“Ed...” she said. “Take it easy! It’s me — Tina La Flor.”
I wiped my sleeve across my forehead and stared at Tina the Flower.
When I say she was a living doll, I mean it literally. She had a calendar-girl figure, sunny-reddish hair that rippled to her shoulders, green eyes with a tiny up-tilt at the corners, and a face so mistily beautiful that you had to look twice at the porcelain perfection of it to make sure it was real.
And after that second look, along about the third or fourth look, you felt your heart break a little on her account. Because all that perfectly proportioned, out-of-this-world loveliness was a sleek package that stood slightly over three feet high when she cleared the table top and straightened up.
In a doll-sized black dress, nylons sheer as baby cobwebs, and tiny black shoes with spike heels like toothpicks, she lifted a perfect pink hand, no bigger than two of my fingers, and pointed at my face.
“You... run into a door, Ed?”
“Yeah, with two arms and legs and a head full of intentions right out of a sewer.”
She paled slightly, avoided my eyes, and walked into the bed-sittingroom. Watching her made me think of the chick of a slick magazine illustration seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
She came to an indecisive halt in the middle of the room. A shiver crossed her shoulders. With her back toward me, she asked faintly, “You got a drink, Ed?”
“Beer’s all.”
The spun copper of her hair washed across her shoulders as she shook her head. “That stuff’s too puny. Anyhow, I need to watch my figure.”
“I’ll order a jug from the package store.”
“No, I really don’t need the drink.”
“I’ll be glad to...”
“I know. But I wouldn’t take a drink now if I had it. For a second there... Why don’t you go ahead and have your beer?”
While I opened and poured beer, I thought of the attack in the alley and Tina’s presence here. I began to explore the realm of ideas.
Studying her out of the corner of my eyes, I wondered what kind of trouble she was in. There are a lot of midgets in this country, so many of the proud, smart Little People that they hold periodic national conventions and elect their own president.
Tampa developed into a kind of home base for many of them years ago when the carnivals began winter-quartering in the area. The Little People are mainly big citizens. Few of them get into trouble, but I suspected I knew one who had a bigger package of woe on her tiny shoulders than most of us normal-sized human beings are ever faced with.
I carried the beer into the bed-sittingroom. Tina had perched on the end of the couch. I hadn’t seen her in several months. I’d got to know her pretty well when she headlined the show at the Latin Club. They’d billed her as the “World’s Tiniest and Most Beautiful Chanteuse,” which was a pleasant and fairly accurate honesty. I don’t go in much for nightclubbing, but the Latin, under the old management had the best food and draft in town, which attracted some interesting conversationalists.
I stood in front of Tina and looked meaningfully from her to the open transom over my door. “It’s a wonder,” I said, “that you didn’t break a leg, climbing that old wicker hall table, shinnying over the transom and dropping inside the apartment. He sure must have been hot on your heels.”
“He was, Ed,” she said, like she’d tasted a bitter green apple.
“So he couldn’t get in without rousing the whole house, and you didn’t dare go back out where there wouldn’t be a locked door between you.”
“Something like that,” she said in a small voice.
“And then he lays for me — to get a key to this door.”
She bit her lips. “I swear, Ed, I thought he’d go away. I didn’t know he’d try to knock your brains out.”
“Why’d you pick on me, Tina?”.
“I was coming to see you. You’re a private cop. You work for hire. I needed to hire. Simple enough?”
“So far,” I said. “Where does the man figure?”
“He was the job.”
I pulled up a chair and took a sip of the beer. “I don’t see how we could be talking about different guys, but let’s make sure. He was a big fellow, wearing greasy ducks, old yachting cap. Looks like a carny or a seaman on a freighter steaming out of Port Tampa.”
“That’s him,” she said. The shudder touched her again.
“Who is he?”
“Bucks Jordan. I used to know him on a carny circuit. He ran a kewpie-doll concession.”
“What’d you do to him?”
“Nothing, Ed. I swear it.”
“Then why is he after you?”
A brittle hardness came to her green eyes. “Geez! You ain’t a rube. You wasn’t born yesterday!”
No, but my mind wouldn’t grasp it that quickly. “A masher?”
“You said it.”
I nearly dropped the beer. “Tina, a full grown man and a little doll like you...” I didn’t mean to say it. Maybe it was in my face without my saying it.
She pressed back against the daybed bolster. A poisonous change took place inside of her, born of a knowledge she carried night and day through all her years. She reminded me of a cornered kitten, back arched and ready to start spitting against torture.
“Tina,” I said, “I didn’t mean...”
“The hell you didn’t!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Maybe you didn’t want to mean it, but you couldn’t help yourself. You stinking, lousy race of giants! You big hogs staring at the little freak...”
Her breaking voice quit on her. Tears in her eyes, she sat with her hands balled into tiny fists as if she wanted to slug the world of normal-sized tables and chairs and lunch counters and stair steps and wash basins and telephone booths.
I sensed the ghosts in the room right then. The big fat business man getting a laugh out of his pals: “Baby, why don’t I put you in my briefcase and sneak you down to the office; my wife would never know.” The simpering matron: “My, isn’t she the perfect little thing!” The child, around a mouthful of carny cotton candy: “Look, mama, she’s no bigger than my dolly. I wish my dolly could sing and dance.”
Few were intentionally vicious or cruel. They stared, and they were reassured. They were Big People, and their bigness was added to. And they didn’t stop to think that her feelings and emotions were as big as their own.
Chapter Two
I killed the beer and said bluntly, “Okay, so I made a booboo. Like you say, Tina, it wasn’t intentional. Blame it on my being human. Now, we going to think about it all night — or this problem of Bucks Jordan?”
She remained a long way off for another moment. Gradually, she came back, wiped her lower lids with a pink-nailed fingertip, and said, “Is that supposed to be an apology?”
“Yes.”
A hint of a smile touched her lips. “For a guy as tough as an old bull-elephant, you got a mushpot for a heart, Ed.”
“I’m interested in this guy with the free swinging blackjack,” I said, “and the reason you headed for me instead of the cops.”
“I want the police kept out of it.”
“I’ll repeat — why?”
“I don’t want any publicity. Not that kind.”
“Why?”
“Is that all you can say?”
“I’m fishing for your story. You’re not making it easy, but you’d better make it good.”
She scooted off the daybed and walked to the table where a pack of cigarettes lay on scattered magazines. The fags were beyond her reach. I got up, handed them to her, and struck a paper match for her. The smoke was regular size, no filter, but in her lips it looked like a kingsize.
“Thanks, Ed.” She treated herself to several deep, satisfying drags. “Come to think of it, the story may not be so good.”