I didn’t say anything. I was too tired.

“At least,” she said, “you had the brains to look in those mouthpieces. The way you talked over on Aster Drive I thought you had missed the whole thing.”

“Those cards don’t mean anything.”

Her eyes snapped at me. “You sit there and tell me that after the man had you beaten up by a couple of crooked policemen and thrown in a two-day liquor cure to teach you to mind your own business? Why the thing stands out so far you could break off a yard of it and still have enough left for a baseball bat.”

“I ought to have said that one,” I said. “Just my style. Crude. What sticks out?”

“That this elegant psychic person is nothing but a high-class mobster. He picks the prospects and milks the minds and then tells the rough boys to go out and get the jewels.”

“You really think that?”

She stared at me. I finished my glass and got my weak look on my face again. She ignored it.

“Of course I think it,” she said. “And so do you.”

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that.”

Her smile was cozy and acid at the same time. “I beg your pardon. I forgot for the moment you were a detective. It would have to be complicated, wouldn’t it? I suppose there’s a sort of indecency about a simple case.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

“All right. I’m listening.”

“I don’t know. I just think so. Can I have one more drink?”

She stood up. “You know, you’ll have to taste water sometime, just for the hell of it.” She came over and took my glass. “This is going to be the last.” She went out of the room and somewhere ice cubes tinkled and I closed my eyes and listened to the small unimportant sounds. I had no business coming here. If they knew as much about me as I suspected, they might come here looking. That would be a mess.

She came back with the glass and her fingers cold from holding the cold glass touched mine and I held them for a moment and then let them go slowly as you let go of a dream when you wake with the sun in your face and have been in an enchanted valley.

She flushed and went back to her chair and sat down and made a lot of business of arranging herself in it.

She lit a cigarette, watching me drink.

“Amthor’s a pretty ruthless sort of lad,” I said. “But I don’t somehow see him as the brain guy of a jewel mob. Perhaps I’m wrong. If he was and he thought I had something on him, I don’t think I’d have got out of that dope hospital alive. But he’s a man who has things to fear. He didn’t get really tough until I began to babble about invisible writing.”

She looked at me evenly. “Was there some?”

I grinned. “If there was, I didn’t read it.”

“That’s a funny way to hide nasty remarks about a person, don’t you think? In the mouthpieces of cigarettes. Suppose they were never found.”

“I think the point is that Marriott feared something and that if anything happened to him, the cards would be found. The police would go over anything in his pockets with a fine-tooth comb. That’s what bothers me. If Amthor’s a crook, nothing would have been left to find.”

“You mean if Amthor murdered him — or had him murdered? But what Marriott knew about Amthor may not have had any direct connection with the murder.”

I leaned back and pressed my back into the chair and finished my drink and made believe I was thinking that over. I nodded.

“But the jewel robbery had a connection with the murder. And we’re assuming Amthor had a connection with the jewel robbery.”

Her eyes were a little sly, “I bet you feel awful,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to go to bed?”

“Here?”

She flushed to the roots of her hair. Her chin stuck out. “That was the idea. I’m not a child. Who the devil cares what I do or when or how?”

I put my glass aside and stood up. “One of my rare moments of delicacy is coming over me,” I said. “Will you drive me to a taxi stand, if you’re not too tired?”

“You damned sap,” she said angrily. “You’ve been beaten to a pulp and shot full of God knows how many kinds of narcotics and I suppose all you need is a night’s sleep to get up bright and early and start out being a detective again.”

“I thought I’d sleep a little late.”

“You ought to be in a hospital, you damn fool!”

I shuddered. “Listen,” I said. “I’m not very clear-headed tonight and I don’t think I ought to linger around here too long. I haven’t a thing on any of these people that I could prove, but they seem to dislike me. Whatever I might say would be my word against the law, and the law in this town seems to be pretty rotten.”

“It’s a nice town,” she said sharply, a little breathlessly. “You can’t judge — “

“Okey, it’s a nice town. So is Chicago. You could live there a long time and not see a Tommygun. Sure, it’s a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles. But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You can buy a town this size all complete, with the original box and tissue paper. That’s the difference. And that makes me want out.”

She stood up and pushed her chin at me. “You’ll go bed now and right here. I have a spare bedroom and you can turn right in and — “

“Promise to lock your door?”

She flushed and bit her lip “Sometimes I think you’re a world-beater,” she said, “and sometimes I think you’re worst heel I ever met.”

“On either count would you run me over to where I can get a taxi?”

“You’ll stay here,” she snapped. “You’re not fit. You’re a sick man.”

“I’m not too sick to have my brain picked,” I said nastily.

She ran out of the room so fast she almost tripped over the two steps from the living room up to the hall. She came back in nothing flat with a long flannel coat on over her slack suit and no hat and her reddish hair looking as mad as her face. She opened a side door and threw it away from her, bounced through it and her steps clattered on the driveway. A garage door made a faint sound lifting. A car door opened and slammed shut again. The starter ground and the motor caught and the lights flared past the open French door of the living room.

I picked my hat out of a chair and switched off a couple of lamps and saw that the French door had a Yale lock. I looked back a moment before I closed the door. It was a nice room. It would be a nice room to wear slippers in.

I shut the door and the little car slid up beside me and I went around behind it to get in.

She drove me all the way home, tight-lipped, angry. She drove like a fury. When I got out in front of my apartment house she said goodnight in a frosty voice and swirled the little car in the middle of the street and was gone before I could get my keys out of my pocket.

They locked the lobby door at eleven. I unlocked it and passed into the always musty lobby and along to the stairs and the elevator. I rode up to my floor. Bleak light shone along it. Milk bottles stood in front of service doors. The red fire door loomed at the back. It had an open screen that let in a lazy trickle of air that never quite swept the cooking smell out. I was home in a sleeping world, a world as harmless as a sleeping cat.

I unlocked the door of my apartment and went in and sniffed the smell of it, just standing there, against the door for a little while before I put the light on. A homely smell, a smell of dust and tobacco smoke, the smell of a world where men live, and keep on living.

I undressed and went to bed. I had nightmares and woke out of them sweating. But in the morning I was a well man again.

29

I was sitting on the side of my bed in my pajamas, thinking about getting up, but not yet committed. I didn’t feel very well, but I didn’t feel as sick as I ought to, not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job. My head hurt and felt large and hot and my tongue was dry and had gravel on it and my throat was stiff and my jaw was not untender. But I had had worse mornings.