The Cracker saw what he was up against, and saved his own hide by squealing, and he squealed plenty. That had started the show. The lawyer tried to get his men to keep quiet, but they were each one trying to pin the fatal shot on the other.
It was a complete blow-up. I looked across at Norma.
The hardboiled little cuss was sitting there, reading the newspaper.
“It gives me a chance, Ed! It gives me a chance to begin over,” she kept saying. She repeated the words mechanically, over and over.
After a while she got up. Then she tiptoed to the door, looked out.
“You ain’t sorry, Ed?” she asked.
I laughed at her. “Sorry for what?”
“Getting tied up with a crook again?”
“A straight crook!” I told her.
She slipped into the corridor, closed the door. I waited for her to come back. After a while I began to wonder. There was a knock on the door. I opened it. A bellboy handed me a plain envelope. I knew what it was, even before I ripped open the seal.
“Dear Ed: You are a lone wolf. You tied up with me to give me a break, and now I’ve got it. I won’t come back, so don’t wait. I don’t think you’ll see me again. You’re too damned straight, Ed, to be teamed with a crook—and I went bad on that gem job. If it hadn’t been for you. . . .
“Bye bye,
That was the note. I knew she’d faded from the picture.
Perhaps, some day, in the teeming millions of the big city, our paths were destined to cross again. In the meantime she’d walked out of my life—to give me a break.
I got up and closed the window, shivered a little bit.
It seemed hard to be always on the dodge, always ducking for cover, always avoiding my fellow man . . . she may have been a crook, but she was a straight crook. That was the game we’d played with the law—and won.
Straight crooks!
