"How much do you get for a trick?" I asked her.
"A hundred bucks. Some people think it's too much, but I'm working my way through the university." She smiled. "Make it two and you can stay all night."
"What's your major?"
"Foreign relations," she said with a straight face.
"I'll give you the hundred for information, no game-playing required. I'm looking for Moose."
"And I thought this was going to be a fun date. Oh, well. A hundred is a hundred. You give me the money and I'll give you Moose's address."
It was much too easy. I said, "He's in town?"
"He got in yesterday. Let's see the cash," she insisted.
I pulled out the money, glad I didn't have to file a formal expense account. There were some people in AXE's clerical department who simply wouldn't understand.
Barbara folded the bill carefully and stuck it in her trousers pocket. Then she tossed me a telephone book. "Moose called and asked me to come over. I haven't been yet, but I wrote the address down on the cover."
I tore the address off the book. "I'm surprised you didn't ask why I'm looking for him."
"I don't really care. I don't imagine you're a member of his Cub Scout troop, but that's no business of mine. Just don't tell him that I sent you."
She might look like the Venus de Milo, I thought, but she had a heart like the Chase Manhattan Bank.
When I turned to leave, she picked up a heavy glass ashtray from an end table and struck me on the head with it. The blow was a good one. I found myself on my knees, shaking my head in a effort to clear it.
She also knew karate. She leaped on my back and slashed at the back of my neck with the edge of her hand. I blacked out.
I awoke lying on my back on the floor. My coat had been removed and Wilhelmina extracted from the holster under my arm. When I got through telling myself how stupid I had been to let her catch me by surprise, I rolled on my side.
Barbara was talking to someone on the telephone. "He's here," she was saying. "Everything's under control."
I realized that my sleeves were rolled up. Both of them. She had also taken the stiletto out of its scabbard. Maybe I wasn't stupid, she was just smart. A lot of professional spies had searched me and missed that little knife. Barbara hadn't.
She glanced at me as I sat up. She lifted the Luger, which she was holding in her hand, and pointed it at my head. Her eyes gave me a warning I didn't ignore. I sat very still.
"All right," she said to the person on the other end of the line and hung up.
"Moose?" I asked her.
"You know as much about Moose's whereabouts as I do," she said. "I wrote the address on that telephone book six months ago."
I felt dizzy. I said, "So I'm your prisoner. Do you mind telling me why?"
"I collect snoopers."
My eyes were beginning to haze over. I brushed my hand over them. Suddenly suspicious, I checked both my arms. The needle mark was on the right one. I looked around and spotted the hypodermic needle on the arm of a chair.
"It's nothing fatal," Barbara said. "I knew what I was doing. I'm not really studying foreign relations. I'm a student nurse."
"What else are you?"
"You'd be surprised," she said with a smile. "I've been waiting for you for days, Mr. Carter. I was beginning to think you weren't going to show up."
The room was tilting now, turning slowly in one direction, then in the other. I slid down on my side.
"You're going under," Barbara said. "Just relax and let the drug work. The way you've been running around the country shooting people and beating them up, you need a little rest anyway."
"How did..." I had trouble talking. My words were slurred. "How'd you... know?"
"I'm Marco Valante's daughter," she said.
Ten
It took me a long time, but I finally climbed out of the deep well of darkness and opened my eyes. Morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the girl's apartment. I squinted and turned my face away from it. I had a faint headache, which could have been a hangover from the drug Barbara Valante had injected in my arm or an effect of the blow she had dealt me with the heavy ashtray.
Everything had its compensations, I thought. At least I now knew why Moose had put the exclamation points after her name in his book. It wasn't every day a cheap hood like Moose scored with the daughter of a Mafia chieftain.
I heard a radio in the other room playing rock music. The volume was high. It didn't help my headache at all. My arms had been bound to the back of the wooden chair in which I was seated. My ankles had been tied tightly to the rungs at the bottom. I tried to move and had little success. An expert had put me in the chair to stay.
I closed my eyes and tried to organize my thoughts. I had been knocked out all night by the drug. The call Barbara had been making must have been long distance. That would account for her putting me to sleep for more than eight hours.
The discovery that Barbara was Valante's daughter had proved a shocker. I wondered how the girl came to be in Denver when her father reportedly operated on the Eastern Seaboard. My memory of what I'd read of Mafia power divisions was spotty, but I knew that Lew (the Doctor) Rossi was in charge of the Mob's Denver territory.
I opened my eyes and called the girl. "Barbara!"
The volume of the radio diminished slightly. Barbara came through a door holding a cup of coffee in her hand. This morning she looked much less like a product of Americas counterculture. She was dressed smartly in a green dress and her black hair was in a neat bun at the back of her head.
"You're completely different today. You should have been an actress," I said.
"If I had become an actress, people would have started falling all over themselves giving me juicy parts as soon as they found out who I was." She took a sip of the coffee and regarded me with clear blue eyes. "I went through a period of enjoying that kind of attention and then I grew up. I came out here to get away from my father's influence and people who had heard of him. I changed my last name and started studying to be a nurse."
"Then you did hand me one piece of truth last night."
She gave me a firm, open smile. When she did that, she looked almost like the girl next door. The only difference was that most girls next door weren't suited for a Playboy centerfold.
"I'm sorry I had to slug you with the ashtray, but I was afraid I couldn't handle you unless you were stunned. I'd been told that you're a hard man to put down and out. My karate instructor says I'm one of his best students, but I'm not especially strong and I felt I needed that little edge on you."
"You handled me like I was an old maid school teacher," I said.
She walked nearer and touched the lump at the back of my head lightly with her fingers. "That knot will go down. And you don't seem to have a concussion."
"A mere concussion is the least of my worries."
"Do you think someone plans to kill you, Mr. Carter?"
"A lot of people have been trying."
"Don't worry about it. You're in good hands with Valante." She held her coffee cup to my lips. "Here. Take a sip of this. It's the best I can do for you at the moment. I have to get to classes."
I swallowed the hot coffee down." You and Moose. That's a pairing that doesn't seem natural."
"I didn't know what Moose was then. I mean, what he was inside. The fact that he was a holdup man didn't matter to me one way or the other. How could it matter to the daughter of Marco Valante?"
She held the cup to my lips again.
An announcer on the radio broke in on the music and gave the hour. It was 8:30 a.m. He began to give the news, which included a shooting at a Reno trailer camp. He didn't describe the kind of trailer camp it was.