters.”
“I’m telling you the truth, you damned—”
“About Mousie Lawrence,” I said.
“Mousie Lawrence? I never heard of a—”
“The picture I showed you. Back there at the Nirvana?”
“Oh.” She sucked in her breath.
“You were lying about that, weren’t you?”
“Yes... but only because I don’t like to talk about what isn’t my business. Kids like me, we learn to keep our noses clean.”
“Start getting it dirty, sweetie, because if I opened up to the cops about you, you’d be really jammed.”
She strode about the room. I watched her, enjoying every nuance of movement. She went to the couch and sat down. She put her face in her hands. “I want to be fair,” she said. “What do you want to know? What do you want to know about the man whose picture you showed me?”
“You know him?”
“I don’t know him as Mousie Lawrence.”
“You know him by any other name?”
“Manny Larson.”
“Fine,” I said. “Where do you know him from?”
“The Nirvana. And there was another guy.”
“Kiddy Malone? Kenneth Masters?”
“That’s it. Masters. Lenny Masters. They were picking out girls, girls who would kind of work a little racket without worrying too much about it.”
“What kind of racket?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Did they approach you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you take their proposition?”
“No.”
“What was the proposition?”
“Simple. I would be given a few little packages, oh, a few small little packages, no bigger than a couple of lumps of sugar, no bigger than that. They’d be given to me at home, a man would deliver them. Then, at the dance hall, sooner or later, a man would be dancing with me and he would say, ‘I come from Larson.’ And I was supposed to say, ‘Who’s Larson?’ And he was supposed to say, ‘A friend of Masters.’ Then, while we were dancing, I was supposed to slip him the little packet and he was supposed to slip me a folded hundred dollar bill. Somebody, later on, would come to my home to collect. Either I had all the packets, or I had hundred dollar bills for the packets I didn’t have. I’d get five bucks for every transaction. Could happen two-three times a night, they told me.”
“Why didn’t you take the deal?”
“Because it was penny-ante.”
“Didn’t you also figure it for trouble?”
“I did, but they explained that it couldn’t actually be trouble. If anything happened, I would just tell the truth. On the other hand, I was to keep my nose clean. If I talked about it — without trouble — then I would be causing trouble, and like that, the least that would happen to me would be a dose of acid in my eyes.”