Presently she opened her eyes, looked confusedly around the room, and endeavored to sit up. He pressed her head gently down on the couch.
“Lie still a moment longer — until you feel all right.”
She seemed to see him then for the first time, and to remember where she was. She shook her head clear of his restraining hand and sat up, swinging her feet down to the floor.
“So I lose again,” she said, with an attempt at nonchalance that was only faintly tinged with bitterness, her eyes meeting his.
They were green eyes and very long, and they illuminated her face which, without their soft light, had seemed of too sullen a cast for beauty, despite the smooth regularity of the features.
Carter’s glance dropped to her discolored cheek, where his knuckles had left livid marks.
“I’m sorry I struck you,” he apologized. “In the dark I naturally thought you were a man. I wouldn’t have—”
“Forget it,” she commanded coolly. “It’s all in the game.”
“But I—”
“Aw, stop it!” Impatiently. “It doesn’t amount to anything. I’m all right.”
“I’m glad of that.”
His bare toes came into the range of his vision, and he went into his bedroom for slippers and a robe. The girl watched him silently when he returned to her, her face calmly defiant.
“Now,” he suggested, drawing up a chair, “suppose you tell me all about it.”
She laughed briefly. “It’s a long story, and the bulls ought to be here any minute now. There wouldn’t be time to tell it.”
“The police?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I didn’t send for them! Why should I?”
“God knows!” She looked around the room and then abruptly straight into his eyes. “If you think I’m going to buy my liberty, brother” — her voice was icy insolent — “you’re way off!”
He denied the thought. Then: “Suppose you tell me about it.”
“All primed to listen to a sob story?” she mocked. “Well, here goes: I got some bad breaks on the last couple of jobs I pulled and had to lay low — so low that I didn’t even get anything to eat for a day or two. I figured I’d have to pull another job for getaway money — so I could blow town for a while. And this was it! I was sort of giddy from not eating and I made too much noise; but even at that” — with a scornful laugh — “you’d never have nailed me if I’d had a gun on me!”
Carter was on his feet.
“There’s food of some sort in the icebox. We’ll eat before we do any more talking.”
A grunt came from the open window by which the girl had entered. Both of them wheeled toward it. Framed in it was a burly, red-faced man who wore a shiny blue serge suit and a black derby hat. He threw one thick leg over the sill and came into the room with heavy, bearlike agility.
“Well, well” — the words came complacently from his thick-lipped mouth, under a close-clipped gray moustache — “if it ain’t my old friend Angel Grace!”
“Cassidy!” the girl exclaimed weakly, and then relapsed into sullen stoicism.
Carter took a step forward.
“What—”
“’S all right!” the newcomer assured him, displaying a bright badge. “Detective-Sergeant Cassidy. I was passin’ and sported somebody makin’ your fire escape. Decided to wait until they left and nab ’em with the goods. Got tired of waitin’ and came up for a look-see.”
He turned jovially to the girl.
“And here it turns out to be the Angel herself! Come on, kid, let’s take a ride.”
Carter put out a detaining hand as she started submissively toward the detective.
“Wait a minute! Can’t we fix this thing up? I don’t want to prosecute the lady.”
Cassidy leered from the girl to Carter and back, and then shook his head.
“Can’t be done! The Angel is wanted for half a dozen jobs. Don’t make no difference whether you make charges against her or not — she’ll go over for plenty anyways.”
The girl nodded concurrence.
“Thanks, old dear,” she told Carter, with an only partially successful attempt at nonchalance, “but they want me pretty bad.”
But Carter would not submit without a struggle. The gods do not send a real flesh-and-blood feminine crook into a writer’s rooms every evening in the week. The retention of such a gift was worth contending for. The girl must have within her, he thought, material for thousands, tens of thousands, of words of fiction. Was that a boon to be lightly surrendered? And then her attractiveness was in itself something; and a still more potent claim on his assistance — though not perhaps so clearly explainable — was the mottled area his fists had left on the smooth flesh of her cheek.
“Can’t we arrange it somehow?” he asked. “Couldn’t we fix it so that the charges might be — er — unofficially disregarded for the present?”
Cassidy’s heavy brows came down and the red of his face darkened.
“Are you tryin’ to—”
He stopped, and his small blue eyes narrowed almost to the point of vanishing completely.
“Go ahead! You’re doin’ the talkin’.”
Bribery, Carter knew, was a serious matter, and especially so when directed toward an officer of the law. The law is not to be lightly set aside, perverted, by an individual. To fling to this gigantic utensil a few bits of green-engraved paper, expecting thus to turn it from its course, was, to say the least, a foolhardy proceeding.
Yet the law as represented by this fat Cassidy in baggy, not too immaculate garments, while indubitably the very same law, seemed certainly less awe-inspiring, less unapproachable. Almost it took on a human aspect — the aspect of a man who was not entirely without his faults. The law just now, in fact, looked out through little blue eyes that were manifestly greedy, for all their setting in a poker face.
Carter hesitated, trying to find the words in which his offer would be most attractively dressed; but the detective relieved him of the necessity of broaching the subject.
“Listen, mister,” he said candidly. “I get you all right! But on the level, I don’t think it’d be worth what it’d cost you.”
“What would it cost?”
“Well, there’s four hundred in rewards offered for her that I know of — maybe more.”
Four hundred dollars! That was considerably more than Carter had expected to pay. Still, he could get several times four hundred dollars’ worth of material from her.
“Done!” he said. “Four hundred it is!”
“Woah!” Cassidy rumbled. “That don’t get me nothin’! What kind of chump do you think I am? If I turn her in I get that much, besides credits for promotion. Then what the hell’s the sense of me turnin’ her loose for that same figure and runnin’ the risk of bein’ sent over myself if it leaks out?”
Carter recognised the justice of the detective’s stand.
“Five hundred,” he bid.
Cassidy shook his head emphatically.
“On the level, I wouldn’t touch it for less’n a thousan’ — and you’d be a sucker to pay that much! She’s a keen kid all right, but the world’s full of just as keen ones that’ll come a lot cheaper.”
“I can’t pay a thousand,” Carter said slowly; he had only a few dollars more than that in his bank.
His common sense warned him not to impoverish himself for the girl’s sake, warned him that the payment of even five hundred dollars for her liberty would be a step beyond the limits of rational conduct.
He raised his head to acknowledge his defeat, and to tell Cassidy that he might take the girl away; then his eyes focused on the girl. Though she still struggled to maintain her attitude of ironic indifference to her fate, and did attain a reckless smile, her chin quivered and her shoulders were no longer jauntily squared.
The dictates of reason went for nothing in the face of these signs of distress.
Without conscious volition, Carter found himself saying, “The best I can do is seven hundred and fifty.”
Cassidy shook his head briskly, but he caught one corner of his lower lip between his teeth, robbing the rejecting gesture of its finality.