Mae jockeyed me out into the kitchen as soon as she could. She leaned against the sink and sucked up most of a glass of gin and ginger ale and whispered dramatically: “We’ve got to get rid of Tony.”
I am not the most patient person in the world, with drunks. I looked at her with what I hoped would penetrate her gin haze as an extremely disgusted expression.
She went on hurriedly in the stage whisper: “I mean for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you an’ I don’t want him busting in.” She finished her drink and then with a very wise and meaning look, said, “Wait,” and coasted back into the living room.
I poured the gin in my glass into the sink and filled the glass with ginger ale and ice.
She came back in a minute. “I sent him up to Cora’s to get some ice,” she said. Cora was Mae’s sidekick; she lived upstairs.
Mae steered me through the short corridor into the bedroom and closed the door behind us. She went to the dresser and dug around in the bottom drawer for a minute and came up with a folded piece of yellow paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it and held it under the light at the head of the bed; it was Louis L. Steinlen’s personal check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Steinlen was the executive head of the Astra Motion Picture Company.
I said: “That’s swell, Mae.” I handed the check back to her and she held it with the light shining down on it and looked at it and then looked up at me.
“It’s swell,” she said, “an’ it’s going to be a lot sweller.”
She smiled and her face lost its set drunken look for a moment. She was a very pretty girl and when she smiled she was almost beautiful.
I said: “So what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic about staying in the bedroom with her because Tony might come back sooner than she expected and he was a long way from being stone sober — I didn’t want him to get any trick ideas.
Mae kept on smiling at me. She said: “So this is the amount” — she bobbed her head at the check — “of your cut for helping me make a deal with Steinlen.”
I had a faint idea of what she was getting at, but not enough to help much. I said: “What the hell are you talking about?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to sell Steinlen his two-bit check for twenty-five grand,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I felt like laughing but I didn’t — I waited.
“This little piece of paper,” she went on, “is worth its weight in radium.” She glanced down fondly at the check, then back up at me. She was not smiling any more. “Steinlen has been chasing me for months. Last weekend Tony went up to Frisco on business — I went to Arrowhead with Steinlen — on business.” She smiled again, slowly. She held the check in one hand and whipped the index finger of her other hand with it. “This is a little token of the deal.”
I said: “That’s quite a token.” I liked Mae at that moment about ninety percent less than I’d ever liked her, and she’d never been the kind of girl I’d want to take home and introduce to the folks. I didn’t tell her I thought she’d been extravagantly overpaid — that was pretty obvious. I waited for her to go on and let me in on what I had to do with it all.
She went into a fast song and dance about what a cinch it was going to be to take Steinlen for the twenty-five grand, about how it wasn’t technically blackmail because she was simply exchanging his check — a check that he’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to his wife — for the cash — ten times as much cash. She said the reason she wanted me to come in on it was because she thought I could make the deal better than she could and because we’d have to be careful not to let the twenty-five-hundred-dollar check get out of our hands before we got the cash.
When she finished I grinned at her without any particular warmth and said: “Why don’t you have Tony work with you on this?”
She said: “Don’t be a sap, Red — if Tony knew about this, or found out about it, he’d cut my throat.” Then she went on to cuss Tony out and explain that she was all washed up with him, and had been for a long time — and that she was going to scram to Europe as soon as she got her big dough.
When she got all that out of her system I lit into her and told her that in the first place she was crazy as a bedbug to figure on beating Steinlen out of anything, and in the second place I wouldn’t show in a deal of that kind if it was for a million, and a natural — I was getting along too well legitimately — and in the third place she was an awful sucker to finagle around with something that Tony might find out about before she could get away; I finally wound up by explaining to her, with gestures, that my job was keeping people out of trouble, not getting them into it.
She took it fairly easy. She said she was sorry I couldn’t see it her way, and that she’d have to find somebody else or do it herself. She said that however she worked it, it would have to be done quickly because Steinlen’s wife, who was Sheila Dale the Astra star, was due back from location the next morning — and Steinlen would be psychologically ripe for the touch with his wife coming in. Mae was a bright girl in some ways. It’s too bad she was so full of larceny — bad company I guess.
We went back out into the kitchen and she fixed a drink for herself and started fixing one for me and I showed her my full glass.
She said: “I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this under your hat...”
I smiled and shook my head and drank some of the ginger ale in a kind of silent toast to her success. Then I tried to talk her out of it again in a roundabout way but it was no go — she’d made up her mind. A couple drunks weaved out into the kitchen and Mae mixed drinks for them.
Tony came in while they were there, which was just as well because it didn’t look like Mae and I had been doing our double act all the time he’d been out.
He said: “Cora made me stay an’ have a couple drinks with her. She is very sad and won’t come down.” He went on to explain to me that Cora’s boyfriend had walked out on her, and what a heel he was, and what he, Tony, would do to him if he saw him. Tony’s voice was very soft and he spoke each word very quietly, very distinctly, with just a trace of accent.
I glanced at Mae while Tony was telling me in detail what he would do to Cora’s boyfriend; she was gargling another drink.
I shoved off pretty soon and went down and got into a cab and went back to the Derby. In a little while the fight crowd started drifting in and Franey and Broun and a bookmaker named Connie Hartley came in and we had a few drinks and sat around and told lies. I’d been on the wagon for a couple weeks and I was getting pretty sick of it — I had quite a few drinks. Hartley had some racing forms and Franey and I picked a few losers for Saturday.
After a while Franey and Hartley and I went out to the Colony Club and there was a friend of mine there who was a swell piano player. We listened to him and had a lot more drinks. I got home about four.
I woke sometime around eleven I guess, but I didn’t get up right away. I made a couple phone calls and then tried to get back to sleep but that was out. Finally I rolled over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the extra which had been shoved under the door. By twisting my head around I could read the headline: