I let him see the corner of a sawbuck. "Could be that I'm not a guest."
"Could be." He took the sawbuck and made it vanish. "You look like a fire inspector to me."
"That'll do if anybody asks. Where's Dolly's room?"
"Dolly? That bag? What you want with her?" He took his glasses off and waved them down the hall. "She ain't got no room. Under the stairs is a supply closet and she usually changes in there." The glasses went back on and he squinted through them at me. "She's no good, Mac. Only fills in on an empty spot."
"Don't worry about it."
"I won't." He tilted the chair back again and picked up the paper. His eyes stayed on me curiously, then he shrugged and started reading.
There was a single light hanging from the ceiling halfway down and a red exit bulb over a door at the end. A pair of dressing rooms with doors side by side opened off my right and I could hear the women behind them getting ready for their act. In one of them a man was complaining about the pay and a woman told him to shut up. She said something else and he cracked her one.
The other side was a blank beaverboard wall painted green that ran down to, the iron staircase before meeting a cement-block wall. It must have partitioned off the kitchen from the racket that was going on in back of it.
I found the closet where the guy said it would be. It had a riveted steel door with an oversize latch and SUPPLIES stenciled across the top. I stepped back in the shadows under the staircase and waited.
From far off came the singer's voice rising to the pitch of the piano. Down the hall the guy was still tilted back reading. I knocked on the door.
A muffled voice asked who it was. I knocked again.
This time the door opened a crack. I had my foot in the opening before she could close it. She looked like she was trying hard to scream. I said, "I'm a friend, Georgia."
Stark terror showed in her eyes at the mention of her name. She backed away until the fear reached her legs, then collapsed on a box. I went all the way in and shut the door.
Now the figure from the mist had a face. It wasn't a nice face. Up close it showed every year and experience in the tiny lines that crisscrossed her skin. At one time it had been pretty. Misery and fear had wiped all that out without leaving more than a semblance of a former beauty. She was small and fighting to hold her figure. None of the artifices were any good. The red hair, the overly mascaraed eyes, the tightly corseted waist were too plainly visible. I wondered why the management even bothered with her. Maybe she sang dirty songs. That always made a hit with the customers who were more interested in lyrics than music.
The kind of terror that held her was too intense to last very long. She managed to say, "Who... are you?"
"I told you I was a friend." There was another box near the door and I pulled it over. I wanted this to be fast. I sat down facing the door, a little behind it. "Ed Teen's outside."
If I thought that would do something to her I was wrong. Longsuffering resignation made a new mask on her face. "You're afraid of him, aren't you?"
"Not any more," she replied simply. The mascara on her lashes, suddenly wet, made dark patches under her eyes. Her smile was a wry, twisted thing that had no humor in it. "It had to come sometime," she said. "It took years to catch up with me and running never put it behind me."
"Would you like to stop running?"
"Oh, God!" Her face went down into her hands.
I leaned on my knees and made her look at me. "Georgia... you know what's happened, don't you?"
"I read about it."
"Now listen carefully. The police will be here shortly. They're your friends too if you'd only realize it. You won't be hurt, understand! Nobody is going to hurt you." She nodded dumbly, the dark circles under her eyes growing bigger. I said, "I want to know about Charlie Fallon. Eveything. Tell me about Fallon and Grindle and Teen and Link and anybody else that matters. Can you do that?"
I lit a cigarette and held it out to her. She took it, holding her eyes on the tip while she passed her finger through the column of smoke. "Charlie... he and I lived together. He was running the rackets at the time. He and Lou and Ed worked together, but Charlie was the top man.
"It... it started when Charlie got sick. His heart was bad. Lou and Ed didn't like the idea of doing all the work so they... they looked for a way to get rid of him. Charlie was much too smart for them. He found out about it. At the time, the District Attorney was trying his best to break up the organization and Charlie saw a way to... to keep the two of them in line. He was afraid they'd kill him... so he took everything he had that would incriminate Ed and Lou, things that would put them right in the chair, and brought them to Toady Link to be photographed. Toady put them on microfilms.
"Charlie told me about it that night. We sat out in the kitchen and laughed about it. He thought... he had his partners where they could never bother him again. He said he was going to put the microfilms in a letter addressed to the District Attorney and send it to a personal friend of his to mail if anything ever happened to him.
"He did it, too. He did it that same night. I remember him sitting there doing all his correspondence. It was the last letter he ever wrote. He intended to wait awhile, then tell Lou and Ed about it, but something else happened he didn't foresee. Toady Link saw a way to work himself into the organization. He went to Ed and told him what Charlie had done.
"That's... where I came into it. Lou came for me. He threatened me. I was afraid. Honest, it wasn't my fault... I couldn't help myself. Lou... would have killed me if I didn't do what he said! They wanted to kill Charlie so they wouldn't be suspected at all. They knew he had frequent attacks and had to take nytroglycerin tablets and they made me steal the tablets from his pockets. God, I couldn't help myself! They made me do it! Charlie had an attack the next day and died in the theater. God, I didn't mean it, I had to do it to stay alive!"
"The bastards!" The word cut into her sobbing. "The lousy miserable bastards. Toady pulled a double-cross as long as your arm. He must have made two prints of those films. He kept one himself and let the boys know about it, otherwise they would have knocked him off long ago. That was his protection. That's what Teen thought I took out of his apartment!"
Georgia shook her head, not knowing what I was talking about, but it made sense to me. It made a damn lot of sense now.
I said, "After Fallon died... what happened? What did the District Attorney do?"
"Nothing. Nothing happened."
The evil of it was like the needle-point of a dagger digging into my brain. The incredible evil of it was right there in front of my face and needed nothing more than a phone call to make it a fact.
All along I had tripped over that one stumbling block that threw me on my face. I had missed it because it had been so goddamn small, but now it stuck out like a huge white rock with a spotlight on it.
I grabbed Georgia by the arm and lifted her off the box. "Come on, we're getting out of here. Anything you want to take with you?"
She reached out automatically for her hat and purse, then I shoved her out the door. The hallway was empty. There was no guy in the chair down under the light. A pair of tomtoms made the air pulsate with a harsh jungle rhythm that seemed to enjoy echoing through the corridor as if it were in its natural element.
I didn't like it a bit.
The red exit light pointed the way out. If Ed Teen was waiting to see Georgia he was going to have a long wait. Maybe he thought he was the only one looking for her and he didn't have to hurry. I pulled the door open and stepped out ahead of her, feeling for the step.
The voice behind the gun said, "This the one, Ed?"
And Ed said, "That's the one. Take him."
I was keyed up for it. There was no surprise to it except for them. A gun is a gun and when one is rammed in your ribs you aren't supposed to scream your guts out while you slam into a woman in the darkness and hit the pavement as the flame blasts out above your head.