I was willing enough to camp there with her until something happened. That apartment looked like the scene of the next action. But I had to cover up my own game. I couldn’t let her know she was only a minor figure in it. I had to pretend there was nothing behind my willingness to stay but a desire to protect her. Another man might have got by with a chivalrous, knight-errant, protector-of-womanhood-without-personal-interest attitude. But I don’t look, and can’t easily act, like that kind of person. I had to hold her off without letting her guess that my interest wasn’t personal. It was no cinch. She was too damned direct, and she had too much brandy in her.
I didn’t kid myself that my beauty and personality were responsible for any of her warmth. I was a thick-armed male with big fists. She was in a jam. She spelled my name P-r-o-t-e-c-t-i-o-n. I was something to be put between her and trouble.
Another complication: I am neither young enough nor old enough to get feverish over every woman who doesn’t make me think being blind isn’t so bad. I’m at that middle point around forty where a man puts other feminine qualities — amiability, for one — above beauty on his list. This brown woman annoyed me. She was too sure of herself. Her work was rough. She was trying to handle me as if I were a farmer boy. But in spite of all this, I’m constructed mostly of human ingredients. This woman got more than a stand-off when faces and bodies were dealt. I didn’t like her. I hoped to throw her in the can before I was through. But I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that she had me stirred up inside — between her cuddling against me, giving me the come-on, and the brandy I had drunk.
The going was tough — no fooling.
A couple of times I was tempted to bolt. Once I looked at my watch — 2:06. She put a ring-heavy brown hand on the timepiece and pushed it down to my pocket.
“Please, Jerry!” the earnestness in her voice was real. “You cannot go. You cannot leave me here. I will not have it so. I will go also, through the streets following. You cannot leave me to be murdered here!”
I settled down again.
A few minutes later a bell rang sharply.
She went to pieces immediately. She piled over on me, strangling me with her bare arms. I pried them loose enough to let me talk.
“What bell is that?”
“The street door. Do not heed it.”
I patted her shoulder.
“Be a good girl and answer it. Let’s see who it is.”
Her arms tightened.
“No! No! No! They have come!”
The bell rang again.
“Answer it,” I insisted.
Her face was flat against my coat, her nose digging into my chest.
“No! No!”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll answer it myself.”
I untangled myself from her, got up and went into the passageway. She followed me. I tried again to persuade her to do the talking. She would not, although she didn’t object to my talking. I would have liked it better if whoever was downstairs didn’t learn that the woman wasn’t alone. But she was too stubborn in her refusal for me to do anything with her.
“Well?” I said into the speaking-tube.
“Who the hell are you?” a harsh, deep-chested voice asked.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to Inés.”
“Speak your piece to me,” I suggested, “and I’ll tell her about it.”
The woman, holding one of my arms, had an ear close to the tube.
“Billie, it is,” she whispered. “Tell him that he goes away.”
“You’re to go away,” I passed the message on.
“Yeah?” the voice grew harsher and deeper. “Will you open the door, or will I bust it in?”
There wasn’t a bit of playfulness in the question. Without consulting the woman, I put a finger on the button that unlocks the street door.
“Welcome,” I said into the tube.
“He’s coming up,” I explained to the woman. “Shall I stand behind the door and tap him on the skull when he comes in? Or do you want to talk to him first?”
“Do not strike him!” she exclaimed. “It is Billie.”
That suited me. I hadn’t intended putting the slug to him — not until I knew who and what he was, anyway. I had wanted to see what she would say.
VII
Billie wasn’t long getting up to us. I opened the door when he rang, the woman standing beside me. He didn’t wait for an invitation. He was through the doorway before I had the door half opened. He glared at me. There was plenty of him!
A big, red-faced, red-haired bale of a man — big in any direction you measured him — and none of him was fat. The skin was off his nose, one cheek was clawed, the other swollen. His hatless head was a tangled mass of red hair. One pocket had been ripped out of his coat, and a button dangled on the end of a six-inch ribbon of torn cloth.
This was the big heaver who had been in the taxicab with the woman.
“Who’s this mutt?” he demanded, moving his big paws toward me.
I knew the woman was a goof. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she had tried to feed me to the battered giant. But she didn’t. She put a hand on one of his and soothed him.
“Do not be nasty, Billie. He is a friend. Without him I would not this night have escaped.”
He scowled. Then his face straightened out and he caught her hand in both of his.
“So you got away it’s all right,” he said huskily. “I’d a done better if we’d been outside. There wasn’t no room in that taxi for me to turn around. And one of them guys crowned me.”
That was funny. This big clown was apologizing for getting mangled up protecting a woman who had scooted, leaving him to get out as well as he could.
The woman led him into the sitting-room, I tagging along behind. They sat on the bench. I picked out a chair that wasn’t in line with the window the Whosis Kid ought to be watching.
“What did happen, Billie?” She touched his grooved cheek and skinned nose with her fingertips. “You are hurt.”
He grinned with a sort of shamefaced delight. I saw that what I had taken for a swelling in one cheek was only a big hunk of chewing tobacco.
“I don’t know all that happened,” he said. “One of ’em crowned me, and I didn’t wake up till a coupla hours afterwards. The taxi driver didn’t give me no help in the fight, but he was a right guy and knowed where his money would come from. He didn’t holler or nothing. He took me around to a doc that wouldn’t squawk, and the doc straightened me out, and then I come up here.”
“Did you see each one of those men?” she asked.
“Sure! I seen ’em, and felt ’em, and maybe tasted ’em.”
“They were how many?”
“Just two of ’em. A little fella with a trick tickler, and a husky with a big chin on him.”
“There was no other? There was not a younger man, tall and thin?”
That could be the Whosis Kid. She thought he and the Frenchman were working together?
Billie shook his shaggy, banged-up head.
“Nope. They was only two of ’em.”
She frowned and chewed her lip.
Billie looked sidewise at me — a look that said “Beat it.”
The woman caught the glance. She twisted around on the bench to put a hand on his head.
“Poor Billie,” she cooed; “his head most cruelly hurt saving me, and now, when he should be at his home giving it rest, I keep him here talking. You go, Billie, and when it is morning and your poor head is better, you will telephone to me?”
His red face got dark. He glowered at me.
Laughing, she slapped him lightly on the cheek that bulged around his cud of tobacco.