For the first time she started to smile. No, not quite smile . . . a grin, sort of. It changed her whole face and somehow there was no heat and no hangover and no pain in my head and everything was different and I was different. But it was like a flash flood, suddenly there and suddenly gone, leaving behind it only damage from another broken memory.
"Can I do anything for you?"
"Nobody can do anything for me, kid."
She looked around, the grin gone now. "I . . . was running. This was the first place I came to. Your door was open."
I shaded the light with my hand. "Who were they?"
The fear touched her eyes. "I don't know," she finally said.
"They weren't just playing around, kid."
She nodded as if it were a familiar thing to her, then she took a few quick steps across the room and looked over me through the window to the street below.
Close now, I could see she was more lovely than I realized, bigger, and more scared. She was intent on the street below, and when I slipped my hand around hers and squeezed it; she squeezed back involuntarily without realizing it until I let go. Then she gave a sudden start and stepped back quickly, a frown crossing her face.
"I just kissed you," I said.
"What?" softly.
"When we were kids we called it sneak kissing, hand kissing. It meant you wanted to do more but somebody might be looking." I laughed at the expression on her face, but it hurt my head and I stopped. But it was worth it. I saw the trace of the grin again before the fear came back.
Once more she scanned the street, then said, "I'll have to go now."
"You're crazy if you do. You didn't know those two. How will you know any others who make a try for you. And right now you're a beautiful, sweaty, wet target. In this neighborhood you couldn't be missed."
She sucked her breath in through her teeth, and moved back from the window. I pointed to the chair at the foot of the couch and she sat down, hugging herself as though she were cold.
"When did it happen before?" I asked.
For a moment she stared past me, then shook her head. "I . . . don't know what you mean."
I bit the words out. "You're lying."
The anger came slowly, her folded arms pushing her breasts taut. "Why am I, then?"
"If you didn't know them and didn't expect them to hit, they would have nailed you. They were pros."
The anger receded and it was like losing her outer defenses. I had made her think and correlate and whatever the answers were put her on edge like a great big animal. "All right. It had happened before. Twice."
"When?"
"Tuesday. A car almost ran me down in front of my house. Then the day before yesterday I was followed."
"How'd you know? Pros aren't easy to spot."
Without hesitating she said, "I shopped in the lingerie department of three stores. You don't see many men there and when you do they're noticeable and uncomfortable. I saw this particular one in all three places. I left, made two cab changes, and went into the subway."
She paused, took a deep shuddering breath. Then with a small choking sob, buried her face in her hands and tried to keep from screaming.
I pushed myself up from the cot, my head a sudden spinning ball of pain. I reached over and took her hands down. She wasn't hysterical. She was just on the deep edge momentarily and now she was coming out of it. "Say it," I told her.
She nodded. "The train was coming in the station."
"Go on."
"I . . . felt his hands at my back and he pushed and I was falling and that train was coming on and I could hear the screams and the yells and the train trying to stop and my head hit something and it was like falling into a blessed sleep." She closed her eyes, rubbing at her temples to ease the pain of the thought. "I woke up and they were still yelling and hammering and lights were like fingers poking at me and I didn't know where I was. Terrible. It was terrible."
Then it was my turn to remember. "I saw the pictures. You fell between the tracks in the drainage well. Contusions and abrasions."
"I was very lucky."
"You told them you slipped off the edge."
"I know."
"Why?"
"Some silly woman said I tried to kill myself. She said I jumped. I explained that when I felt myself go I did launch myself out to fall between the tracks."
"They accepted it?"
"Yes. Otherwise I would have been held for observation."
"Smart thinking. Why didn't you say you were pushed?"
She looked up slowly. "I . . . was afraid. It isn't always easy to do certain things when you're afraid."
"Yeah," I said. "I know. What name did you give out?"
"Ann Lowry," she told me, and her eyes were squinting now. "You're asking an awful lot of questions about me. Who are you?"
"Phil Rocca, kid. I'm a nothing."
When a long moment had gone by, she asked quietly, "All right, then. Who were you?"
All of it came back like a breath of fresh air. The old days. The long time ago. The quick excitement of life and the feeling of accomplishment. The spicy competition that was in reality a constant war of nerves with all the intrigue and action of actual conflict. Then maybe Rooney's or Patty's for supper, to gloat or sulk depending on who won.
I said, "I was a police reporter on a now-defunct journal, a guy who once had a great story. But an editor and a publisher were too cowardly to print it and because I had it I had to be removed. So I was framed into prison. Nobody went to bat for me. I took seven years in the can and the paper and the story is no more. So here I am."
"I'm sorry. Who did a thing like that?"
"A guy I dream about killing every day but never will be able to because he's already dead."
She took in the squalor of the room. "Does it have to be this way?"
"Uh-huh. It does. This is all there is, there ain't no more. Not for me. And as for you, kid, there's only one question more. The BIG WHY. Somebody's trying to finger you out, and the last time they're playing guns. It doesn't get that big without a reason. You're a money dame with money clothes and you wind up in the tenement district in front of two guns. Where were you headed?"
She had to tell somebody. Some things are just too big to hold in long. "I was going to meet my father. I had . . . never seen him."
"Meet him here? In this neighborhood!"
"It was his idea. I think it was because . . . he was down and out. Not that it would have mattered. All my life he took good care of me and my mother. He set up a trust fund for us both even before I was born."
"Why didn't you ever see him?"
"Mother divorced him a year after they were married. She took me to California and never returned. She died there two months ago."
"I'm sorry."
Her shrug was peculiar. "Perhaps I should be too. I'm not. Mother was strange. She was always wrapped up in herself, and her ailments with nothing left over for anybody else, not even me. She would never speak to me about my father. It was as if he had never even existed. If it weren't that I found some of her private papers, I'd never have known what my real name was."
"Oh? What was it?"
She squinted again. "Massley. Terry Massley."
That terrible thing in my stomach uncoiled and pulled at my intestines up into the hollow. I seemed to glow from the sudden flush of blood that a heart gone suddenly berserk threw at a mad pace into the far reaches of its system.
I was so tight and eager again it almost made me sick. I got up, made another trip back to the sink, and ran the bowl brim full with cold water, washed down, and soaked my head clear. Then when the pounding had stopped I pulled in a deep breath and looked at myself in the mirror. Dirty, unshaven, eyes red with too much whiskey and not enough sleep, cheekbones prominent from not enough to eat. And I could smell myself. I stank. But in a way I felt good.