I looked around at Maria — and got one of the biggest jolts of my life.
She didn’t have a stitch on, except those nylons and that little white cap on her head.
“You damned tramp!” Bill yelled, and made a lunge at her.
I took a seat by the window and watched them put on their act — he chasing her around, she backing away — and I woke up at last to what I’d got my foot into. When Maria had gone to the door and opened it part way, it had been a signal to this big bruiser. She couldn’t have been wearing anything under her maid’s uniform, or she couldn’t have gotten so naked so fast. And now I was the sucker in a badger game, caught like a rat in a trap. This pair had me, and unless I wanted he house detective, and maybe even the police, all I could do was grin and kick in when the bite was made.
When the ruckus began to slacken off a bit, I said, “Okay, Bill, I get it. I don’t have to be hit with a brick. What is it you’re after? Let’s hear your pitch.” I hadn’t seem any bulges on him as he circled around, and it seemed to me that a gun was the last thing he should have if his caper went slightly sour and he had to face some cops. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but by then I didn’t much give a damn.
But all he did was blink.
“What’re you after?” I asked him again.
“Dough, Mister. Just dough.”
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
I took out my wallet, squeezed it to show how thick it was, and began dealing out tens, dropping them on the cocktail table. When I’d let eight bills fall, I stopped. “That’ll do it,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, “you got more.”
“I think you’ll settle for this.”
“And what gives you that idea?”
“Well,” I said, taking my time, “I figure you for tinhorn chiselers, a pair that’ll sell out cheap. It’s worth a hundred — this eighty and the twenty I already gave her, when I’m sure she’ll tell you about — to get you out of here. I’ll just charge it to lessons in life. But for more, I’d just as soon crack it open. You want this money or not?”
It wasn’t all just talk. From Maria’s eyes as she watched the bills, I knew that for some reason they worried her. She looked at them a second, and then said to me, “Will you please bring me my uniform, Mr. Hull? Like a nice fellow?”
I didn’t know why I was being got rid of, but when I went into the bedroom and had a peep through the crack in the door, Maria was down on her knees at the table, holding my tens to the light, looking for the punctures that are sometimes put on marked money. Bill was grumbling at her, but she grumbled back, and I heard her say, “Mademoiselle Zita.”
When I heard Zita’s name, I saw red. I made up my mind I’d get to the bottom of this if I had to take the place apart piece by piece. The big problem was how. I sat down on the edge of the bed, and the more I thought about it the madder I got. I glared down at Maria’s uniform lying there on the bed beside me, and called her a few choice names under my breath. And then, still glaring at the uniform, I suddenly knew I had it. That uniform was going to be good for something besides showing off Maria’s legs.
I grabbed the uniform off the bed, went to the window and threw it out. Then I went back to the sitting room. Maria was still on her knees at the table.
“Lady,” I said, “if you want a uniform, you tell Mademoiselle Zita to bring it up here. Call her, and make it quick. Somebody else won’t do. I want to talk to her.”
“Oh,” I said. “That.”
“Give it to me!” she said. “You took it. You—”
“Well, no, Maria, I didn’t,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t have taken it. Not that you misjudge my character. I’m just that greedy. And just that mean. I didn’t remember it, that’s all.”
“Ah!” she said. “Ah!” She was standing with her feet spread apart and her hands on her hips. I’d never seen a nude woman so completely unconscious of her body as this one was.
Bill came over from the window and slapper her — to make her pipe down with the racket, I suppose — and suddenly I realized I’d pulled a damn good stunt. It was now a question of who was trapped. All three of us were, of course, except that I didn’t care any more if the cops barged in or not. I didn’t care, but they did.
“Get on that phone,” I told Maria, “because you don’t get out till Zita comes — unless you go with the cops.”
“Call,” Bill told her. “You got to.”
He went to the phone in the foyer, put in the call, and gave Maria the receiver. She talked a long time in Hungarian, and then she hung up and came back into the living room. “She’ll be here,” she said. “She’ll bring me something to wear. And now, Mr. Hull, give me that money you threw out with my—”
I clipped her on the jaw, and I didn’t pull the punch. Bill caught her as she fell, which was his big mistake. I dived over her head and got both hands on his throat, and we all went down together.
I didn’t hit him, or take time to pull the girl away, or anything of the kind. I just lay there, squeezing my fingers into his windpipe, while he clawed at my hands and threshed. I let him thresh for one minute, clocking it by my wristwatch, which was as long as I figured him to last.
When he’d quit threshing, and lay there as limp as Maria was, I let go and dragged him away from her. I reached in his pocked and got my eighty dollars, and then I massaged his throat to give him a chance to breathe.
His fact was almost black, but he began to fight for air, sounding like a windsucker horse.
I went over a Maria and aimed a kick at her bottom.
It gave me some satisfaction, sinking my toe in like a kick from the forty-yard stripe, and listening to her groan. I did it again, and when she sad up I said, “Once more, baby — what did Zita come here for? You ready to talk about it?”
She opened her mouth to answer me, but then she saw Bill lying there and she gave a yelp and scrambled on all fours to him to help him.
I had to slap her around a little more to get it through her head that I was the most important guy in this room. And I had to ask her a question.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s have it. What was it she came about?”
“To — warn you.” Maria said. “I knew she was becoming suspicious of Bill and me, and...”
She moistened her lips and turned to look at where Bill was still sleeping with his noisy gasps.
“The rest of it!” I said. “And hurry!”
She shrugged. “I phoned Bill right after I talked to you, so that he’d know where to come. I spoke softly — but even so, perhaps Mademoiselle Zita overheard enough to put two and two together.”
“You said she came here to warn me,” I told her. “Why didn’t she go ahead and do it?”
She shrugged again. “You ask her.”
She moved over and took Bill in her arms, and I didn’t try to stop her. I watcher her stroking his face, and I was so surprised to see that a ferret like her could love that I was a second slow on the buzzer when it sounded abruptly.
I was a little groggy from all my exertion by then, but I staggered into the foyer, closed the living room door, and opened the one to the hall.
Sure enough, Zita was there again. She was holding a dress folded across her arms.
I jerked the dressed away from her. “Come in, Zita,” I said. “Come in and join our fouled-up little party. We’re having one hell of a time here, Zita — thanks to the warning you didn’t give me.”
I took a breath, and was all ready to start in on her again, when she took a step toward me and fired a slap that stung clear down to my heels. Her eyes sparkled with anger.
“What did you expect?” she said. “You dated my maid! My maid!”