Reno Rendezvous. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ Dexter Cromwell gave me one surprised look. Then his handsome face wrinkled in the most engaging mock despair.

      “But Judy—you said your aunt! We saw this lady—but we thought she was just another customer, out for the cure. She doesn’t look like anybody’s aunt . . . not even yours, darling!”

      He stepped forward and put out his hand with a frank charming smile. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham! You really don’t, you know—look like anybody’s aunt!”

      “Well, I might feel flattered,” I said, “—if I hadn’t seen you so instantly engrossed with my fellow passenger.”

      It was a perfectly horrid thing to say, I suppose, especially as I had heard Whitey say “Hey—where’s the old lady?” And in a sense it was rather flattering that it hadn’t occurred to any of them that I was she.

      Dex Cromwell smiled again.

      “Oh come, come, lady—let’s be friends!”

      He looked at Kaye Gorman.

      “Rescue me, Kaye! Tell them I didn’t even know you were coming out!”

      The blonde girl gave him the most provokingly open smile.

      “Darling—don’t tell me! I thought that was what you were there for, to meet me! That’s all I’ve been living on!”

      She sipped her daiquiri, her baby blue eyes wide open above its frosted rim.

      The color burned in hot dull patches under Judy’s brown cheeks.

      I jumped as a voice spoke in my ear. The man called Whitey had got up and was standing by me. “Look what you started,” he said out of one side of his mouth. He turned to some nondescript young woman behind him. “If that ain’t the payoff!” he added. “Remember I said half-way back I wondered if the dame with the Park Avenue accent was the kid’s aunt?”

      Somebody said, practically, “You’ll wind up behind the eight ball yourself, if you don’t keep out of this.”

      It sounded sensible to me. I was beginning to wish I’d kept out. Judy’s strong brown fingers were gripping my arm like a vise. The thin edges of her perfect little nostrils were quivering.

      “Let’s go upstairs, Grace,” she said quietly. She’d never, even when she was in pigtails, dignified me with an Aunt to my name. “So long—we’ll be seeing you.”

      Whitey spoke suddenly as we turned to go. “Hey, take your antique, Judy. I guess that’s what you call it.”

      Judy turned back. I looked around.

      He handed her an odd-looking implement. It was a black rusty piece of wrought iron, about a foot long, that looked like a meat skewer except that at one end a hook was set in it alongside a small hollow cylinder that contained an old piece of candle dropping over the side. At the base of the short candle holder was a metal thumb piece.

      “What’s that?” Kaye Gorman asked curiously.

      Dex Cromwell took it. “It’s an old candle pick they used in the mines,” he said.

      Whitey fingered the sharp pointed end. “They stuck it in the timbers,” he said. “Or they hung it up.”

      He pointed to the hook behind the candle cylinder. “You get it up in Virginia City?”

      Judy nodded.

      “You could kill a guy with that, Judy.”

      Judy nodded again.

      “That’s what the man at Virginia City said—and he said it wouldn’t be the first time it had been used for that.”

      She poked the end of it into her own flat little stomach and smiled, more like the Judy I knew, all of a sudden, than she had been before. “In fact, I’d rather thought of using it myself.”

      Whitey grinned, looking at me. “I’ll bet,” he said.

      Judy took my arm again. “Come along, darling,” she said. We went out. I was aware of a curious silence that we left behind us, and then, out of it, I heard Kaye Gorman . . . and with no possible hope that Judy wasn’t hearing her too. “Lord, no wonder Clem made her come out. I thought it was only his sanity he was afraid of, but God, it’s his life too!”

      I felt Judy’s body stiffen, her hand tighten in a little spasm on my arm. Then she relaxed suddenly, with what seemed to me a rather woeful attempt at sang-froid.

      “I’d especially like to use it on that woman,” she said.

      She gripped my arm again. “Oh, I hate her, Grace—I hate her!”

      “I know, angel,” I said. “But—”

      She laughed. “I’m sorry! Don’t pay any attention to me, darling.”

      We got out of the elevator. Judy unlocked the door of her apartment. She stood for a moment looking at the table, with a little oddly-bewildered look, as if something she had been dreading had escaped her. Then her eyes roved around the room.

      “If you’re looking for that paper,” I said, throwing my hat on the sofa, “I put it in the waste basket.”

      I looked at her. Her face was crumpled, suddenly, and I don’t know what happened to the space between us, for the next instant Judy Bonner was in my arms, crying as if her heart would break. She was also sitting on my hat, which I’d paid thirty-five dollars for in a mad moment in New York.

      “I thought you’d seen it in Chicago, and hadn’t got off the plane, when they didn’t find you,” she sobbed miserably. “And here I’d been waiting for you to come, and she came instead! I . . . I just thought I couldn’t bear it!”

      “Oh, lamb, don’t be stupid,” I said. I was practically weeping myself.

      She sat up and dabbed at her eyes with a wadded handkerchief she fished out of her jodhpurs pocket, and sniffled.

      Then she gave me a sort of miserable smile.

      “If you do that in an alley in Reno, somebody tries to sell you dope,” she said. Then she smiled again. “I always say you can pick up useful information in the most unlikely places if you have an open mind.”

      “So it seems,” I said. I was glad to be able to laugh at something. “I see by the papers you’ve gone in for gambling—I hope you don’t do dope too.”

      “No,” she said. Her gray eyes lighted for an instant, and became grave again. “I keep strictly to minor vices. They say a lot of divorcées do go in for dope, but I doubt it, unless they did before they came. They clean the place up once in a while—but they do everywhere, don’t they?”

      “They seem to,” I said.

      “They say Whitey takes dope.”

      She put her miner’s candle pick, which had been sticking uncomfortably into my ribs, on the table.

      “But СКАЧАТЬ